well going from previous experience, microsoft usually rolls out standards because they have an implementation which they're just about to release into beta.
so don't bother to attempt to report any problems with the proposal, because if you do, then microsoft will say "oh it's too late, we don't have time to fix that, we're going to have to ship with the broken protocol anyway".
at least, that's exactly what they did with the SMB protocol, just... rolled over everyone and rolled them over.
"Contributing software to the open source community alone was not sufficient to save the successor to the Netscape browser."
very very interesting. recently i just ran Microsoft Office under Crossover-Office (Wine with codeweavers improvements) and on a pentium 400 with 128mb of RAM it took 5 seconds to load a word document.
the SAME document took OVER A MINUTE to load with OpenOffice.
open source software does not automatically mean better.
as a community we are almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of large corporate sponsors to back their own aims, shoring up linux and its applications in areas suited to them.
consumers ARE forced to buy microsoft - or at least they perceive so.
the alternatives are... well... basically... pitiful - _if_ people are even aware that they exist.
i just installed crossover-office plus winword.exe on a pentium3(400mhz) with 128mb of ram.
i also installed openoffice.
openoffice took ONE MINUTE to open a document.
crossover-office (a win32 _emulator_) took FIVE SECONDS to open the same document with winword.exe.
now try telling me and everyone else that open source is great and a real viable alternative for _real_ world usage.
other than that: yes, i sincerely hope that things get so bad that microsoft prices themselves out of their own monopoly market, and _have_ to provide the means for people to interoperate.
well the principle of 3D image editing should be investigated: selecting and manipulating objects below the "front" one will be an integral part of any CAD/CAM package.
a one mr partenan claims to have successfully developed and patented a battery based on aluminium. unlike previous aluminium batteries, the aluminium compound in the partenan cell is the cathode rather than the anode (or is it vice-versa) and consequently the battery doesn't turn to sludge that needs expensive reprocessing.
instead mr partenan has managed to create a RECHARGEABLE SEALED cell. a 1.5volt D-size cell is capable of... get this: over 100Ah!!! in other words, an 80Kg bank of rechargeable aluminium cells would propel a car-sized vehicle SIX HUNDRED MILES.
now, this is totally revolutionary.
it makes a mockery of the need for these hybrid vehicles and also of the need for dependence on oil (which will, if it continues, cause in OUR lifetimes some even more serious world problems than we already have).
the reason why hybrid vehicles are necessary is because the batteries are so incredibly expensive and heavy.
a NiMh battery array capable of around 15,000Ah (enough to get about... mmmm.. 150 to 200 miles) will weigh about 150 kg... and will cost you a staggering amount - around $10,000!
if you want a reasonable battery array, enough to get you any distance (600 miles?), you need to spend around $30,000 - JUST ON BATTERIES!
now, if you look at the cost of the cars... uhm... wasn't the Saturn EV1 about that much?
cars that have 75kW Fuel Cells such as the Toyota RAV4-EV were available until March 2003 for 30,000.... have you _any_ idea how much the platinum is worth in a 75kW fuel cell???
well, it's roughly $1,500 per kilowatt. so that's about... mmm... $100,000 JUST FOR THE FUEL CELL!
no wonder Toyota and the other manufacturers stopped doing their EVs once people cottoned on to that: $30,000 for $100,000 worth of platinum?? BARGAIN! HA!
aluminium makes up about 8% of the earth's crust. it's an incredibly abundant material, and incredibly powerful. i never managed or dared to reproduce it, but did once manage to set fire to an aluminium pencil sharpener by holding it in a bunsen burner for half an hour in a bored chemistry class. it shot across the room like a rocket: i never did find it.
well, the reasons given for this identity card system are to combat crime and terrorism.
what actually will happen is that criminals and terrorists will become smarter (than they already are?) which leaves us with a nazi style police state and the mistaken belief that we are safer (from criminals and terrorists).
it will become more difficult to believe, in court cases, that someone's identity has been forged.
the solution to the underlying problem (criminal and terrorist tendencies) is to take away the criminals' and terrorists' tendencies to behave like criminals and terrorists, not to "up the ante" in what is effectively an arms race.
so the focus should be on looking at solutions such as those offered by the levitators (http://www.globalcountry.org.uk) - the mad transcendental meditation people who for more than thirty years have been persistently voicing the solution to crime prevention and much much more, and working quietly to achieve their goals.
That's not true that only Microsoft gets to use DirectX. www.transgaming.com now have their own version of Wine that supports most of DirectX 9.2 (reverse engineered of course).
i have had to take back _two_ USB DVD+RW drives, one of them a Hewlett Packard drive and another the Freecom FX-50. i thought i was buying reputable products from reputable companies.
they BOTH failed irrevocably after i created a backup of my hard drive. they BOTH cost around 200 each.
further searches on the internet showed that the HP USB DVD drive had problems with some DVD recording software from france: it was a "known issue" and a fix would be available soon.
in other words, these fucking drives have fucking anti-copying measures in them that, if you don't pay fucking money for fucked fucking proprietary software, the drive fucks itself over.
so, that being the case, why the FUCK is it so cheap to get 40gbyte USB hard drives?
dude, you are clearly using the wrong distribution.
under debian, for example, it is completely unnecessary to compile packages: it is also completely unnecessary for you to track down the dependency libraries. personally, i use apt: i understand that a lot of other people use aptitude, and although i have never felt the urge to look, there is most likely to be a whizzy-graphically-tool about.
that having been said, you are right: there is a lot more to be done, whilst the geeks like to get on with the next cool bit of functionality.
so.
the question becomes: who is going to _pay_ for all this lovely wizzy-graphically-prettiness that makes linux ready for noddy users?
almost every time someone mentions nt to linux data migration, i mention that if someone pays me money, i'll do the work.
the migration tools for nt 4 style domains would take about 2 to 3 weeks to do: most of the work has already been done, it's a matter of documenting it, checking it and making it easier to use.
the open source migration tools for nt 5 (aka w2k) style domains would take a bit longer: a few months, at most, though, as various efforts (e.g. heimdal) are already underway.
the open source migration tools for exchange, now _that's_ a challenge, requiring about twelve to eighteen man-months of work to get somewhere.
i know someone who has done most of the work already, in his spare time: it's proprietary but if an open source exchange project was to seriously take off, i know he'd consider releasing some of his code to 1) help out 2) make sure _his_ copyright notices are at the top of the files, because in open source just as in the proprietary world, the _first_ person to release is the one that tends to take off, not the best.
ironically, just ONE company with more than one hundred employees that will be looking to pay microsoft's next set of exorbitant upgrade-because-everyone-else-has-and-oh-look-ever yone-we-send-documents-to-can't-read-them fees could instead pay me to do the development work on exchange and nt domains compatibility - and then NEVER HAVE TO PAY THEM AGAIN.
US, canada and argentinia are threatening Europe with Biological Weapons masquerading as food - genetically modified food.
US canada and argentinia plan to take europe, which has a moratorium against allowing BW^H^HGM in, to the world trade organisation, claiming that it's against trade and profit.
i believe that because GM foods are biological weapons, the United Nations must pass a resolution stating same.
then this will allow other nations to classify the US citizens responsible for GM foods as terrorists, to bomb US food supplies, napalm all the fields (the only way of making sure that the pollen doesn't spread), kill the president and any corporations and scientists responsible for these horrific biological weapons.
all in the name of pre-emptive self-preservation, of course.
if the US can do it, then so can anyone else.
p.s. you stupid idiots: don't mess with international and natural law. what goes around comes around.
because if they consider the "interface" to the database to be, for example, a web site (e.g. msn.com) we are in deep shite.
for example, all search engines could be prone to being taken to court for (accidentally or deliberately, esp. if some daft company doesn't respect robots.txt) cacheing someone's site.
the combination of linux being open source plus the legal requirement that all US government employees must release code they develop as public domain results in SElinux.
in other cases it results in a very good statistical test suite being dumped into the public domain.
David Brin, _that's_ the name of that boring 9-book series.
i bought them all, i read them all. yes, as an _introduction_ to the concept of space opera and alternate sci-fi technology, they "do the job".
however, there are much better stories around that, rather than go along the lines of "oh, let's mention some great technology", actually _take it for granted_ and just get on with telling an incredible story.
peter f. hamilton is very good at telling interesting and moving stories where the technology isn't the be-all and end-all. so is greg bear, so is iain m. banks.
neal stephenson actually does a very good job of explaining technology in _interesting_ ways, for example the diamond age explains turing machines and nano technology, yet it is also a beautiful and touching story of a young girl who only meets the person who was always there for her, effectively as her mother, when she becomes a teenager.
the uplift series could have been condensed into two books and it would have been better for it, basically.
science fiction: what to read and what to avoid
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 2, Informative
i have seven shelves six feet long stacked with sci-fi books, mostly good and some bad.
at one point i stopped buying sci-fi books because there weren't any that were, in my opinion, any good (around 2000) and i had to wait.
piers anthony is childish: the books are great for children. my advice is that you not read any of his books after the time when he obtained a computer, i.e. after mars in the eternity series.
so is anne mccaffrey but she has a specific purpose in her writing: to co-author books with someone who brings a particular topic and experience to the fore: for example acorna the unicorn book is actually about child slave labour, and the ship who fought is about rape.
if you want _really_ good sci-fi books to read, then go for the "masterworks" series, for example "first and last men" by olaf stapledon is incredible: every other sci-fi book a la "space opera" genre just "fills in the gaps" left by first and last men.
basically, the masterworks books are what sci-fi writers read.
if you want _incredible_ stories, read orson scott card's books - all of them. pay particular attention to the alvin maker series, people from the US. you will find that "book 2" of the trilogy, which is actually the second half of book 1 outside of the US, is not available on the shelves. the reason is because the book covers the murder of 10,000 native red indians.
if you want good space opera, i recommend ken macleod (although his politics are a little odd, i.e. he could be branded a commie 20 years ago, until you get to his more recent works where it actually starts to make sense in a universe perspective and things get messy).
and also for space opera: greg bear, but greg bear takes getting used to. _really_ getting used to. i do NOT recommend "talking heads" as a first read.
also for space opera, alasdair reynolds, peter f hamilton and iain m. banks.
alasdair reynolds is very new on the scene, yet his books are extremely well written.
peter f hamilton's books are fantastic: i love them, although "a quantum murder" i found disturbing.
iain m banks' books are really good, although i would never have read them if i had read "the wasp factory" first. banks' books are very graphic in their violence (but not in a "horror" way) but they are also funny and sad as well as deep and illustrate futility of life.
i thoroughly recommend "the player of games" if you want to be shell-shocked even right up to the end of the book.
what else.
for space opera, don't bother with those stupid nine books by that idiot author who did all those different species, damn i wasted my money on those.
there is so much to choose from, you just have to be selective: to make a blanket statememt that time has been wasted is rather disappointing to hear.
problem 1:
when i accidentally and i do _mean_ accidentally looked over the shoulder of someone who had access to AFPS - AT & T's "advanced file and print sharer" source code, which is actually NT 3.5 source code ported by AT & T to Unix, i was slightly freaked out by the similarity between the code there and the code that i had written in samba's NT Domain Services, like samrd.
the thing is that in order to produce network-API-compatible code, there _is_ no other way to do the same job.
so yes, i think that Wine and Samba have to watch it.
"refused" authorisation is in fact sufficient under the European Directive on Copyright law (91/EC/250) for you to use "any other means, including reverse engineering", to obtain the information required.
the important thing is that you MUST not break any laws regarding the license agreements of any products that you are a) using b) using to do the reverse engineering.
there's something called QT which is open source, it runs under a linux 2.4.19 kernel, on ARM processors.
QT has _over 1,600 applications_.
if you have purchased, say, a sharp zaurus sl-5600, you get a license to use the hanson word and excel packages on _any_ handheld that supports the QT desktop.
i even have handwriting stuff on my sl 5600.... not that i can use it because my handwriting is worse than a drunken 80 year old doctors'
i looked last month at psion's new organiser-phone.
i didn't buy it because when i looked for linux porting efforts, there weren't any.
instead, however, i looked for an xda-2 porting effort and found http://wiki.xda-developers.org. i since managed to get an initial boot of the xda-2....ironic that now psion is thinking of doing linux.
PDA+phone+bluetooth+wireless+GPRS+GSM equals cool _and_ useful in my book.
... cos if they haven't, then the U.S. military could buy Dells for their aircraft carriers, install linux, and then they'd have a reliable warship that didn't have to be towed in because windows crashed, and in rough seas the computers would flex as much as the ship.
hey, did they stop doing those plastic desktop cases yet? you know, the ones where if you took the top off you could lift one corner of the machine an inch clean off the ground whilst all three other corners stayed on the desk?
1) dave cutler's VAX/VMS team gets bored (funding cut)
2) microsoft hires dave and his team (6 people).
3) they code 200,000 lines per year EACH for 5 years, exclusively in c.
4) paul leach (of apollo and NCS 1.0 which became DCE/RPC fame) recommends DCE/RPC for NT Domain services.
5) bill gates orders from-on-high that NT must have a windows interface.
6) dave's team add a windows subsystem to placate bill: they have to port the win16 subsystem to 32-bit (hence the win32 subsystem).
[7) ibm somehow gets involved: nt also has an OS/2 subsystem. someone gets terribly embarrassed that NT uses ibm's OS/2 "HPFS" and orders that NT must have its own file system (esp. because HPFS doesn't support VAX/VMS security model) hence NTFS.]
8) DEC cottons on to what dave cutler is up to, especially when the VAX/VMS security model's interface turns up pretty much function-for-function in NT, and gets integrated properly into the NT Domain Services.
9) DEC gets paid $50m and mysteriously NT 3.51 gets ported to the DEC Alpha.
that's why NT runs on those lovely RISC processors: it was written in c and so was dead-easy to add other OSes.
Slashdot Mirror
well going from previous experience, microsoft usually rolls out standards because they have an implementation which they're just about to release into beta.
... rolled over everyone and rolled them over.
so don't bother to attempt to report any problems with the proposal, because if you do, then microsoft will say "oh it's too late, we don't have time to fix that, we're going to have to ship with the broken protocol anyway".
at least, that's exactly what they did with the SMB protocol, just
"Contributing software to the open source community alone was not sufficient to save the successor to the Netscape browser."
very very interesting. recently i just ran Microsoft Office under Crossover-Office (Wine with codeweavers improvements) and on a pentium 400 with 128mb of RAM it took 5 seconds to load a word document.
the SAME document took OVER A MINUTE to load with OpenOffice.
open source software does not automatically mean better.
as a community we are almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of large corporate sponsors to back their own aims, shoring up linux and its applications in areas suited to them.
consumers ARE forced to buy microsoft - or at least they perceive so.
the alternatives are... well... basically... pitiful - _if_ people are even aware that they exist.
i just installed crossover-office plus winword.exe on a pentium3(400mhz) with 128mb of ram.
i also installed openoffice.
openoffice took ONE MINUTE to open a document.
crossover-office (a win32 _emulator_) took FIVE SECONDS to open the same document with winword.exe.
now try telling me and everyone else that open source is great and a real viable alternative for
_real_ world usage.
other than that: yes, i sincerely hope that things get so bad that microsoft prices themselves out of their own monopoly market, and _have_ to provide the means for people to interoperate.
well the principle of 3D image editing should be investigated: selecting and manipulating objects below the "front" one will be an integral part of any CAD/CAM package.
a one mr partenan claims to have successfully developed and patented a battery based on aluminium. unlike previous aluminium batteries, the aluminium compound in the partenan cell is the cathode rather than the anode (or is it vice-versa) and consequently the battery doesn't turn to sludge that needs expensive reprocessing.
... have you _any_ idea how much the platinum is worth in a 75kW fuel cell???
instead mr partenan has managed to create a RECHARGEABLE SEALED cell. a 1.5volt D-size cell is capable of... get this: over 100Ah!!! in other words, an 80Kg bank of rechargeable aluminium cells would propel a car-sized vehicle SIX HUNDRED MILES.
now, this is totally revolutionary.
it makes a mockery of the need for these hybrid vehicles and also of the need for dependence on oil (which will, if it continues, cause in OUR lifetimes some even more serious world problems than we already have).
the reason why hybrid vehicles are necessary is because the batteries are so incredibly expensive and heavy.
a NiMh battery array capable of around 15,000Ah
(enough to get about... mmmm.. 150 to 200 miles) will weigh about 150 kg... and will cost you a staggering amount - around $10,000!
if you want a reasonable battery array, enough to get you any distance (600 miles?), you need to spend around $30,000 - JUST ON BATTERIES!
now, if you look at the cost of the cars... uhm... wasn't the Saturn EV1 about that much?
cars that have 75kW Fuel Cells such as the Toyota RAV4-EV were available until March 2003 for 30,000.
well, it's roughly $1,500 per kilowatt. so that's about... mmm... $100,000 JUST FOR THE FUEL CELL!
no wonder Toyota and the other manufacturers stopped doing their EVs once people cottoned on to that: $30,000 for $100,000 worth of platinum?? BARGAIN! HA!
aluminium makes up about 8% of the earth's crust. it's an incredibly abundant material, and incredibly powerful. i never managed or dared to reproduce it, but did once manage to set fire to an aluminium pencil sharpener by holding it in a bunsen burner for half an hour in a bored chemistry class. it shot across the room like a rocket: i never did find it.
well, the reasons given for this identity card system are to combat crime and terrorism.
what actually will happen is that criminals and terrorists will become smarter (than they already are?) which leaves us with a nazi style police state and the mistaken belief that we are safer (from criminals and terrorists).
it will become more difficult to believe, in court cases, that someone's identity has been forged.
the solution to the underlying problem (criminal and terrorist tendencies) is to take away the criminals' and terrorists' tendencies to behave like criminals and terrorists, not to "up the ante" in what is effectively an arms race.
so the focus should be on looking at solutions such as those offered by the levitators (http://www.globalcountry.org.uk) - the mad transcendental meditation people who for more than thirty years have been persistently voicing the solution to crime prevention and much much more, and working quietly to achieve their goals.
That's not true that only Microsoft gets to use DirectX. www.transgaming.com now have their own version of Wine that supports most of DirectX 9.2 (reverse engineered of course).
i have had to take back _two_ USB DVD+RW drives, one of them a Hewlett Packard drive and another the Freecom FX-50. i thought i was buying reputable products from reputable companies.
they BOTH failed irrevocably after i created a backup of my hard drive. they BOTH cost around 200 each.
further searches on the internet showed that the HP USB DVD drive had problems with some DVD recording software from france: it was a "known issue" and a fix would be available soon.
in other words, these fucking drives have fucking anti-copying measures in them that, if you don't pay fucking money for fucked fucking proprietary software, the drive fucks itself over.
so, that being the case, why the FUCK is it so cheap to get 40gbyte USB hard drives?
dude, you are clearly using the wrong distribution.
under debian, for example, it is completely unnecessary to compile packages: it is also completely unnecessary for you to track down the dependency libraries. personally, i use apt: i understand that a lot of other people use aptitude, and although i have never felt the urge to look, there is most likely to be a whizzy-graphically-tool about.
that having been said, you are right: there is a lot more to be done, whilst the geeks like to get on with the next cool bit of functionality.
so.
the question becomes: who is going to _pay_ for all this lovely wizzy-graphically-prettiness that makes linux ready for noddy users?
you?
me?
ibm?
almost every time someone mentions nt to linux data migration, i mention that if someone pays me money, i'll do the work.
r yone-we-send-documents-to-can't-read-them fees could instead pay me to do the development work on exchange and nt domains compatibility - and then NEVER HAVE TO PAY THEM AGAIN.
the migration tools for nt 4 style domains would take about 2 to 3 weeks to do: most of the work has already been done, it's a matter of documenting it, checking it and making it easier to use.
the open source migration tools for nt 5 (aka w2k) style domains would take a bit longer: a few months, at most, though, as various efforts (e.g. heimdal) are already underway.
the open source migration tools for exchange, now _that's_ a challenge, requiring about twelve to eighteen man-months of work to get somewhere.
i know someone who has done most of the work already, in his spare time: it's proprietary but if an open source exchange project was to seriously take off, i know he'd consider releasing some of his code to 1) help out 2) make sure _his_ copyright notices are at the top of the files, because in open source just as in the proprietary world, the _first_ person to release is the one that tends to take off, not the best.
ironically, just ONE company with more than one hundred employees that will be looking to pay microsoft's next set of exorbitant upgrade-because-everyone-else-has-and-oh-look-eve
wow, one hundred and eighty seven comments at threshold one, so far and not one of them mentions revelations.
you know where the best place for RFID tags are placed, on humans, in order to take advantage of body heat?
the back of the hand and the forehead.
targetted bomb, anyone? classification of people as cattle?
US, canada and argentinia are threatening Europe with Biological Weapons masquerading as food - genetically modified food.
US canada and argentinia plan to take europe, which has a moratorium against allowing BW^H^HGM in, to the world trade organisation, claiming that it's against trade and profit.
i believe that because GM foods are biological weapons, the United Nations must pass a resolution stating same.
then this will allow other nations to classify the US citizens responsible for GM foods as terrorists, to bomb US food supplies, napalm all the fields (the only way of making sure that the pollen doesn't spread), kill the president and any corporations and scientists responsible for these horrific biological weapons.
all in the name of pre-emptive self-preservation, of course.
if the US can do it, then so can anyone else.
p.s. you stupid idiots: don't mess with international and natural law. what goes around comes around.
because if they consider the "interface" to the database to be, for example, a web site (e.g. msn.com) we are in deep shite.
for example, all search engines could be prone to being taken to court for (accidentally or deliberately, esp. if some daft company doesn't respect robots.txt) cacheing someone's site.
e.g. google is going to be in serious trouble.
the combination of linux being open source plus the legal requirement that all US government employees must release code they develop as public domain results in SElinux.
in other cases it results in a very good statistical test suite being dumped into the public domain.
http://csrc.nist.gov/rng/
security -> tends to zero as Sum(Idiots) -> tends to infinity.
91/EC/250 is the EU directive on copyright and the exemptions under which copyright law CANNOT BE ENFORCED.
specifically, interfaces between software-software, software-hardware and hardware-hardware are EXEMPT from copyright law.
whereas number 15.
it says that the new directive is "without prejudice" to 91/EC/250.
David Brin, _that's_ the name of that boring 9-book series.
i bought them all, i read them all. yes, as an _introduction_ to the concept of space opera and alternate sci-fi technology, they "do the job".
however, there are much better stories around that, rather than go along the lines of "oh, let's mention some great technology", actually _take it for granted_ and just get on with telling an incredible story.
peter f. hamilton is very good at telling interesting and moving stories where the technology isn't the be-all and end-all. so is greg bear, so is iain m. banks.
neal stephenson actually does a very good job of explaining technology in _interesting_ ways, for example the diamond age explains turing machines and nano technology, yet it is also a beautiful and touching story of a young girl who only meets the person who was always there for her, effectively as her mother, when she becomes a teenager.
the uplift series could have been condensed into two books and it would have been better for it, basically.
i have seven shelves six feet long stacked with sci-fi books, mostly good and some bad. at one point i stopped buying sci-fi books because there weren't any that were, in my opinion, any good (around 2000) and i had to wait. piers anthony is childish: the books are great for children. my advice is that you not read any of his books after the time when he obtained a computer, i.e. after mars in the eternity series. so is anne mccaffrey but she has a specific purpose in her writing: to co-author books with someone who brings a particular topic and experience to the fore: for example acorna the unicorn book is actually about child slave labour, and the ship who fought is about rape. if you want _really_ good sci-fi books to read, then go for the "masterworks" series, for example "first and last men" by olaf stapledon is incredible: every other sci-fi book a la "space opera" genre just "fills in the gaps" left by first and last men. basically, the masterworks books are what sci-fi writers read. if you want _incredible_ stories, read orson scott card's books - all of them. pay particular attention to the alvin maker series, people from the US. you will find that "book 2" of the trilogy, which is actually the second half of book 1 outside of the US, is not available on the shelves. the reason is because the book covers the murder of 10,000 native red indians. if you want good space opera, i recommend ken macleod (although his politics are a little odd, i.e. he could be branded a commie 20 years ago, until you get to his more recent works where it actually starts to make sense in a universe perspective and things get messy). and also for space opera: greg bear, but greg bear takes getting used to. _really_ getting used to. i do NOT recommend "talking heads" as a first read. also for space opera, alasdair reynolds, peter f hamilton and iain m. banks. alasdair reynolds is very new on the scene, yet his books are extremely well written. peter f hamilton's books are fantastic: i love them, although "a quantum murder" i found disturbing. iain m banks' books are really good, although i would never have read them if i had read "the wasp factory" first. banks' books are very graphic in their violence (but not in a "horror" way) but they are also funny and sad as well as deep and illustrate futility of life. i thoroughly recommend "the player of games" if you want to be shell-shocked even right up to the end of the book. what else. for space opera, don't bother with those stupid nine books by that idiot author who did all those different species, damn i wasted my money on those. there is so much to choose from, you just have to be selective: to make a blanket statememt that time has been wasted is rather disappointing to hear.
problem 1: when i accidentally and i do _mean_ accidentally looked over the shoulder of someone who had access to AFPS - AT & T's "advanced file and print sharer" source code, which is actually NT 3.5 source code ported by AT & T to Unix, i was slightly freaked out by the similarity between the code there and the code that i had written in samba's NT Domain Services, like samrd. the thing is that in order to produce network-API-compatible code, there _is_ no other way to do the same job. so yes, i think that Wine and Samba have to watch it.
"refused" authorisation is in fact sufficient under the European Directive on Copyright law (91/EC/250) for you to use "any other means, including reverse engineering", to obtain the information required.
the important thing is that you MUST not break any laws regarding the license agreements of any products that you are a) using b) using to do the reverse engineering.
have you seen www.handhelds.org?
... not that i can use it because my handwriting is worse than a drunken 80 year old doctors'
have you seen www.openzaurus.org?
there's something called QT which is open source, it runs under a linux 2.4.19 kernel, on ARM processors.
QT has _over 1,600 applications_.
if you have purchased, say, a sharp zaurus sl-5600, you get a license to use the hanson word and excel packages on _any_ handheld that supports the QT desktop.
i even have handwriting stuff on my sl 5600.
i looked last month at psion's new organiser-phone.
...ironic that now psion is thinking of doing linux.
i didn't buy it because when i looked for linux porting efforts, there weren't any.
instead, however, i looked for an xda-2 porting effort and found http://wiki.xda-developers.org. i since managed to get an initial boot of the xda-2.
PDA+phone+bluetooth+wireless+GPRS+GSM equals cool _and_ useful in my book.
... cos if they haven't, then the U.S. military could buy Dells for their aircraft carriers, install linux, and then they'd have a reliable warship that didn't have to be towed in because windows crashed, and in rough seas the computers would flex as much as the ship.
hey, did they stop doing those plastic desktop cases yet? you know, the ones where if you took the top off you could lift one corner of the machine an inch clean off the ground whilst all three other corners stayed on the desk?
the story goes something like this:
1) dave cutler's VAX/VMS team gets bored (funding cut)
2) microsoft hires dave and his team (6 people).
3) they code 200,000 lines per year EACH for 5 years, exclusively in c.
4) paul leach (of apollo and NCS 1.0 which became DCE/RPC fame) recommends DCE/RPC for NT Domain services.
5) bill gates orders from-on-high that NT must have a windows interface.
6) dave's team add a windows subsystem to placate bill: they have to port the win16 subsystem to 32-bit (hence the win32 subsystem).
[7) ibm somehow gets involved: nt also has an OS/2 subsystem. someone gets terribly embarrassed that NT uses ibm's OS/2 "HPFS" and orders that NT must have its own file system (esp. because HPFS doesn't support VAX/VMS security model) hence NTFS.]
8) DEC cottons on to what dave cutler is up to, especially when the VAX/VMS security model's interface turns up pretty much function-for-function in NT, and gets integrated properly into the NT Domain Services.
9) DEC gets paid $50m and mysteriously NT 3.51 gets ported to the DEC Alpha.
that's why NT runs on those lovely RISC processors: it was written in c and so was dead-easy to add other OSes.
not bad doing 2 weeks work and getting paid $50m.