To answer my own question: I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Fedora CORE 3 anyway. Bad mistake. First of all, after the installation was complete and it rebooted the computer it got stuck at "GRUB loading stage 2. Please wait...". It was frozen solid; wouldn't respond to anything but the reset button. It took me several hours of messing with it in Linux rescue mode to get the hard drive booting again. The solution: fortunately I had made a backup copy of nearly everything in RedHat 9 into a hidden subdirectory, so I replaced the new GRUB 0.95 with the older GRUB 0.93 and reinstalled the old boot loader to the MBR.
Once I finally got it booting Linux again, X kept crashing on me because I was using ATI's fglrx driver which only works with XFree86 4.3.0. They don't make a driver for Xorg (yet), so I had to switch out to the generic ati driver. That means I lost my 3D acceleration. In addition, for some reason the ATI driver doesn't seem to work right with 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions, so I've got less screen real estate than I did before.
The first time X finally came up, it got stuck on a black screen with a rotating hourglass pointer. That's because Gnome was not fully installed. I had chosen the upgrade option when installing Fedora, and it never let me choose which packages to install; and since previously I had replaced RedHat 9's Gnome packages with ones I built from source, that meant most of them never got upgraded. I spent quite a bit of time going through and installing the missing Gnome packages until I finally got a login screen. And then it wasn't even the same login screen I had used before -- Fedora had overwritten my custom gdm configuration.
After logging in, I found that my usual Gnome session had been replaced by GNUstep! I have no idea how that got in there; I hadn't used GNUstep since February 2003. I can log out and log back in to Gnome by manually setting the session, but for some strange reason if I let it log in with the default session it takes me back to GNUstep.
Once logged in to my Gnome desktop, I found that my launcher icons were all messed up. Nearly all of the launchers I had created on the panel lost their Name tags. The menu is cluttered with duplicate entries, both within the same menu and across parent and submenus, and a few submenus are completely duplicated as well. (Of course, I remember having this same problem when I tried installing Gnome 2.6 over Gnome 2.4.)
I also found out that my Alt keys no longer work properly -- they should be generating meta-characters, but instead the left Alt is generating foreign letters, and the right Alt does nothing (it doesn't even generate the Alt_R keycode -- it's been changed to ISO_Level3_Shift).
A few of my programs (that I built from source), such as Gnumeric 1.3, no longer run because the libraries they were linked with have been removed (obsoleted by newer RPM's). I'm having trouble recompiling it because it requires version 1.10.0 of a library and pkg-config seems to think I have version 1.9.1 installed, but rpm -q tells me I have 1.10.1.
I was up until 4AM last night trying to get my computer in at least a semi-usable state. It's going to take several more days to go through it and clean things up, find out what else doesn't work, and recompile a lot of my 3rd party programs.
Along the same line, my computer has RH9 installed but I've removed a lot of the RH RPM's for Gnome 2.2 and installed Gnome 2.6 from source. Sorting out the dependencies was hell, and parts of Gnome are still broken. Is that possibly going to create (or continue) problems if I upgrade to FC3 with its Gnome 2.8 RPM's? Should I try to manually uninstall Gnome 2.6 before upgrading? What about any other software that I replaced with custom builds from source (some of it lives in/usr/local, some in/usr)?
I just tried all 5 of the sample pages listed in the report with the W3C Markup Validation Service. None of them crashed the validator; they all showed "This page is not Valid !" and listed the specific lines which were in error.
The best PC joystick I've tried so far, for general gaming, is Belkin's Notromo n45. It already has a USB interface. There's a 4-directional digital stick, just like Nintendo's, plus two analog sticks, three control buttons in the middle (for start/pause/whatever), four fire buttons on the left, and four more L/R buttons on top. It fits in your hand really well too.
That brings up a question: they say that 8.9% is the lowest voluntary turnover since the early 80's, and that the involuntary turnover of 11.2% is lower than it was in 2001. That's hardly a fair comparison, since the 2001 number would be the highest rate (or nearly so). What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
This probably applies to all sectors, not just IT. The masses demand products and services for as little money as they can get away with. In order to price items competitively, companies focus on reducing costs as low as they can, even if it means using cheap parts, reducing/eliminating quality control, and hiring cheap labor. Cheap labor means people can't afford to spend money on quality products, so they demand even lower prices. It's a downward spiral -- we're saving money at the cost of good jobs. And from what I can tell, this has been going on since the start of the industrial age.
This patent suffers from several problems, but one that struck me was that it seems to be impossible to implement. The author uses such terms as "honor", "cowardice", "guilt", and "concern". Even where such terms are well-defined among all human cultures (and many of them are not), how the #@&%! are we supposed to program an AI to recognize what they mean? Further, terms such as "anger", "joy", "spite", and "love" define human emotions, and I seriously doubt we're ever going to build machines that feel any emotion.
Asimov's Three Laws are defined in terms that should be relatively easy to program into an AI, given sufficient intelligence: "do not harm any human" (it just needs to recognize what actions will physically hurt people), "obey instructions" (easy), "keep yourself functioning" (self-diagnostic and repair).
I just got back from the SIGGRAPH conference myself, and a couple of the items that impressed me the most were new monitor technologies.
First, there were 3-D monitors. There was a demonstration of 3D TV yesterday, but I actually found that to be unimpressive; it suffered from a double image that I couldn't get away from no matter where I stood. However, there were several companies that were using monitors with the label X3D which were very impressive! It almost looks like a regular LCD monitor, full color and brightness, but it displays a stereoscopic image that you can view without any special glasses. It seems to have an optimal viewing angle is within around ninety degrees, but in that range the illusion of depth is quite convincing. The major drawback to it is that it appears finely honeycombed, as if looking through the eyes of an insect (with several tens of thousands of lenses). There was also another display (I didn't get the name of the company that made the monitor) which used polarized light to achieve the 3D effect with a very high resolution, but the down side to that of course is you need polarized shades to see it.
The other item I found very interesting was a couple of new displays which combine LED lighting with an LCD display to achieve 300 times the contrast ratio of standard LCD monitors (that's right -- three hundred). 40,000:1! Viewing images of sunsets and light shining through stained glass windows on this monitor was simply breathtaking. They had it sitting next to a regular LCD monitor showing the same image so you could compare the difference, but even if they didn't have that, the quality of the lighting is enough to amaze you. It's much more true to life than a photograph can capture. One of the manufacturers was NEC, and the other was Sunnybrook Technologies. They said that these units would be ready for commercial production within a year.
And of course there were the companies like ATI and nVidia showing off their latest hardware, and Apple, Alias, Adobe, etc. demonstrating their latest software. Disney Feature Animation had clips of their new upcoming movie. But IMHO the above monitors had the biggest "wow" factor of all the exhibits I saw.
... by the article's use of the word 'instrument', as in "Users have more places to instrument a box and an easier way to do so.". I had never heard it used as a verb before. So I looked it up in the dictionary:
There are two major things wrong with this article, which have been touched on by other posters. One is that the number of vulnerabilities is different than the number of advisories, because advisories can cover multiple vulnerabilities.
The second is that (as other posters have covered) Linux distributors post advisories and bug fixes for all software bundled with their distribution, not just the kernel and core libraries. Looking at the list of MS Windows XP advisories, all I see are the core components, with the glaring omission of Internet Explorer (which these days is in fact a core component of the operating system).
I've been pretty lucky so far that I haven't totally destroyed any computer. But I have caused quite a few short-circuits.
When I was younger I tried cleaning out my dad's keyboard... while the computer was still on! The screwdriver accidentally slipped, touching the exposed circuit board, and the keyboard would no longer work after that.
When I put together my first PC and tried starting it, the thing started pouring out smoke. After some examination I discovered there was a short in the case speaker (from the manufacturer). After replacing that, everything was fine.
I had a similar problem with my third PC--burning wires due to a short in the case speaker. Again, only the speaker needed replacing; everything else was fine.
One time my dad was upgrading his motherboard and we accidentally plugged in the CPU 90 degrees in the wrong direction. (This was shortly before CPU's were keyed.) It started smoking. IIRC, the CPU had to be replaced, but the motherboard worked fine after that.
I used to work at a company that had several 2.5" hard drives attached to VME equipment using adapter boards that converted the drives' HD connectors to standard 50-pin SCSI connectors. There was no socket surrounding the pins, so it was too easy to misalign the cable, and when you did that both the cable and the traces on the adapter board would burn up. I think I personally fried two of those boards, but I wasn't the first or the last person at the company to do so.
I've gotten to the point where whenever I put together or upgrade a system, I first power it on with the case open, my finger on the power supply cutoff switch, and my nose sniffing around the wires for the first sign of trouble.
I wonder if the estimated MPG on the sticker takes into account when and where you would be driving? I have a Pontiac Sunfire, which was advertised as having from 24 MPG city up to 34 MPG highway. Generally it's been getting around 25 MPG. During a recent trip out of state (from CA to NM), my mileage got up above 33 MPG. On the flip side, I recently took a job where I have to commute within Los Angeles, often during rush hour. Now my mileage is only 17 MPG!
Actually it wasn't so much that different TV's produced different colors, but different *TIA chips produced different colors. Specifically, some early Atari demos (I forget which one - it displayed an image of the Atari 800 and monitor) and games (Choplifter, Beneath the Pyramids) were written expecting the artifacting colors to be orange and cyan (or red and blue), which was the case on the CTIA chip. Later on Atari replaced the CTIA with GTIA, whose luminance signal differed from the former chip by 90 degrees, resulting in artifacting colors of green and magenta. I have detailed notes about this at http://www.xmission.com/~trevin/atari/video_notes. html.
However, I haven't had my ST out of the box since I moved to California. Now I play the PC version of Dungeon Master which you can get from dmweb.free.fr, and is playable in VMware (albiet without sound). You can also get Chaos Strikes Back for Windows or Linux, thanks to some very dedicated fans. These versions don't have copy protection, so you can enjoy them as long as old PC's are emulated and you remember to keep your hard drive backed up regularly!
FTL Games had a similar policy to this way back when they made Dungeon Master. The media was just a 3.5" floppy but it had copy-protected sectors on it. Their warranty stated that if the disk was defective, you could simply return it to them for a replacement for just the cost of shipping + media. IIRC, when I had mine replaced (after at least five years of use) it only cost me four and a half bucks.
It seems like everyone has been repeating the same ideas over and over, but I only saw one poster who came close to this. Since the security vulnerabilities that allow worms and viruses to spread are well known, why doesn't Microsoft just write their own virus that seeks out pirated copies of Windows and nukes them? Or, if they want to be nicer, just break the networking capability of the pirated systems so that other viruses won't be able to spread.
There is just one drawback: how will Microsoft's virus know whether a given MS-Windows installation is legitimate or pirated?
The problem with building software blocks like LEGO blocks is that LEGO has a single standard interface for nearly all of their blocks, so you can take any block and connect it to any other block and they will snap together. Often they can snap together in several different ways. (Whether they connect in a way that is useful is up to the modeller.)
With software, you can't possibly define a single interface that fits all components. Each piece of a program has a specific task, with inputs and outputs that are specific to the task performed. Other components that 'mate' with that piece have to match with corresponding outputs and/or inputs. So the overall design is more like a picture puzzle than LEGOs.
Of course, I'm not saying there aren't exceptions to that description. One could conceivably write software that runs like a neural net, where each piece has the same inputs and outputs, the only difference being what the piece does internally to decide what outputs to procude for a given set of inputs. But that's a topic in which I never got very far in college.
'We do not send our basketball teams to compete against the rest of the world, saying the other teams have to play slower because our folks aren't fit enough to run as fast.'
Give me a break! Has he ever heard of the "dream team" we sent to the U.S. Olympics in 1996? Our basketball players were so good, the rest of the world couldn't touch us. It was no contest. But the other significant difference between our players and other countries' players is that ours had a much higher salary. At least in basketball, we know our players are worth it.
I'll bet many of our IT people are better at their jobs than a lot of the workers in 3rd-world countries. But do our CEO's recognize that by hiring them for a higher salary? No, they just look at the $$$ and hire the people who are cheapest.
I tried the WordPerfect Office 12 trial download. The first thing I did with it was open up some (very) old documents I have which were saved with WordPerfect 5.1. Normally I would expect the formatting to change slightly because WP customarily reformats your document for the default printer. Much to my surprise, after viewing the first two pages the rest of the entire document was missing!! I tried a few other documents (each of which should have had dozens of pages), and they all showed the same problem -- only two pages came through, the rest disappeared.
By way of comparison, I regularly use WP 8, and it has never had any problem opening up WP 5.1 files.
Just for the heck of it, I also tried opening up another old document which had been saved with MS Word 6.0, since WP claims to have better Word compatibility. Well, it brought up the "Converting document" dialog box with the pages flashing yellow and white furiously... for over five minutes. That's when I gave up and hit "Cancel". Of course, that caused WP to stop responding, so I had to give it the three-finger salute. (To be fair, WP 8 wasn't any good at opening those MS Word documents either.)
I also tried opening up a spreadsheet I had saved with Quatro Pro 8 into Quatro Pro 12. This sheet had several pages of charts attached to it. Well, the new Quatro Pro completely redid the formatting of my charts. The line styles and fonts had changed. The numeric format of the X axis labels was changed from dates ("Apr 29") to numeric codes (32756...). One of my line series which should have been scaled to the secondary Y axis was instead scaled to the primary axis. And one of the series seems to have been corrupted, because the right end of the line shot back to the left edge of the chart and made a vertical line. Even worse than losing the formatting was the fact that I couldn't fix it.
Personally, I don't care about WP being compatible with PDF, XML, or MS Word. But if it can't even remain compatible with WP's own file formats, I'm not going to upgrade.
I don't know how things stand in the current economy, but when I got my first entry-level software engineering job I was 6 years out of college (I had been doing PC tech support before then) and they offered me a salary of $35,000. Over the next couple of years as I showed my peers the kind of work I could do, I received significant raises until I was earning $50K. So if you have a good boss, and you have talent, I wouldn't worry about your starting salary. It will grow over time.
OTOH, at my next job I worked as a system administrator for a measly $15/hour, and the stingy boss never offered me a raise. I quit after 14 months. One of my coworkers there had been working for them for two years for even less money, and when he threatened to quit he finally got a raise. So if you have a boss who is taking advantage of you, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
Sorry, I wasn't being dishonest; simply uninformed. I was under the assumption that RealMedia was a proprietary format that could only be played by RealPlayer, which RealNetworks, Inc. does not make for Linux. Thanks for pointing out that there is a 3rd-party player for RealMedia.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer my own question: I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Fedora CORE 3 anyway. Bad mistake. First of all, after the installation was complete and it rebooted the computer it got stuck at "GRUB loading stage 2. Please wait...". It was frozen solid; wouldn't respond to anything but the reset button. It took me several hours of messing with it in Linux rescue mode to get the hard drive booting again. The solution: fortunately I had made a backup copy of nearly everything in RedHat 9 into a hidden subdirectory, so I replaced the new GRUB 0.95 with the older GRUB 0.93 and reinstalled the old boot loader to the MBR.
Once I finally got it booting Linux again, X kept crashing on me because I was using ATI's fglrx driver which only works with XFree86 4.3.0. They don't make a driver for Xorg (yet), so I had to switch out to the generic ati driver. That means I lost my 3D acceleration. In addition, for some reason the ATI driver doesn't seem to work right with 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions, so I've got less screen real estate than I did before.
The first time X finally came up, it got stuck on a black screen with a rotating hourglass pointer. That's because Gnome was not fully installed. I had chosen the upgrade option when installing Fedora, and it never let me choose which packages to install; and since previously I had replaced RedHat 9's Gnome packages with ones I built from source, that meant most of them never got upgraded. I spent quite a bit of time going through and installing the missing Gnome packages until I finally got a login screen. And then it wasn't even the same login screen I had used before -- Fedora had overwritten my custom gdm configuration.
After logging in, I found that my usual Gnome session had been replaced by GNUstep! I have no idea how that got in there; I hadn't used GNUstep since February 2003. I can log out and log back in to Gnome by manually setting the session, but for some strange reason if I let it log in with the default session it takes me back to GNUstep.
Once logged in to my Gnome desktop, I found that my launcher icons were all messed up. Nearly all of the launchers I had created on the panel lost their Name tags. The menu is cluttered with duplicate entries, both within the same menu and across parent and submenus, and a few submenus are completely duplicated as well. (Of course, I remember having this same problem when I tried installing Gnome 2.6 over Gnome 2.4.)
I also found out that my Alt keys no longer work properly -- they should be generating meta-characters, but instead the left Alt is generating foreign letters, and the right Alt does nothing (it doesn't even generate the Alt_R keycode -- it's been changed to ISO_Level3_Shift).
A few of my programs (that I built from source), such as Gnumeric 1.3, no longer run because the libraries they were linked with have been removed (obsoleted by newer RPM's). I'm having trouble recompiling it because it requires version 1.10.0 of a library and pkg-config seems to think I have version 1.9.1 installed, but rpm -q tells me I have 1.10.1.
I was up until 4AM last night trying to get my computer in at least a semi-usable state. It's going to take several more days to go through it and clean things up, find out what else doesn't work, and recompile a lot of my 3rd party programs.
Along the same line, my computer has RH9 installed but I've removed a lot of the RH RPM's for Gnome 2.2 and installed Gnome 2.6 from source. Sorting out the dependencies was hell, and parts of Gnome are still broken. Is that possibly going to create (or continue) problems if I upgrade to FC3 with its Gnome 2.8 RPM's? Should I try to manually uninstall Gnome 2.6 before upgrading? What about any other software that I replaced with custom builds from source (some of it lives in /usr/local, some in /usr)?
I just tried all 5 of the sample pages listed in the report with the W3C Markup Validation Service. None of them crashed the validator; they all showed "This page is not Valid !" and listed the specific lines which were in error.
Sorry about the typo; it's spelled Nostromo n45.
The best PC joystick I've tried so far, for general gaming, is Belkin's Notromo n45. It already has a USB interface. There's a 4-directional digital stick, just like Nintendo's, plus two analog sticks, three control buttons in the middle (for start/pause/whatever), four fire buttons on the left, and four more L/R buttons on top. It fits in your hand really well too.
That brings up a question: they say that 8.9% is the lowest voluntary turnover since the early 80's, and that the involuntary turnover of 11.2% is lower than it was in 2001. That's hardly a fair comparison, since the 2001 number would be the highest rate (or nearly so). What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
This probably applies to all sectors, not just IT. The masses demand products and services for as little money as they can get away with. In order to price items competitively, companies focus on reducing costs as low as they can, even if it means using cheap parts, reducing/eliminating quality control, and hiring cheap labor. Cheap labor means people can't afford to spend money on quality products, so they demand even lower prices. It's a downward spiral -- we're saving money at the cost of good jobs. And from what I can tell, this has been going on since the start of the industrial age.
This patent suffers from several problems, but one that struck me was that it seems to be impossible to implement. The author uses such terms as "honor", "cowardice", "guilt", and "concern". Even where such terms are well-defined among all human cultures (and many of them are not), how the #@&%! are we supposed to program an AI to recognize what they mean? Further, terms such as "anger", "joy", "spite", and "love" define human emotions, and I seriously doubt we're ever going to build machines that feel any emotion.
Asimov's Three Laws are defined in terms that should be relatively easy to program into an AI, given sufficient intelligence: "do not harm any human" (it just needs to recognize what actions will physically hurt people), "obey instructions" (easy), "keep yourself functioning" (self-diagnostic and repair).
I just got back from the SIGGRAPH conference myself, and a couple of the items that impressed me the most were new monitor technologies.
First, there were 3-D monitors. There was a demonstration of 3D TV yesterday, but I actually found that to be unimpressive; it suffered from a double image that I couldn't get away from no matter where I stood. However, there were several companies that were using monitors with the label X3D which were very impressive! It almost looks like a regular LCD monitor, full color and brightness, but it displays a stereoscopic image that you can view without any special glasses. It seems to have an optimal viewing angle is within around ninety degrees, but in that range the illusion of depth is quite convincing. The major drawback to it is that it appears finely honeycombed, as if looking through the eyes of an insect (with several tens of thousands of lenses). There was also another display (I didn't get the name of the company that made the monitor) which used polarized light to achieve the 3D effect with a very high resolution, but the down side to that of course is you need polarized shades to see it.
The other item I found very interesting was a couple of new displays which combine LED lighting with an LCD display to achieve 300 times the contrast ratio of standard LCD monitors (that's right -- three hundred). 40,000:1! Viewing images of sunsets and light shining through stained glass windows on this monitor was simply breathtaking. They had it sitting next to a regular LCD monitor showing the same image so you could compare the difference, but even if they didn't have that, the quality of the lighting is enough to amaze you. It's much more true to life than a photograph can capture. One of the manufacturers was NEC, and the other was Sunnybrook Technologies. They said that these units would be ready for commercial production within a year.
And of course there were the companies like ATI and nVidia showing off their latest hardware, and Apple, Alias, Adobe, etc. demonstrating their latest software. Disney Feature Animation had clips of their new upcoming movie. But IMHO the above monitors had the biggest "wow" factor of all the exhibits I saw.
So, IE now has only 94.7% of the browser market instead of 95.7%? Gee, I feel sorry for them. :-P
At this rate, how long is it going to take until we see some competitive market shares, like < 70%?
... by the article's use of the word 'instrument', as in "Users have more places to instrument a box and an easier way to do so.". I had never heard it used as a verb before. So I looked it up in the dictionary:
tr.v. instrumented, instrumenting, instruments (-mnt)Can somebody tell me which of these definitions is meant in the article?
There are two major things wrong with this article, which have been touched on by other posters. One is that the number of vulnerabilities is different than the number of advisories, because advisories can cover multiple vulnerabilities.
The second is that (as other posters have covered) Linux distributors post advisories and bug fixes for all software bundled with their distribution, not just the kernel and core libraries. Looking at the list of MS Windows XP advisories, all I see are the core components, with the glaring omission of Internet Explorer (which these days is in fact a core component of the operating system).
I've been pretty lucky so far that I haven't totally destroyed any computer. But I have caused quite a few short-circuits.
When I was younger I tried cleaning out my dad's keyboard... while the computer was still on! The screwdriver accidentally slipped, touching the exposed circuit board, and the keyboard would no longer work after that.
When I put together my first PC and tried starting it, the thing started pouring out smoke. After some examination I discovered there was a short in the case speaker (from the manufacturer). After replacing that, everything was fine.
I had a similar problem with my third PC--burning wires due to a short in the case speaker. Again, only the speaker needed replacing; everything else was fine.
One time my dad was upgrading his motherboard and we accidentally plugged in the CPU 90 degrees in the wrong direction. (This was shortly before CPU's were keyed.) It started smoking. IIRC, the CPU had to be replaced, but the motherboard worked fine after that.
I used to work at a company that had several 2.5" hard drives attached to VME equipment using adapter boards that converted the drives' HD connectors to standard 50-pin SCSI connectors. There was no socket surrounding the pins, so it was too easy to misalign the cable, and when you did that both the cable and the traces on the adapter board would burn up. I think I personally fried two of those boards, but I wasn't the first or the last person at the company to do so.
I've gotten to the point where whenever I put together or upgrade a system, I first power it on with the case open, my finger on the power supply cutoff switch, and my nose sniffing around the wires for the first sign of trouble.
I wonder if the estimated MPG on the sticker takes into account when and where you would be driving? I have a Pontiac Sunfire, which was advertised as having from 24 MPG city up to 34 MPG highway. Generally it's been getting around 25 MPG. During a recent trip out of state (from CA to NM), my mileage got up above 33 MPG. On the flip side, I recently took a job where I have to commute within Los Angeles, often during rush hour. Now my mileage is only 17 MPG!
HAM: Handheld AMateur radio
Actually it wasn't so much that different TV's produced different colors, but different *TIA chips produced different colors. Specifically, some early Atari demos (I forget which one - it displayed an image of the Atari 800 and monitor) and games (Choplifter, Beneath the Pyramids) were written expecting the artifacting colors to be orange and cyan (or red and blue), which was the case on the CTIA chip. Later on Atari replaced the CTIA with GTIA, whose luminance signal differed from the former chip by 90 degrees, resulting in artifacting colors of green and magenta. I have detailed notes about this at http://www.xmission.com/~trevin/atari/video_notes. html.
FTL Games is dead, but the Classic Amiga Preservation Society is working to preserve old Atari ST and Amiga games.
However, I haven't had my ST out of the box since I moved to California. Now I play the PC version of Dungeon Master which you can get from dmweb.free.fr, and is playable in VMware (albiet without sound). You can also get Chaos Strikes Back for Windows or Linux, thanks to some very dedicated fans. These versions don't have copy protection, so you can enjoy them as long as old PC's are emulated and you remember to keep your hard drive backed up regularly!
FTL Games had a similar policy to this way back when they made Dungeon Master. The media was just a 3.5" floppy but it had copy-protected sectors on it. Their warranty stated that if the disk was defective, you could simply return it to them for a replacement for just the cost of shipping + media. IIRC, when I had mine replaced (after at least five years of use) it only cost me four and a half bucks.
It seems like everyone has been repeating the same ideas over and over, but I only saw one poster who came close to this. Since the security vulnerabilities that allow worms and viruses to spread are well known, why doesn't Microsoft just write their own virus that seeks out pirated copies of Windows and nukes them? Or, if they want to be nicer, just break the networking capability of the pirated systems so that other viruses won't be able to spread.
There is just one drawback: how will Microsoft's virus know whether a given MS-Windows installation is legitimate or pirated?
I'm sorry, when was this?
2000 USA RESULTS (8-0)
Catching up is not the same as winning.
The problem with building software blocks like LEGO blocks is that LEGO has a single standard interface for nearly all of their blocks, so you can take any block and connect it to any other block and they will snap together. Often they can snap together in several different ways. (Whether they connect in a way that is useful is up to the modeller.)
With software, you can't possibly define a single interface that fits all components. Each piece of a program has a specific task, with inputs and outputs that are specific to the task performed. Other components that 'mate' with that piece have to match with corresponding outputs and/or inputs. So the overall design is more like a picture puzzle than LEGOs.
Of course, I'm not saying there aren't exceptions to that description. One could conceivably write software that runs like a neural net, where each piece has the same inputs and outputs, the only difference being what the piece does internally to decide what outputs to procude for a given set of inputs. But that's a topic in which I never got very far in college.
Give me a break! Has he ever heard of the "dream team" we sent to the U.S. Olympics in 1996? Our basketball players were so good, the rest of the world couldn't touch us. It was no contest. But the other significant difference between our players and other countries' players is that ours had a much higher salary. At least in basketball, we know our players are worth it.
I'll bet many of our IT people are better at their jobs than a lot of the workers in 3rd-world countries. But do our CEO's recognize that by hiring them for a higher salary? No, they just look at the $$$ and hire the people who are cheapest.
I tried the WordPerfect Office 12 trial download. The first thing I did with it was open up some (very) old documents I have which were saved with WordPerfect 5.1. Normally I would expect the formatting to change slightly because WP customarily reformats your document for the default printer. Much to my surprise, after viewing the first two pages the rest of the entire document was missing!! I tried a few other documents (each of which should have had dozens of pages), and they all showed the same problem -- only two pages came through, the rest disappeared.
... for over five minutes. That's when I gave up and hit "Cancel". Of course, that caused WP to stop responding, so I had to give it the three-finger salute. (To be fair, WP 8 wasn't any good at opening those MS Word documents either.)
By way of comparison, I regularly use WP 8, and it has never had any problem opening up WP 5.1 files.
Just for the heck of it, I also tried opening up another old document which had been saved with MS Word 6.0, since WP claims to have better Word compatibility. Well, it brought up the "Converting document" dialog box with the pages flashing yellow and white furiously
I also tried opening up a spreadsheet I had saved with Quatro Pro 8 into Quatro Pro 12. This sheet had several pages of charts attached to it. Well, the new Quatro Pro completely redid the formatting of my charts. The line styles and fonts had changed. The numeric format of the X axis labels was changed from dates ("Apr 29") to numeric codes (32756...). One of my line series which should have been scaled to the secondary Y axis was instead scaled to the primary axis. And one of the series seems to have been corrupted, because the right end of the line shot back to the left edge of the chart and made a vertical line. Even worse than losing the formatting was the fact that I couldn't fix it.
Personally, I don't care about WP being compatible with PDF, XML, or MS Word. But if it can't even remain compatible with WP's own file formats, I'm not going to upgrade.
I don't know how things stand in the current economy, but when I got my first entry-level software engineering job I was 6 years out of college (I had been doing PC tech support before then) and they offered me a salary of $35,000. Over the next couple of years as I showed my peers the kind of work I could do, I received significant raises until I was earning $50K. So if you have a good boss, and you have talent, I wouldn't worry about your starting salary. It will grow over time.
OTOH, at my next job I worked as a system administrator for a measly $15/hour, and the stingy boss never offered me a raise. I quit after 14 months. One of my coworkers there had been working for them for two years for even less money, and when he threatened to quit he finally got a raise. So if you have a boss who is taking advantage of you, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
Sorry, I wasn't being dishonest; simply uninformed. I was under the assumption that RealMedia was a proprietary format that could only be played by RealPlayer, which RealNetworks, Inc. does not make for Linux. Thanks for pointing out that there is a 3rd-party player for RealMedia.