I apologize, the link to Geoshell is wrong. Apparently they just moved hosting providers and Geoshellx.com has been taken up by a domain parker complete with popups and crap. The correct domain is http://www.geoshell.com. The old site under the 'x' domain is still cached in Google.
You can do that with today to a certain extent. You can run KDE3 within Cygwin in full-screen mode (Cygwin includes a fully functional X port), but it's... just not right. I mean, it's not nearly the same as running the real thing and although it's kind of cool it eats up way too much memory and is a bit jerky for my tastes.
Writing a complete shell for Windows is not a particularly easy thing to do and I doubt that somehow porting KDE is viable. There are lots of shell replacements out there (Aston, GeoShell, BackBox and so on). Some are free and some are not. I've tried just about every one and for some reason or another I keep going back to Explorer after a while. It's really the little details, like not being able to open a folder view directly from the shell's Run command because the shell extension (Explorer) happens to not be loaded or the way minimized windows are managed. If you're curious you should try Geoshell. In my opinion it should be what other shells aspire to be, but even as good as it is it's still not quite there. For one thing, the entire configuration is registry-based.
I'm no Microsoft basher, but I've always thought that opening up the shell would be the best thing they could do. After all, you'd still be running Windows underneath. But it's just too darn difficult to write your own. Explorer extensions (like the Google deskbar) are complicated, never mind a whole shell.
Compile this as a standard Windows EXE. Use the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) to add this as a button to the IE toolbar. Click it once, Flash disabled. Click it again, Flash enabled.
You can probably take this and make it fancier (error reporting, toggle notification or whatever, right now it's silent), but that's basically how it works.
Interesting. Maybe you'd also like to suggest how Valve could have made any money off their open source "product"? By providing "Gamer Training Services" perhaps? The hardware to run the game maybe? Or even by selling the sprites for $5.99 a pop?
I'd really be interested in looking at your theoretical business model, as long as it doesn't include "???" anywhere.
Liberty, by Duran Duran. Circa 1995, I think. Maybe later.
But it was an MP2, not MP3. I still have it on a backup CD somewhere.
I found it on a directory listing on some university server in Europe, IIRC. Over a 14.4 modem.
I had a DOS program that played the things. It also played MOD (tracker) files, which I was into at the time. Couldn't run it on Win95, had to boot to DOS. The sound was fantastic coming out of my unpowered $3.99 speakers.
BSD folks that tried out linux in 1994, and still have the impression stuck in their mind. They seem to think that linux hasn't changed at all since then.
Linux folks that tried out Windows in 1994, and still have the impression stuck in their mind. They seem to think that Windows hasn't changed at all since then.
Couldn't let that one go, sorry.
[...] went into a BSD channel in efnet and asked some lame question like "since linux is unix, where can i get the FreeBSD RPMS?" and got flamed so hard that they had to crawl out of a hole in the ground.
I'm sorry, but in my personal experience it's exactly the other way around. BSD (especially FreeBSD folks) are helpful as hell. The people who run Debian on the other hand... well.
Was it a "good idea" for Microsoft to rewrite Windows as XP and Server 2003? I don't know, it's their code, they can do whatever they like with it. But I do know that they had a fairly solid, reasonable system with Windows 2000 - quite reliable, combining the better aspects of Windows NT with the multimedia capabilities of Windows 98. Maybe it wasn't perfect, and there were a lot of bugs and vulnerabilities - but was it really a good idea to start from scratch? They billed this as if it was a good thing. It wasn't. It simply introduced a whole slew of new bugs and vulnerabilities, not to mention the instability. It's just another example of where a total rewrite didn't really do anyone any good. I don't think anyone is using Windows for anything so different now than they were when Windows 2000 was around, and yet we're looking at a 100% different codebase. Windows Server 2003 won't even run some older software, which must be fun for those users...
2003: HAHAHA, M$ IS TEH SUX, thye shuld reWritee tehir WINDOZE from sctratch!!! HAHAHA!!!
2004: HAHAHA, M$ IS TEH SUX, thye reWriteed tehir WINDOZE from sctratch!!! HAHAHA!!!
Sweet jesus no! Not different processor architecures! Apparently this guy hasn't heard of Debian.
The embedded market is full of wacky microprocessors made by companies you've never heard of, with wildly different clock speeds, alignments and memory and I/O interfaces. These are chosen by device makers and integrators based on their needs, and then put into things other than desktop PCs and PDAs. Your ridiculous snide remark aside, I suggest you at least Google a bit before posting. That will help you understand what it is the article is talking about. The Debian ports collection indeed.
This guy simply sounds like he has a grudge against GNU and Linux
He has a differing opinion from the slashbot group think, so I guess that makes him evil. "Oh look, he's criticizing Linux!!! let's kill him!!".
And the fact that he runs a company that makes an embedded OS is besides the point - it's made clear in the article and gives him credibility to talk about the subject. You're more than welcome to disagree, assuming you understand the subject to begin with.
Kodak makes crappy cameras. The 35mm brick jobs with substandard optics, flashes and mechanisms are good for 90% of the people who just want to take a few pics and take the film to Walgreens to get it developed. This is amateur recreational photography an to be honest Kodak never played well there to begin with, except long ago when the format first became popular. Their film on the other hand is quite nice, especially the B&W and under ISO-400 ones.
Most people who are into this type of photography won't miss Kodak (or Fuji or whatever) fading away from the segment, but I have to question Kodak's wisdom on this. Do they also think they're going to get Dell to sell a PC with every digital camera? Are thy going to retrofit all their developing centers and parters with developing/printing equipment that reads digital media? I think it's going to be a bit painful for them at the start, though I do wish them well. Digital makes more sense in most cases and for most people. And it's more environment-friendly.
Those of us who are into SLR-type cameras and won't think about dropping $2K on a Carl Zeiss 120mm zoom lens or good optical filters to use with Canon, Olyumpus or Nikon rigs... well, Kodak won't be missed =)
Actually, let me help you with this - on content that you generate (as in during the CD ripping and encoding process), DRM is only enabled if you have configured WMP to do so. You can turn it off so you can generate WMAs until you're blue in the face without DRM of any sort.
WMP has the ability to play/restrict DRM content obtained from somewhere else, but it does not force you to do the same thing, assuming you're using it to rip in the first place.
I'll take a page out of the Open Source Revolucionary Handbook and say "your post is nothing but pure FUD".
Hope that helps.
Re:Less support for WMA the better
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm so tired of the WMA format. It's like a god damned virus.
It's a Microsoft thing so I don't like it.
was explaining the concept of a CD MP3 player to someone I know and when he showed me his digital music collection, it was all in WMA
And this is a problem because? Your friend obviously ripped his CD collection himself. Are you angry because he used WMP to do it or because he didn't just download one of the 13 million free rippers capable of writing MP3 instead? Are you pissed because he's stupid? Nothing forces you to use WMA or WMP for that matter - the fact that it ships with Windows is besides the point. CDex runs just fine on Windows, as far as I can tell. If anything it's lack of information, yes? And this gets your panties all in a bunch?
MP3 is the standard, nothing else should be supported, if only for clarity and simplicity reasons!
You are so right. We should also all use JPEG, because that's the One True Graphics Format. Or was it PNG? Or TGA? Or GIF? Hmmmmm.
See, here's the thing: WMA is a choice. If you're not smart enough to figure out that you can rip your music to something else then that's just too bad. People that push things like OGG champion choice - is this a case of "yes well, but that's not the choice we like"?
If anything else is ever supported, it should be OGG because OGG is essentially open source MP3
No, because that would cause confusion. You just said that.
I won't even go into the benchmarks that have proven WMA is better than MP3 at lower bitrates for most audio uses, or the fact that it's a far better streaming format than MP3. That would be besides the point. I don't like WMA or otherwise use it, but just to give you an example: if I had a player with a smallish 5 or 6GB drive that supported WMA I'd probably encode my collection to it at lower bitrates to fit more songs into the thing, and still get pretty much the same audio quality. That's called choice. Look it up.
There's a millibar, which is low compared to sea-level pressure on Earth but nowhere near negligible
The average is 7mb. That's 0.007% of Earth's. How low do you want to go before you call it "negligible"? And in any case I'm not trying to contest the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars, since we all know that water will boil there, right? Unless you picked that up from something I also didn't write.
hydrogen and oxygen why don't people ionise on a sunbed? Or on the beach?
I don't understand - are you comparing solar radiation striking Mars to a beach on earth?
will have an effect on the escape veocity of gases near the top of the atmosphere but otherwise does not significantly affect the small-scale molecular kinetics.
Ummmm. OK, so water won't be broken down by gravity (not that I'd... expect it to) but will allow it to escape into space. And what happens when it does that? Why is there far more argon there than H2O?
Plenty of UV radiation reaches the Earth's surface
Ozone ring a bell?
I'm sure you're way smarter than me, but you're also excellent at quoting out of context.
But I guess more importantly, are you saying that if I release enough water into the Martian atmosphere I'd get clouds and stuff? Because, well, water is just fine there, right? There just isn't enough of it?
A tiny amount may see enough high-energy radiation near the top of the atmosphere to
I disagree. Mars does not have enough of an atmosphere for this to happen at high altitude. It'll more than likely happen at surface level.
you do frequently find optically thin clouds of ice crystals
CO2 crystals, not H2O. You would have heard about it in the news by now if a spectrometer detected a cloud of water in Mars (or anywhere else for that matter).
Holy... where did I say that boiling water causes it to dissociate? Perhaps I didn't elaborate enough. Don't get all medieval on me.
into countless tiny droplets above the kettle's spout
There's no kettle, no spout, no atmospheric pressure, little gravity and enough UV energy to give you a good tan in about 5 seconds. Beyond your third grade physics lesson, what exactly happens to the water under those circumstances?
Vacuum won't, no, but UV energy will, assuming the low gravity keeps it in place for that long.
If this wasn't the case and the theory of open water existing on Mars in past ages is right, Mars would be covered in beautiful blue clouds. Because the water would turn to steam and what are clouds made of again? It kinda breaks down, doesn't it?
Think about how you've been told that water is easier to boil at different altitudes. For example, it's easier to boil water in Denver than it is in Miami, because Denver is located at a higher altitude. The standard is 100C at 766 mmHg (mm of mercury, or one atmosphere), but that only applies to sea level. However, altitude itself has nothing to do with this. It's really atmospheric pressure. Remember that what we call "air" (a mixture of oxigen, hydrogen and nitrogen among other things) has mass and therefore weighs. So, the atmosphere "weighs" less in Denver because there's less of it on top of the city. Right? That's why it takes less temperature to boil it.
So, water boils - regardless of temperature - when its vapor pressure equals the atmospheric pressure. So if you take your sealed pressurized bottle of Evian to Mars and you open it so that the pressure equalizes to that of the Martian atmosphere, the water will suddenly (and quite violently) reach its vapor pressure and boil.
The resulting "steam" will be steam for just a few seconds because the H2O molecules will be likely broken up by ultraviolet energy (a process called photodissociation). Mars has no atmosphere to speak of, so it has no pretection against UV.
It's possible there's a process other than photodissociation that gets to the water molecules first - I'm not sure. Low gravity also plays into it.
So, it would boil because there was not enough atmospheric pressure to keep it in liquid form?
Yep.
Would it create something similar to steam, or would it just completely dissipate - in other words, would it covert to a gas, or would it just... um... cease to exist?
Not steam, no. Steam is still a form of water, like ice. The molecules simply decouple and turn into individual hydrogen and oxigen atoms (albeit it's possible there's some intermediate compound, I don't remember).
I'm not the smartest pencil in the mug, but how little water do you expect you need to counteract the effects of violent evaporation due to low atmospheric pressure? =)
Water is water, no matter how much of it there is. Polar binding forces like van Der Walls are not likely to counteract that, AFAIK. Perhaps if you get into some freaky milling technology which creates something like polymer gels to make your mud. But then again if the martians are making their mud like that I don't think we want to get friendly with them.
Actually it would probably boil first. Freezing is a much slower process. The lack of atmospheric pressure would get to it long before the temperature ever did.
It feels like mud and is a mixture of soil and water, but it can't be mud!
It can't be mud because of physics. Water cannot exist in free form in the surface of Mars because it would simply evaporate instantly (at least in most locations). Temperature and atmospheric pressure are the usual suspects here. And we do know what those are with a relatively high degree of certainty. Ergo, it can't be mud. It must be some sort of wacky sand, like montmorillonite. Data from the Mariner probes has detected a few dozen types of this clay. Maybe this is one we haven't seen before.
Water, if found, will be either in the poles or trapped in molecule-sized amounts in rocks under the surface, nominally because of some sort of organism like microscopic algae or fungus keeps it there as part of its organic cycle. The idea goes that if you find water there you're also likely to find some type of primitive life.
But I suggest we let the thing dig holes and stuff before we get all excited =)
I'm not sure if you of the camp that linux is competition for windows
It is, and that's good.
and hope that windows will one day be dethroned by free software
It won't, and that's also good.
Someone who takes the time to come up with a packaged version of linux designed to ease the pain of switching to new and non-cimputer savy people deserves respect in my book.
See: Lycoris; Xandros. Lindows is a stupid gimmick.
The you are free do do whatever you want as long as you do it this way approach.
Which is why Linux won't "dethrone" Windows any time soon. 90% of people who purchase computers don't want "freedom", they want functionality. Anything else is an LSD-induced high.
Lindow is not trademark infringment. Anyone with half a brain knows that Windows and Lindows are not the same word
Let me put it this way - if a pharmaceutical company came up with a penis enhancer called "Tindows" I doubt Microsoft would take notice. When Robertson the quack calls his operating system "Lindows" then we have a problem. The same way we'd have a problem with Pfizer if said pharmaceutical company had named their medicine "Piagra". Surely that's not too hard to understand, even for someone like you.
So please tell me, what is it about lindows that scares you so? Are you just against linux adoption in general?
I'm having a hard time figuring out why you think Lindows "scares me"? I don't give a flyin' hoot if Lindows succeeds or not. I want to see Linux become a player because that will make Windows better through competitive pressure, not because I think Linux is better, or even a viable alternative to Windows.
Lindows saw an opportunity to capitalise on the ruling by getting Microsoft to pay for users to have Lindows software and hardware
Lindows saw an opportunity to do what it does best - expell hot air and try to "stick it to the man".
undoubtedly too bitter a pill for Microsoft to take.
Microsoft should have just stood by and lose the suit by default. Yeah.
Microsoft filed suit against the website Michael Robertson, owner of Lindows and a strong anti-Microsoft voice, will undoubtedly be disappointed with the ruling.
Robertson is not a "strong anti-microsoft voice", he's a quack and a con. And I doubt he'll be disappointed since there are many other dumb childish things he can do to draw attention to his pointless "fight". Now all we need is for the courts to make him stop using the word "Lindows" and all will be well.
This guy is nothing more than a scab in the image of the people who work on open source software. He should concentrate on going public, running the company to the ground and walking away with a few dozen million like he did with MP3.com.
You, apparently, since you decided to reward us with your insight.
Several years ago mentioned that windows will look more and more like unix every version
Looks to me that Linux is looking more like Windows XP, but that's just me. As to "the backend", ideally Windows will continue to look more like what Dave Cutler intended it to be. We can only hope.
An example would be that there are several things that don't kick off or operate properly in windows until someone logs in
Whatever "group" you're working with don't know what the fuck they're doing. That's your problem. Unless you can tack developer/analyst/consultant stupidity on the OS vendor, which is relatively uncommon. But I guess you can do that if you want. I mean, it's a great anecdote if you want to make a point that "Windoze is teh sux". I think I'll start blaming RedHat or Debian every time my weekly Mozilla build fails, eh? It's so much easier!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry 'bout that.
Writing a complete shell for Windows is not a particularly easy thing to do and I doubt that somehow porting KDE is viable. There are lots of shell replacements out there (Aston, GeoShell, BackBox and so on). Some are free and some are not. I've tried just about every one and for some reason or another I keep going back to Explorer after a while. It's really the little details, like not being able to open a folder view directly from the shell's Run command because the shell extension (Explorer) happens to not be loaded or the way minimized windows are managed. If you're curious you should try Geoshell. In my opinion it should be what other shells aspire to be, but even as good as it is it's still not quite there. For one thing, the entire configuration is registry-based.
I'm no Microsoft basher, but I've always thought that opening up the shell would be the best thing they could do. After all, you'd still be running Windows underneath. But it's just too darn difficult to write your own. Explorer extensions (like the Google deskbar) are complicated, never mind a whole shell.
#include <windows.h>
0 00}";
int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
LPSTR lpCmdLine,
int nCmdShow)
{
HKEY hKey = NULL;
char* szKey = "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\ActiveX Compatibility\\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540
char* szValueName = "Compatibility Flags";
const DWORD dwEnable = 0x0;
const DWORD dwDisable = 0x400;
LRESULT lresult = RegCreateKeyEx(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, szKey, 0, NULL, REG_OPTION_NON_VOLATILE, KEY_ALL_ACCESS, NULL, &hKey, NULL);
if (ERROR_SUCCESS == lresult)
{
DWORD dwValue = 0;
DWORD dwType = REG_DWORD;
DWORD dwSize = sizeof(DWORD);
lresult = RegQueryValueEx(hKey, szValueName, NULL, &dwType, (LPBYTE)&dwValue, &dwSize);
if ((ERROR_SUCCESS == lresult) || (ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND == lresult))
{
if (dwValue == dwDisable)
dwValue = dwEnable;
else
dwValue = dwDisable;
RegSetValueEx(hKey, szValueName, 0, REG_DWORD, (LPBYTE)&dwValue, sizeof(DWORD));
}
RegCloseKey(hKey);
}
return 0;
}
Compile this as a standard Windows EXE. Use the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) to add this as a button to the IE toolbar. Click it once, Flash disabled. Click it again, Flash enabled.
You can probably take this and make it fancier (error reporting, toggle notification or whatever, right now it's silent), but that's basically how it works.
I'd really be interested in looking at your theoretical business model, as long as it doesn't include "???" anywhere.
Thanks.
But it was an MP2, not MP3. I still have it on a backup CD somewhere.
I found it on a directory listing on some university server in Europe, IIRC. Over a 14.4 modem.
I had a DOS program that played the things. It also played MOD (tracker) files, which I was into at the time. Couldn't run it on Win95, had to boot to DOS. The sound was fantastic coming out of my unpowered $3.99 speakers.
Yay.
Linux folks that tried out Windows in 1994, and still have the impression stuck in their mind. They seem to think that Windows hasn't changed at all since then.
Couldn't let that one go, sorry.
[...] went into a BSD channel in efnet and asked some lame question like "since linux is unix, where can i get the FreeBSD RPMS?" and got flamed so hard that they had to crawl out of a hole in the ground.
I'm sorry, but in my personal experience it's exactly the other way around. BSD (especially FreeBSD folks) are helpful as hell. The people who run Debian on the other hand... well.
2003: HAHAHA, M$ IS TEH SUX, thye shuld reWritee tehir WINDOZE from sctratch!!! HAHAHA!!!
2004: HAHAHA, M$ IS TEH SUX, thye reWriteed tehir WINDOZE from sctratch!!! HAHAHA!!!
The embedded market is full of wacky microprocessors made by companies you've never heard of, with wildly different clock speeds, alignments and memory and I/O interfaces. These are chosen by device makers and integrators based on their needs, and then put into things other than desktop PCs and PDAs. Your ridiculous snide remark aside, I suggest you at least Google a bit before posting. That will help you understand what it is the article is talking about. The Debian ports collection indeed.
This guy simply sounds like he has a grudge against GNU and Linux
He has a differing opinion from the slashbot group think, so I guess that makes him evil. "Oh look, he's criticizing Linux!!! let's kill him!!".
And the fact that he runs a company that makes an embedded OS is besides the point - it's made clear in the article and gives him credibility to talk about the subject. You're more than welcome to disagree, assuming you understand the subject to begin with.
Most people who are into this type of photography won't miss Kodak (or Fuji or whatever) fading away from the segment, but I have to question Kodak's wisdom on this. Do they also think they're going to get Dell to sell a PC with every digital camera? Are thy going to retrofit all their developing centers and parters with developing/printing equipment that reads digital media? I think it's going to be a bit painful for them at the start, though I do wish them well. Digital makes more sense in most cases and for most people. And it's more environment-friendly.
Those of us who are into SLR-type cameras and won't think about dropping $2K on a Carl Zeiss 120mm zoom lens or good optical filters to use with Canon, Olyumpus or Nikon rigs... well, Kodak won't be missed =)
WMP has the ability to play/restrict DRM content obtained from somewhere else, but it does not force you to do the same thing, assuming you're using it to rip in the first place.
I'll take a page out of the Open Source Revolucionary Handbook and say "your post is nothing but pure FUD".
Hope that helps.
It's a Microsoft thing so I don't like it.
was explaining the concept of a CD MP3 player to someone I know and when he showed me his digital music collection, it was all in WMA
And this is a problem because? Your friend obviously ripped his CD collection himself. Are you angry because he used WMP to do it or because he didn't just download one of the 13 million free rippers capable of writing MP3 instead? Are you pissed because he's stupid? Nothing forces you to use WMA or WMP for that matter - the fact that it ships with Windows is besides the point. CDex runs just fine on Windows, as far as I can tell. If anything it's lack of information, yes? And this gets your panties all in a bunch?
MP3 is the standard, nothing else should be supported, if only for clarity and simplicity reasons!
You are so right. We should also all use JPEG, because that's the One True Graphics Format. Or was it PNG? Or TGA? Or GIF? Hmmmmm.
See, here's the thing: WMA is a choice. If you're not smart enough to figure out that you can rip your music to something else then that's just too bad. People that push things like OGG champion choice - is this a case of "yes well, but that's not the choice we like"?
If anything else is ever supported, it should be OGG because OGG is essentially open source MP3
No, because that would cause confusion. You just said that.
I won't even go into the benchmarks that have proven WMA is better than MP3 at lower bitrates for most audio uses, or the fact that it's a far better streaming format than MP3. That would be besides the point. I don't like WMA or otherwise use it, but just to give you an example: if I had a player with a smallish 5 or 6GB drive that supported WMA I'd probably encode my collection to it at lower bitrates to fit more songs into the thing, and still get pretty much the same audio quality. That's called choice. Look it up.
Oh jeez. Hey, let's call it a day, mmkay?
The average is 7mb. That's 0.007% of Earth's. How low do you want to go before you call it "negligible"? And in any case I'm not trying to contest the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars, since we all know that water will boil there, right? Unless you picked that up from something I also didn't write.
hydrogen and oxygen why don't people ionise on a sunbed? Or on the beach?
I don't understand - are you comparing solar radiation striking Mars to a beach on earth?
will have an effect on the escape veocity of gases near the top of the atmosphere but otherwise does not significantly affect the small-scale molecular kinetics.
Ummmm. OK, so water won't be broken down by gravity (not that I'd... expect it to) but will allow it to escape into space. And what happens when it does that? Why is there far more argon there than H2O?
Plenty of UV radiation reaches the Earth's surface
Ozone ring a bell?
I'm sure you're way smarter than me, but you're also excellent at quoting out of context.
But I guess more importantly, are you saying that if I release enough water into the Martian atmosphere I'd get clouds and stuff? Because, well, water is just fine there, right? There just isn't enough of it?
I disagree. Mars does not have enough of an atmosphere for this to happen at high altitude. It'll more than likely happen at surface level.
you do frequently find optically thin clouds of ice crystals
CO2 crystals, not H2O. You would have heard about it in the news by now if a spectrometer detected a cloud of water in Mars (or anywhere else for that matter).
into countless tiny droplets above the kettle's spout
There's no kettle, no spout, no atmospheric pressure, little gravity and enough UV energy to give you a good tan in about 5 seconds. Beyond your third grade physics lesson, what exactly happens to the water under those circumstances?
If this wasn't the case and the theory of open water existing on Mars in past ages is right, Mars would be covered in beautiful blue clouds. Because the water would turn to steam and what are clouds made of again? It kinda breaks down, doesn't it?
So, water boils - regardless of temperature - when its vapor pressure equals the atmospheric pressure. So if you take your sealed pressurized bottle of Evian to Mars and you open it so that the pressure equalizes to that of the Martian atmosphere, the water will suddenly (and quite violently) reach its vapor pressure and boil.
The resulting "steam" will be steam for just a few seconds because the H2O molecules will be likely broken up by ultraviolet energy (a process called photodissociation). Mars has no atmosphere to speak of, so it has no pretection against UV.
It's possible there's a process other than photodissociation that gets to the water molecules first - I'm not sure. Low gravity also plays into it.
Yep.
Would it create something similar to steam, or would it just completely dissipate - in other words, would it covert to a gas, or would it just ... um ... cease to exist?
Not steam, no. Steam is still a form of water, like ice. The molecules simply decouple and turn into individual hydrogen and oxigen atoms (albeit it's possible there's some intermediate compound, I don't remember).
Water is water, no matter how much of it there is. Polar binding forces like van Der Walls are not likely to counteract that, AFAIK. Perhaps if you get into some freaky milling technology which creates something like polymer gels to make your mud. But then again if the martians are making their mud like that I don't think we want to get friendly with them.
Actually it would probably boil first. Freezing is a much slower process. The lack of atmospheric pressure would get to it long before the temperature ever did.
It can't be mud because of physics. Water cannot exist in free form in the surface of Mars because it would simply evaporate instantly (at least in most locations). Temperature and atmospheric pressure are the usual suspects here. And we do know what those are with a relatively high degree of certainty. Ergo, it can't be mud. It must be some sort of wacky sand, like montmorillonite. Data from the Mariner probes has detected a few dozen types of this clay. Maybe this is one we haven't seen before.
Water, if found, will be either in the poles or trapped in molecule-sized amounts in rocks under the surface, nominally because of some sort of organism like microscopic algae or fungus keeps it there as part of its organic cycle. The idea goes that if you find water there you're also likely to find some type of primitive life.
But I suggest we let the thing dig holes and stuff before we get all excited =)
It is, and that's good.
and hope that windows will one day be dethroned by free software
It won't, and that's also good.
Someone who takes the time to come up with a packaged version of linux designed to ease the pain of switching to new and non-cimputer savy people deserves respect in my book.
See: Lycoris; Xandros. Lindows is a stupid gimmick.
The you are free do do whatever you want as long as you do it this way approach.
Which is why Linux won't "dethrone" Windows any time soon. 90% of people who purchase computers don't want "freedom", they want functionality. Anything else is an LSD-induced high.
Lindow is not trademark infringment. Anyone with half a brain knows that Windows and Lindows are not the same word
Let me put it this way - if a pharmaceutical company came up with a penis enhancer called "Tindows" I doubt Microsoft would take notice. When Robertson the quack calls his operating system "Lindows" then we have a problem. The same way we'd have a problem with Pfizer if said pharmaceutical company had named their medicine "Piagra". Surely that's not too hard to understand, even for someone like you.
So please tell me, what is it about lindows that scares you so? Are you just against linux adoption in general?
I'm having a hard time figuring out why you think Lindows "scares me"? I don't give a flyin' hoot if Lindows succeeds or not. I want to see Linux become a player because that will make Windows better through competitive pressure, not because I think Linux is better, or even a viable alternative to Windows.
Hope that helps.
Lindows saw an opportunity to do what it does best - expell hot air and try to "stick it to the man".
undoubtedly too bitter a pill for Microsoft to take.
Microsoft should have just stood by and lose the suit by default. Yeah.
Microsoft filed suit against the website Michael Robertson, owner of Lindows and a strong anti-Microsoft voice, will undoubtedly be disappointed with the ruling.
Robertson is not a "strong anti-microsoft voice", he's a quack and a con. And I doubt he'll be disappointed since there are many other dumb childish things he can do to draw attention to his pointless "fight". Now all we need is for the courts to make him stop using the word "Lindows" and all will be well.
This guy is nothing more than a scab in the image of the people who work on open source software. He should concentrate on going public, running the company to the ground and walking away with a few dozen million like he did with MP3.com.
You, apparently, since you decided to reward us with your insight.
Several years ago mentioned that windows will look more and more like unix every version
Looks to me that Linux is looking more like Windows XP, but that's just me. As to "the backend", ideally Windows will continue to look more like what Dave Cutler intended it to be. We can only hope.
An example would be that there are several things that don't kick off or operate properly in windows until someone logs in
Whatever "group" you're working with don't know what the fuck they're doing. That's your problem. Unless you can tack developer/analyst/consultant stupidity on the OS vendor, which is relatively uncommon. But I guess you can do that if you want. I mean, it's a great anecdote if you want to make a point that "Windoze is teh sux". I think I'll start blaming RedHat or Debian every time my weekly Mozilla build fails, eh? It's so much easier!
ooohh, and he made me a foe. how fucking quaint. and "M$"? hahahaha!! brilliant.