Flywheels for long-term energy storage are made of layered composites which (one hopes) change the failure mode from fracture to a more mild gradual delamination.
Unfortunately, in this context, "gradual" means a fortieth of a second rather than a ten thousandth of a second. And at 60+KRPM, all that's needed to destroy the flywheel is for the vacuum it's spinning in to be compromised. But yah, they do tend to go through bearings--not the solidly mounted ones in laboratories, whose magnetic bearings can hum along nearly forever, but if you put one of these things in a car, you have a fair amount of gyroscopic force to overcome every time you the pitch or roll of the car changes--as in going up a hill. So you have the thing in a gimbal (sp?) system, but if you get in a wreck that knocks the car sideways and thus knocks the 'scope out of its bearings, or torques it out of its bearings, you have a Dramatic Event (tm) to deal with.
One way to overcome such potential emergencies is to use two counterrotating flywheels. It is much more difficult to extract energy from them (because you have more trouble doing it magnetically through the flywheel housing), but in the event of a detectable failure, you can essentially clamp the two together, resulting in an amazing amount of heat (which can be managed), but no projectiles.
Creating Baby Bills--one for OS, one for business and Internet apps, one for games, and one for content--won't make a damned bit of difference. Even if the consent decrees state that the companies must behave towards each other exactly like they behave towards each other, it won't change a thing.
All the OS company and the Web apps company have to do is buy full-disclosure source access license agreements from each other. They can let any company in the world buy one too, on the open market--for one hundred and fifty billion dollars. It's a high price, to be sure, but if you can raise it, you have full access. Remember that Microsoft is presently worth over half a trillion dollars. The only other company with nearly that much market cap is Cisco.
If we cut MS into two quarter-trillion dollar companies, then Company A licenses something to Company B for price X, and B licenses something back to A for the same price, and both companies' books are in balance. Price X is in both companies' accounts payable and accounts receiveable, and the money goes around in a circle, payable over X/min(annual_revenue_of_A, annual_revenue_of_B) years. Hell, they can even charge each other interest on the outstanding balance.
And with a good enough set of lawyers, you fend off another company seeking equally favorable terms for years.
Ah, but that's the whole DMCA right there--it explicitly excludes claims of fair use. If you make a tool that can be used for pirating, and you prove that the tool has been used for pirating, you are liable for the pirating as an accessory thereunto.
It's like suing Xerox for manufacturing photocopiers if somebody runs off a few copies of their favorite Dilbert and hands them out to coworkers.
This is infuriating, and it will be fascinating to see how (or if) it is ever resolved.
these puppies would act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second
Them's some fast puppies. A lot faster than my sister's new Labrador retriever puppy. He doesn't even know how to sit, much less act like a transistor. But I bet that, accelerated to 100THz, he could go through some serious shoes...
Nice troll, rips. I'm only giving it a 7.3, though, because it only contained three misspellings and no profanity. I suspect that "anywhere on Earth where it still matters" refers not to the United States, but parts of the world close enough to the North Pole and still dark. At the time of the posting, that was mostly Canada.
I've always wanted to see the Northern Lights. That a solar storm brought them far enough south that others who've always wanted to see them could see them makes me happy for them. Unfortunately, I live too far south, in a bright place. Cheers to anyone in Finland that got to enjoy these.
P.S. Has the Vernal transition happened recently enough that the storm would cause visible Southern Lights as well?
I think the RIAA--and the MPAA, for that matter--need to have this book read to them in a big way. The problem that I have with these fascists is not that they are trying to "protect" the interests of artists, but that they are trying to perpetuate an obsolete business model by interfering with the evolution of the new one. The old model of producers ramming products down the throats of consumers, regardless of what the consumers actually want--is being replaced with one in which consumers and producers discuss products--what is possible, what can and should be created and used.
To put the RIAA's actions in Industrial Revolution terms, what they are doing is tantamount to buggy whip manufacturers filing injunctions against Ford Motor Company over the Model T.
Agreed. The attacks will start right back up as soon as IRC comes back on line, because there's nothing that encourages a bratty thirteen year old more than saying "Don't do that thing that bothers me anymore that I can't keep you from doing because it hurts my feeeeelinnnngs!"
Folks who start DDoS and other script-based attacks are, for the most part, immature little jerks who are so incompetent in every other part of their lives that they have to do sociopathic things in order to feel powerful. If they didn't have IRC to DDoS, they'd probably be out smoking cigarettes to show Mom who's boss, or writing "SUX" on bathroom stalls. They're probably cruel to littler kids, so they can feel like they're bigger and tougher than somebody. They hate their mothers, but they secretly wish they could fuck them, so they break into web sites and vandalize them with the particularly telling message that they "own" them now. They try to "own" cnn.com, but what they really want to own is Mom. The slang they use to talk to each other is full of sublimated expressions like "rule" and "own" and "bitchslap" and "you're my bitch now," and, of course, "muthafucka."
They don't have their own personalities, so the only form of self-expression they can come up with is to find the things that are better than them--that make them feel as little and irrelevant as they actually are--and destroy them.
The IRCNet gesture is intended to polarize us, not to convince script kiddies they're getting on our nerves. On our nerves is where they want to be.
Actually, it's sort of a contraction--"I am anal." It indicates that the author is about to get incredibly pedantic about legal issues. When discussing programming, however, incredible pedantry is the default, so IANAL flag is omitted as redundant.
As to why we all insist on discussing law, well, we may be geeks, but that doesn't mean we're monomaniacs. Many of us just like figuring out complicated things, and the law is, more or less, just an incredibly complex instruction set used for delimiting appropriate behaviors. There are also laws about laws, providing us with cascading metalevels, overriding principles, and precedence issues.
Hacking law can be fun. Writing IANAL is not just a disclaimer; it is an admission that one is dabbling with legal theories.
There was a very interesting Frontline last night discussing the fifteen billion dollar libel suit Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds threatened against 60 Minutes. Faced with a libel judgment of almost three times CBS's eventual selling price, they pulled the story. Quoting Don Hewitt's 1995.10.17 National Press Club address:
We have a story that we think is solid. We don't think anybody could ever sue us for libel. There are some twists and turns, and if you get in front of a jury in some states where the people on that jury are all related to people who work in tobacco companies, look out. That's a $15 billion gun pointed at your head. We may opt to get out of the line of fire. that doesn't make me proud, but it's not my money. I don't have $15 billion.
The suit claimed in part that a researcher for Brown & Williamson tobacco, Jeffrey Wigland, would be in violation of his severance contract's non-disclosure clause. The whole thing is well covered at the story's web page.
If you read Cryptonomicon, you heard a lot about tactical litigation. The way Philip Morris and RJR engaged in "tortious interference" against the corporation attempting to run a news story is another real-world example.
The biggest problem with the 60 Minutes debacle was that the decision to pull the story is that the network was up for sale at the time it was made, and that it was made on the recommendation of corporate executives, not news directors. The chairman of CBS received $12M, the general counsel, who recommended to kill the story, received $1.2M. They would not have made that money if Westinghouse didn't buy CBS at $5.6B, and Westinghouse would not have bought the company if it had a $15B lawsuit hanging over it's head.
Ironically, the story did end up making the news, not directly, but in stories by other news agencies, discussing not the spiking allegation itself, but the tobacco industry's litigious efforts to supress it.
The DMCA could be the most profoundly damaging tool ever used against investigative journalism. If it is illegal to decrypt something copyrighted, by even trivially encrypting internal corporate memos like the Halloween documents or the tobacco companies' executive briefs on the deliberate manipulation of nicotine levels in cigarettes, corporations can provide themselves powerful protection against leaks. Publishing any part of a damning--but previously encrypted--document would be sufficient evidence of a criminal activity; to wit, the unauthorized decryption of those documents, that RJR could sue a newspaper publisher for millions, and possibly win.
If an employee uses authorized software like his e-mail reader to decrypt a memo, then print it, it could still be illegal. He was using the software in an unauthorized manner; to wit, decrypting proprietary copyrighted material to deliver it to someone outside the company.
Don't forget that it was the press, not the government, that got the first evidence of astroturfing, nicotine doping, the Love Canal coverup, mercury dumping, "embrace and extend", Unsafe at Any Speed, planned automobile obsolescence, and countless other example of unconscionable behavior on the part of American and international corporations. And it was the press that exposed Nixon's illegal bombing campaigns and the Watergate coverup. Could he have used parts of the DMCA to fight them off, by handing them an encrypted tape then, having them arrested as soon as they broke it?
Unless the courts strike down these specious restrictions on "fair use", US citizens are badly, badly screwed, by their own government, on behalf of monied corporate interests.
Nasa doesn't hand the landing back over to the highly-trained human: they move the landing
But they do hand the decision about how and where to land over to humans--a meteorologist, flight control, the pilot and mission commander. I would have used an example from chemical refineries, but I know less about them than I do about space shuttles. I do know that in the late 1980s, software controlling nuclear reactors, if it didn't know what to do next, used to simply scram the reactor. When it turned out that a new reactor in Aiken, South Carolina was executing an "emergency shutdown" two or three times a week--much to the delight of the press--they adopted new procedures: if the computer knew something bad was happening, it would scram; otherwise, it would ring a bell in the control room, as if to say, "Excuse me, but would you be so kind as to put down the magazine and look at the goddamned gauges? I'm a nuclear reactor, you jackass! Pay attention!"
As for driving by Ouija board, that would explain a whole lot. It's either that or dice, given the traffic around here.
Stephen Fear's High Fidelity is as good a movie as the l995 Nick Hornsby novel on which it is based.
Let's trim it down to the right phrase:
the l995 Nick Hornsby novel
Try it in a typewrite face:
the l995 Nick Hornsby novel
And do it in all uppercase:
THE L995 NICK HORNSBY NOVEL
Jon, since you're having trouble finding it, the numeral one can be found by hitting the exclamation point key without hitting the shift key. Sneaky, I know, but L995 isn't five years ago; it's a bad variable name.
I know numerous engineering examples, from the Space Shuttle to chemical plants, where the "dumb" computer, uttlerly lacking intuition, outperforms the human.
With due respect, the situations you describe are very controlled environments, and while the consequences of error are obviously much higher than smacking into a lamp post, nearly all the variables of interest are within the control of the software. Please note that when--for example--there are high, gusty cross winds at a given landing site, Shuttle Control postpones or relocates the landing, because they know this is a situation outside the software's capabilities. On the road, there are an astonishing number of things outside one's control. Sooner or later the car's software will come across a situation it can't handle, but whose solution would be blindingly obvious to a human.
If some company starts rushing an "authorized" Linux DVD driver/player out the door, it will be a tactic in the pending DeCSS lawsuit, not a goodwill gesture to the Linux community. They will release it unsupported, due to the "unstable and unpredictable" Linux environment. But they will mention that there are authorized DVD players for Linux, thus proving once and for all that a tool like DeCSS are for stealing, just like kitchen knives are for stabbing battered spouses. Why own a kitchen knife when you can buy wholesome products already sliced for you?
They can't Open Source it. That would be violating their own collusion--err--consortium's charter. When such a player does show up, it will be closed source, so as to protect the already widely known trade secrets the lawsuits are trying to make us unknow. It won't be an effort to embrace another user community; it will be an effort to control yet another market segment.
George Orwell warned that this could happen in his epic novel, 1984.
It's not uncommon for science fiction authors to be off by a few decades in one direction or another, or to miss a technological innovation that could have a critical role in manifesting their vision. In this case, Orwell missed out on the elegance of simply making it easier to narc on undesirables, rather than directly spying. All you have to do now is wait by the phone, and check your email every now and then.
Orwell was also off by about fifteen to twenty years in spotting this pilot project. See, this is why the Hitler Youth analogy scares me: if you teach someone as a child or teenager that a certain set of behaviors are acceptable, they will carry that attitude with them into adulthood. Once you are an adult, the attitudes you learned in school will be used in--and by--the corporation, or the government.
Corporations love having narcs working for them. My fiancee's brother recently applied for a job at Circuit City. They made him fill out a questionnaire that asked, among others, two interesting questions: "What would you do if you found out another employee was stealing?" and "What would you do if you found out another employee was using drugs?" The correct answer to either, of course, is to notify his supervisor immediately. The answer given to the second was "If he's only smoking pot, probably nothing. What he does in his spare time is his own business." He didn't get the job. He had good references from previous jobs selling electronics, a clean record, and he got along well with the managers and staff at the Circuit City to which he applied. But the answers on his questionnaire were mailed off to corporate HR to be graded there, and they said he didn't get the job.
Katz is far from the first to notice what schools actually do. It has been long observed that the first and foremost duty of American Public schools is not to educate, but to turn children into adults that will be useful to the best interests of society. At present, society's best interests are not defined in terms of benefit to those who live in it, but of benefit to those who own it.
Looks like SCO is going to be the first Unix effectively killed by Linux.
Ironic, isn't it? All this time we've been gloating over how Linux will be at the forefront of a Unix revolution that will crush Bill's Evil Empire, when all Linux has actually done in the market is cannibalise other Unices, starting with the x86-based ones. Windows's market share has not decreased at all since the 2.0 kernel was released; only other non-Windows OSs have been affected.
I'd wager BSDI/OS is next to go.
I'll take that wager--with the recent merger of BSDI and FreeBSD, BSDI will survive by providing support and services for their consolidated Open Source OS.
The article had MS PR flaks describing CE in a number of unflattering ways--including as a "companion to NT Embedded." I guess I should count myself fortunate that I've never even heard of this critter. Personally, I can't imagine NT having the uptime, stability, or simplicity to operate as an embedded system.
In the meantime, can anybody here think of anything in CE's source that might be worth reading? MSFT's not exactly giving away the whole store here.
You know what I really want them to open source? Word for DOS 5.0. There never was a nicer word processor.
Slackware was one of the very first Linux distros; what do you think has contributed to its longevity, particularly given the popularity of "upstarts" like SuSE, Redhat, and Caldera, who are staking their future market share on increased levels of user handholding and initial ease-of-use? Have you found the pressure to dumb down hard to resist? Given that you have resisted this trend so far, are you targeting Slackware at a particular niche?
Thanks for all your work; Slackware was my first distro, and I think I learned a whole lot more about Unix than if I had pulled another distro of that CD back in '93.
Makes you an oldhat next to me--I had an Infomagic CDrom--April 93 I think--I had to drive over to the guy's house to get it. He also sold me his (annotated) copy of UNIX in a Nutshell and guided me through my first kernel compile when I called him up not knowing how to switch virtual consoles. Turns out I was saying RtAlt+F1 instead of LtAlt+F1. Ah, those were the days. Very patient guy by the name of Matt Walsh. No, not that one.
I do remember when a Linux distro was first made available on ExecPC. Didn't feel like paying all that money to D/L it long distance at 2400bps.
The first Linux I installed was Slackware based on the 1.0.8 kernel. I've since upgraded that box to something more, erm, recent.
I have four Unix boxen at home---a tattered 486 running FreeBSD, a P/150 running Slackware, a P/166 running Redhat, and a Redhat laptop. I seldom touch the 486 because it's frustratingly slow, for development, but functions nicely as a firewall/router. The laptop and the 166 are running Redhat because I use them as clients and I like the big, hefty, comprehensive, everything-supports-it nature of Redhat in that environment.
But when I feel like playing with Unix, when I want to fiddle with server applications, or go in and tweak the configuration of everything, or I'm just gonna bash out some C code to run in a character environment, I do it on the Slackware system. Why? Because Redhat is so comparatively complex and has so many interconnected things that it's so much easier to do indirect damage to the system. This is fine if all you want to do is run the darn thing. But with Slackware, everything is simple, clean and orthogonal. When I want to do mundane preconfigured productivity-type stuff, I use Redhat, but when I want to play, or I want to do the sort of playing other people might mistake for work, I use Slackware. It's just a lot of fun.
Besides, it's still very character-based. I used to run it with a scavenged MDA adapter and a 1983 vintage IBM monochrome monitor, before a splurged on a VGA card and a switchbox. That's what Zork is supposed to look like!
P.S. SuSE is awfully nice, too, like Redhat but with more i18n, tons of included apps and a good user manual. I ran 6.0 for a while, but overwrote it with Redhat for reasons that had more to do with my video card than the distribution itself.
I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos?
Because telcos don't just carry mundane phone calls; they also carry critical calls like 911. Beyond that, they carry data circuits for ATMs and financial institutions and telemetry between hospitals. They carry the video feeds for security cameras and fire alarms. And they carry real-time flight data between air traffic control facilities. Those are situations where five nines is completely unacceptable. In environments like these, five minutes of scheduled downtime a year is planned four months in advance. Five-nines systems are clustered together in groups of three.
I work on a database application which catalogs circuit designs for an RBOC's 911 and FAA circuits; some of these systems are so important their data is routed over four redundant trunk groups--you can have three simultaneous circuit failures and the data will still get through. If it doesn't, well, in an air traffic corridor where planes less than a mile apart are closing on each other at over a thousand miles an hour, five minutes without radar data is an amazingly long period of time, odd/even thousands be damned.
Telephone switches themselves are astonishingly robust pieces of equipment, as has been pointed out above. They are designed to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections and dynamically shunt traffic from overloaded or unavailable trunk groups. If a switch crashes, which happens once every three or four years, it can reboot within twelve seconds and existing calls aren't interrupted. New attempts made during those seven seconds are quietly rerouted somewhere else (sometimes during the last second of boot it just pretends to be ringing the line) and you'd never know the thing went down.
It ain't just phone calls; it's stuff where five minutes of down time could cause a catastrophe.
Slashdot Mirror
One way to overcome such potential emergencies is to use two counterrotating flywheels. It is much more difficult to extract energy from them (because you have more trouble doing it magnetically through the flywheel housing), but in the event of a detectable failure, you can essentially clamp the two together, resulting in an amazing amount of heat (which can be managed), but no projectiles.
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All the OS company and the Web apps company have to do is buy full-disclosure source access license agreements from each other. They can let any company in the world buy one too, on the open market--for one hundred and fifty billion dollars. It's a high price, to be sure, but if you can raise it, you have full access. Remember that Microsoft is presently worth over half a trillion dollars. The only other company with nearly that much market cap is Cisco.
If we cut MS into two quarter-trillion dollar companies, then Company A licenses something to Company B for price X, and B licenses something back to A for the same price, and both companies' books are in balance. Price X is in both companies' accounts payable and accounts receiveable, and the money goes around in a circle, payable over X/min(annual_revenue_of_A, annual_revenue_of_B) years. Hell, they can even charge each other interest on the outstanding balance.
And with a good enough set of lawyers, you fend off another company seeking equally favorable terms for years.
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It's like suing Xerox for manufacturing photocopiers if somebody runs off a few copies of their favorite Dilbert and hands them out to coworkers.
This is infuriating, and it will be fascinating to see how (or if) it is ever resolved.
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Them's some fast puppies. A lot faster than my sister's new Labrador retriever puppy. He doesn't even know how to sit, much less act like a transistor. But I bet that, accelerated to 100THz, he could go through some serious shoes...
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<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
And the table tags are so broken that Netscape Communicator 4.7/NT won't even render it. You have to use Exploder.
It sounds like a nice book, but it's like the saying: if you like sausage, don't ask how it's made.
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I've always wanted to see the Northern Lights. That a solar storm brought them far enough south that others who've always wanted to see them could see them makes me happy for them. Unfortunately, I live too far south, in a bright place. Cheers to anyone in Finland that got to enjoy these.
P.S. Has the Vernal transition happened recently enough that the storm would cause visible Southern Lights as well?
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To put the RIAA's actions in Industrial Revolution terms, what they are doing is tantamount to buggy whip manufacturers filing injunctions against Ford Motor Company over the Model T.
And that's my bad analogy for the day.
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Folks who start DDoS and other script-based attacks are, for the most part, immature little jerks who are so incompetent in every other part of their lives that they have to do sociopathic things in order to feel powerful. If they didn't have IRC to DDoS, they'd probably be out smoking cigarettes to show Mom who's boss, or writing "SUX" on bathroom stalls. They're probably cruel to littler kids, so they can feel like they're bigger and tougher than somebody. They hate their mothers, but they secretly wish they could fuck them, so they break into web sites and vandalize them with the particularly telling message that they "own" them now. They try to "own" cnn.com, but what they really want to own is Mom. The slang they use to talk to each other is full of sublimated expressions like "rule" and "own" and "bitchslap" and "you're my bitch now," and, of course, "muthafucka."
They don't have their own personalities, so the only form of self-expression they can come up with is to find the things that are better than them--that make them feel as little and irrelevant as they actually are--and destroy them.
The IRCNet gesture is intended to polarize us, not to convince script kiddies they're getting on our nerves. On our nerves is where they want to be.
--
As to why we all insist on discussing law, well, we may be geeks, but that doesn't mean we're monomaniacs. Many of us just like figuring out complicated things, and the law is, more or less, just an incredibly complex instruction set used for delimiting appropriate behaviors. There are also laws about laws, providing us with cascading metalevels, overriding principles, and precedence issues.
Hacking law can be fun. Writing IANAL is not just a disclaimer; it is an admission that one is dabbling with legal theories.
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The suit claimed in part that a researcher for Brown & Williamson tobacco, Jeffrey Wigland, would be in violation of his severance contract's non-disclosure clause. The whole thing is well covered at the story's web page.
If you read Cryptonomicon, you heard a lot about tactical litigation. The way Philip Morris and RJR engaged in "tortious interference" against the corporation attempting to run a news story is another real-world example.
The biggest problem with the 60 Minutes debacle was that the decision to pull the story is that the network was up for sale at the time it was made, and that it was made on the recommendation of corporate executives, not news directors. The chairman of CBS received $12M, the general counsel, who recommended to kill the story, received $1.2M. They would not have made that money if Westinghouse didn't buy CBS at $5.6B, and Westinghouse would not have bought the company if it had a $15B lawsuit hanging over it's head.
Ironically, the story did end up making the news, not directly, but in stories by other news agencies, discussing not the spiking allegation itself, but the tobacco industry's litigious efforts to supress it.
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If an employee uses authorized software like his e-mail reader to decrypt a memo, then print it, it could still be illegal. He was using the software in an unauthorized manner; to wit, decrypting proprietary copyrighted material to deliver it to someone outside the company.
Don't forget that it was the press, not the government, that got the first evidence of astroturfing, nicotine doping, the Love Canal coverup, mercury dumping, "embrace and extend", Unsafe at Any Speed, planned automobile obsolescence, and countless other example of unconscionable behavior on the part of American and international corporations. And it was the press that exposed Nixon's illegal bombing campaigns and the Watergate coverup. Could he have used parts of the DMCA to fight them off, by handing them an encrypted tape then, having them arrested as soon as they broke it?
Unless the courts strike down these specious restrictions on "fair use", US citizens are badly, badly screwed, by their own government, on behalf of monied corporate interests.
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As for driving by Ouija board, that would explain a whole lot. It's either that or dice, given the traffic around here.
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I see the testers obeyed the cardinal rule of driving in Italy: stay the hell out of Rome.
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With due respect, the situations you describe are very controlled environments, and while the consequences of error are obviously much higher than smacking into a lamp post, nearly all the variables of interest are within the control of the software. Please note that when--for example--there are high, gusty cross winds at a given landing site, Shuttle Control postpones or relocates the landing, because they know this is a situation outside the software's capabilities. On the road, there are an astonishing number of things outside one's control. Sooner or later the car's software will come across a situation it can't handle, but whose solution would be blindingly obvious to a human.
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They can't Open Source it. That would be violating their own collusion--err--consortium's charter. When such a player does show up, it will be closed source, so as to protect the already widely known trade secrets the lawsuits are trying to make us unknow. It won't be an effort to embrace another user community; it will be an effort to control yet another market segment.
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Orwell was also off by about fifteen to twenty years in spotting this pilot project. See, this is why the Hitler Youth analogy scares me: if you teach someone as a child or teenager that a certain set of behaviors are acceptable, they will carry that attitude with them into adulthood. Once you are an adult, the attitudes you learned in school will be used in--and by--the corporation, or the government.
Corporations love having narcs working for them. My fiancee's brother recently applied for a job at Circuit City. They made him fill out a questionnaire that asked, among others, two interesting questions: "What would you do if you found out another employee was stealing?" and "What would you do if you found out another employee was using drugs?" The correct answer to either, of course, is to notify his supervisor immediately. The answer given to the second was "If he's only smoking pot, probably nothing. What he does in his spare time is his own business." He didn't get the job. He had good references from previous jobs selling electronics, a clean record, and he got along well with the managers and staff at the Circuit City to which he applied. But the answers on his questionnaire were mailed off to corporate HR to be graded there, and they said he didn't get the job.
Katz is far from the first to notice what schools actually do. It has been long observed that the first and foremost duty of American Public schools is not to educate, but to turn children into adults that will be useful to the best interests of society. At present, society's best interests are not defined in terms of benefit to those who live in it, but of benefit to those who own it.
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Ironic, isn't it? All this time we've been gloating over how Linux will be at the forefront of a Unix revolution that will crush Bill's Evil Empire, when all Linux has actually done in the market is cannibalise other Unices, starting with the x86-based ones. Windows's market share has not decreased at all since the 2.0 kernel was released; only other non-Windows OSs have been affected.
I'll take that wager--with the recent merger of BSDI and FreeBSD, BSDI will survive by providing support and services for their consolidated Open Source OS.
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The article had MS PR flaks describing CE in a number of unflattering ways--including as a "companion to NT Embedded." I guess I should count myself fortunate that I've never even heard of this critter. Personally, I can't imagine NT having the uptime, stability, or simplicity to operate as an embedded system.
In the meantime, can anybody here think of anything in CE's source that might be worth reading? MSFT's not exactly giving away the whole store here.
You know what I really want them to open source? Word for DOS 5.0. There never was a nicer word processor.
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Thanks for all your work; Slackware was my first distro, and I think I learned a whole lot more about Unix than if I had pulled another distro of that CD back in '93.
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I do remember when a Linux distro was first made available on ExecPC. Didn't feel like paying all that money to D/L it long distance at 2400bps.
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I have four Unix boxen at home---a tattered 486 running FreeBSD, a P/150 running Slackware, a P/166 running Redhat, and a Redhat laptop. I seldom touch the 486 because it's frustratingly slow, for development, but functions nicely as a firewall/router. The laptop and the 166 are running Redhat because I use them as clients and I like the big, hefty, comprehensive, everything-supports-it nature of Redhat in that environment.
But when I feel like playing with Unix, when I want to fiddle with server applications, or go in and tweak the configuration of everything, or I'm just gonna bash out some C code to run in a character environment, I do it on the Slackware system. Why? Because Redhat is so comparatively complex and has so many interconnected things that it's so much easier to do indirect damage to the system. This is fine if all you want to do is run the darn thing. But with Slackware, everything is simple, clean and orthogonal. When I want to do mundane preconfigured productivity-type stuff, I use Redhat, but when I want to play, or I want to do the sort of playing other people might mistake for work, I use Slackware. It's just a lot of fun.
Besides, it's still very character-based. I used to run it with a scavenged MDA adapter and a 1983 vintage IBM monochrome monitor, before a splurged on a VGA card and a switchbox. That's what Zork is supposed to look like!
P.S. SuSE is awfully nice, too, like Redhat but with more i18n, tons of included apps and a good user manual. I ran 6.0 for a while, but overwrote it with Redhat for reasons that had more to do with my video card than the distribution itself.
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I work on a database application which catalogs circuit designs for an RBOC's 911 and FAA circuits; some of these systems are so important their data is routed over four redundant trunk groups--you can have three simultaneous circuit failures and the data will still get through. If it doesn't, well, in an air traffic corridor where planes less than a mile apart are closing on each other at over a thousand miles an hour, five minutes without radar data is an amazingly long period of time, odd/even thousands be damned.
Telephone switches themselves are astonishingly robust pieces of equipment, as has been pointed out above. They are designed to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections and dynamically shunt traffic from overloaded or unavailable trunk groups. If a switch crashes, which happens once every three or four years, it can reboot within twelve seconds and existing calls aren't interrupted. New attempts made during those seven seconds are quietly rerouted somewhere else (sometimes during the last second of boot it just pretends to be ringing the line) and you'd never know the thing went down.
It ain't just phone calls; it's stuff where five minutes of down time could cause a catastrophe.
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