A better idea is to extract raw materials from the asteroids. In the system Earth-moon the smallest mass change would cause, in the long term, gravitational instabilities that could perturb Earth's orbit around the sun.
It is hard to find a set of applications capable of testing every aspect of computer performance. Starting from scratch it demands a lot of time (and money) to make the applications portable enough to run on different architectures and operating environments (including compilers, filesystems, etc.) Then a database containing the results must be mantained for future reference. Only in these conditions the benchmark programs can be considered standard, it is perfectly justified to sell it for money. In conclusion, benchmarking is a task for especialists, it should be performed by computer and software makers using a (rapidly evolving) set of standard applications.
IMO, the problem is not the virus nor the virus writer no matter it's psychological profile. There is a natural tendency of humans to form communities with special practices, sort of religion. It happens that their actions hurt the interests of a larger community, this is a statistical problem, it comes from the monopolistic practices that tend to homogenize computing systems. Under these circumstances when a virus is introduced it spreads rapidly like a human epidemy. Solution: diversity of OS and applications.
I agree. They are the masters of theft, making money out of nothing at all. I thought once that M$ was the master of FUD but SCO beats them, even if they don't have as much money as M$.
Installing new programs in RedHat 9 is as easy as in Windows. Open nautilus or KDE filemanager, click on the icon of the application to be installed, type root password and that's all. Dependencies will continue to be a problem, there are some efforts to provide automatic dependency resolution (Ximian RedCarpet, Apt-rpm, urpmi, etc.) But I agree in part with you, Linux does not have (at present) an intuitive desktop interface nor has resolved the problem of integrating all the facilities Windows provides.
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A better idea is to extract raw materials
from the asteroids. In the system Earth-moon
the smallest mass change would cause, in the
long term, gravitational instabilities that
could perturb Earth's orbit around the sun.
It is hard to find a set of applications capable of testing every aspect of computer performance. Starting from scratch it demands a lot of time (and money) to make the applications portable enough to run on different architectures and operating environments (including compilers, filesystems, etc.) Then a database containing the results must be mantained for future reference. Only in these conditions the benchmark programs can be considered standard, it is perfectly justified to sell it for money. In conclusion, benchmarking is a task for especialists, it should be performed by computer and software makers using a (rapidly evolving) set of standard applications.
IMO, the problem is not the virus nor the virus
writer no matter it's psychological profile. There is a natural tendency of humans to form
communities with special practices, sort of religion. It happens that their actions hurt
the interests of a larger community, this is
a statistical problem, it comes from the monopolistic practices that tend to homogenize computing systems. Under these
circumstances when a virus is introduced it
spreads rapidly like a human epidemy. Solution:
diversity of OS and applications.
I agree. They are the masters of theft, making
money out of nothing at all. I thought once that
M$ was the master of FUD but SCO beats them,
even if they don't have as much money as M$.
Yeah, but FORTRAN is a lot easier to program.
Installing new programs in RedHat 9 is as easy as in
Windows. Open nautilus or KDE filemanager, click on
the icon of the application to be installed, type
root password and that's all. Dependencies will
continue to be a problem, there are some efforts to
provide automatic dependency resolution (Ximian
RedCarpet, Apt-rpm, urpmi, etc.) But I agree in
part with you, Linux does not have (at present) an
intuitive desktop interface nor has resolved the
problem of integrating all the facilities Windows
provides.