"The site 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu is running thttpd/2.20c 21nov01 on Linux.
Linux users include Rackspace, www.dialtone.com, www.vasoftware.com and Borders.com
We have no uptime data for 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu at present, and cannot plot a graph.
The host 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu has been added to the list of sites that we may monitor. We will start monitoring 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu in the next daily monitoring cycle.
We will continue to monitor this host for a few days, to get enough values to plot a graph. After this time the host will not be monitored again unless it's requested again, or it is one of the most frequently requested hosts."
So for those that are intersted, keep checking this on Netcraft to see on the sitability of the wireless iPac as a hosting platform, you could even compare it to slashdot's uptime.
This is a debate which has been raging in Europe, and especially in the UK for a number of months. Here in the UK, On Digital, later ITV digital, were in direct competition with Rupert Murdoch's SKY satellite services. Yet the suspicion was that millions were being lost by ITV digital by the sale of pirate smart cards, which by the end of the service could be picked up at most car boot sales for about ten pounds, yet would unlock all the premium rate channels for the service. Normally these guys sell dodgy 3rd generation videos, so how did they mange to crack technology which was equivelant in security to the triple DES algorithm?. The following articles from The Guardian offer more information.
The Guardian is a left leading broadsheet in the UK which carries influence beyond its half million (UK) circulation figure. Yet it even devoted an editorial to this subject whcih can be read here;
You jest but...
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 4, Informative
John Lennon did actually record a track called "Two minutes of Silence", which has been covered by several bands including Soundgarden.
17 years earlier John Cage wrote "433", a work for no instruments which required the performer to walk onstage and do nothing for 4 minutes 33 seconds, there is an excellent introduction to Cage's work in this field in this Washington Post Article.
The LDAP server in question is the iPlanet (now Sun ONE) directory server and is generally regared as being one fo the best in the industry. The install is fairly painless (14 questions as I recall), certainly no harder than say a typical Oracle install. To configure it you have the choice of some nice configuration files, which are very similar to Open LDAP, or a rather nasty heavy weight Java console.
Before they gave a 200,000 licence version free in Solaris 8 and above, this used to cost a significant fee per user, I think the list price was around $10 per entry, even if you asume people payed 10% of that it is still an expensive product, and getting it free with Solaris 8 is a bargain.
The server itself is very stable (version 4.x and 5.1 at least). I have been running it for three years to manage almost 200,000 entries, we replicate the data to seven servers worldwide and service well in excess of 4 million searches every business day. The servers are fast (much faster than Oracle's LDAP interface, OpenLAP or Active Directory), not resource intensive and are very stable, on a par with Apache for stability rather than say Solaris itself but still good. I would highly recommend looking at this product again, if you are interested in building a corporate directory it may be worth getting an E220 or two just to get hold of this product.
"Multihead support in Xfree86 is lame, and needs lots of work. For programming, multihead is REALLY nice to have"
I have to disagree with this, multihead support seems to vary much more with Window Managers than with any XFree86 config. I currently use the default KDE window manager and I have to say it works with Xinerama excellently. In KDE 2.2.2 they got most things right, windows maximised on single or both screens (your choice), correct display of desktops in the panel and desktop pager etc. With KDE 3 they have fixed any dialog boxes which used to pop up between the two screens and I have yet to encounter any problems. Blackbox worked well for me too
I agree that using different resolution monitors did pose minor problems, but no more so than Windows 98 ever did (havn't tried XP).
Incidentially, for anyone looking for good wallpaper for dual screen displays, this site has a good selection, the image of the world at night is particularly nice.
This is an excellent point, well put. I would estimate there are now well over a hundred contributors to the Linux kernel ( as opposed to additional tools ) who have accepted the name as a convenient and legal trademark to use. If we want to talk about competing with commercial competitors we should remember that Linus spends some time and money defending the trademark of this OS. Also, if you read "Just for Fun", you may recall that this wasn't Linus' first choice of name, rather one that happened almost by accident.
I have a number of Solaris machines which I manage which probably have less closed source software than the Linux box I write this on (GCC, top etc. but no StarOffice or Netscape). Equally I know a number of Linux developers who work on Visual C++.
This argument has now become profoundly unhelpful. I would fully support the creation of a genuine Linux distribution based on only GNU tools, in fact I would be happy to subscribe to it as I do SuSE now. This would move the argument on from this playground stuff we see here to a fuller understanding of which parts of a typical distribution are distributed as genuinely free software and which we have to convince to change their licence or build a free alternative too (e.g. XFree86)
I have been running the KDE RC2 and RC3 releases on SuSE for some time and the final release for over a week now. I had to say I have had no problem installing any of them using YAST (yet another set-up tool, SuSEs config manager). All that was required is download the packages, select "Add Packages" in YAST, tick the required packages and hit F10 to install, YAST took care of the rest. After this all I had to change were the KDEDIR and WINDOWMANAGER attributes and startx booted directly into KD3.
The package does then ask you if you want to use your old KDE settings. I chose yes but I wonder if this was the right thing to do, if you do you will notice almost no changes visually, you may be better ajusting your setting to a more KDE3 look and feel.
The only problems I encountered were that a number of desktop icons (applinks) no longer worked. I haven't worked out a pattern to this, Netscpe 4.7 continued to run but 6.2 would not start. In every case manually recreating the link worked.
The main improvements for me have been;
The Konqueror Web Browser now has superb Javascript support and very good control on pop-up windows. It feels very fast, in many cases (but not all) faster than Mozilla 0.99 at page rendering.
KMail is now an excellent mail client, and much, much faster than Mozilla at reading IMAP mailboxes and messages. I haven't managed to corrupt any of my mailboxes yet, it seems to handle nested folders without the problems that older versions suffered from. The only think I found missing is support for LDAP autocomplete of mail addresses.
Support for dual screens / dual head graphics cards, this was good in KDE 2.22 but has been further improved in KDE3, I haven't found any prompt / dialogue boxes which are displayed across both screens.
The Konsole Terminal Emulator is much nicer, and works happily with anti aliased fonts. Font support is much better generally, and the Kate Editor XML extension is much appreciated.
I haven't managed to crash KDE3 yet, and spent 26 hours this weekend using it to upgrade 7 Solaris servers worldwide using about 20 terminal sessions plus several Java / X applications on 8 virtual desktops. As the main point of this release was the upgrade to Version 3 of the QT toolkit, I suspect we won't see all the benefits until 3.1 / 3.2, but all credit to the KDE team and testers for an excellent desktop management system and set of applications.
Why is it that there is genuine concern that the collapse of Anderson leaving only 4 large acounting firms eliminates competition, or the fact there are only 4 major retail banks in the UK is perceved to stifle competeition in the retail sector, or the EU recently found 7 vitamin manufactureres guily of operating a cartel, yet 2 processor manufacturers offers healthy competitio?. This can be healthy only in comparison with a single monopoly such as Micsosoft.
With AMD and Intel, we are in a complex monopoly position, where the two players may sometimes compete agressivly and at other times pursue similar strategies to drive up profits or remove rivals, did either of them really welcome Transmata as a third force in this marketplace?.
" I remember reading somewhere that 2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then? "
I think you will find that 1653 corresponds to the earliest date reasonably accurate temperature measurements were taken and recorded, so the quote should probably have read "2001 was the warmest year in the last 350 years". Ironically, it is this misunderstanding of statistics that Bjorn Lomborg goes to some length to discuss in the book you reference.
To study before that we have to look at tests such as lake bed pollen sediment analysis, to see now plant species have migrated in response to changing local climates. Climatic change is definitely occurring at present at a much faster rate than the past 1000 years. However, the link between this and CO2 is far more complex and difficult to prove.
The GPL covers only the code within an application. There are quite clearly more cases of why you wouldn't want to use the GPL than those who wish to compete or steal code.
The key example would be those who wish to promote a business method of network protocol. Suppose you invent a new networking protocol for a specific service and wish to have this protocol widely adapted. You may wish to produce an application to act as a reference client for this protocol, but the goal of this would be to encouage the adoption of the protocol rather than the inherent worth of your code. Licencing this under a Free BSD style licence would allow as many people as possible to use the code, adopting the protocol, without feeling they have to promote their improvements back to the community and their competitors. The protocol is standardised by the relevent RFC, but the client can then be incorperated by all for commercial or open source ends.
This has been the route taken by many early TCP on Intel solutions, and hasn't done the cause of TCP/IP too much harm. The GPL has been a major force for good in software licencing, but true freedom has to mean freedom of choice in the work we produce,including its licencing. After all FreeBSD is still going strong, despite all the horror stories we hear about how Microsoft could take it over at any time.
I was offered one of the devices a few months ago by a friend who regularly commultes between London and the Far East. As a big GBA fan (apart from the screen) I was interested as this seemed to offer me a way to play a number of the games I own without having to carry all the cartridgees on long distance flights etc. However, the cost for a four cartridge version ($160) seemed to be the same as the four cartridges themselves, a heavy premium to pay for portability.
On expressing my concern he explained that were a high number of sites where I could download game ROMS to the device from the internet, a list of which would normally be supplied with the device. Basically, I would be able to download hundreds of games and play four for free at any one time.
I turned down the offer at this point. I personally feel that game boy advance games are way overpriced, as is Microsoft software. However, as is the case with MS Software, the terms on which it is purchased are clearly understood at the point of purchase. Microsoft may also have more complex tectics, which involve giving away some products, e.g. Internet Explorer which must have cost many millions to develop, in order to dominate a larger marketplace, i.e. the Internet.
Nintendo are clear about what they want to do, namely develop games to a clear policy (i.e. generally friendly to small children with limited fighting and gore), and sell them at a profit with control over price and distribution.
The choice for the consumer is clear, do I buy into this or not?. It has been clear since the days of Nintendo's 16 bit machines, with very few, if any , fighting games being ported to these consoles. As a parent of small children, I appreciate a company who are going to so explicitly state their gouidelines at the outset, so I can make my own choices about purchasing their products.
This device may be used to circumvent this policy to allow developer to develop their own games for the GBA, but 99% of the market has to be to copy other's games. This cannot be the way forward, we should never encourage the critisism of Microsoft to be directed to bypassing security in Windows XP, but into develping alternatives. Equallly, using the DCMA against this product may be wrong, but products which promote piracy of commercial software do not encourage people to act against the right targets.
The UCL - Space Sciences posting linked to above is an excellent introduction to both the technical capability and the commercail terms that most of the major earth imaging satellite systems work to. It also has some good descriptions on the legal restrictions on imaging specific areas of the
globe and the impact on the aerial photography market. The document starts with a clear copyright statement and a very limited distribution list, so it may not be there for too long!.
The University College London Geography Department hosts an excellent web site for those interested in remote sensing but also produce some excellent visualisations of the internet and world wide web, the site can be found at http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/.
As a dedicated SuSe user, I thought I would give this a quick try and compare the two as both are KDE centric distributions.
In terms of the basic components, Suse seems to have a slight edge, shipping Kernel 2.4.4 compared to 2.4.2, KDE 2.1.2 compared to 2.1.0 and the same release of Xfree86 (4.0.3). SuSE seem to go further with shipping of Samba 2.2 and a personal firewall product, which must give them a much higher security rating than Caldera. SuSE have also been very quick to release updates for KDE, their automated update tool recently updated KDE 2.1.2 to 2.2. for me and I believe 2.2.1 is now available for download.
Both distributions integrate admin functionality into the KDE Control Center and I think Caldera have done a much more comprehensive job then SuSE on this to date. However, this can be a mixed blessing. I still prefer to drop out of X and use YAST 1 for system administration, which is SuSE's text based administration tool.This functionality seemed lacking in Caldara, perhaps deliberatly.
I have been very impressed with SuSEs hardware detection, the only problem I have found recently was with a modem on a IBM Thinkpad (although Windows 2000 also failed to detect this correctly). Installing Caldara posed no problems, altough this is based on a sample of one old IBM PC.
SuSE wins in terms of default telnet and FTP servers, but again I suspect this is a design decision. Although not enabled by default, both are very easy to configure and I find the ability to telnet and FTP to my work PC when working from home one of the strongest selling points of Linux generally.
Both graphical installers are good, although Caldera have the edge. However, I wonder how useful this is. Ideally you should see a graphical installer once and then use a PC for 3 years without seeing it again. However, if this is aimed at the corporate market it may be that people setting up 100's of PCs want some eye candy, but even then there comes a point where excessive graphics cease to be useful and simply become irriating.
The snapshots feature in Caldara looks useful and is one I hope other vendors copy.
Overall, if you are looking for a KDE centric distribution, I think SuSE still edges it, in terms of the frequency and range of packages and updates. For users who like to run and administer their own systems SuSE wins every time for me. However, for the corporate market Caldera is aiming at, where administrators like to supply users with locked down desktops, I think Caldera have done a great job and you have to wish them every success in this area.
Actually, it was meant simply as an observation, not a general comment on the general status of all Windows and Linux installations. I have been using Windows since 3.0 and Linux for about 3 years. When I started the install I thourougly expected to spend about 2 days getting X to work under Linux and about 3 hours getting Windows to work. It is a tribute to the work of Dirk and all the contributors to the XFree86 that the X included with SuSE recognised both the Laptop Video card and the Matrox multiheaded card in my Compaq box.
The five hours of downloads were really caused by Windows not recognising the Network or Modem card in the Thinkpad, so I had to boot the machine into Linux, find and download the correct drivers from IBM, copy to floppy and then copy into Windows from the floppy to install. Once I had done this the IBM drivers site was excellent for picking up the remaining Video drivers, which are now working very nicely.
So perhaps the more genaral observation, based on this very small sample size, is that a modern Linux distribution, specifically SuSE according to this sample, can be considered equivelent to Windows 2000 in it's detection and installation of device drivers on a very small sample of machines, nothing more, nothing less.
Dirk used to work at Deutsche Bank where he was head of Unix Strategy. You can see a short biography of him at the main SuSe site.
He was heavily involved in the XFree86 project, which SuSE have supported for a number of years, in addition to their support for KDE, OpenLDAP etc.. There is an interview with him at Changelog.
I think he will be missed at SuSE but they employ over 220 people worldwide and support many more development effors, while making a profit, so don't write them off on the basis of this announcement.
I am currently running SuSE 7.2 on both my PC and Laptop. It is the best distribution I have used to date and the Support for XFree86 and KDE2.x is useful and appreciated. One interesting observation concerns a recent install I did on my IBM X21 Laptop, when SuSE was installed from DVD it installed completely in under an hour and correctly recognised network card and video Driver. Installing Windows 2000 on the other partition failed to recognise network or video card, it took 5 hours of downloads to fix this. Power management also works a treat on the laptop by defaut, credit and thanks to SuSE for this, and good luck for the future.
I disagree. I know a number of people who ask this question for technical posts but I believe the answer can still be wrong. When I first started in IT, some 10 years ago, I came from a background of running a home Machine (Atari, BBC, Atari again, IBM). Now I employ a team of staff who are all over 30 in age and home PC choice is relativly unimportant. Some of the best people I employ regard their home life as time to be spent with children, family and friends. Because, as an employer I give them the freedom to do that, I can benefit from people who are committed to the job I employ then to do because it funds their lifestyle. Plus there are so many advantages to employing people who can see the fundamental problems in IT remain the same, just the solutions (Cobol, C++, Perl, Java (.net???)) change.
Linux on a watch seems like an excellent idea in itself, but bulky digital watches have to provide some application beyond simply telling the time and scheduling appointments to be cool. I am the proud owner of a Casio Protrek GPS watch which has to be one of the largest and ugliest watches ever created (See the image here), yet gets far more attention than your average Rolex. The new Casio camera and MP3 watches are also looking good.
So a Linux watch that ran MAME or even Mozilla via the IR link would have enough street cred to allow you to answer the "wow, what a huge watch, what does it do, is it an electronic tag, are you on parole?" type questions. Something that size that allows you have a to-do list unfortunatly dosn't.
The massive growth in "free" internet service providers has to be good news for growth of the UK Internet, a huge range of suppliers, from Elecrical Retailers to Supermarkets are now offering free internet access, this weekend I went to Toys R Us and Tescos Supermarket, both had heavy promotion on thier "Free Internet Access"
However, I believe that most suppliers are not in the market simply to gain revenue from phone calls. Dixons, the electrical retailer who set up the most popular of these services "Freeserve", which has 1.5 million members compared to AOLs 750K, did so largely in response to worries that companies such as Dell, who sell direct to customers via the internet and phone, would erode the market share of their store based retail network. Most of the free ISP's direct users to there own portals, usually featuring heavy advertising. I would imagine that Tescos and MSN have a similar marketing strategy.
The company that stands to lose most from this in the UK is AOL, who continue to charge between 10 and 15 pounds to use their services. AOL has been experimenting with with free 0800 access to it's services and is lobbying for a reduction in local phone calls to help it compete. In a seperate trial, Surry based LocalTel are offering free internet access and free off peak calls if you sign up for telephone calls with them, although this is a limited service at present.
Now, if the UK could get cheap or free ISDN or Cable modem access sorted out.....
I think a statue would be worthwhile for a number of reasons. Britain has a number of memorials to Generals and other wartime "heroes", it would be nice to honour a man who's contribution to a war was in the application of intelligence rather than high explosive, something which is particularly relevant to the current war is the Balkans. It would also serve to remind us of how shamefully he was treated by the British authorities, the law changing the homosexual age of consent has not been passed yet, and the recent debate in the hose of Lords shows that homophobia is alive and well in the UK almost 50 years after his death.
As for American corporations contributing to the statue, it is worth remembering that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle etc. employ thousands of people in the UK who make a contribution to their profits, it is not unreasonable to ask then to contribute to this.
But perhaps the most fitting monument would be to cast a 12 inch bronze figure and put on the inscription "Funded by the UK Computer Industry". From Alan Turing to Frank Whittle, Britain has a long tradition of producing fine inventors and then persecuting or ignoring then. It's a tradition we could do without.
Is DG/UX dead and burried?, DG are still advertising it on their web site. I have to disagree that is was a worse OS than SCO Unix, it had excellent disk management tools and hapily ran SAMBA, NFS, sendmail and web servers. I set my first ever web server up on a DGUX AViiON and we had an UPTIME of 300 days on a busy public site.
By contrast SCO is awful. I think it must be the only UNIX that sells TCP/IP as an option and it is very poorly documented. Support was poor and the longest UPTIME we managed was about 7 days. However, I suspect Data General may agree with you that DG/UX is worse, I see you can buy AViiONs pre-configured with DG/UX, SCO Unix or Windows NT, an excellent choice which should satisfy every user.
Slashdot Mirror
From Netcraft
"The site 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu is running thttpd/2.20c 21nov01 on Linux.
Linux users include Rackspace, www.dialtone.com, www.vasoftware.com and Borders.com
We have no uptime data for 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu at present, and cannot plot a graph.
The host 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu has been added to the list of sites that we may monitor. We will start monitoring 24-6-206.wireless.lcs.mit.edu in the next daily monitoring cycle.
We will continue to monitor this host for a few days, to get enough values to plot a graph. After this time the host will not be monitored again unless it's requested again, or it is one of the most frequently requested hosts."
So for those that are intersted, keep checking this on Netcraft to see on the sitability of the wireless iPac as a hosting platform, you could even compare it to slashdot's uptime.
This is a debate which has been raging in Europe, and especially in the UK for a number of months. Here in the UK, On Digital, later ITV digital, were in direct competition with Rupert Murdoch's SKY satellite services. Yet the suspicion was that millions were being lost by ITV digital by the sale of pirate smart cards, which by the end of the service could be picked up at most car boot sales for about ten pounds, yet would unlock all the premium rate channels for the service. Normally these guys sell dodgy 3rd generation videos, so how did they mange to crack technology which was equivelant in security to the triple DES algorithm?. The following articles from The Guardian offer more information.
How codebreakers cracked the secrets of the smart card and Murdoch security chief linked to TV piracy site.
The Guardian is a left leading broadsheet in the UK which carries influence beyond its half million (UK) circulation figure. Yet it even devoted an editorial to this subject whcih can be read here;
Breaking the code - Piracy on the digital airwaves.
John Lennon did actually record a track called "Two minutes of Silence", which has been covered by several bands including Soundgarden.
17 years earlier John Cage wrote "433", a work for no instruments which required the performer to walk onstage and do nothing for 4 minutes 33 seconds, there is an excellent introduction to Cage's work in this field in this Washington Post Article.
The LDAP server in question is the iPlanet (now Sun ONE) directory server and is generally regared as being one fo the best in the industry. The install is fairly painless (14 questions as I recall), certainly no harder than say a typical Oracle install. To configure it you have the choice of some nice configuration files, which are very similar to Open LDAP, or a rather nasty heavy weight Java console.
Before they gave a 200,000 licence version free in Solaris 8 and above, this used to cost a significant fee per user, I think the list price was around $10 per entry, even if you asume people payed 10% of that it is still an expensive product, and getting it free with Solaris 8 is a bargain.
The server itself is very stable (version 4.x and 5.1 at least). I have been running it for three years to manage almost 200,000 entries, we replicate the data to seven servers worldwide and service well in excess of 4 million searches every business day. The servers are fast (much faster than Oracle's LDAP interface, OpenLAP or Active Directory), not resource intensive and are very stable, on a par with Apache for stability rather than say Solaris itself but still good. I would highly recommend looking at this product again, if you are interested in building a corporate directory it may be worth getting an E220 or two just to get hold of this product.
"I mean they've had microsparc, hypersparc, supersparc, turbosparc and now ultrasparc, what's next?"
...
Intel Itanium (TM)
"Multihead support in Xfree86 is lame, and needs lots of work. For programming, multihead is REALLY nice to have"
I have to disagree with this, multihead support seems to vary much more with Window Managers than with any XFree86 config. I currently use the default KDE window manager and I have to say it works with Xinerama excellently. In KDE 2.2.2 they got most things right, windows maximised on single or both screens (your choice), correct display of desktops in the panel and desktop pager etc. With KDE 3 they have fixed any dialog boxes which used to pop up between the two screens and I have yet to encounter any problems. Blackbox worked well for me too
I agree that using different resolution monitors did pose minor problems, but no more so than Windows 98 ever did (havn't tried XP).
Incidentially, for anyone looking for good wallpaper for dual screen displays, this site has a good selection, the image of the world at night is particularly nice.
This is an excellent point, well put. I would estimate there are now well over a hundred contributors to the Linux kernel ( as opposed to additional tools ) who have accepted the name as a convenient and legal trademark to use. If we want to talk about competing with commercial competitors we should remember that Linus spends some time and money defending the trademark of this OS. Also, if you read "Just for Fun", you may recall that this wasn't Linus' first choice of name, rather one that happened almost by accident.
I have a number of Solaris machines which I manage which probably have less closed source software than the Linux box I write this on (GCC, top etc. but no StarOffice or Netscape). Equally I know a number of Linux developers who work on Visual C++.
This argument has now become profoundly unhelpful. I would fully support the creation of a genuine Linux distribution based on only GNU tools, in fact I would be happy to subscribe to it as I do SuSE now. This would move the argument on from this playground stuff we see here to a fuller understanding of which parts of a typical distribution are distributed as genuinely free software and which we have to convince to change their licence or build a free alternative too (e.g. XFree86)
The package does then ask you if you want to use your old KDE settings. I chose yes but I wonder if this was the right thing to do, if you do you will notice almost no changes visually, you may be better ajusting your setting to a more KDE3 look and feel.
The only problems I encountered were that a number of desktop icons (applinks) no longer worked. I haven't worked out a pattern to this, Netscpe 4.7 continued to run but 6.2 would not start. In every case manually recreating the link worked.
The main improvements for me have been;
I haven't managed to crash KDE3 yet, and spent 26 hours this weekend using it to upgrade 7 Solaris servers worldwide using about 20 terminal sessions plus several Java / X applications on 8 virtual desktops. As the main point of this release was the upgrade to Version 3 of the QT toolkit, I suspect we won't see all the benefits until 3.1 / 3.2, but all credit to the KDE team and testers for an excellent desktop management system and set of applications.
Why is it that there is genuine concern that the collapse of Anderson leaving only 4 large acounting firms eliminates competition, or the fact there are only 4 major retail banks in the UK is perceved to stifle competeition in the retail sector, or the EU recently found 7 vitamin manufactureres guily of operating a cartel, yet 2 processor manufacturers offers healthy competitio?. This can be healthy only in comparison with a single monopoly such as Micsosoft.
With AMD and Intel, we are in a complex monopoly position, where the two players may sometimes compete agressivly and at other times pursue similar strategies to drive up profits or remove rivals, did either of them really welcome Transmata as a third force in this marketplace?.
" I remember reading somewhere that 2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then? "
I think you will find that 1653 corresponds to the earliest date reasonably accurate temperature measurements were taken and recorded, so the quote should probably have read "2001 was the warmest year in the last 350 years". Ironically, it is this misunderstanding of statistics that Bjorn Lomborg goes to some length to discuss in the book you reference.
To study before that we have to look at tests such as lake bed pollen sediment analysis, to see now plant species have migrated in response to changing local climates. Climatic change is definitely occurring at present at a much faster rate than the past 1000 years. However, the link between this and CO2 is far more complex and difficult to prove.
The GPL covers only the code within an application. There are quite clearly more cases of why you wouldn't want to use the GPL than those who wish to compete or steal code.
The key example would be those who wish to promote a business method of network protocol. Suppose you invent a new networking protocol for a specific service and wish to have this protocol widely adapted. You may wish to produce an application to act as a reference client for this protocol, but the goal of this would be to encouage the adoption of the protocol rather than the inherent worth of your code. Licencing this under a Free BSD style licence would allow as many people as possible to use the code, adopting the protocol, without feeling they have to promote their improvements back to the community and their competitors. The protocol is standardised by the relevent RFC, but the client can then be incorperated by all for commercial or open source ends.
This has been the route taken by many early TCP on Intel solutions, and hasn't done the cause of TCP/IP too much harm. The GPL has been a major force for good in software licencing, but true freedom has to mean freedom of choice in the work we produce,including its licencing. After all FreeBSD is still going strong, despite all the horror stories we hear about how Microsoft could take it over at any time.
I was offered one of the devices a few months ago by a friend who regularly commultes between London and the Far East. As a big GBA fan (apart from the screen) I was interested as this seemed to offer me a way to play a number of the games I own without having to carry all the cartridgees on long distance flights etc. However, the cost for a four cartridge version ($160) seemed to be the same as the four cartridges themselves, a heavy premium to pay for portability.
On expressing my concern he explained that were a high number of sites where I could download game ROMS to the device from the internet, a list of which would normally be supplied with the device. Basically, I would be able to download hundreds of games and play four for free at any one time.
I turned down the offer at this point. I personally feel that game boy advance games are way overpriced, as is Microsoft software. However, as is the case with MS Software, the terms on which it is purchased are clearly understood at the point of purchase. Microsoft may also have more complex tectics, which involve giving away some products, e.g. Internet Explorer which must have cost many millions to develop, in order to dominate a larger marketplace, i.e. the Internet.
Nintendo are clear about what they want to do, namely develop games to a clear policy (i.e. generally friendly to small children with limited fighting and gore), and sell them at a profit with control over price and distribution.
The choice for the consumer is clear, do I buy into this or not?. It has been clear since the days of Nintendo's 16 bit machines, with very few, if any , fighting games being ported to these consoles. As a parent of small children, I appreciate a company who are going to so explicitly state their gouidelines at the outset, so I can make my own choices about purchasing their products.
This device may be used to circumvent this policy to allow developer to develop their own games for the GBA, but 99% of the market has to be to copy other's games. This cannot be the way forward, we should never encourage the critisism of Microsoft to be directed to bypassing security in Windows XP, but into develping alternatives. Equallly, using the DCMA against this product may be wrong, but products which promote piracy of commercial software do not encourage people to act against the right targets.
Enough well intentioned (I HOPE) rant for now...
The UCL - Space Sciences posting linked to above is an excellent introduction to both the technical capability and the commercail terms that most of the major earth imaging satellite systems work to. It also has some good descriptions on the legal restrictions on imaging specific areas of the globe and the impact on the aerial photography market. The document starts with a clear copyright statement and a very limited distribution list, so it may not be there for too long!.
The University College London Geography Department hosts an excellent web site for those interested in remote sensing but also produce some excellent visualisations of the internet and world wide web, the site can be found at http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/.
> i'm so sure you're all thinking 'real coders use VI' ;-)
Actually, many of us are thinking 'real coders use EMACS, I'm sure there's nothing controversial there....
As a dedicated SuSe user, I thought I would give this a quick try and compare the two as both are KDE centric distributions.
In terms of the basic components, Suse seems to have a slight edge, shipping Kernel 2.4.4 compared to 2.4.2, KDE 2.1.2 compared to 2.1.0 and the same release of Xfree86 (4.0.3). SuSE seem to go further with shipping of Samba 2.2 and a personal firewall product, which must give them a much higher security rating than Caldera. SuSE have also been very quick to release updates for KDE, their automated update tool recently updated KDE 2.1.2 to 2.2. for me and I believe 2.2.1 is now available for download.
Both distributions integrate admin functionality into the KDE Control Center and I think Caldera have done a much more comprehensive job then SuSE on this to date. However, this can be a mixed blessing. I still prefer to drop out of X and use YAST 1 for system administration, which is SuSE's text based administration tool.This functionality seemed lacking in Caldara, perhaps deliberatly.
I have been very impressed with SuSEs hardware detection, the only problem I have found recently was with a modem on a IBM Thinkpad (although Windows 2000 also failed to detect this correctly). Installing Caldara posed no problems, altough this is based on a sample of one old IBM PC.
SuSE wins in terms of default telnet and FTP servers, but again I suspect this is a design decision. Although not enabled by default, both are very easy to configure and I find the ability to telnet and FTP to my work PC when working from home one of the strongest selling points of Linux generally.
Both graphical installers are good, although Caldera have the edge. However, I wonder how useful this is. Ideally you should see a graphical installer once and then use a PC for 3 years without seeing it again. However, if this is aimed at the corporate market it may be that people setting up 100's of PCs want some eye candy, but even then there comes a point where excessive graphics cease to be useful and simply become irriating.
The snapshots feature in Caldara looks useful and is one I hope other vendors copy.
Overall, if you are looking for a KDE centric distribution, I think SuSE still edges it, in terms of the frequency and range of packages and updates. For users who like to run and administer their own systems SuSE wins every time for me. However, for the corporate market Caldera is aiming at, where administrators like to supply users with locked down desktops, I think Caldera have done a great job and you have to wish them every success in this area.
Actually, it was meant simply as an observation, not a general comment on the general status of all Windows and Linux installations. I have been using Windows since 3.0 and Linux for about 3 years. When I started the install I thourougly expected to spend about 2 days getting X to work under Linux and about 3 hours getting Windows to work. It is a tribute to the work of Dirk and all the contributors to the XFree86 that the X included with SuSE recognised both the Laptop Video card and the Matrox multiheaded card in my Compaq box.
The five hours of downloads were really caused by Windows not recognising the Network or Modem card in the Thinkpad, so I had to boot the machine into Linux, find and download the correct drivers from IBM, copy to floppy and then copy into Windows from the floppy to install. Once I had done this the IBM drivers site was excellent for picking up the remaining Video drivers, which are now working very nicely.
So perhaps the more genaral observation, based on this very small sample size, is that a modern Linux distribution, specifically SuSE according to this sample, can be considered equivelent to Windows 2000 in it's detection and installation of device drivers on a very small sample of machines, nothing more, nothing less.
Dirk used to work at Deutsche Bank where he was head of Unix Strategy. You can see a short biography of him at the main SuSe site.
He was heavily involved in the XFree86 project, which SuSE have supported for a number of years, in addition to their support for KDE, OpenLDAP etc.. There is an interview with him at Changelog.
I think he will be missed at SuSE but they employ over 220 people worldwide and support many more development effors, while making a profit, so don't write them off on the basis of this announcement.
I am currently running SuSE 7.2 on both my PC and Laptop. It is the best distribution I have used to date and the Support for XFree86 and KDE2.x is useful and appreciated.
One interesting observation concerns a recent install I did on my IBM X21 Laptop, when SuSE was installed from DVD it installed completely in under an hour and correctly recognised network card and video Driver. Installing Windows 2000 on the other partition failed to recognise network or video card, it took 5 hours of downloads to fix this. Power management also works a treat on the laptop by defaut, credit and thanks to SuSE for this, and good luck for the future.
I disagree. I know a number of people who ask this question for technical posts but I believe the answer can still be wrong. When I first started in IT, some 10 years ago, I came from a background of running a home Machine (Atari, BBC, Atari again, IBM). Now I employ a team of staff who are all over 30 in age and home PC choice is relativly unimportant. Some of the best people I employ regard their home life as time to be spent with children, family and friends. Because, as an employer I give them the freedom to do that, I can benefit from people who are committed to the job I employ then to do because it funds their lifestyle. Plus there are so many advantages to employing people who can see the fundamental problems in IT remain the same, just the solutions (Cobol, C++, Perl, Java (.net???)) change.
Linux on a watch seems like an excellent idea in itself, but bulky digital watches have to provide some application beyond simply telling the time and scheduling appointments to be cool. I am the proud owner of a Casio Protrek GPS watch which has to be one of the largest and ugliest watches ever created (See the image here), yet gets far more attention than your average Rolex. The new Casio camera and MP3 watches are also looking good.
So a Linux watch that ran MAME or even Mozilla via the IR link would have enough street cred to allow you to answer the "wow, what a huge watch, what does it do, is it an electronic tag, are you on parole?" type questions. Something that size that allows you have a to-do list unfortunatly dosn't.
However, I believe that most suppliers are not in the market simply to gain revenue from phone calls. Dixons, the electrical retailer who set up the most popular of these services "Freeserve", which has 1.5 million members compared to AOLs 750K, did so largely in response to worries that companies such as Dell, who sell direct to customers via the internet and phone, would erode the market share of their store based retail network. Most of the free ISP's direct users to there own portals, usually featuring heavy advertising. I would imagine that Tescos and MSN have a similar marketing strategy.
The company that stands to lose most from this in the UK is AOL, who continue to charge between 10 and 15 pounds to use their services. AOL has been experimenting with with free 0800 access to it's services and is lobbying for a reduction in local phone calls to help it compete. In a seperate trial, Surry based LocalTel are offering free internet access and free off peak calls if you sign up for telephone calls with them, although this is a limited service at present.
Now, if the UK could get cheap or free ISDN or Cable modem access sorted out.....
I think a statue would be worthwhile for a number of reasons. Britain has a number of memorials to Generals and other wartime
"heroes", it would be nice to honour a man who's contribution to a war was in the application of intelligence rather than high
explosive, something which is particularly relevant to the current war is the Balkans. It would also serve to remind us of how
shamefully he was treated by the British authorities, the law changing the homosexual age of consent has not been passed yet,
and the recent debate in the hose of Lords shows that homophobia is alive and well in the UK almost 50 years after his death.
As for American corporations contributing to the statue, it is worth remembering that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle etc. employ
thousands of people in the UK who make a contribution to their profits, it is not unreasonable to ask then to contribute to this.
But perhaps the most fitting monument would be to cast a 12 inch bronze figure and put on the inscription "Funded by the UK
Computer Industry". From Alan Turing to Frank Whittle, Britain has a long tradition of producing fine inventors and then
persecuting or ignoring then. It's a tradition we could do without.
Is DG/UX dead and burried?, DG are still advertising it on their web site. I have to disagree that is was a worse OS than SCO Unix, it had excellent disk management tools and hapily ran SAMBA, NFS, sendmail and web servers. I set my first ever web server up on a DGUX AViiON and we had an UPTIME of 300 days on a busy public site.
By contrast SCO is awful. I think it must be the only UNIX that sells TCP/IP as an option and it is very poorly documented. Support was poor and the longest UPTIME we managed was about 7 days. However, I suspect Data General may agree with you that DG/UX is worse, I see you can buy AViiONs pre-configured with DG/UX, SCO Unix or Windows NT, an excellent choice which should satisfy every user.