Being hard to get into has nothing to do with CE marks - all our PCs are CE marked and they are designed to be EASY to get into - all our PCs here can be almost completely stripped without any tools. Even the power supplies can be totally disassembled with a normal Phillips screwdriver.
I hate the way some companies use oddball screws to try and stop people taking the device apart. It doesn't work - those who really want to take it apart will find the tool or improvise, and it merely annoys them. Those who don't want to take it apart wouldn't even if you used screws that could be undone with the tip of a steak knife.
It's like a wall-wart I have at home - I want to get the case off it to salvage the transformer for other projects, yet they use these nasty 'interrupted flathead' screws (two slots opposite each other on the screw head) which now means I have to buy or make a special tool *just* for this one device. Grrr. Eventually the tool will become common (just like Torx bits have become common, that was the last shenanigan they tried to stop people from taking something apart) and they will change to another infuriatingly uncommon screw type.
If any article deserves a 'wishfulthinking' it's this one. Making a desktop fusor is not anything to do with generating electricity or solving our energy problems - it won't even break even. It's like expecting Michael Faraday at the turn of the 1900s to suddenly invent integrated circuits.
WTF? In 1994, I worked on a smart card demo (using the smart card chips we now see in credit cards) for a benefits card to replace the paper-based system. Storing a mugshot on the card was not a problem, and reading it was a sub-second operation. In 1994!
Why not use a credit-card style chip instead of something that's remotely readable in the first instance? Using an RF smart card seems like a completely retarded idea where the trivial expedient of using a chip where you MUST have physical contact is probably much cheaper (and by default, much more secure even with a trivial key!)
You may think that a non party political system is a panacea - it isn't - it winds up being worse than a dictatorship because you just don't know who you're going to end up having in government or what their policies will be after each general election. I live somewhere where nearly all the candidates are independents, and there's no real party political system. Our election is next Thursday. I have NO IDEA what sort of government we'll have after Thursday. Not a clue. I don't even know who will be Chief Minister. We elect our members of parliament and then they decide.
When the government does form, it's all political horse trading and who's done favours to who because there is no party system binding one side or other together. They all collectively hush up scandal, and if one minister disagrees with government policy the Chief Minister sacks them. All that then happens is the Government typically just copies what the UK government does.
A party political system might suck, but it's the best we've come up with - a rabble of independents is much, much worse.
That's a big part of the problem. Whose retarded idea was it to use RFID? Wouldn't, say, a smart card chip like the chip & pin card in credit cards have been MUCH better because then you actually need to physically have the passport in your hand to read it - instead of being able to read it through envelopes, clothing and the like with no evidence that it's been read?
The trouble is with the 6502, while it could do many instructions in two clock cycles (the Z80 generally needed four), it took twice as many instructions to do most things. Combined with the Z80 also having higher clock rates (the Z80 typically was clocked at 4 MHz, when its 6502 peers were clocked at 2 MHz), you just got a lot more done on a Z80. I learned Z80 first on my Sinclair Spectrum, and later did 6502 on the BBC Microcomputers at school (the Beeb had a built in assembler!). Half an hour writing 6502 asm made you want to claw your eyes out if you had experience with the Z80. To compensate for the lack of registers on the 6502, I used to write some god-awful self modifying code. But I was only 15, so I didn't know any better!
I agree. The BBC Micro was BY FAR the best 8 bit system. The difference between the Beeb and Commodore's 8 bit offerings were like night and day. The same happened again with the Archimedes. Even without the fancy hardware graphics acceleration that the Amiga had, they Arc could give one a good run for its money.
We had an Econet network of Beebs at school. A friend and I wrote a true client/server MUD for the BBC (an unholy mess of BBC BASIC and assembler). The server was a Torch BBC compatible that no one used because the keyboard layout was a bit different to the BBC. The clients worked on a mix of peer-to-peer communication and client/server communication.
I never owned a Beeb - far too expensive. I had a Spectrum instead - which itself was a great machine, but mainly due to how affordable it was and how much they managed to get out of the machine for the price it was sold at (the Speccy sold for about 1/3rd the price of the Beeb, and probably half the price of a C=64). But the BBC was the proper no-compromises 8 bit machine - very well engineered, very expandable, well documented and durable. Sadly, Acorn was mismanaged into oblivion too. Acorn could quite easily have still been a prospering company today - look how ubiquitous the ARM is.
Did you know that TRIPOS machines are *STILL* being made and sold? A company called Misys (who supplies stuff to the insurance and financial industry) still manufacture a Motorola 68000 based system that runs TRIPOS to insurance brokers. It even understands TCP/IP.
On a point of pedantry, it wasn't a Timex he had, but a Sinclair QL - a 68000 based system (physically about the same size as a Commodore 64).
Machines like the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro et al. were not as closed as you think they were - in fact, it was pretty much impossible to make them a closed hardware platform since they were so simple. I had a Sinclair Spectrum (in Britain, Sinclair were far more influential than Commodore - Sinclair computers were more affordable and used a faster Z80 processor) - and there was no such thing as closed source software or closed hardware - indeed, there was a book published by Melbourne House called 'The Complete Spectrum ROM disassembly' which included a well explained and well commented listing of the entire ROM (including the BASIC interpreter, tape loading routines etc). There were similar books for the BBC Micro. All you needed is a disassembler for the processor that was used. The user guide that was shipped with a Sinclair Spectrum had complete details on the edge connector, and you could easily obtain a complete schematic for the whole computer.
The display may have been nixie tubes if they were orange (cold cathode neon displays - each digit is a cathode the shape of the digit - they are rather beautiful I think). The hum was probably because greater demand was being placed on the 170 volt power supply needed to strike the nixies as more tubes were lit.
These days though, those of us who build stuff with nixie tubes tend to use switch mode supplies that work at 30kHz, and you can't hear them:-)
Door seals on a front loading washer is a solved problem by the way (in some nations, solved in the 1970s). Sticking with pre-historic top loading twin tubs wasting water and using four or five times the energy - well, that really is stupidity:-)
Which would be extreme wishful thinking on the part of Bill Gates. Microsoft would be crucified by their shareholders if they did anything to even slightly endanger their existence in the European market - which has a population of almost twice the United States. Indeed, the shareholders could easily sue Microsoft's board if they were to take such an ill-advised act. Not to mention, the rest of the world would be scrambling to migrate away from Microsoft products so they don't get extorted in the same manner.
It would also demonstrate to the EU the urgency of which Microsoft's monopoly would need to be broken - so even the rumour of such a threat would be severely damaging to the value of Microsoft as a company.
Indeed - you can still buy a plain, newly manufactured Z80 processor today. It's still popular in embedded applications. There's also a microcontroller version of the Z80, the eZ80.
Since you're running the 27 year old version (which predates both the PC and Macintosh) you will be using an emulator. Therefore, yes - I can run the 27 year old Visicalc on an Apple II emulator on PC, Linux, Mac, BSD and I dare say Solaris.
As for programs written for the platform - I sometimes like to wind down by playing a bit of Crystal Quest on my Mac. Circa 1986 I think, that game is. Plays just as well on my PowerBook as it did on the Mac Plus in the mid 80s.
But that does not have to do with the license. It has more to do with the snail's pace that Sun's development process follows. The whole CAB thing is interesting, but you cannot get a feature into OpenSolaris without it being sponsored by a Sun employee
The thing is - Solaris has a stable kernel ABI. It won't be necessary to have your drivers (the bulk of extra development that Open Solaris needs) sponsored because it'll be perfectly possible to develop a driver for your hardware, package it up with your hardware (or put it on your web page for download) and know it'll work without needing to be recompiled. Since Linux lacks a stable kernel API, it's essential to get accepted by the Linux developers and have your driver accepted by the developers, too - because otherwise your users are stuck with the inconvenience of rebuilding the drivers with every minor kernel update that comes down the pike from their distro maker.
I suspect if a GPL'd Open Solaris happens and starts gaining any sort of traction with hardware vendors thanks to the stable kernel API, Linus will change his tune on that for the Linux kernel in pretty short order.
No - the only headache is for users. People with closed source drivers (like nvidia) simply provide an open source glue layer. An unstable kernel API does not stop closed source drivers.
All it does is inconvenience users. If you have a minority piece of hardware, even with open source drivers - each kernel upgrade that comes down the pike when you do a security update on your distro means you have to recompile and reinstall the drivers (and then hope they still work). The Linux "stable" kernel is a fiction - 2.4 is probably the most egregious example of this - it was still a development kernel, but just at a slower rate.
Their *LOW END* hardware is Opteron based. I suspect they make their bread and butter off the high end stuff which is still Sparc. Sparc is still being developed and pushed forwards. They just don't use it in the low end stuff.
Actually - you're wrong: Microsoft does have a history of threatening open source developers - see ASF transcoding in AudioDub which had to be removed because Microsoft threatened the author with a lawsuit for patent infringement.
Not totally separate - a network administrator can also administer Windows machines and still be a network administrator. The knowledge of one doesn't preclude the knowledge of another; human memory is large enough to remember how to do both!
The tagging system is meant to search from OTHER metadata that's NOT in the article. There's no point in tagging an article about, say, Sun with the tag "sun", because Sun will _already_ be in the article text - and you can already search on the article text.
Tags like 'fud', 'notfud', 'wishfulthinking' etc. are EXACTLY what should be in tags. I will agree that 'yes' and 'no' are pretty useless - but it's a good way of searching for articles that Slashdotters consider to be 'fud' or 'wishfulthinking' or whatever.
The trouble is with things like that are the unintended consequences that it'll undoubtedly have. The real fix is that we start living sustainably. The sunshade won't fix problems such as that which will be caused because we're using 4 barrels of oil for every new one discovered.
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Being hard to get into has nothing to do with CE marks - all our PCs are CE marked and they are designed to be EASY to get into - all our PCs here can be almost completely stripped without any tools. Even the power supplies can be totally disassembled with a normal Phillips screwdriver.
I hate the way some companies use oddball screws to try and stop people taking the device apart. It doesn't work - those who really want to take it apart will find the tool or improvise, and it merely annoys them. Those who don't want to take it apart wouldn't even if you used screws that could be undone with the tip of a steak knife.
It's like a wall-wart I have at home - I want to get the case off it to salvage the transformer for other projects, yet they use these nasty 'interrupted flathead' screws (two slots opposite each other on the screw head) which now means I have to buy or make a special tool *just* for this one device. Grrr. Eventually the tool will become common (just like Torx bits have become common, that was the last shenanigan they tried to stop people from taking something apart) and they will change to another infuriatingly uncommon screw type.
I think the word to use when dealing with Microsoft is "Bohica", which means "Bend Over Here It Comes Again".
If any article deserves a 'wishfulthinking' it's this one. Making a desktop fusor is not anything to do with generating electricity or solving our energy problems - it won't even break even. It's like expecting Michael Faraday at the turn of the 1900s to suddenly invent integrated circuits.
WTF? In 1994, I worked on a smart card demo (using the smart card chips we now see in credit cards) for a benefits card to replace the paper-based system. Storing a mugshot on the card was not a problem, and reading it was a sub-second operation. In 1994!
Why not use a credit-card style chip instead of something that's remotely readable in the first instance? Using an RF smart card seems like a completely retarded idea where the trivial expedient of using a chip where you MUST have physical contact is probably much cheaper (and by default, much more secure even with a trivial key!)
You may think that a non party political system is a panacea - it isn't - it winds up being worse than a dictatorship because you just don't know who you're going to end up having in government or what their policies will be after each general election. I live somewhere where nearly all the candidates are independents, and there's no real party political system. Our election is next Thursday. I have NO IDEA what sort of government we'll have after Thursday. Not a clue. I don't even know who will be Chief Minister. We elect our members of parliament and then they decide.
When the government does form, it's all political horse trading and who's done favours to who because there is no party system binding one side or other together. They all collectively hush up scandal, and if one minister disagrees with government policy the Chief Minister sacks them. All that then happens is the Government typically just copies what the UK government does.
A party political system might suck, but it's the best we've come up with - a rabble of independents is much, much worse.
That's a big part of the problem. Whose retarded idea was it to use RFID? Wouldn't, say, a smart card chip like the chip & pin card in credit cards have been MUCH better because then you actually need to physically have the passport in your hand to read it - instead of being able to read it through envelopes, clothing and the like with no evidence that it's been read?
The trouble is with the 6502, while it could do many instructions in two clock cycles (the Z80 generally needed four), it took twice as many instructions to do most things. Combined with the Z80 also having higher clock rates (the Z80 typically was clocked at 4 MHz, when its 6502 peers were clocked at 2 MHz), you just got a lot more done on a Z80. I learned Z80 first on my Sinclair Spectrum, and later did 6502 on the BBC Microcomputers at school (the Beeb had a built in assembler!). Half an hour writing 6502 asm made you want to claw your eyes out if you had experience with the Z80. To compensate for the lack of registers on the 6502, I used to write some god-awful self modifying code. But I was only 15, so I didn't know any better!
I agree. The BBC Micro was BY FAR the best 8 bit system. The difference between the Beeb and Commodore's 8 bit offerings were like night and day. The same happened again with the Archimedes. Even without the fancy hardware graphics acceleration that the Amiga had, they Arc could give one a good run for its money.
We had an Econet network of Beebs at school. A friend and I wrote a true client/server MUD for the BBC (an unholy mess of BBC BASIC and assembler). The server was a Torch BBC compatible that no one used because the keyboard layout was a bit different to the BBC. The clients worked on a mix of peer-to-peer communication and client/server communication.
I never owned a Beeb - far too expensive. I had a Spectrum instead - which itself was a great machine, but mainly due to how affordable it was and how much they managed to get out of the machine for the price it was sold at (the Speccy sold for about 1/3rd the price of the Beeb, and probably half the price of a C=64). But the BBC was the proper no-compromises 8 bit machine - very well engineered, very expandable, well documented and durable. Sadly, Acorn was mismanaged into oblivion too. Acorn could quite easily have still been a prospering company today - look how ubiquitous the ARM is.
Did you know that TRIPOS machines are *STILL* being made and sold? A company called Misys (who supplies stuff to the insurance and financial industry) still manufacture a Motorola 68000 based system that runs TRIPOS to insurance brokers. It even understands TCP/IP.
On a point of pedantry, it wasn't a Timex he had, but a Sinclair QL - a 68000 based system (physically about the same size as a Commodore 64).
Machines like the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro et al. were not as closed as you think they were - in fact, it was pretty much impossible to make them a closed hardware platform since they were so simple. I had a Sinclair Spectrum (in Britain, Sinclair were far more influential than Commodore - Sinclair computers were more affordable and used a faster Z80 processor) - and there was no such thing as closed source software or closed hardware - indeed, there was a book published by Melbourne House called 'The Complete Spectrum ROM disassembly' which included a well explained and well commented listing of the entire ROM (including the BASIC interpreter, tape loading routines etc). There were similar books for the BBC Micro. All you needed is a disassembler for the processor that was used. The user guide that was shipped with a Sinclair Spectrum had complete details on the edge connector, and you could easily obtain a complete schematic for the whole computer.
The display may have been nixie tubes if they were orange (cold cathode neon displays - each digit is a cathode the shape of the digit - they are rather beautiful I think). The hum was probably because greater demand was being placed on the 170 volt power supply needed to strike the nixies as more tubes were lit.
:-)
These days though, those of us who build stuff with nixie tubes tend to use switch mode supplies that work at 30kHz, and you can't hear them
Door seals on a front loading washer is a solved problem by the way (in some nations, solved in the 1970s). Sticking with pre-historic top loading twin tubs wasting water and using four or five times the energy - well, that really is stupidity :-)
Which would be extreme wishful thinking on the part of Bill Gates. Microsoft would be crucified by their shareholders if they did anything to even slightly endanger their existence in the European market - which has a population of almost twice the United States. Indeed, the shareholders could easily sue Microsoft's board if they were to take such an ill-advised act. Not to mention, the rest of the world would be scrambling to migrate away from Microsoft products so they don't get extorted in the same manner.
It would also demonstrate to the EU the urgency of which Microsoft's monopoly would need to be broken - so even the rumour of such a threat would be severely damaging to the value of Microsoft as a company.
Indeed - you can still buy a plain, newly manufactured Z80 processor today. It's still popular in embedded applications. There's also a microcontroller version of the Z80, the eZ80.
Since you're running the 27 year old version (which predates both the PC and Macintosh) you will be using an emulator. Therefore, yes - I can run the 27 year old Visicalc on an Apple II emulator on PC, Linux, Mac, BSD and I dare say Solaris.
As for programs written for the platform - I sometimes like to wind down by playing a bit of Crystal Quest on my Mac. Circa 1986 I think, that game is. Plays just as well on my PowerBook as it did on the Mac Plus in the mid 80s.
The thing is - Solaris has a stable kernel ABI. It won't be necessary to have your drivers (the bulk of extra development that Open Solaris needs) sponsored because it'll be perfectly possible to develop a driver for your hardware, package it up with your hardware (or put it on your web page for download) and know it'll work without needing to be recompiled. Since Linux lacks a stable kernel API, it's essential to get accepted by the Linux developers and have your driver accepted by the developers, too - because otherwise your users are stuck with the inconvenience of rebuilding the drivers with every minor kernel update that comes down the pike from their distro maker.
I suspect if a GPL'd Open Solaris happens and starts gaining any sort of traction with hardware vendors thanks to the stable kernel API, Linus will change his tune on that for the Linux kernel in pretty short order.
No - the only headache is for users. People with closed source drivers (like nvidia) simply provide an open source glue layer. An unstable kernel API does not stop closed source drivers.
All it does is inconvenience users. If you have a minority piece of hardware, even with open source drivers - each kernel upgrade that comes down the pike when you do a security update on your distro means you have to recompile and reinstall the drivers (and then hope they still work). The Linux "stable" kernel is a fiction - 2.4 is probably the most egregious example of this - it was still a development kernel, but just at a slower rate.
Their *LOW END* hardware is Opteron based. I suspect they make their bread and butter off the high end stuff which is still Sparc. Sparc is still being developed and pushed forwards. They just don't use it in the low end stuff.
Actually - you're wrong: Microsoft does have a history of threatening open source developers - see ASF transcoding in AudioDub which had to be removed because Microsoft threatened the author with a lawsuit for patent infringement.
Zonk, this summary abuses apostrophes badly.
As Dave Barry said, "An apostrophe doesn't mean - Yikes! Look out! Here comes an S".
Tip: It's means "it is".
Not totally separate - a network administrator can also administer Windows machines and still be a network administrator. The knowledge of one doesn't preclude the knowledge of another; human memory is large enough to remember how to do both!
The tagging system is meant to search from OTHER metadata that's NOT in the article. There's no point in tagging an article about, say, Sun with the tag "sun", because Sun will _already_ be in the article text - and you can already search on the article text.
Tags like 'fud', 'notfud', 'wishfulthinking' etc. are EXACTLY what should be in tags. I will agree that 'yes' and 'no' are pretty useless - but it's a good way of searching for articles that Slashdotters consider to be 'fud' or 'wishfulthinking' or whatever.
The trouble is with things like that are the unintended consequences that it'll undoubtedly have. The real fix is that we start living sustainably. The sunshade won't fix problems such as that which will be caused because we're using 4 barrels of oil for every new one discovered.