Does anybody know other applications that supercomputers are being used for. I know some do weather predictions.
Ok, non-military uses, off the top of my head:
mathematical research - simply complicated maths on big numbers
fluid dynamics modelling - traffic flows, or aerodynamics, or hydrodynamics - this is also tied in quite closely with weather/climate prediction
statistical modelling - wouldn't you like to know if the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, before it happens?
computational chemistry/biochemistry - protein folding is just the tip of the iceberg - imagine being able to design a molecule and then simulate the effect it will have on the human body, without that substance ever having been actually synthesized or going near a human... this is the future of drug development
quantum mechanical simulation - related to computational chemistry, imagine taking all those complicated quantum mechanics equations to their logical conclusions, predicting as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles and their behaviour, or to design better magnetic containment fields so that practical fusion energy generation is possible
good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters
I'm sure there are plenty more applications for supercomputer power - any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling, especially when there's more than one unknown variable (multivariate analysis is complicated, to say the least).
It's like writting off French or Japanese because, "English is good enough."
I like this analogy. Like English vs. French/Japanese, C++ is understood by more people/platforms than Java or C#, and this in itself is a very good reason for writing it. At the same time, just like English, although it has lots of peculiar ways of getting it wrong and shooting yourself in the foot, it is, thanks to its bastardized nature and its myriad of influences, a richer language, with many more ways to express the same ideas and concepts than other competitive languages. Until you are fluent in it, you make more mistakes than you would with another language, but once you have a grasp of it you can express exactly what you mean in fewer words/LOC than anything else.
Larry Wall understands this perfectly, which is why in Perl, There's More Than One Way To Do It, as opposed to the simplified elegance of, for instance, Python. This is also why Perl totally dominates over its competitor scripting languages.
WxWindows is one of the most magnificent development projects in existence and the fact we hear so little about it is shame upon the technological press in general and the open source information resources in particular.
wxWindows' biggest acceptance problem is... Qt. Both occupy basically the same niche - a cross-platform C++ toolkit. There are obvious technical differences, particularly the reuse of native widgets (wxWindows) versus reimplementation of widgets (Qt) but the basic philosophy behind both toolkits is the same - create the be-all-and-end-all of application toolkits, cross-platform and written in the best language available for the job (C++). They are plainly in direct competition.
There are couple of things that really set them apart - commercial support, where Qt, being a proprietary toolkit that has gone Open Source, has some advantages, particularly in terms of documentation and timely technical support - but, it has to be said, the number one reason is KDE. TrollTech's support of KDE right from the start, and their willingness to turn their business model almost on its head for it, has been one of the most successful strategies I've seen in the software industry, securing them forever the number one spot in C++ toolkits for Linux, and assuring them of major profits to come as Linux gradually achieves world domination.
Those of you who'd like to make a buck or two out of Open Source software should take note of the way TrollTech does things - Qt is arguably no better technically than wxWindows, but through clever and Open Source-friendly strategy, TrollTech has assured themslelves of the upper hand. It's a funny world, isnt it, when an originally proprietary piece of software ends up being more successful in the Open Source world than something that was Open Source right from the start?
The day CD-DA disappears because "everyone" has magically switched to Windows Media, I will eat my hat.
Sure, I mean this isn't the industry that forced us all to transition to LP's from 78's, or that convinced us to rebuy all our music on cassette after that, and then 20 years ago convinced us all to upgrade all our music to CD again. Is it?
Tried getting hold of any mainstream music on vinyl recently? Even cassettes are pretty hard to find now, and the sound and cassette assembly quality of pre-recorded cassettes is at an all-time low. Of course, you probably don't notice this, because chances are, you buy everything on CD.
The content industry has proved at least 3 times that it knows exactly how to get us all to upgrade our media formats, whether we like it or not: the transition from LP to cassette was in all sorts of ways a step backwards, but it still happened. Cassettes didn't last too long in the mainstream either, because they allowed you to record. The content providers pushed for a more desirable format, and up popped CD, which you could only copy to analogue cassette for the first 15 years of its life or so, significantly downgrading the quality.
Today we face a situation fairly similar to how things were in 1981 or thereabouts: a recordable, fairly open format (Then: cassette, Now: MP3/Ogg) is going mainstream, and is slowly killing off an older, more cumbersome, more expensive but arguably better-sounding format (Then: LP, Now: CD). The content industry is unhappy about this, because they feel that the recordability/copyability of the newer format is going to affect their bottom line. So they lobby for new laws in the US (Then: 1976 Copyright Act, Now: 1998 DMCA) to give them some legal standing, and to enable them to clamp down on those encouraging copying, and then they push for a new, virtually uncopyable format (Then: CD, Now: Windows Media/Palladium) with their technology partners (Then: Sony/Philips, Now: Microsoft/Intel/AMD). The new format has benefits for the consumer (Then: better sound quality and robustness, Now: no more trudging round music shops - entire catalogues available for easy download, all with pristine encoding and no blatant P2P spyware/stealware included).
The parallels are stark, and it only took 10 years for CD to dominate and for other formats to start dying, niche markets aside. If the content industry and Microsoft gets the marketing right, I fully expect exactly the same to happen with WM/Palladium - it will come to dominate in 10 years and CD will die.
The situation isn't entirely identical - the evolution of digital technology has made the stakes higher for both content provider (free P2P distribution is their worst nightmare) and consumer (breaking strong encryption on trusted systems seems a lot harder than simply waiting for recordable CD technology to become available and affordable). So you can expect much more of a battle than was the case with CDs. Nonetheless, I still expect the content industry to win this one - they are the ones with all the strings to pull. We don't have to let them walk all over us though - if we make noise now, we should be able to at least get some concessions towards fair use. If we shout loud enough, there is still the outside possibility that we can kill it dead.
However, if you simply sit tight and see what happens, maybe buying a Mac rather than a PC in a token gesture, then I hope you've got lube and an unwanted hat (not a red fedora by any chance?) because you'll be bending right over for the content industry and you'd better be hungry.
For those of you who don't get it yet...
on
Stopping Palladium?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...here's a quick rundown on what I think is Microsoft's strategy with Palladium: it's quite beautiful actually in its cunning, and it's going to be difficult to formulate a solid response to it. It has absolutely nothing to do with stopping Open Source software from running on PCs, as this would be blatantly anti-competitive and PC manufacturers would run away screaming from it. It's more subtle than that. Instead, it is all about the age-old Microsoft tradition of decommoditization of formats and protocols that we learnt so much about from the 1998 Halloween documents, taking this low-ethics strategy one step further.
Media companies have known as long as almost any of us that the public at large want downloadable digital media - music, films, TV-on-demand. With the growth of broadband and PC ownership this has now become impossible for them to ignore. However, the explosion of P2P networks has also shown Big Media that without effective copy-protection, their content is soon available to anyone and everyone that wants it, without paying them. The media companies see this as a threat, as they think it will cut into their bottom line. From their point of view I think that's a reasonable assumption to make. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with this or whether this is in fact the truth: the truth is irrelevant. The only thing that matters here is how the media companies see it, because they are the ones with almost all the content the public wants, and they have very deep pockets.
We've already seen the media companies and their surrogates make attempts at addressing this perceived threat on their own: witness PressPlay, LiquidAudio, SDMI, several CD copy-protection mechanisms and all sorts of other schemes. The trouble is that the media industry is still fairly clueless about the Internet and its users, and lacks the clout to force these schemes on the public, so all of them have so far fallen flat on their face, or have been cracked in no time at all, reducing their copy-protection effectiveness to zero.
Enter Microsoft and Palladium. Palladium is, in essence, a system which allows Microsoft to verify, through the use of hardware-assisted and hardened strong cryptography, that the PC that Windows is running on does not have any peculiar software or hardware attached that could divert and record an unencrypted digital signal - that is, the PC has a secure, verifiable digital path.
This is how it works: Each PC has a unique public/private keypair stored on the processor itself, in addition to Microsoft's public key. When Palladium is enabled, the hardware will refuse to run an operating system that is not signed by Microsoft's private key, and then the operating system will refuse to load hardware drivers that have not also been signed by Microsoft, effectively removing any possibility for diverting the unencrypted digital stream. When you download Palladium-protected content, it is encrypted using the client machine's unique public key, so it will only play back on the machine with the corresponding private key. Your access to the content is completely dictated by Microsoft, and because of the verifiable software and hardware in the client machine, there's precisely nothing you can do about it - at least, barring Microsoft's usual quota of bugs, but expect Microsoft to be quite meticulous here. You'll almost certainly always be able to turn Palladium off, but then you won't be able to play Palladium-protected content - you won't have access to the private key stored on the CPU that can decrypt the content. It absolutely will not stop you from listening or watching to unencrypted content, not on its own, anyway, and Microsoft is too smart to cut off its own air supply.
Microsoft can do this when the media companies failed because they have such total dominance over the whole client PC market and its architecture. Witness how they have already got Intel and AMD onboard to do the hardware side of things. Much of the software required to do this is already in Windows: driver signing, for instance, has been there since Windows 2000, although optional, and encrypted digital rights management has been in Windows Media Player for some time now too. It's plain Microsoft has been planning this for a while and has been doing the whole 'How to boil a frog' thing - i.e., slowly, bit-by-bit, all the time spinning it their own way.
The media companies will love it: finally they get their secure digital path and can start distributing all their content over the internet, whilst screwing the public out of their fair use rights. No new laws have had to be paid for, although the DMCA and similar laws worldwide will help keep attempted cracking of the system to a minimum. They can gradually start phasing out CDs so that, in ten years time, Palladium-protected content is the only digital content you can get.
Microsoft loves it because it gives them total control over the whole PC - they can dictate to hardware manufacturers exactly what they can and cannot produce, because if they don't listen, they don't get their drivers signed and the hardware won't run with Windows.
Once they have a good lead in the amount of content produced for Windows Media/Palladium systems, it gives them an enormous amount of leverage in consumer media products: music players, TV, cable, you name it. Everything media-related will be subject to Microsoft's whims, because without Microsoft's approval, your hardware won't be able to play any content.
It gives them complete control over what will probably eventually be the media industry's main form of distribution, which will earn them billions. Better still, with downloadable digital content becoming more and more important, it will be a major body-blow to Linux and Open Source - Microsoft will never sign a Linux distribution's kernel so that it can run in Palladium mode, so Palladium-protected content will never ever play in Linux. This will put an enormous dent in Linux's chances as an OS for the desktop - none of the media industry's output will play, and as CD/DVD supply gradually dries up over time, it will put Linux on the retreat back into its server homeland.
You can bet that eventually Apple will cave in too, assuming Windows Media protected by Palladium becomes dominant. They simply won't have any choice but to side with Microsoft and implement Palladium, because otherwise the supply of available content will dry up, unless there's a revolution in independent, free media. Mac-heads should get on board the anti-Palladium train now, because if you don't, Apple will be just as vulnerable to Microsoft as the rest of us. You simply don't have the desktop share to matter on your own, unfortunately, but together we might.
It is a domesday scenario for desktop Linux, and pretty ugly for consumer electronics manufacturers, PC peripheral manufacturers, Apple and other non-PC hardware makers, not forgetting of course the public at large. What can be done?
Well, there's six things that I can think off the top of my head:
Nothing. If Linux/Mac desktop usage can grow quickly enough, then the media companies may be unable to ignore this market. They withhold their media because there is no secure distribution system for it, P2P networks and MP3/Ogg thrive, and we're back to square one. It's possible that P2P networks with a very wide range of freely available media may cause Palladium-protected media to be DOA anyway. I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in this basket though.
Crack it. Always a possibility, and if it comes to pass, then I expect some of the best minds in the world to work at this. There are a few potential areas of attack: getting the unique private key off the CPU and stored elsewhere for decryption when not in Palladium mode. Cryptographic attacks on the Windows Media carrier format, which have already had some success on previous versions. Tricking the hardware into booting an unsigned OS when in Palladium mode. Tricking Windows into loading an unsigned driver (to me this sounds the most promising, given Microsoft's notoriously poor code safety). Any others?
Build an alternative secure digital distribution system that does not shut out Linux and does not give total control to Microsoft. Why not have something simple, like an external decoder/sound card/video output box that accepts crypto smartcards and that the OS only has to send encrypted data to? Why bother getting the OS involved in the decryption process at all? I think this is the most promising of all the options, because the media companies aren't going to give up their requirements for a secure digital distribution system, and they will probably appreciate a system that they control rather than Microsoft. Let's cut Microsoft's air supply off before Palladium gets a foothold and they start doing really nasty things to us. It still involves taking away fair use rights, and this sickens me, but it may be the only way. Palladium does this anyway, so it may come down to simply choosing the lesser of two evils.
Revolutionize the free media. A nice idea, and something to aim for long-term, but unlikely to happen in the short-term. Big Media is just too powerful at the moment.
Discredit Palladium. It worked for Intel's Pentium III serial numbers, it might work now. Invasion of privacy. Your fair use rights being taken away. On the other hand, Microsoft's PR is second-to-none. It'll be difficult, but we should give it a go.
Indict Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour. Leveraging the desktop monopoly to gain control of digital media? Sound sort-of familiar? I think Palladium is anti-competitive, and from my point of view it's a cut-and-shut case. Microsoft is more careful about these things these days though - Palladium doesn't immediately exclude Real or Quicktime or anyone else for that matter aside from Linux/Open Source, although in practise it probably would. Worth looking into, but with Bush in the White House.... difficult.
I don't think the war is lost yet, but we need to start fighting. Microsoft has come up with a spectacularly shrewd bit of corporate strategy, and we need an equally good response - very soon.
There are good frontends
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Accurate OCR?
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· Score: 2
Well, in the best traditions of UNIX software, the gocr authors decided to keep the user interface and the actual OCR code separate. Sensible.
Actually it comes with Tcl/Tk (gocr.tcl) and GTK+ (gtk-gocr) frontends. My personal favourite, though, is the KDE scanning program, Kooka, which includes support for gocr amongst its many very useful talents.
It's the duty of any government to spend its citizens' money thoughtfully.
Agreed. In fact, this is a perfect example of the free market working as it should. What has happened is that one of the major customers of groupware products has realised that it is now cheaper to contract out for their own solution than to buy in from external suppliers, and so this is what they are doing. This is in large part due to the wealth of excellent free software available to base such a home-grown solution on, but also due to the high prices and excessive restrictions on existing groupware products.
Put simply, the incumbent suppliers have not reacted to changes in the market and have priced themselves out. If Exchange, for instance, was $100 for an unlimited user licence, then I suspect this Kroupware project would never have got off the drawing board - it simply wouldn't be economically sensible. Unfortunately, the current vendors' greed has blinded them to the needs of their customers, and they will suffer in the longer-term for it.
The fact that the Kroupware project will itself all be free software matters not one jot, at least not from the perspective of the free market, all it is is a new competitor, and from the point of view of the consumer, one that has a number of very attractive attributes that existing solutons cannot match. But that's just how it works: if, as a vendor, you price your products too high, or your products are sub-optimal or place too many restrictions on the user, then you are going to get competition and often you will have a hard time matching your new competition. That's just tough luck. If you cannot compete on price due to your competitor having lower costs that you cannot reduce, then you will have to make your product attractive in other ways.
This is precisely how the free market economy is supposed to work. It doesn't matter that the project was instigated by a government, all they are is one of, if not the largest customer of such products, so they have the most to gain from reducing their costs, and are probably one of the least risk-averse - it doesn't matter to them if the project succeeds or fails, they will survive either way without really batting an eyelid.
Free market advocates who try to write governments out of the economic script have it precisely backwards - in any country government is one of the most important players in the economy, certainly one of the biggest consumers, and you cannot just ignore that. Consider them as the largest non-profit organization, in effect a charity dedicated to the advancement of the country as a whole, and you have a better idea of who they are and how they are important economically.
It would, in reality, be no different if a large ordinary non-profit had commisioned the Kroupware project for economic reasons, but I bet people wouldn't complain about that.
Does your 1290 start to tick when it's been sitting idle for a while?
Well it kinda makes a ticking noise when it pauses to wait for data (I assume that's what's happening, anyway) whilst printing but I don't hear the ticking any other time. Not quite sure what the ticking noise is.
I only have two complaints about my 1290 really, and these problems seem to be common to a lot of Epson inkjets: first, it seems to be rather incontinent with black ink. It dribbles black ink all over its insides and on long print jobs, say a high-quality colour A3 print, it has a habit of doing this all over the page, so I get these blobs of black disfiguring the picture. Annoying. The second problem seems to be related to this, this is the grease problem that a couple of other poster have mentioned here. What seems to happen is that the dribbled black ink gets over the guide bar that the head runs on, and this causes the grease on it to gunge up and go stiff. This in turn causes the print head to move erratically and causes all sorts of printing artifacts. I fixed it with a wipe down of the guide bar with a cloth and a few squirts of silicone lubricant.
Can you get it to print edge to edge with Gimp-Print?
Works fine with the GIMP plugin version of Gimp-Print, although it's usually half a mm out on one side or the other - I put that down to a not-quite perfect paper feed system, as the same happens with the Windows drivers. I can't say I've tried printing edge-to-edge with the CUPS driver version, that does look a bit more difficult as the margin settings are dependent on the application that's doing the printing and few seem to have much control over this. Oh well.
As it happens, Epson already does help us (Gimp-print) out, in exactly the right fashion -- they provide programming manuals for their printers, usually quite promptly too.
Well then, I take it back, hats off to them, I didn't realize they were so ridiculously Free Software-friendly. I'm still slightly mystified as to why they provide(d) their own drivers as well, but I suppose the more support the better. It seems like somewhat wasted effort, but I guess Epson have their reasons.
BTW, congratulations on Gimp-Print, the output from my Stylus Photo 1290 is nothing short of stunning. Excellent work!
It's certainly unfortunate that this GPL violation occurred and that Epson have had to pull this software, which I'm sure is useful to some people.
However, in terms of inconvenience to users, it means very little indeed. The combination of GIMP-Print drivers for Epson inkjets with CUPS doing the spooling already produces output that is arguably better quality than any driver Epson has produced for either Windows or Mac. With the KDEPrint subsystem providing the user interface, you get a system that is powerful, flexible, easy to use and can do everything that Epson's own drivers do, and then some, whilst looking and working as an integral part of KDE applications.
Similarly, the KDE scanner program, Kooka, is a nice, powerful KDE-style alternative to xsane, supporting all the scanner hardware that SANE does and better, can scan straight into all sorts of KDE software, including KOffice, similar to the TWAIN system on Windows and Mac.
There are, of course, plugins for the GIMP also - GIMP-Print and xsane's GIMP plugin which provide similar features, at least to the GIMP, although not GTK or GNOME applications as a whole (hey guys, is this going to be fixed anytime soon? printing from GNOME apps is still in the dark ages, and there's nothing like Kooka's scan-service mode at all:(
Personally, I don't see why Epson bothers - the Free Software community has outdone them. It would be far better if they just helped projects like GIMP-Print and SANE out more, although I guess that means they can't stick Epson logos all over the software... ahh, the joys of corporate ego gratification.
There are protocols for remote storage, why not use these?
I agree that for most network storage, low-level SAN protocols are pointless - higher-level abstractions of remote disk such as smb/nfs/etc are much better as they enforce proper filesystem semantics, and run on top of a physical filesystem. You get all the advantages of having a filesystem in the first place - locking, sane disk space allocation algorithms, journaling, that sort of thing.
However, some applications - big databases particularly - prefer to have raw access to the storage medium, with no filesystem in the way to slow them down. These applications implement their own locking, sharing and space allocation semantics which are optimized for their own particular storage use patterns.
Classic file sharing protocols don't cut it for these big databases because there's no way to get raw disk access over the network with them. Which is why these lower-level SAN protocols exist - they provide the raw disk access that the big databases want, over a network. This means you can have your database spread over multiple physical locations to minimize the risk of your whole database going up in smoke, without taking the performance hit that running the database over smb/nfs would have.
You won't see iSCSI hardware making it into bog-standard file server hardware any time soon, but I can see it being huge in big-iron database servers, where it should be considerably cheaper and easier than Fibre Channel, the current best solution.
Admittedly, there are big questions over whether raw disk access is really necessary for databases - modern general-purpose filesystems are a LOT quicker than they used to be, and MySQL, for instance, which doesn't use raw disk IO but is still blazingly fast, is turning some of the performance assumptions on their head. But the big guys - Oracle, DB2 and so forth - still prefer it, so this is why iSCSI is here.
No, not at all. This is a very genuine concern. Personally, I think having a separate daemon to do this job is a very dumb idea. Existing, well tested tools like ssh and cron could do this, and the less new, untested code that runs on the network, the better for security.
For a start, it's going to have a port open on the network in order for a master computer to contact it and tell it to update. This in itself is a major security risk - any open port is. Now also remember that, because it will be updating packages system-wide, part of the update process is going to have to run as root - I hope at least the network-facing daemon doesn't. If it does - instant remote root when the first stack-smashing or format string exploit comes along - and it will, have no doubt about that. Even if the daemon itself has limited privileges, it is going to have to talk to something setuid root in order to perform the package upgrades, so a remote root shell is only two exploits away, one for the daemon and then another for the setuid program that does the updating.
Remember, this is new code, untested in the wild for any length of time, unexamined yet by anyone external. ssh would do the job fine instead, and, although ssh has had security problems, it has had a lot of pounding on it for a long time now. The Red Carpet daemon - hasn't.
In short, wtf aren't Ximian using ssh instead of their own potentially hokey code?
Second, there is a big problem with automatic updating generally. If I can get root on a machine within a network - or in fact, just plug my laptop into this network - then with a bit of spoofing trickery I can convince any other machine within that network that I am the update server, and next time they update, they will download packages from me, which I could easily trojan - and then I've got control of every single box on the network, and almost all the work was done for me. Signed packages are supposed to alleviate this problem, but past incidents with both OpenSSL and ssh suggest that certificate checking is not always up to scratch, and there may still be other ways to convince the Red Carpet daemon to install unsigned packages. If you have an insecure wireless network attached, then you're going to have even larger problems as an attacker who wants to get in this way doesn't even have to be physically connected to your network.
This sounds like a very convenient way to automatically update software - although nothing that ssh/apt doesn't already offer - but it also sounds like a potentially gaping security hole that will bite people hard in the future.
Of course, I'm not everyone, so I'll ask: Is there any really compelling reason to go to a Linux distro left?
Here's a good one: Speed.
OS X is a fairly well engineered Unix but at its core is Mach, and Mach-based systems don't have a good reputation for performance. Darwin is better than most Mach-based systems but it's still a traditional message-passing nanokernel and there is a performance hit associated with that, compared to a monolithic kernel (of which Linux is an excellent example) or newer approaches to microkernel design like L4 (which the HURD, currently based on Mach, is gradually porting to).
If you're developing POSIXy software on Apple hardware, the seconds you save on your compiles using Linux can very quickly add up into minutes, hours and days. This is especially true on SMP hardware - which of course, every PowerMac is now - where Linux currently scales better than anyone else, at least on systems up to about 8 processors.
Similarly, if you're using the machine exclusively as a server (an area Apple is trying to push into), the extra speed of Linux may come in useful.
In any case, if you're going to use the machine largely as a GNOME workstation, why not run it on Linux, where it runs fastest (insert rant by FreeBSD users) and has the least rough edges? You're obviously familiar with Unixes, and you use fink so you must be comfortable with apt-get. Why not use Debian where you use the same tools but have a far far larger package selection?
You see, it depends on what you use your Mac for. If you absolutely must have some Cocoa-based apps, then yes, OS X is the better solution. If you want an idiot-proof interface, then yes, OS X is better. But if all your MacOS apps are Classic or Carbon then Mac-on-Linux works fine. Audio apps don't work so well, but then they don't under Classic on OS X and there's not much of a rush to make them run native on OS X, so either way it's a reboot into OS 9.
Personally I think KDE is beginning to outclass OS X eye-candy wise (Keramik is drop-dead gorgeous and the Crystal icons are excellent too) so at the very least this is less of a factor than it used to be.
Put simply: if you want Unix, well, OS X is a good Unix. But Linux is just better at it.
The day a developer stops listening to user requests directly or indirectly and starts to do whatever he likes most (in their free or payed time) is the day I'll want to switch to something else (personal choice here).
Which is why just about every OSS project (KDE included) that is large enough to use a bug-tracking system has a 'wishlist' category in the bug-tracker.
Just about every OSS project I know would LOVE to hear about new ideas and ways to improve the software - but PLEASE report these ideas in the appropriate place, which is in the bug-tracking system. If you post your ideas to a mailing list, then not only are your proposals far more likely to get lost in the noise of other posts, you are also creating extra work for the developers who have to wade through tons of feature requests, often for identical things, before they can use the mailing list for what it was designed for - which is communicating with each other. If the idea is in the bug tracking system, it is recorded for eternity, indexed and can be searched and reviewed by developers easily when they run out of pressing bugs to fix.
To repeat: if you have a killer idea, post it to the bug-tracking system, with a 'wishlist' category! Although you may not get an immediate response, my experience is that you have a far far better chance of seeing your idea implemented in the future than if you pollute project mailing lists.
Now, if you're prepared to implement your idea yourself, then by all means post to the mailing lists when you need help - that is what they're there for - but if you aren't, leave it to the bug tracking system.
there is entirely too little experimental and experiental data for any strong claims about the safety of RTG containment to be made
Rubbish. NASA RTG containment systems have been tested in real-life missions on re-entry twice, once in 1968 from a failed meteorological satellite, and once in 1970 from the remains of Apollo 13. On both occasions the RTG containment worked fine. Lab studies on both the re-entry and the explosion-on-launch scenarios have been extensive, and NASA's RTG systems have been tested to and survived nearly 4x the pressure produced from a rocket explosion on a Shuttle-type spacecraft.
The physics and engineering behind an effective RTG containment system are quite simple. Frankly, a good Victorian-era engineer could have done it (although it would certainly have been a lot heavier than modern systems).
NASA has a nice little piece on RTG safety that they wrote for people concerned about Galileo's power system. It's available here.
Of course, you are free to disagree with NASA's findings, but it seems like good enough evidence to me.
If a nuclear-powered device explodes on launch, or in low orbit, it's "not a good thing". At the very least you'll get radioactive debris spread over a wide area.
You actually think NASA would be dumb enough to send up a nuclear-powered device without adequate containment against explosion and re-entry?
NASA may be huge, inefficient, wasteful and sluggish, but they're not stupid.
It's a shame that the environmentalists had a hissy fit in the 80's and 90's that blocked this very reliable technology from being used on modern spacecraft.
Not really. The problem is that in order to make one of these generators safe, it needs to be protected from the launch rocket exploding on take-off. It doesn't matter whether you're an environmentalist or not - if a couple of kilos of plutonium gets vaporised and spread to the four winds on the launch pad, you've just made enormous chunks of the US's only major space launch site unusable until it can be cleaned up. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn't make the radiation go away. Needless to say, the clean-up operation and interruption to US space activities would cost tens of billions of dollars - and quite possibly a lot more.
It's perfectly possible to protect these generators from the explosive force caused by a rocket blowing up on the launch pad - it's just a simple engineering problem. The problem is that it costs weight - lots of it, and the number one thing you want to avoid on a rocket launch is extra weight. Every extra kilogram costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, or costs you one or two or three valuable scientific instruments.
So unless you absolutely need a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, you don't use one. Solar panels are lighter (because they don't need explosion protection) and, therefore, cheaper to launch (which is the only really major cost consideration - the cost of the space vehicle itself pales in comparison). Modern solar panels are good out to nearly Jupiter. Beyond that you need an RTG. I can only think of one mission that NASA has launched since the Voyagers that has gone out that far - Galileo, which was launched in 1989 - and yes, it had an RTG on-board despite the protests.
Honestly, NASA - at least the engineers - couldn't give a damn about the environmental issues involved with RTGs. Because as long as their containment engineering is up to scratch - and I rather suspect it is - there simply are no environmental issues. Instead, it comes down to economics - and for most missions that NASA undertakes, which go no further out than Mars, thermoelectric generators lose out badly to solar panels.
Now, perhaps environmentalist fears are preventing NASA from sending more probes beyond Jupiter because they need an RTG, but that's a different matter entirely. Maybe they need to publicly blow up a few rockets with the generator containers on-board to prove their point.
The abuse done by the NSA during the Nixon years caused a lot of severe curbs (both open and classified) to be placed on the NSA, and those laws have serious teeth that will bite anyone violating them.
Indeed. However, there's absolutely nothing stopping a friendly foreign signals intelligence agency (say, the UK's GCHQ or Canada's CSE) from gathering intelligence on US nationals, and then passing that intelligence back to US agencies through the formalised intelligence sharing agreements that exist. Of course, the NSA isn't allowed to even solicit such information, but how hard do you think it would be for GCHQ to find out who the NSA is interested in, or simply make the judgement call on who to monitor themselves?
Which means that in reality, those safeguards against spying on your own people mean absolutely nothing. The NSA can enforce those regulations as tightly as they like, and all it does is create warm fuzzies. They'll still be getting all the intelligence they want.
It's quite simple: CDex uses software error correction (based on the xiph.org paranoia library), iTunes does not.
What this means is that CDex reads each sector off the CD several times, compares the reads, and attempts to correct for jitter and other common read errors.
iTunes, on the other hand, doesn't. It simply reads each sector once off the CD, and believes what the CD drive hands to it.
This software error correction causes a major slowdown - my audio rip speed goes from about 16x down to about 2x. You probably won't notice the jitter correction either unless you've got good ears.
However, if you have some scratched CDs, compare the output of the two. The CDex rip will probably be listenable - even if the CD is so badly scratched that several sectors are totally unreadable, the paranoia library will attempt to smoothly interpolate between known good data. The iTunes rip, on the other hand, unless your CD drive is really good, will be unlistenable, with gaps and nasty audible errors.
This, of course, has precisely nothing to do with the relative processor speeds of your PC versus your Mac. Switch off the error correction in CDex and the Dell will almost certainly be faster.
it's in your food as well. If we are going to worry about endocrine disruption, then does it not make sense to start with looking at what we eat? The biggest problem is with soya (a.k.a. soy or soybeans). You could be ingesting this every day at levels that are known to have serious endocrine-disrupting effects, and not even realise it.
The problem with soya is that it contains large quantities of various 'phytoestrogens', or plant oestrogens, and in particular the compunds diadzein and genistein. These belong to a family of compounds known as isoflavonoids, many of which share an oestrogen-like effect. Isoflavonoids are a mixed bag: perhaps you may have heard of their anti-cancer properties. However, what you perhaps haven't heard is that they are only effective against certain types of tumour, in particular testosterone-dependent tumours, such as most prostate and testicular cancers. This is, of course, consistent with their oestrogenic (which implies anti-testosterone) properties. However, some tumours (such as some breast, and most ovarian cancers) are oestrogen-dependent, and isoflavonoids can actually aggravate such tumours. The evidence for the efficacy of isoflavonoid treatment of non-hormone-dependent cancers is shaky, at best.
Perhaps you might be concerned about the effect it has on sex and reproduction - according to a Swiss study, 100g of soya material contains isoflavonoids with approximately equivalent oestrogenic effects to a single combined (oestrogen and progesterone-containing) contraceptive pill. This level of oestrogenic compounds is well known to cause feminization of males, infertility and loss of sex drive. In the very rare cases where women who were taking the combined contraceptive pill become pregnant, a termination is almost always advised due to the effects the external oestrogenic hormones have on the developing foetus, which can include developmental abnormalities through to miscarriage.
If you're a woman, and not planning to get pregnant, this is not such a problem, and postmenopausal women may find soya useful to help guard against osteoporosis and other postmenopausal symptoms. But is it made clear that soya is much less helpful for men than women, or can even be detrimental, or that it can be dangerous for women trying to get pregnant? No.
Use of soya is on the increase. In the US, soybean consumption rose from 23.54 million metric tonnes in 1975 to 43.28 million metric tonnes in 2000. It is used for all sorts of things, from animal feed to cooking oil, and is increasingly used as a bulk protein and carbohydrate in many processed foods. Soya is also the number one source for lecithin, used widely as an emulsifier. Take a look at the ingredients list on some of the food in your refrigerator and cupboards: you might be surprised how much contains soya. Thanks to various loopholes in food labelling regulations, soya is also sometimes present in foods which do not have it labelled. In the EU, for instance, if an ingredient makes up less than 25% of a foodstuff, then there is no legal requirement for that ingredient to be labelled.
Unfortunately this makes it extremely difficult to know exactly how much soya and soya-derived products you are actually ingesting. Traditionally, it has been accepted that East Asian countries consume much more soya in their diets than anywhere in the West: it is, after all, a traditional food there. This, in turn, has been used as evidence that soya use in the West is at safe levels. However, with the increase of soya use in processed food, and inadequate labelling regulations, is this really true any more?
This also doesn't include people that consciously make an effort to eat soya: vegetarians, vegans, people who believe in its health-giving properties, people who drink soya milk as an animal milk substitute, and many more. If you consume more than three glasses of soya milk each day, then you are already consuming more soya isoflavonoids than the average Japanese man. If you eat a fairly standard portion of soy protein (100g) every day then you are ingesting many times that, and are without doubt disrupting your endocrine system in quite a major way.
In all fairness, in moderation, soya is probably as harmless as any other common foodstuff. East Asian peoples have been eating moderate quantities of soya for millenia with no obvious ill effect. However, with the creeping addition of soya into everyday foods, and the encouragement of people to eat soya as a major part of their diet, I believe that many people have already passed the level of consumption that could be called 'moderate'.
The soya industry has talked up the health benefits of soya without giving any regard to the downsides. This is, I suppose, inevitable. This is big business - 56% of US oilseed production is soya, and agriculture has pretty dismal regulation. Unfortunately, the supposed 'health-food' industry has bought into the propaganda lock, stock and barrel, and parrot that propaganda endlessly. It neatly coincides with their own financial interests as the primary supplier of soya foods. To say this has made me cynical about the claims of an industry that supposedly puts the health of consumers first is, to put it mildly, an understatement.
How exactly does one run Apache and mySQL on a PDA? What would be the applications of it in the real world?
There sure are a lot of geeks that do Linux development. Imagine being able to take your whole development environment, with exactly the same tools you use on a PC, stick it in your pocket and take it wherever you go. Remember the Zaurus even has a small, but perfectly-formed keyboard. Why bother with a laptop?
As for how to run Apache and MySQL, it's simple: just install the packages, like you would on any other Linux system. You wouldn't get much space for the database with the Zaurus' memory, but it would be plenty for most development and testing.
A sensible approach would be to let the Americans spend the money, then when it becomes commercial feasible people in Europe will start running commercial services up their anyway
So you've never heard of Arianespace then? Arianespace has over 50% of the world's commercial launch market. That sounds kinda commercially feasible to me.
And the reason? Simple. The Ariane rockets get satellites into space faster, with less hassle, and more reliably than anyone else. Which means that when you add up the total costs, Ariane also gets them into orbit cheaper than anyone else (although the Russians are competitive, and currently have a less-full launch schedule, which is why the Beagle 2 is scheduled to launch on a Russian rocket). The US doesn't even come close, mostly due to reliance on the horrendously-expensive Shuttle and the resulting negative impact that has had on the Atlas and Delta launch programmes.
The EU is up with the best in terms of unmanned space vehicle technlogy too - as an example, the Huygens lander that is part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan was developed and built in the UK, and in 2000, Europe finally supplied over 50% of the world's geostationary communication satellites.
NASA and the rest of the US space industry has talked for some years about doing it 'faster, cheaper, better' but right now, the Europeans are walking the walk rather than talking the talk and are reaping the benefits.
However, outside the space industry itself the European space programme has an image problem - as demonstrated by your post, even Europeans have no idea how well the European space industry is doing. This, in turn, has a negative impact on future sales of satellites and launch services. What it needs is good PR, and the best way of doing that is by headline-grabbing space science programmes, and Beagle 2 is a good example. Think of it as a long-term marketing investment by European governments. What is spent now on space science projects will, if the mission is successful, repay itself many times in the future in terms of sales of satellites and launch services and the tax revenues that are derived from that, not to mention the effect it has on overall national prestige and worldwide perception as leaders in technology, which has other spinoff benefits.
The Americans and Russians have understood this for decades, which is why there has been continued investment in space science programmes of limited immediate economic benefit in these countries, and why you have this distorted view of the world in which American and Russian space technology is far superior to everyone else's.
Just because you are unable to see short-term economic benefit does not mean that such economic benefit will not happen later and perhaps indirectly: all it shows it that you are blinkered by short-termism. Sadly, such views are common and are in some ways the biggest blight on the Western way of life, but I'll save that for another rant.
I think this is more than a conincidence. I also heard the author of ffmpeg got an email that the many error codes in tkcVideo are very similiar to ffmpeg...
Ok, yes, you're probably right, it probably does use ffmpeg. What's the big deal? As you point out, ffmpeg is LGPL'ed, which allows proprietary applications to link to it. Any modifications they make to ffmpeg would have to be released, but I'm betting they had to make zero, zilch, none. A Zaurus is just a fairly typical ARM Linux system. As long as they're using a standard shared library version of ffmpeg, supply a copy of the LGPL somewhere, and give credits to ffmpeg in the about box and a pointer to where the LGPL is, they are in the clear. That's not really asking a lot. If they do this, they don't even have to provide ffmpeg source. At least, this is how I and quite a few people read the LGPL.
The LGPL is quite a different beast to the GPL, and that's by design.
The European Union has rejected genetically engineered food based not on any reliable scientific studies but on public and political pressure from small special interest groups.
Yes, and they are right to do so. Perhaps this has become an unfamiliar concept in the US, but by and large democratic governments are supposed to listen to their citizens. A large majority of EU citizens do not want genetically modified food, and there is no economic reason to do so - the EU already produces far more of most foods than it requires to feed itself. So much so that in fact the EU spends a lot of money paying farmers NOT to grow certain crops - because some countries within the EU are more efficient than others, and having massive surplus generated by these countries would kill agriculture in some of the less-efficient EU countries. Using GM crops to increase yield would only exascerbate this problem. Perhaps you think this is a stupid idea and that the free market should sort it out, but most Europeans would disagree - national identity is a key issue within the EU, and part of that national identity in most countries is being able to feed your own population. In addition, since most of the GM crops developed so far are US in origin, use of GM crops widely would change the balance of trade negatively. Instead of the seed company->farmer relationship being entirely intra-EU trade, it changes to a drain of money from the EU to the US. So both the EU agriculture and financial bigwigs are against it, because it would cost them more money.
Because of this slightly funny way agriculture works within the EU, gains in yield from GM foods would be unsellable, and since the GM seed is more expensive, and is a recurring expense due to the inability to use saved seed, GM crops actually end up in less profit for the EU farmer, who is on average quite poor anyway. So the farmers are against it too.
There is also the cross-pollination problem, as illustrated by the Canadian farmer that some other have written about, who suffered exactly this problem. Once GM crops are established in an area, it becomes impossible for non-GM crops of the same species to grow in that area without becoming 'infected' by the genes of the GM crop. The GM seed producer can then clamp down using patent laws and extract money from farmers who weren't even growing the GM crop in the first place - because patented genes from the GM crop end up in the genome of non-GM crops. It could become an effective non-governmental 'tax' on all EU farmers, and worse, chances are it wouldn't even be collected by an EU company but rather a US one.
The fact that most EU consumers would rather die than eat genetically modified food is helpful to EU farmers and ministers in banning widespread use of GM crops and keeping the ban in place, but it's not the key issue here.
It isn't that the EU is behind in genetic research and is playing Not Invented Here - after all, 1/3 of the human genome project was done in the UK, not to mention that the structure of DNA was discovered there too. The EU could develop its own GM crops, which would sidestep some of the issues but not most, and indeed it is and has. But still the ban on commercial GM agriculture remains, so these crops remain research tools, and have met with fierce opposition wherever they have been test-planted.
Has there been ANY reliable scientific study relating ANY harmful effects to bio-engineered food?
As far as I'm aware, no, not directly. However, research in this area is still young, and more importantly, mostly corporate-funded. It's the same kind of situation as with the pharmaceutical industry - we ingest these substances, so we'd better make damn sure they're safe, yet most of the research is funded by the companies that want approval. I shouldn't have to remind you that the pharmaceutical industry managed to get things like thalidomide on the market, and no-one had any credible evidence (that hadn't been suppressed) against that for several years after it was available on the market.
It was interesting to read that somehow two extra genetic fragments that shouldn't have been in the genome of the Monsanto GM soybeans ended up there. Are we really sure we know all the knock-on effects? What else was missed? What if those genetic fragments had coded for a protein that switched off one of the human body's immune responses to cancer, or were themselves carcinogenic? Unlikely perhaps, but it took 3 years after commercial growing of these crops had started for the discovery to be made. Are you willing to take the risk, just so some company you've never worked for, never met anyone from, never bought anything from and which could well not even be in your own country or continent can make a few extra dollars for their shareholders?
Perhaps the general mistrust in the EU of genetic modification is due to other food safety scares like BSE, caused by considerably less obvious tinkering than with genetic modification, but with the same aim - increasing efficiency and yield. The US hasn't had to deal with a food scare of similar scale, which is perhaps why the US public are so dismissive of the dangers. From an EU perspective, it seems the US consumer simply doesn't care what they eat, as long as it's cheap. The widespread use in the US of growth hormone to fatten livestock is another example of this, but this too is banned in the EU and repugnant to EU consumers.
There are indirect environmental reasons to dislike some GM crops too. As an example, take Monsanto's GM soybeans, which are resistant to the Monsanto weedkiller Roundup (glyphosate). Here is a product that is designed to encourage use of Roundup and to allow farmers to spray willy-nilly without worrying about the effects it will have on their crop. If this doesn't mean farmers end up using more weedkiller than they would have done with a non-resistant crop, I'll eat my hat. The farmers are supposed to do this - it maximizes their yield. Goundwater contamination beckons...
As an EU citizen, I am very glad that the EU has rejected genetically modified food, and I am glad that Zimbabwe has taken the same viewpoint, whatever I may think of their political leadership. GM foods are being used as a tool of economic imperialism, encourage environmental bad practice, encourage patent system abuse, are insufficiently tested and understood and simply aren't necessary. Chalk up another one on the US image problem score board.
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Does anybody know other applications that supercomputers are being used for. I know some do weather predictions.
Ok, non-military uses, off the top of my head:
I'm sure there are plenty more applications for supercomputer power - any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling, especially when there's more than one unknown variable (multivariate analysis is complicated, to say the least).
It's like writting off French or Japanese because, "English is good enough."
I like this analogy. Like English vs. French/Japanese, C++ is understood by more people/platforms than Java or C#, and this in itself is a very good reason for writing it. At the same time, just like English, although it has lots of peculiar ways of getting it wrong and shooting yourself in the foot, it is, thanks to its bastardized nature and its myriad of influences, a richer language, with many more ways to express the same ideas and concepts than other competitive languages. Until you are fluent in it, you make more mistakes than you would with another language, but once you have a grasp of it you can express exactly what you mean in fewer words/LOC than anything else.
Larry Wall understands this perfectly, which is why in Perl, There's More Than One Way To Do It, as opposed to the simplified elegance of, for instance, Python. This is also why Perl totally dominates over its competitor scripting languages.
Sad but true.
WxWindows is one of the most magnificent development projects in existence and the fact we hear so little about it is shame upon the technological press in general and the open source information resources in particular.
wxWindows' biggest acceptance problem is... Qt. Both occupy basically the same niche - a cross-platform C++ toolkit. There are obvious technical differences, particularly the reuse of native widgets (wxWindows) versus reimplementation of widgets (Qt) but the basic philosophy behind both toolkits is the same - create the be-all-and-end-all of application toolkits, cross-platform and written in the best language available for the job (C++). They are plainly in direct competition.
There are couple of things that really set them apart - commercial support, where Qt, being a proprietary toolkit that has gone Open Source, has some advantages, particularly in terms of documentation and timely technical support - but, it has to be said, the number one reason is KDE. TrollTech's support of KDE right from the start, and their willingness to turn their business model almost on its head for it, has been one of the most successful strategies I've seen in the software industry, securing them forever the number one spot in C++ toolkits for Linux, and assuring them of major profits to come as Linux gradually achieves world domination.
Those of you who'd like to make a buck or two out of Open Source software should take note of the way TrollTech does things - Qt is arguably no better technically than wxWindows, but through clever and Open Source-friendly strategy, TrollTech has assured themslelves of the upper hand. It's a funny world, isnt it, when an originally proprietary piece of software ends up being more successful in the Open Source world than something that was Open Source right from the start?
The day CD-DA disappears because "everyone" has magically switched to Windows Media, I will eat my hat.
Sure, I mean this isn't the industry that forced us all to transition to LP's from 78's, or that convinced us to rebuy all our music on cassette after that, and then 20 years ago convinced us all to upgrade all our music to CD again. Is it?
Tried getting hold of any mainstream music on vinyl recently? Even cassettes are pretty hard to find now, and the sound and cassette assembly quality of pre-recorded cassettes is at an all-time low. Of course, you probably don't notice this, because chances are, you buy everything on CD.
The content industry has proved at least 3 times that it knows exactly how to get us all to upgrade our media formats, whether we like it or not: the transition from LP to cassette was in all sorts of ways a step backwards, but it still happened. Cassettes didn't last too long in the mainstream either, because they allowed you to record. The content providers pushed for a more desirable format, and up popped CD, which you could only copy to analogue cassette for the first 15 years of its life or so, significantly downgrading the quality.
Today we face a situation fairly similar to how things were in 1981 or thereabouts: a recordable, fairly open format (Then: cassette, Now: MP3/Ogg) is going mainstream, and is slowly killing off an older, more cumbersome, more expensive but arguably better-sounding format (Then: LP, Now: CD). The content industry is unhappy about this, because they feel that the recordability/copyability of the newer format is going to affect their bottom line. So they lobby for new laws in the US (Then: 1976 Copyright Act, Now: 1998 DMCA) to give them some legal standing, and to enable them to clamp down on those encouraging copying, and then they push for a new, virtually uncopyable format (Then: CD, Now: Windows Media/Palladium) with their technology partners (Then: Sony/Philips, Now: Microsoft/Intel/AMD). The new format has benefits for the consumer (Then: better sound quality and robustness, Now: no more trudging round music shops - entire catalogues available for easy download, all with pristine encoding and no blatant P2P spyware/stealware included).
The parallels are stark, and it only took 10 years for CD to dominate and for other formats to start dying, niche markets aside. If the content industry and Microsoft gets the marketing right, I fully expect exactly the same to happen with WM/Palladium - it will come to dominate in 10 years and CD will die.
The situation isn't entirely identical - the evolution of digital technology has made the stakes higher for both content provider (free P2P distribution is their worst nightmare) and consumer (breaking strong encryption on trusted systems seems a lot harder than simply waiting for recordable CD technology to become available and affordable). So you can expect much more of a battle than was the case with CDs. Nonetheless, I still expect the content industry to win this one - they are the ones with all the strings to pull. We don't have to let them walk all over us though - if we make noise now, we should be able to at least get some concessions towards fair use. If we shout loud enough, there is still the outside possibility that we can kill it dead.
However, if you simply sit tight and see what happens, maybe buying a Mac rather than a PC in a token gesture, then I hope you've got lube and an unwanted hat (not a red fedora by any chance?) because you'll be bending right over for the content industry and you'd better be hungry.
...here's a quick rundown on what I think is Microsoft's strategy with Palladium: it's quite beautiful actually in its cunning, and it's going to be difficult to formulate a solid response to it. It has absolutely nothing to do with stopping Open Source software from running on PCs, as this would be blatantly anti-competitive and PC manufacturers would run away screaming from it. It's more subtle than that. Instead, it is all about the age-old Microsoft tradition of decommoditization of formats and protocols that we learnt so much about from the 1998 Halloween documents, taking this low-ethics strategy one step further.
Media companies have known as long as almost any of us that the public at large want downloadable digital media - music, films, TV-on-demand. With the growth of broadband and PC ownership this has now become impossible for them to ignore. However, the explosion of P2P networks has also shown Big Media that without effective copy-protection, their content is soon available to anyone and everyone that wants it, without paying them. The media companies see this as a threat, as they think it will cut into their bottom line. From their point of view I think that's a reasonable assumption to make. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with this or whether this is in fact the truth: the truth is irrelevant. The only thing that matters here is how the media companies see it, because they are the ones with almost all the content the public wants, and they have very deep pockets.
We've already seen the media companies and their surrogates make attempts at addressing this perceived threat on their own: witness PressPlay, LiquidAudio, SDMI, several CD copy-protection mechanisms and all sorts of other schemes. The trouble is that the media industry is still fairly clueless about the Internet and its users, and lacks the clout to force these schemes on the public, so all of them have so far fallen flat on their face, or have been cracked in no time at all, reducing their copy-protection effectiveness to zero.
Enter Microsoft and Palladium. Palladium is, in essence, a system which allows Microsoft to verify, through the use of hardware-assisted and hardened strong cryptography, that the PC that Windows is running on does not have any peculiar software or hardware attached that could divert and record an unencrypted digital signal - that is, the PC has a secure, verifiable digital path.
This is how it works: Each PC has a unique public/private keypair stored on the processor itself, in addition to Microsoft's public key. When Palladium is enabled, the hardware will refuse to run an operating system that is not signed by Microsoft's private key, and then the operating system will refuse to load hardware drivers that have not also been signed by Microsoft, effectively removing any possibility for diverting the unencrypted digital stream. When you download Palladium-protected content, it is encrypted using the client machine's unique public key, so it will only play back on the machine with the corresponding private key. Your access to the content is completely dictated by Microsoft, and because of the verifiable software and hardware in the client machine, there's precisely nothing you can do about it - at least, barring Microsoft's usual quota of bugs, but expect Microsoft to be quite meticulous here. You'll almost certainly always be able to turn Palladium off, but then you won't be able to play Palladium-protected content - you won't have access to the private key stored on the CPU that can decrypt the content. It absolutely will not stop you from listening or watching to unencrypted content, not on its own, anyway, and Microsoft is too smart to cut off its own air supply.
Microsoft can do this when the media companies failed because they have such total dominance over the whole client PC market and its architecture. Witness how they have already got Intel and AMD onboard to do the hardware side of things. Much of the software required to do this is already in Windows: driver signing, for instance, has been there since Windows 2000, although optional, and encrypted digital rights management has been in Windows Media Player for some time now too. It's plain Microsoft has been planning this for a while and has been doing the whole 'How to boil a frog' thing - i.e., slowly, bit-by-bit, all the time spinning it their own way.
The media companies will love it: finally they get their secure digital path and can start distributing all their content over the internet, whilst screwing the public out of their fair use rights. No new laws have had to be paid for, although the DMCA and similar laws worldwide will help keep attempted cracking of the system to a minimum. They can gradually start phasing out CDs so that, in ten years time, Palladium-protected content is the only digital content you can get.
Microsoft loves it because it gives them total control over the whole PC - they can dictate to hardware manufacturers exactly what they can and cannot produce, because if they don't listen, they don't get their drivers signed and the hardware won't run with Windows.
Once they have a good lead in the amount of content produced for Windows Media/Palladium systems, it gives them an enormous amount of leverage in consumer media products: music players, TV, cable, you name it. Everything media-related will be subject to Microsoft's whims, because without Microsoft's approval, your hardware won't be able to play any content.
It gives them complete control over what will probably eventually be the media industry's main form of distribution, which will earn them billions. Better still, with downloadable digital content becoming more and more important, it will be a major body-blow to Linux and Open Source - Microsoft will never sign a Linux distribution's kernel so that it can run in Palladium mode, so Palladium-protected content will never ever play in Linux. This will put an enormous dent in Linux's chances as an OS for the desktop - none of the media industry's output will play, and as CD/DVD supply gradually dries up over time, it will put Linux on the retreat back into its server homeland.
You can bet that eventually Apple will cave in too, assuming Windows Media protected by Palladium becomes dominant. They simply won't have any choice but to side with Microsoft and implement Palladium, because otherwise the supply of available content will dry up, unless there's a revolution in independent, free media. Mac-heads should get on board the anti-Palladium train now, because if you don't, Apple will be just as vulnerable to Microsoft as the rest of us. You simply don't have the desktop share to matter on your own, unfortunately, but together we might.
It is a domesday scenario for desktop Linux, and pretty ugly for consumer electronics manufacturers, PC peripheral manufacturers, Apple and other non-PC hardware makers, not forgetting of course the public at large. What can be done?
Well, there's six things that I can think off the top of my head:
I don't think the war is lost yet, but we need to start fighting. Microsoft has come up with a spectacularly shrewd bit of corporate strategy, and we need an equally good response - very soon.
Well, in the best traditions of UNIX software, the gocr authors decided to keep the user interface and the actual OCR code separate. Sensible.
Actually it comes with Tcl/Tk (gocr.tcl) and GTK+ (gtk-gocr) frontends. My personal favourite, though, is the KDE scanning program, Kooka, which includes support for gocr amongst its many very useful talents.
It's the duty of any government to spend its citizens' money thoughtfully.
Agreed. In fact, this is a perfect example of the free market working as it should. What has happened is that one of the major customers of groupware products has realised that it is now cheaper to contract out for their own solution than to buy in from external suppliers, and so this is what they are doing. This is in large part due to the wealth of excellent free software available to base such a home-grown solution on, but also due to the high prices and excessive restrictions on existing groupware products.
Put simply, the incumbent suppliers have not reacted to changes in the market and have priced themselves out. If Exchange, for instance, was $100 for an unlimited user licence, then I suspect this Kroupware project would never have got off the drawing board - it simply wouldn't be economically sensible. Unfortunately, the current vendors' greed has blinded them to the needs of their customers, and they will suffer in the longer-term for it.
The fact that the Kroupware project will itself all be free software matters not one jot, at least not from the perspective of the free market, all it is is a new competitor, and from the point of view of the consumer, one that has a number of very attractive attributes that existing solutons cannot match. But that's just how it works: if, as a vendor, you price your products too high, or your products are sub-optimal or place too many restrictions on the user, then you are going to get competition and often you will have a hard time matching your new competition. That's just tough luck. If you cannot compete on price due to your competitor having lower costs that you cannot reduce, then you will have to make your product attractive in other ways.
This is precisely how the free market economy is supposed to work. It doesn't matter that the project was instigated by a government, all they are is one of, if not the largest customer of such products, so they have the most to gain from reducing their costs, and are probably one of the least risk-averse - it doesn't matter to them if the project succeeds or fails, they will survive either way without really batting an eyelid.
Free market advocates who try to write governments out of the economic script have it precisely backwards - in any country government is one of the most important players in the economy, certainly one of the biggest consumers, and you cannot just ignore that. Consider them as the largest non-profit organization, in effect a charity dedicated to the advancement of the country as a whole, and you have a better idea of who they are and how they are important economically.
It would, in reality, be no different if a large ordinary non-profit had commisioned the Kroupware project for economic reasons, but I bet people wouldn't complain about that.
Does your 1290 start to tick when it's been sitting idle for a while?
Well it kinda makes a ticking noise when it pauses to wait for data (I assume that's what's happening, anyway) whilst printing but I don't hear the ticking any other time. Not quite sure what the ticking noise is.
I only have two complaints about my 1290 really, and these problems seem to be common to a lot of Epson inkjets: first, it seems to be rather incontinent with black ink. It dribbles black ink all over its insides and on long print jobs, say a high-quality colour A3 print, it has a habit of doing this all over the page, so I get these blobs of black disfiguring the picture. Annoying. The second problem seems to be related to this, this is the grease problem that a couple of other poster have mentioned here. What seems to happen is that the dribbled black ink gets over the guide bar that the head runs on, and this causes the grease on it to gunge up and go stiff. This in turn causes the print head to move erratically and causes all sorts of printing artifacts. I fixed it with a wipe down of the guide bar with a cloth and a few squirts of silicone lubricant.
Can you get it to print edge to edge with Gimp-Print?
Works fine with the GIMP plugin version of Gimp-Print, although it's usually half a mm out on one side or the other - I put that down to a not-quite perfect paper feed system, as the same happens with the Windows drivers. I can't say I've tried printing edge-to-edge with the CUPS driver version, that does look a bit more difficult as the margin settings are dependent on the application that's doing the printing and few seem to have much control over this. Oh well.
As it happens, Epson already does help us (Gimp-print) out, in exactly the right fashion -- they provide programming manuals for their printers, usually quite promptly too.
Well then, I take it back, hats off to them, I didn't realize they were so ridiculously Free Software-friendly. I'm still slightly mystified as to why they provide(d) their own drivers as well, but I suppose the more support the better. It seems like somewhat wasted effort, but I guess Epson have their reasons.
BTW, congratulations on Gimp-Print, the output from my Stylus Photo 1290 is nothing short of stunning. Excellent work!
It's certainly unfortunate that this GPL violation occurred and that Epson have had to pull this software, which I'm sure is useful to some people.
However, in terms of inconvenience to users, it means very little indeed. The combination of GIMP-Print drivers for Epson inkjets with CUPS doing the spooling already produces output that is arguably better quality than any driver Epson has produced for either Windows or Mac. With the KDEPrint subsystem providing the user interface, you get a system that is powerful, flexible, easy to use and can do everything that Epson's own drivers do, and then some, whilst looking and working as an integral part of KDE applications.
Similarly, the KDE scanner program, Kooka, is a nice, powerful KDE-style alternative to xsane, supporting all the scanner hardware that SANE does and better, can scan straight into all sorts of KDE software, including KOffice, similar to the TWAIN system on Windows and Mac.
There are, of course, plugins for the GIMP also - GIMP-Print and xsane's GIMP plugin which provide similar features, at least to the GIMP, although not GTK or GNOME applications as a whole (hey guys, is this going to be fixed anytime soon? printing from GNOME apps is still in the dark ages, and there's nothing like Kooka's scan-service mode at all :(
Personally, I don't see why Epson bothers - the Free Software community has outdone them. It would be far better if they just helped projects like GIMP-Print and SANE out more, although I guess that means they can't stick Epson logos all over the software... ahh, the joys of corporate ego gratification.
There are protocols for remote storage, why not use these?
I agree that for most network storage, low-level SAN protocols are pointless - higher-level abstractions of remote disk such as smb/nfs/etc are much better as they enforce proper filesystem semantics, and run on top of a physical filesystem. You get all the advantages of having a filesystem in the first place - locking, sane disk space allocation algorithms, journaling, that sort of thing.
However, some applications - big databases particularly - prefer to have raw access to the storage medium, with no filesystem in the way to slow them down. These applications implement their own locking, sharing and space allocation semantics which are optimized for their own particular storage use patterns.
Classic file sharing protocols don't cut it for these big databases because there's no way to get raw disk access over the network with them. Which is why these lower-level SAN protocols exist - they provide the raw disk access that the big databases want, over a network. This means you can have your database spread over multiple physical locations to minimize the risk of your whole database going up in smoke, without taking the performance hit that running the database over smb/nfs would have.
You won't see iSCSI hardware making it into bog-standard file server hardware any time soon, but I can see it being huge in big-iron database servers, where it should be considerably cheaper and easier than Fibre Channel, the current best solution.
Admittedly, there are big questions over whether raw disk access is really necessary for databases - modern general-purpose filesystems are a LOT quicker than they used to be, and MySQL, for instance, which doesn't use raw disk IO but is still blazingly fast, is turning some of the performance assumptions on their head. But the big guys - Oracle, DB2 and so forth - still prefer it, so this is why iSCSI is here.
Sounds like a clueless poster.
No, not at all. This is a very genuine concern. Personally, I think having a separate daemon to do this job is a very dumb idea. Existing, well tested tools like ssh and cron could do this, and the less new, untested code that runs on the network, the better for security.
For a start, it's going to have a port open on the network in order for a master computer to contact it and tell it to update. This in itself is a major security risk - any open port is. Now also remember that, because it will be updating packages system-wide, part of the update process is going to have to run as root - I hope at least the network-facing daemon doesn't. If it does - instant remote root when the first stack-smashing or format string exploit comes along - and it will, have no doubt about that. Even if the daemon itself has limited privileges, it is going to have to talk to something setuid root in order to perform the package upgrades, so a remote root shell is only two exploits away, one for the daemon and then another for the setuid program that does the updating.
Remember, this is new code, untested in the wild for any length of time, unexamined yet by anyone external. ssh would do the job fine instead, and, although ssh has had security problems, it has had a lot of pounding on it for a long time now. The Red Carpet daemon - hasn't.
In short, wtf aren't Ximian using ssh instead of their own potentially hokey code?
Second, there is a big problem with automatic updating generally. If I can get root on a machine within a network - or in fact, just plug my laptop into this network - then with a bit of spoofing trickery I can convince any other machine within that network that I am the update server, and next time they update, they will download packages from me, which I could easily trojan - and then I've got control of every single box on the network, and almost all the work was done for me. Signed packages are supposed to alleviate this problem, but past incidents with both OpenSSL and ssh suggest that certificate checking is not always up to scratch, and there may still be other ways to convince the Red Carpet daemon to install unsigned packages. If you have an insecure wireless network attached, then you're going to have even larger problems as an attacker who wants to get in this way doesn't even have to be physically connected to your network.
This sounds like a very convenient way to automatically update software - although nothing that ssh/apt doesn't already offer - but it also sounds like a potentially gaping security hole that will bite people hard in the future.
Of course, I'm not everyone, so I'll ask: Is there any really compelling reason to go to a Linux distro left?
Here's a good one: Speed.
OS X is a fairly well engineered Unix but at its core is Mach, and Mach-based systems don't have a good reputation for performance. Darwin is better than most Mach-based systems but it's still a traditional message-passing nanokernel and there is a performance hit associated with that, compared to a monolithic kernel (of which Linux is an excellent example) or newer approaches to microkernel design like L4 (which the HURD, currently based on Mach, is gradually porting to).
If you're developing POSIXy software on Apple hardware, the seconds you save on your compiles using Linux can very quickly add up into minutes, hours and days. This is especially true on SMP hardware - which of course, every PowerMac is now - where Linux currently scales better than anyone else, at least on systems up to about 8 processors.
Similarly, if you're using the machine exclusively as a server (an area Apple is trying to push into), the extra speed of Linux may come in useful.
In any case, if you're going to use the machine largely as a GNOME workstation, why not run it on Linux, where it runs fastest (insert rant by FreeBSD users) and has the least rough edges? You're obviously familiar with Unixes, and you use fink so you must be comfortable with apt-get. Why not use Debian where you use the same tools but have a far far larger package selection?
You see, it depends on what you use your Mac for. If you absolutely must have some Cocoa-based apps, then yes, OS X is the better solution. If you want an idiot-proof interface, then yes, OS X is better. But if all your MacOS apps are Classic or Carbon then Mac-on-Linux works fine. Audio apps don't work so well, but then they don't under Classic on OS X and there's not much of a rush to make them run native on OS X, so either way it's a reboot into OS 9.
Personally I think KDE is beginning to outclass OS X eye-candy wise (Keramik is drop-dead gorgeous and the Crystal icons are excellent too) so at the very least this is less of a factor than it used to be.
Put simply: if you want Unix, well, OS X is a good Unix. But Linux is just better at it.
The day a developer stops listening to user requests directly or indirectly and starts to do whatever he likes most (in their free or payed time) is the day I'll want to switch to something else (personal choice here).
Which is why just about every OSS project (KDE included) that is large enough to use a bug-tracking system has a 'wishlist' category in the bug-tracker.
Just about every OSS project I know would LOVE to hear about new ideas and ways to improve the software - but PLEASE report these ideas in the appropriate place, which is in the bug-tracking system. If you post your ideas to a mailing list, then not only are your proposals far more likely to get lost in the noise of other posts, you are also creating extra work for the developers who have to wade through tons of feature requests, often for identical things, before they can use the mailing list for what it was designed for - which is communicating with each other. If the idea is in the bug tracking system, it is recorded for eternity, indexed and can be searched and reviewed by developers easily when they run out of pressing bugs to fix.
To repeat: if you have a killer idea, post it to the bug-tracking system, with a 'wishlist' category! Although you may not get an immediate response, my experience is that you have a far far better chance of seeing your idea implemented in the future than if you pollute project mailing lists.
Now, if you're prepared to implement your idea yourself, then by all means post to the mailing lists when you need help - that is what they're there for - but if you aren't, leave it to the bug tracking system.
there is entirely too little experimental and experiental data for any strong claims about the safety of RTG containment to be made
Rubbish. NASA RTG containment systems have been tested in real-life missions on re-entry twice, once in 1968 from a failed meteorological satellite, and once in 1970 from the remains of Apollo 13. On both occasions the RTG containment worked fine. Lab studies on both the re-entry and the explosion-on-launch scenarios have been extensive, and NASA's RTG systems have been tested to and survived nearly 4x the pressure produced from a rocket explosion on a Shuttle-type spacecraft.
The physics and engineering behind an effective RTG containment system are quite simple. Frankly, a good Victorian-era engineer could have done it (although it would certainly have been a lot heavier than modern systems).
NASA has a nice little piece on RTG safety that they wrote for people concerned about Galileo's power system. It's available here.
Of course, you are free to disagree with NASA's findings, but it seems like good enough evidence to me.
If a nuclear-powered device explodes on launch, or in low orbit, it's "not a good thing". At the very least you'll get radioactive debris spread over a wide area.
You actually think NASA would be dumb enough to send up a nuclear-powered device without adequate containment against explosion and re-entry?
NASA may be huge, inefficient, wasteful and sluggish, but they're not stupid.
I can only think of one mission that NASA has launched since the Voyagers that has gone out that far - Galileo
Cassini, as well. Which, surprise surprise, also has an RTG on-board.
It's a shame that the environmentalists had a hissy fit in the 80's and 90's that blocked this very reliable technology from being used on modern spacecraft.
Not really. The problem is that in order to make one of these generators safe, it needs to be protected from the launch rocket exploding on take-off. It doesn't matter whether you're an environmentalist or not - if a couple of kilos of plutonium gets vaporised and spread to the four winds on the launch pad, you've just made enormous chunks of the US's only major space launch site unusable until it can be cleaned up. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn't make the radiation go away. Needless to say, the clean-up operation and interruption to US space activities would cost tens of billions of dollars - and quite possibly a lot more.
It's perfectly possible to protect these generators from the explosive force caused by a rocket blowing up on the launch pad - it's just a simple engineering problem. The problem is that it costs weight - lots of it, and the number one thing you want to avoid on a rocket launch is extra weight. Every extra kilogram costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, or costs you one or two or three valuable scientific instruments.
So unless you absolutely need a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, you don't use one. Solar panels are lighter (because they don't need explosion protection) and, therefore, cheaper to launch (which is the only really major cost consideration - the cost of the space vehicle itself pales in comparison). Modern solar panels are good out to nearly Jupiter. Beyond that you need an RTG. I can only think of one mission that NASA has launched since the Voyagers that has gone out that far - Galileo, which was launched in 1989 - and yes, it had an RTG on-board despite the protests.
Honestly, NASA - at least the engineers - couldn't give a damn about the environmental issues involved with RTGs. Because as long as their containment engineering is up to scratch - and I rather suspect it is - there simply are no environmental issues. Instead, it comes down to economics - and for most missions that NASA undertakes, which go no further out than Mars, thermoelectric generators lose out badly to solar panels.
Now, perhaps environmentalist fears are preventing NASA from sending more probes beyond Jupiter because they need an RTG, but that's a different matter entirely. Maybe they need to publicly blow up a few rockets with the generator containers on-board to prove their point.
The abuse done by the NSA during the Nixon years caused a lot of severe curbs (both open and classified) to be placed on the NSA, and those laws have serious teeth that will bite anyone violating them.
Indeed. However, there's absolutely nothing stopping a friendly foreign signals intelligence agency (say, the UK's GCHQ or Canada's CSE) from gathering intelligence on US nationals, and then passing that intelligence back to US agencies through the formalised intelligence sharing agreements that exist. Of course, the NSA isn't allowed to even solicit such information, but how hard do you think it would be for GCHQ to find out who the NSA is interested in, or simply make the judgement call on who to monitor themselves?
Which means that in reality, those safeguards against spying on your own people mean absolutely nothing. The NSA can enforce those regulations as tightly as they like, and all it does is create warm fuzzies. They'll still be getting all the intelligence they want.
It's quite simple: CDex uses software error correction (based on the xiph.org paranoia library), iTunes does not.
What this means is that CDex reads each sector off the CD several times, compares the reads, and attempts to correct for jitter and other common read errors.
iTunes, on the other hand, doesn't. It simply reads each sector once off the CD, and believes what the CD drive hands to it.
This software error correction causes a major slowdown - my audio rip speed goes from about 16x down to about 2x. You probably won't notice the jitter correction either unless you've got good ears.
However, if you have some scratched CDs, compare the output of the two. The CDex rip will probably be listenable - even if the CD is so badly scratched that several sectors are totally unreadable, the paranoia library will attempt to smoothly interpolate between known good data. The iTunes rip, on the other hand, unless your CD drive is really good, will be unlistenable, with gaps and nasty audible errors.
This, of course, has precisely nothing to do with the relative processor speeds of your PC versus your Mac. Switch off the error correction in CDex and the Dell will almost certainly be faster.
it's in your food as well. If we are going to worry about endocrine disruption, then does it not make sense to start with looking at what we eat? The biggest problem is with soya (a.k.a. soy or soybeans). You could be ingesting this every day at levels that are known to have serious endocrine-disrupting effects, and not even realise it.
The problem with soya is that it contains large quantities of various 'phytoestrogens', or plant oestrogens, and in particular the compunds diadzein and genistein. These belong to a family of compounds known as isoflavonoids, many of which share an oestrogen-like effect. Isoflavonoids are a mixed bag: perhaps you may have heard of their anti-cancer properties. However, what you perhaps haven't heard is that they are only effective against certain types of tumour, in particular testosterone-dependent tumours, such as most prostate and testicular cancers. This is, of course, consistent with their oestrogenic (which implies anti-testosterone) properties. However, some tumours (such as some breast, and most ovarian cancers) are oestrogen-dependent, and isoflavonoids can actually aggravate such tumours. The evidence for the efficacy of isoflavonoid treatment of non-hormone-dependent cancers is shaky, at best.
Perhaps you might be concerned about the effect it has on sex and reproduction - according to a Swiss study, 100g of soya material contains isoflavonoids with approximately equivalent oestrogenic effects to a single combined (oestrogen and progesterone-containing) contraceptive pill. This level of oestrogenic compounds is well known to cause feminization of males, infertility and loss of sex drive. In the very rare cases where women who were taking the combined contraceptive pill become pregnant, a termination is almost always advised due to the effects the external oestrogenic hormones have on the developing foetus, which can include developmental abnormalities through to miscarriage.
If you're a woman, and not planning to get pregnant, this is not such a problem, and postmenopausal women may find soya useful to help guard against osteoporosis and other postmenopausal symptoms. But is it made clear that soya is much less helpful for men than women, or can even be detrimental, or that it can be dangerous for women trying to get pregnant? No.
Use of soya is on the increase. In the US, soybean consumption rose from 23.54 million metric tonnes in 1975 to 43.28 million metric tonnes in 2000. It is used for all sorts of things, from animal feed to cooking oil, and is increasingly used as a bulk protein and carbohydrate in many processed foods. Soya is also the number one source for lecithin, used widely as an emulsifier. Take a look at the ingredients list on some of the food in your refrigerator and cupboards: you might be surprised how much contains soya. Thanks to various loopholes in food labelling regulations, soya is also sometimes present in foods which do not have it labelled. In the EU, for instance, if an ingredient makes up less than 25% of a foodstuff, then there is no legal requirement for that ingredient to be labelled.
Unfortunately this makes it extremely difficult to know exactly how much soya and soya-derived products you are actually ingesting. Traditionally, it has been accepted that East Asian countries consume much more soya in their diets than anywhere in the West: it is, after all, a traditional food there. This, in turn, has been used as evidence that soya use in the West is at safe levels. However, with the increase of soya use in processed food, and inadequate labelling regulations, is this really true any more?
This also doesn't include people that consciously make an effort to eat soya: vegetarians, vegans, people who believe in its health-giving properties, people who drink soya milk as an animal milk substitute, and many more. If you consume more than three glasses of soya milk each day, then you are already consuming more soya isoflavonoids than the average Japanese man. If you eat a fairly standard portion of soy protein (100g) every day then you are ingesting many times that, and are without doubt disrupting your endocrine system in quite a major way.
In all fairness, in moderation, soya is probably as harmless as any other common foodstuff. East Asian peoples have been eating moderate quantities of soya for millenia with no obvious ill effect. However, with the creeping addition of soya into everyday foods, and the encouragement of people to eat soya as a major part of their diet, I believe that many people have already passed the level of consumption that could be called 'moderate'.
The soya industry has talked up the health benefits of soya without giving any regard to the downsides. This is, I suppose, inevitable. This is big business - 56% of US oilseed production is soya, and agriculture has pretty dismal regulation. Unfortunately, the supposed 'health-food' industry has bought into the propaganda lock, stock and barrel, and parrot that propaganda endlessly. It neatly coincides with their own financial interests as the primary supplier of soya foods. To say this has made me cynical about the claims of an industry that supposedly puts the health of consumers first is, to put it mildly, an understatement.
How exactly does one run Apache and mySQL on a PDA? What would be the applications of it in the real world?
There sure are a lot of geeks that do Linux development. Imagine being able to take your whole development environment, with exactly the same tools you use on a PC, stick it in your pocket and take it wherever you go. Remember the Zaurus even has a small, but perfectly-formed keyboard. Why bother with a laptop?
As for how to run Apache and MySQL, it's simple: just install the packages, like you would on any other Linux system. You wouldn't get much space for the database with the Zaurus' memory, but it would be plenty for most development and testing.
A sensible approach would be to let the Americans spend the money, then when it becomes commercial feasible people in Europe will start running commercial services up their anyway
So you've never heard of Arianespace then? Arianespace has over 50% of the world's commercial launch market. That sounds kinda commercially feasible to me.
And the reason? Simple. The Ariane rockets get satellites into space faster, with less hassle, and more reliably than anyone else. Which means that when you add up the total costs, Ariane also gets them into orbit cheaper than anyone else (although the Russians are competitive, and currently have a less-full launch schedule, which is why the Beagle 2 is scheduled to launch on a Russian rocket). The US doesn't even come close, mostly due to reliance on the horrendously-expensive Shuttle and the resulting negative impact that has had on the Atlas and Delta launch programmes.
The EU is up with the best in terms of unmanned space vehicle technlogy too - as an example, the Huygens lander that is part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan was developed and built in the UK, and in 2000, Europe finally supplied over 50% of the world's geostationary communication satellites.
NASA and the rest of the US space industry has talked for some years about doing it 'faster, cheaper, better' but right now, the Europeans are walking the walk rather than talking the talk and are reaping the benefits.
However, outside the space industry itself the European space programme has an image problem - as demonstrated by your post, even Europeans have no idea how well the European space industry is doing. This, in turn, has a negative impact on future sales of satellites and launch services. What it needs is good PR, and the best way of doing that is by headline-grabbing space science programmes, and Beagle 2 is a good example. Think of it as a long-term marketing investment by European governments. What is spent now on space science projects will, if the mission is successful, repay itself many times in the future in terms of sales of satellites and launch services and the tax revenues that are derived from that, not to mention the effect it has on overall national prestige and worldwide perception as leaders in technology, which has other spinoff benefits.
The Americans and Russians have understood this for decades, which is why there has been continued investment in space science programmes of limited immediate economic benefit in these countries, and why you have this distorted view of the world in which American and Russian space technology is far superior to everyone else's.
Just because you are unable to see short-term economic benefit does not mean that such economic benefit will not happen later and perhaps indirectly: all it shows it that you are blinkered by short-termism. Sadly, such views are common and are in some ways the biggest blight on the Western way of life, but I'll save that for another rant.
I think this is more than a conincidence. I also heard the author of ffmpeg got an email that the many error codes in tkcVideo are very similiar to ffmpeg...
Ok, yes, you're probably right, it probably does use ffmpeg. What's the big deal? As you point out, ffmpeg is LGPL'ed, which allows proprietary applications to link to it. Any modifications they make to ffmpeg would have to be released, but I'm betting they had to make zero, zilch, none. A Zaurus is just a fairly typical ARM Linux system. As long as they're using a standard shared library version of ffmpeg, supply a copy of the LGPL somewhere, and give credits to ffmpeg in the about box and a pointer to where the LGPL is, they are in the clear. That's not really asking a lot. If they do this, they don't even have to provide ffmpeg source. At least, this is how I and quite a few people read the LGPL.
The LGPL is quite a different beast to the GPL, and that's by design.
The European Union has rejected genetically engineered food based not on any reliable scientific studies but on public and political pressure from small special interest groups.
Yes, and they are right to do so. Perhaps this has become an unfamiliar concept in the US, but by and large democratic governments are supposed to listen to their citizens. A large majority of EU citizens do not want genetically modified food, and there is no economic reason to do so - the EU already produces far more of most foods than it requires to feed itself. So much so that in fact the EU spends a lot of money paying farmers NOT to grow certain crops - because some countries within the EU are more efficient than others, and having massive surplus generated by these countries would kill agriculture in some of the less-efficient EU countries. Using GM crops to increase yield would only exascerbate this problem. Perhaps you think this is a stupid idea and that the free market should sort it out, but most Europeans would disagree - national identity is a key issue within the EU, and part of that national identity in most countries is being able to feed your own population. In addition, since most of the GM crops developed so far are US in origin, use of GM crops widely would change the balance of trade negatively. Instead of the seed company->farmer relationship being entirely intra-EU trade, it changes to a drain of money from the EU to the US. So both the EU agriculture and financial bigwigs are against it, because it would cost them more money.
Because of this slightly funny way agriculture works within the EU, gains in yield from GM foods would be unsellable, and since the GM seed is more expensive, and is a recurring expense due to the inability to use saved seed, GM crops actually end up in less profit for the EU farmer, who is on average quite poor anyway. So the farmers are against it too.
There is also the cross-pollination problem, as illustrated by the Canadian farmer that some other have written about, who suffered exactly this problem. Once GM crops are established in an area, it becomes impossible for non-GM crops of the same species to grow in that area without becoming 'infected' by the genes of the GM crop. The GM seed producer can then clamp down using patent laws and extract money from farmers who weren't even growing the GM crop in the first place - because patented genes from the GM crop end up in the genome of non-GM crops. It could become an effective non-governmental 'tax' on all EU farmers, and worse, chances are it wouldn't even be collected by an EU company but rather a US one.
The fact that most EU consumers would rather die than eat genetically modified food is helpful to EU farmers and ministers in banning widespread use of GM crops and keeping the ban in place, but it's not the key issue here.
It isn't that the EU is behind in genetic research and is playing Not Invented Here - after all, 1/3 of the human genome project was done in the UK, not to mention that the structure of DNA was discovered there too. The EU could develop its own GM crops, which would sidestep some of the issues but not most, and indeed it is and has. But still the ban on commercial GM agriculture remains, so these crops remain research tools, and have met with fierce opposition wherever they have been test-planted.
Has there been ANY reliable scientific study relating ANY harmful effects to bio-engineered food?
As far as I'm aware, no, not directly. However, research in this area is still young, and more importantly, mostly corporate-funded. It's the same kind of situation as with the pharmaceutical industry - we ingest these substances, so we'd better make damn sure they're safe, yet most of the research is funded by the companies that want approval. I shouldn't have to remind you that the pharmaceutical industry managed to get things like thalidomide on the market, and no-one had any credible evidence (that hadn't been suppressed) against that for several years after it was available on the market.
It was interesting to read that somehow two extra genetic fragments that shouldn't have been in the genome of the Monsanto GM soybeans ended up there. Are we really sure we know all the knock-on effects? What else was missed? What if those genetic fragments had coded for a protein that switched off one of the human body's immune responses to cancer, or were themselves carcinogenic? Unlikely perhaps, but it took 3 years after commercial growing of these crops had started for the discovery to be made. Are you willing to take the risk, just so some company you've never worked for, never met anyone from, never bought anything from and which could well not even be in your own country or continent can make a few extra dollars for their shareholders?
Perhaps the general mistrust in the EU of genetic modification is due to other food safety scares like BSE, caused by considerably less obvious tinkering than with genetic modification, but with the same aim - increasing efficiency and yield. The US hasn't had to deal with a food scare of similar scale, which is perhaps why the US public are so dismissive of the dangers. From an EU perspective, it seems the US consumer simply doesn't care what they eat, as long as it's cheap. The widespread use in the US of growth hormone to fatten livestock is another example of this, but this too is banned in the EU and repugnant to EU consumers.
There are indirect environmental reasons to dislike some GM crops too. As an example, take Monsanto's GM soybeans, which are resistant to the Monsanto weedkiller Roundup (glyphosate). Here is a product that is designed to encourage use of Roundup and to allow farmers to spray willy-nilly without worrying about the effects it will have on their crop. If this doesn't mean farmers end up using more weedkiller than they would have done with a non-resistant crop, I'll eat my hat. The farmers are supposed to do this - it maximizes their yield. Goundwater contamination beckons...
As an EU citizen, I am very glad that the EU has rejected genetically modified food, and I am glad that Zimbabwe has taken the same viewpoint, whatever I may think of their political leadership. GM foods are being used as a tool of economic imperialism, encourage environmental bad practice, encourage patent system abuse, are insufficiently tested and understood and simply aren't necessary. Chalk up another one on the US image problem score board.