It's the only "large" commercial distro left in Europe, since SuSE now belongs to Novell. I don't mean to flame the US, but I sort of feel it's good for distros to be seperated in different countries, as crazy as that may sound.
I think the only reliable method of biometric data would be to include a DNA sample in one's passport and then use a device a la the ones in the Gattaca movie to take a small blood/hair/skin sample at the airport or where ever. The others are either too simply faked (fingerprint testing) or open to abuse (face recognition) unless only used as confirming factors in a passport, not as a replacement for the actual passport itself.
I have just read two articles by you, linked from slashdot, the site you love to hate because simply no one likes you or your opinions, which, to me, is what it seems to boil down to. I was amazed on your wild theories of OS security, mainly because I use OSX (which really isn't the same thing as System6), OpenBSD and Windows XP at home, and while recently reinstalling Windows XP on my new Dell (I was dumb enough to have it connected directly to the internet) it got rooted before I even had a chance to get to Windows Update. I somehow think you have no idea just how bad the security is on Windows (At my last job I was a system admin for a small company with 20 WinXP machines).
Mac OSX isn't perfect, and Apple has let some nasty bugs siip into the OS from time to time, but I have peace of mind at home because I don't have to worry that the Firewall isn't on by default etc. Don't get me wrong, I find Windows ok if correctly maintained and you're right about Apple zealots bashing Windows for no real reason, but you give the impression of doing exactly the same thing form the other side.
Maybe it's time to visit the doctor and get the EEG checked out.
Peace and Love Lance, say hi to Darl when you get to the clinic.
This law is an EU wide law and therefore applies to all member countries, including from next year (2004) at least some of the Spammers favourite countries such as Poland, Estonia etc.
I must admit, as a CIO of a Netware/Windows shop that is moving some of its server space over to Linux that I have been at first worried, and now simply utterly confused as to what SCO is actually trying to achieve with these extremely inconsistent public attacks on allmost all areas of the industry remotely related to SCO. First it was IBM, then it was Linux, then it was faked copyright issues at that conference earlier this year, then it was Novell and now it's the GPL.
Does SCO have any idea what this actually sounds like to serious professionals in the industry? People who were worried are now simply shaking their heads, and this letter claiming that the GPL is somehow against copyrights is simply misleading. Even I know that. I can read the GPL, and what I see, and what most lawyers will probably see is that the GPL is a software licence. It in no way damages copyrights as these are kept by the individual authors. It also has nothing to do with software patents. Does SCO actually know that even if the GPL were to be deemed invalid that it would make itself open to thousands of claims of copyright abuse by all the open source developers whose software SCO has distributed/is distributing?
I find this whole matter to be irritating. Rest assured that I will never recommend SCO software in any form, as SCO seems highly irresponsable at best.
What a joke. SCO is simply amazing in its childish fantasies.
In the interest of continuing cooperation and in helping to improve security for all essential Free Software infrastructure, and despite important philosophical differences, we are working closely with Debian project members to find the perpetrators and to secure essential Free Software infrastructure for the future.
This just had to have RMS invloved, managing to get his bigoted statements in, even when the system has been compromised.
Damn man, you've been rooted and you can think of nothing better to say than that you have "important philosophical differences" with the rest of the OSS world, but that you will be OH SO GENEROUS and actually bother to talk to some people who don't get all hyped up when they say Linux and not GNU/Linux.
That is why your fuckshit GNU/Hurd is still where it is you pompous clown.
Damn right. The Phil Greenspun prick claims that that shit is state of the art IT-development. Bullshit. It's an excuse to pay someone a lot of money for fuck all.
I'm not even American and I shudder with rage reading this bullshit. So basically what he is saying that he and his crew were simply too fucking lazy and stupid to do anything else than use Microsoft's software because Gartner, which is known to be the biggest bunch of brainless thieving fucks in the so called consulting industry, said to do so, and then to go and outsource the whole fucking thing to save the extra money that was spent on buying Microsoft software.
Con-fucken-gratulations
But the best and most violently disgusting bit is when he says that this state of the art course at MIt is basically telling those MIT CS students who pay around $29k a year, that they will have no fuckin jobs when they leave.
This must give the word "student" a whole new meaning: Future MacJob applicant!
If it was me I would organise a lynch mob on campus for pricks like this. Then I would leave school at take a course on plumbing.
I have no idea if Apple could or would make a Tablet, but if they did, this is what I would want/not want: 1.Larger than current PDA's and smaller than current Tablets. PDA's are a pain to do quick writing on and Tablet PC's weighing over a kilo are a pain to hold in the crook of your arm. Apple's larget Newton was about right. 2.A high resolution display so that I can write down notes that will be readable just easily as pen on paper is. 3.Fuck handwriting recognition. The only handwriting recognition I need is for the title of the paper.My handwriting, and that of many students, is so illegible to others than no OCR programme on earth can read it, but I can, and that's what's important. 4.An application that works just like an block of paper, where I can just tap a corner to get to the next sheet and back again. Apple had an application like this in the classic Mac OS called notes or something. This should have the ability to save any section of the written/sketched papers as a single file. It should allow basic high res sketching in a few colours as well. 5.An art sketching application that supports natural media like inks (Think Corel's Painter, but not so bloated -- Alias Sketchbook perhaps) and layers for artists who just want to draw and not have to fuck with the computer. 6.Around 20GB of harddrive space like the iPod. i.e. a tiny hard drive. 7.Voice recording. 8.USB or Firewire for Digicam and data transfer. 9.Wireless data sync with a Mac or PC, but easily done like iSync.
And thats it. I wouldn't want a browser or email, but I suppose most would, so make that around 6 applications.
Nice and light, handy and simple, just like that block of paper and pen that always works.
I just read the heise.de forums and the overall tone of the posters is disbelief and viscious anger. On the one hand they're angry that their politicians could bend over so easily and on the other they're hopping mad that the Americans would apply so much political pressure to do this.
I'll say this for you anks. There is literally no other country on earth that makes enemies and loses allies as well as your country is presently doing.
In light of the recent Debian break in, where the core servers were rooted and a rootkit installed on other machines, and all this using ldap for user authentification, I think Apple is making a huge mistake. All it needs is a couple of apple machines to be rooted by an exploit based on this and Apple will be in the same sorry boat that MS is in.
(And for the zealots, I'm posting this from a G4 PB so STFU thanks.)
As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."
To the contrary, I think this is highly typical of the culture we have today, where everything is a transient fad in the media, technology and politics.
And it is also self feeding, I think, since market forces need to clear out the old to make room for the new in order to meet sales forecasts and shareholder expectations. And this is very true for pop, news and technology, which explains the lack of staying power of pop icons these days and becomes interesting when you want to ask yourself if you really need that new 3GHz machine just to surf the web.
And it is highly convenient in politics where a politician doesn't have to be accountable for what he said 100 days ago.
And so, the lack of long time life on the web is simply symbolic of all the rest here really, even if it is highly questionable.
(Slightly off topic, but there has been some discussion of the SC's failure here) I think that the Sonic Cruiser was possibly introduced as a mainly vapourware device to forestall interest in the Airbus 380 when it was first introduced in the late 90's. I remember quite a lot of turmoil going on over at Boeing when the A380 concept was announced and one should remember that there were no programmes or anything at the time. They were all simply concept studies which cost a lot less than actually starting an engineering programme.
Boeing talked for a while about making an extended upper deck version of the 747, called the 747X IIRC, but it was eventually shelved, I assume for engineering reasons as well as the feeling that it would not work financially. I remember some discussion that the wing of the 747 would have had to be redesigned to support the load which would have meant basically a new airplane.
Boeing the came up with the Sonic Cruiser, I think mainly to have something to show at the Paris airshow in 96 or 98 so as not to be totally out in the cold when Airbus announced full commitment to the A380. I was never sure just how serious Boeing were to the SC, as the concept had a some plusses (slightly higher speed but not radically more so -- around 100 mph faster) but a lot of questions, such as not having much passenger space compared to other widebodies and questionable fuel efficiency.
And so today we have the A380 coming in two years and no SC. To it's credit Boeing has made a lot of mileage out of the 737 line with newer versions continuing to sell very well and compete well against the A320 family in the regional market where the biggest growth has been in airlines.
The 7E7 will probably compete well against the A330/A340 family in the future if it truly is as efficient as Boeing hopes, since it is still in early design stages.
It's only tecnology research, but wise thinking
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The BBC article states clearly that they're only doing the research on the technologies, with the aim of producing a flying hypersonic craft with noise reduction down to that of a 747. It also states that they realise full well that there is no commercial market for such a craft right now.
So why are these people researching some technology that has no current market? Obviously because they realise that the market will not always be in the slump that it now is. It's called visionary thinking. The Concorde may have not covered full costs (I don't know enough about that), but it made BA and Air France a fist full of money as tickets cost around $3000 a pop IIRC and there were definitely enough rich people willing to pay those prices for a quick pop to New York or Rio, and those same rich bastards will still be willing in the future when and if this thing ever becomes a real plane.
For the rest of us there's the double decker Airbus A380 that will be making it's maiden flight in 2005.
Slashdot has never been a pretty site (pun not intended), but a site that has been about content, the whole content and nothing but the content. While huge numbers of tables have a way of eating bandwdth, the html 3.2 works on everything on the planet with the possible exception of Mr. Ozimba's Netscape 1. 419 browser in Nigeria, and it renders damn fast as well, and seems to be pretty much indestructible.
There are bound to be issues with the multitude of browsers available, each rendering even CSS 1.0 in their own inimitable style (pun intended), because what Mac IE5 considers as a box, and what Windows IE5 consider as decent box or text attribute sometimes tend to be entirely different things.
If it works don't break it, I think. Rather fix the search engine.
While it certainly is interesting discussing the merits of *BSD, Linux and OSX, I don't think that that is what Bill Joy's problem is. While he has definitely been an important visionary in the world of computing, he seems for all the world to be one of those philosophical types who lose the connection to the real world. His big worries about machines running out of control in the future, while perhaps pertinent didn't seem to help Sun's bottom line and I remember an interview with Scott McNealy saying that he would have made some Sun people leave much earlier if he could go back in time. I wonder if he was referring to Bill Joy here?
His comment on Linux is simply demeaning to all the hundreds of thousands of developers who develop for it (and I use Mac OSX!). Linux has become more important than Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, like it or not, Mr Joy, and those (IBM) who saw this coming are now reaping the benefits and those who didn't (Sun) are now struggling to catch up. Mac OS X is hugely successful, precisely because it appeals to all the people that want the OS to just work, but that in no way means that Linux or the BSDs are worse. They are very good at what they do.
I don't know if it's only me but I found his answers to the less than good questions poor. Apart from the questions about up2date and the educational issues (10a/b/c) , I found one big question missing that had been modded up to 5, and that is the question about what will happen to RedHat's image due to leaving the non commercial space.
Many people were wondering why RedHat did this, since the non commercial space is where most people got to know RH in the first place. My personal reaction to this is that I went out and bought a Mandrake subscription, as I felt that RH had sort of "betrayed" it's most loyal users. I see no real difference between Fedora and Gentoo and I felt that the one company left supporting non commercial users, Mandrake, was worth supporting. I see an image problem for RH in gaining new geek advocacy in future. It remains to be seen what becomes of SuSE's non commercial efforts.
As for the questions about educational institutions, I found his answers very poor. Why did painhope have to wait this long to get a reply? Why were RedHat sales teams so ignorant of educational pricing from Microsoft that they neglected customers like this, until it got posted on/. for the world to see?
To me, It sounds like RH has a very disconnected view of some important issues in the real world. Number one is lack of perception from customers' point of view and number two is an incredible lack of perspective and proactive action on RH's part: If the desktop was profitable, and considering the fact that this was RH's public image, then why not keep it for simple reasons of good PR. If there are so many driver issues (web cams, digital cameras etc) then why on earth didn't RH simply approach some companies in order to get a Linux effort started with those companies? The way he says it, it sounds as if he's simply too bloody lazy and disinterested in actually listening to customers.
Post an article, any article portraying Linus in a positive light compared to Bill. In no time whatsoever will you have loads of MS fans defensively pointing out how many developers MS has, and thereby missing the point entirely.
I get so violently irritated every time I read yet another Darl McBride piece that I have the impulsive feeling to go up and smack him him in the face, my fist between his astonished eyes, when I see the slime bag standing in front of an audience in a suit that is two sizes to big for him (canal rats are not used to the daylight it seems). I gather that many other feel the same way as I do or else Darl McFuck would not now have bodyguards to save his arse when he opens that sewage pipe he calls his mouth.
After reading his waffling and calming myself down a bit, I realise some things, which follow:
1.Every time a question is posed about SCO's products he comes out with very obvious marketing speak and hubris about how exited SCO resellers are and about the supposed 2 million servers (do cash registers count as servers?) running SCO warez. This should be blindly obvious. It would be marketing suicide and almost unheard of for any CEO to admit that the SEC filings were in any way truthful about the true state of the company. Why hasn't anyone thought to ask him about the SEC filings his own company made????
2.SCO's case, as far as I can tell from the respective IBM and SCO court filings, is on weak ground at best. SCO has yet to answer IBM's request on a line for line clarification of exactly which files are infringing SysV R4 copyright. They have claimed in their answer to IBM that some 531 files are infringing, with some 30'000 lines. This is not anywhere near the "half a million lines" that he talks about in public. But he hasn't specified any lines directly. Why???????????
3.SCO distributed Linux for a long time after they had started their legal proceedings, and I'm damn sure this is going to have an effect on the case. Why isn't this point raised in press interviews???
4.SCO's public accusations and threats are almost certainly going to be taken into account in the case. One must note that McBride has not once talked specifically about any company that he will threaten with the $699/$1399 charge. This is obviously because once he does that, he faces being sued by that company for extortion. Almost all of SCO's public speech is stock value influencing bluff. And no one thought to ask him about a specific company???
5. McFuck finally mentioned that BSD is in the clear, but in the same sentence mentions that BSD code is in Linux without the copyright information, yet makes no mention about SCO products using the same code. And no one thought to ask????
6. McBrat says that Samba is not infringing anything, so SCO can use it. Nice of him isn't it? It fits in with his strategy of trying to weaken the GPL by appealing to marketing greed that is so fucking rampant on Wall Street. He wants it "friendlier" to business. It should be obvious that he wants to save his arse for distributing stuff under the GPL for so long, and the fact that he faces copyright infringement of his own even if the GPL is invalid.
I realise that many prominent GPL contributors don't want to frighten off businesses by suing SCO for copyright infringement or breach of contract, including Linus. Yet everyone who has been accused publicly of something by SCO has gotten involved whether they wanted it or not. And this irritates me. Why do Linus and Co not defend themselves? Why do they not start legal action against SCO? Why is it that almost no one from the OSS crowd ever tries to speak to standard industry rags and make decent legal points about SCO? I get so fricking mad when Linus does his dumb hippy free love act in the press interviews until he finally gets subpoenaed by SCO's team of legal drug dealers. Why the fuck does no one stand up in public for fuck sake?
Sorry for the rant, but this whole SCO thing is so publicly damaging for the GPL and Linux, and the fact way the media and the stock markets work is that one is automatically guilty when one makes no good comment.
(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Actually you should thank the Normans probably, and the old French they spoke. Up until the Norman invasion of 1066, Old English (such as the text of Beowulf) had the standard Germanic set of of 4 declinations (cases) and three genders, which, left at that would have left English somewhere between Dutch and German today. The resulting linguistic mix in England resulted in a much simplified language. This has happened in other languages too. Think of the numerous creoles or of Afrikaans from South Africa, which evolved in only 300 years from Dutch into a language that is even simpler than English in terms of grammatical bagage, due to the mixed languages spoken in South Africa at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the only "large" commercial distro left in Europe, since SuSE now belongs to Novell. I don't mean to flame the US, but I sort of feel it's good for distros to be seperated in different countries, as crazy as that may sound.
I think the only reliable method of biometric data would be to include a DNA sample in one's passport and then use a device a la the ones in the Gattaca movie to take a small blood/hair/skin sample at the airport or where ever. The others are either too simply faked (fingerprint testing) or open to abuse (face recognition) unless only used as confirming factors in a passport, not as a replacement for the actual passport itself.
Has Microsoft also registered the words "Crashes", "Exploits" and "Vulnerabilities" then?
I have just read two articles by you, linked from slashdot, the site you love to hate because simply no one likes you or your opinions, which, to me, is what it seems to boil down to. I was amazed on your wild theories of OS security, mainly because I use OSX (which really isn't the same thing as System6), OpenBSD and Windows XP at home, and while recently reinstalling Windows XP on my new Dell (I was dumb enough to have it connected directly to the internet) it got rooted before I even had a chance to get to Windows Update. I somehow think you have no idea just how bad the security is on Windows (At my last job I was a system admin for a small company with 20 WinXP machines).
Mac OSX isn't perfect, and Apple has let some nasty bugs siip into the OS from time to time, but I have peace of mind at home because I don't have to worry that the Firewall isn't on by default etc. Don't get me wrong, I find Windows ok if correctly maintained and you're right about Apple zealots bashing Windows for no real reason, but you give the impression of doing exactly the same thing form the other side.
Maybe it's time to visit the doctor and get the EEG checked out.
Peace and Love Lance, say hi to Darl when you get to the clinic.
This law is an EU wide law and therefore applies to all member countries, including from next year (2004) at least some of the Spammers favourite countries such as Poland, Estonia etc.
I must admit, as a CIO of a Netware/Windows shop that is moving some of its server space over to Linux that I have been at first worried, and now simply utterly confused as to what SCO is actually trying to achieve with these extremely inconsistent public attacks on allmost all areas of the industry remotely related to SCO. First it was IBM, then it was Linux, then it was faked copyright issues at that conference earlier this year, then it was Novell and now it's the GPL.
Does SCO have any idea what this actually sounds like to serious professionals in the industry? People who were worried are now simply shaking their heads, and this letter claiming that the GPL is somehow against copyrights is simply misleading. Even I know that. I can read the GPL, and what I see, and what most lawyers will probably see is that the GPL is a software licence. It in no way damages copyrights as these are kept by the individual authors. It also has nothing to do with software patents. Does SCO actually know that even if the GPL were to be deemed invalid that it would make itself open to thousands of claims of copyright abuse by all the open source developers whose software SCO has distributed/is distributing?
I find this whole matter to be irritating. Rest assured that I will never recommend SCO software in any form, as SCO seems highly irresponsable at best.
What a joke. SCO is simply amazing in its childish fantasies.
We all know in order for 'nix to make it to the desktop, it has to become WAY more user friendly.
You mean like Mac OSX?
In the interest of continuing cooperation and in helping to improve security for all essential Free Software infrastructure, and despite important philosophical differences, we are working closely with Debian project members to find the perpetrators and to secure essential Free Software infrastructure for the future.
This just had to have RMS invloved, managing to get his bigoted statements in, even when the system has been compromised.
Damn man, you've been rooted and you can think of nothing better to say than that you have "important philosophical differences" with the rest of the OSS world, but that you will be OH SO GENEROUS and actually bother to talk to some people who don't get all hyped up when they say Linux and not GNU/Linux.
That is why your fuckshit GNU/Hurd is still where it is you pompous clown.
Damn right. The Phil Greenspun prick claims that that shit is state of the art IT-development. Bullshit. It's an excuse to pay someone a lot of money for fuck all.
I'm not even American and I shudder with rage reading this bullshit. So basically what he is saying that he and his crew were simply too fucking lazy and stupid to do anything else than use Microsoft's software because Gartner, which is known to be the biggest bunch of brainless thieving fucks in the so called consulting industry, said to do so, and then to go and outsource the whole fucking thing to save the extra money that was spent on buying Microsoft software.
Con-fucken-gratulations
But the best and most violently disgusting bit is when he says that this state of the art course at MIt is basically telling those MIT CS students who pay around $29k a year, that they will have no fuckin jobs when they leave.
This must give the word "student" a whole new meaning: Future MacJob applicant!
If it was me I would organise a lynch mob on campus for pricks like this. Then I would leave school at take a course on plumbing.
I have no idea if Apple could or would make a Tablet, but if they did, this is what I would want/not want:
1.Larger than current PDA's and smaller than current Tablets. PDA's are a pain to do quick writing on and Tablet PC's weighing over a kilo are a pain to hold in the crook of your arm. Apple's larget Newton was about right.
2.A high resolution display so that I can write down notes that will be readable just easily as pen on paper is.
3.Fuck handwriting recognition. The only handwriting recognition I need is for the title of the paper.My handwriting, and that of many students, is so illegible to others than no OCR programme on earth can read it, but I can, and that's what's important.
4.An application that works just like an block of paper, where I can just tap a corner to get to the next sheet and back again. Apple had an application like this in the classic Mac OS called notes or something. This should have the ability to save any section of the written/sketched papers as a single file. It should allow basic high res sketching in a few colours as well.
5.An art sketching application that supports natural media like inks (Think Corel's Painter, but not so bloated -- Alias Sketchbook perhaps) and layers for artists who just want to draw and not have to fuck with the computer.
6.Around 20GB of harddrive space like the iPod. i.e. a tiny hard drive.
7.Voice recording.
8.USB or Firewire for Digicam and data transfer.
9.Wireless data sync with a Mac or PC, but easily done like iSync.
And thats it. I wouldn't want a browser or email, but I suppose most would, so make that around 6 applications.
Nice and light, handy and simple, just like that block of paper and pen that always works.
Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107?
You mean something like the Airbus A380?
If so, why don't they fly them?
Could you be referring to planes such as the Airbus A340, A330, A320, A310, A300. Tuploev Tu-204. Ilyushin Il-96?
Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes?
See Airbus above.
I just read the heise.de forums and the overall tone of the posters is disbelief and viscious anger. On the one hand they're angry that their politicians could bend over so easily and on the other they're hopping mad that the Americans would apply so much political pressure to do this.
I'll say this for you anks. There is literally no other country on earth that makes enemies and loses allies as well as your country is presently doing.
In light of the recent Debian break in, where the core servers were rooted and a rootkit installed on other machines, and all this using ldap for user authentification, I think Apple is making a huge mistake. All it needs is a couple of apple machines to be rooted by an exploit based on this and Apple will be in the same sorry boat that MS is in.
(And for the zealots, I'm posting this from a G4 PB so STFU thanks.)
SCO telling IBM about the software design process is like someone telling a Bedouin about sand or a fish about water.
in green please.
As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."
To the contrary, I think this is highly typical of the culture we have today, where everything is a transient fad in the media, technology and politics.
And it is also self feeding, I think, since market forces need to clear out the old to make room for the new in order to meet sales forecasts and shareholder expectations. And this is very true for pop, news and technology, which explains the lack of staying power of pop icons these days and becomes interesting when you want to ask yourself if you really need that new 3GHz machine just to surf the web.
And it is highly convenient in politics where a politician doesn't have to be accountable for what he said 100 days ago.
And so, the lack of long time life on the web is simply symbolic of all the rest here really, even if it is highly questionable.
(Slightly off topic, but there has been some discussion of the SC's failure here) I think that the Sonic Cruiser was possibly introduced as a mainly vapourware device to forestall interest in the Airbus 380 when it was first introduced in the late 90's. I remember quite a lot of turmoil going on over at Boeing when the A380 concept was announced and one should remember that there were no programmes or anything at the time. They were all simply concept studies which cost a lot less than actually starting an engineering programme.
Boeing talked for a while about making an extended upper deck version of the 747, called the 747X IIRC, but it was eventually shelved, I assume for engineering reasons as well as the feeling that it would not work financially. I remember some discussion that the wing of the 747 would have had to be redesigned to support the load which would have meant basically a new airplane.
Boeing the came up with the Sonic Cruiser, I think mainly to have something to show at the Paris airshow in 96 or 98 so as not to be totally out in the cold when Airbus announced full commitment to the A380. I was never sure just how serious Boeing were to the SC, as the concept had a some plusses (slightly higher speed but not radically more so -- around 100 mph faster) but a lot of questions, such as not having much passenger space compared to other widebodies and questionable fuel efficiency.
And so today we have the A380 coming in two years and no SC. To it's credit Boeing has made a lot of mileage out of the 737 line with newer versions continuing to sell very well and compete well against the A320 family in the regional market where the biggest growth has been in airlines.
The 7E7 will probably compete well against the A330/A340 family in the future if it truly is as efficient as Boeing hopes, since it is still in early design stages.
The BBC article states clearly that they're only doing the research on the technologies, with the aim of producing a flying hypersonic craft with noise reduction down to that of a 747. It also states that they realise full well that there is no commercial market for such a craft right now.
So why are these people researching some technology that has no current market? Obviously because they realise that the market will not always be in the slump that it now is. It's called visionary thinking. The Concorde may have not covered full costs (I don't know enough about that), but it made BA and Air France a fist full of money as tickets cost around $3000 a pop IIRC and there were definitely enough rich people willing to pay those prices for a quick pop to New York or Rio, and those same rich bastards will still be willing in the future when and if this thing ever becomes a real plane.
For the rest of us there's the double decker Airbus A380 that will be making it's maiden flight in 2005.
Slashdot has never been a pretty site (pun not intended), but a site that has been about content, the whole content and nothing but the content. While huge numbers of tables have a way of eating bandwdth, the html 3.2 works on everything on the planet with the possible exception of Mr. Ozimba's Netscape 1. 419 browser in Nigeria, and it renders damn fast as well, and seems to be pretty much indestructible.
There are bound to be issues with the multitude of browsers available, each rendering even CSS 1.0 in their own inimitable style (pun intended), because what Mac IE5 considers as a box, and what Windows IE5 consider as decent box or text attribute sometimes tend to be entirely different things.
If it works don't break it, I think. Rather fix the search engine.
While it certainly is interesting discussing the merits of *BSD, Linux and OSX, I don't think that that is what Bill Joy's problem is. While he has definitely been an important visionary in the world of computing, he seems for all the world to be one of those philosophical types who lose the connection to the real world. His big worries about machines running out of control in the future, while perhaps pertinent didn't seem to help Sun's bottom line and I remember an interview with Scott McNealy saying that he would have made some Sun people leave much earlier if he could go back in time. I wonder if he was referring to Bill Joy here?
His comment on Linux is simply demeaning to all the hundreds of thousands of developers who develop for it (and I use Mac OSX!). Linux has become more important than Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, like it or not, Mr Joy, and those (IBM) who saw this coming are now reaping the benefits and those who didn't (Sun) are now struggling to catch up. Mac OS X is hugely successful, precisely because it appeals to all the people that want the OS to just work, but that in no way means that Linux or the BSDs are worse. They are very good at what they do.
I don't know if it's only me but I found his answers to the less than good questions poor. Apart from the questions about up2date and the educational issues (10a/b/c) , I found one big question missing that had been modded up to 5, and that is the question about what will happen to RedHat's image due to leaving the non commercial space.
/. for the world to see?
Many people were wondering why RedHat did this, since the non commercial space is where most people got to know RH in the first place. My personal reaction to this is that I went out and bought a Mandrake subscription, as I felt that RH had sort of "betrayed" it's most loyal users. I see no real difference between Fedora and Gentoo and I felt that the one company left supporting non commercial users, Mandrake, was worth supporting. I see an image problem for RH in gaining new geek advocacy in future. It remains to be seen what becomes of SuSE's non commercial efforts.
As for the questions about educational institutions, I found his answers very poor. Why did painhope have to wait this long to get a reply? Why were RedHat sales teams so ignorant of educational pricing from Microsoft that they neglected customers like this, until it got posted on
To me, It sounds like RH has a very disconnected view of some important issues in the real world. Number one is lack of perception from customers' point of view and number two is an incredible lack of perspective and proactive action on RH's part: If the desktop was profitable, and considering the fact that this was RH's public image, then why not keep it for simple reasons of good PR. If there are so many driver issues (web cams, digital cameras etc) then why on earth didn't RH simply approach some companies in order to get a Linux effort started with those companies? The way he says it, it sounds as if he's simply too bloody lazy and disinterested in actually listening to customers.
Post an article, any article portraying Linus in a positive light compared to Bill. In no time whatsoever will you have loads of MS fans defensively pointing out how many developers MS has, and thereby missing the point entirely.
I get so violently irritated every time I read yet another Darl McBride piece that I have the impulsive feeling to go up and smack him him in the face, my fist between his astonished eyes, when I see the slime bag standing in front of an audience in a suit that is two sizes to big for him (canal rats are not used to the daylight it seems). I gather that many other feel the same way as I do or else Darl McFuck would not now have bodyguards to save his arse when he opens that sewage pipe he calls his mouth.
After reading his waffling and calming myself down a bit, I realise some things, which follow:
1.Every time a question is posed about SCO's products he comes out with very obvious marketing speak and hubris about how exited SCO resellers are and about the supposed 2 million servers (do cash registers count as servers?) running SCO warez. This should be blindly obvious. It would be marketing suicide and almost unheard of for any CEO to admit that the SEC filings were in any way truthful about the true state of the company. Why hasn't anyone thought to ask him about the SEC filings his own company made????
2.SCO's case, as far as I can tell from the respective IBM and SCO court filings, is on weak ground at best. SCO has yet to answer IBM's request on a line for line clarification of exactly which files are infringing SysV R4 copyright. They have claimed in their answer to IBM that some 531 files are infringing, with some 30'000 lines. This is not anywhere near the "half a million lines" that he talks about in public. But he hasn't specified any lines directly. Why???????????
3.SCO distributed Linux for a long time after they had started their legal proceedings, and I'm damn sure this is going to have an effect on the case. Why isn't this point raised in press interviews???
4.SCO's public accusations and threats are almost certainly going to be taken into account in the case. One must note that McBride has not once talked specifically about any company that he will threaten with the $699/$1399 charge. This is obviously because once he does that, he faces being sued by that company for extortion. Almost all of SCO's public speech is stock value influencing bluff. And no one thought to ask him about a specific company???
5. McFuck finally mentioned that BSD is in the clear, but in the same sentence mentions that BSD code is in Linux without the copyright information, yet makes no mention about SCO products using the same code. And no one thought to ask????
6. McBrat says that Samba is not infringing anything, so SCO can use it. Nice of him isn't it? It fits in with his strategy of trying to weaken the GPL by appealing to marketing greed that is so fucking rampant on Wall Street. He wants it "friendlier" to business. It should be obvious that he wants to save his arse for distributing stuff under the GPL for so long, and the fact that he faces copyright infringement of his own even if the GPL is invalid.
I realise that many prominent GPL contributors don't want to frighten off businesses by suing SCO for copyright infringement or breach of contract, including Linus. Yet everyone who has been accused publicly of something by SCO has gotten involved whether they wanted it or not. And this irritates me. Why do Linus and Co not defend themselves? Why do they not start legal action against SCO? Why is it that almost no one from the OSS crowd ever tries to speak to standard industry rags and make decent legal points about SCO? I get so fricking mad when Linus does his dumb hippy free love act in the press interviews until he finally gets subpoenaed by SCO's team of legal drug dealers. Why the fuck does no one stand up in public for fuck sake?
Sorry for the rant, but this whole SCO thing is so publicly damaging for the GPL and Linux, and the fact way the media and the stock markets work is that one is automatically guilty when one makes no good comment.
(It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)
Actually you should thank the Normans probably, and the old French they spoke. Up until the Norman invasion of 1066, Old English (such as the text of Beowulf) had the standard Germanic set of of 4 declinations (cases) and three genders, which, left at that would have left English somewhere between Dutch and German today. The resulting linguistic mix in England resulted in a much simplified language. This has happened in other languages too. Think of the numerous creoles or of Afrikaans from South Africa, which evolved in only 300 years from Dutch into a language that is even simpler than English in terms of grammatical bagage, due to the mixed languages spoken in South Africa at the time.