This is interesting. And admirable, considering that nobody in their right minds should be running Win9x. It makes testing tricky.
I have a Win98 VMWare image for such testing, so I can test stuff in emergencies. But with its EOL with a known security hole, I have had to change the image so that it has no network access other than to/from its host; it lives in a private subnet. Otherwise that image would be 0wned.
Win98 is now officially dead: there is a remote code execution hole that wont be fixed.
so, open it up to the users. Stick up the source, the compiler, the drivers, the test suite. Make the code GPL, with calls through the normal API isolated.
It may keep win98 alive, but if not, wine will benefit from the code and test suite.
1. VMWare runs on non windows x86 platforms (Unix, linux, soon macos).
2. They have *excellent* support, even for vmware client. That is a rarity today. But if you have some problem with the virtual VGA driver on Vista when hosting on Suse/Redhat, you can file tickets with them and get someone to actually help you -even to phone up to check up on how well it worked.
3. It's pretty fast, even on x86 kit without the new opcodes
4. VMWare images are freely redistributable, they dont even ask for reactivation when you move XP or Vista images around.
5. Its a realistic enough OS emulation you can develop and debug kernel-mode code on it.
#5 matters. We've done stuff that needed drivers in the IDE chain to emulate enhanced DVD drives that werent ready. Virtual PC would just bail out, its their virtual IDE drive and you mustnt fiddle with. VMWare happily runs the stuff.
I got into using VMWare just to run windows apps on Unix. Its not as elegant a solution as Wine -you need two operating systems to keep up to date, a virtual XP image is just as insecure as a real one. But it runs nearly everything, even those legacy apps that I need to use to do corporate things like travel expense.
What we've got into more recently is vmware for simulating and testing complex networks/systems. As an example, say your web server needs a database behind it, and it takes ages to populate it with 5million records for testing. Create the database on a virtual linux image, fully configured, then save that image as a snapshot. whenever you need the database up for testing, bring up the image, then revert to the snapshot afterwards. Its lovely.
The sourceforge project, PDFCreator (http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.ht m) does pretty well. No indexing and things but works better than acrobat at going from visio/metafile inline to decent PS.
One pet peeve I have with MS is that Visio 2003 pulled export to.eps and adobe illustrator support from visio, which is something neither I nor my book publisher was happy about when we found it. I have to use some other thing to turn a pasted image into.eps. Pulling something from a product that is used to turn the doc into printed form is not good, not at all.
I've been thinking some more. Its arguably actually better for linux-land that google invest effort fixing wine than porting picasa straight to GTK. Because if Wine gets better, then all those legacy corporate apps that nobody wants to touch can all move to linux, and all those Microsoft apps that MS dont want to port may work there too.
Admittedly, they may not be as fully integrated as native apps, but its better to run stuff under wine than to have to resort to MSOffice-under-Xp-under-VMWare, which is what I do these days.
Its interesting they chose picasa as their first linux-ported app -maybe they will see how many downloads they get (though in the UK we get a 404 response, not even a "go away foreigner" page).
I suspect that getting wine to work with picasa is probably the first step in porting other google apps (firefox toolbar, google talk) over to linux-with-wine.
the 5MB memory leak is not "5MB per process", it is "5MB every time a laptop resumes from suspend", or otherwise recreates a graphics context. That's not a minor problem, it means that the lifespan of an app is very limited if you are running it on a laptop.
the GTK look and feal just exposes the fact that Swing is trying to emulate GTK, not integrate with it.
I dont think testing is minor. I am a strong advocate of test driven development, and Swing is a nightmare to test. HttpUnit is much nicer for testing http pages, Xul and WinFX should be better, being more declarative. But testing swing? you'd be lucky. I can test SOAP servers hosted beyond the firewall with junit more easily than I can check that the 'commit' button on a dialog is disabled when there is nothing to commit.
Incidentally, I didnt even get started on drag and drop between swing and the linux desktop. I think partly its a linux/X11 problem, but swing apps seem to suffer from it more than most.
This does not mean that I dont like Java; I think it is great for coding big, complex, networked apps in. I just dont think that Swing or AWT are any good, and I have yet to come to a conclusion about SWT. The nice thing about SWT is that it is open source, though now that Harmony has a Swing implementation, maybe there is one out there I can fix.
It often seems to lose focus on dialogs, keyboard input only comes back if you switch away to a legacy (non-java) app and back again.
GTK look and feel is laughably bad.
The whole GUI development model has inadequate support for testing, at least by modern (junit) processes. SwingUnit looks like the only hope there, and it still feels a bit of an afterthought.
There, much better, a whole new set of complaints.
I don't know about 'proof'. not having your defs file properly locked down is bad news, as malware could come in and patch it. But malware tends to just delete the spyware scanners outright.
As for the performance thing, that I dont actually agree with. The author says that you get more performance by mapping files into main memory, instead of doing the IO yourself. If you are writing high performance code you dont map files, because then any pointer deref can cause the OS to swap in the data. Its better to have one thread reading (or use the Async IO operations) then have the second thread analysing the previous buffer. Better yet, if you are doing checksums against streamed data, you dont need lots of memory, just a rotating set of buffers being filled by thread #1, analysed by thread #2. So I'd argue that both the original and the 'much better' way to do it are both pretty limited.
What I do have to say about adware is that it finds things that the McAfee security centre does not find, something i know because I spent three hours at a relatives purging the box of junk. After I'd dealt with the spyware, the trojans, and all the little quicktime/real/java startup apps, the only thing bringing the PC to its knees at startup was all this McAfee security junk, stuff that was not doing its job.
F-Secure, that's who I pointed them at. Trust a vendor that doesn't trust Sony.
Why would you fedex pirate dvds? its a premium service and now you know they even sniff your luggage. Go use the mainstream postal service instead.
This new program will help defend small homegrown uk and eu DVD printing presses from the competition of those evil third-world pirates who dont treat their employees with the same respect or salaries.
Presumably the reason that there is that big NSA facility in Yakima, WA is the same reason that much of the manhattan project was done up there: lots of electrons from the big reservoir/hydro system in that state and the Columbia river.
Even so, cracking moderate decryption is much more intensive than trying to do speech recognition on unencrypted streams, and as the amount of data increases, it only gets worse. Email is much easier to read.
What echelon (and this new ATT intercept does) is have the ability to intercept packets that are routed over different paths, so even if packets go different ways, they could still get the stream.
I think its a shame that there is a split between the apache and gnu projects, a split that cuts both ways. Gnu classpath has its own XML parser and XSL engine, even though Java1.5 bundles the Apache ones. If classpath adopted Xalan and Xerces then they could tick that bit of compatiblity off and worry about other problems.
Some Apache groups do support Kaffe. Ant (which I work on), tries to avoid any imports of sun.* and com.sun.* classes, and we happily field bugreps that surface on Kaffe+classpath. The big apache Gump clean-build-off-open-source-Java tool does a nightly build on kaffe/classpath too. The more the projects work together, the better things will be.
I knew some people involved in Cairo. It was a distributed system. WinFS is just metadata on files, but in Cairo OLE, Object Linking and Embedding would actually work. Unfortunately for MS (and indirectly, the Corba desktops), distributed objects got killed by HTTP as a way of working with remote systems. [Despite attempts by the SOAP camp to go back to distributed objects]
There are hints of Cairo in Win2K and winXP, in the 'distributed link tracking service' that promises to maintain links between files as they move round NTFS file systems. I always turn that service off as it is pointless.
I dont disagree. I'm thinking of switching to cable. I do like the static IP addr and the ability to SSH in in to home, but otherwise, I find the fact that BT are part of the loop causes problems and finger pointing that nobody can deal with.
My wife works from home and she has a different issue with plus.net. They do their system maintenance during the early mornings weekdays. So when things go wrong (like they did two weeks ago, when the raidus auth server went down), she can't do any work. That doesn't make her happy at all.
given how songs by the Wolfe Tones are a ubiquitous part of IRA propaganda, you'd probably find them forcing copies of "the men behind the wire" onto the iPods or phones of teenagers who werent currently involved in the cause.
they have been known to do
-major bank robberies, big enough to force the replacment of one of the Ulster bank notes.
-petrol smuggling, via an oil bunker near crossmaglen with access from both sides of the border
-drug dealing. One advantage the IRA have in that industry is the ability to enforce deals. Nobody doublecrosses a represenative of the PIRA and gets away with it,
Now, someone the IRA killed for crossing them, "the general", a criminal from Dublin did actually do something innovative: he invented a whole new use for stolen art. He nicked a painting worth many millions and used it as collateral in drug deals. Nobody could understand why the picture hadnt surfaced or been resold, but it was because its published worth was used to fund drug purchases.
If you have a plusnet consumer DSL contract it gets traffic shaped at peak (evening) periods. I have a plusnet business one and it isnt, but I'm still unhappy about the ISP because if they start doing shaping, they will look at the business customers eventually.
What really annoys me is they have three levels of service, and their own VoIp traffic gets higher priority than competitors. That is an abuse of power.
yes, this is doable. Indeed, you can get programs to do it. Why? Because if you are trying to debug any communications over SSH, like a SOAP conversation, you need a proxy that can see the plaintext.
The hard part is getting the new trusted root in there. If it is your java or python app you are debugging, its trivial.
Now, I could imagine some evil malware adding new trusted roots to ease phishing. That would be devious indeed, and make mozilla vulnerable too. Nowadays they just add a Browser Helper Object to IE and get in at the raw channel before it has been encrypted, but if MS ever fix that or firefox becomes more popular, they will have to find new forms of attack.
you can't MIM SSL because the certification chain is wrong. That's exactly what SSL is designed to stop. You could do SSH if the people said "yes" to a key being different.
but by default things like gmail are plaintext; look at the URL. If someone gets your inbox, they get a lot of information. And to get that inbox, all they need to do is clone your cookies and hit the same URL, walk the inbox, etc.
You are right, the only person who should bring the network to is knees is me.I do this by configuring my router so the bittorrent ports go to my machine, and not to any of those evil piggybackers.
I actually run an open network for a number of reasons
-I cant be bothered to set up access for overnight guests and other visitors
-I explicitly allow a neighbour to share
-I dont think classic WEP, that some of my hardware is, is at all secure.
-Knowing the net is open forces me to lock down the boxes better. All firewalled, no SMB connectivity (SSH/SCP to the server only).
And finally: I like it when I get free networks when I travel, and want to share the joy. Saturday: father in law's house, public network "linksys". Last summer -stuck at my mother's house for a few days. Public network from a neighbour. I dont care whether these people did it on purpose or through ignorance, I benefit, and their cost is minimal.
I believe that you can get firmware for the linksys WRT54G boxes that let you throttle guests...
One of the problems is that many of the MS protocols are not designed, not in the way that, say, NFS was designed. SMB is a nightmare mess of features added over time, and probably lacks a full, complete specification other than that in the source.
But the source is worthless for OSS projects; contribute to samba after seeing it and the MS lawyers will have you. So the offer of source access is clearly a tactic to give the EU the illusion of openness, without it being of any value. Just like what happened after the US lawsuit.
They could be made to publish the source for the test suites, the stuff used to check compliance, with a proper license like GPL. Then we could rebuild it and run it against Samba and the like. Hey, we could even add bits:)
Yeah, when all this is over and the books are written, SCO's choice of targets for lawsuits is going to go down there as sensible as invading russia proved to various european nation states over the centuries.
First they pick IBM, who probably have more lawyers than R&D engineers. Then, for collateral damage, they pick on a car company, what was it, Daimer-Chrystler. I mean, car companies. They have legal departments on 24-hour call waiting to dismiss the classic "I ran over a bus queue of 8 people while drunk, it was the fault of your ABS system" lawsuits coming in every day. Having someone sue you over linux violations is just a spare time activity.
On the other hand, from the lawyers perspective, going up against well funded legal departments guarantees large amounts of cash coming your way...
This is exactly the same problem that Nokia's context aware cellphone proto from 1999/2000 had. A dark and quiet environment can mean "phone is in briefcase" or "cinema"
The interesting thing about gecko feet is that they work in a vacuum, unlike suction pads of other things.
This gives the evolutionaries a problem "why did geckos evolve to stick to things in a vacuum". It also gives the ID-believes a different problem "why did the intelligent designer give geckos the ability to stick to things in a vacuum"?
it also raises another question: what experiments were done to determine which animals can stick to walls in a vaccuum, and which cant. I can imagine a large glass container with all these animals clinging to the side, all the air being slowly sucked out and things like flies falling off as suction failes, but the geckos hanging on until the loss of air pressure causes their bodies to explode in a red pulp, leaving just four little feet, stuck to the wall.
The other feature of it is that it usually has higher speed limits; 70 mph out of town, 40 mph in town, unless otherwise stated. But unlike motorways (=freeways), dual carriageways are open to traffic other than cars: bikes, tractors, horses, whatever.
As a cyclist, I'm pretty worried about how safe these auto driving vehicles are; how optimised they are for things in the road. Its one thing to have a car that brakes if you are about to hit something, another to have the thing make steering decisions too. Also, what is your excuse if caught speeding "it wasn't me, the car did it".
yeah, but he didnt say whether or not she bought a legit XP PC or a white-box that came with office and powerpoint for $400.
Funnily enough, I have recently told my near family members that I dont support windows problems any more. While i used to spyware purge and firefox them, its just a losing battle. From now on they get a choice of Suse or Ubuntu Linux, which I will set up with SSH for remote maintenance if ever needed. Harsh but fair.
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This is interesting. And admirable, considering that nobody in their right minds should be running Win9x. It makes testing tricky.
I have a Win98 VMWare image for such testing, so I can test stuff in emergencies. But with its EOL with a known security hole, I have had to change the image so that it has no network access other than to/from its host; it lives in a private subnet. Otherwise that image would be 0wned.
-steve
Win98 is now officially dead: there is a remote code execution hole that wont be fixed.
so, open it up to the users. Stick up the source, the compiler, the drivers, the test suite.
Make the code GPL, with calls through the normal API isolated.
It may keep win98 alive, but if not, wine will benefit from the code and test suite.
good point
1. VMWare runs on non windows x86 platforms (Unix, linux, soon macos).
2. They have *excellent* support, even for vmware client. That is a rarity today. But if you have some problem with the virtual VGA driver on Vista when hosting on Suse/Redhat, you can file tickets with them and get someone to actually help you -even to phone up to check up on how well it worked.
3. It's pretty fast, even on x86 kit without the new opcodes
4. VMWare images are freely redistributable, they dont even ask for reactivation when you move XP or Vista images around.
5. Its a realistic enough OS emulation you can develop and debug kernel-mode code on it.
#5 matters. We've done stuff that needed drivers in the IDE chain to emulate enhanced DVD drives that werent ready. Virtual PC would just bail out, its their virtual IDE drive and you mustnt fiddle with. VMWare happily runs the stuff.
I got into using VMWare just to run windows apps on Unix. Its not as elegant a solution as Wine -you need two operating systems to keep up to date, a virtual XP image is just as insecure as a real one. But it runs nearly everything, even those legacy apps that I need to use to do corporate things like travel expense.
What we've got into more recently is vmware for simulating and testing complex networks/systems. As an example, say your web server needs a database behind it, and it takes ages to populate it with 5million records for testing. Create the database on a virtual linux image, fully configured, then save that image as a snapshot. whenever you need the database up for testing, bring up the image, then revert to the snapshot afterwards. Its lovely.
-steve
The sourceforge project, PDFCreator (http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.ht m) does pretty well. No indexing and things but works better than acrobat at going from visio/metafile inline to decent PS.
.eps and adobe illustrator support from visio, which is something neither I nor my book publisher was happy about when we found it. I have to use some other thing to turn a pasted image into .eps. Pulling something from a product that is used to turn the doc into printed form is not good, not at all.
One pet peeve I have with MS is that Visio 2003 pulled export to
Didnt know that.
I've been thinking some more. Its arguably actually better for linux-land that google invest effort fixing wine than porting picasa straight to GTK. Because if Wine gets better, then all those legacy corporate apps that nobody wants to touch can all move to linux, and all those Microsoft apps that MS dont want to port may work there too.
Admittedly, they may not be as fully integrated as native apps, but its better to run stuff under wine than to have to resort to MSOffice-under-Xp-under-VMWare, which is what I do these days.
Its interesting they chose picasa as their first linux-ported app -maybe they will see how many downloads they get (though in the UK we get a 404 response, not even a "go away foreigner" page).
I suspect that getting wine to work with picasa is probably the first step in porting other google apps (firefox toolbar, google talk) over to linux-with-wine.
the 5MB memory leak is not "5MB per process", it is "5MB every time a laptop resumes from suspend", or otherwise recreates a graphics context. That's not a minor problem, it means that the lifespan of an app is very limited if you are running it on a laptop.
the GTK look and feal just exposes the fact that Swing is trying to emulate GTK, not integrate with it.
I dont think testing is minor. I am a strong advocate of test driven development, and Swing is a nightmare to test. HttpUnit is much nicer for testing http pages, Xul and WinFX should be better, being more declarative. But testing swing? you'd be lucky. I can test SOAP servers hosted beyond the firewall with junit more easily than I can check that the 'commit' button on a dialog is disabled when there is nothing to commit.
Incidentally, I didnt even get started on drag and drop between swing and the linux desktop. I think partly its a linux/X11 problem, but swing apps seem to suffer from it more than most.
This does not mean that I dont like Java; I think it is great for coding big, complex, networked apps in. I just dont think that Swing or AWT are any good, and I have yet to come to a conclusion about SWT. The nice thing about SWT is that it is open source, though now that Harmony has a Swing implementation, maybe there is one out there I can fix.
-steve
There, much better, a whole new set of complaints.
I don't know about 'proof'. not having your defs file properly locked down is bad news, as malware could come in and patch it. But malware tends to just delete the spyware scanners outright.
As for the performance thing, that I dont actually agree with. The author says that you get more performance by mapping files into main memory, instead of doing the IO yourself. If you are writing high performance code you dont map files, because then any pointer deref can cause the OS to swap in the data. Its better to have one thread reading (or use the Async IO operations) then have the second thread analysing the previous buffer. Better yet, if you are doing checksums against streamed data, you dont need lots of memory, just a rotating set of buffers being filled by thread #1, analysed by thread #2. So I'd argue that both the original and the 'much better' way to do it are both pretty limited.
What I do have to say about adware is that it finds things that the McAfee security centre does not find, something i know because I spent three hours at a relatives purging the box of junk. After I'd dealt with the spyware, the trojans, and all the little quicktime/real/java startup apps, the only thing bringing the PC to its knees at startup was all this McAfee security junk, stuff that was not doing its job.
F-Secure, that's who I pointed them at. Trust a vendor that doesn't trust Sony.
Why would you fedex pirate dvds? its a premium service and now you know they even sniff your luggage. Go use the mainstream postal service instead.
This new program will help defend small homegrown uk and eu DVD printing presses from the competition of those evil third-world pirates who dont treat their employees with the same respect or salaries.
Presumably the reason that there is that big NSA facility in Yakima, WA is the same reason that much of the manhattan project was done up there: lots of electrons from the big reservoir/hydro system in that state and the Columbia river.
Even so, cracking moderate decryption is much more intensive than trying to do speech recognition on unencrypted streams, and as the amount of data increases, it only gets worse. Email is much easier to read.
What echelon (and this new ATT intercept does) is have the ability to intercept packets that are routed over different paths, so even if packets go different ways, they could still get the stream.
I think its a shame that there is a split between the apache and gnu projects, a split that cuts both ways. Gnu classpath has its own XML parser and XSL engine, even though Java1.5 bundles the Apache ones. If classpath adopted Xalan and Xerces then they could tick that bit of compatiblity off and worry about other problems.
Some Apache groups do support Kaffe. Ant (which I work on), tries to avoid any imports of sun.* and com.sun.* classes, and we happily field bugreps that surface on Kaffe+classpath. The big apache Gump clean-build-off-open-source-Java tool does a nightly build on kaffe/classpath too. The more the projects work together, the better things will be.
I knew some people involved in Cairo. It was a distributed system. WinFS is just metadata on files, but in Cairo OLE, Object Linking and Embedding would actually work. Unfortunately for MS (and indirectly, the Corba desktops), distributed objects got killed by HTTP as a way of working with remote systems. [Despite attempts by the SOAP camp to go back to distributed objects]
There are hints of Cairo in Win2K and winXP, in the 'distributed link tracking service' that promises to maintain links between files as they move round NTFS file systems. I always turn that service off as it is pointless.
I dont disagree. I'm thinking of switching to cable. I do like the static IP addr and the ability to SSH in in to home, but otherwise, I find the fact that BT are part of the loop causes problems and finger pointing that nobody can deal with.
My wife works from home and she has a different issue with plus.net. They do their system maintenance during the early mornings weekdays. So when things go wrong (like they did two weeks ago, when the raidus auth server went down), she can't do any work. That doesn't make her happy at all.
given how songs by the Wolfe Tones are a ubiquitous part of IRA propaganda, you'd probably find them forcing copies of "the men behind the wire" onto the iPods or phones of teenagers who werent currently involved in the cause.
they have been known to do
-major bank robberies, big enough to force the replacment of one of the Ulster bank notes.
-petrol smuggling, via an oil bunker near crossmaglen with access from both sides of the border
-drug dealing. One advantage the IRA have in that industry is the ability to enforce deals. Nobody doublecrosses a represenative of the PIRA and gets away with it,
Now, someone the IRA killed for crossing them, "the general", a criminal from Dublin did actually do something innovative: he invented a whole new use for stolen art. He nicked a painting worth many millions and used it as collateral in drug deals. Nobody could understand why the picture hadnt surfaced or been resold, but it was because its published worth was used to fund drug purchases.
So: fine art funds drugs, maybe terrorism
What really annoys me is they have three levels of service, and their own VoIp traffic gets higher priority than competitors. That is an abuse of power.
-steve
yes, this is doable. Indeed, you can get programs to do it. Why? Because if you are trying to debug any communications over SSH, like a SOAP conversation, you need a proxy that can see the plaintext.
The hard part is getting the new trusted root in there. If it is your java or python app you are debugging, its trivial.
Now, I could imagine some evil malware adding new trusted roots to ease phishing. That would be devious indeed, and make mozilla vulnerable too. Nowadays they just add a Browser Helper Object to IE and get in at the raw channel before it has been encrypted, but if MS ever fix that or firefox becomes more popular, they will have to find new forms of attack.
you can't MIM SSL because the certification chain is wrong. That's exactly what SSL is designed to stop. You could do SSH if the people said "yes" to a key being different.
but by default things like gmail are plaintext; look at the URL. If someone gets your inbox, they get a lot of information. And to get that inbox, all they need to do is clone your cookies and hit the same URL, walk the inbox, etc.
You are right, the only person who should bring the network to is knees is me.I do this by configuring my router so the bittorrent ports go to my machine, and not to any of those evil piggybackers.
I actually run an open network for a number of reasons
-I cant be bothered to set up access for overnight guests and other visitors
-I explicitly allow a neighbour to share
-I dont think classic WEP, that some of my hardware is, is at all secure.
-Knowing the net is open forces me to lock down the boxes better. All firewalled, no SMB connectivity (SSH/SCP to the server only).
And finally: I like it when I get free networks when I travel, and want to share the joy. Saturday: father in law's house, public network "linksys". Last summer -stuck at my mother's house for a few days. Public network from a neighbour. I dont care whether these people did it on purpose or through ignorance, I benefit, and their cost is minimal.
I believe that you can get firmware for the linksys WRT54G boxes that let you throttle guests...
-steve
One of the problems is that many of the MS protocols are not designed, not in the way that, say, NFS was designed. SMB is a nightmare mess of features added over time, and probably lacks a full, complete specification other than that in the source.
:)
But the source is worthless for OSS projects; contribute to samba after seeing it and the MS lawyers will have you. So the offer of source access is clearly a tactic to give the EU the illusion of openness, without it being of any value. Just like what happened after the US lawsuit.
They could be made to publish the source for the test suites, the stuff used to check compliance, with a proper license like GPL. Then we could rebuild it and run it against Samba and the like. Hey, we could even add bits
-steve
Yeah, when all this is over and the books are written, SCO's choice of targets for lawsuits is going to go down there as sensible as invading russia proved to various european nation states over the centuries.
First they pick IBM, who probably have more lawyers than R&D engineers. Then, for collateral damage, they pick on a car company, what was it, Daimer-Chrystler. I mean, car companies. They have legal departments on 24-hour call waiting to dismiss the classic "I ran over a bus queue of 8 people while drunk, it was the fault of your ABS system" lawsuits coming in every day. Having someone sue you over linux violations is just a spare time activity.
On the other hand, from the lawyers perspective, going up against well funded legal departments guarantees large amounts of cash coming your way...
This is exactly the same problem that Nokia's context aware cellphone proto from 1999/2000 had. A dark and quiet environment can mean "phone is in briefcase" or "cinema"
The interesting thing about gecko feet is that they work in a vacuum, unlike suction pads of other things.
This gives the evolutionaries a problem "why did geckos evolve to stick to things in a vacuum". It also gives the ID-believes a different problem "why did the intelligent designer give geckos the ability to stick to things in a vacuum"?
it also raises another question: what experiments were done to determine which animals can stick to walls in a vaccuum, and which cant. I can imagine a large glass container with all these animals clinging to the side, all the air being slowly sucked out and things like flies falling off as suction failes, but the geckos hanging on until the loss of air pressure causes their bodies to explode in a red pulp, leaving just four little feet, stuck to the wall.
The other feature of it is that it usually has higher speed limits; 70 mph out of town, 40 mph in town, unless otherwise stated. But unlike motorways (=freeways), dual carriageways are open to traffic other than cars: bikes, tractors, horses, whatever.
As a cyclist, I'm pretty worried about how safe these auto driving vehicles are; how optimised they are for things in the road. Its one thing to have a car that brakes if you are about to hit something, another to have the thing make steering decisions too. Also, what is your excuse if caught speeding "it wasn't me, the car did it".
yeah, but he didnt say whether or not she bought a legit XP PC or a white-box that came with office and powerpoint for $400.
Funnily enough, I have recently told my near family members that I dont support windows problems any more. While i used to spyware purge and firefox them, its just a losing battle. From now on they get a choice of Suse or Ubuntu Linux, which I will set up with SSH for remote maintenance if ever needed. Harsh but fair.
-steve