No but most real OSes present information from kernel level code at Boot, especially when something goes wrong. Worse still some default to presenting no useful information to the visually impaired user, think vaguely animated horizontal bar, whilst booting. Defaults matter here, can't expect people to magically know secret key presses.
The question isn't whether this or that is technically part of the OS, but how much work it would take to make the OS accessible.
Doesn't matter if a boot loader isn't part of the OS, if all the available boot loaders for an OS are inaccessible, there is still a given amount of work to do before the OS can even be booted in an accessible fashion.
"You can use any already existing decent OS as the base."
I'm not convinced it can be done easily. I assume part of the reason this question got featured was the report of blind and deaf people feeling excluded by technology (I'm not sure they are alone in that feeling).
Part of this is that the technology needs to be useable from the "get go", so that the visually impaired aren't (always) dependent on sighted people to get them started (or to reinstall when they mess up - like we all do from time to time). For most systems this would be a ground up redesign hardware and software (The new Apple IMac s might be good base to start from, large high contrast screen, sound built in, virtually no cables to plug in, it already has some okay accessibility features in MACOSX, but I really hate that screen reader).
For starters my computer here has no non-visual clue as to which is the power on button, or which socket is for the microphone, and which for the speakers/headset.
You can just about feel which way up a CD should be, although figuring out which is the CD drive button (and which is down with vertically mounted CD drives....). Does the OS come on more than one CD? If so how do I know which to use first.
Screen readers suck big time, but you probably want an OS that does load screen readers early (do any load sound drivers THAT early?), and support from braille readers for those that need them (some of the bootable GNU/Linux CDs load braille device drivers early, but even then it is rarely at the point the OS starts spitting output to the screen. They are going to get very stuck if the boot stops with "LI" on the screen if they can't even hear/read/feel it (trust me it is bad enough when you can see it).
Braille is a distinctly minority activity, as mentioned earlier, most visually impaired users have some vision (most with no vision either don't know braille or are inexperienced), so we want to load accessibility stuff to zoom the screen as early as possible. Ideally in the installer, or in the initial loader (think accessible GRUB/LILO, even BIOS - although hopefully BIOSes can be simplified out of existence, most people never need to interact with the BIOS other than to set boot device order, and that is a pretty simple task we could do at boot).
We haven't even got our OS installed yet, wait till I get to application issues;)
The good news is a lot of the changes required would make computing a damn site easier for people without disabilities.
"and completely failed to provide a usable desktop environment"
I used it successfully and productively for many years, but then at the time I had a choice between VUE/CDE with Applixware, and Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Office.
Only one of them could reliably get my paper size right - so really a no brainer. Window managers are overrated if the underlying applications are poor.
"Is there really a concern that they'll embrace and extend when they take so long to embrace?"
Yes, they embraced and extended DNS, and many other technologies, years after these technologies were widely deployed and used.
Many companies have subsequently deployed Microsoft DNS because they needed the interoperability with other Microsoft products (ADS) which they discovered they suddenly needed to manage their Windows boxes, when of course there was never any need for ADS to require any DNS changes, other than at most one name in each domain identifying the ADS servers for that domain.
Indeed it is probably better to embrace and extend established technologies, as a way of levering your way into an established market.
Without the totally unnecessary dependence on MS DNS in ADS, few would have replaced their Unix or Linux based DNS servers with MS DNS (and MS servers). Because the MS DNS technology was overly complex for the task at hand, notoriously buggy and insecure, and only ran on Microsoft servers (which still aren't enterprise quality, but more like overgrown desktop machines), in an area where 100% service availability has long been considered normal.
When people discuss 100% service availability, they discuss things like deliberately using diverse platforms for increased availability, this kind of thinking doesn't fit the Microsoft way.
It isn't clear that this particular example is "embrace and extend", not every standard change Microsoft proposes will be, but anyone dealing more than necessary with a company for which "embrace and extend" is a deliberate business strategy will get what they deserve in the long run.
"Microsoft argues that publishing SPF records is simple. It usually does not require new hardware or software and the most arduous part is doing an inventory of mail servers and the subsequent maintenance of the record, Spiezle said."
So why don't all microsoft owned domains advertise them?
Same reason the vast majority of the thousands of domains I'm technical contact for don't, implementing it involves the non-trivial administrative task "check where valid email is sent from" unless the record says "and from anywhere else on the internet", which is totally useless for the person adding the record, and people receiving the email. Email servers just got harder to configure for minimal gain.
SPF isn't quiet that useless, but it is of limited value in the fight against spam.
It can be used to reduce those irritating paypal phishing messages, if they come from paypal.com. That is essentially it's goal. It doesn't stop someone registering a "paypal.com" like domains. "paypal-support.com", "paypal.com.id" or whatever, so it may not reduce the volume of such much.
By advertising genuine email servers for a domain it does facilitate other email filtering schemes, and may allow you to reduce unwanted backscatter when people use your domain, by permitting those that choose to reject messages that fail.
(Actually it is relatively easy to mitigate backscatter - at least from an end user perspective - if you know all the email will be sent from a small number of servers you control.)
What it doesn't address directly is spam. The spammer can advertise SPF records for the domains he choses to send spam from. You could then decide to blacklist the domain, but then you've probably gone from blacklist IP addresses (range less than 2^32) to blacklisting domains (range many orders of magnitude greater than 2^32).
I advertise SPF records for new domains where I control the email set-up, and know people can easily send email via the proper servers (web interface, SMTP AUTH etc). I don't think it is worth reworking established big email domains with lots of forwarding and other weird stuff happening just to be able to advertise an SPF record.
I haven't yet deployed any filtering on other peoples SPF records, indeed with my current spam filtering I've yet to see the point, most of the viral dross, and paypal scams are killed by other techniques - RBL, greylisting, mime type filtering for Windows executables.
HP produced CDE, under than name HP-VUE, which became the standard Unix desktop.
I believe there were about 5,000,000 Amigas sold. SUN were shipping around a third of a million workstations a year in the mid 90's, they were selling workstations from the late 80's till now, so the difference in total volume probably isn't large. Sure the desktop changed over this period.
First consider how much more SUN workstations cost than Amigas.
Now lets discuss our definition of success. People seem to be equating success with market share of all desktops, but the Unix workstations never really chased the business desktop, they variously chased the high end performance desktop, be it scientific, financial, or technical. Over most of the period SUN held between 1/3 and 1/2 of this market.
SUN were the largest player in the high-end market through out the 1990s, despite having distinctly inferior processor technology towards the end of the period.
"Though not implementing this law would mean violating the WIPOs rulings; which state that circumvention of TPM (...DRMs) are illegal."
WIPO doesn't make the law in Canada, so the WIPO treatise can't make anything illegal.
The copyright treatise, article 11, says;
"Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures..."
In the UK some argued (unsucessfully) that this was basically covered by the fact that copyright infringement permits the author legal redress under existing UK legislation. Since by definition the act of circumvention necessarily includes the act of copyright infringement, where as anything else may well be reasonably classed under topics such as reverse engineering.
Of course how a technical measure can be "effective" if it needs legal sanction to make it work, points up the core silliness at the heart of DRM systems.
We have 10 year old SCSI adaptors, and Sarge works with it great - if only I could find the driver disk that came with the box I could reinstall Windows NT 4 and get the box doing what it is suppose to be doing . Its not supported in W2K SP4 either - ho hum.
Next time buy a laptop with GNU/Linux preinstalled - so there is a market for the people who sell these to people who can't sort the issues.
Actually there is a bigger reason why OSX won't ship for generic x86 hardware, and that is that it needs drivers, and no one has written them yet.
Microsoft don't support that hardware despite appearances, it is supported by the manufacturers, and by and large they only produce drivers for MS Windows.
They might produce a MACOS driver if there was demand, but hell the server manufacturers have been slow to support GNU/Linux in many cases and that has some huge percentage of the server market. The external peripherals may have a Macos for PowerPC driver in some cases already - but that may not be good enough. But the internals, all those broken BIOSes and broken power save variants... just ain't going to be able to press the power button on the keyboard and have it spring to life...
Of course the thing about having a user base so picky about the interface, is even if BSD has drivers for a particular piece of hardware, Apple would probably have to tidy up the user experience, and make sure it is all properly guified.
When Apple are talking to DELL and HP about "boxes" then the rest of the software suppliers can get scared, but historically Apple have been effectively a hardware seller.
I'm not sure people will want Macos X if you have to stick three or four vendor CDs in when installing it. That isn't the premium experience you pay for.
I do think that the natural Linux user base is being encroached on slightly by Macos X - especially laptops and the Minimac - but a lot of the serious developers soon find Macos X gets in the way, and they then stick Debian on, and get back to a sensible environment. Developers are not normal users however - well in the free software world they can be. Part of this is the lack of decent preinstalled Linux laptops in the market.
Solaris is probably mentioned most because it had the largest user base, and probably also the most software development going on.
HP may have been hot on compilers, but SUN were dealing with dynamic loading of modules, dynamic tuning of kernel parameters and the kind of things that find favour on LKML.
IBM may have done all sorts of things in AIX, but they must have had the hangers on from the OS/2 marketing team doing their PR, because I never heard of any of it till they put it in GNU/Linux.
I'd dispute Windows working, it doesn't work compared to most other operating systems. It remains unstable, and the core Microsoft apps are hideously designed, and insecure.
Those people who don't understand why we get KDE/GNOME flame wars, also don't understand why they get an email client, which despite shipping to 100,000,000+ desktops still has a fit with more than 16384 messages in a folder.
Brand new shiny Mac, ancient Linux laptop, experience MAC user who has editted video before, experience Linux user who has never editted video in Kino.
The job got done on the old Linux laptop.
"Wot no firewire?" - Steve Jobs (allegedly)
But really if you are setting them up from fresh just get compatible technology. That is after all how Apple do it. If you don't you might not even be able to plug the video camera in;)
"It's actually not all that bad. If the sign is broken, the tritium gas just goes straight up."
Lets hope it doesn't burn or otherwise react to form something that doesn't just float away. Like urm water.
Yes sorry I meant "curies" I had read it right. Usually discussing radio-iodine doses, and the muscle memory must have kicked in.
Obviously Iodine concentrates in the thyroid, but 10 millicuries is a typical dose for destroying the thyroid, and kills a small but measurable number of the patients who have it through increased incidence of cancer (~1%).
As such 10 curies for just lighting a sign, when presumably most of the benefit could be achieved with a capacitor/battery or other simple electronics.... Just seems like madness to me.
Oh and I like the "the supplier will dispose of it in 10 years time" comment on the website, like anyone will remember in ten years time, no one will rip it off and dump it in a skip, or take it home and stick it in their kids bedroom as a nightlight.
What started as a nice conversation on what stupid people do, is now reminding me why I went from pro-nuclear, to thinking the entire nuclear industry is scary.
We should teach nuclear dosing know-how to school kids, as they are going to need to know their curies, from their rads.
Okay I'm adding geiger counter to the birthday list.
"Yep, they don't even compare to Britain. IF you want scientific achievement per capita, Britain is No.1."
Much as I'd like to believe this do you have a source.
nationmaster.com does "nobel prizes per capita" and "nobel prizes by GDP" which is interesting, although proximity to Sweden seems to be the dominant factor in who gets nobel prizes.
The Hitachi SCSI drive gives you 73GB for 132.16GBP at 10,000 RPM (180p/GB) and 8MB cache.
The SATA150 Maxtor gives you 250GB for 95.23GBP (38p/GB) at 7,200 RPM with 16MB cache built in. So three times the space, and the software RAID performance looked pretty comparable when using the Adaptec controller.
The Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 at 32.95GBP is probably the suitable SATA150 drive to put up against an 80GB SCSI drive. And the saving of 100GBP probably won't make a huge impact in performance (2MB cache I believe), if it does, buy 4 of them to get 8MB of cache back;)
You pay a lot for the extra cache in the drives, but the RAID controller if it is good will switch this off for write-back and use its own for reliability reasons. I wish I understood enough Norweigan to see what he'd done with write-back caching.
Even if you have 32MB or 64MB of cache on each drive, it is still small (and expensive) compared to both the disk drive size, and the memory used for caching on modern servers, as a result the disks own cache will have a fickle impact on performance, possibly improving some unrealistic benchmarks better than it will actually help in real life. My guess is most people are better off saving the money and buying RAM, which is probably cheaper per MB, and has a more general utility beyond just the I/O intensive operations.
Perhaps what we need is a competition to design and build servers for particular application purposes; email server, database server, and see what people can do for a specific amount of money.
Many modern SATA drives are physically identical to the SCSI disks in terms of the disk components, the SCSI drives are more expensive because of the lower volumes shipped, and the more complex controllers.
Last study I read said that whilst the SCSI disks outperformed the SATA, pricing was such that they could buy many more disks (something like 3 to 1 ratio), and SCSI simply isn't that much better that it can outperform three times as many disks.
Besides for most purposes it is either total throughput (which isn't very different), or blocking writes to disk, the later bottleneck generally better met by doing the blocking writes to something that doesn't have to spin than to get more faster spinning things.
"Why do companies on the web insist on click through ads? I can't click through on TV, Radio or Billboards and they've work fine for decades?"
The "Holy Grail of advertising", you actually get to know immediately if the advert worked (for some definition of worked).
Also it removes the doubt about viewing figures. Everyone will claim lots of viewing on the adverts they show for you, but reality is often a little different. If you can verify 200 click throughs from various IP addresses you can assume that many more than 200 people saw it.
Just ponder the mystery of TV viewing figures, tonight I saw a claim that 850,000 Brits are watching Poker on TV. I'm a gaming enthusiast and I doubt I've watched more than a few hours of televised Poker in my entire life. This is a sign of how detached TV viewing figures have become in their quest to sell advertising.
Viral advertising, click through, and the like are the way of the future. Highly targetted advertising that works and can ne immediately measured to work. TV is evolving into a similar set of niche markets, and expect clickable TV ads to come (shopping channels already do).
"According to law students I used to live with, the truth is an absolute defence against libel under English law."
Of course calling Tony Blair a liar would be slander, libel applies to more permanent forms (/. comments are probably somewhere in between), but truth is a defence to all forms of defamation I would have thought, because you can't defame the guilty almost by definition.
The reason Tony Blair probably doesn't sue is that "liar" is a broad term in English, you'd probably only need to prove he lied once on something. And much as I think he is a generally good chap he is still a politician with lips that move.
I don't believe there is much difference between UK, Spanish or American law on these topics, but then IANAL.
After excluding favicons hits. Explorer 78.1% Firefox 9.9%
I really should creates a very small, very cachable favicon, and figure out how to get it served if the website being served doesn't have one, this would save a lot of wasted traffic.
Either way no idea how a valid test set gets anywhere near 90% for IE, I can't force the figure over 80%, and these stats are from sites with a distinct IE bias.
Market share doesn't of course affect the fact that IE doesn't run on real operating systems;)
"All the geeks on planet earth are now using Firefox."
Real geeks get their software from package archives, or source.
This figure just means there are a lot of people getting software the old fashioned and tedious method, because they haven't learnt better, or their operating system makes it unusually difficult to install software (i.e. Mostly MS Windows users).
Slashdot Mirror
No but most real OSes present information from kernel level code at Boot, especially when something goes wrong. Worse still some default to presenting no useful information to the visually impaired user, think vaguely animated horizontal bar, whilst booting. Defaults matter here, can't expect people to magically know secret key presses.
The question isn't whether this or that is technically part of the OS, but how much work it would take to make the OS accessible.
Doesn't matter if a boot loader isn't part of the OS, if all the available boot loaders for an OS are inaccessible, there is still a given amount of work to do before the OS can even be booted in an accessible fashion.
"You can use any already existing decent OS as the base."
;)
I'm not convinced it can be done easily. I assume part of the reason this question got featured was the report of blind and deaf people feeling excluded by technology (I'm not sure they are alone in that feeling).
Part of this is that the technology needs to be useable from the "get go", so that the visually impaired aren't (always) dependent on sighted people to get them started (or to reinstall when they mess up - like we all do from time to time). For most systems this would be a ground up redesign hardware and software (The new Apple IMac s might be good base to start from, large high contrast screen, sound built in, virtually no cables to plug in, it already has some okay accessibility features in MACOSX, but I really hate that screen reader).
For starters my computer here has no non-visual clue as to which is the power on button, or which socket is for the microphone, and which for the speakers/headset.
You can just about feel which way up a CD should be, although figuring out which is the CD drive button (and which is down with vertically mounted CD drives....). Does the OS come on more than one CD? If so how do I know which to use first.
Screen readers suck big time, but you probably want an OS that does load screen readers early (do any load sound drivers THAT early?), and support from braille readers for those that need them (some of the bootable GNU/Linux CDs load braille device drivers early, but even then it is rarely at the point the OS starts spitting output to the screen. They are going to get very stuck if the boot stops with "LI" on the screen if they can't even hear/read/feel it (trust me it is bad enough when you can see it).
Braille is a distinctly minority activity, as mentioned earlier, most visually impaired users have some vision (most with no vision either don't know braille or are inexperienced), so we want to load accessibility stuff to zoom the screen as early as possible. Ideally in the installer, or in the initial loader (think accessible GRUB/LILO, even BIOS - although hopefully BIOSes can be simplified out of existence, most people never need to interact with the BIOS other than to set boot device order, and that is a pretty simple task we could do at boot).
We haven't even got our OS installed yet, wait till I get to application issues
The good news is a lot of the changes required would make computing a damn site easier for people without disabilities.
"and completely failed to provide a usable desktop environment"
I used it successfully and productively for many years, but then at the time I had a choice between VUE/CDE with Applixware, and Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Office.
Only one of them could reliably get my paper size right - so really a no brainer. Window managers are overrated if the underlying applications are poor.
"Is there really a concern that they'll embrace and extend when they take so long to embrace?"
Yes, they embraced and extended DNS, and many other technologies, years after these technologies were widely deployed and used.
Many companies have subsequently deployed Microsoft DNS because they needed the interoperability with other Microsoft products (ADS) which they discovered they suddenly needed to manage their Windows boxes, when of course there was never any need for ADS to require any DNS changes, other than at most one name in each domain identifying the ADS servers for that domain.
Indeed it is probably better to embrace and extend established technologies, as a way of levering your way into an established market.
Without the totally unnecessary dependence on MS DNS in ADS, few would have replaced their Unix or Linux based DNS servers with MS DNS (and MS servers). Because the MS DNS technology was overly complex for the task at hand, notoriously buggy and insecure, and only ran on Microsoft servers (which still aren't enterprise quality, but more like overgrown desktop machines), in an area where 100% service availability has long been considered normal.
When people discuss 100% service availability, they discuss things like deliberately using diverse platforms for increased availability, this kind of thinking doesn't fit the Microsoft way.
It isn't clear that this particular example is "embrace and extend", not every standard change Microsoft proposes will be, but anyone dealing more than necessary with a company for which "embrace and extend" is a deliberate business strategy will get what they deserve in the long run.
"Microsoft argues that publishing SPF records is simple. It usually does not require new hardware or software and the most arduous part is doing an inventory of mail servers and the subsequent maintenance of the record, Spiezle said."
So why don't all microsoft owned domains advertise them?
Same reason the vast majority of the thousands of domains I'm technical contact for don't, implementing it involves the non-trivial administrative task "check where valid email is sent from" unless the record says "and from anywhere else on the internet", which is totally useless for the person adding the record, and people receiving the email. Email servers just got harder to configure for minimal gain.
SPF isn't quiet that useless, but it is of limited value in the fight against spam.
It can be used to reduce those irritating paypal phishing messages, if they come from paypal.com. That is essentially it's goal. It doesn't stop someone registering a "paypal.com" like domains. "paypal-support.com", "paypal.com.id" or whatever, so it may not reduce the volume of such much.
By advertising genuine email servers for a domain it does facilitate other email filtering schemes, and may allow you to reduce unwanted backscatter when people use your domain, by permitting those that choose to reject messages that fail.
(Actually it is relatively easy to mitigate backscatter - at least from an end user perspective - if you know all the email will be sent from a small number of servers you control.)
What it doesn't address directly is spam. The spammer can advertise SPF records for the domains he choses to send spam from. You could then decide to blacklist the domain, but then you've probably gone from blacklist IP addresses (range less than 2^32) to blacklisting domains (range many orders of magnitude greater than 2^32).
I advertise SPF records for new domains where I control the email set-up, and know people can easily send email via the proper servers (web interface, SMTP AUTH etc). I don't think it is worth reworking established big email domains with lots of forwarding and other weird stuff happening just to be able to advertise an SPF record.
I haven't yet deployed any filtering on other peoples SPF records, indeed with my current spam filtering I've yet to see the point, most of the viral dross, and paypal scams are killed by other techniques - RBL, greylisting, mime type filtering for Windows executables.
Obvious solution, use only non-Microsoft OSes for client machines ;)
Somehow I don't suppose this was the line Microsoft were intending to encourage.
HP produced CDE, under than name HP-VUE, which became the standard Unix desktop.
I believe there were about 5,000,000 Amigas sold. SUN were shipping around a third of a million workstations a year in the mid 90's, they were selling workstations from the late 80's till now, so the difference in total volume probably isn't large. Sure the desktop changed over this period.
First consider how much more SUN workstations cost than Amigas.
Now lets discuss our definition of success. People seem to be equating success with market share of all desktops, but the Unix workstations never really chased the business desktop, they variously chased the high end performance desktop, be it scientific, financial, or technical. Over most of the period SUN held between 1/3 and 1/2 of this market.
SUN were the largest player in the high-end market through out the 1990s, despite having distinctly inferior processor technology towards the end of the period.
"when is the recording industry going to start charging for singing inthe shower?"
;)
In the UK, they already do if you have an audience of 9 or more when you shower
"Though not implementing this law would mean violating the WIPOs rulings; which state that circumvention of TPM (...DRMs) are illegal."
WIPO doesn't make the law in Canada, so the WIPO treatise can't make anything illegal.
The copyright treatise, article 11, says;
"Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures..."
In the UK some argued (unsucessfully) that this was basically covered by the fact that copyright infringement permits the author legal redress under existing UK legislation. Since by definition the act of circumvention necessarily includes the act of copyright infringement, where as anything else may well be reasonably classed under topics such as reverse engineering.
Of course how a technical measure can be "effective" if it needs legal sanction to make it work, points up the core silliness at the heart of DRM systems.
"There's only one company on earth that has created a successful UNIX based desktop system."
Is that SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, or Apple you are talking about? Or one of the other ones?
Someone kick these youngster about a bit till they learn some history.
We have 10 year old SCSI adaptors, and Sarge works with it great - if only I could find the driver disk that came with the box I could reinstall Windows NT 4 and get the box doing what it is suppose to be doing . Its not supported in W2K SP4 either - ho hum.
Next time buy a laptop with GNU/Linux preinstalled - so there is a market for the people who sell these to people who can't sort the issues.
Actually there is a bigger reason why OSX won't ship for generic x86 hardware, and that is that it needs drivers, and no one has written them yet.
Microsoft don't support that hardware despite appearances, it is supported by the manufacturers, and by and large they only produce drivers for MS Windows.
They might produce a MACOS driver if there was demand, but hell the server manufacturers have been slow to support GNU/Linux in many cases and that has some huge percentage of the server market. The external peripherals may have a Macos for PowerPC driver in some cases already - but that may not be good enough. But the internals, all those broken BIOSes and broken power save variants... just ain't going to be able to press the power button on the keyboard and have it spring to life...
Of course the thing about having a user base so picky about the interface, is even if BSD has drivers for a particular piece of hardware, Apple would probably have to tidy up the user experience, and make sure it is all properly guified.
When Apple are talking to DELL and HP about "boxes" then the rest of the software suppliers can get scared, but historically Apple have been effectively a hardware seller.
I'm not sure people will want Macos X if you have to stick three or four vendor CDs in when installing it. That isn't the premium experience you pay for.
I do think that the natural Linux user base is being encroached on slightly by Macos X - especially laptops and the Minimac - but a lot of the serious developers soon find Macos X gets in the way, and they then stick Debian on, and get back to a sensible environment. Developers are not normal users however - well in the free software world they can be. Part of this is the lack of decent preinstalled Linux laptops in the market.
Solaris is probably mentioned most because it had the largest user base, and probably also the most software development going on.
HP may have been hot on compilers, but SUN were dealing with dynamic loading of modules, dynamic tuning of kernel parameters and the kind of things that find favour on LKML.
IBM may have done all sorts of things in AIX, but they must have had the hangers on from the OS/2 marketing team doing their PR, because I never heard of any of it till they put it in GNU/Linux.
I'd dispute Windows working, it doesn't work compared to most other operating systems. It remains unstable, and the core Microsoft apps are hideously designed, and insecure.
Those people who don't understand why we get KDE/GNOME flame wars, also don't understand why they get an email client, which despite shipping to 100,000,000+ desktops still has a fit with more than 16384 messages in a folder.
Hehe we just had this one at the local GLUG.
;)
Brand new shiny Mac, ancient Linux laptop, experience MAC user who has editted video before, experience Linux user who has never editted video in Kino.
The job got done on the old Linux laptop.
"Wot no firewire?" - Steve Jobs (allegedly)
But really if you are setting them up from fresh just get compatible technology. That is after all how Apple do it. If you don't you might not even be able to plug the video camera in
"It's actually not all that bad. If the sign is broken, the tritium gas just goes straight up."
Lets hope it doesn't burn or otherwise react to form something that doesn't just float away. Like urm water.
Yes sorry I meant "curies" I had read it right. Usually discussing radio-iodine doses, and the muscle memory must have kicked in.
Obviously Iodine concentrates in the thyroid, but 10 millicuries is a typical dose for destroying the thyroid, and kills a small but measurable number of the patients who have it through increased incidence of cancer (~1%).
As such 10 curies for just lighting a sign, when presumably most of the benefit could be achieved with a capacitor/battery or other simple electronics.... Just seems like madness to me.
10 millicuries for an "Exit" sign!?!
Oh and I like the "the supplier will dispose of it in 10 years time" comment on the website, like anyone will remember in ten years time, no one will rip it off and dump it in a skip, or take it home and stick it in their kids bedroom as a nightlight.
What started as a nice conversation on what stupid people do, is now reminding me why I went from pro-nuclear, to thinking the entire nuclear industry is scary.
We should teach nuclear dosing know-how to school kids, as they are going to need to know their curies, from their rads.
Okay I'm adding geiger counter to the birthday list.
"Yep, they don't even compare to Britain. IF you want scientific achievement per capita, Britain is No.1."
Much as I'd like to believe this do you have a source.
nationmaster.com does "nobel prizes per capita" and "nobel prizes by GDP" which is interesting, although proximity to Sweden seems to be the dominant factor in who gets nobel prizes.
He does indeed very odd.
;)
The Hitachi SCSI drive gives you 73GB for 132.16GBP at 10,000 RPM (180p/GB) and 8MB cache.
The SATA150 Maxtor gives you 250GB for 95.23GBP (38p/GB) at 7,200 RPM with 16MB cache built in. So three times the space, and the software RAID performance looked pretty comparable when using the Adaptec controller.
The Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 at 32.95GBP is probably the suitable SATA150 drive to put up against an 80GB SCSI drive. And the saving of 100GBP probably won't make a huge impact in performance (2MB cache I believe), if it does, buy 4 of them to get 8MB of cache back
You pay a lot for the extra cache in the drives, but the RAID controller if it is good will switch this off for write-back and use its own for reliability reasons. I wish I understood enough Norweigan to see what he'd done with write-back caching.
Even if you have 32MB or 64MB of cache on each drive, it is still small (and expensive) compared to both the disk drive size, and the memory used for caching on modern servers, as a result the disks own cache will have a fickle impact on performance, possibly improving some unrealistic benchmarks better than it will actually help in real life. My guess is most people are better off saving the money and buying RAM, which is probably cheaper per MB, and has a more general utility beyond just the I/O intensive operations.
Perhaps what we need is a competition to design and build servers for particular application purposes; email server, database server, and see what people can do for a specific amount of money.
Prices quoted are list at DABS.COM excluding VAT.
"they use better components on the SCSI drives"
Many modern SATA drives are physically identical to the SCSI disks in terms of the disk components, the SCSI drives are more expensive because of the lower volumes shipped, and the more complex controllers.
Last study I read said that whilst the SCSI disks outperformed the SATA, pricing was such that they could buy many more disks (something like 3 to 1 ratio), and SCSI simply isn't that much better that it can outperform three times as many disks.
Besides for most purposes it is either total throughput (which isn't very different), or blocking writes to disk, the later bottleneck generally better met by doing the blocking writes to something that doesn't have to spin than to get more faster spinning things.
"Why do companies on the web insist on click through ads? I can't click through on TV, Radio or Billboards and they've work fine for decades?"
The "Holy Grail of advertising", you actually get to know immediately if the advert worked (for some definition of worked).
Also it removes the doubt about viewing figures. Everyone will claim lots of viewing on the adverts they show for you, but reality is often a little different. If you can verify 200 click throughs from various IP addresses you can assume that many more than 200 people saw it.
Just ponder the mystery of TV viewing figures, tonight I saw a claim that 850,000 Brits are watching Poker on TV. I'm a gaming enthusiast and I doubt I've watched more than a few hours of televised Poker in my entire life. This is a sign of how detached TV viewing figures have become in their quest to sell advertising.
Viral advertising, click through, and the like are the way of the future. Highly targetted advertising that works and can ne immediately measured to work. TV is evolving into a similar set of niche markets, and expect clickable TV ads to come (shopping channels already do).
"According to law students I used to live with, the truth is an absolute defence against libel under English law."
Of course calling Tony Blair a liar would be slander, libel applies to more permanent forms (/. comments are probably somewhere in between), but truth is a defence to all forms of defamation I would have thought, because you can't defame the guilty almost by definition.
The reason Tony Blair probably doesn't sue is that "liar" is a broad term in English, you'd probably only need to prove he lied once on something. And much as I think he is a generally good chap he is still a politician with lips that move.
I don't believe there is much difference between UK, Spanish or American law on these topics, but then IANAL.
I wonder if this include favicon hits ;)
;)
Last 6 hours from webserver.
Explorer 72.9%
Firefox 15.5%
After excluding favicons hits.
Explorer 78.1%
Firefox 9.9%
I really should creates a very small, very cachable favicon, and figure out how to get it served if the website being served doesn't have one, this would save a lot of wasted traffic.
Either way no idea how a valid test set gets anywhere near 90% for IE, I can't force the figure over 80%, and these stats are from sites with a distinct IE bias.
Market share doesn't of course affect the fact that IE doesn't run on real operating systems
"All the geeks on planet earth are now using Firefox."
Real geeks get their software from package archives, or source.
This figure just means there are a lot of people getting software the old fashioned and tedious method, because they haven't learnt better, or their operating system makes it unusually difficult to install software (i.e. Mostly MS Windows users).