Under the "We own your life 24/7/365 contract" that most people sign - even these Slashdot postings belong to your employer - since any creative work you do belongs to them. This means that they can censor what you have to say here.
This is - of course - manifestly wrong. The reason that companies get away with this sort of thing is horrendous case law; beat up somebody in court who doesn't have the financial resources to fight you and you have established a precedent to use against everyone.
When I signed my employment contract I specifically exempted GPL software development, as well as several other things. My employer had no problem with that.
Two basic principals to keep in mind:
#1. It has been my experience that most companies steal; it is very difficult for a company to make money ethically, and very few even try. While they may talk a good ethical game you will discover that the employment contract puts lots of constraints on you, and almost none on them.
#2. The only reason someone wants you to sign anything is to use it against you in a court of law and for no other reason. People might say "Oh its just a formality" but don't you believe them: they want a legal weapon to use against you.
Scaling off of the data in "The effects of Nuclear Weapons" I get a circle of total destruction with a radius of about 7 miles. Hiroshima had a circle of total destruction of about 1 mile radius. The number of people killed by the asteroid strike - given the same population density as Hiroshima would be about 2.5 million.
The earth gets hit by a rock that size about every 120 years.
We got hit by a 4 megaton blast in 1994 - the good news is that it went off over the pacific ocean where evidently nothing but the Air Force tracking satellites saw it.
There is a class of people in the world who are deathly afraid that somewhere somebody might be happy, and they work diligently to make as sure as possible that never happens.
These people work on the basis of comparative happiness: if you are happy it makes them feel bad by comparison. If you are sad - they feel good by comparison.
If they could these people would bring back the dark ages complete with plague and small pox - in the midst of such misery they are positively buoyant.
The proper way to handle such people is to point out their agenda of misery so that no one is fooled by what they have to say.
In my opinion these are foul subhumans who are responsible for most of the problems in the world; step on them whenever possible. At the very least be exuberant when you are around them - no matter how miserable you are feeling - never show pain, that is what they want.
OS/2 was by far the best work that Microsoft ever did.
There was a wonderful quote from the head of the marketing team for Windows 95 who said words to the effect that " If you asked anyone at Microsoft they could have told you that OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 - our job was to keep anyone else from discovering that."
The Microsoft marketing team did a great job and foisted off on the public the worst operating system ever on any computer.
By the way - if you doubt that W95 is the worst OS ever - here is a simple test: name an OS that was less stable - less secure - and more virus prone that W9x. There isn't one. Like I said; W95 is the worst operating system ever put on a computer.
-- I think that Microsoft supporters ought to be known as 'Renfields'. They have similar motivations, and like Dracula's servant they are on an "all the bugs you can eat" diet. --
Not the first Tiqit machine to run linux
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Here is information on their earlier machine with some mention of pricing.
Applications
1. Factors and Considerations
The MPC is intended for situations calling for a small, light, low-powered, respectably performing, silent commodity PC. The MPC meets these requirements as follows.
Size 5 cubic inches (84 cc)
Weight 3.3 oz (93 g)
Power 3 to 7.5 watts
Performance Positioned midway between a laptop and a PDA, the MPC is a 32-bit 66 MHz computer, while its hard drive spins at 4500 RPM and transfers data at approximately 1 MB/s.
Noise The MPC has no fan, and the hard drive has in common with a Swiss watch not only its precision but its near-silent operation.
Platform The MPC is based on the ubiquitous x86 architecture and can therefore run the user's choice of Windows, DOS, Linux, OS/2, Solaris, QNX, and other x86 operating systems.
This hard-to-meet combination is realized with the help of two key components.
The AMD Elan SC410, an x86-based microprocessor designed for low-power embedded applications.
The IBM Microdrive, a 1 gigabyte conventional rotating magnetic hard drive occupying less than half a cubic inch (7.8 cc) and weighing half an ounce (16 g). The Matchbox PC is also available with the smaller 340 MB Microdrive, or with no Microdrive in which case the operating system resides on the 16 MB flash.
No other system available today comes close to equalling the MPC's combination of features. PDAs such as the Palm Pilot while small and light lack the computing power and storage capacity needed to run the full-scale operating systems used on desktops and laptops. So-called pocket-size Pentium-based platforms such as the Saintsong Espresso are more powerful, but their power is achieved with a much larger package (Espresso: 31 cu.in/508 cc and 1 lb/460 g), drawing much more power (10-20 W), and making more noise with their fan and physically larger hard drive.
2. Representative Applications
The following applications are a good match to the MPC's design parameters.
Wearable Computing The MPC was originally designed as a wearable computer. Suitable components complementing it in this application are a VGA headmounted display such as the TekGear M1 or M2 or the Virtual Research V6 or V8, the Handykey Twiddler chording keyboard and mouse or the WristPC QWERTY keyboard, and a serial wireless modem such as a cellular phone with serial cable or the Novatel Sage CDPD modem.
Transportable Desktop The MPC together with its battery may be unplugged from one port expander and carried to another site where it is plugged into another port expander. The peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, ethernet, printer, floppy) may be left connected at each end, greatly simplifying departure and arrival.
While in transit the MPC can continue to operate, solving preassigned computational problems or beingused as a wearable computer.
Mobile Datalogging Equipped with such mobile accessories as GPS and AD converters connected to its two serial ports, the MPC can log hundreds of megabytes of data unattended. It is ideal when weight is a major concern.
Space Missions Size, weight, and power dissipation are all of concern in the cramped quarters of a space vehicle. Every ounce of payload requires another pound of fuel to launch it. And the absence of gravity inhibits the usual upward flow of heat by convection, leaving Brownian motion of the air molecules as the primary mechanism for carrying heat away (a fan adds size and weight while consuming additional power).
At least as important in space is robustness of the software; an operating system such as Linux that has been closely scrutinized by literally thousands of programmers for eight years stands a much better chance of surviving the surprises of space than one written for a special-purpose platform by a small team of dedicated but fallible programmers.
3. Non-Applications
The MPC is not suited to all applications that one might at first think of.
MP3 Player Although the MPC is ideally sized for a personal MP3 player it lacks support both for audio output and for decoding MP3 without skipping.
Beowulf Node Although a cluster of MPCs would take up little space and draw little power, the performance available per cubic foot is less than that achievable using a smaller number of physically larger and more powerful nodes.
Desktop Replacement Although the MPC has all the functionality of a desktop, with all the capacity of a 1995 desktop, the intervening five years have witnessed dramatic growth in the size and quantity of both software and databases.
A modern desktop outperforms the MPC by easily an order of magnitude in both speed and storage capacity.
The march of progress notwithstanding, many users may be placing the same demands on their desktops today that they did five years ago. Those users at least should find the MPC meets their needs perfectly adequately. For such users the main drawback of the MPC will then be one of economics: the manufacturing costs of a tiny but powerful computer put it out of practical reach when one considers that a new desktop PC can be had for less than half the price of the MPC.
The 4.67 billion megatons figure is correct for your assumptions.
The good news is that there is only about a one in three billion chance of a rock that size hitting the earth this year. These are long odds - but the chance is not zero.
Sorry - you are wrong about that - it is not a Hollywood exaggeration. There are plenty of rocks in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter which are large enough to cause a Permian level extinction on the Earth. These rocks are from time to time deflected by the massive gravitational field of Jupiter in such a way as to become potentially hazardous to Earth .
The object Toutatis . Is an example of a large asteroid which has been deflected in this way. Fortunately the orbit of Toutatis won't allow it to hit us any time soon - but it is plenty big enough - about 2.8 Km across - to kill billions of people if it did. On average the Earth is struck by a rock that big about every 8 million years - not a Dinosaur killer - but enough to effectively destroy civilization.
Put simply: "Time is money" the time waiting for a hard drive seek costs money. Under some circumstances that time cost is bigger than the initial cost of the more expensive components.
Additionally DRAM has a much longer time between failures than hard drives do; so maintenance costs are lower.
All code attacks are nothing but an attempt by people to maintain illusions of superiority: "I must be a better programmer than Linus Torvalds because I can sabotage his work." It is the vandal throwing paint on an existing painting and saying "See I am an artist too". No, if you were a better programmer than Torvalds you would have written a better kernel than he wrote.
People become 'elite crackers' because it is much easier to do destructive things than constructive things; buildings are much easier to tear down than to build in the first place. Because of the asymmetry of the effort involved they get the illusion that they are superior to the people whose code they are cracking.
There is a lot of frustration in youth; the discovery that there are people who have done
much better work than you have ever done - or will ever do - leads to an illusion of inferiority. People attempt to counter that illusion with an illusion of superiority. Not everyone can be as good a coder as Alan Cox - I know I am not even vaguely in his league - but that doesn't make me feel inferior; just different. Nor does being a better coder than most people make me feel superior to them; just different.
Knowing and understanding your limitations and weaknesses is just as important in life as knowing your abilities and strengths. Most people try to hide their limitations and weaknesses from hemselves rather than exploring them, and that is a serious error; you can only do that by lying to yourself. Lying to yourself - when you don't even have a clue that is what you are doing - is a miserable way to go through life.
No, Capitalism is having 40% net profits (after your accountants have played every trick possible to bring that number down from the 90% gross figure) and yet paying $0,00 in taxes while paying out $0.00 in dividends to your stock holders. That is what the Microsoft monopoly not only makes possible, that is what they achieve.
If you don't work for Microsoft you ought to find those numbers highly offensive. Every small businessman I have pointed them out to has been outraged to learn them; conservatives as well as liberals. It ought to be apparent that Microsoft is not carrying its fair share of the load: I pay more federal taxes than that multi billion dollar highly profitable company.
Microsoft has been taking all of its customers for a ride: they spend more money on advertising than they do on development. Their claim that they spent a billion dollars developing Windows 2000 is ludicrous: figure the cost to them per line of new code in the OS and you will see how ridiculous the claim is. Either they have the worst coders in the world or they are just lying again.
How do you like finding out that 90% of the money you pay to Microsoft is gross profit?
At least Dracula promised Renfield all the bugs he could eat - come to think of it - that is exactly the deal that Microsoft offers to all of its personal Butt Monkeys . Charles - there is a crisis at Microsoft: Bill Gates needs to water ski behind another Air Craft carrier - better send another wheelbarrow of your cash to Redmond as fast as you can.
Speaking of bullshit, if the US had been waging war against an Islamic people who were hostile to American interests in the area we wouldn't have sent a few helicopters in without adequate intelligence. What would have happened if your perspective were correct is that there would have been no Islamic people left alive to drag any US soldiers bodies through the streets. Both Desert Storm and Afghanistan demonstrate what happens when the US does wage war.
What was going on is that Bill Clinton was playing at a game of global chess for his own personal amusement and got a bunch of people on both sides killed just because he could. He had great contempt for people in the military and he believed their lives meant nothing.
What is to keep Vito Bentnose from creating the Business Software Compliance Agency and doing exactly the same things that the BSA is doing?
The answer is basically nothing. This is a really sweet scam - send a threatening letter to a company 'audit' them and demand payments. If Vito wants to be 'legit' he can even split his take with software companies.
It would appear that both Vito and the BSA have got nothing going for them but bluff and intimidation; however in the age of the DMCA both Vito and the BSA have got an even stronger bluff. They can claim that by failing to have the proper number of licenses you are breaking a digital encryption method and subject to the draconian 5 year felony conviction + $500,000 fine for the first offense, 10 year + $1,000,000 fine fore each subsequent 'offense' penalties of the DMCA. Look 'fraudulently' having a license number to enter into the software when it asks for one is 'circumventing' a digital encryption method for protecting a copyrighted work.
I doubt that the BSA can file a business method patent on their way of extorting money - so how would a company know that Vito's organization is not authorized to do what it is doing?
Is it now clear to everyone that what the BSA is doing is extortion?
Sometimes a matter of scale is very important. The difference between a marble being dropped on your head and a wrecking ball being dropped on your head is only a matter of scale.
Because of Microsoft's size and power an unethical act by them is generally far more serious than the same unethical act by a tiny one person software company.
Just bought a 19" CRT based monitor for a net retail cost of well under $200. It is a really nice monitor which looks good. The only negative is that it is slightly slower changing resolutions than my old 17" was - so switching to a GUI screen from a text screen takes slightly longer.
When I can buy a similarly featured LCD screen at an equivalent price I will - until then I'll stick with CRT's.
I have an older customer who I set up with a Linux box for net surfing, word processing (with AbiWord) and email. His machine is on DSL with a router between it and the DSL modem.
He not only does not have root permissions - he doesn't even know 'root' exists, or what it is; clicking on Netscape's Icon in the GUI is about at his limits. I gave him a command line menu with a script when he exits X that will allow him to go back to the GUI or shut his machine down, and tell him when to turn off the power. (The exit from X script also erases the.netscape/lock file in case Netscape crashes and won't restart properly.)
Since Netscape's email won't execute binaries by clicking on them I don't have to worry too much about him getting infected. I make regular cdrom backups of his home directory - just in case.
The only problem he has had is that he thought he wasn't getting new emails because he had accidentally changed the sort order from 'date' to 'subject' with a misplaced mouse click. I showed him how to change sort orders, and once he saw that he hadn't lost anything he was happy.
The great virtue of the machine is that his Windows machine is now completely disconnected from the net and highly unlikely to ever get a virus. He likes the Linux box so much he wants me to get rid of Windows altogether: there is only one Windows app I haven't converted to Linux yet: a massive custom Access ap which will take a large development effort to duplicate.
Let us remember: all computing power belongs to Microsoft; no matter how powerful your computer is your Microsoft operating system will make it feel like a 20 Mhz 386 running Windows 3.11.
From Microsoft's point of view the ultra fast and powerful processor will allow them to write the 2012 version of Windows in Visual Basic 13.0; they will be able to hire beggars off the streets of Bombay at $0.40 a day to write their OS - no more expensive college grads to hire. Here is the real reason (from the Microsoft perspective) for more powerful computers. Naturally their PR people will tell everyone that the new version of Windows cost almost a trillion dollars to write, and everyone in the press will solemnly repeat that claim.
If you project down that path a little more you can arrive at true artificial intelligence so that Microsoft can have computers writing the next generation of Windows without the need of human intervention. That way they can cut out their largest expense - programmers - and jump their gross profit margins from 90% of sales to 99.9%. Once this occurs you will actually start to see faster versions of Windows as machines won't need dumbed down languages to program in.
As you are undoubtedly aware - a lawsuit does not have to be won to win. Microsoft has no case - knows it and doesn't care; what Microsoft does have is huge sums of money which Lindows.com does not.
Microsoft realizes that if the LindowsOS ever came into existence that it would be very bad for Microsoft's bottom line. You can expect them to do everything in their power to keep that from ever happening.
If Lindows.com stays in business after spending large amounts of money to defend itself against Microsoft's lawsuit you can be assured that Microsoft will file suit after suit until Lindows.com is out of business.
I wonder what Bill Gates response would have been had DEC filed similar frivolous lawsuits against Microsoft back in the late 1970's?
While the tech and content factions described in the article are fighting - no one is listening to the other side of the battle; almost no one even knows the other side exists.
Who is on the other side? The content producers (artists) and the listeners/watchers. Neither the tech side nor the 'content' side want the artists or the audience to have any say in the issue.
Doubtless defenders of the current status quo will spout blather about "Valid contracts" with the artists or how the record companies provide promotion and advertising etc. as excuses for the predatory behavior of companies toward actual content providers. But before you start writing posts like that I am going to propose a shame test: for the sake of argument assume that there really is a God, and that you are going to have to defend your statements in front of Him at your judgment someday. Do you think you could get away with the "valid contract" claim when you know larceny is in your heart? I always apply that shame test to what I have to say - if you don't do it then you are insincere - a troll at best, or evil at the worst.
Why doesn't the tech faction want to see the artist and audience side heard? The answer is that tech companies do the same things to engineers and programmers that recording companies do to artists, and neither faction wants people to be paid what they are actually worth.
Programmers, artists, engineers and the audience to our works belong on one side of the argument along with sincere and honest businessmen (I have met a few; they do exist). On the other side are all the greedy thieves: Mega corps and the RIAA.
By the way -for all of you Libertarians; the standard for a contract ought to be right and wrong, not "what I can get away with". If a contract is not really equally benefiting both sides it is a fraud.
By far the biggest problem with collision in space comes from micro meteorites. The formula for the quantity of meteors of a given size is that the number of meteors is inversely proportional to the mass of the meteor. If there are 1000 1 Km asteroids in near earth orbit there would be about one million 100 meter asteroids. (Remember the mass of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its diameter.) That means that there are about a billion 10 meter rocks in near earth orbit - a trillion 1 meter rocks, 10 to the 15th 10 cm rocks, 10 to the 18th 1 cm rocks etc.
One of the problems that we humans have is over estimating our importance in the cosmic sphere - the universe hardly notices us - indeed the Earth hardly notices us; from low earth orbit it is very difficult to see anything that man has done on the Earth.
The space station - because of its size - has about 1/2 lb of drag due to the nascent atmosphere 250 miles up. This drag is why experiments in the station are referred to as "micro gravity" instead of "zero g"; there is a tiny gravitational field due to the drag. One of the reasons for the periodic shuttle trips is to reboost the space station to make up for the lost velocity from the residual drag.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion was achieved by Philo Farnsworth in 1967 in the ITT labs.
A device based on an earlier Farnsworth design is currently being sold as a neutron source by Chrysler - it is correctly advertised as producing neutrons by controlled thermonuclear fusion.
Farnsworth's work has been duplicated by a number of amateurs and at least one professor at a university.
Most people in the fusion field have never heard of Farnsworth's fusion experiments, and are unfamiliar with the combination of electrostatic and inertial confinement he used.
Philo Farnsworth is best known for his invention of the entire system of television: cameras, picture tubes, transmitters, and receivers in 1927! Among his other inventions are the photo multiplier tube, and Infrared 'night vision' scopes used by the U.S. military during World War II. He is a member of the inventors Hall of Fame at the Patent office in Washington D.C.
Sadly, shortly after succeeding in creating a working fusion device, Dr. Farnsworth suffered a series of strokes which led to his death a few years later.
Here is a follow up report. The Russians did say what the UPI story says BUT
" Rising numbers of Arab mercenaries have reportedly flooded into the country this year, allegedly taking part in civilian massacres against minority Shia Muslim communities in Hazarajat, central Afghanistan, in the
first months of the year. Analysts believe there are up to 12,000 foreigners - a quarter of the Taliban's military force - fighting in Afghanistan.
At least some analysts said the development of this so-called "foreign legion" may be the source of reports, issued on 30 August 2001 by the Russian Foreign Ministry, that Bin Laden was named the "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime. Although unconfirmed by Western intelligence sources, the allegations are certainly indicative of Bin Laden's financial support for and "clout" with the Taliban. "
So the story I posted seems to be a true story; but the Russians may have gotten it wrong - . or it could still be true - the Russian foreign ministry seems to have believed it when they said it.
People do understand that fact on some level; learning about something does give them information to act upon.
Here is some information which has not been reported in the general news: guess who the commander-in-chief of the Afghan military is.
I'll type the article in in part since it is on an extremely slow server even without the slashdot effect.
"MOSCOW, Aug 30 (UPI) - Russia's Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the appointment of Saudi terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, the official RIA Novosti news agency reported."
I am not setting this up as a link because for some reason the Slashdot editor (in Netscape) insists on putting a space in the number 216037, and I can't get the link to work. If you wish to see the original - copy and paste the address into your browser and delete the space.
Note the date on the story: almost 2 weeks before the trade center attack.
I first saw the link on www.drudgereport.com
Appointing someone as your commander-in-chief qualifies as somewhat more than harboring - don't you think?
The original source of the report was Pakistan's 'Nation daily'.
The story - like everything you read - might be false. But since it predates the current furor - I tend to believe it. Chances are -before the crisis - the UPI wouldn't have published it without checking sources
Much of 'throw out the old cruft' is simply arrogance on the part of new developers: "These guys didn't know what they were doing" implying of course that "we are much better than they were".
Old code is hard to read - even if it is your code - because you lack the overall 'grasp' of what the code is doing - which the developer had had when it was written. Old code becomes just lines of code instead of part of an intelligent structure; you can see the 'trees' but the 'forest' has been lost.
This means that the problem with old code is that YOU don't know what the developers were doing; not that THE DEVELOPERS didn't know what they were doing!
It is a very easy mistake to confuse those two types of ignorance. Add in a little 'it can't be me that is wrong' attitude and the name of the game becomes a contemptuous 'out with the old in with the new.'
The truth is that there are differences in skill levels of programmers - old code written by good programmers is a lot better than new code written by poorer quality programers. If you didn't know that programmers differ in skill level it is conclusive proof that you are not a good programmer; to a bad programmer all code looks the same - that is why a bad programmer is a bad programmer
Many more people read comic books than read the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. That does not make comic books correct while the handbook is wrong. Gui IDE's and CLI tools have about the same relationship.
If you are doing something light with a GUI - which is most programming these days - an IDE is a good way to do it. If you are doing an asteroid orbit research tool - upon which the fate of humanity might depend - a CLI with a Fortran compiler is the correct way to write it.
People who write light weight apps - a database for a secretary to use - need to understand that they are not the best developers in the world, and that perhaps their opinions on how to write code are not exactly profound.
Most developers who use the Microsoft IDE tools believe that Microsoft uses those tools to develop code for Windows itself or to write programs like Word or Excel. They don't; the tools which they do use are not for sale. That is part of the reason that you can't compete with Microsoft; they have a lot better tools than the ones that they will sell to you. The only Microsoft app I know of that was written with one of their IDE tools was Microsoft Money ( written in Visual Basic). The last time that I checked Microsoft Money was not one of their core money makers.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the "We own your life 24/7/365 contract" that most people sign - even these Slashdot postings belong to your employer - since any creative work you do belongs to them. This means that they can censor what you have to say here.
This is - of course - manifestly wrong. The reason that companies get away with this sort of thing is horrendous case law; beat up somebody in court who doesn't have the financial resources to fight you and you have established a precedent to use against everyone.
When I signed my employment contract I specifically exempted GPL software development, as well as several other things. My employer had no problem with that.
Two basic principals to keep in mind:
#1. It has been my experience that most companies steal; it is very difficult for a company to make money ethically, and very few even try. While they may talk a good ethical game you will discover that the employment contract puts lots of constraints on you, and almost none on them.
#2. The only reason someone wants you to sign anything is to use it against you in a court of law and for no other reason. People might say "Oh its just a formality" but don't you believe them: they want a legal weapon to use against you.
Scaling off of the data in "The effects of Nuclear Weapons" I get a circle of total destruction with a radius of about 7 miles. Hiroshima had a circle of total destruction of about 1 mile radius. The number of people killed by the asteroid strike - given the same population density as Hiroshima would be about 2.5 million.
The earth gets hit by a rock that size about every 120 years.
We got hit by a 4 megaton blast in 1994 - the good news is that it went off over the pacific ocean where evidently nothing but the Air Force tracking satellites saw it.
There is a class of people in the world who are deathly afraid that somewhere somebody might be happy, and they work diligently to make as sure as possible that never happens.
These people work on the basis of comparative happiness: if you are happy it makes them feel bad by comparison. If you are sad - they feel good by comparison.
If they could these people would bring back the dark ages complete with plague and small pox - in the midst of such misery they are positively buoyant.
The proper way to handle such people is to point out their agenda of misery so that no one is fooled by what they have to say.
In my opinion these are foul subhumans who are responsible for most of the problems in the world; step on them whenever possible. At the very least be exuberant when you are around them - no matter how miserable you are feeling - never show pain, that is what they want.
OS/2 was by far the best work that Microsoft ever did.
There was a wonderful quote from the head of the marketing team for Windows 95 who said words to the effect that " If you asked anyone at Microsoft they could have told you that OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 - our job was to keep anyone else from discovering that."
The Microsoft marketing team did a great job and foisted off on the public the worst operating system ever on any computer.
By the way - if you doubt that W95 is the worst OS ever - here is a simple test: name an OS that was less stable - less secure - and more virus prone that W9x. There isn't one. Like I said; W95 is the worst operating system ever put on a computer.
-- I think that Microsoft supporters ought to be known as 'Renfields'. They have similar motivations, and like Dracula's servant they are on an "all the bugs you can eat" diet. --
Here is information on their earlier machine with some mention of pricing.
Applications
1. Factors and Considerations
The MPC is intended for situations calling for a small, light, low-powered, respectably
performing, silent commodity PC. The MPC meets these requirements as follows.
Size 5 cubic inches (84 cc)
Weight 3.3 oz (93 g)
Power 3 to 7.5 watts
Performance Positioned midway between a laptop and a PDA, the MPC is a 32-bit 66 MHz
computer, while its hard drive spins at 4500 RPM and transfers data at approximately 1
MB/s.
Noise The MPC has no fan, and the hard drive has in common with a Swiss watch not only its
precision but its near-silent operation.
Platform The MPC is based on the ubiquitous x86 architecture and can therefore run the
user's choice of Windows, DOS, Linux, OS/2, Solaris, QNX, and other x86 operating
systems.
This hard-to-meet combination is realized with the help of two key components.
The AMD Elan SC410, an x86-based microprocessor designed for low-power embedded applications.
The IBM Microdrive, a 1 gigabyte conventional rotating magnetic hard drive occupying less than half a cubic inch (7.8 cc) and weighing half an ounce (16 g). The Matchbox PC is also available with the smaller 340 MB Microdrive, or with no Microdrive in which case the operating system resides on the 16 MB flash.
No other system available today comes close to equalling the MPC's combination of features.
PDAs such as the Palm Pilot while small and light lack the computing power and storage capacity needed to run the full-scale operating systems used on desktops and laptops. So-called pocket-size Pentium-based platforms such as the Saintsong Espresso are more powerful, but their power is achieved with a much larger package (Espresso: 31 cu.in/508 cc
and 1 lb/460 g), drawing much more power (10-20 W), and making more noise with their fan
and physically larger hard drive.
2. Representative Applications
The following applications are a good match to the MPC's design parameters.
Wearable Computing The MPC was originally designed as a wearable computer. Suitable components complementing it in this application are a VGA headmounted display such as the TekGear M1 or M2 or the Virtual Research V6 or V8, the Handykey
Twiddler chording keyboard and mouse or the WristPC QWERTY keyboard, and a serial wireless modem such as a cellular phone with serial cable or the Novatel Sage CDPD modem.
Transportable Desktop The MPC together with its battery may be unplugged from one port expander and carried to another site where it is plugged into another port expander. The peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, ethernet, printer, floppy) may be left connected at each end, greatly simplifying departure and arrival.
While in transit the MPC can continue to operate, solving preassigned computational problems or beingused as a wearable computer.
Mobile Datalogging Equipped with such mobile accessories as GPS and AD converters connected to its two serial ports, the MPC can log hundreds of megabytes of data unattended. It is ideal when weight is a major concern.
Space Missions Size, weight, and power dissipation are all of concern in the cramped quarters of a space vehicle. Every ounce of payload requires another pound of fuel to launch it. And the absence of gravity inhibits the usual upward flow of heat by convection, leaving Brownian motion of the air molecules as the primary mechanism for carrying heat away (a fan adds size and weight while consuming additional power).
At least as important in space is robustness of the software; an operating system such as Linux that has been closely scrutinized by literally thousands of programmers for eight years stands a much better chance of surviving the surprises of space than one written for a special-purpose platform by a small team of dedicated but fallible programmers.
3. Non-Applications
The MPC is not suited to all applications that one might at first think of.
MP3 Player Although the MPC is ideally sized for a personal MP3 player it lacks support both for audio output and for decoding MP3 without skipping.
Beowulf Node Although a cluster of MPCs would take up little space and draw little power, the performance available per cubic foot is less than that achievable using a smaller number of physically larger and more powerful nodes.
Desktop Replacement Although the MPC has all the functionality of a desktop, with all the capacity of a 1995 desktop, the intervening five years have witnessed dramatic growth in the size and quantity of both software and databases.
A modern desktop outperforms the MPC by easily an order of magnitude in both speed and storage capacity.
The march of progress notwithstanding, many users may be placing the same demands on their desktops today that they did five years ago. Those users at least should find the MPC meets their needs perfectly adequately. For such users the main drawback of the MPC will then be one of economics: the manufacturing costs of a tiny but powerful computer put it out of practical reach when one considers that a new desktop PC can be had for less than half the price of the MPC.
The good news is that there is only about a one in three billion chance of a rock that size hitting the earth this year. These are long odds - but the chance is not zero.
The object Toutatis . Is an example of a large asteroid which has been deflected in this way. Fortunately the orbit of Toutatis won't allow it to hit us any time soon - but it is plenty big enough - about 2.8 Km across - to kill billions of people if it did. On average the Earth is struck by a rock that big about every 8 million years - not a Dinosaur killer - but enough to effectively destroy civilization.
Additionally DRAM has a much longer time between failures than hard drives do; so maintenance costs are lower.
All code attacks are nothing but an attempt by people to maintain illusions of superiority: "I must be a better programmer than Linus Torvalds because I can sabotage his work." It is the vandal throwing paint on an existing painting and saying "See I am an artist too". No, if you were a better programmer than Torvalds you would have written a better kernel than he wrote.
People become 'elite crackers' because it is much easier to do destructive things than constructive things; buildings are much easier to tear down than to build in the first place. Because of the asymmetry of the effort involved they get the illusion that they are superior to the people whose code they are cracking.
There is a lot of frustration in youth; the discovery that there are people who have done
much better work than you have ever done - or will ever do - leads to an illusion of inferiority. People attempt to counter that illusion with an illusion of superiority. Not everyone can be as good a coder as Alan Cox - I know I am not even vaguely in his league - but that doesn't make me feel inferior; just different. Nor does being a better coder than most people make me feel superior to them; just different.
Knowing and understanding your limitations and weaknesses is just as important in life as knowing your abilities and strengths. Most people try to hide their limitations and weaknesses from hemselves rather than exploring them, and that is a serious error; you can only do that by lying to yourself. Lying to yourself - when you don't even have a clue that is what you are doing - is a miserable way to go through life.
If you don't work for Microsoft you ought to find those numbers highly offensive. Every small businessman I have pointed them out to has been outraged to learn them; conservatives as well as liberals. It ought to be apparent that Microsoft is not carrying its fair share of the load: I pay more federal taxes than that multi billion dollar highly profitable company.
Microsoft has been taking all of its customers for a ride: they spend more money on advertising than they do on development. Their claim that they spent a billion dollars developing Windows 2000 is ludicrous: figure the cost to them per line of new code in the OS and you will see how ridiculous the claim is. Either they have the worst coders in the world or they are just lying again.
How do you like finding out that 90% of the money you pay to Microsoft is gross profit?
At least Dracula promised Renfield all the bugs he could eat - come to think of it - that is exactly the deal that Microsoft offers to all of its personal Butt Monkeys . Charles - there is a crisis at Microsoft: Bill Gates needs to water ski behind another Air Craft carrier - better send another wheelbarrow of your cash to Redmond as fast as you can.
What was going on is that Bill Clinton was playing at a game of global chess for his own personal amusement and got a bunch of people on both sides killed just because he could. He had great contempt for people in the military and he believed their lives meant nothing.
The answer is basically nothing. This is a really sweet scam - send a threatening letter to a company 'audit' them and demand payments. If Vito wants to be 'legit' he can even split his take with software companies.
It would appear that both Vito and the BSA have got nothing going for them but bluff and intimidation; however in the age of the DMCA both Vito and the BSA have got an even stronger bluff. They can claim that by failing to have the proper number of licenses you are breaking a digital encryption method and subject to the draconian 5 year felony conviction + $500,000 fine for the first offense, 10 year + $1,000,000 fine fore each subsequent 'offense' penalties of the DMCA. Look 'fraudulently' having a license number to enter into the software when it asks for one is 'circumventing' a digital encryption method for protecting a copyrighted work.
I doubt that the BSA can file a business method patent on their way of extorting money - so how would a company know that Vito's organization is not authorized to do what it is doing?
Is it now clear to everyone that what the BSA is doing is extortion?
Because of Microsoft's size and power an unethical act by them is generally far more serious than the same unethical act by a tiny one person software company.
Just bought a 19" CRT based monitor for a net retail cost of well under $200. It is a really nice monitor which looks good. The only negative is that it is slightly slower changing resolutions than my old 17" was - so switching to a GUI screen from a text screen takes slightly longer.
When I can buy a similarly featured LCD screen at an equivalent price I will - until then I'll stick with CRT's.
He not only does not have root permissions - he doesn't even know 'root' exists, or what it is; clicking on Netscape's Icon in the GUI is about at his limits. I gave him a command line menu with a script when he exits X that will allow him to go back to the GUI or shut his machine down, and tell him when to turn off the power. (The exit from X script also erases the .netscape/lock file in case Netscape crashes and won't restart properly.)
Since Netscape's email won't execute binaries by clicking on them I don't have to worry too much about him getting infected. I make regular cdrom backups of his home directory - just in case.
The only problem he has had is that he thought he wasn't getting new emails because he had accidentally changed the sort order from 'date' to 'subject' with a misplaced mouse click. I showed him how to change sort orders, and once he saw that he hadn't lost anything he was happy.
The great virtue of the machine is that his Windows machine is now completely disconnected from the net and highly unlikely to ever get a virus. He likes the Linux box so much he wants me to get rid of Windows altogether: there is only one Windows app I haven't converted to Linux yet: a massive custom Access ap which will take a large development effort to duplicate.
From Microsoft's point of view the ultra fast and powerful processor will allow them to write the 2012 version of Windows in Visual Basic 13.0; they will be able to hire beggars off the streets of Bombay at $0.40 a day to write their OS - no more expensive college grads to hire. Here is the real reason (from the Microsoft perspective) for more powerful computers. Naturally their PR people will tell everyone that the new version of Windows cost almost a trillion dollars to write, and everyone in the press will solemnly repeat that claim.
If you project down that path a little more you can arrive at true artificial intelligence so that Microsoft can have computers writing the next generation of Windows without the need of human intervention. That way they can cut out their largest expense - programmers - and jump their gross profit margins from 90% of sales to 99.9%. Once this occurs you will actually start to see faster versions of Windows as machines won't need dumbed down languages to program in.
Microsoft realizes that if the LindowsOS ever came into existence that it would be very bad for Microsoft's bottom line. You can expect them to do everything in their power to keep that from ever happening.
If Lindows.com stays in business after spending large amounts of money to defend itself against Microsoft's lawsuit you can be assured that Microsoft will file suit after suit until Lindows.com is out of business.
I wonder what Bill Gates response would have been had DEC filed similar frivolous lawsuits against Microsoft back in the late 1970's?
Who is on the other side? The content producers (artists) and the listeners/watchers. Neither the tech side nor the 'content' side want the artists or the audience to have any say in the issue.
Doubtless defenders of the current status quo will spout blather about "Valid contracts" with the artists or how the record companies provide promotion and advertising etc. as excuses for the predatory behavior of companies toward actual content providers. But before you start writing posts like that I am going to propose a shame test: for the sake of argument assume that there really is a God, and that you are going to have to defend your statements in front of Him at your judgment someday. Do you think you could get away with the "valid contract" claim when you know larceny is in your heart? I always apply that shame test to what I have to say - if you don't do it then you are insincere - a troll at best, or evil at the worst.
Why doesn't the tech faction want to see the artist and audience side heard? The answer is that tech companies do the same things to engineers and programmers that recording companies do to artists, and neither faction wants people to be paid what they are actually worth.
Programmers, artists, engineers and the audience to our works belong on one side of the argument along with sincere and honest businessmen (I have met a few; they do exist). On the other side are all the greedy thieves: Mega corps and the RIAA.
By the way -for all of you Libertarians; the standard for a contract ought to be right and wrong, not "what I can get away with". If a contract is not really equally benefiting both sides it is a fraud.
By far the biggest problem with collision in space comes from micro meteorites. The formula for the quantity of meteors of a given size is that the number of meteors is inversely proportional to the mass of the meteor. If there are 1000 1 Km asteroids in near earth orbit there would be about one million 100 meter asteroids. (Remember the mass of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its diameter.) That means that there are about a billion 10 meter rocks in near earth orbit - a trillion 1 meter rocks, 10 to the 15th 10 cm rocks, 10 to the 18th 1 cm rocks etc.
One of the problems that we humans have is over estimating our importance in the cosmic sphere - the universe hardly notices us - indeed the Earth hardly notices us; from low earth orbit it is very difficult to see anything that man has done on the Earth.
The space station - because of its size - has about 1/2 lb of drag due to the nascent atmosphere 250 miles up. This drag is why experiments in the station are referred to as "micro gravity" instead of "zero g"; there is a tiny gravitational field due to the drag. One of the reasons for the periodic shuttle trips is to reboost the space station to make up for the lost velocity from the residual drag.
A device based on an earlier Farnsworth design is currently being sold as a neutron source by Chrysler - it is correctly advertised as producing neutrons by controlled thermonuclear fusion.
Farnsworth's work has been duplicated by a number of amateurs and at least one professor at a university.
Most people in the fusion field have never heard of Farnsworth's fusion experiments, and are unfamiliar with the combination of electrostatic and inertial confinement he used.
Philo Farnsworth is best known for his invention of the entire system of television: cameras, picture tubes, transmitters, and receivers in 1927! Among his other inventions are the photo multiplier tube, and Infrared 'night vision' scopes used by the U.S. military during World War II. He is a member of the inventors Hall of Fame at the Patent office in Washington D.C.
Sadly, shortly after succeeding in creating a working fusion device, Dr. Farnsworth suffered a series of strokes which led to his death a few years later.
" Rising numbers of Arab mercenaries have reportedly flooded into the country this year, allegedly taking part in civilian massacres against minority Shia Muslim communities in Hazarajat, central Afghanistan, in the
first months of the year. Analysts believe there are up to 12,000 foreigners - a quarter of the Taliban's military force - fighting in Afghanistan.
At least some analysts said the development of this so-called "foreign legion" may be the source of reports, issued on 30 August 2001 by the Russian Foreign Ministry, that Bin Laden was named the "commander-in-chief" of the armed forces of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime. Although unconfirmed by Western intelligence sources, the allegations are certainly indicative of Bin Laden's financial support for and "clout" with the Taliban. "
So the story I posted seems to be a true story; but the Russians may have gotten it wrong - . or it could still be true - the Russian foreign ministry seems to have believed it when they said it.
link to story
People do understand that fact on some level; learning about something does give them information to act upon.
Here is some information which has not been reported in the general news: guess who the commander-in-chief of the Afghan military is.
I'll type the article in in part since it is on an extremely slow server even without the slashdot effect.
"MOSCOW, Aug 30 (UPI) - Russia's Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the appointment of Saudi terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, the official RIA Novosti news agency reported."
I am not setting this up as a link because for some reason the Slashdot editor (in Netscape) insists on putting a space in the number 216037, and I can't get the link to work. If you wish to see the original - copy and paste the address into your browser and delete the space.
http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=216 03 7
Several comments:
Old code is hard to read - even if it is your code - because you lack the overall 'grasp' of what the code is doing - which the developer had had when it was written. Old code becomes just lines of code instead of part of an intelligent structure; you can see the 'trees' but the 'forest' has been lost.
This means that the problem with old code is that YOU don't know what the developers were doing; not that THE DEVELOPERS didn't know what they were doing!
It is a very easy mistake to confuse those two types of ignorance. Add in a little 'it can't be me that is wrong' attitude and the name of the game becomes a contemptuous 'out with the old in with the new.'
The truth is that there are differences in skill levels of programmers - old code written by good programmers is a lot better than new code written by poorer quality programers. If you didn't know that programmers differ in skill level it is conclusive proof that you are not a good programmer; to a bad programmer all code looks the same - that is why a bad programmer is a bad programmer
If you are doing something light with a GUI - which is most programming these days - an IDE is a good way to do it. If you are doing an asteroid orbit research tool - upon which the fate of humanity might depend - a CLI with a Fortran compiler is the correct way to write it.
People who write light weight apps - a database for a secretary to use - need to understand that they are not the best developers in the world, and that perhaps their opinions on how to write code are not exactly profound.
Most developers who use the Microsoft IDE tools believe that Microsoft uses those tools to develop code for Windows itself or to write programs like Word or Excel. They don't; the tools which they do use are not for sale. That is part of the reason that you can't compete with Microsoft; they have a lot better tools than the ones that they will sell to you. The only Microsoft app I know of that was written with one of their IDE tools was Microsoft Money ( written in Visual Basic). The last time that I checked Microsoft Money was not one of their core money makers.