So? Doesn't negate the fact that there are plenty of Linux-based point of sale terminals, and the number is growing. (The others may well be POS;-), certainly the ones that still have SCO on them).
Point is that most people don't think in terms of those things having an OS.
You left out cash registers (er, "point of sale" terminals) at major store chains, telco infrastructure (especially in Europe), and others.
In fact, every x86-based server shipped by a certain major vendor, even those destined to run Windows, also comes with Linux: the bootable CD that includes standalone hardware diagnostics and configuration programs, etc, is based on Debian.
As far as double-digit market shares -- Linux already has that of the computer/OS market as a whole. Desktop/laptop PCs are a small fraction of that market, they just happen to be the most visible.
I want to be able to develop applications in both Windows and Linux.
Then learn some standard languages (Perl, Python, C++, Java...) and portable toolkits (Qt, Wx, etc), not Microsoft's proprietary stuff.
Visual BASIC skills
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Linux can really use more easy to use and easy to develop applications without having to learn kernel hacking
Uh, right. Not sure where you get the idea that developing apps using the IDEs, languages and toolkits available for Linux has anything to do with kernel hacking. Have you ever even used Linux?
"You are correct that as soon as Microsoft successfully sues somebody for patent infrigement, said somebody must immediately cease distributing any GPL covered works that infringe that patent."
There, fixed that for you.
Reread Section 7.
" 7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License."
First, if the suit is unsuccessful, no conditions are imposed. Second, the GPL Section 7 only applies to the person on whom those conditions are imposed.
Now, it may well be prudent for third parties -- in the same legal jurisdiction in which the suit was filed, and if the suit went as far as a judgement that ruled the patent valid and that GPL'd code infringed (settlement without such judgement doesn't count, people often settle for reasons that have nothing to do with the legalities of the case) -- to also cease distribution of said code, but nothing in the GPL forces them to.
2/ we take the prudent side and try to cut emissions... ...and it turns out that the emissions were the only thing holding off another ice age and oops, the Great Lakes and surrounding cities are buried under 5000 feet of ice...
That is, after all, what climatologists were worried about in the 1960s and 1970s.
The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious,
BTW, for those who might think (as I once did) that the word "meretricious" is somehow derived from "merit" and thus a good thing, think again. Here's widipedia's definition, other's you'll find are similar:
Meretricious - like or relating to a prostitute; "meretricious relationships" brassy: tastelessly showy; "a flashy car"; "garish colors"; gilded: based on pretense; deceptively pleasing; "the gilded and perfumed but inwardly rotten nobility"; "meretricious praise"; "a meretricious argument"
(The word that is derived from "merit" is "meritorious", deserving of praise.)
showing that the majority of glaciers studied have decreased in size.
So, how many glaciers were studied, what percentage of the 160,000 total?
Researchers looked at 244 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula. Their research shows that since the 1950s, 87 per cent of the glaciers have shrunk.
Hmm, (244*0.87)/160000 = 0.00132. So all we can say with certainty is that 0.132% of glaciers are known to be shrinking. And those were measured on the most equatorial parts of Antarctica.
Glaciers in the Bolivian Andes are shrinking at an alarming rate, say scientists.
What percent of the world's glaciers are in the Bolivian Andes (near the equator)? Vanishingly small, pardon the pun.
If rising temperatures and low precipitation continue, many smaller glaciers will vanish in a decade, the researchers believe.
Gee, the Andes are near the coast of the world's biggest ocean, from which direction the predominant winds blow. Seems like the winds are drier than they used to be...perhaps the ocean is cooling? (More likely just an effect similar to Kilimanjaro, where upwind deforestation has caused drier winds due to less transpiration.)
As someone elsewhere said, the plural of anecdote is not data. Before you talk about the effect global warming on glaciers, let's see the global glacier survey data.
the science behind global warming predictions was considered sound by the scientific community.
Not at all. Oh, you'll get some segments of the scientific community that buy into it -- computer scientists, biologists, anthropologists, and so forth. For others -- climatologists (especially paleoclimatologists), geochemists, atmospheric chemists, etc, the ones that really study the field -- there's less agreement. And even where there's agreement on the general temperature trends, there's disagreement on the causes and effects.
For example, warming causes increased greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Gases (such as CO2) are less soluable in warm water vs cold; warming increases the decay rate, producing more methane and CO2, and so on. But, CO2 is a lousy greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. That's one reason a snowball Earth is hard to reverse -- the water vapor in the atmosphere freezes out and drops the average temperature another few degrees.
There's certainly very little indication that anthropogenic effects make even a small fraction of the difference that natural fluctuations do, except locally (eg urban microclimates).
Good thing she didn't do it with a hydrogen-air mix. The "ka-boom" would have been more of a "BANG!" and probably have taken out quite a few more ceiling tiles. Must have been a big balloon, though. At a lecture/demo I attended, there were about a half-dozen balloons, most with helium, a couple with pure hydrogen, and one hydrogen-air (or was it hydrogen-oxygen?). Tested each one with a glowing splint on a long stick: "pop", "pop", "whoomp!", "pop", "BANG!"
(Another fun way to clear out ceiling tiles is to have a couple of 4000psi storage cylinders in the back of the dive shop get a little too warm over a summer weekend and blow the burst disk. Also took out the merchandise rack on the side wall. Note, this was the safety mechanism that kicked in.)
when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted but only you are able to tell which vote was yours by the corresponding ticket number
Or anyone you choose to show your ticket to or who forces it out of you. That really opens the door to vote buying and vote extortion.
Some of that probably happens already, but you can always lie about how you voted. With the above scheme the vote can be verified.
Microsoft and Bill Gates were actively pushing OS/2 to everyone, and most especially to 3rd party application vendors (Lotus, WordPerfect, etc), right up until NT was ready to roll.
By a strange coincidence, the Microsoft Office suite was also available for NT at that time, but applications from other vendors weren't.
Yes it does. The gist of them being: if you can't grant downstream distributers the same licenses to any patents in the code that you have, then you can't distribute.
So, this is either a clever way to keep Novell from distributing SUSE, or a clever way to keep Novell as nervous as hell about what it distributes as part of any GPL'd code. (MS is just promising not to prosecute Novell over patents, it's not (AFAICT) granting a license much less any sub-licensing rights.)
Now, never mind just SUSE, think about Mono for a bit.
It should. Larry Niven did it to Mars back in 1973 (the January '74 edition of "Analog") with "The Hole Man", and won the Hugo for it.
Thanks for the link, BTW. I hadn't heard of Escape Pod. Yet another market, if a small one. (The sketch on the page is an interesting coincidence -- I just started my NaNoWriMo novel, "The Martian War" (aka "The War of the Worlds: The True Story"). Earth wasn't quite so defenseless as Wells lets on, and Nikola Tesla is implicated in both attracting the Martians, and helping defeat them by duplicating their heat ray. More to it than just that, of course.)
. ..a black hole coexisting at the center of Earth should only make a minimal impact, right?
Right.
If the black hole was created at the center of the Earth, no problem. It's when it is created at the surface and falls down, and through the center, eating a little bit of matter on the way down, then back up the other side, then down again, and up, and down, and up... Then we have a problem.
If the graphics applications you use require windows, [...] then what can you do?
Buy a cheap Linux box and use it as a dedicated firewall appliance. (Or buy a firewall appliance, odds are it has Linux embedded in it anyway.) I've got an old 166 MHz Pentium box (ancient Dell desktop) that cost me all of $15 (plus the 2nd NIC I had lying around). No worries.
In my area, if you were to refuse me a ride on your bus (and you'd have to do it with force
Nah, he just has to call the cops and sit there waiting until they show up. If nothing else, they'll charge you with creating a disturbance. If you try making him drive they'll get you for hijacking, too.
That's if the passengers don't lynch you for delaying them.
monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts.
There were a number of incidents in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo series where the spacecraft or mission would have been lost if there'd been monkeys rather than humans aboard. (Gemini 6, Gemini 8, Apollo 13, Skylab -- just off the top of my head.) Of course, nobody would have cared much were it just monkeys.
As for the aerospace engineer astronauts being overqualified, they took a very active role in the design and engineering of the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft (some too in Mercury, but those were late changes). Yeah, others may have been more expert in single aspects of the vehicles, but the astronauts probably undestood the systems as a whole better than anyone else. It was their and their buddies' butts on the line, after all. No just spacecraft engineering either. Buzz Aldrin, for example, was the expert in both the theory and practise of orbital rendezvous manoeuvers.
It wasn't just about endurance -- certainly that was important: the Gemini launches for example subjected the crews to 8 Gs acceleration, and working in a pressurized space suit (especially the earlier designs) was something that would tax even olympic athletes -- it was also about a base of prior knowledge and experience to build on. (What does a long-distance runner know about roll, pitch and yaw, or celestial navigation? What does a weight lifter know about recognizing the effects of hypoxia or experiencing unusual +ve, -ve or sideways G forces? This is all stuff that is old-hat to any pilot even before they enter test-pilot school.)
And any graduate of test-pilot school will be known to have both a sufficient understanding of flight dynamics and a problem solving ability and coolness of head to be in a situation where, for example, if he's testing an aircraft outside its known envelope and it starts behaving in a manner totally unexpected, he can diagnose the problem and do something about it hopefully before it kills him, all while reporting to the ground everything that is happening and everything that he's trying to do to fix it just in case the fix doesn't work and he makes another smoking hole in the desert and gets a street at Edwards AFB named after him.
(And you're right, the Shuttle is definitely a "heavy" and not a fighter -- although most of its flight regime is supersonic and it has to dead-stick the landing. A Concorde pilot, perhaps, or SR-71 pilots. Although now computers can do the whole thing -- as witness the Soviet Buran flight.)
but our first ones were fighter pilots, aka fighter jocks.
Actually they were aerospace engineers and test pilots. They may have also been fighter jocks (although some flew other types of aircraft) since that's about the only way to rack up time on high performance jets, but at the time of astronaut selection they were working as test pilots. Most (all?) of them had degrees in aerospace engineering. (Armstrong was accepted to MIT, but ended up attending a different college).
Now, with servers getting smaller (e.g., blades) and CPUs evolving to multi-core, heat and power usage density is increasing dramatically within the same floor space...and cooling it effectively ranges between difficult and nearly impossible...without ripping everything out and starting over..
Yep. The datacenter where I work now has a limit in place on the number of blades allowed per enclosure in a blade rack; a rack full of blades would have a melt down because it couldn't be cooled adequately.
On average this is balanced out by tape libraries, which are just long rows of shelves of tapes with a robot in the middle, producing hardly any heat at all for the square footage. Problem is, it's not the average that counts, so it does indeed reach a point where you need to rip things out and start over.
HOLY MOLY, that's a lot of power! If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously!
Well, see, it's 1 megawatt to feed the power supplies of your computers, and another 1 megawatt to run the air conditioning to get rid of all that heat.
a filesize has no reason to be measured in power-of-two quantities.
A filesize has lots of reasons to be measured in power-of-two quantities. If you don't think so, let us know which drives use powers-of-ten sector sizes and which filesystems read/write powers-of-ten block sizes.
(The SI guys can take a hike. The computer industry has been using kilo, mega, etc for powers-of-two since they got away from decimal computers almost 50 years ago now. It was the disk drive marketing guys who started pre-empting that so that they could advertise their eg 95.37 MB drives as 100 MB.)
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So? Doesn't negate the fact that there are plenty of Linux-based point of sale terminals, and the number is growing. (The others may well be POS ;-), certainly the ones that still have SCO on them).
Point is that most people don't think in terms of those things having an OS.
RTFA.
This is a VTO/VL test. The first few DC-X flights were similar.
You left out cash registers (er, "point of sale" terminals) at major store chains, telco infrastructure (especially in Europe), and others.
In fact, every x86-based server shipped by a certain major vendor, even those destined to run Windows, also comes with Linux: the bootable CD that includes standalone hardware diagnostics and configuration programs, etc, is based on Debian.
As far as double-digit market shares -- Linux already has that of the computer/OS market as a whole. Desktop/laptop PCs are a small fraction of that market, they just happen to be the most visible.
I want to be able to develop applications in both Windows and Linux.
Then learn some standard languages (Perl, Python, C++, Java...) and portable toolkits (Qt, Wx, etc), not Microsoft's proprietary stuff.
Visual BASIC skills
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Linux can really use more easy to use and easy to develop applications without having to learn kernel hacking
Uh, right. Not sure where you get the idea that developing apps using the IDEs, languages and toolkits available for Linux has anything to do with kernel hacking. Have you ever even used Linux?
There, fixed that for you.
Reread Section 7.
First, if the suit is unsuccessful, no conditions are imposed.
Second, the GPL Section 7 only applies to the person on whom those conditions are imposed.
Now, it may well be prudent for third parties -- in the same legal jurisdiction in which the suit was filed, and if the suit went as far as a judgement that ruled the patent valid and that GPL'd code infringed (settlement without such judgement doesn't count, people often settle for reasons that have nothing to do with the legalities of the case) -- to also cease distribution of said code, but nothing in the GPL forces them to.
The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate.
The US Senate did do no such thing. Senator Joe Barton, [...] asked statistician Wegman [...] on behalf of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Strange meaning of "no such thing" you have there.
2/ we take the prudent side and try to cut emissions ... ...and it turns out that the emissions were the only thing holding off another ice age and oops, the Great Lakes and surrounding cities are buried under 5000 feet of ice...
That is, after all, what climatologists were worried about in the 1960s and 1970s.
BTW, for those who might think (as I once did) that the word "meretricious" is somehow derived from "merit" and thus a good thing, think again. Here's widipedia's definition, other's you'll find are similar:
(The word that is derived from "merit" is "meritorious", deserving of praise.)
showing that the majority of glaciers studied have decreased in size.
So, how many glaciers were studied, what percentage of the 160,000 total?
Researchers looked at 244 glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Their research shows that since the 1950s, 87 per cent of the glaciers have shrunk.
Hmm, (244*0.87)/160000 = 0.00132. So all we can say with certainty is that 0.132% of glaciers are known to be shrinking. And those were measured on the most equatorial parts of Antarctica.
Glaciers in the Bolivian Andes are shrinking at an alarming rate, say scientists.
What percent of the world's glaciers are in the Bolivian Andes (near the equator)? Vanishingly small, pardon the pun.
If rising temperatures and low precipitation continue, many smaller glaciers will vanish in a decade, the researchers believe.
Gee, the Andes are near the coast of the world's biggest ocean, from which direction the predominant winds blow. Seems like the winds are drier than they used to be...perhaps the ocean is cooling? (More likely just an effect similar to Kilimanjaro, where upwind deforestation has caused drier winds due to less transpiration.)
As someone elsewhere said, the plural of anecdote is not data. Before you talk about the effect global warming on glaciers, let's see the global glacier survey data.
Funny man. If that were true, it'd be the only field in all of science in which there was no disagreement.
In other words, bullshit.
the science behind global warming predictions was considered sound by the scientific community.
Not at all. Oh, you'll get some segments of the scientific community that buy into it -- computer scientists, biologists, anthropologists, and so forth. For others -- climatologists (especially paleoclimatologists), geochemists, atmospheric chemists, etc, the ones that really study the field -- there's less agreement. And even where there's agreement on the general temperature trends, there's disagreement on the causes and effects.
For example, warming causes increased greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Gases (such as CO2) are less soluable in warm water vs cold; warming increases the decay rate, producing more methane and CO2, and so on. But, CO2 is a lousy greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. That's one reason a snowball Earth is hard to reverse -- the water vapor in the atmosphere freezes out and drops the average temperature another few degrees.
There's certainly very little indication that anthropogenic effects make even a small fraction of the difference that natural fluctuations do, except locally (eg urban microclimates).
Good thing she didn't do it with a hydrogen-air mix. The "ka-boom" would have been more of a "BANG!" and probably have taken out quite a few more ceiling tiles. Must have been a big balloon, though. At a lecture/demo I attended, there were about a half-dozen balloons, most with helium, a couple with pure hydrogen, and one hydrogen-air (or was it hydrogen-oxygen?). Tested each one with a glowing splint on a long stick: "pop", "pop", "whoomp!", "pop", "BANG!"
(Another fun way to clear out ceiling tiles is to have a couple of 4000psi storage cylinders in the back of the dive shop get a little too warm over a summer weekend and blow the burst disk. Also took out the merchandise rack on the side wall. Note, this was the safety mechanism that kicked in.)
when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted but only you are able to tell which vote was yours by the corresponding ticket number
Or anyone you choose to show your ticket to or who forces it out of you. That really opens the door to vote buying and vote extortion.
Some of that probably happens already, but you can always lie about how you voted. With the above scheme the vote can be verified.
Microsoft and Bill Gates were actively pushing OS/2 to everyone, and most especially to 3rd party application vendors (Lotus, WordPerfect, etc), right up until NT was ready to roll.
By a strange coincidence, the Microsoft Office suite was also available for NT at that time, but applications from other vendors weren't.
Hmm...
The GPL v2 doesn't contain patent provisions.
Yes it does. The gist of them being: if you can't grant downstream distributers the same licenses to any patents in the code that you have, then you can't distribute.
So, this is either a clever way to keep Novell from distributing SUSE, or a clever way to keep Novell as nervous as hell about what it distributes as part of any GPL'd code. (MS is just promising not to prosecute Novell over patents, it's not (AFAICT) granting a license much less any sub-licensing rights.)
Now, never mind just SUSE, think about Mono for a bit.
That sounds kinda familiar....
It should. Larry Niven did it to Mars back in 1973 (the January '74 edition of "Analog") with "The Hole Man", and won the Hugo for it.
Thanks for the link, BTW. I hadn't heard of Escape Pod. Yet another market, if a small one. (The sketch on the page is an interesting coincidence -- I just started my NaNoWriMo novel, "The Martian War" (aka "The War of the Worlds: The True Story"). Earth wasn't quite so defenseless as Wells lets on, and Nikola Tesla is implicated in both attracting the Martians, and helping defeat them by duplicating their heat ray. More to it than just that, of course.)
. . .a black hole coexisting at the center of Earth should only make a minimal impact, right?
Right.
If the black hole was created at the center of the Earth, no problem. It's when it is created at the surface and falls down, and through the center, eating a little bit of matter on the way down, then back up the other side, then down again, and up, and down, and up... Then we have a problem.
If the graphics applications you use require windows, [...] then what can you do?
Buy a cheap Linux box and use it as a dedicated firewall appliance. (Or buy a firewall appliance, odds are it has Linux embedded in it anyway.) I've got an old 166 MHz Pentium box (ancient Dell desktop) that cost me all of $15 (plus the 2nd NIC I had lying around). No worries.
Grandparent: At the moment there is NO way to legally buy a copy of OS X for Intel without hardware,
Parent: Sure there is. You can buy a Mac,
That sure seems like buying it with hardware to me.
In my area, if you were to refuse me a ride on your bus (and you'd have to do it with force
Nah, he just has to call the cops and sit there waiting until they show up. If nothing else, they'll charge you with creating a disturbance. If you try making him drive they'll get you for hijacking, too.
That's if the passengers don't lynch you for delaying them.
monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts.
There were a number of incidents in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo series where the spacecraft or mission would have been lost if there'd been monkeys rather than humans aboard. (Gemini 6, Gemini 8, Apollo 13, Skylab -- just off the top of my head.) Of course, nobody would have cared much were it just monkeys.
As for the aerospace engineer astronauts being overqualified, they took a very active role in the design and engineering of the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft (some too in Mercury, but those were late changes). Yeah, others may have been more expert in single aspects of the vehicles, but the astronauts probably undestood the systems as a whole better than anyone else. It was their and their buddies' butts on the line, after all. No just spacecraft engineering either. Buzz Aldrin, for example, was the expert in both the theory and practise of orbital rendezvous manoeuvers.
It wasn't just about endurance -- certainly that was important: the Gemini launches for example subjected the crews to 8 Gs acceleration, and working in a pressurized space suit (especially the earlier designs) was something that would tax even olympic athletes -- it was also about a base of prior knowledge and experience to build on. (What does a long-distance runner know about roll, pitch and yaw, or celestial navigation? What does a weight lifter know about recognizing the effects of hypoxia or experiencing unusual +ve, -ve or sideways G forces? This is all stuff that is old-hat to any pilot even before they enter test-pilot school.)
And any graduate of test-pilot school will be known to have both a sufficient understanding of flight dynamics and a problem solving ability and coolness of head to be in a situation where, for example, if he's testing an aircraft outside its known envelope and it starts behaving in a manner totally unexpected, he can diagnose the problem and do something about it hopefully before it kills him, all while reporting to the ground everything that is happening and everything that he's trying to do to fix it just in case the fix doesn't work and he makes another smoking hole in the desert and gets a street at Edwards AFB named after him.
(And you're right, the Shuttle is definitely a "heavy" and not a fighter -- although most of its flight regime is supersonic and it has to dead-stick the landing. A Concorde pilot, perhaps, or SR-71 pilots. Although now computers can do the whole thing -- as witness the Soviet Buran flight.)
but our first ones were fighter pilots, aka fighter jocks.
Actually they were aerospace engineers and test pilots. They may have also been fighter jocks (although some flew other types of aircraft) since that's about the only way to rack up time on high performance jets, but at the time of astronaut selection they were working as test pilots. Most (all?) of them had degrees in aerospace engineering. (Armstrong was accepted to MIT, but ended up attending a different college).
I wouldn't call them nerds, though.
Now, with servers getting smaller (e.g., blades) and CPUs evolving to multi-core, heat and power usage density is increasing dramatically within the same floor space...and cooling it effectively ranges between difficult and nearly impossible...without ripping everything out and starting over..
Yep. The datacenter where I work now has a limit in place on the number of blades allowed per enclosure in a blade rack; a rack full of blades would have a melt down because it couldn't be cooled adequately.
On average this is balanced out by tape libraries, which are just long rows of shelves of tapes with a robot in the middle, producing hardly any heat at all for the square footage. Problem is, it's not the average that counts, so it does indeed reach a point where you need to rip things out and start over.
HOLY MOLY, that's a lot of power! If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously!
Well, see, it's 1 megawatt to feed the power supplies of your computers, and another 1 megawatt to run the air conditioning to get rid of all that heat.
a filesize has no reason to be measured in power-of-two quantities.
A filesize has lots of reasons to be measured in power-of-two quantities. If you don't think so, let us know which drives use powers-of-ten sector sizes and which filesystems read/write powers-of-ten block sizes.
(The SI guys can take a hike. The computer industry has been using kilo, mega, etc for powers-of-two since they got away from decimal computers almost 50 years ago now. It was the disk drive marketing guys who started pre-empting that so that they could advertise their eg 95.37 MB drives as 100 MB.)