Oh, I agree - for the combatant nations it is more than a bit unpleasant. Europe, for example, would be pretty much totally destroyed (both urban and rural areas) because it's such a "target rich" area - cities and military installations all close together. In the 1970s, Europe alone would probably receive half the megatonnage as it'd be the nuclear battleground before the final exchange. Europe would effectively be carpet bombed.
However, it's likely that as much as half of the US population would survive long term, and a larger proportion of the USSR population would have survived due to the relatively low population densities, leaving large areas of land where life is at least possible.
The Southern Hemisphere would be largely unaffected.
The point is - not that it wouldn't be an apocalypse of unseen proportions, but it would not be the end of life on Earth or the human race. The Western world ceasing to exist doesn't equal all of humanity ceasing to exist (no matter how important we in the west think we are).
No more DVDs when Vista has come out? I'm sure Vista coming out won't affect my installation of Fedora Core in any way, nor other peoples installs of Windows XP...
Threads was set in Sheffield, an industrial town of half a million in Yorkshire (at the time Threads was made, Sheffield was a major steel producing city). In the vicinity of Sheffield is the former air force base at Finningley (approximately 15 miles away), and the whole Vale of York area (there's several RAF bases in that part of the country).
Threads follows two families who live in Sheffield. One family is a well-to-do middle class family, as far as you can gather, the man of the house is a manager or engineer at a steel works, the mother a housewife, and they have one daughter. The other family is a working class family with three children - the youngest is pre-teen, a teenage girl, and a man in his early 20s who works as a carpenter (the families are linked as he is engaged to marry his pregnant girlfriend, the daughter of the other family). The first family has a substantial stone house on the outskirts of Sheffield which includes a cellar. The other family lives in the high-density housing areas in suburban Sheffield. Their only cover is an improvised shelter built inside the house by the father.
The first strike, like The Day After, is an EMP attack which causes no injury on the ground. The first strike against a ground target is a 150kt strike on Finningley, which causes car accidents in Sheffield (from those who were driving in towards the flash). The shockwave of that strike breaks windows in Sheffield. At this stage there is panic - the working class family are madly scrambling to take shelter - the father and mother is seen desperately piling up matresses and other items onto the improvised shelter (the man is actually taking a crap at the time the Finningley strike occurs). The other familly is seen going down to their cellar, trying to help the elderly grandmother down the stairs to the cellar. The young woman runs out to find her boyfriend, but is caught by her father and taken down to the shelter. Meanwhile, the young man was at work when the Finningley strike occurs, and tries to drive to his girlfriend's, but his car won't start - presumably due to the EMP (although being an 1969 Cortina, it probably wasn't that reliable anyway!) So he takes off on foot. That's the last we see of him.
Not long after, Sheffield is hit by a strategic nuclear weapon of unknown strength. I first saw "Threads" aged about 12, and the image of milk bottles melting in the heat stopped me from sleeping properly for at least three weeks. Only the husband and wife of the working class family make it into their shelter, and the wife is badly burned by the flash. All of the other family survives the initial strike.
The film also covers the civil defence team from the City Council who take shelter in the basement of the town hall.
After the attack, the film covers the next 13 years. We see most of the rest of the story through the eyes of Ruth, the pregnant woman. Everyone else we met and got to know at the start of the film (including the city council) dies - some immediately during the attack on Sheffield, and some later (the children of the working class family all die in the attack, the parents survive a little longer and presumably die of radiation sickness since their shelter was very poor). The middle class family apart from Ruth are killed by looters. The civil defence team suffocates in the city council bunker as the town hall has collapsed and closed off the ventilation. The rest of the film shows the devastation, the effects of nuclear winter, and the effects on Ruth's child who was born a few months after the war. There is very little dialogue in the second half of the film. You see shell shocked survivors trying to rebuild at least a subsistence level - scavenging food, trying to make new clothes out of scavenged material. Later on in the film, you see some limited electricity generation and the use of steam, and attempts to teach the post-war children. The film ends with Ruth's 13 year old daughter miscarrying her baby.
It also contains the real public information broadcasts t
Who are you trying to kid about fallout being a myth?
The intensity can vary depending on the kind of strike and the altitude of the detonation. Ground bursts are extremely radioactively dirty - the neutron flux makes the ground that was evaporated highly radioactive. This is sucked up as the mushroom cloud goes up, and is deposited downwind. It is extremely lethal for the first couple of days, and the danger decreases. It generally isn't safe for a couple of weeks.
Air bursts tend to cause less fall out, especially if the fireball doesn't touch the ground and evaporate soil and debris that has been made radioactive by the intense neutron flux.
Fission bombs (per kiloton) will generally produce more dangerous fallout than fusion bombs. However, all fusion bombs include at least one fission stage. Some thermonuclear bombs may make half their yield from the fusion of the primary and the natural uranium tamper.
Britain is a densely populated country, with all the targets close together. In the event of a nuclear war in the 1970s, Britain would have essentially been carpet bombed - and far worse off radiologically than the United States or the USSR (who would undoubtedly been the parties who actually started the war). The UK government estimated that in a nuclear war, Britain would have been struck with at least 200 megatons, and feasibly up to 1000 megatons. This level of attack would leave almost no unbroken windows in Britain, and virtually the entire land mass would have enough fall out deposited on it to cause radiation sickness. Most livestock would be killed, and most crops would fail. There would only be a few areas that would have been safe - some of the west cost of Scotland (the prevailing winds are generally westerly) and some areas of Cumbria/Northumbria. It is quite likely that the British population would have fallen to under 5 million or fewer (from 55 million). By contrast, probably half the US population would survive due to the vastly lower population density. An even larger proprotion of Russians would probably survive. The rest of Western Europe would suffer a worse fate than Britain, being the probable battlefield prior to the final attack.
The film 'Threads' features some of the public information films and broadcasts that would have been broadcast prior to nuclear war. They are made all the more chilling because of the odd music played at the start and end of the broadcasts (Threads used the actual films - not a speculative mock up).
In the early 1980s, the government also issued Protect and Survive: the leaflets and some of the public information broadcasts are here: http://www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/atomic/
The west would have almost immediately used nuclear weapons - the Davy Crockett nuclear mortar was built just for that purpose, to use on the front lines against advancing Soviet forces. The Davy Crockett was the smallest Western nuclear weapon, with a selectable yield from 10 tons to 400 tons (no not kilotons, tons). The weapon weighed around 150 lbs, and was the smallest practical nuclear weapon. Most likely the soldiers using them would be committing suicide - the prompt radioactive effects went far beyond the blast and thermal range of these weapons (in essence because of the low yield they were just as much radiation weapons as anything else).
I have both Threads and The Day After. The Day After is pretty good until the actual attack - especially the sequences in the missile LCF etc. However, the attack is unrealistic (if the doctor had been close enough that he heard the explosion when he did, he'd have been vaporized, but he was pretty much uninjured) especially compared to Threads where the nuclear explosions are silent until the blast hits. Threads is so much better made. It is also probably the most depressing film I've ever seen.
Do you have or know of where to get a copy of "A Guide to Armageddon"? It was shown on the BBC programme QED in about 1982-1983 and it was about the effects of a one megaton strike on London. I've not seen or heard of it since. Google hasn't turned up anything useful either, nor have the P2P networks.
Actually - the entire planet would not be a graveyard. A Cold-War USSR vs NATO nuclear war would not end the human race, even though life in the combatant nations would be extremely unpleasant for decades afterwards.
Sending EXE files is a problem because people get 'socially engineered' into running them, especially a forged email from someone they supposedly know. For this reason, the MX for alioth.net rejects all Microsoft executables. So far, 100% of the executables sent to any of the two dozen or so domains the host is MX for, they have been malware.
It could have been worse - they may have gone with the old (was it Bell Atlantic, or Southwestern Bell?) Bell logo that looked like a Wehrmacht helmet!
The biggest point is that ID is _not_ science and should not be taught in a science class. I personally couldn't care less if it's taught about in a philosophy class or a religious studies class, because that's where it fits. To teach it as science is to do a gross dis-service to the people you're supposedly teaching science to. If it's to even be mentioned in a science class, it should only be mentioned in the context of WHY it is not a scientific theory and WHY it is not science.
If you say "...remains just that - a theory", you don't really understand what a scientific theory is. A scientific theory is not a guess or a hunch (which is the non-scientific meaning of the word 'theory'), it is much stronger than that. By contrast, intelligent design doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis - it's merely a conjecture. A scientific theory by contrast makes testable predictions and is falsifiable amongst other things.
The theory of electromagentism is "just" a theory too, but the lightbulbs in my house all seem to work when I flick the switch.
You may like to accept the degraded (or non existent signal) if the US turns it off, but pilots aren't. Already, there are plans in the US to get rid of most ground-based navaids. Currently, in Europe, GPS is not valid for IFR (instrument flight rules) navigation, because no European country has any kind of guarantee on quality-of-service. It wouldn't be too great, for example, if you were on an instrument approach and >poof, GPS is degraded or turned off just when you really really need sub 5-meter accuracy. Until Europe has its own satellite navigation system, its commercial airlines and private aircraft must rely on many expensive and inaccurate ground-based navaids (for example, you still need an ADF receiver - truly pre-historic, inadequate and inaccurate - to fly IFR in Europe).
Re:Distribution on Windows
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Why Use GTK+?
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· Score: 1
I doubt GTK will require 6-8MB if the developer made a 'dependency pack' for systems that don't come with GTK+.
Even GNUstep doesn't require that much - the dependency pack for the game, oolite, includes a minimalist GNUstep to support the Objective C runtime and the Foundation, as well as all the required SDL libraries. The resulting autopackage installer for Oolite on Linux is the same size as the.dmg installer for Mac OS X. If a developer is willing to pare a runtime dependency pack down to just what's needed, it can be made quite small.
GNUstep is good enough that we ported Oolite (written for Cocoa on the Macintosh) to Linux and *BSD using GNUstep. Even the OpenGL stuff works in GNUstep (although we did end up changing this to SDL since it has better functionality for games, such as full screen support and joystick support).
Overall, objective c message call performance is comparable to Javascript.
That's highly inaccurate. The ObjC runtime is not as fast as a function call in C, I'll grant you that. However, it isn't that slow - see my signature for a 3D OpenGL game written in Objective C. Objective C overall is certainly faster than Java, and orders of magnitude faster than Javascript.
So does C++: they're called virtual function tables.
They don't work for 'new' though. You can't, say, trivially replace something halfway in the inheritence tree in a library you're using (and have it replace it in all instances of the code). With Objective-C, I can override methods in the base NSObject *for code I do not even have the source for* by writing a category. My own version of NSObject will get made instead. The ObjC runtime is so much more than C++ virtual function tables.
There is a way of doing this in C++, it's called 'exemplars' (and was written about in James O. Coplien's hideous book 'Advanced idioms in C++ programming' - title paraphrased, because I don't remember what it is exactly, other than this is the first book I read that managed to make an interesting subject seem about as interesting as paint drying - his writing style is simply terrible). But that only does you any good if the code you're using has been written that way. Exemplars, in any case, feel very much like a big hack (and they are).
I know little about De Beers so can't comment there, but I do know a bit about airplanes, and Airbus is not a monopoly, so I don't know why you even mentioned it. In any case, no one is asking Microsoft to make their software open source (the equivalent to publishing all Airbus's engineering drawings), they are telling Microsoft to publish their protocols in a manner that other organizations and people can use them (the equivalent, hypothetically, of making Airbus publish how to make some proprietary Airbus only navaid work, so non-Airbus companies can also make the ground based equipment to drive the navaid). In reality, in the case of Airbus, the navigation systems are all open spec - any manufacturer can make the ground based transmitters such as ILS and VOR transmitters that will work with systems on Airbus flight decks. In any case, that's irrelevant - if Airbus was a monopoly (which it isn't) and was using this monopoly to subsidise a business making the navaid ground equipment which only works with proprietary Airbus navigation systems to force out competitors in that market (which they aren't) to only work with Airbus planes, they too would face an anti-trust suit, certainly in the United States. In reality, in the business of making airliners, there is very strong competition between Airbus and Boeing.
This is not the situation with Microsoft. Only Microsoft servers can supply streaming content for Windows Media Player. Microsoft have been using their desktop monopoly to try and control other markets (the market for streaming media servers). Only Microsoft can make an active directory server. Since they have a desktop monopoly, they can use this (and have used this) to force out competitors in markets they want to enter by cross-subsidising these ventures with the income generated from their monopoly. This is against US and EU law, and Microsoft have been prosecuted in both juristictions for this breach.
The law is not a bad law; anti-trust laws are there to ensure that a capitalist marketplace exists (without some moderation, you wind up with consolidation and then the market ceases to function properly, that's why any capitalist country has anti-trust laws). These laws are not arbitrary (well, you could nitpick and say any law is arbitrary), but antitrust regulations have a long legal history. Microsoft isn't the first company to have to pay the consequences for abusing a monopoly even in the computing field - IBM got slapped down a couple of decades ago too. Look in any industry where there has been consolidation and you'll see an anti-trust slapdown or two - they are hardly unpredicatable. It is certain Microsoft knew long ago that they were likely to be investigated for anti-trust violations, but made a business decision that the cost of the anti-trust suits would be less than the income gained by the new business. In fact, I'm sure Microsoft knew that by the time the anti-trust suits had finished, it would be far too late - they will have castrated or destroyed their competition and gained such an entrenched foothold that new competitors even with all the protocol specs are a non-starter. They just want to appeal and defeat this particular one because it will set a bad precedent when they get prosecuted again for their next anti-trust violation.
If you think the BBC is the mouthpiece of the Government, either you aren't really British (Brit or British is a perfectly valid term, and you do hear it in Britain, ooh, like British Airways, or British Broadcasting Corporation) or you haven't been paying an awful lot of attention.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
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NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It was actually only recently I tried NetBSD - approximately 4 weeks ago. What I found - the documentation for MOP booting a VAX with NetBSD is 404 - Not found. Googling brings up at least three or four different documents, none of which matched the files that were actually on ftp.netbsd.org. I spent quite a bit of time looking for documentation that actually matched what seemed to exist on the ftp site.
I eventually gave up and found that not only did OpenBSD have the documentation for MOP booting right where it should be (in the same document as all the other installation notes, rather than on a different website altogether), OpenBSD _does_ support SCSI controllers.
I notice the website is now fixed and documentation now exists, so I may give it another go, however, I'm less inclined to do so since OpenBSD is running on the machine very satisfactorily.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
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NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I'd disagree that NetBSD performs better on a VAX - it's currently uninstallable and un-runnable on most VAXen due to the problems already stated in this thread (starting with inadequate netbooting documentation, and a MOP booting procedure that doesn't even work). Essentially they say they support the platform, but haven't really supported it since 1.4.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
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NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
OpenBSD has a _much_ better VAX port than NetBSD it seems - OpenBSD 3.8 MOP boots and runs just fine on my 3100-80. There are a few caveats (probably due to the compiler - O2 doesn't always make correct code so when you build programs use -O or -O1)
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
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NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
NetBSD claims to be extremely portable - portability is the main stated goal. If it only runs well on x86, NetBSD becomes basically irrelevant - FreeBSD is far better on x86, and OpenBSD (whose goal is security and implenetation and correctness) is more portable (OpenBSD runs fine on VAX). Essentially, if NetBSD doesn't actually talk the talk they have about portability, all they are is an inadequate OpenBSD that is less secure and less portable - and it has no advantages.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
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NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Because there are still people around who like to run a VAX. It is also the platform that saw BSD come of age (BSD was started on the VAX's "genetic predecessor", the PDP-11)
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Oh, I agree - for the combatant nations it is more than a bit unpleasant. Europe, for example, would be pretty much totally destroyed (both urban and rural areas) because it's such a "target rich" area - cities and military installations all close together. In the 1970s, Europe alone would probably receive half the megatonnage as it'd be the nuclear battleground before the final exchange. Europe would effectively be carpet bombed.
r 1.html
However, it's likely that as much as half of the US population would survive long term, and a larger proportion of the USSR population would have survived due to the relatively low population densities, leaving large areas of land where life is at least possible.
The Southern Hemisphere would be largely unaffected.
There is a good synopsis here: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwa
The point is - not that it wouldn't be an apocalypse of unseen proportions, but it would not be the end of life on Earth or the human race. The Western world ceasing to exist doesn't equal all of humanity ceasing to exist (no matter how important we in the west think we are).
No more DVDs when Vista has come out? I'm sure Vista coming out won't affect my installation of Fedora Core in any way, nor other peoples installs of Windows XP...
Threads was set in Sheffield, an industrial town of half a million in Yorkshire (at the time Threads was made, Sheffield was a major steel producing city). In the vicinity of Sheffield is the former air force base at Finningley (approximately 15 miles away), and the whole Vale of York area (there's several RAF bases in that part of the country).
Threads follows two families who live in Sheffield. One family is a well-to-do middle class family, as far as you can gather, the man of the house is a manager or engineer at a steel works, the mother a housewife, and they have one daughter. The other family is a working class family with three children - the youngest is pre-teen, a teenage girl, and a man in his early 20s who works as a carpenter (the families are linked as he is engaged to marry his pregnant girlfriend, the daughter of the other family). The first family has a substantial stone house on the outskirts of Sheffield which includes a cellar. The other family lives in the high-density housing areas in suburban Sheffield. Their only cover is an improvised shelter built inside the house by the father.
The first strike, like The Day After, is an EMP attack which causes no injury on the ground. The first strike against a ground target is a 150kt strike on Finningley, which causes car accidents in Sheffield (from those who were driving in towards the flash). The shockwave of that strike breaks windows in Sheffield. At this stage there is panic - the working class family are madly scrambling to take shelter - the father and mother is seen desperately piling up matresses and other items onto the improvised shelter (the man is actually taking a crap at the time the Finningley strike occurs). The other familly is seen going down to their cellar, trying to help the elderly grandmother down the stairs to the cellar. The young woman runs out to find her boyfriend, but is caught by her father and taken down to the shelter. Meanwhile, the young man was at work when the Finningley strike occurs, and tries to drive to his girlfriend's, but his car won't start - presumably due to the EMP (although being an 1969 Cortina, it probably wasn't that reliable anyway!) So he takes off on foot. That's the last we see of him.
Not long after, Sheffield is hit by a strategic nuclear weapon of unknown strength. I first saw "Threads" aged about 12, and the image of milk bottles melting in the heat stopped me from sleeping properly for at least three weeks. Only the husband and wife of the working class family make it into their shelter, and the wife is badly burned by the flash. All of the other family survives the initial strike.
The film also covers the civil defence team from the City Council who take shelter in the basement of the town hall.
After the attack, the film covers the next 13 years. We see most of the rest of the story through the eyes of Ruth, the pregnant woman. Everyone else we met and got to know at the start of the film (including the city council) dies - some immediately during the attack on Sheffield, and some later (the children of the working class family all die in the attack, the parents survive a little longer and presumably die of radiation sickness since their shelter was very poor). The middle class family apart from Ruth are killed by looters. The civil defence team suffocates in the city council bunker as the town hall has collapsed and closed off the ventilation. The rest of the film shows the devastation, the effects of nuclear winter, and the effects on Ruth's child who was born a few months after the war. There is very little dialogue in the second half of the film. You see shell shocked survivors trying to rebuild at least a subsistence level - scavenging food, trying to make new clothes out of scavenged material. Later on in the film, you see some limited electricity generation and the use of steam, and attempts to teach the post-war children. The film ends with Ruth's 13 year old daughter miscarrying her baby.
It also contains the real public information broadcasts t
Who are you trying to kid about fallout being a myth?
The intensity can vary depending on the kind of strike and the altitude of the detonation. Ground bursts are extremely radioactively dirty - the neutron flux makes the ground that was evaporated highly radioactive. This is sucked up as the mushroom cloud goes up, and is deposited downwind. It is extremely lethal for the first couple of days, and the danger decreases. It generally isn't safe for a couple of weeks.
Air bursts tend to cause less fall out, especially if the fireball doesn't touch the ground and evaporate soil and debris that has been made radioactive by the intense neutron flux.
Fission bombs (per kiloton) will generally produce more dangerous fallout than fusion bombs. However, all fusion bombs include at least one fission stage. Some thermonuclear bombs may make half their yield from the fusion of the primary and the natural uranium tamper.
Britain is a densely populated country, with all the targets close together. In the event of a nuclear war in the 1970s, Britain would have essentially been carpet bombed - and far worse off radiologically than the United States or the USSR (who would undoubtedly been the parties who actually started the war). The UK government estimated that in a nuclear war, Britain would have been struck with at least 200 megatons, and feasibly up to 1000 megatons. This level of attack would leave almost no unbroken windows in Britain, and virtually the entire land mass would have enough fall out deposited on it to cause radiation sickness. Most livestock would be killed, and most crops would fail. There would only be a few areas that would have been safe - some of the west cost of Scotland (the prevailing winds are generally westerly) and some areas of Cumbria/Northumbria. It is quite likely that the British population would have fallen to under 5 million or fewer (from 55 million). By contrast, probably half the US population would survive due to the vastly lower population density. An even larger proprotion of Russians would probably survive. The rest of Western Europe would suffer a worse fate than Britain, being the probable battlefield prior to the final attack.
The film 'Threads' features some of the public information films and broadcasts that would have been broadcast prior to nuclear war. They are made all the more chilling because of the odd music played at the start and end of the broadcasts (Threads used the actual films - not a speculative mock up).
In the early 1980s, the government also issued Protect and Survive: the leaflets and some of the public information broadcasts are here: http://www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/atomic/
The west would have almost immediately used nuclear weapons - the Davy Crockett nuclear mortar was built just for that purpose, to use on the front lines against advancing Soviet forces. The Davy Crockett was the smallest Western nuclear weapon, with a selectable yield from 10 tons to 400 tons (no not kilotons, tons). The weapon weighed around 150 lbs, and was the smallest practical nuclear weapon. Most likely the soldiers using them would be committing suicide - the prompt radioactive effects went far beyond the blast and thermal range of these weapons (in essence because of the low yield they were just as much radiation weapons as anything else).
I have both Threads and The Day After. The Day After is pretty good until the actual attack - especially the sequences in the missile LCF etc. However, the attack is unrealistic (if the doctor had been close enough that he heard the explosion when he did, he'd have been vaporized, but he was pretty much uninjured) especially compared to Threads where the nuclear explosions are silent until the blast hits. Threads is so much better made. It is also probably the most depressing film I've ever seen.
Do you have or know of where to get a copy of "A Guide to Armageddon"? It was shown on the BBC programme QED in about 1982-1983 and it was about the effects of a one megaton strike on London. I've not seen or heard of it since. Google hasn't turned up anything useful either, nor have the P2P networks.
Actually - the entire planet would not be a graveyard. A Cold-War USSR vs NATO nuclear war would not end the human race, even though life in the combatant nations would be extremely unpleasant for decades afterwards.
Sending EXE files is a problem because people get 'socially engineered' into running them, especially a forged email from someone they supposedly know. For this reason, the MX for alioth.net rejects all Microsoft executables. So far, 100% of the executables sent to any of the two dozen or so domains the host is MX for, they have been malware.
It could have been worse - they may have gone with the old (was it Bell Atlantic, or Southwestern Bell?) Bell logo that looked like a Wehrmacht helmet!
The biggest point is that ID is _not_ science and should not be taught in a science class. I personally couldn't care less if it's taught about in a philosophy class or a religious studies class, because that's where it fits. To teach it as science is to do a gross dis-service to the people you're supposedly teaching science to. If it's to even be mentioned in a science class, it should only be mentioned in the context of WHY it is not a scientific theory and WHY it is not science.
What is this g-d thing? Some kind of incomplete equation where we are supposed to find the what the terms 'g' and 'd' equal?
If you say "...remains just that - a theory", you don't really understand what a scientific theory is. A scientific theory is not a guess or a hunch (which is the non-scientific meaning of the word 'theory'), it is much stronger than that. By contrast, intelligent design doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis - it's merely a conjecture. A scientific theory by contrast makes testable predictions and is falsifiable amongst other things.
The theory of electromagentism is "just" a theory too, but the lightbulbs in my house all seem to work when I flick the switch.
You may like to accept the degraded (or non existent signal) if the US turns it off, but pilots aren't. Already, there are plans in the US to get rid of most ground-based navaids. Currently, in Europe, GPS is not valid for IFR (instrument flight rules) navigation, because no European country has any kind of guarantee on quality-of-service. It wouldn't be too great, for example, if you were on an instrument approach and >poof, GPS is degraded or turned off just when you really really need sub 5-meter accuracy. Until Europe has its own satellite navigation system, its commercial airlines and private aircraft must rely on many expensive and inaccurate ground-based navaids (for example, you still need an ADF receiver - truly pre-historic, inadequate and inaccurate - to fly IFR in Europe).
I doubt GTK will require 6-8MB if the developer made a 'dependency pack' for systems that don't come with GTK+.
.dmg installer for Mac OS X. If a developer is willing to pare a runtime dependency pack down to just what's needed, it can be made quite small.
Even GNUstep doesn't require that much - the dependency pack for the game, oolite, includes a minimalist GNUstep to support the Objective C runtime and the Foundation, as well as all the required SDL libraries. The resulting autopackage installer for Oolite on Linux is the same size as the
GNUstep is good enough that we ported Oolite (written for Cocoa on the Macintosh) to Linux and *BSD using GNUstep. Even the OpenGL stuff works in GNUstep (although we did end up changing this to SDL since it has better functionality for games, such as full screen support and joystick support).
That's highly inaccurate. The ObjC runtime is not as fast as a function call in C, I'll grant you that. However, it isn't that slow - see my signature for a 3D OpenGL game written in Objective C. Objective C overall is certainly faster than Java, and orders of magnitude faster than Javascript.
They don't work for 'new' though. You can't, say, trivially replace something halfway in the inheritence tree in a library you're using (and have it replace it in all instances of the code). With Objective-C, I can override methods in the base NSObject *for code I do not even have the source for* by writing a category. My own version of NSObject will get made instead. The ObjC runtime is so much more than C++ virtual function tables.
There is a way of doing this in C++, it's called 'exemplars' (and was written about in James O. Coplien's hideous book 'Advanced idioms in C++ programming' - title paraphrased, because I don't remember what it is exactly, other than this is the first book I read that managed to make an interesting subject seem about as interesting as paint drying - his writing style is simply terrible). But that only does you any good if the code you're using has been written that way. Exemplars, in any case, feel very much like a big hack (and they are).
I know little about De Beers so can't comment there, but I do know a bit about airplanes, and Airbus is not a monopoly, so I don't know why you even mentioned it. In any case, no one is asking Microsoft to make their software open source (the equivalent to publishing all Airbus's engineering drawings), they are telling Microsoft to publish their protocols in a manner that other organizations and people can use them (the equivalent, hypothetically, of making Airbus publish how to make some proprietary Airbus only navaid work, so non-Airbus companies can also make the ground based equipment to drive the navaid). In reality, in the case of Airbus, the navigation systems are all open spec - any manufacturer can make the ground based transmitters such as ILS and VOR transmitters that will work with systems on Airbus flight decks. In any case, that's irrelevant - if Airbus was a monopoly (which it isn't) and was using this monopoly to subsidise a business making the navaid ground equipment which only works with proprietary Airbus navigation systems to force out competitors in that market (which they aren't) to only work with Airbus planes, they too would face an anti-trust suit, certainly in the United States. In reality, in the business of making airliners, there is very strong competition between Airbus and Boeing.
This is not the situation with Microsoft. Only Microsoft servers can supply streaming content for Windows Media Player. Microsoft have been using their desktop monopoly to try and control other markets (the market for streaming media servers). Only Microsoft can make an active directory server. Since they have a desktop monopoly, they can use this (and have used this) to force out competitors in markets they want to enter by cross-subsidising these ventures with the income generated from their monopoly. This is against US and EU law, and Microsoft have been prosecuted in both juristictions for this breach.
The law is not a bad law; anti-trust laws are there to ensure that a capitalist marketplace exists (without some moderation, you wind up with consolidation and then the market ceases to function properly, that's why any capitalist country has anti-trust laws). These laws are not arbitrary (well, you could nitpick and say any law is arbitrary), but antitrust regulations have a long legal history. Microsoft isn't the first company to have to pay the consequences for abusing a monopoly even in the computing field - IBM got slapped down a couple of decades ago too. Look in any industry where there has been consolidation and you'll see an anti-trust slapdown or two - they are hardly unpredicatable. It is certain Microsoft knew long ago that they were likely to be investigated for anti-trust violations, but made a business decision that the cost of the anti-trust suits would be less than the income gained by the new business. In fact, I'm sure Microsoft knew that by the time the anti-trust suits had finished, it would be far too late - they will have castrated or destroyed their competition and gained such an entrenched foothold that new competitors even with all the protocol specs are a non-starter. They just want to appeal and defeat this particular one because it will set a bad precedent when they get prosecuted again for their next anti-trust violation.
If you think the BBC is the mouthpiece of the Government, either you aren't really British (Brit or British is a perfectly valid term, and you do hear it in Britain, ooh, like British Airways, or British Broadcasting Corporation) or you haven't been paying an awful lot of attention.
It was actually only recently I tried NetBSD - approximately 4 weeks ago. What I found - the documentation for MOP booting a VAX with NetBSD is 404 - Not found. Googling brings up at least three or four different documents, none of which matched the files that were actually on ftp.netbsd.org. I spent quite a bit of time looking for documentation that actually matched what seemed to exist on the ftp site.
I eventually gave up and found that not only did OpenBSD have the documentation for MOP booting right where it should be (in the same document as all the other installation notes, rather than on a different website altogether), OpenBSD _does_ support SCSI controllers.
I notice the website is now fixed and documentation now exists, so I may give it another go, however, I'm less inclined to do so since OpenBSD is running on the machine very satisfactorily.
Well, I'd disagree that NetBSD performs better on a VAX - it's currently uninstallable and un-runnable on most VAXen due to the problems already stated in this thread (starting with inadequate netbooting documentation, and a MOP booting procedure that doesn't even work). Essentially they say they support the platform, but haven't really supported it since 1.4.
OpenBSD has a _much_ better VAX port than NetBSD it seems - OpenBSD 3.8 MOP boots and runs just fine on my 3100-80. There are a few caveats (probably due to the compiler - O2 doesn't always make correct code so when you build programs use -O or -O1)
NetBSD claims to be extremely portable - portability is the main stated goal.
If it only runs well on x86, NetBSD becomes basically irrelevant - FreeBSD is far better on x86, and OpenBSD (whose goal is security and implenetation and correctness) is more portable (OpenBSD runs fine on VAX). Essentially, if NetBSD doesn't actually talk the talk they have about portability, all they are is an inadequate OpenBSD that is less secure and less portable - and it has no advantages.
Because there are still people around who like to run a VAX. It is also the platform that saw BSD come of age (BSD was started on the VAX's "genetic predecessor", the PDP-11)