I do work at NASA, and sadly, they do use Outlook - run unpatched systems etc.
Even more ridiculously I am forced to do engineering work on a 64 MB Win 98 machine. When I tried to at least get more memory for the machine I was told that I didn't qualify: Engineers were considered in the same category as secretaries as far as their computer usage.
If it weren't for the (personally owned) Linux box I keep on my desk I couldn't get much useful work done.
The people who do the actual work at NASA are the sharpest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working around - but like most places the upper management has more than its fair share of 'clueless techno ignorants' making decisions.
At least our computers are behind a firewall - so they don't get hacked all the time - but there are enough technically unsophisticated people (managers, secretaries etc.) on computers that viruses remain a problem.
One trick used by VC's is to give you enough money to fund the product development - but not enough to do any marketing. When the company has a fine product developed but is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy for lack of marketing - the VC's move in and take it over.
The old saw about "The world beating a path to your door if you have a better mouse trap" is pure hokum. The one thing that Microsoft proved with Windows 95 is that if you have enough marketing money you can sell anything - no matter how bad it is. Conversely - take the best commercial program you can find - write up a sign that says "Software $5.00" stand on a street corner with the sign and see how many copies you sell. I have tried that: all you'll get is sun-burned; marketing is far more important than product when it comes to making money in a business.
What the MPAA type people of the world fear about the Internet is that THEY don't control it. Every attack news report you have seen on TV - "predators roam the Internet trying to seduce your children" has as its root goal passing the MESSAGE: "Conventional media good Internet BAAAAAD . Quite correctly - people currently in positions of power fear a media which they can't control - it will eventually undermine their positions of power, authority, and privilege.
To understand the DeCSS issue you have to understand the deeper issue of media control. The Internet is a communications media much in the same way that the air is a communications media for voice communications.
To see what is really going on in attempts to control the Internet are substitute the word air for the word Internet in the following headline:
Internet control necessary: predators using the Internet to go after YOUR (Children/Money/Identity (choose one))
If anyone tried to use the above in an attempt to control the air it would be obvious to anyone with the snap of the village idiot that they were trying to get a strangle hold over everyone. That is what the battle is over. DeCSS is a test case: One in which people can be easily confused with plausible lies into misunderstanding. This is NOT just about money - it IS about obtaining a strangle hold over humanity.
15 year olds have always thought that their elders were hostile, incompetent, and clueless - adding computers to the mix really hasn't changed much in that regard.
The history of aero-space is littered with plans for space bombers. Much of the original shuttle design work was done in these abandoned projects.
This is a ploy to keep the research going - NASA can't afford to do it - so the hope is the Pentagon will. The valuable work that the military can do is cut the support requirement and speed up the rate with which the device can be reused. Currently the shuttle takes months between launches.
The air force has recently realized that they aren't interested in winning air battles 51-49; they want 100-zip. This point of view is eventually going to spread to the other branches of the military. Not only is this the safest thing for your own troops - it also greatly reduces the chance of war; no one is crazy enough to think they can beat an elephant in a fist fight.
As a weapon - it would take a huge fleet of X-33 type bombers (which would have to be converted to stealth devices) to have much of an impact on the outcome of a war. The U.S. is the only country in the history of the world to have been in the situation of knowing it could conquer the rest of the world and yet not do it. While other countries might bad mouth the U.S. they also realize this simple truth: at the end of World War II the rest of the world was at the mercy of the U.S., and mercy is exactly what the U.S. showed.
If the same experiment were run here on Earth, and you got the same results - would you attempt to explain it as 'ozone'?
There is something for all of you young students of science to keep in mind:
Plausibility != truth
Truth may be implausible
When you apply plausibility as a go - no go decision maker you run the risk of swallowing plausible lies - while rejecting implausible truth. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
By the way, being a nay sayer - which is what you are doing here - takes absolutely nothing. Professors will pass off nay saying as being a good scientist - but the truth is what they like about nay saying is the illusion of power that comes from being destructive. For example - you didn't do the work necessary to see the correlation in the Viking data - that would have been to hard, and required you to put yourself at risk in doing so. It is much easier to come up with a half assed explanation like 'ozone' than to do all of that work - you get this swell illusion of power by being negative. It is the same illusion of power that a vandal gets when they throw point on an an existing work of art: "See I'm an artist too!".
Being a turd is not part of science - it is a cancer on science.
Careful work is important - and looking at possible alternatives explanations is necessary - but playing nay saying games is not science - it is just useless self deceiving time wasting.
No nay sayer has ever advanced science and knowledge by so much as one femto-meter.
The politics of fusion are much more difficult than actually achieving fusion.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion with a continuos isotropic neutron output was achieved by Philo Farnsworth in the ITT labs in 1967.
Currently Chrysler is selling a neutron source based on a simplistic recreation of one of Farnsworth's earlier tube designs. The device is advertised as creating neutrons by controlled thermonuclear fusion - which it does.
There are several amateurs who have duplicated Farnsworth's work and have achieved fusion in their basements.
These facts are a massive embarrassment to the people at the top of the magnetic fusion community - and as a result there is zero funding available for people using the electric field - inertial confinement principles outlined in the Farnsworth patents.
Most people in the fusion field have never even heard of Farnsworth.
Farnsworth is best known as the person who created the entire system of television in 1927. Farnsworth is enshrined in the Inventors hall of Fame at the patent office in Washington DC. Sadly Dr. Farnsworth suffered a series of strokes shortly after his fusion work and died in 1971. His work has languished in obscurity ever since.
There are so many advertising dollars at stake that there is no way the press will allow XP to be delayed. Remember - Microsoft has promised to spend even more than they did when they released Windows 95.
There is so much money at stake that if Windows XP caused your computer to release a pack of rabid wild dogs into your house - the press would write "and it even comes with FREE pets!"
In other words no matter how bad XP is - it is going to get glowing reviews.
If you don't think all of those dollars have an effect on the legal system I suggest that you have someone whack you over the head with a two by four so as to knock some semblance of reality back into your life. I suspect that all along part of the motivation for the anti trust suit was to get Microsoft to turn loose of some of that pile of money that they have.
Windows 95 proved to Microsoft that you can sell the public anything if you spend enough money pushing it. I defy anyone anywhere to point to a more unstable, insecure, virus ridden joke of an 'operating system' than that pile of rotting dingo's kidneys that Microsoft called 'Windows 95'.
Microsoft seems to spend money on advertising in inverse relationship to how good the product they are pushing is: i.e. they spent a lot more on 95 than they did on NT - and they spent almost nothing on OS/2 when they were involved in it. IF XP keeps that trend up we can only look forward to something that will leave us wistful memories of the 'good old days of Win 95'.
By the way, has anyone noticed that Microsoft's attitude is that all of the power that you pay for in a new computer belongs to them? Basically what you are getting to pay for with new hardware is the privilege of running even slower bloat ware than the last OS. Computers are about 100 times as fast today as they were 10 years ago - I defy anyone to show how Windows 2K is doing 100 times as much work as Windows for Work groups 3.11 - but on today's machines W2K is no faster than WFW 3.11 would run on a ten year old machine. Recently a co-worker got a new 900 MHZ computer with W2K on it - when I asked him how he liked it he said "God - its slow". I never figured out how to make a Z80 with 64 K of memory feel slow - I am in awe of programmers who are able to make a 900 MHZ Pentium III with 128 Mb run sluggishly - Microsoft's programmers have truly put the 'K' into 'Kwality'.
When Apple went with the Power PC the decision almost put them out of business. Why? Because there was no software for their new chip. They had to do with kludges like emulating the 68K in order to have anything running.
When you change chip architectures you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were before.
As Intel is discovering with the Itanium writing state of the art compilers to support a new architecture is a very difficult job.
If processor manufacturers switched architecture every few years like you seem to be suggesting then software adds would look like this:
Gamesoft announces PONG for the Snazoid 2010
WooHoo.
Doing things like arbitrarily switching processor architecture just because you can is adolescent "I have no clue how the universe actually works - so I am randomly trying things until I find out what is going on" behavior.
This lawsuit is much more important than most people on Slashdot realize. Because of the way legal precedents are established this is effectively the ONLY shot that the good guys are going to get to fire. If this doesn't result in a win we are dead.
What do I think the chances are? I would say they are about the same as the chances of me dating Sarah Michele Gellar next week; realistically as close to zero as anything can be.
Why do I say that?
The opposition has the 'image of respectability' on their side, and they are able to paint us as a group of scruffy malcontents.
The fight is over technical issues. The average juror can barely stay away when technical issues are being discussed.
A horrible miscarriage of justice will occur if the other side wins. The legal system thrives on horrible miscarriages of justice in cases like this: look up Armstrong vs. RCA - the case in which RCA stole FM - for an example of what I mean by that statement.
One of the defendants is the US Government. The case will be tried in a U.S. Government court room. Doubtless some attorney is leaping to his keyboard to post a learned explanation of how that is fair because - blah blah blah . Please don't bother - I am not interested in listening to your self deluded bilge. The village idiot can see the conflict of interest involved - do you really want to expose yourself as less insightful than the village idiot?
So, am I in favor of just giving up because it is hopeless? No, this is one of those hopeless fights that anyone who cherishes their freedom has to fight - not because it can be won - but because it can't be won; at a minimum the opposition needs to walk away holding a bloody nose. By the way, I am a paying member of the EFF, and I intend to contribute more for this case.
Besides, every once in a while - against all odds - the good guys do win one. It could happen - the race is not always to the swift - nor the fight always to the strong - but odds are that's how it is going to turn out.
Microsoft has a long history of intentionally breaking things to the detriment of their competition. See the DR DOS court case against them for some of their dirty tricks.
Do you really believe that it is an accident that Real Player crashes Windows? Lets see, Microsoft wants to dominate that field and suddenly their competition can't write software that even works. How wonderful for Microsoft - the wheels just keep falling off of their competitors software. Microsoft gets to say "Use this Wonderful (T) Microsoft product instead and everything will work" This creates the impression among the clueless that Microsoft makes better products than anyone else.
Point two: Microsoft desperately wants to get rid of old software. They lose big time if your copy of Office 97 works on their latest operating system - since you now have no reason to buy Office XP or whatever 'fresh coat of paint on the same old Yugo" that they want to sell to you this year. Because of this they have absolutely no financial reason to keep the Win 32 API constant. It is called "planned obsolescence" if you have never heard of it before.
Sadly the odds against a civilization ending impact are not nearly as great as one would hope for.
If we assume that a 1000 meter rock is large enough to do the trick then the actual odds of impact are - over the next 20 years - just 5000 to one against the impact. That is very lousy odds for an event that could kill a billion people.
A one KM diameter asteroid traveling at 21 Km per sec has the explosive energy of one hundred thousand 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. The fireball from such an impact would be about 75 miles across - big enough to punch out of the atmosphere much as Shoemaker Levy 9 did with Jupiter.
The estimate is that we take a hit from a rock this size about every 100,000 years - over a 20 year span that gives about 1 in 5000 chance of a hit.
Of course we have been on the good side of that 5000 to one odds every 20 years since the beginning of recorded history.
I suspect that the most important use of a technology like this will be to produce flat screen displays - driving the current high cost of HDTV and flat screen monitors way down.
Several interesting effects occur as line widths decrease. The first is that the working voltage has to go down: at.1 micrometer a one volt difference between the two sides of the line gives and electric field of 10 million volts per meter - which begins to approach the insulation capability of the best known insulator. In other words the insulators start to arc through. The cell wall of a neuron is so thin that the neuron is restricted to voltages of about 90 millivolts by this effect. The electric field problem is why present day processors operate at the approximately the 2 volt level.
Lowering the voltage has some good effects - the main one is that the power consumption drops as the square of the voltage (assuming Ohms law). However lowering the voltage causes everything to run slower. The old fashioned 4000 series CMOS chips were much faster at 15 volts than they were at 5 volts.
Chips get faster when they shrink because the capacitances decrease as the surface area of a conductor shrinks; cut the feature size by a factor of two in both directions and the capacitance is down by a factor of four. However there is another effect which occurs as everything shrinks; the insulation between features shrinks, and that shrinking feature increases the parasitic capacitance between the two features.
In the past the increase in capacitance caused by the thinning of insulators has not been a significant effect in limiting clock speeds but there comes a point where the effect does become important. In neurons the cell walls are so thin that the capacitance effects of the thin dielectric limit signal propagation speeds in the neuron to about 180 miles per hour or so. Long axons have thick sheaths to cut the capacitance and increase the signal propagation speeds.
This increasing capacitance with the decreasing dielectric thickness combined with the decreasing speed from the lowered voltages will eventually put an effective cap on the clock speed of silicon devices. The only big trick left in the book is too switch to Diamond based semi conductors - which are as much better than silicon than silicon was than germanium - and that will give us some more speed. Above a certain frequency Nature itself changes the way it does things. At RF frequencies bulk devices like crystals function - at the frequencies of light waves only atomic devices can switch from one state to another quickly enough.
In other words at some point in the near future we are going to reach a point where simple die shrinking won't be enough to crank up clock speeds any more. Enjoy things while they last - but another factor of a thousand increase in clock speed (Apple II one megahertz to present day one gigahertz) is going to be very difficult to achieve.
The most unfortunate part of the entire attempt by the RIAA MPAA etc. to control everything is that the people who make all of the actual decisions - the politicians - have no clue what is actually going on.
Here are the things that the politicians need to understand:
Copy protection is not about commercial piracy.
No copy protection scheme prevents commercial pirates from turning out identical copies of the 'copy protected' material.
All 'copy protection' schemes are about preventing people who have legally purchased material from using their material in ways which the law has always allowed.
Copy protection is not about protecting artists or writers.
Copy protection is about allowing current industry companies to maintain control of artists and other people who create copyrighted material.
'Copy protection' is about the current industry companies attempts to continue to be dominant in the recording and publishing fields.
Current companies are terrified of the Internet because the Internet allows artists and writers to publish their works without going through a publishing company .
There is a difference between 'Copyright protection' and 'Copy protection'.
'Copyright protection' is the responsibility of government to protect material which is copyrighted from theft or other illegal use.
'Copy protection' is a scheme by companies in the recording and publishing industries to control how legitimate purchasers of copyrighted material use that material . 'Copy protection' is an attempt by the recording and publishing industries to eliminate 'fair use' of copyrighted material such as LIBRARIES .
Recording and publishing companies don't vote . The people who are affected by the schemes these companies are pushing do vote .
The only encouraging thing about the copy protected disk situation is that it is the first time that I have been able to get across to non technical people why the DMCA affects them . That is a very good thing - we need to let the non technical people understand why these things are so important to all of us.
You didn't try it on the ASUS motherboard I did. It took me 6 hours and three retries before I figured out that the drivers on the CD were defective - and that it was necessary to use the updated drivers on the diskettes to boot from. Nothing but Blue Screens when using the CD's.
After I did the install an MCSE wiped the disk and spent 3 days trying to do the reinstall. (NT Server). He refused to believe me when I told him what was wrong. After he gave up a third party then spent 2 weeks trying to do the same install. After I wrote down the procedure (which involved doing more than just booting from the diskettes - you had to install even newer drivers from the ASUS web site - and yes I tried to install them with a CD boot - Nothing but Blue Screens) he was able to get it to work also.
Nothing 'piece of cake' about it - it was a major hassle.
As I said - you were working with equipment which didn't have any problems with NT - the other people weren't.
And no - the instructions on the ASUS web site didn't mention using the diskettes. Or even that there were other drivers to install.
When you are a young smart ass with little experience everything looks easy to you. You assume that other people are just stupid - when the fact is that you just haven't been presented with the same set of problems that they have seen.
When you run into a rip roaring bitch of an install you won't be quite so much of a smart ass anymore. One of the great lessons of life is that it knocks the arrogance out of you.
I have suggested to the Register that all of these type of schemes be referred to as 'Damaged Data'. In other words the new hard drives would be called 'Damaged Data Drives'. That is what is really going on in every case - and it lets the average consumer understand that something bad is happening inside his machine.
What is now called 'Copy protection' would be renamed to as 'Data Damaging' ; it is a much more accurate description - and it lets people know what we technical people think of the activity. As in "I see someone has come up with a new data damaging scheme."
Even pointy haired bosses would realize that 'damaged data' drives are a bad idea.
Copy protection schemes failed the first time around because they made the hardware less reliable and more of a hassle to work with; all copy protection schemes work by 'breaking' the hardware under certain circumstances. Designing a computer so that it works properly is a very difficult thing to do; a computer which works is right at the limit of what humans are able to do. Deliberately sabotaging the equipment makes that job way harder.
However the situation has changed since then (the 1980's). Several factors have come into play which did not exist back then. The first is in the pre Windows days people expected computers to work more or less correctly, and they noticed when copy protection broke their machines. Most computer users raised on Windows 9X don't have any expectation that computers work reliably ; Windows 9X crashes so often that most people accept computer crashes as a fact of life . Most people have never operated a machine which will run for months without a reboot - and don't believe that such a machine can be built.
Secondly Windows has conditioned people to expect that doing anything with a computer involves a fight with the computer to get it to do what the person wants; in the simplistic MSDOS days one gave commands to the computer - and the computer did what it was told without argument - so people noticed when the machine failed to do as told - this made copy protection hassles stand out like a sore thumb.
Under Windows everything you do is a hassle, and people are used to wrestling with their machines to get something done.
Example:
DOS - copy *.doc a:
Windows: launch explorer click on the proper directory in the tree - re-sort the directory on file type - holding down the shift key click and drag cursor across all.doc files (assuming you have 'display file types' turned on in Explorer) once the files are selected - right click on one of them - select copy from the pull down menu - go to the other section of Explorer - find the A: drive icon - right click on the drive icon - select 'paste' from the menu - and you are done!
That is what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'. Because everything in Windows is a hassle adding more hassle to the process is not very noticeable . Don't expect the average person who never does backups anyway to notice that he now can't do backups. Most businesses don't even do backups.
The third factor that has changed is the DMCA. Because most people just obey laws without questioning them - the DMCA has the effect of causing most people to just blindly go along with it; sheep don't mind being herded.
By the way - under the DMCA any hard drive that doesn't have the copy protection scheme is a piece of hardware for circumventing copy protection and thus illegal. That is what the IBM spokesman meant when he said that the scheme would be on all hard drives by next summer - the manufacturers have no choice in the matter.
Don't count on consumer outrage to stop this mess - it won't be like it was in the 80's. This is going to happen the same way that DVD region coding happened - it will be a fait acompli before most people realize what is going on.
You were doing installs on machines where NT had no significant problems.
The people who do run into problems are using hardware where there are problems.
For example: I can pretty much state that you weren't trying to do a multi processor install on a machine with an embedded Adaptec SCSI chip. If you did that you would find out very quickly what people were complaining about.
What kind of agenda was the author of the article pushing? I suspect he was trying to say something on the order of "See these people are just as big pieces of shit as the rest of us are." I suspect he was attempting to denigrate something he couldn't do in a million years so that he would feel better about himself; it is the same rational in back of someone who 'keys' a new car "maybe I can't have one of these - but I'll make sure you aren't happy about it either".
I think in the religious war over the quality of MS software there are a couple of points that everyone is missing.
The first thing to note is that the 'raids' are taking place in Virginia. I don't think this is accidental: Virginia is the first state to pass UCITA.
I suspect that what Microsoft is doing is attacking in the place where it has the best chance of winning, and then using the precedents (if anyone tries to counter in court) to bully governments and companies in the other states where UCITA is not the law.
Microsoft must be getting desperate for revenue growth sources. Somebody at the corporate offices probably realized that most people are not fastidious about keeping 'proof of purchase' certificates, and realized that recharging legitimate owners was a potential revenue stream.
If the manufacturer of your hard disk goes out of business and the drive crashes, it would be illegal for anyone to try to recover the data from your crashed hard drive.
The reverse engineering aspect of the DMCA is perhaps its worst feature. It becomes illegal for me to post a message in a news group which says "By the way, the XYZ device stores its data as straight text" Why is this so? Because the letter 'A' is never stored on a digital disk as a physical 'A' it is always stored as some sort of digital code. The DMCA makes it illegal for me to find out what that code is. The DMCA does not require that the encoding be difficult to break, the encoding can be completely straight forward it is still illegal for me to find out what that encoding method is.
Every time I read something from a geek about how 'Violence doesn't solve anything' I get this image of a dweeb getting a mammoth wedgie from the captain of the football team - then being dragged into the girl's rest room and repeatedly dunked head first in a toilet while all the cheerleaders laugh at him. Even Ghandi's pious non violence gets wiped out by that sort of humiliation; its only because the British didn't turn some soccer hooligans loose on him that Ghandi is remembered.
What do you do in response? Write an editorial in the school newspaper? Grow up to be John Katz? Or do you contemplate pulling a Columbine in revenge? Thus acknowledging that violence does solve things. The pen is mightier than the sword only if the guy with the pen has enough people with swords protecting him so that he can do his writing.
All law is based on force and violence. Without the threat of violence the law is impotent. In the final analysis everything gets back to the physical.
Live by the sword die by the sword. Don't live by the sword - die by the sword - really quickly, and without even putting up a fight.
All I was saying is that I think you need the station first then the mining. Space station is a bigger project than Mir.
Just because you know how to build a mud hut doesn't mean you know how to build an apartment building. That is why we are doing it - to find out if we do know enough to handle that level job before we do more ambitious things.
Space technology is expensive; that is just a fact. It is important to note that none of those 60 billion dollars has left the earth - the money is still in circulation here stimulating the economy.
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Even more ridiculously I am forced to do engineering work on a 64 MB Win 98 machine. When I tried to at least get more memory for the machine I was told that I didn't qualify: Engineers were considered in the same category as secretaries as far as their computer usage.
If it weren't for the (personally owned) Linux box I keep on my desk I couldn't get much useful work done.
The people who do the actual work at NASA are the sharpest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working around - but like most places the upper management has more than its fair share of 'clueless techno ignorants' making decisions.
At least our computers are behind a firewall - so they don't get hacked all the time - but there are enough technically unsophisticated people (managers, secretaries etc.) on computers that viruses remain a problem.
The old saw about "The world beating a path to your door if you have a better mouse trap" is pure hokum. The one thing that Microsoft proved with Windows 95 is that if you have enough marketing money you can sell anything - no matter how bad it is. Conversely - take the best commercial program you can find - write up a sign that says "Software $5.00" stand on a street corner with the sign and see how many copies you sell. I have tried that: all you'll get is sun-burned; marketing is far more important than product when it comes to making money in a business.
To understand the DeCSS issue you have to understand the deeper issue of media control. The Internet is a communications media much in the same way that the air is a communications media for voice communications.
To see what is really going on in attempts to control the Internet are substitute the word air for the word Internet in the following headline:
Internet control necessary: predators using the Internet to go after YOUR (Children/Money/Identity (choose one))
If anyone tried to use the above in an attempt to control the air it would be obvious to anyone with the snap of the village idiot that they were trying to get a strangle hold over everyone. That is what the battle is over. DeCSS is a test case: One in which people can be easily confused with plausible lies into misunderstanding. This is NOT just about money - it IS about obtaining a strangle hold over humanity.
15 year olds have always thought that their elders were hostile, incompetent, and clueless - adding computers to the mix really hasn't changed much in that regard.
This is a ploy to keep the research going - NASA can't afford to do it - so the hope is the Pentagon will. The valuable work that the military can do is cut the support requirement and speed up the rate with which the device can be reused. Currently the shuttle takes months between launches.
The air force has recently realized that they aren't interested in winning air battles 51-49; they want 100-zip. This point of view is eventually going to spread to the other branches of the military. Not only is this the safest thing for your own troops - it also greatly reduces the chance of war; no one is crazy enough to think they can beat an elephant in a fist fight.
As a weapon - it would take a huge fleet of X-33 type bombers (which would have to be converted to stealth devices) to have much of an impact on the outcome of a war. The U.S. is the only country in the history of the world to have been in the situation of knowing it could conquer the rest of the world and yet not do it. While other countries might bad mouth the U.S. they also realize this simple truth: at the end of World War II the rest of the world was at the mercy of the U.S., and mercy is exactly what the U.S. showed.
There is something for all of you young students of science to keep in mind:
When you apply plausibility as a go - no go decision maker you run the risk of swallowing plausible lies - while rejecting implausible truth. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
By the way, being a nay sayer - which is what you are doing here - takes absolutely nothing. Professors will pass off nay saying as being a good scientist - but the truth is what they like about nay saying is the illusion of power that comes from being destructive. For example - you didn't do the work necessary to see the correlation in the Viking data - that would have been to hard, and required you to put yourself at risk in doing so. It is much easier to come up with a half assed explanation like 'ozone' than to do all of that work - you get this swell illusion of power by being negative. It is the same illusion of power that a vandal gets when they throw point on an an existing work of art: "See I'm an artist too!".
Being a turd is not part of science - it is a cancer on science.
Careful work is important - and looking at possible alternatives explanations is necessary - but playing nay saying games is not science - it is just useless self deceiving time wasting.
No nay sayer has ever advanced science and knowledge by so much as one femto-meter.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion with a continuos isotropic neutron output was achieved by Philo Farnsworth in the ITT labs in 1967.
Currently Chrysler is selling a neutron source based on a simplistic recreation of one of Farnsworth's earlier tube designs. The device is advertised as creating neutrons by controlled thermonuclear fusion - which it does.
There are several amateurs who have duplicated Farnsworth's work and have achieved fusion in their basements.
These facts are a massive embarrassment to the people at the top of the magnetic fusion community - and as a result there is zero funding available for people using the electric field - inertial confinement principles outlined in the Farnsworth patents.
Most people in the fusion field have never even heard of Farnsworth.
Farnsworth is best known as the person who created the entire system of television in 1927. Farnsworth is enshrined in the Inventors hall of Fame at the patent office in Washington DC. Sadly Dr. Farnsworth suffered a series of strokes shortly after his fusion work and died in 1971. His work has languished in obscurity ever since.
There is so much money at stake that if Windows XP caused your computer to release a pack of rabid wild dogs into your house - the press would write "and it even comes with FREE pets!"
In other words no matter how bad XP is - it is going to get glowing reviews.
If you don't think all of those dollars have an effect on the legal system I suggest that you have someone whack you over the head with a two by four so as to knock some semblance of reality back into your life. I suspect that all along part of the motivation for the anti trust suit was to get Microsoft to turn loose of some of that pile of money that they have.
Windows 95 proved to Microsoft that you can sell the public anything if you spend enough money pushing it. I defy anyone anywhere to point to a more unstable, insecure, virus ridden joke of an 'operating system' than that pile of rotting dingo's kidneys that Microsoft called 'Windows 95'.
Microsoft seems to spend money on advertising in inverse relationship to how good the product they are pushing is: i.e. they spent a lot more on 95 than they did on NT - and they spent almost nothing on OS/2 when they were involved in it. IF XP keeps that trend up we can only look forward to something that will leave us wistful memories of the 'good old days of Win 95'.
By the way, has anyone noticed that Microsoft's attitude is that all of the power that you pay for in a new computer belongs to them? Basically what you are getting to pay for with new hardware is the privilege of running even slower bloat ware than the last OS. Computers are about 100 times as fast today as they were 10 years ago - I defy anyone to show how Windows 2K is doing 100 times as much work as Windows for Work groups 3.11 - but on today's machines W2K is no faster than WFW 3.11 would run on a ten year old machine. Recently a co-worker got a new 900 MHZ computer with W2K on it - when I asked him how he liked it he said "God - its slow". I never figured out how to make a Z80 with 64 K of memory feel slow - I am in awe of programmers who are able to make a 900 MHZ Pentium III with 128 Mb run sluggishly - Microsoft's programmers have truly put the 'K' into 'Kwality'.
When you change chip architectures you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were before.
As Intel is discovering with the Itanium writing state of the art compilers to support a new architecture is a very difficult job.
If processor manufacturers switched architecture every few years like you seem to be suggesting then software adds would look like this:
Gamesoft announces PONG for the Snazoid 2010
WooHoo.
Doing things like arbitrarily switching processor architecture just because you can is adolescent "I have no clue how the universe actually works - so I am randomly trying things until I find out what is going on" behavior.
What do I think the chances are? I would say they are about the same as the chances of me dating Sarah Michele Gellar next week; realistically as close to zero as anything can be.
Why do I say that?
So, am I in favor of just giving up because it is hopeless? No, this is one of those hopeless fights that anyone who cherishes their freedom has to fight - not because it can be won - but because it can't be won; at a minimum the opposition needs to walk away holding a bloody nose. By the way, I am a paying member of the EFF, and I intend to contribute more for this case.
Besides, every once in a while - against all odds - the good guys do win one. It could happen - the race is not always to the swift - nor the fight always to the strong - but odds are that's how it is going to turn out.
Do you really believe that it is an accident that Real Player crashes Windows? Lets see, Microsoft wants to dominate that field and suddenly their competition can't write software that even works. How wonderful for Microsoft - the wheels just keep falling off of their competitors software. Microsoft gets to say "Use this Wonderful (T) Microsoft product instead and everything will work" This creates the impression among the clueless that Microsoft makes better products than anyone else.
Point two: Microsoft desperately wants to get rid of old software. They lose big time if your copy of Office 97 works on their latest operating system - since you now have no reason to buy Office XP or whatever 'fresh coat of paint on the same old Yugo" that they want to sell to you this year. Because of this they have absolutely no financial reason to keep the Win 32 API constant. It is called "planned obsolescence" if you have never heard of it before.
If we assume that a 1000 meter rock is large enough to do the trick then the actual odds of impact are - over the next 20 years - just 5000 to one against the impact. That is very lousy odds for an event that could kill a billion people.
A one KM diameter asteroid traveling at 21 Km per sec has the explosive energy of one hundred thousand 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. The fireball from such an impact would be about 75 miles across - big enough to punch out of the atmosphere much as Shoemaker Levy 9 did with Jupiter. The estimate is that we take a hit from a rock this size about every 100,000 years - over a 20 year span that gives about 1 in 5000 chance of a hit.
Of course we have been on the good side of that 5000 to one odds every 20 years since the beginning of recorded history.
I suspect that the most important use of a technology like this will be to produce flat screen displays - driving the current high cost of HDTV and flat screen monitors way down.
Lowering the voltage has some good effects - the main one is that the power consumption drops as the square of the voltage (assuming Ohms law). However lowering the voltage causes everything to run slower. The old fashioned 4000 series CMOS chips were much faster at 15 volts than they were at 5 volts.
Chips get faster when they shrink because the capacitances decrease as the surface area of a conductor shrinks; cut the feature size by a factor of two in both directions and the capacitance is down by a factor of four. However there is another effect which occurs as everything shrinks; the insulation between features shrinks, and that shrinking feature increases the parasitic capacitance between the two features.
In the past the increase in capacitance caused by the thinning of insulators has not been a significant effect in limiting clock speeds but there comes a point where the effect does become important. In neurons the cell walls are so thin that the capacitance effects of the thin dielectric limit signal propagation speeds in the neuron to about 180 miles per hour or so. Long axons have thick sheaths to cut the capacitance and increase the signal propagation speeds.
This increasing capacitance with the decreasing dielectric thickness combined with the decreasing speed from the lowered voltages will eventually put an effective cap on the clock speed of silicon devices. The only big trick left in the book is too switch to Diamond based semi conductors - which are as much better than silicon than silicon was than germanium - and that will give us some more speed. Above a certain frequency Nature itself changes the way it does things. At RF frequencies bulk devices like crystals function - at the frequencies of light waves only atomic devices can switch from one state to another quickly enough.
In other words at some point in the near future we are going to reach a point where simple die shrinking won't be enough to crank up clock speeds any more. Enjoy things while they last - but another factor of a thousand increase in clock speed (Apple II one megahertz to present day one gigahertz) is going to be very difficult to achieve.
Troll.
No copy protection scheme prevents commercial pirates from turning out identical copies of the 'copy protected' material.
All 'copy protection' schemes are about preventing people who have legally purchased material from using their material in ways which the law has always allowed.
Copy protection is about allowing current industry companies to maintain control of artists and other people who create copyrighted material.
'Copy protection' is about the current industry companies attempts to continue to be dominant in the recording and publishing fields.
Current companies are terrified of the Internet because the Internet allows artists and writers to publish their works without going through a publishing company .
'Copyright protection' is the responsibility of government to protect material which is copyrighted from theft or other illegal use.
'Copy protection' is a scheme by companies in the recording and publishing industries to control how legitimate purchasers of copyrighted material use that material . 'Copy protection' is an attempt by the recording and publishing industries to eliminate 'fair use' of copyrighted material such as LIBRARIES .
The only encouraging thing about the copy protected disk situation is that it is the first time that I have been able to get across to non technical people why the DMCA affects them . That is a very good thing - we need to let the non technical people understand why these things are so important to all of us.
After I did the install an MCSE wiped the disk and spent 3 days trying to do the reinstall. (NT Server). He refused to believe me when I told him what was wrong. After he gave up a third party then spent 2 weeks trying to do the same install. After I wrote down the procedure (which involved doing more than just booting from the diskettes - you had to install even newer drivers from the ASUS web site - and yes I tried to install them with a CD boot - Nothing but Blue Screens) he was able to get it to work also.
Nothing 'piece of cake' about it - it was a major hassle.
As I said - you were working with equipment which didn't have any problems with NT - the other people weren't.
And no - the instructions on the ASUS web site didn't mention using the diskettes. Or even that there were other drivers to install.
When you are a young smart ass with little experience everything looks easy to you. You assume that other people are just stupid - when the fact is that you just haven't been presented with the same set of problems that they have seen.
When you run into a rip roaring bitch of an install you won't be quite so much of a smart ass anymore. One of the great lessons of life is that it knocks the arrogance out of you.
What is now called 'Copy protection' would be renamed to as 'Data Damaging' ; it is a much more accurate description - and it lets people know what we technical people think of the activity. As in "I see someone has come up with a new data damaging scheme."
Even pointy haired bosses would realize that 'damaged data' drives are a bad idea.
However the situation has changed since then (the 1980's). Several factors have come into play which did not exist back then. The first is in the pre Windows days people expected computers to work more or less correctly, and they noticed when copy protection broke their machines. Most computer users raised on Windows 9X don't have any expectation that computers work reliably ; Windows 9X crashes so often that most people accept computer crashes as a fact of life . Most people have never operated a machine which will run for months without a reboot - and don't believe that such a machine can be built.
Secondly Windows has conditioned people to expect that doing anything with a computer involves a fight with the computer to get it to do what the person wants; in the simplistic MSDOS days one gave commands to the computer - and the computer did what it was told without argument - so people noticed when the machine failed to do as told - this made copy protection hassles stand out like a sore thumb.
Under Windows everything you do is a hassle, and people are used to wrestling with their machines to get something done.
Example:
That is what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'. Because everything in Windows is a hassle adding more hassle to the process is not very noticeable . Don't expect the average person who never does backups anyway to notice that he now can't do backups. Most businesses don't even do backups.
The third factor that has changed is the DMCA. Because most people just obey laws without questioning them - the DMCA has the effect of causing most people to just blindly go along with it; sheep don't mind being herded.
By the way - under the DMCA any hard drive that doesn't have the copy protection scheme is a piece of hardware for circumventing copy protection and thus illegal. That is what the IBM spokesman meant when he said that the scheme would be on all hard drives by next summer - the manufacturers have no choice in the matter.
Don't count on consumer outrage to stop this mess - it won't be like it was in the 80's. This is going to happen the same way that DVD region coding happened - it will be a fait acompli before most people realize what is going on.
The people who do run into problems are using hardware where there are problems.
For example: I can pretty much state that you weren't trying to do a multi processor install on a machine with an embedded Adaptec SCSI chip. If you did that you would find out very quickly what people were complaining about.
What kind of agenda was the author of the article pushing? I suspect he was trying to say something on the order of "See these people are just as big pieces of shit as the rest of us are." I suspect he was attempting to denigrate something he couldn't do in a million years so that he would feel better about himself; it is the same rational in back of someone who 'keys' a new car "maybe I can't have one of these - but I'll make sure you aren't happy about it either".
The first thing to note is that the 'raids' are taking place in Virginia. I don't think this is accidental: Virginia is the first state to pass UCITA.
I suspect that what Microsoft is doing is attacking in the place where it has the best chance of winning, and then using the precedents (if anyone tries to counter in court) to bully governments and companies in the other states where UCITA is not the law.
Microsoft must be getting desperate for revenue growth sources. Somebody at the corporate offices probably realized that most people are not fastidious about keeping 'proof of purchase' certificates, and realized that recharging legitimate owners was a potential revenue stream.
If the manufacturer of your hard disk goes out of business and the drive crashes, it would be illegal for anyone to try to recover the data from your crashed hard drive.
The reverse engineering aspect of the DMCA is perhaps its worst feature. It becomes illegal for me to post a message in a news group which says "By the way, the XYZ device stores its data as straight text" Why is this so? Because the letter 'A' is never stored on a digital disk as a physical 'A' it is always stored as some sort of digital code. The DMCA makes it illegal for me to find out what that code is. The DMCA does not require that the encoding be difficult to break, the encoding can be completely straight forward it is still illegal for me to find out what that encoding method is.
What do you do in response? Write an editorial in the school newspaper? Grow up to be John Katz? Or do you contemplate pulling a Columbine in revenge? Thus acknowledging that violence does solve things. The pen is mightier than the sword only if the guy with the pen has enough people with swords protecting him so that he can do his writing.
All law is based on force and violence. Without the threat of violence the law is impotent. In the final analysis everything gets back to the physical.
Live by the sword die by the sword. Don't live by the sword - die by the sword - really quickly, and without even putting up a fight.
Just because you know how to build a mud hut doesn't mean you know how to build an apartment building. That is why we are doing it - to find out if we do know enough to handle that level job before we do more ambitious things.
Space technology is expensive; that is just a fact. It is important to note that none of those 60 billion dollars has left the earth - the money is still in circulation here stimulating the economy.