I poked a multimeter into a wall socket, and we were only getting 90-110v. Surprisingly my computer and the tv were working fine.
TVs and computers use switched mode power supplies these days, which are quite happy running on a fairly wide range of voltages (although the current draw will of course be much higher at lower voltages). This is the reason why PSUs nolonger have 110/220v switches on them.
Don't forget WAAS. That satellite provides higher accuracy over North America. And locations not covered by WAAS can use local DGPS for additional accuracy.
WAAS is provided by two GEO satellites (similarly, regions outside North America are covered by other SBAS satellites, such as EGNOS which uses three GEO satellites to cover Europe and MSAS which covers Asia. I imagine that SBAS is only going to be required for GPS-assisted landings - I can't see that you'd _require_ that extra accuracy when flying at altitude. But in any case, in the event that you lose access to the SBAS signal, you can continue using the old ionospheric corrections for some time (e.g. 15 minutes or so), which would probably give the controllers enough time to make the situation safe.
Care to qualify that statement? Satellites are pretty reliable (I'd be inclined to say a single satellite is probably more reliable than radar, although I have no figures to back this up). Afterall, satellites are designed to run without maintenance whereas radars are not, so it makes sense that radars would be less reliable.
In addition, you would need to lose several satellites at the same time to render the GPS inoperable.
I don't want to trust my life on the optimistic hope that solar flars won't be at peak when I'm traveling
As mentioned above, you would need to lose several satellites at the same time to cause a problem.
Additionally, which is harder: disrupting radar systems, or shooting down a few satellites ?
Disrupting radar is probably a lot easier to do than shooting down several satellites.
which is harder: sending a few people to fix a broken radar in a few hours, or sending people up to fix a satellite in six months ?
NAVSTAR has been running for a long time without much trouble. There are more than enough satellites to cope with a few breaking at any one time and the satellites are fairly routinely replaced and deorbitted with no disruption to the service.
how many satellites would we need to cover reliably the whole planet before they can switch totally to GPS
24 satellites are required to cover the whole planet - there are currently 30 in operation.
Which means that if there is a solar flare or something of the sort, the potential for disaster is enormous.
The chances of a solar flare killing a significant proportion of the GPS satellites seems very remote.
Loads of planes flying around close together using a system that depends on vulnerable satellite links.
The GPS ranging sats are in reasonably low orbits so not especially vulnerable to solar activity. Of course, they may be requiring SBAS signals too, which rely on a small number of satellites in GEO - much more vulnerable. But even if you lose the SBAS signal you've got a reasonably long time before the ionospheric corrections it provides are out of date (on the order of 15 minutes), which would probably be plenty of time to space the planes out a bit. In reality, I imagine that SBAS would only be required for GPS augmented landings.
Second, while GPS may take 30 seconds to get a lock (no idea if this is true), the GPS would undoubtedly be always online.
Most consumer grade GPS receivers quote cold start times of 45 seconds, warm start 15 seconds (no idea if the expensive things they will be using on planes are better). Cold start basically means that you haven't seen at least 4 of the satellites that are in view for several hours, so losing the lock on all the satellites for a few minutes is only going to cause warm-start conditions at worst. Losing a lock on a single satellite is a non-issue (planes are going to have a line of sight with most of the satellites in the hemisphere and you only need a good constellation of 4 in order to get a fix).
It would seem reasonable to have more than one independent GPS system (complete antenna and receiver) in case of complete failure of the receiver or antenna though.
One worry is not so much a complete failure, but if the system reports errornous information. Current systems rely on the planes transmitting their altitude to the controllers rather than the controllers getting an independent measurement of altitude - I am aware of at least 1 incident where a plane crashed because it was relaying errornous altitude data to the controller (who was unaware that the data was produced by the plane itself, which was known to be having instrumentation problems).
That actually is untrue. Most (if not all) free software companies make their money off support.
Not true - you can buy supportless RHEL.
The software isn't the product - the support is.
When I buy a graphics card, the interface isn't the product - the hardware is. You can still sell hardware if the interface is documented, just as you can still sell support if the software is open.
Of course they're willing to give the software out for free, and do anything they can to improve it
So why aren't hardware manufacturers willing to give out specs for free? Remember, the hardware is the product, not the specs.
better software means more people wanting support!
Better hardware documentation means more people wanting the hardware.
Now, if Redhat (as an example) posted all of their internal Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures online
RedHat do post a lot of Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures.
and provided training for free
Noone's asking the likes of nVidia to provide training - just publish the specs. We can train outselves.
and asked that their support workers give out constant free help to random people in the community
Redhat developers give out constant free help to random people in the community (via the Fedora Project).
Redhat's product is the support. And that, they guard closely.
I think you have picked an extremely bad analogy which more or less proves my point. Red Hat's product is _not_ support. Red Hat's product is a support _contract_ which guarantees a level of service. You can get support elsewhere for free (even from Red Hat's developers themselves) - what you can't get for free is a _guarantee_ of support.
In the same way, nVidia's product is the hardware/software bundle - they make no money off the interface and would lose nothing by publishing the interface specs which would allow people buying the hardware/software bundle to throw away the software part and use the hardware with different software. This would increase the available market since the hardware could be put to other uses without expending any of nVidia's development time.
If MS ever goes to a POSIX based UNIX type OS with a Windows GUI, just like Apple did, they would do the same thing but they wouldn't be nice enough to maintain an open source version like Apple has done with Darwin.
Isn't this exactly why the GPL licence is good? It forces people taking advantage of the Free code to keep it Free, which is better for the customers.
I really don't understand why people think that they should have the right to incorporate Free software in their product without giving anything back to the community. Afterall, you are going to benefit from other people's work so why shouldn't other people benefit from yours?
What it does do is help ATI and Intel quite a bit. That's where the "trade secret" part comes in.
I very much doubt publishing the interface specs is going to help ATI and Intel.
Giving your competitors the data you've spent millions of dollars coming up with and plan to make money off is very bad from a competitive point of view
If they have spent millions of dollars just coming up with an interface specification then they've done something very wrong. The interface specification is also not something they "plan to make money off" - they are making money off the hardware (and would sell the hardware into new markets if they provided such information).
and no company does this.
That is fundamentally untrue - companies who base their products on Free software do this all the time and seem to do ok. They stay ahead of their competetors by producing better products (or better/more rapid improvements to the products) rather than preventing their customers from taking full advantage of the product. The Free software industry has shown that you _can_ run a business that collaberates with your competetors and the end result is good for everyone.
Unfortunately most companies ask the question "what information do we _have_ to hand out", rather than "what information can we hand out without harming ourselves" - the latter option makes for a better customer experience, doesn't harm the business and can also benefits the business by allowing customers to participate in the development activities at no cost.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to cripple 99.9% of their market in order to placate 0.1% of it? That's what changing the interface to be "simpler" would do.
Who said anything about crippling or simplifying anything - just publish specs for the existing interface. This doesn't require opening up the secrets of how the driver works, just the interface between the driver and hardware.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to give up trade secrets in order to placate 0.1% of their market?
In keeping something secret if it doesn't benefit you - I don't see how publishing interface specs harms them. If anything it might improve the value of their hardware by allowing more people to use it for non-standard stuff.
nVidia doesn't have even close to the financial incentive to open their drivers
Noone wants them to open their crappy unstable drivers - we just want the interface specs so we can write some Free drivers from scratch.
As you've mentioned, Intel drivers are open - use Intel GPUs and it'll work just fine.
Intel don't make discrete devices - they make integrated chipsets. If you don't have an Intel processor then you're SOL. I have no interest in replacing my entire machine in order to get 3D graphics, but I would replace my graphics card.
You are ignoring the fact that some of us are more interested in open 3D drivers than performance. If they produced Free technical documentation for the hardware interface, whilst we might not get _fast_ drivers, the Free software world can probably produce working open drivers.
I also think it's worth pointing out that despite the fact that the Intel chipsets I've got in some machines are technically less powerful than the nVidia chipsets, they generally run a *lot* faster. Why? Because the binary nVidia drivers are so buggy that you often have to enable hugely expensive work arounds for the system to be usable. Since the drivers are closed, noone except nVidia can fix the problem, and nVidia's bug-fix cycle seems to take in excess of 2 years and provides the end-user no visibility of the progress.
Compare that with spam pump-n-dump / p3n1z pi11z emails which offer products of no or negative value which are only profitable at the expense of the gross majority of recipients.
Oh, I get quite enough snail mail spam which offers products of no or negative value to me.
Not to mention the vast amount of crap dropped through my door by people paid to wander round dropping junk though doors rather than sending through the postal service.
Wrong - the recipient has to fund the disposal or recycling of this crap through their taxes.
Fraudulent claims in ads are pursued
Often not the case - most scams come from abroad for the precise reason that they _can't_ be pursued.
The Direct Marketing Association will gladly remove you from member mailing lists (stopping about 85% of junk mail, in my experience)
You have clearly had more success with this kind of thing than I have.
[SMS/email spam] "E-mail fraud" doesn't have the same problems as mail fraud, and is not readily investigated
How does email fraud not have the same problems as mail fraud? Fraud is fraud - both can be investigated (but as mentioned above, generally not if the sender is in another country, which is often the case with email, SMS, snail mail and telesales.
Also, reverse billed SMS fraud is rife and noone cares (I've twice been fraudulantly subscribed to reverse billed SMS spam - neither my service provider (Orange) nor ICSTIS are interested in helping. Orange swears blind that I must have subscribed to the system even though they can see that the phone in question has never sent an SMS message anywhere, let alone to a premium rate service. Refusing to pay the bill leads to threats of debt collectors and wrecked credit ratings.
[Telemarketting] There is a do-not-call registry
Which doesn't work on international calls and isn't entirely successful on domestic calls (no surprises why - noone has ever been prosecuted for ignoring the registry). I also find that telemarketters often get very abusive if you point out to them that they are breaking the law.
Why should we do that? This stuff harms the environment and costs the tax payer far more than spam does.
Since the post office does investigate mail fraud (at least in the US), most of the offers may be stupid, but they are usually legitimate.
In the UK there is a problem of scams being mailed in from overseas - there's not a lot the post office or the police can do about it (although it is far rarer than email scams of course).
how do you handle walking down the street or using public transportation?
I don't - public transport in the UK (with the exception of London) is a joke, so generally I have to use my car.
Wouldn't someone actually being able to see you be far more of an invasion of your privacy?
Ok, maybe privacy is the wrong word - what I'm trying to say is that I find unsolicited crap being pushed at me (through whatever means) offensive.
Given that each of his communications cost $0.41 I'm assuming he's a snail mailer.
Sorry, I'm failing to see why sending snail mail spam is ok, but email and SMS spam, unsolicited telephone marketting, etc are bad.
Direct sales, no matter what the form, are a Bad Thing - they are an invasion of my privacy and make me go to some effort (whether that effort be answering the phone and telling someone to get lost, deleting spam emails or taking spam snail mail to the recycling bin).
Infact, snail mail spam is also bad since it increases my council tax (which goes towards paying for this stuff to be recycled).
I wonder if any companies involved in direct marketting do any research into how many potential customers they _lose_ - I actively avoid companies who do direct marketting to me in any way.
Some of the WHAT-WG's proposals for HTML5 look fun.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of crazyness in there too. XHTML 1.1 went some way towards reducing the redundency of some tags. For example, the object tag replaces embed, iframe, etc with a single unified tag to handle all embedded objects (not sure why they didn't ditch img at the same time.
HTML 5, on the other hand, seems to be keeping object but also reviving iframe and embed. Meanwhile they are introducing a load of tags to do the same job - video, audio, etc. This is crazyness since it means you have to revise the markup language every time someone invents a new type of embedded object, whereas just using a single object tag for everything means your browser can determine the type of content from the MIME content type of the object and render it if supported.
I would prefer to see new features going into XHTML rather than HTML. However, XHTML does need a modification IMHO: the spec states that XHTML which isn't well formed must not be rendered - I think it would be better to require the browser display a page saying something along the lines of "this page is broken, click this button to try and fix it - it may not render correctly". Forcing web developers into writing well formed code is a Good Thing, but the end user needs a way of trying to render the page anyway if the developer did muppet it up.
The trick to making bad web developers write good code is to make sure the people who are paying them know that they are bad developers - presenting a page stating that fact is a good way to do that.
I don't believe the spec can (or should) define how to handle broken code in the specific sense - defining the handling for every corner case is impossible and would make the spec far too complex. Much better to just say "you present an error, give the user the option to fix it and then fix it up as best you can (how to do this is outside the scope of the spec)".
The easiest way to stop this crazy, "IE only partially implements html x.0/css x.1/xhtml x.x" crap is to involve them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Microsoft involved in the development and ratification of several of the existing standards (which they have failed to implement fully/correctly)?
So no power efficiency modes (i.e hibernate) for you then?
These days it seems to be considered that spinning down 2.5 inch drives isn't good for power saving - most of them are pretty good at using minimal power while spinning but idle and spinning them up does use a lot of power and causes wear. I'm not sure if this applies to 3.5" drives though.
unless the drive reports the sector as failing (this sounds like it will just return the wrong data).
Can't see why it would return the wrong data - if the sector has been trashed the checksums should all be wrong and the drive would therefore report an uncorrectable error (hard drives store a large amount of ECC data - most of the time it can be used to correct corruption but in the case of a catestrophic failure like this it should be able to detect the failure in most cases. Most drives will report the total number of correctable and uncorrectable errors through SMART - the number of correctable errors is usually some scarilly big number.
A short list taken from a post above (Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Red Flag and SuSE), what really is the difference between all of those?
There are important differences between them, and this is often bourne out in the full name.
For example, there is no such thing as "Red Hat Linux" - it's "Red Hat Enterprise Linux". The "Enterprise" bit should give you a clue as to it's purpose - i.e. it's enterprise grade, with long term support.
I guess Fedora and Ubuntu are comparable distros - they both have a rapid release cycle and feature all the new toys. Which one you like is a personal choice.
I'm not entirely sure you can consider Slackware to be mainstream anymore - certainly I don't think anyone would recommend it to a new user. As for Gentoo, that's fairly specialist - wouldn't recommend it to new users.
So really the choice probably comes down to Fedora/Ubuntu for rapid release cycle desktop distros and RHEL/CentOS/SLES/Debian for slow release cycle server distros. The availability of a support contract may also be a deal breaker for some people so that further restricts the choices.
Having choice _is_ a good thing, but I'm not sure I would necessarilly use the word "always" there. The problem with choice is that it means people have to expend effort rather than following the path of least resistance.
For example, the most common reason I hear for (informed) people deciding to use Skype instead of a SIP phone for their VoIP->PSTN gatewaying is because Skype "just works" whereas SIP phones require you to choose a gateway. So many people would prefer to have a company dictate "you _will_ use us as your service provider and you _will_ pay this tariff" rather than shopping around for a good deal (and have the option of changing service providers at a later date without changing all their software (and possibly hardware) in order to do so).
So sadly most people seem to be willing to give up their freedom if it makes things easier for them in the short term.
microsoft push the idea that the stuff windows is good at is the most important stuff (for example, semi-transparent fuzzy windows).
The funny thing is that after hearing everying raving on about Aero I was expecting something spectacular. When I finally saw the thing a couple of months back I was woefully disappointed - it's not a patch on Beryl...
Then again, for a lowly small-sized company, they would want to have their Windows Millennium Edition supported for a millennium because they couldn't afford another costly upgrade that would surely break their budget.
So go pick an enterprise grade distro such as CentOS....
Having a large number of distros is a Good Thing - it allows you to pick the one that most suits your needs. If you want a rapid release cycle with 18 months of support and all the new toys then you can pick something like Fedora. If you want a slow release cycle with 5 years of support and well proven software go get something like CentOS.
JoeLinux is going to have to be one awesome distribution if it is going to really come out of nowhere and get somebody's attention, something like Gentoo and Ubuntu did.
Whilest Ubuntu is a good distro, I can't help feeling that it's got where it is more through good publicity than anything else. Comparing Ubuntu to Fedora (for example), there isn't a whole lot of difference - Ubuntu does better in some areas, Fedora does better in others. However, Canonical seem to have the upper hand when it comes to marketting.
In my experience, Ubuntu seems to attract the newbies (i.e. the people who decide to use Linux because they've seen talk about it in the media) whilest Fedora seems to attract the users who have been using Linux for a long while (people who pick a distro based on experience, word of mouth and just plain momentum of what they are already used to using and probably don't pay too much attention to what the media are saying).
What is needed is something like SELinux, which makes it impossible for applications to do things they shouldn't be doing.
I say "something like" because SELinux is a very complicated system
And here you have discovered the fundamental problem. SELinux is appropriate for the job _because_ it allows very fine grained control over permissions. And very fine grained == very complicated - I don't believe you can have one without the other. This is probably why, despite it's flaws, standard unix permissions still persist to this day - they are really simple and so they are easy to use for most tasks.
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I poked a multimeter into a wall socket, and we were only getting 90-110v. Surprisingly my computer and the tv were working fine.
TVs and computers use switched mode power supplies these days, which are quite happy running on a fairly wide range of voltages (although the current draw will of course be much higher at lower voltages). This is the reason why PSUs nolonger have 110/220v switches on them.
Don't forget WAAS. That satellite provides higher accuracy over North America. And locations not covered by WAAS can use local DGPS for additional accuracy.
WAAS is provided by two GEO satellites (similarly, regions outside North America are covered by other SBAS satellites, such as EGNOS which uses three GEO satellites to cover Europe and MSAS which covers Asia. I imagine that SBAS is only going to be required for GPS-assisted landings - I can't see that you'd _require_ that extra accuracy when flying at altitude. But in any case, in the event that you lose access to the SBAS signal, you can continue using the old ionospheric corrections for some time (e.g. 15 minutes or so), which would probably give the controllers enough time to make the situation safe.
Yay for uninformed scare-mongering posts...
And satellites are far less reliable than radars.
Care to qualify that statement? Satellites are pretty reliable (I'd be inclined to say a single satellite is probably more reliable than radar, although I have no figures to back this up). Afterall, satellites are designed to run without maintenance whereas radars are not, so it makes sense that radars would be less reliable.
In addition, you would need to lose several satellites at the same time to render the GPS inoperable.
I don't want to trust my life on the optimistic hope that solar flars won't be at peak when I'm traveling
As mentioned above, you would need to lose several satellites at the same time to cause a problem.
Additionally, which is harder: disrupting radar systems, or shooting down a few satellites ?
Disrupting radar is probably a lot easier to do than shooting down several satellites.
which is harder: sending a few people to fix a broken radar in a few hours, or sending people up to fix a satellite in six months ?
NAVSTAR has been running for a long time without much trouble. There are more than enough satellites to cope with a few breaking at any one time and the satellites are fairly routinely replaced and deorbitted with no disruption to the service.
how many satellites would we need to cover reliably the whole planet before they can switch totally to GPS
24 satellites are required to cover the whole planet - there are currently 30 in operation.
Which means that if there is a solar flare or something of the sort, the potential for disaster is enormous.
The chances of a solar flare killing a significant proportion of the GPS satellites seems very remote.
Loads of planes flying around close together using a system that depends on vulnerable satellite links.
The GPS ranging sats are in reasonably low orbits so not especially vulnerable to solar activity. Of course, they may be requiring SBAS signals too, which rely on a small number of satellites in GEO - much more vulnerable. But even if you lose the SBAS signal you've got a reasonably long time before the ionospheric corrections it provides are out of date (on the order of 15 minutes), which would probably be plenty of time to space the planes out a bit. In reality, I imagine that SBAS would only be required for GPS augmented landings.
Second, while GPS may take 30 seconds to get a lock (no idea if this is true), the GPS would undoubtedly be always online.
Most consumer grade GPS receivers quote cold start times of 45 seconds, warm start 15 seconds (no idea if the expensive things they will be using on planes are better). Cold start basically means that you haven't seen at least 4 of the satellites that are in view for several hours, so losing the lock on all the satellites for a few minutes is only going to cause warm-start conditions at worst. Losing a lock on a single satellite is a non-issue (planes are going to have a line of sight with most of the satellites in the hemisphere and you only need a good constellation of 4 in order to get a fix).
It would seem reasonable to have more than one independent GPS system (complete antenna and receiver) in case of complete failure of the receiver or antenna though.
One worry is not so much a complete failure, but if the system reports errornous information. Current systems rely on the planes transmitting their altitude to the controllers rather than the controllers getting an independent measurement of altitude - I am aware of at least 1 incident where a plane crashed because it was relaying errornous altitude data to the controller (who was unaware that the data was produced by the plane itself, which was known to be having instrumentation problems).
That actually is untrue. Most (if not all) free software companies make their money off support.
Not true - you can buy supportless RHEL.
The software isn't the product - the support is.
When I buy a graphics card, the interface isn't the product - the hardware is. You can still sell hardware if the interface is documented, just as you can still sell support if the software is open.
Of course they're willing to give the software out for free, and do anything they can to improve it
So why aren't hardware manufacturers willing to give out specs for free? Remember, the hardware is the product, not the specs.
better software means more people wanting support!
Better hardware documentation means more people wanting the hardware.
Now, if Redhat (as an example) posted all of their internal Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures online
RedHat do post a lot of Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures.
and provided training for free
Noone's asking the likes of nVidia to provide training - just publish the specs. We can train outselves.
and asked that their support workers give out constant free help to random people in the community
Redhat developers give out constant free help to random people in the community (via the Fedora Project).
Redhat's product is the support. And that, they guard closely.
I think you have picked an extremely bad analogy which more or less proves my point. Red Hat's product is _not_ support. Red Hat's product is a support _contract_ which guarantees a level of service. You can get support elsewhere for free (even from Red Hat's developers themselves) - what you can't get for free is a _guarantee_ of support.
In the same way, nVidia's product is the hardware/software bundle - they make no money off the interface and would lose nothing by publishing the interface specs which would allow people buying the hardware/software bundle to throw away the software part and use the hardware with different software. This would increase the available market since the hardware could be put to other uses without expending any of nVidia's development time.
If MS ever goes to a POSIX based UNIX type OS with a Windows GUI, just like Apple did, they would do the same thing but they wouldn't be nice enough to maintain an open source version like Apple has done with Darwin.
Isn't this exactly why the GPL licence is good? It forces people taking advantage of the Free code to keep it Free, which is better for the customers.
I really don't understand why people think that they should have the right to incorporate Free software in their product without giving anything back to the community. Afterall, you are going to benefit from other people's work so why shouldn't other people benefit from yours?
What it does do is help ATI and Intel quite a bit. That's where the "trade secret" part comes in.
I very much doubt publishing the interface specs is going to help ATI and Intel.
Giving your competitors the data you've spent millions of dollars coming up with and plan to make money off is very bad from a competitive point of view
If they have spent millions of dollars just coming up with an interface specification then they've done something very wrong. The interface specification is also not something they "plan to make money off" - they are making money off the hardware (and would sell the hardware into new markets if they provided such information).
and no company does this.
That is fundamentally untrue - companies who base their products on Free software do this all the time and seem to do ok. They stay ahead of their competetors by producing better products (or better/more rapid improvements to the products) rather than preventing their customers from taking full advantage of the product. The Free software industry has shown that you _can_ run a business that collaberates with your competetors and the end result is good for everyone.
Unfortunately most companies ask the question "what information do we _have_ to hand out", rather than "what information can we hand out without harming ourselves" - the latter option makes for a better customer experience, doesn't harm the business and can also benefits the business by allowing customers to participate in the development activities at no cost.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to cripple 99.9% of their market in order to placate 0.1% of it? That's what changing the interface to be "simpler" would do.
Who said anything about crippling or simplifying anything - just publish specs for the existing interface. This doesn't require opening up the secrets of how the driver works, just the interface between the driver and hardware.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to give up trade secrets in order to placate 0.1% of their market?
In keeping something secret if it doesn't benefit you - I don't see how publishing interface specs harms them. If anything it might improve the value of their hardware by allowing more people to use it for non-standard stuff.
nVidia doesn't have even close to the financial incentive to open their drivers
Noone wants them to open their crappy unstable drivers - we just want the interface specs so we can write some Free drivers from scratch.
As you've mentioned, Intel drivers are open - use Intel GPUs and it'll work just fine.
Intel don't make discrete devices - they make integrated chipsets. If you don't have an Intel processor then you're SOL. I have no interest in replacing my entire machine in order to get 3D graphics, but I would replace my graphics card.
You are ignoring the fact that some of us are more interested in open 3D drivers than performance. If they produced Free technical documentation for the hardware interface, whilst we might not get _fast_ drivers, the Free software world can probably produce working open drivers.
I also think it's worth pointing out that despite the fact that the Intel chipsets I've got in some machines are technically less powerful than the nVidia chipsets, they generally run a *lot* faster. Why? Because the binary nVidia drivers are so buggy that you often have to enable hugely expensive work arounds for the system to be usable. Since the drivers are closed, noone except nVidia can fix the problem, and nVidia's bug-fix cycle seems to take in excess of 2 years and provides the end-user no visibility of the progress.
Compare that with spam pump-n-dump / p3n1z pi11z emails which offer products of no or negative value which are only profitable at the expense of the gross majority of recipients.
Oh, I get quite enough snail mail spam which offers products of no or negative value to me.
Not to mention the vast amount of crap dropped through my door by people paid to wander round dropping junk though doors rather than sending through the postal service.
[Postal spam]
The sender bears the entire cost
Wrong - the recipient has to fund the disposal or recycling of this crap through their taxes.
Fraudulent claims in ads are pursued
Often not the case - most scams come from abroad for the precise reason that they _can't_ be pursued.
The Direct Marketing Association will gladly remove you from member mailing lists (stopping about 85% of junk mail, in my experience)
You have clearly had more success with this kind of thing than I have.
[SMS/email spam]
"E-mail fraud" doesn't have the same problems as mail fraud, and is not readily investigated
How does email fraud not have the same problems as mail fraud? Fraud is fraud - both can be investigated (but as mentioned above, generally not if the sender is in another country, which is often the case with email, SMS, snail mail and telesales.
Also, reverse billed SMS fraud is rife and noone cares (I've twice been fraudulantly subscribed to reverse billed SMS spam - neither my service provider (Orange) nor ICSTIS are interested in helping. Orange swears blind that I must have subscribed to the system even though they can see that the phone in question has never sent an SMS message anywhere, let alone to a premium rate service. Refusing to pay the bill leads to threats of debt collectors and wrecked credit ratings.
[Telemarketting]
There is a do-not-call registry
Which doesn't work on international calls and isn't entirely successful on domestic calls (no surprises why - noone has ever been prosecuted for ignoring the registry). I also find that telemarketters often get very abusive if you point out to them that they are breaking the law.
It sucks but it's a fact of life if I want to keep my job.
Find a job with a more ethical employer?
If we ignore the environmental burden
Why should we do that? This stuff harms the environment and costs the tax payer far more than spam does.
Since the post office does investigate mail fraud (at least in the US), most of the offers may be stupid, but they are usually legitimate.
In the UK there is a problem of scams being mailed in from overseas - there's not a lot the post office or the police can do about it (although it is far rarer than email scams of course).
how do you handle walking down the street or using public transportation?
I don't - public transport in the UK (with the exception of London) is a joke, so generally I have to use my car.
Wouldn't someone actually being able to see you be far more of an invasion of your privacy?
Ok, maybe privacy is the wrong word - what I'm trying to say is that I find unsolicited crap being pushed at me (through whatever means) offensive.
Given that each of his communications cost $0.41 I'm assuming he's a snail mailer.
Sorry, I'm failing to see why sending snail mail spam is ok, but email and SMS spam, unsolicited telephone marketting, etc are bad.
Direct sales, no matter what the form, are a Bad Thing - they are an invasion of my privacy and make me go to some effort (whether that effort be answering the phone and telling someone to get lost, deleting spam emails or taking spam snail mail to the recycling bin).
Infact, snail mail spam is also bad since it increases my council tax (which goes towards paying for this stuff to be recycled).
I wonder if any companies involved in direct marketting do any research into how many potential customers they _lose_ - I actively avoid companies who do direct marketting to me in any way.
Some of the WHAT-WG's proposals for HTML5 look fun.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of crazyness in there too. XHTML 1.1 went some way towards reducing the redundency of some tags. For example, the object tag replaces embed, iframe, etc with a single unified tag to handle all embedded objects (not sure why they didn't ditch img at the same time.
HTML 5, on the other hand, seems to be keeping object but also reviving iframe and embed. Meanwhile they are introducing a load of tags to do the same job - video, audio, etc. This is crazyness since it means you have to revise the markup language every time someone invents a new type of embedded object, whereas just using a single object tag for everything means your browser can determine the type of content from the MIME content type of the object and render it if supported.
I would prefer to see new features going into XHTML rather than HTML. However, XHTML does need a modification IMHO: the spec states that XHTML which isn't well formed must not be rendered - I think it would be better to require the browser display a page saying something along the lines of "this page is broken, click this button to try and fix it - it may not render correctly". Forcing web developers into writing well formed code is a Good Thing, but the end user needs a way of trying to render the page anyway if the developer did muppet it up.
The trick to making bad web developers write good code is to make sure the people who are paying them know that they are bad developers - presenting a page stating that fact is a good way to do that.
I don't believe the spec can (or should) define how to handle broken code in the specific sense - defining the handling for every corner case is impossible and would make the spec far too complex. Much better to just say "you present an error, give the user the option to fix it and then fix it up as best you can (how to do this is outside the scope of the spec)".
The easiest way to stop this crazy, "IE only partially implements html x.0/css x.1/xhtml x.x" crap is to involve them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Microsoft involved in the development and ratification of several of the existing standards (which they have failed to implement fully/correctly)?
So no power efficiency modes (i.e hibernate) for you then?
These days it seems to be considered that spinning down 2.5 inch drives isn't good for power saving - most of them are pretty good at using minimal power while spinning but idle and spinning them up does use a lot of power and causes wear. I'm not sure if this applies to 3.5" drives though.
unless the drive reports the sector as failing (this sounds like it will just return the wrong data).
Can't see why it would return the wrong data - if the sector has been trashed the checksums should all be wrong and the drive would therefore report an uncorrectable error (hard drives store a large amount of ECC data - most of the time it can be used to correct corruption but in the case of a catestrophic failure like this it should be able to detect the failure in most cases. Most drives will report the total number of correctable and uncorrectable errors through SMART - the number of correctable errors is usually some scarilly big number.
A short list taken from a post above (Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Red Flag and SuSE), what really is the difference between all of those?
There are important differences between them, and this is often bourne out in the full name.
For example, there is no such thing as "Red Hat Linux" - it's "Red Hat Enterprise Linux". The "Enterprise" bit should give you a clue as to it's purpose - i.e. it's enterprise grade, with long term support.
I guess Fedora and Ubuntu are comparable distros - they both have a rapid release cycle and feature all the new toys. Which one you like is a personal choice.
I'm not entirely sure you can consider Slackware to be mainstream anymore - certainly I don't think anyone would recommend it to a new user. As for Gentoo, that's fairly specialist - wouldn't recommend it to new users.
So really the choice probably comes down to Fedora/Ubuntu for rapid release cycle desktop distros and RHEL/CentOS/SLES/Debian for slow release cycle server distros. The availability of a support contract may also be a deal breaker for some people so that further restricts the choices.
Having choice is always good thing.
Having choice _is_ a good thing, but I'm not sure I would necessarilly use the word "always" there. The problem with choice is that it means people have to expend effort rather than following the path of least resistance.
For example, the most common reason I hear for (informed) people deciding to use Skype instead of a SIP phone for their VoIP->PSTN gatewaying is because Skype "just works" whereas SIP phones require you to choose a gateway. So many people would prefer to have a company dictate "you _will_ use us as your service provider and you _will_ pay this tariff" rather than shopping around for a good deal (and have the option of changing service providers at a later date without changing all their software (and possibly hardware) in order to do so).
So sadly most people seem to be willing to give up their freedom if it makes things easier for them in the short term.
microsoft push the idea that the stuff windows is good at is the most important stuff (for example, semi-transparent fuzzy windows).
The funny thing is that after hearing everying raving on about Aero I was expecting something spectacular. When I finally saw the thing a couple of months back I was woefully disappointed - it's not a patch on Beryl...
Then again, for a lowly small-sized company, they would want to have their Windows Millennium Edition supported for a millennium because they couldn't afford another costly upgrade that would surely break their budget.
So go pick an enterprise grade distro such as CentOS....
Having a large number of distros is a Good Thing - it allows you to pick the one that most suits your needs. If you want a rapid release cycle with 18 months of support and all the new toys then you can pick something like Fedora. If you want a slow release cycle with 5 years of support and well proven software go get something like CentOS.
JoeLinux is going to have to be one awesome distribution if it is going to really come out of nowhere and get somebody's attention, something like Gentoo and Ubuntu did.
Whilest Ubuntu is a good distro, I can't help feeling that it's got where it is more through good publicity than anything else. Comparing Ubuntu to Fedora (for example), there isn't a whole lot of difference - Ubuntu does better in some areas, Fedora does better in others. However, Canonical seem to have the upper hand when it comes to marketting.
In my experience, Ubuntu seems to attract the newbies (i.e. the people who decide to use Linux because they've seen talk about it in the media) whilest Fedora seems to attract the users who have been using Linux for a long while (people who pick a distro based on experience, word of mouth and just plain momentum of what they are already used to using and probably don't pay too much attention to what the media are saying).
What is needed is something like SELinux, which makes it impossible for applications to do things they shouldn't be doing.
I say "something like" because SELinux is a very complicated system
And here you have discovered the fundamental problem. SELinux is appropriate for the job _because_ it allows very fine grained control over permissions. And very fine grained == very complicated - I don't believe you can have one without the other. This is probably why, despite it's flaws, standard unix permissions still persist to this day - they are really simple and so they are easy to use for most tasks.