Actually you CAN double click to install applications on Linux. See Applications -> Add/Remove software. It's actually easier to use than Windows, since you can just search for what you want, click on it, and it's done, no need to schlep to a store, enter a product key, insert a USB dongle or whatever.
For applications that are not part of a distro, there is Autopackage - http://autopackage.org/ . We use it for Oolite. Our Oolite autopackage installer is a simple double click on pretty much any Linux install that came out in the last 5 or 6 years. Autopackage is better than Windows installer as it includes dependency resolution (yes, Windows packages often have dependency hell, especially Windows server software).
The desktop PC market is ENORMOUS. 2% of a gigantic market is still tens of millions of machines. MS of course wants to turn these tens of millions of systems that aren't paying for their software into ones that are.
But whenever the artist is live, they end up falling flat on their face. I saw Lily Allen on Johnathon Ross the other night, and she sounds *terrible* live, I've heard schoolgirls singing along to their MP3 player better than that.
It seems they get them from all over the place, look at the message on the bit of map you're looking at, that usually gives you a clue where they come from. Being voluntary, you may be able to approach whoever-it-is directly and see if they will be kind.
For example, where I live (Isle of Man) we didn't have even a street map let alone images that were better than about 1 pixel per km^2. However, a couple of years ago the Isle of Man Government flew a light plane up and down the island - and guess what the information provider shown by Google is - Isle of Man Govt. (Many of the hi-res "satellite images" aren't from a satellite at all, but from an aircraft flying relatively low).
The CEO of Sun hasn't made vague threats about patent infringement on the OS that most Mono developers are targeting. That's the difference.
Also, in the.NET world, Linux is very much a second class citizen. Mono will always be behind.NET, and will never be feature complete compared to.NET. Linux, on the other hand, is a first class citizen in the Java world.
100 MBps ethernet is 3 level at the physical layer, and it's very reliable. It uses levels 1, 0 and -1.
But that's not to say you don't have a point; binary is much, much easier to do on mass, even today. Ethernet is just a special case, and the 3 level nature is basically a means to get more bandwidth out of a long piece of copper.
In the 80s, as a normal Russian you just couldn't go out and buy a computer - most of the clones were homebuilt. The Soviets built about 100 different types of clones of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - the Speccy was very popular in Russia because it was easy to smuggle in software and the machine was simple enough that you could build it using the local Z80 clone and a bunch of TTL. The Apple clone they had was probably quite similar, at most built by a cottage industry.
As an example, I used to be an H1-B worker (well, L1 then H1-B). This was due to having specific knowledge of a rather large C++ project that was being developed for an Extremely Large Customer in the US.
Firstly, I was paid the same as the US workers - and an international service payment on top of that. So I certainly was not cheaper labour. I worked the same hours as the US workers. There were actually two of us working on this arrangement. We ended up building a team of 20 developers to work on the project, which made a good deal of revenue for the company (and provided 18 new development posts).
Now had the H1 program not existed, instead of being transferred to the US, we would have remained in the UK, and those 18 jobs would have been created in the UK and not in the US.
PCs for the most part aren't about fashion. PCs, for the most part, are for businesses and should be boring and un-distracting (and part of the problem with Vista is they forgot this, and blinged it out at the expense of hardware).
As well as administering Linux and BSD systems, I also admin a couple of Win2K3 servers. I sort of like Win2K3, because it's crushingly boring and just gets the job done. Once I've set up the scripting environment how I like it, I hardly notice it's there. That's how a business OS should be. Windows should be dull, and prior to Vista it was dull and that's why businesses liked it - stick XP on your AD domain, and begone Teletubbies theme. It should fade into the background. It should not be giving me an "experience" (how I hate that word when applied to an OS). At most, 3D and transparency effects should be subtle and a visual cue to the eye, not yelling "HEY LOOK AT ME, I DO TRANSPARENCY AND 3D EFFECTS!!!111eleventyone", like Vista does. Ironically, the fashion-sensitive Apple people do better in this respect than Windows. Ubuntu does better too in this respect.
But music players are another kettle of fish - for the most part they ARE fashion driven. Release a fashion disaster like the Zune promoted by a sweaty fashion disaster like Ballmer who uses the word "squirt" in relation to it, and you have a failure.
It was broadcast live by the BBC using the Flash-based iPlayer (on the news website so probably not limited to UK IP addresses).
Incidentally, Arethra Franklin started singing the British National Anthem. The music she sang is the same for the first few bars, I was half expecting that Obama was going to invite Her Royal Britannic Majesty to take over:-)
The garage was taking him for a ride. You can't have a car fail for too much power in the UK, the MOT doesn't test that at all. They would have to dyno it and test centres don't have dynos. They sort of have the reverse of a dyno, a rolling road brake tester.
You might have trouble *insuring* the vehicle, the insurer asks if the car has been modified, and many insurers don't want to touch modified cars. Some do, and specialize in it, but it depends how the modification was done and may want an engineer's report. Massively uprated engine but same crappy old brakes? You can lie, but if you crash you'll be prosecuted for driving without insurance.
That's because the United States is a federation of states, and it's up to the individual states to impose whatever standards they may; it falls within the sovereignty of the state. Much as there is not a EU wide vehicle test, there is not a US wide test. It's up to the states, exactly the same as it's up to EU states to specify their own tests.
Texas, for instance, has a State Inspection that checks basic safety items (lights, brakes etc.) and in some counties does a pollution check.
The UK test is in some ways milking the motorist - there are some ridiculous items on the UK MOT, such as you'll fail the MOT for a small 11mm chip in the windscreen just above the wiper under "driver's view of the road" even though you can only see the bonnet through that bit of the screen. Also, it's set up so the garage that does the test has an incentive to fail cars, since it's most likely to get the repair work due to the free retest.
It's also dubious whether it really contributes much to road safety. I live in the Isle of Man where we have no MOT at all, and having worked for an insurer for a while, I never saw any claims due to defective vehicles, all the claims were for bad driving. (Here, all Police officers are trained vehicle testers too, so if you get stopped you can be inspected).
Samba is an implied component of these things. Samba doesn't do directory services (well, not as at the current stable versions - samba 4 which has been brewing for years and years will have its own LDAP service). Usually, an AD replacement consists of some directory service, such as OpenLDAP, with Samba handling the job of serving files and sharing printers. The open source services tend to follow the Unix paradigm of making a service - construct a whole out of components, and choose the components that suit you best. For instance, for our development network at work, we use OpenLDAP as the directory service, and Samba to share files from the server. Samba queries OpenLDAP when someone tries to authenticate. As do our little web applications - when you log onto one, it will query the same OpenLDAP server to authenticate/authorize your login.
What astounds me is that it seems like you can be convicted in Florida solely on breath test evidence. In this country, the breathalyzer is used *solely* to see if a further test is required, it is not used in evidence in itself. If you blow over the limit, you also have a blood test made. We don't rely on a single instrument in something as important as this, where you are going to potentially ruin someone's life.
I remember that Pascal system. We had it on the BBC Micros at school.
Unfortunately, I didn't appreciate it at the time. I heard we were getting it and was really excited because I understood it generated machine code, not P-code - and was very disappointed when I found out it didn't make native code...so I went back to assembler.
I would appreciate your achievement these days though (but I'd still use assembler nonetheless!) One of the great things about the Beeb was the built in assembler. Although my retrocomputing love is the Sinclair Spectrum, I do have two BBC Micros - they were by far the best 8 bit architecture of the time. We had an econet network of them at school, and a friend an I wrote a Shades-inspired MUD, part in BASIC, part in asm. Unfortunately we couldn't afford one for home, the Spectrum at about a third of the price was the affordable proposition, so I know my way around the Z80 much better than the 6502. It was only in 2007 that I got my first BBC Micro!
The 6502 wasn't that bad, or at least the 65C02. While you only have 3 registers, you do have fast zero page operations which makes it almost like having 256 registers. However, I still prefer the Z80, it makes things a lot easier to have the 16 bit register pair ops, and notwithstanding the 6502's zero page instructions, most routines on the Z80 are a bit easier to program since most of the time you don't have to shuffle things to and from RAM because you can fit everything in the two register banks. I still write Z80 asm today, it's fun.
You can do floating point in software, it was done all the time in the 8 bit days, in fact it was done all the time right the way into the 486 days (the 486sx, IIRC, lacked an FPU). It's just not all that fast. But for the size of spreadsheet you could make on a 32K RAM system, the speed of the floating point calculator probably wasn't much of a factor. It wouldn't surprise me if the spreadsheet authors used the BASIC ROM's floating point routine, if it has one (I have no experience with the 8 bit Apple machines. The 8 bit stuff I do play with, like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, have floating point calculator routines you can call).
I'd disagree. A solar storm may contain a fair bit of energy, but it is released over a very wide area over a relatively long period of time. Therefore, the effects aren't nearly as extreme. It won't hurt a computer, it won't break your car's ECU, it won't make fly-by-wire aircraft fall from the sky.
The EMP from a nuclear explosion, on the other hand, occurs over an incredibly short period of time and is highly concentrated, so it is far more damaging to anything within range.
As an analogy, compare a thunderstorm: a typical afternoon thunderstorm in Texas releases about the same amount of energy as a small thermonuclear weapon. So how come Houston isn't flattened three times a week? The thunderstorm takes an hour or so to release this energy and does so over a wide area. By contrast, a nuke would release that energy in a few tens of nanoseconds and releases it in an incredibly small area.
So comparisons to nuclear explosions may be valid in terms of energy, but it's really comparing apples with orangutangs for the purposes of the damage it would cause.
I have been personally around 50 feet from a strong cloud-to-ground strike. It was very, very loud, and quite frightening. We found out exactly where it struck the next morning because there was a burn mark where it hit.
But none of the nearby electronics were harmed, including the VHF aviation band radio with a big antenna on the roof.
No, nearly every transatlantic and transpacific phone call goes via undersea fibreoptic cable, and has for some time. Satellite communication is far too expensive for phone calls. In the days when phone calls were routed that way, a transatlantic phone call was tens of dollars a minute in today's money. However, these days a transatlantic call may be cheaper than a call from Texas to California, perhaps 1 or 2 cents a minute.
...the answer is "not much". It affected telegraph traffic because telegraph lines were extremely long conductors, in which large currents could be induced by the electromagnetic interference. But the conductors in your computer are very short (engineers go to lots of trouble to make them as short as possible). Modern equipment is also rather better shielded from electromagnetic interference than antique telegraph systems.
It's unlikely it would affect cars and planes and personal computers. The telegraph lines had problems because they are very, very long, and a large current could be induced into such long conductors. Long telecoms lines now are fibre optic. You won't induce any current in them. The wires in your car are short, and in any case, well shielded, so large currents will not be induced in them. It may cause temporary power outages because power lines tend to be long conductors in which large currents can be induced, but protection systems should prevent permanent damage to power distribution networks in most cases.
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Actually you CAN double click to install applications on Linux. See Applications -> Add/Remove software. It's actually easier to use than Windows, since you can just search for what you want, click on it, and it's done, no need to schlep to a store, enter a product key, insert a USB dongle or whatever.
For applications that are not part of a distro, there is Autopackage - http://autopackage.org/ . We use it for Oolite. Our Oolite autopackage installer is a simple double click on pretty much any Linux install that came out in the last 5 or 6 years. Autopackage is better than Windows installer as it includes dependency resolution (yes, Windows packages often have dependency hell, especially Windows server software).
The desktop PC market is ENORMOUS. 2% of a gigantic market is still tens of millions of machines. MS of course wants to turn these tens of millions of systems that aren't paying for their software into ones that are.
But whenever the artist is live, they end up falling flat on their face. I saw Lily Allen on Johnathon Ross the other night, and she sounds *terrible* live, I've heard schoolgirls singing along to their MP3 player better than that.
It seems they get them from all over the place, look at the message on the bit of map you're looking at, that usually gives you a clue where they come from. Being voluntary, you may be able to approach whoever-it-is directly and see if they will be kind.
For example, where I live (Isle of Man) we didn't have even a street map let alone images that were better than about 1 pixel per km^2. However, a couple of years ago the Isle of Man Government flew a light plane up and down the island - and guess what the information provider shown by Google is - Isle of Man Govt. (Many of the hi-res "satellite images" aren't from a satellite at all, but from an aircraft flying relatively low).
The Westminster government *is* the British government, regardless of who occupies the Scottish parliament.
The CEO of Sun hasn't made vague threats about patent infringement on the OS that most Mono developers are targeting. That's the difference.
Also, in the .NET world, Linux is very much a second class citizen. Mono will always be behind .NET, and will never be feature complete compared to .NET. Linux, on the other hand, is a first class citizen in the Java world.
100 MBps ethernet is 3 level at the physical layer, and it's very reliable. It uses levels 1, 0 and -1.
But that's not to say you don't have a point; binary is much, much easier to do on mass, even today. Ethernet is just a special case, and the 3 level nature is basically a means to get more bandwidth out of a long piece of copper.
In the 80s, as a normal Russian you just couldn't go out and buy a computer - most of the clones were homebuilt. The Soviets built about 100 different types of clones of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - the Speccy was very popular in Russia because it was easy to smuggle in software and the machine was simple enough that you could build it using the local Z80 clone and a bunch of TTL. The Apple clone they had was probably quite similar, at most built by a cottage industry.
It needs fixing, not throwing away.
As an example, I used to be an H1-B worker (well, L1 then H1-B). This was due to having specific knowledge of a rather large C++ project that was being developed for an Extremely Large Customer in the US.
Firstly, I was paid the same as the US workers - and an international service payment on top of that. So I certainly was not cheaper labour. I worked the same hours as the US workers. There were actually two of us working on this arrangement. We ended up building a team of 20 developers to work on the project, which made a good deal of revenue for the company (and provided 18 new development posts).
Now had the H1 program not existed, instead of being transferred to the US, we would have remained in the UK, and those 18 jobs would have been created in the UK and not in the US.
The H1 system should be fixed, not thrown out.
PCs for the most part aren't about fashion. PCs, for the most part, are for businesses and should be boring and un-distracting (and part of the problem with Vista is they forgot this, and blinged it out at the expense of hardware).
As well as administering Linux and BSD systems, I also admin a couple of Win2K3 servers. I sort of like Win2K3, because it's crushingly boring and just gets the job done. Once I've set up the scripting environment how I like it, I hardly notice it's there. That's how a business OS should be. Windows should be dull, and prior to Vista it was dull and that's why businesses liked it - stick XP on your AD domain, and begone Teletubbies theme. It should fade into the background. It should not be giving me an "experience" (how I hate that word when applied to an OS). At most, 3D and transparency effects should be subtle and a visual cue to the eye, not yelling "HEY LOOK AT ME, I DO TRANSPARENCY AND 3D EFFECTS!!!111eleventyone", like Vista does. Ironically, the fashion-sensitive Apple people do better in this respect than Windows. Ubuntu does better too in this respect.
But music players are another kettle of fish - for the most part they ARE fashion driven. Release a fashion disaster like the Zune promoted by a sweaty fashion disaster like Ballmer who uses the word "squirt" in relation to it, and you have a failure.
It was broadcast live by the BBC using the Flash-based iPlayer (on the news website so probably not limited to UK IP addresses).
Incidentally, Arethra Franklin started singing the British National Anthem. The music she sang is the same for the first few bars, I was half expecting that Obama was going to invite Her Royal Britannic Majesty to take over :-)
The garage was taking him for a ride. You can't have a car fail for too much power in the UK, the MOT doesn't test that at all. They would have to dyno it and test centres don't have dynos. They sort of have the reverse of a dyno, a rolling road brake tester.
You might have trouble *insuring* the vehicle, the insurer asks if the car has been modified, and many insurers don't want to touch modified cars. Some do, and specialize in it, but it depends how the modification was done and may want an engineer's report. Massively uprated engine but same crappy old brakes? You can lie, but if you crash you'll be prosecuted for driving without insurance.
That's because the United States is a federation of states, and it's up to the individual states to impose whatever standards they may; it falls within the sovereignty of the state. Much as there is not a EU wide vehicle test, there is not a US wide test. It's up to the states, exactly the same as it's up to EU states to specify their own tests.
Texas, for instance, has a State Inspection that checks basic safety items (lights, brakes etc.) and in some counties does a pollution check.
The UK test is in some ways milking the motorist - there are some ridiculous items on the UK MOT, such as you'll fail the MOT for a small 11mm chip in the windscreen just above the wiper under "driver's view of the road" even though you can only see the bonnet through that bit of the screen. Also, it's set up so the garage that does the test has an incentive to fail cars, since it's most likely to get the repair work due to the free retest.
It's also dubious whether it really contributes much to road safety. I live in the Isle of Man where we have no MOT at all, and having worked for an insurer for a while, I never saw any claims due to defective vehicles, all the claims were for bad driving. (Here, all Police officers are trained vehicle testers too, so if you get stopped you can be inspected).
Samba is an implied component of these things. Samba doesn't do directory services (well, not as at the current stable versions - samba 4 which has been brewing for years and years will have its own LDAP service). Usually, an AD replacement consists of some directory service, such as OpenLDAP, with Samba handling the job of serving files and sharing printers. The open source services tend to follow the Unix paradigm of making a service - construct a whole out of components, and choose the components that suit you best. For instance, for our development network at work, we use OpenLDAP as the directory service, and Samba to share files from the server. Samba queries OpenLDAP when someone tries to authenticate. As do our little web applications - when you log onto one, it will query the same OpenLDAP server to authenticate/authorize your login.
What astounds me is that it seems like you can be convicted in Florida solely on breath test evidence. In this country, the breathalyzer is used *solely* to see if a further test is required, it is not used in evidence in itself. If you blow over the limit, you also have a blood test made. We don't rely on a single instrument in something as important as this, where you are going to potentially ruin someone's life.
I expect the lawyers would hire someone with expertise in the subject to provide an analysis rather than doing it themselves.
I remember that Pascal system. We had it on the BBC Micros at school.
Unfortunately, I didn't appreciate it at the time. I heard we were getting it and was really excited because I understood it generated machine code, not P-code - and was very disappointed when I found out it didn't make native code...so I went back to assembler.
I would appreciate your achievement these days though (but I'd still use assembler nonetheless!) One of the great things about the Beeb was the built in assembler. Although my retrocomputing love is the Sinclair Spectrum, I do have two BBC Micros - they were by far the best 8 bit architecture of the time. We had an econet network of them at school, and a friend an I wrote a Shades-inspired MUD, part in BASIC, part in asm. Unfortunately we couldn't afford one for home, the Spectrum at about a third of the price was the affordable proposition, so I know my way around the Z80 much better than the 6502. It was only in 2007 that I got my first BBC Micro!
The 6502 wasn't that bad, or at least the 65C02. While you only have 3 registers, you do have fast zero page operations which makes it almost like having 256 registers. However, I still prefer the Z80, it makes things a lot easier to have the 16 bit register pair ops, and notwithstanding the 6502's zero page instructions, most routines on the Z80 are a bit easier to program since most of the time you don't have to shuffle things to and from RAM because you can fit everything in the two register banks. I still write Z80 asm today, it's fun.
You can do floating point in software, it was done all the time in the 8 bit days, in fact it was done all the time right the way into the 486 days (the 486sx, IIRC, lacked an FPU). It's just not all that fast. But for the size of spreadsheet you could make on a 32K RAM system, the speed of the floating point calculator probably wasn't much of a factor. It wouldn't surprise me if the spreadsheet authors used the BASIC ROM's floating point routine, if it has one (I have no experience with the 8 bit Apple machines. The 8 bit stuff I do play with, like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, have floating point calculator routines you can call).
Cars are shielded, at least if they have steel body work. The electronics, such as the ECU, are shielded.
I'd disagree. A solar storm may contain a fair bit of energy, but it is released over a very wide area over a relatively long period of time. Therefore, the effects aren't nearly as extreme. It won't hurt a computer, it won't break your car's ECU, it won't make fly-by-wire aircraft fall from the sky.
The EMP from a nuclear explosion, on the other hand, occurs over an incredibly short period of time and is highly concentrated, so it is far more damaging to anything within range.
As an analogy, compare a thunderstorm: a typical afternoon thunderstorm in Texas releases about the same amount of energy as a small thermonuclear weapon. So how come Houston isn't flattened three times a week? The thunderstorm takes an hour or so to release this energy and does so over a wide area. By contrast, a nuke would release that energy in a few tens of nanoseconds and releases it in an incredibly small area.
So comparisons to nuclear explosions may be valid in terms of energy, but it's really comparing apples with orangutangs for the purposes of the damage it would cause.
I have been personally around 50 feet from a strong cloud-to-ground strike. It was very, very loud, and quite frightening. We found out exactly where it struck the next morning because there was a burn mark where it hit.
But none of the nearby electronics were harmed, including the VHF aviation band radio with a big antenna on the roof.
No, nearly every transatlantic and transpacific phone call goes via undersea fibreoptic cable, and has for some time. Satellite communication is far too expensive for phone calls. In the days when phone calls were routed that way, a transatlantic phone call was tens of dollars a minute in today's money. However, these days a transatlantic call may be cheaper than a call from Texas to California, perhaps 1 or 2 cents a minute.
...the answer is "not much". It affected telegraph traffic because telegraph lines were extremely long conductors, in which large currents could be induced by the electromagnetic interference. But the conductors in your computer are very short (engineers go to lots of trouble to make them as short as possible). Modern equipment is also rather better shielded from electromagnetic interference than antique telegraph systems.
It's unlikely it would affect cars and planes and personal computers. The telegraph lines had problems because they are very, very long, and a large current could be induced into such long conductors. Long telecoms lines now are fibre optic. You won't induce any current in them. The wires in your car are short, and in any case, well shielded, so large currents will not be induced in them. It may cause temporary power outages because power lines tend to be long conductors in which large currents can be induced, but protection systems should prevent permanent damage to power distribution networks in most cases.