Why don't you learn how to use `sed` properly before trying to be funny:
The AC sed it wasn't funny? Seriously, the people I know who can use sed correctly don't have a sense of humor. They also tend to use emacs instead of the superior vi.:)
This was just the thing I needed to convince me to try Open Solaris. Hopefully porting drivers from Linux and the *BSD's to Open Solaris won't prove too difficult.
:) If you have any problems, just email the author. You will be suprised at how helpful and understanding good ol' "Schily" is. *Turns purple while choking back laughter* You could also ask him why he insists on using his own broken version of printf in mkisofs while you're at it.
The program doesn't run nail.exe, but it runs some file with a random name like fmjqx.exe under your user ID. It initially uses very little memory but builds up as you use your machine. Kill the process and another, similarly named one takes its place instantly; the only way to stop it from spawning right away is to kill explorer.exe before killing it. Then wait a while, and a nerfed explorer.exe (one that doesn't create the desktop or do any normal explorer.exe things) comes back and starts spawning the bloody things again. I bought a new hard drive, copied my legitimately downloaded files onto it, and wiped the old one. It was maddening.
And you're still running Windows because . . . it's so much fun?.. it just works?.. you're clueless?..
OK, well, you've got me beat there! I'm jealous, I was just a baby when man last landed on the moon.
We were glued to the TV during the moon landing. Our TV was still B/W, but that was okay since the transmission was too. Once we recovered from the LEM's landing, we were expecting John Carter type bounding leaps across the lunar surface, and we got bunny-hops instead. It was educational, to say the least, about mistaken expectations. In any case, it was one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen. Of course it's widely available in replay now, but it was better in (vicarious) person when space travel was a very new thing.
You can find this in any standard history of the space program, eg in McDougall's... The Heavens and the Earth, pp. 422-3: "The only major new program still in the running [in 1971] was a space shuttle meant to provide routine access to earth orbit at a much lower cost-per-pound than expendable rockets."
So? NASA proposes, and Congress disposes. The projects selected for continuation are done via the Congressional budget appropriation. As I recall, the shuttle was a keystone in the proposed space station (to eventually become the ISS). How much would it have cost to get the ISS building materials into orbit aboard an Apollo capsule?
I'm not sure what we are arguing about here. You seem to equate cheap with unsafe.
So does the rest of the world these days. You still haven't remembered the Columbia press coverage?
Use a manned spacecraft to put people into space and nothing else. Use an unmanned spacecraft for payloads so you can get them up there cheaply.
So use two missions in the place of one where you need to assemble the stuff you're lifting, as in the case of the ISS? And how are you going to get a platform for that mobile robotic arm?
I'm saying Shuttle was supposed to be cheap. It's not. That's all.
You still haven't shown that it isn't cheap in relation to the other shuttle program.
In fact, the Rogers commission report noted: "Costs were the primary concern of NASA's selection board [for Shuttle contractors], particularly those incurred early in the program." (vol 1 chapter 6 p 120).
Costs are a major concern for any US federal agency. There are laws (designed to protect the taxpayers) that may require an agency to select the lowest bidder against the agency's better judgement. I've posted a number of times about this in the past. If you need some (basic, totally non-secret) information about how government agency contracts work, we can take this offline.
This is all irrelevent - to my point, anyway. All I am trying to get across is that Shuttle has not performed as initially advertised - nowhere near it.
As advertised by whom? If you're as interested in history as you claim, perhaps you might want to use the FOIA to get the relevant NASA documents rather than relying on wire service tips and aerospace contractor presentations. As far as I'm concerned, it has done well, but that wouldn't fit in with your thesis, would it? It's all a matter of viewpoint.
One early plan contemplated an eventual rate of a mission a week, but realism forced several downward revisions.
Um, yes, that's called budgetary constraint. With enough money, you can do most anything. When Congress says, "Whoa", you whoa. NASA does not control their budget, unfortunately. You seem to have a problem separating proposals and possible projections from approvals and allocated funding.
That's putting the cart before the horse.
Really? It seems to me that horse did a yeoman's job of pulling the mandated cart. 111 times.
There are no alternatives precisely because of the committment to Shuttle. A better question would be, what more cost-effective, reuseable spacecraft might you have if you hadn't been forced to use Shuttle?
I sometimes take manlyca when my stomach is upset.
That's good, because when they rename the distro Mandrivacoris, a lot of us will have upset stomachs - again. Let's just hope there isn't some Greek distro named Janopaparopalaus looking to be acquired.
"In defense, I've heard (through channels, no citation, unfortunately) that italics are actually easier to read."
Definitely not true when using a new Dell 19-inch LCD monitor at top resolution (and lower resolution isn't much better). I want my old CRT monitor back.
I dunno how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember Columbia's first flight, and I still have all the newspaper articles about it I cut out about it at the time, as a major little space geek.
I remember watching the coverage of Shepard's first flight. Dad worked at Aerojet or JPL at the time, so there was no chance of missing it. I've followed the program ever since. I couldn't qualify as a military pilot because my eyesight wasn't perfect (the rules at the time), so my hopes for being an astronaut were dashed early on. Age took care of any later hopes.
you'll see that in the 1970s it was often claimed that Shuttle would provide cheaper access to space (a "quantum leap" according to one article).
Yes, I remember it being advertised as reusable, which could translate into savings over things like Apollo. If there was a big marketing campaign, it sure didn't make much of an impression on me, or perhaps I was sold already.
I don't know what you are talking about with regard to cutting corners and so forth
For someone claiming to be so well-versed in the program's history, you suffer remarkable tunnel vision. I guess you must have missed all the accusations that the Columbia's crew died because NASA put budget concerns and cost-savings over the safety of the astronauts. This is why it's not a good idea to put the words NASA and cheap in the same sentence.
Reliable? Not sure what early aircraft you are thinking of. . . The proper comparison should be with the 1920s and 1930s, when you had breakthrough aircraft like the DC3, say, or the Empire class flying boats.
I'd suggest you check the survival rate of the early test pilots (and planes) for military aircraft. Your comparison is invalid. The shuttle was the first American spacecraft that was not only reusable but also made controlled landings (not to mention the other features). It was the first of its kind, not a slightly larger or slightly faster improvement of an existing aircraft. (Compare the two - the shuttle doesn't bear any resemblance to an Apollo capsule.) Two failures in 113 missions is far better than Apollo's record of one disaster and one near-disaster scrubbed mission. The fatality ratio for the shuttle is also less.
Regular? I don't mean the grounding after the accidents, I mean the fact it was supposed to fly on the order of weekly, with a turnaround time of a month or so.
Perhaps there was some hype it didn't live up to. My car doesn't really get 36 MPG either, despite the government figures. 113 missions in about 20 years is pretty regular. The missions were so regular that I was one of the very few watching the launch when the Challenger exploded.
You are the one who is employing hindsight to redefine its purpose - it wasn't meant to be an experimental vehicle at all, but a rugged, practical, cost-effective workhorse.
The Mercury was an experimental vehicle. The Apollo was an experimental vehicle. The Skylab was an experimental vehicle. The shuttle is an experimental vehicle. SpaceShipOne is an experimental vehicle. The successor to the shuttle will be an experimental vehicle, no matter what the PR types say. Considering that it has done its job as a reusable LEO cargo transport, I'd say it has been proven as a rugged, practical workhorse. As to cost-effective, again, in comparison to which other resuable space transport that we have?
As I pointed out very early on in this, er, discussion, BIOS calls would be problematic, but even so, a file system with decent (and reserved) permissions would have gone a long way to discouraging a lot of bad things. I think I already mentioned that most of the crackers in those days weren't the best bit bangers (the better ones went to work for game companies). If you can't see where that's headed, there's no point in pursuing it.
Also to repeat myself, I can think of dozens of things that would have made DOS more secure. If you can't think of a dozen things that would have helped, then we're probably talking about different levels of security, doable versus absolute. (And a redone version of the PC BIOS would have made it easy.) In those days, attacks came in one shot from a local source. There weren't any potpourri attacks over an internet connection. Again, security was not a design issue, even in the (relatively minor) face of problems. Perhaps my problem is that I'm a coder who was there rather than a theoretician.
The fact that DOS on a 386 was just as promiscuous as DOS on a 8088 just proves my point that security was not a design consideration for MS, even when the hardware tools were available and waiting to be used.
However, you and the other guy using your UID are having your differences, so I'll leave you two to finish the debate. Bye.
Fine then, as an experiment in cheap, reliable, regular transport to space, Shuttle was a failure.
Although NASA is not a for-profit organization with an interest in "cheap", cheap in relation to what other reusable space transport that was tried, tested, and could support the assembly need of the ISS? Put the words "cheap" and "NASA" together, and you have the press screaming about shortcuts and a Congressional investigation.
As for "reliable", it has been far more reliable than early airplanes or LTA craft which didn't face anywhere near the challenges the shuttle has.
As for "regular", if there hadn't been those claims about NASA doing things on the "cheap" and the public incited by the media frenzy, there wouldn't have been such a long interruption. The astronauts have never sought delays in the program.
As I said before, hindsight is a wonderful thing when you've been brought to a point where you can look back. Being unable to realize that you're looking back is being shortsighted. As for "failure", you're entitled to your opinion - it's a free country.
My uncle in Texas lives somewhere dry enough and hot enough for swamp coolers to be the normal A/C system (obviously nowhere near Houston...).
Swamp coolers are really popular in Colorado, and they're actually beneficial. The humidity is usually so low that a swamp cooler makes it easier on skin and wooden surfaces. They also transfer in fresh air, rather than recirculating the interior air.
It should be quite a bit more efficient than this guy's system.
At the very least, he needs to get a lid on that tub of water. Warmer, drier air is more comfortable than slightly cooler, more humid air. 80 in the California desert is fine (especially with a nice, cold brew:). 80 in the Midwest with 90% humidity is miserable (even with the brew).
There was very little that a user could modify in DOS.
Huh? You could overwrite system files, write self-modifying code, build code on the fly in the data segment and run it from there, steal interrupt vectors, modify the MBR, the list is nearly endless.
But my main point was that basic security and stability must be supported by the hardware; which the OS can take advantage of or not.
An OS does not have to be promiscuous, as MS-DOS was. Although not perfect, as I already said, there are dozens of things the OS could have done to be more secure. Security just wasn't a design consideration. Not all malware writers are great programmers. Most aren't even very good, and it didn't take much to discourage them in the pre-internet, pre-script-kiddie days.
You'd have to write most if not all of it in assembly. I suspect that most CS students spend very little time writing assembly language programs because so much of industry work is done in high level languages. That's not to say that they're not smart enough, they just don't have the training for it.
That may be the first valid point you've had. Let's say any group of CS students from that period.
I'm not lecturing you on MS security in general, but I am pointing out some misconceptions that you have about early PCs.
I spent a number of years writing code for the early PCs - mostly in assembler - including serial and parallel port interfaces to test instruments, and various game hacks. Even later, with the 386, I was still able to write a dual-boot loader by hijacking the DOS boot procedure. I believe the misconceptions are yours.
Huh? I've *NEVER* seen a case where a later version of Word couldn't open an older version of Word's documents identically to the original.
Then you've never had a Word document with tables or macros in it. My guess is that it is done deliberately to force all users in a company to upgrade. I could cut MS some slack if it were just that an older version couldn't open a doc from a newer version, but it fails both ways.
How can anyone take these numbers seriously when you have a) A fresh install of OO.o vs a year old install of MS Office.
What does the time from installation have to do with it? Does MS Word suffer from bit rot or something? Before my latest Linux upgrade, I ran OO Writer for a year and a half with no change in performance. If Word is loading all kinds of crap into the registry or.ini files and then trying to get it back, that's Word's problem. The thing is a resource hog, it's slow to load (although it gets a semi-functional window up quickly), and every new version is incompatible with previous versions. It's a PITA - they just installed Word 2003 on my Windows machine at work, so I know.
Please explain to me how you implement privilege levels in an OS on a processor that doesn't support it.
It doesn't have all that much to do with privilege levels - its about policy. The MS policy, until very recently, has always been to let a user modify anything. Although BIOS calls would be a problem, any group of CS students could write an 808x OS more secure than MS-DOS. Again, don't lecture me on MS security until they allow all users to do security updates on their systems.
The shuttle wasn't intended to be an experiment. It was intended to be a working vehicle. Its goal was to reduce the cost of launching to orbit.
The purported goal has nothing to do with it. Anything that has not been tried before is an experiment. The fact that it worked makes it a successful experiment.
Something like ISS only makes sense if you have a workable, economic launch system, which the shuttle never was.
It has nothing to do with economics. Once again, it's an experiment in building orbital platforms following Skylab and Mir. Perhaps if the rest of us were all as brilliant as you we wouldn't need to try things out. I'm sure that with you in charge, a space station never would have suffered the problems and component failures that the ISS has, and we wouldn't have needed to learn from it. (In case you're still wondering, that was sarcasm.)
The shuttle is one of the biggest wastes of money and manpower ever.
Your numerous arguments and evidence are compelling, however, I'll disagree. Like most of the space program, the shuttle has been a successful experiment, and much has been learned. There have been a couple of missions that supplied us with innovative earth observation data, and without the shuttle, the ISS wouldn't exist. You may not consider that worthwhile, but I do. Hindsight is a wonderful thing that can be used only after you've been taken to a position where you can look back.
Real engineers, rather than bureaucrats, are the only way that NASA can be revitalized.
NASA already has plenty of real engineers. This is just a reorg of the top brass to make sure the current administration's manned Mars missions fantasies have a loyal following. Then the next administration will have to clean house again, and everyone will be complaining about all the money NASA wasted on pie-in-the-sky projects. Why don't people ever learn to blame the policy makers instead of those who have to follow orders?
You have to enable QuickEdit for your console (properties menu). With QuickEdit off, you have to use the menu in the top left corner.
Well, of course. Everyone should know that. (If it really works). That Linux thingy is so hard to use in comparison to Windows. You just select and paste using two mouse buttons. And I'm getting modded troll for this nonsense. It's typical of Slashdot these days. What a crock.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you learn how to use `sed` properly before trying to be funny:
The AC sed it wasn't funny? Seriously, the people I know who can use sed correctly don't have a sense of humor. They also tend to use emacs instead of the superior vi. :)
This was just the thing I needed to convince me to try Open Solaris. Hopefully porting drivers from Linux and the *BSD's to Open Solaris won't prove too difficult.
:) If you have any problems, just email the author. You will be suprised at how helpful and understanding good ol' "Schily" is. *Turns purple while choking back laughter* You could also ask him why he insists on using his own broken version of printf in mkisofs while you're at it.
The program doesn't run nail.exe, but it runs some file with a random name like fmjqx.exe under your user ID. It initially uses very little memory but builds up as you use your machine. Kill the process and another, similarly named one takes its place instantly; the only way to stop it from spawning right away is to kill explorer.exe before killing it. Then wait a while, and a nerfed explorer.exe (one that doesn't create the desktop or do any normal explorer.exe things) comes back and starts spawning the bloody things again. I bought a new hard drive, copied my legitimately downloaded files onto it, and wiped the old one. It was maddening.
And you're still running Windows because . . . it's so much fun? .. it just works? .. you're clueless? ..
OK, well, you've got me beat there! I'm jealous, I was just a baby when man last landed on the moon.
We were glued to the TV during the moon landing. Our TV was still B/W, but that was okay since the transmission was too. Once we recovered from the LEM's landing, we were expecting John Carter type bounding leaps across the lunar surface, and we got bunny-hops instead. It was educational, to say the least, about mistaken expectations. In any case, it was one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen. Of course it's widely available in replay now, but it was better in (vicarious) person when space travel was a very new thing.
You can find this in any standard history of the space program, eg in McDougall's ... The Heavens and the Earth, pp. 422-3: "The only major new program still in the running [in 1971] was a space shuttle meant to provide routine access to earth orbit at a much lower cost-per-pound than expendable rockets."
So? NASA proposes, and Congress disposes. The projects selected for continuation are done via the Congressional budget appropriation. As I recall, the shuttle was a keystone in the proposed space station (to eventually become the ISS). How much would it have cost to get the ISS building materials into orbit aboard an Apollo capsule?
I'm not sure what we are arguing about here. You seem to equate cheap with unsafe.
So does the rest of the world these days. You still haven't remembered the Columbia press coverage?
Use a manned spacecraft to put people into space and nothing else. Use an unmanned spacecraft for payloads so you can get them up there cheaply.
So use two missions in the place of one where you need to assemble the stuff you're lifting, as in the case of the ISS? And how are you going to get a platform for that mobile robotic arm?
I'm saying Shuttle was supposed to be cheap. It's not. That's all.
You still haven't shown that it isn't cheap in relation to the other shuttle program.
In fact, the Rogers commission report noted: "Costs were the primary concern of NASA's selection board [for Shuttle contractors], particularly those incurred early in the program." (vol 1 chapter 6 p 120).
Costs are a major concern for any US federal agency. There are laws (designed to protect the taxpayers) that may require an agency to select the lowest bidder against the agency's better judgement. I've posted a number of times about this in the past. If you need some (basic, totally non-secret) information about how government agency contracts work, we can take this offline.
This is all irrelevent - to my point, anyway. All I am trying to get across is that Shuttle has not performed as initially advertised - nowhere near it.
As advertised by whom? If you're as interested in history as you claim, perhaps you might want to use the FOIA to get the relevant NASA documents rather than relying on wire service tips and aerospace contractor presentations. As far as I'm concerned, it has done well, but that wouldn't fit in with your thesis, would it? It's all a matter of viewpoint.
One early plan contemplated an eventual rate of a mission a week, but realism forced several downward revisions.
Um, yes, that's called budgetary constraint. With enough money, you can do most anything. When Congress says, "Whoa", you whoa. NASA does not control their budget, unfortunately. You seem to have a problem separating proposals and possible projections from approvals and allocated funding.
That's putting the cart before the horse.
Really? It seems to me that horse did a yeoman's job of pulling the mandated cart. 111 times.
There are no alternatives precisely because of the committment to Shuttle. A better question would be, what more cost-effective, reuseable spacecraft might you have if you hadn't been forced to use Shuttle?
LOL. Again were back to perfect hindsight.
I sometimes take manlyca when my stomach is upset.
That's good, because when they rename the distro Mandrivacoris, a lot of us will have upset stomachs - again. Let's just hope there isn't some Greek distro named Janopaparopalaus looking to be acquired.
"In defense, I've heard (through channels, no citation, unfortunately) that italics are actually easier to read."
Definitely not true when using a new Dell 19-inch LCD monitor at top resolution (and lower resolution isn't much better). I want my old CRT monitor back.
I dunno how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember Columbia's first flight, and I still have all the newspaper articles about it I cut out about it at the time, as a major little space geek.
I remember watching the coverage of Shepard's first flight. Dad worked at Aerojet or JPL at the time, so there was no chance of missing it. I've followed the program ever since. I couldn't qualify as a military pilot because my eyesight wasn't perfect (the rules at the time), so my hopes for being an astronaut were dashed early on. Age took care of any later hopes.
you'll see that in the 1970s it was often claimed that Shuttle would provide cheaper access to space (a "quantum leap" according to one article).
Yes, I remember it being advertised as reusable, which could translate into savings over things like Apollo. If there was a big marketing campaign, it sure didn't make much of an impression on me, or perhaps I was sold already.
I don't know what you are talking about with regard to cutting corners and so forth
For someone claiming to be so well-versed in the program's history, you suffer remarkable tunnel vision. I guess you must have missed all the accusations that the Columbia's crew died because NASA put budget concerns and cost-savings over the safety of the astronauts. This is why it's not a good idea to put the words NASA and cheap in the same sentence.
Reliable? Not sure what early aircraft you are thinking of. . . The proper comparison should be with the 1920s and 1930s, when you had breakthrough aircraft like the DC3, say, or the Empire class flying boats.
I'd suggest you check the survival rate of the early test pilots (and planes) for military aircraft. Your comparison is invalid. The shuttle was the first American spacecraft that was not only reusable but also made controlled landings (not to mention the other features). It was the first of its kind, not a slightly larger or slightly faster improvement of an existing aircraft. (Compare the two - the shuttle doesn't bear any resemblance to an Apollo capsule.) Two failures in 113 missions is far better than Apollo's record of one disaster and one near-disaster scrubbed mission. The fatality ratio for the shuttle is also less.
Regular? I don't mean the grounding after the accidents, I mean the fact it was supposed to fly on the order of weekly, with a turnaround time of a month or so.
Perhaps there was some hype it didn't live up to. My car doesn't really get 36 MPG either, despite the government figures. 113 missions in about 20 years is pretty regular. The missions were so regular that I was one of the very few watching the launch when the Challenger exploded.
You are the one who is employing hindsight to redefine its purpose - it wasn't meant to be an experimental vehicle at all, but a rugged, practical, cost-effective workhorse.
The Mercury was an experimental vehicle. The Apollo was an experimental vehicle. The Skylab was an experimental vehicle. The shuttle is an experimental vehicle. SpaceShipOne is an experimental vehicle. The successor to the shuttle will be an experimental vehicle, no matter what the PR types say. Considering that it has done its job as a reusable LEO cargo transport, I'd say it has been proven as a rugged, practical workhorse. As to cost-effective, again, in comparison to which other resuable space transport that we have?
Just illustrating ideas about where you would define the threshold.
Defining the HTML tags would be even more illustrative.
That post was really inciteful.
Since you could incite only yourself to respond, I'd say no.
Oh, great job. Set me up to deliver the straight line. ;)
As I pointed out very early on in this, er, discussion, BIOS calls would be problematic, but even so, a file system with decent (and reserved) permissions would have gone a long way to discouraging a lot of bad things. I think I already mentioned that most of the crackers in those days weren't the best bit bangers (the better ones went to work for game companies). If you can't see where that's headed, there's no point in pursuing it.
Also to repeat myself, I can think of dozens of things that would have made DOS more secure. If you can't think of a dozen things that would have helped, then we're probably talking about different levels of security, doable versus absolute. (And a redone version of the PC BIOS would have made it easy.) In those days, attacks came in one shot from a local source. There weren't any potpourri attacks over an internet connection. Again, security was not a design issue, even in the (relatively minor) face of problems. Perhaps my problem is that I'm a coder who was there rather than a theoretician.
The fact that DOS on a 386 was just as promiscuous as DOS on a 8088 just proves my point that security was not a design consideration for MS, even when the hardware tools were available and waiting to be used.
However, you and the other guy using your UID are having your differences, so I'll leave you two to finish the debate. Bye.
Fine then, as an experiment in cheap, reliable, regular transport to space, Shuttle was a failure.
Although NASA is not a for-profit organization with an interest in "cheap", cheap in relation to what other reusable space transport that was tried, tested, and could support the assembly need of the ISS? Put the words "cheap" and "NASA" together, and you have the press screaming about shortcuts and a Congressional investigation.
As for "reliable", it has been far more reliable than early airplanes or LTA craft which didn't face anywhere near the challenges the shuttle has.
As for "regular", if there hadn't been those claims about NASA doing things on the "cheap" and the public incited by the media frenzy, there wouldn't have been such a long interruption. The astronauts have never sought delays in the program.As I said before, hindsight is a wonderful thing when you've been brought to a point where you can look back. Being unable to realize that you're looking back is being shortsighted. As for "failure", you're entitled to your opinion - it's a free country.
My uncle in Texas lives somewhere dry enough and hot enough for swamp coolers to be the normal A/C system (obviously nowhere near Houston...).
Swamp coolers are really popular in Colorado, and they're actually beneficial. The humidity is usually so low that a swamp cooler makes it easier on skin and wooden surfaces. They also transfer in fresh air, rather than recirculating the interior air.
why not just buy a regular air conditioner?
I can understand why you post AC (on AC). This is the site that has a weekly article on liquid-cooling your over-clocked, obsolete PC.
It should be quite a bit more efficient than this guy's system.
At the very least, he needs to get a lid on that tub of water. Warmer, drier air is more comfortable than slightly cooler, more humid air. 80 in the California desert is fine (especially with a nice, cold brew :). 80 in the Midwest with 90% humidity is miserable (even with the brew).
You're still posting? The reports of your death were greatly exaggerated.
There was very little that a user could modify in DOS.
Huh? You could overwrite system files, write self-modifying code, build code on the fly in the data segment and run it from there, steal interrupt vectors, modify the MBR, the list is nearly endless.
But my main point was that basic security and stability must be supported by the hardware; which the OS can take advantage of or not.
An OS does not have to be promiscuous, as MS-DOS was. Although not perfect, as I already said, there are dozens of things the OS could have done to be more secure. Security just wasn't a design consideration. Not all malware writers are great programmers. Most aren't even very good, and it didn't take much to discourage them in the pre-internet, pre-script-kiddie days.
You'd have to write most if not all of it in assembly. I suspect that most CS students spend very little time writing assembly language programs because so much of industry work is done in high level languages. That's not to say that they're not smart enough, they just don't have the training for it.
That may be the first valid point you've had. Let's say any group of CS students from that period.
I'm not lecturing you on MS security in general, but I am pointing out some misconceptions that you have about early PCs.
I spent a number of years writing code for the early PCs - mostly in assembler - including serial and parallel port interfaces to test instruments, and various game hacks. Even later, with the 386, I was still able to write a dual-boot loader by hijacking the DOS boot procedure. I believe the misconceptions are yours.
Huh? I've *NEVER* seen a case where a later version of Word couldn't open an older version of Word's documents identically to the original.
Then you've never had a Word document with tables or macros in it. My guess is that it is done deliberately to force all users in a company to upgrade. I could cut MS some slack if it were just that an older version couldn't open a doc from a newer version, but it fails both ways.
How can anyone take these numbers seriously when you have a) A fresh install of OO.o vs a year old install of MS Office.
What does the time from installation have to do with it? Does MS Word suffer from bit rot or something? Before my latest Linux upgrade, I ran OO Writer for a year and a half with no change in performance. If Word is loading all kinds of crap into the registry or .ini files and then trying to get it back, that's Word's problem. The thing is a resource hog, it's slow to load (although it gets a semi-functional window up quickly), and every new version is incompatible with previous versions. It's a PITA - they just installed Word 2003 on my Windows machine at work, so I know.
That's okay. Microsoft is inspired by your dreams to create software. Please do us all a favor and try not to sleep so long from now on.
Please explain to me how you implement privilege levels in an OS on a processor that doesn't support it.
It doesn't have all that much to do with privilege levels - its about policy. The MS policy, until very recently, has always been to let a user modify anything. Although BIOS calls would be a problem, any group of CS students could write an 808x OS more secure than MS-DOS. Again, don't lecture me on MS security until they allow all users to do security updates on their systems.
The shuttle wasn't intended to be an experiment. It was intended to be a working vehicle. Its goal was to reduce the cost of launching to orbit.
The purported goal has nothing to do with it. Anything that has not been tried before is an experiment. The fact that it worked makes it a successful experiment.
Something like ISS only makes sense if you have a workable, economic launch system, which the shuttle never was.
It has nothing to do with economics. Once again, it's an experiment in building orbital platforms following Skylab and Mir. Perhaps if the rest of us were all as brilliant as you we wouldn't need to try things out. I'm sure that with you in charge, a space station never would have suffered the problems and component failures that the ISS has, and we wouldn't have needed to learn from it. (In case you're still wondering, that was sarcasm.)
The shuttle is one of the biggest wastes of money and manpower ever.
Your numerous arguments and evidence are compelling, however, I'll disagree. Like most of the space program, the shuttle has been a successful experiment, and much has been learned. There have been a couple of missions that supplied us with innovative earth observation data, and without the shuttle, the ISS wouldn't exist. You may not consider that worthwhile, but I do. Hindsight is a wonderful thing that can be used only after you've been taken to a position where you can look back.
Real engineers, rather than bureaucrats, are the only way that NASA can be revitalized.
NASA already has plenty of real engineers. This is just a reorg of the top brass to make sure the current administration's manned Mars missions fantasies have a loyal following. Then the next administration will have to clean house again, and everyone will be complaining about all the money NASA wasted on pie-in-the-sky projects. Why don't people ever learn to blame the policy makers instead of those who have to follow orders?
You have to enable QuickEdit for your console (properties menu). With QuickEdit off, you have to use the menu in the top left corner.
Well, of course. Everyone should know that. (If it really works). That Linux thingy is so hard to use in comparison to Windows. You just select and paste using two mouse buttons. And I'm getting modded troll for this nonsense. It's typical of Slashdot these days. What a crock.