It couldn't survive past its morbidity but that doesn't mean it couldn't evolve in the first place.
There's always a slim chance of a totally random mutant springing up, with characteristics drastically different from it's parents.
But I wouldn't quite call that "evolution". And certainly it wouldn't be "natural selection". The word "fluke" seems correct.
One way that a super-plague (or a super-predator, or anything other organism which would destroy its own environment) can really evolve, of course, is if the evolution takes place in a completely different environment from the one that it eventually comes to dominate. "Alien species without natural predators" and all that.
(Some argue that home sapien evolved in a different world than now exists, and that they will outstrip their food supply and doom themselves through relentless expansion)
As other replies mention, a Von Neumann machine is a conceptual computer which is somewhat more realistic than a Turing machine (although equivalent in the problems it can solve). But why is a relentless science-fiction monster named after a computational theorist?
The distinguishing characteristic of a Von Neumann machine is that code and data are treated the same. Both are stored in the same memory, which seems natural to a modern user, but was revolutionary back when it was introduced.
One might say that Von Neumann invented the idea of "software". Pre-Von Neumann computer programmers spent days clipping relays into breadboards. To change the program, you had to rebuild the machine.
But with executable code actually stored inside the pattern of magnetic switches, it's as if the machine has the ablity to rebuild itself when needed. By running compiler software, for instance, is as if the computer is enhancing itself to extend or optimize it's features. The "machine" gets more complex. Likewise, virus programs seem to be replicating small bits of machinery.
So a Von Neumann computer, in a way, is a machine which can modify it's own functions. Von Neumann software are machines which can edit, delete, or replicate themselves. ("cp/bin/cp ~/cp2") The idea of a "Von Neumann device" extends this concept out of the digital world and posits physical machinery which is able to construct machines very similar to itself.
Just like a computer virus (or worm, or mere fork-bomb) could expand to take up all your memory, so could a Von Neuman robot replicate to eventually use up all the metals and silicates on a planet (or even galaxy).
Many scientists and journalists will agree that HIV is "the AIDS virus".
Technically, there is such a thing as the AIDS-virus, and it's called HIV. This is just as correct as saying "Dodge pickup" instead of "Ram".
The difference between HIV and AIDS is that AIDS is an older word, and was used before the virus was known. AIDS, obviously, is a "syndrome"- a set of visible symptoms. If a person catches the disease, but doesn't yet show any bad effects from it, then it's accurate to say he has HIV, or "the AIDS virus", but not AIDS. (There are at least 2 people who've had HIV for 10+ years and not developed AIDS, and that's without medication)
SARS is also a syndrome, and it's presumably caused by the "SARS virus", which has no other name that I've heard.
English probably isn't your favorite language, but it seems you're saying that only Mbeki believes in the AIDS virus?
That is precisely the opposite of what world newspapers claim- Mbeki is often attacked because he denies that HIV causes AIDS, even though all modern doctors have believed this since the 1980s.
If it were possible to make a virus that would cause extremely massive casualties, don't you think it would have evolved already?
No, it absolutely would not have evolved already. Yes, viruses have been evolving forever, but their goal is not to destroy humanity- it's to create more viruses. Exterminating humankind would get in the way.
Textbook: "Evolution by natural selection allows population pressure to gradually change an organism into something more likely to survive."
A virsus that kills 100% of it's host population is not more likely to survive- there is no way natural selection could create one. But that doesn't disprove the possibility of one being created artificially.
However, a biologist with very advanced equipment (near-future science-fiction level) could theoretically create a virus which spreads as rapidly as the common cold, has no known cure, is fatal, and produces no symptoms for 18 months. Something like that could cleanse the planet.
It is not possible for a virus to kill more than a certain percentage of a population because at some point the population gets so sparse that the virus can no longer spread.
True, depending on the nature of the super-virus, it might kill only 90% of the population. And then probably 80% of those survivors would die of starvation or exposure within a year. The remaining 2% of humanity, with luck, can revert to an agrarian society and start rebuilding civilization.
So it might not be "total" destruction, but 6 billion deaths can be treated nearly the same as "the end of the world" for long-range planning purposes.
But making biological weapons requires big machines which, as the author says, are "easily visible by satellite."
One: someday the machines will be smaller.
Two: big machines are visible from satellite, but their function isn't easily recognizable.
The most realistic apocalyptic bio-weapon scenario is that a legitimate medical facility will be subverted to build a killer virus. No spy satellite will be able to tell it apart from an innocent hospital. (It's hard to distinguish between good and bad molecules from orbit)
He's been spending the money he gets from us buying oil to build WMD's.
No, US citizens don't buy oil from Iraq. However, they do purchase it on the international market, which drives up the price, and slightly increases Saddam's profits from his buyers.
But there's no reason to look for such an indirect money trail. 25 years ago, US tax dollars directly suppied Iraq with chemical weapons.
And of course, by asking "would it be acceptable", you've begged the question of "would we even want to erase the original?" And there's a book on that too. (And even a more recent one)
However, those are traditional "hard SF dilemmas", and there hasn't been any technological change in the past 2 decades to make them any more pressing.
The physical stuff- running, aiming, and crawling behind cover- is already what infantrymen spend all day learning. And they learn it well. Some units even use paintball, or laser tag, in addition to their dry-fire and live-fire drills.
(A DI once told me, while shopping for video games, "We already know how to shoot")
But the things that happen in a real war cannot be simulated with paint.
Big things- the large scope of war includes many effects that guys with toy guns can't attempt to replicate. In actual combat, these situations will be rare, but are critical to practice.
Battlefields you cannot visit or recreate (downtown Bagdad...). More opponents than you have volunteer college kids. Many more civilian bystanders than you can hire as actors.
Air-launched missiles blasting through buildings. An M1A1 rolling through a fighting position. Half the squad inhaling poison gas and needing an airlift evac.
Small things- Paintball, and to a lesser extent MILES and even training rounds suffer from different ballistics than actual weapons. They produce "false training", where a person can be conditioned to expect guns to behave less effectively than they really do. An M16 can be fatal from 1km off- no paintball players would think of engaging targets from such ranges. Laser systems can get the range right, but have other problems- you can't really glue optical sensors onto every surface of a person that might be shot at, and the protectiveness of soft cover is exaggerated. An M249 can tear through the walls of a residential home, but training lasers never will.
Eventually, we're looking towards using a combined live/virtual infantry training approach. Each player will wear a position tracker on his body and weapon. Pulling the trigger will send a message to the master computer, which will compute anyone hit by the shot, and remove him from the game. As long as the location of every kind of solid obstacle is pre-programmed into the system, it should be able to correctly judge when someone is hit.
And the weapons they carry in training can have the same weight as the real things.
Secretly rigging that particular game (by inserting "cheat codes" or other advantages into the code) would've been very hard.
For one thing, MC02 wasn't run on a monolithic piece of software like civilian MMORPGs or networked FPS/RTS games; it was more than 50 independently developed programs, sharing a network protocol but little else. (The Marines ran different software than the Army, who were different from the CIA, who wouldn't even tell us what they were using...)
There was minimal amount of coordination amoung the programmers- to ensure a baseline level of fairness, the week before the game, all the programs lined up their entities in two opposing rows and began shooting at each other (with a GodMode cheat enabled so that fatalities were instantly healed). This was to ensure a general correspondence in the represented power levels of guns and armor.
So, if any one program tried to cheat, chances are the operator of a completely separate piece of software would catch him at it, and complain to the sysadim. This happened several times in fact- for instance, the Navy decided they had binoculars that could see through solid rock- but the response was to ignore the discrepancies and continue with the game. (Which gave fodder for that General's complaints)
(And in general, military software contractors don't practice anything approaching "extreme programming", so expertise to quickly modify the games is rarely easy to find)
(For a few more details on the MC02 fiasco, read this post of mine)
The scenarios of The Army Game are exactly not what the US army is/will finding itself in.
As you mentioned, in the game, the teams are always 100% balanced, and have equally powerful weapons, communications, and survelliance/intelligence assets. The US army will never be willing to engage in a fair fight- it's against their simplest doctrine ("never attack without a 4x numerical advantage" for instance)
Plus, everything that moves is either an ally or an enemy (or one of a small number of hostages).
To make the scenarios at all realistic, there'd have to be dozens of coordinated US soldiers, hundreds of OPFOR (spread out, without reliable communication or leadership) and thousands of civilians. And those OPFOR and civilians should be able to change roles at any moment.
In terms of avoiding war crimes prosecution in the wake of WWI, "Just Following Orders" was in fact an excellent defense.
If not for that, then 20 million German citizens would've faced hanging. But they weren't even sent to trial, because they followed orders, not issued them.
Although I haven't heard of them offering source code, Oracle often gives educators and students free DB licenses to use with their projects.
But in terms of attacking this "Open Source Edge", Microsoft has been really pushing into the field of "academic research testbeds".
5 years ago they launched an extensive program to give interested university researchers resources (hardware, software, and money) as a lure to get experimental new techniques running on Windows(tm) first.
This is part of the motivation behind their Shared Source program, but it goes further. Many important schools have licensed copies of Microsoft's server platform source code which they are allowed to test modifications with.
If I were a researcher, I'd never rise to such bait- publishing articles about a source base that only 0.0001% of the potential audience is allowed to read doesn't feel like the best way to propagate my ideas. Yet, I've encountered a few professors who were happy to try their experimental OS optimization techniques on NT 3.5 first.
No. Original software was written to exploit the bug. (It's the "included zip file" from the announcement). You can't simply copy any old executable code onto the memcard and expect the game to load it- the hacker composed a special, magic header block to smash stack, fool signing, or something.
That software is "a tool"- and unlike 077AUF, it was designed with the explicit purpose of evading Microsoft's code-signing checks- which are a "copy protection mechanism"!
I don't believe they actually cost very much- Dreamcast was already on the decline before Release Groups became very successful.
But I'm sure that Sega and it's game publishing friends would love to claim that their failure was due to rampaging criminals, and not their own business mistakes.
How much of a stretch is it to call this technique a "circumvention tool"? Well within the imagination of Federal prosecutors (advised by friendly Microsoft attorneys):
The 007AUF exploit enables arbitrary, unsigned code to be executed on the XBox- not just Linux, but any other program could be run, without authorization from Microsoft or the copyright holder.
Currently, XBox games are protected from piracy by two technical measures: all game binaries must be signed by Microsoft before being playable, and all games come on non-standard CD-ROMs, which are larger than what consumer hardware can replicate. Together, those two defenses make it impossible for consumers to illegally share copies of a single game.
But now, with the 007AUF hack, one leg is removed- an XBox can be tricked into running unsigned programs. This means that an unscrupulous person can copy a normal XBox game onto his computer, manipulate the game data to reduce it's size to within the 650 megabytes accomdated by normal CD-R media, and then mass-produce copies for distribution on the internet the underworld. Techniques to reduce the size of game data are already well known among the cyber-criminals called "IRC Dreamcast Release Groups" (most famously the gangs Utopia and Kalisto). They will remove, shorten, or reduce the quality of art resources such as pictures, audio, and video, in order to fit the game onto a CD-R.
So far, XBox developers have been spared the economic deprivation that internet game piracy can bring. But if the government fails to punish these new hackers and suppress the 007AUF exploit, this innovative platform may become unprofitable, and go the way of the Sega Dreamcast.
If software installation was done right, they wouldn't have to use a password at all.
The best way to handle installation of optional packages on a PDA is something like the Palm system- you add the packages to the PDA software on your desktop computer, and then they automatically get installed during the next PDA sync.
(The user already should've had to store his PDA password in the desktop sync software, to secure PIM data.)
It means the flash memory hardware will eventually die. The usual number heard is one million writes, or more.
That should last years- and in a few years, CompactFlash cards will be cheap anyway, so who cares? (As long as it's not built into your PDA- but a PDA will be obselete in 4 years as well)
Note that most flash chips contain a little software for "wear leveling" to ensure that those million writes don't happen at all the same place, burning a tiny "hole" in the media while the rest is left unused. Even if you repeatedly load/save the same file, it will try to spread the changes out all over the memory, reducing excessive wear.
In short, ordinary consumers don't need to worry about the fact that flash memory will someday wear out- nobody uses it for persistent storage anyhow, right?
However- people who install custom-built aftermarket software do need to keep this in mind. If you accidently get a file-system driver which disables wear leveling, or you do something like using flash memory as RAM (which a program can edit thousands of times per second), then theoretically, you could be reducing the lifetime of your machine.
It is a very bad idea, because those devices are advertised as using frequent, wireless network access.
This is especially bad because the default root password is "". And changing the root password breaks the default sync software!
If you bring a Zaurus running the OEM software into a location offering 802.11b wireless, you can easily be rooted by any script kiddy who recognizes your PDA.
Zauruses are so obscure that this risk is low, today, but it's still a major design problem. Hopefully, the 5600 version has fixed this. The software patch for the prior model was inadequate.
Flash memory is what's being discussed here, not traditional "RAM". Data on flash can survive without any electricity at all.
So if the storage were used like a hard drive (programs and data are loaded from it into normal RAM, rather than being utilized in place), then it could be powered off except during the very brief periods of use.
I don't know if existing PDAs cut power to external flash cards when it's not being accessed- however, experience tells that adding a 256 meg card doesn't cut down the battery life very perceptibly.
Most likely, the designers left bigger storage out of PDAs for other reasons: 1. More flexibility for customers- they can buy the big storage if they want, but most don't need it. 2. More flexibility for users- they can yank out expansion cards and swap them with other devices (cameras, desktop PCs, other PDAs) 3. Keep the opportunity to introduce a better device next year for $250 more.
Yes, but you need to change most programs and recompile.
Recompile?? Whatever for?
Firstly, most program executables are small enough to install on the actual device without a problem. Users will normally prefer to have applications on permanent storage ("the hard drive") and documents on removable media.
Installing on CF cards will cause most unmodified programs to assume that common libaries is on the CF card.
Why would this be the case? Most Linux applications needing external libraries will check an environment variable to find where they are (in case there's any doubt). Or if it still can't cope, just make a symbolic link to the actual library from wherever the program is looking. (Although most people wouldn't like to reformat CF cards from FAT into filesystems that support symlinks, this is an option)
Recompiling a program just to change library postions sounds like an extreme solution.
Slashdot Mirror
have the right to protect their copyrights.
Reverse engineering is independent of copyright violation.
To break a copyright, you make copies of the material.
Reverse-engineering means you come to understand material already in your possesion.
It does not damage copyright at all, except via circular reasoning.
It couldn't survive past its morbidity but that doesn't mean it couldn't evolve in the first place.
There's always a slim chance of a totally random mutant springing up, with characteristics drastically different from it's parents.
But I wouldn't quite call that "evolution". And certainly it wouldn't be "natural selection". The word "fluke" seems correct.
One way that a super-plague (or a super-predator, or anything other organism which would destroy its own environment) can really evolve, of course, is if the evolution takes place in a completely different environment from the one that it eventually comes to dominate. "Alien species without natural predators" and all that.
(Some argue that home sapien evolved in a different world than now exists, and that they will outstrip their food supply and doom themselves through relentless expansion)
As other replies mention, a Von Neumann machine is a conceptual computer which is somewhat more realistic than a Turing machine (although equivalent in the problems it can solve). But why is a relentless science-fiction monster named after a computational theorist?
/bin/cp ~/cp2") The idea of a "Von Neumann device" extends this concept out of the digital world and posits physical machinery which is able to construct machines very similar to itself.
The distinguishing characteristic of a Von Neumann machine is that code and data are treated the same. Both are stored in the same memory, which seems natural to a modern user, but was revolutionary back when it was introduced.
One might say that Von Neumann invented the idea of "software". Pre-Von Neumann computer programmers spent days clipping relays into breadboards. To change the program, you had to rebuild the machine.
But with executable code actually stored inside the pattern of magnetic switches, it's as if the machine has the ablity to rebuild itself when needed. By running compiler software, for instance, is as if the computer is enhancing itself to extend or optimize it's features. The "machine" gets more complex. Likewise, virus programs seem to be replicating small bits of machinery.
So a Von Neumann computer, in a way, is a machine which can modify it's own functions. Von Neumann software are machines which can edit, delete, or replicate themselves. ("cp
Just like a computer virus (or worm, or mere fork-bomb) could expand to take up all your memory, so could a Von Neuman robot replicate to eventually use up all the metals and silicates on a planet (or even galaxy).
Many scientists and journalists will agree that HIV is "the AIDS virus".
Technically, there is such a thing as the AIDS-virus, and it's called HIV. This is just as correct as saying "Dodge pickup" instead of "Ram".
The difference between HIV and AIDS is that AIDS is an older word, and was used before the virus was known. AIDS, obviously, is a "syndrome"- a set of visible symptoms. If a person catches the disease, but doesn't yet show any bad effects from it, then it's accurate to say he has HIV, or "the AIDS virus", but not AIDS. (There are at least 2 people who've had HIV for 10+ years and not developed AIDS, and that's without medication)
SARS is also a syndrome, and it's presumably caused by the "SARS virus", which has no other name that I've heard.
What the heroes of WW1 and WW2 fought so bravely for
Tzar Nicolas? Stalin?
English probably isn't your favorite language, but it seems you're saying that only Mbeki believes in the AIDS virus?
That is precisely the opposite of what world newspapers claim- Mbeki is often attacked because he denies that HIV causes AIDS, even though all modern doctors have believed this since the 1980s.
If it were possible to make a virus that would cause extremely massive casualties, don't you think it would have evolved already?
No, it absolutely would not have evolved already. Yes, viruses have been evolving forever, but their goal is not to destroy humanity- it's to create more viruses. Exterminating humankind would get in the way.
Textbook: "Evolution by natural selection allows population pressure to gradually change an organism into something more likely to survive."
A virsus that kills 100% of it's host population is not more likely to survive- there is no way natural selection could create one. But that doesn't disprove the possibility of one being created artificially.
However, a biologist with very advanced equipment (near-future science-fiction level) could theoretically create a virus which spreads as rapidly as the common cold, has no known cure, is fatal, and produces no symptoms for 18 months. Something like that could cleanse the planet.
It is not possible for a virus to kill more than a certain percentage of a population because at some point the population gets so sparse that the virus can no longer spread.
True, depending on the nature of the super-virus, it might kill only 90% of the population. And then probably 80% of those survivors would die of starvation or exposure within a year. The remaining 2% of humanity, with luck, can revert to an agrarian society and start rebuilding civilization.
So it might not be "total" destruction, but 6 billion deaths can be treated nearly the same as "the end of the world" for long-range planning purposes.
But making biological weapons requires big machines which, as the author says, are "easily visible by satellite."
One: someday the machines will be smaller.
Two: big machines are visible from satellite, but their function isn't easily recognizable.
The most realistic apocalyptic bio-weapon scenario is that a legitimate medical facility will be subverted to build a killer virus. No spy satellite will be able to tell it apart from an innocent hospital. (It's hard to distinguish between good and bad molecules from orbit)
He's been spending the money he gets from us buying oil to build WMD's.
No, US citizens don't buy oil from Iraq. However, they do purchase it on the international market, which drives up the price, and slightly increases Saddam's profits from his buyers.
But there's no reason to look for such an indirect money trail. 25 years ago, US tax dollars directly suppied Iraq with chemical weapons.
There is a book about that.
And of course, by asking "would it be acceptable", you've begged the question of "would we even want to erase the original?" And there's a book on that too. (And even a more recent one)
However, those are traditional "hard SF dilemmas", and there hasn't been any technological change in the past 2 decades to make them any more pressing.
Hopefully the course instructor is already aware of that particular question, since Luddites have been around for 200 years.
The physical stuff- running, aiming, and crawling behind cover- is already what infantrymen spend all day learning. And they learn it well. Some units even use paintball, or laser tag, in addition to their dry-fire and live-fire drills.
(A DI once told me, while shopping for video games, "We already know how to shoot")
But the things that happen in a real war cannot be simulated with paint.
Battlefields you cannot visit or recreate (downtown Bagdad...). More opponents than you have volunteer college kids. Many more civilian bystanders than you can hire as actors.
Air-launched missiles blasting through buildings. An M1A1 rolling through a fighting position. Half the squad inhaling poison gas and needing an airlift evac.
Eventually, we're looking towards using a combined live/virtual infantry training approach. Each player will wear a position tracker on his body and weapon. Pulling the trigger will send a message to the master computer, which will compute anyone hit by the shot, and remove him from the game. As long as the location of every kind of solid obstacle is pre-programmed into the system, it should be able to correctly judge when someone is hit.
And the weapons they carry in training can have the same weight as the real things.
Secretly rigging that particular game (by inserting "cheat codes" or other advantages into the code) would've been very hard.
For one thing, MC02 wasn't run on a monolithic piece of software like civilian MMORPGs or networked FPS/RTS games; it was more than 50 independently developed programs, sharing a network protocol but little else. (The Marines ran different software than the Army, who were different from the CIA, who wouldn't even tell us what they were using...)
There was minimal amount of coordination amoung the programmers- to ensure a baseline level of fairness, the week before the game, all the programs lined up their entities in two opposing rows and began shooting at each other (with a GodMode cheat enabled so that fatalities were instantly healed). This was to ensure a general correspondence in the represented power levels of guns and armor.
So, if any one program tried to cheat, chances are the operator of a completely separate piece of software would catch him at it, and complain to the sysadim. This happened several times in fact- for instance, the Navy decided they had binoculars that could see through solid rock- but the response was to ignore the discrepancies and continue with the game. (Which gave fodder for that General's complaints)
(And in general, military software contractors don't practice anything approaching "extreme programming", so expertise to quickly modify the games is rarely easy to find)
(For a few more details on the MC02 fiasco, read this post of mine)
The scenarios of The Army Game are exactly not what the US army is/will finding itself in.
As you mentioned, in the game, the teams are always 100% balanced, and have equally powerful weapons, communications, and survelliance/intelligence assets. The US army will never be willing to engage in a fair fight- it's against their simplest doctrine ("never attack without a 4x numerical advantage" for instance)
Plus, everything that moves is either an ally or an enemy (or one of a small number of hostages).
To make the scenarios at all realistic, there'd have to be dozens of coordinated US soldiers, hundreds of OPFOR (spread out, without reliable communication or leadership) and thousands of civilians. And those OPFOR and civilians should be able to change roles at any moment.
In terms of avoiding war crimes prosecution in the wake of WWI, "Just Following Orders" was in fact an excellent defense.
If not for that, then 20 million German citizens would've faced hanging. But they weren't even sent to trial, because they followed orders, not issued them.
Although I haven't heard of them offering source code, Oracle often gives educators and students free DB licenses to use with their projects.
But in terms of attacking this "Open Source Edge", Microsoft has been really pushing into the field of "academic research testbeds".
5 years ago they launched an extensive program to give interested university researchers resources (hardware, software, and money) as a lure to get experimental new techniques running on Windows(tm) first.
This is part of the motivation behind their Shared Source program, but it goes further. Many important schools have licensed copies of Microsoft's server platform source code which they are allowed to test modifications with.
If I were a researcher, I'd never rise to such bait- publishing articles about a source base that only 0.0001% of the potential audience is allowed to read doesn't feel like the best way to propagate my ideas. Yet, I've encountered a few professors who were happy to try their experimental OS optimization techniques on NT 3.5 first.
No. Original software was written to exploit the bug. (It's the "included zip file" from the announcement). You can't simply copy any old executable code onto the memcard and expect the game to load it- the hacker composed a special, magic header block to smash stack, fool signing, or something.
That software is "a tool"- and unlike 077AUF, it was designed with the explicit purpose of evading Microsoft's code-signing checks- which are a "copy protection mechanism"!
I don't believe they actually cost very much- Dreamcast was already on the decline before Release Groups became very successful.
But I'm sure that Sega and it's game publishing friends would love to claim that their failure was due to rampaging criminals, and not their own business mistakes.
The 007AUF exploit enables arbitrary, unsigned code to be executed on the XBox- not just Linux, but any other program could be run, without authorization from Microsoft or the copyright holder.
Currently, XBox games are protected from piracy by two technical measures: all game binaries must be signed by Microsoft before being playable, and all games come on non-standard CD-ROMs, which are larger than what consumer hardware can replicate. Together, those two defenses make it impossible for consumers to illegally share copies of a single game.
But now, with the 007AUF hack, one leg is removed- an XBox can be tricked into running unsigned programs. This means that an unscrupulous person can copy a normal XBox game onto his computer, manipulate the game data to reduce it's size to within the 650 megabytes accomdated by normal CD-R media, and then mass-produce copies for distribution on the internet the underworld. Techniques to reduce the size of game data are already well known among the cyber-criminals called "IRC Dreamcast Release Groups" (most famously the gangs Utopia and Kalisto). They will remove, shorten, or reduce the quality of art resources such as pictures, audio, and video, in order to fit the game onto a CD-R.
So far, XBox developers have been spared the economic deprivation that internet game piracy can bring. But if the government fails to punish these new hackers and suppress the 007AUF exploit, this innovative platform may become unprofitable, and go the way of the Sega Dreamcast.
Is that really too far-fetched?
And already, some corporate firewalls are starting to forbid them...
If software installation was done right, they wouldn't have to use a password at all.
The best way to handle installation of optional packages on a PDA is something like the Palm system- you add the packages to the PDA software on your desktop computer, and then they automatically get installed during the next PDA sync.
(The user already should've had to store his PDA password in the desktop sync software, to secure PIM data.)
It means the flash memory hardware will eventually die. The usual number heard is one million writes, or more.
That should last years- and in a few years, CompactFlash cards will be cheap anyway, so who cares? (As long as it's not built into your PDA- but a PDA will be obselete in 4 years as well)
Note that most flash chips contain a little software for "wear leveling" to ensure that those million writes don't happen at all the same place, burning a tiny "hole" in the media while the rest is left unused. Even if you repeatedly load/save the same file, it will try to spread the changes out all over the memory, reducing excessive wear.
In short, ordinary consumers don't need to worry about the fact that flash memory will someday wear out- nobody uses it for persistent storage anyhow, right?
However- people who install custom-built aftermarket software do need to keep this in mind. If you accidently get a file-system driver which disables wear leveling, or you do something like using flash memory as RAM (which a program can edit thousands of times per second), then theoretically, you could be reducing the lifetime of your machine.
It is a very bad idea, because those devices are advertised as using frequent, wireless network access.
This is especially bad because the default root password is "". And changing the root password breaks the default sync software!
If you bring a Zaurus running the OEM software into a location offering 802.11b wireless, you can easily be rooted by any script kiddy who recognizes your PDA.
Zauruses are so obscure that this risk is low, today, but it's still a major design problem. Hopefully, the 5600 version has fixed this. The software patch for the prior model was inadequate.
Flash memory is what's being discussed here, not traditional "RAM". Data on flash can survive without any electricity at all.
So if the storage were used like a hard drive (programs and data are loaded from it into normal RAM, rather than being utilized in place), then it could be powered off except during the very brief periods of use.
I don't know if existing PDAs cut power to external flash cards when it's not being accessed- however, experience tells that adding a 256 meg card doesn't cut down the battery life very perceptibly.
Most likely, the designers left bigger storage out of PDAs for other reasons:
1. More flexibility for customers- they can buy the big storage if they want, but most don't need it.
2. More flexibility for users- they can yank out expansion cards and swap them with other devices (cameras, desktop PCs, other PDAs)
3. Keep the opportunity to introduce a better device next year for $250 more.
Yes, but you need to change most programs and recompile.
Recompile?? Whatever for?
Firstly, most program executables are small enough to install on the actual device without a problem. Users will normally prefer to have applications on permanent storage ("the hard drive") and documents on removable media.
Installing on CF cards will cause most unmodified programs to assume that common libaries is on the CF card.
Why would this be the case? Most Linux applications needing external libraries will check an environment variable to find where they are (in case there's any doubt). Or if it still can't cope, just make a symbolic link to the actual library from wherever the program is looking. (Although most people wouldn't like to reformat CF cards from FAT into filesystems that support symlinks, this is an option)
Recompiling a program just to change library postions sounds like an extreme solution.
The site did not state one single benefit of openZaurus over the original install.
They tried to give some reasons, although it's true that their website design isn't perfect. It could easily be much more informative.
However, the official Zaurus support site is even more audience-hostile. (It's a litany of website-usability errors)