Brilliant idea. While we're at it, can we have the management at bus and train companies, and in the public transportation departments of councils, forbidden to own cars? And the people who set the levels of welfare benefits forced to live on the amount they specify? I'm sure there are more examples. This category of thinking deserves a name.
How many non-geeks actually know to interpret the beeps as Morse code? Or that the letters "... --..." spell "SMS"? Or what the significance of "SMS" is? It has to be a contender for least-got joke of all time.
Here in the UK, text messaging is very popular as it costs about 12p / 18c, much less than a voice call {especially from one network to another}, and you know your credit will not run out on you.
In most countries, you would be well within your "fair dealing" rights to quote an excerpt so small. Therefore, you have most probably not violated anyone's copyright. Since your statutory rights are inalienable, and the GPL makes no attempt to detract from them, the only thing you possibly could be charged with is wasting police time, or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.
And to think, I've spent all this time working with object paradigms and it was all so easy. I guess the fact that Java is the end result of CLOS, ADA, Actor, Smalltalk, and C++ (among others), along with over three decades of methodology evolution, is irrelevant since I could just 'do it in assembler'.
I'm not knocking OO, just saying it's not for me -- I think procedurally, I eschew abstraction layers in favour of riding the metal, and am totally unashamed of it.
Are you sure you're not ESR using an alias to agree with yourself?/em>
Because when you distribute an executable under the GPL, you are bound by the GPL to make an offer to distribute the source code. In effect you are distributing the source; it's just as though the recipient -- if they accept just the binaries -- has said "I don't really need that right now; hang onto it though, just in case I need it later, can you?"
This is more "lightweight" than Knoppix, and will run fine on less powerful hardware. Only thing is, the version I had is kind of allergic to some Intel P4 motherboards. You have about 60 seconds to type # rmmod i810-tco before it resets itself. Of course, some people would say that an Intel processor is a fault.....
For testing RAM, a kernel compile is about the best you can do. Unfortunately, you might have trouble fitting the necessary stuff {full GCC inc. dependencies and kernel sources} on a CD. You could swap out the RAM into a board with a big HDD though.....
You can check out serial and parallel ports with a voltmeter, a portable oscilloscope, or some homemade gadget with LEDs and resistors. In the dot-matrix days {when printers took ASCII codes} it was easy to tell which bits weren't working by seeing which characters printed wrongly.
I have to agree with the other posters though, that there is no substitute for experience - and a set of known good parts you can swap. There really is no single tool that will do the job. If PC repairs were simple, they wouldn't need a human being to do them!
If you were to take the time to scan [Harry Potter], who would want to bother to print it out since the cost of the paper/toner would probably end up being more than the original book.
Exactly: copying books is thoroughly uneconomical.
Recordable optical discs cost more to make than read-only ones. There is still a stamping to be done with a CD-R, and the special dye is expensive compared to plain aluminium. Plus there is the cost of electricity, CPU cycles &c. to run the computer on which the copying is done, and time. The blank media probably is the least expensive part of CD / DVD copying.
Put it this way: if a prerecorded disc cost no more than three times a blank one, it would be uneconomical for anyone to copy them at all.
Or you could carry on using the previous version, just like you're free to with Open Source.
No, you can't -- that's the myth that closed-source vendors push, but it doesn't work in real life. Ever tried to load a Word XP file into, say, Word 6.0? Microsoft et al deliberately change their file formats every couple of years, for the express purpose of making old software unusable.
I have one thing only to say to the people who complain about "piracy" {the industry's preferred dysphemism for "independent distribution"}.
Look at the ready availability of photocopiers, scanners, printers and the like. And look what's on offer at your local W.H.Smith, or Waterstones, or any independent local newsagent, or remainder store.
Now ask yourself "why don't newspapers, magazines and books have a piracy problem, with all these copiers and so forth out there?"
Whatever the Printed Word industry has done to protect itself from "piracy", the music and movie industries have to do the same thing to protect themselves from the same threat.
Linux/Mplayer would be better because it is Open Source. Therefore, you are not beholden to any single entity. With Windows, Bill Gates has you over a barrel: if you don't accede to his demands, however outrageous they may get, he can cut you off and leave you for dead.
It's sort of like why, before 1994, almost any country's apples -- no matter how minging they may have tasted -- were better than South African apples. It's a human rights thing. As the end-users of a project generally outnumber original authors, so their real right to access and modify the source code outweighs any supposed right of the author to keep it secret.
Drastically reduce commercial fishing, if it cannot be eliminated altogether.
This isn't just another vegetarian / vegan rant. I've nothing against anybody eating all the beef, lamb, pork and so on they want. Or even a few fish, if they caught them themselves. But commercial fishing is ruining the sea.
Land meat is generally farmed. That is, for every pig that gets turned into sausages, at least one pig is raised to replace it. {The exception is game, but we can assume due to its comparative rarity from the dinner table that humans accounts for a tolerable proportion of predation of such species. The same would apply to fish if commercial fishing were reduced or eliminated} This is merely a consequence of private ownership of land; but it is a happy one.
When someone takes a fish out of the ocean, what steps do they take to ensure that another fish will replace it? Even the most hardened capitalist can see that privatising the oceans is never going to work.
Land meat is usually slaughtered quickly. This is a pragmatic, rather than strictly humane, requirement -- you generally don't want to annoy a pig or cow, lest it attempt to retaliate with the full force of its fight-or-flight response adrenalin rush; but the consequences are, again, fortunate.
And yet there are still people who claim they are "vegetarians"; yet they persist in eating fish, which have spent their lives ingesting toxic heavy metals which their bodies cannot excrete, died slowly of suffocation on the deck of a trawler, and not been replaced to ensure a supply for future generations.
I always count my socks into the washer in pairs and don't seem to have a problem. I guess a sock could conceivably be thrown against the port-hole and work its way down between the front of the inner {revolving} drum and the {outer} static drum, but there isn't a lot of room there on modern machines -- you want to minimise the amount of water not doing much {although its cleaning power is diminished by having taken some dirt, so you will never be able to reduce water consumption below a certain minimum -- unless you incorporate a micro-filter, and not the kind that comes with an ADSL-over-phone-line kit -- and that is likely to end up creating worse problems than excessive water consumption}.
Anyway, it's unlikely. To be absolutely sure, you could get one of those continental-style machines, where the clothes are loaded not through the open front end of the drum, but through a hatch in the side of the drum. But you can't put one of these machines under a worktop, or stack a drier on top. Actually, the last time I saw one of these machines was a good five years ago, and I bet even the continentals have gone back to building normal washing machines.
You could, of course, adopt Albert Einstein's own solution to the problem.....
I have never got along with the whole object-oriented thing anyway -- I'd rather tell the computer how to process the data, than tell the data how to let the computer process it. Assembly language will always be free, of course; but not everybody thinks in the same way, and learning a programming language can be as big a job as actually writing a programme in it.
Java really is as close as it gets to open source without being open source -- and it still isn't close enough. There is also the question of whether Java would have matured so well without someone keeping a tight rein over it. Sometimes you have to protect your little ones while they are growing -- but you have to realise that the thing about children is that they eventually grow up and learn to live without you. Sun once has a lot to lose by opening the Java source, but today it has far less to lose in doing so. There soon will be "clean" Java interpreters that contain no Sun code anyway, and the choice for Sun will be whether to free up Java or break it.
But there is always the option of multiple-licencing. Sun's licence restrictions -- particularly the bit about not distributing competing products -- are there deliberately to keep Microsoft from spoiling Java. What if some Linux vendor were to negotiate a separate licence from Sun, permitting them to distribute Sun's Java interpreter ready-to-go with OpenOffice.org and their Web browser?
Their distribution probably would be "tainted" and not freely redistributable in its entirety {thus introducing logistical difficulties, but not insurmountable ones}; but at least it would give Sun a toe in the waters of open source.
Well, if Microsoft have a proprietary alternative to BIND, then that might explain a few things. I've noticed that one or two ISPs -- one a known Microsoft apologist -- have been running broken nameservers, which don't update properly. One of our nameservers' zonefiles is quite dynamic, so it has a short expiry interval; but the serial number is not updated every time the file is edited. Now, the standard for DNS says that if a downstream nameserver sees that the zonefile has expired, then it has expired and must be reloaded -- even whether or not the serial number has changed.
Merely appending new lines to the zonefile without touching the serial number has worked for us for years without a problem. But lately, these few ISPs' nameservers haven't always been updating properly, necessitating manual intervention. The frightening thing is we don't really know the full extent of the problem, because our LAN obviously uses our own nameservers so we can see everything fine.
I had always thought that Microsoft's name server was ripped off lock, stock and barrel from FreeBSD's implementation. But if they have actually gone and tried to write their own, it's no bloody wonder name services are breaking right, left and centre.
This was how Kodak managed to get around the regulations with their single-use cameras IIRC. The cameras have many reusable parts, but the battery for the flash gets replaced as a matter of course, because you never know how many times the flash was used. I have seen packs of Kodak-branded alkaline batteries, labelled "not for resale", on sale in pound stores. Kodak aren't allowed to throw the batteries in landfill themselves, because they would be classed as "industrial waste". But in the UK and USA, any and all "household waste" can be thrown in landfill -- and UIAM there is no prescribed penalty for householders who offer up recyclables or toxic waste for landfill. So Kodak sell the not-very-spent batteries to some waste handler, who then test them to find the good ones, package them up and sell them to the pound stores, who sell them to members of the public who are more bothered about cheap batteries than why they aren't meant to be sold. When the batteries are done with, they end up in landfill -- but, because they were put there by thousands of individual householders rather than in one go by Kodak, the law says it's OK.
Stinks, doesn't it? Why can't we be more like the Continent, where you can be fined or sent to prison for putting recyclable goods in the wrong bin? I'm just glad I try to avoid disposable batteries as far as possible.
Environmental concerns aside, let's follow the money and see how cheap batteries really are.
From the mains, one kilowatt-hour costs about 6.5p.
My petrol powered portable generator costs about 90p. per kWh when you factor in the oil which has to be mixed in with the fuel. {I probably could reclaim the petrol tax from HM Customs and Excise, since it is a non-road-going application; but apart from the words "blood" and "stone" springing to mind, I don't really want to draw their attention to me.}
A pair of alkaline AA cells might be rated at 4Ah, making 2 * 1.5 * 4 = 12Wh. If they cost 99p {which would be a very good deal for 4Ah batteries BTW} then the cost for a full kWh would be 99 / 0.012 = 8520p = GBP85.20.
I know cheap transformer PSUs are lossy, mostly due to having to magnetise and demagnetise a hefty lump of cheap steel fifty times a second; but there's no way they could ever work out more expensive than batteries. And many modern mobile phone rechargers &c. are actually switch mode units.
Hmm..... so I bet if you have some weirdy chromosome setup such as XXY or XO (not XYY) then you could get interesting stuff happening. XXY could conceivably be tetrachromatic, XO would be as likely as XY or XYY to have colour blindness. But I wouldn't know whether the XO/XXY base is large enough in and of itself to get a meaningful sample.
Which just goes to support my theory that anything, no matter how outrageous, will work -- just so long as nobody points out a reason why it shouldn't.
Unshielded Twisted Pair. But the idea is that whenever one wire goes up from 0V to 5V {putting out a pulse of RF}, the other goes down from 5V to 0V {putting out an equal and opposite pulse of RF} so the two should cancel one another out, as long as the wires remain in intimate proximity.
Um, you know, you could be right with that one, especially since I upgraded from thin co-ax to Cat5. Although I thought the twisted pairs had some sort of a shielding effect. And also, most of my kit seems to give off plenty of RF noise, so maybe that helps to mask it.
An ordinary radio set gives only a qualitative estimate. To recover the actual data, you'd need equipment costing more than any of my data is worth {but I wouldn't put it past the M.I.B. to sue me for wasting their time with junk data}. You'd also probably need to be inside my house {which is usually occupied, due to become occupied soon, or locked} and near the actual segment carrying the data; and, since the ADSL connection goes off into who knows where, that would probably be the easier target.
Also, the military deliberately go overboard on security so as in order to make people think things are less secure than they really are. Overkill is just part of the theatre: it makes the top brass feel important, and it cultivates insecurity among the lower ranks.
I've often wondered exactly how rigid the "400-700nm is visible" rule applies. We know that some animals can see infra-red and ultra-violet. But just how well-defined is the wavelength range for human beings? I mean, our bodies are different shapes and sizes, our voices have different pitches, our ears have varying ranges, some of us are allergic to certain substances that others are not..... but has anyone ever investigated the phenomenon of what wavelengths humans can see? Is it a person-to-person variable, or is it constant for everyone? Can some people see IR, red and green, for instance, instead of red, green and blue? Or green, blue and UV, for that matter..... and what would it look like?
I'm glad I still have my old 3210. As long as it continues to make a noise when someone dials it and transmit my voice and their voice in mutually opposite directions when answered, then I have no reason to replace it.
When you're sending data over the air, then you have no way of knowing who is listening. That's why my home LAN is wired -- so I at least know if anyone is tapping me, then they must be on the inside. And I wouldn't trust the phone companies to build in any kind of security either; MI5 would never let them get away with it. You should assume any part of the network you can't see is tappable if not actually tapped. The best form of telephone security is to keep all messages short and hope they aren't listening when you're speaking.
Yeah, I have my old Amiga schematics somewhere. But didn't the Video Toaster use some extra hardware as well? IIRC the Amiga's frame buffer ran synchronously to the processor, and it took some high-order mucking aroud to sync it to an external timing signal such as you would get from a video source.
So now we have the source code for the software, will we get the schematics for the hardware? This could breathe new life in to old Amigas. There must be a few in the backs of wardrobes all over the land.....
How easy would it be to get a real standardisation body to draw up a standard for Open Source software?
Obviously, ISO would be the biggie, but maybe it would be more realistic to begin with a national standards body {German DIN [?] for instance} first, even if only to give the others something to use as a template?
What I'm thinking of is a standard literally for openness of source; so claiming compliance with the standard would oblige vendors to certify that they were giving you permission to copy and modify. Standards bodies themselves do not necessarily do the testing {though many will rent you testing facilities}; but rather, publish the specifications -- and a list of approved test procedures -- and anyone can test and certify their own products, though in doing so they are accepting responsibility for the consequences. The standardisation body gets the right to sue you {for misappropriation of trademarks} if you apply its mark to products that do not meet the standard.
A "standards-compliant" sticker on Open Source software might carry some clout with purchasing authorities, too.....
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Brilliant idea. While we're at it, can we have the management at bus and train companies, and in the public transportation departments of councils, forbidden to own cars? And the people who set the levels of welfare benefits forced to live on the amount they specify? I'm sure there are more examples. This category of thinking deserves a name.
How many non-geeks actually know to interpret the beeps as Morse code? Or that the letters "... -- ..." spell "SMS"? Or what the significance of "SMS" is? It has to be a contender for least-got joke of all time.
Here in the UK, text messaging is very popular as it costs about 12p / 18c, much less than a voice call {especially from one network to another}, and you know your credit will not run out on you.
In most countries, you would be well within your "fair dealing" rights to quote an excerpt so small. Therefore, you have most probably not violated anyone's copyright. Since your statutory rights are inalienable, and the GPL makes no attempt to detract from them, the only thing you possibly could be charged with is wasting police time, or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.
Because when you distribute an executable under the GPL, you are bound by the GPL to make an offer to distribute the source code. In effect you are distributing the source; it's just as though the recipient -- if they accept just the binaries -- has said "I don't really need that right now; hang onto it though, just in case I need it later, can you?"
This is more "lightweight" than Knoppix, and will run fine on less powerful hardware. Only thing is, the version I had is kind of allergic to some Intel P4 motherboards. You have about 60 seconds to type # rmmod i810-tco before it resets itself. Of course, some people would say that an Intel processor is a fault .....
.....
For testing RAM, a kernel compile is about the best you can do. Unfortunately, you might have trouble fitting the necessary stuff {full GCC inc. dependencies and kernel sources} on a CD. You could swap out the RAM into a board with a big HDD though
You can check out serial and parallel ports with a voltmeter, a portable oscilloscope, or some homemade gadget with LEDs and resistors. In the dot-matrix days {when printers took ASCII codes} it was easy to tell which bits weren't working by seeing which characters printed wrongly.
I have to agree with the other posters though, that there is no substitute for experience - and a set of known good parts you can swap. There really is no single tool that will do the job. If PC repairs were simple, they wouldn't need a human being to do them!
Recordable optical discs cost more to make than read-only ones. There is still a stamping to be done with a CD-R, and the special dye is expensive compared to plain aluminium. Plus there is the cost of electricity, CPU cycles &c. to run the computer on which the copying is done, and time. The blank media probably is the least expensive part of CD / DVD copying.
Put it this way: if a prerecorded disc cost no more than three times a blank one, it would be uneconomical for anyone to copy them at all.
I have one thing only to say to the people who complain about "piracy" {the industry's preferred dysphemism for "independent distribution"}.
Look at the ready availability of photocopiers, scanners, printers and the like. And look what's on offer at your local W.H.Smith, or Waterstones, or any independent local newsagent, or remainder store.
Now ask yourself "why don't newspapers, magazines and books have a piracy problem, with all these copiers and so forth out there?"
Whatever the Printed Word industry has done to protect itself from "piracy", the music and movie industries have to do the same thing to protect themselves from the same threat.
Linux/Mplayer would be better because it is Open Source. Therefore, you are not beholden to any single entity. With Windows, Bill Gates has you over a barrel: if you don't accede to his demands, however outrageous they may get, he can cut you off and leave you for dead.
It's sort of like why, before 1994, almost any country's apples -- no matter how minging they may have tasted -- were better than South African apples. It's a human rights thing. As the end-users of a project generally outnumber original authors, so their real right to access and modify the source code outweighs any supposed right of the author to keep it secret.
Drastically reduce commercial fishing, if it cannot be eliminated altogether.
This isn't just another vegetarian / vegan rant. I've nothing against anybody eating all the beef, lamb, pork and so on they want. Or even a few fish, if they caught them themselves. But commercial fishing is ruining the sea.
Land meat is generally farmed. That is, for every pig that gets turned into sausages, at least one pig is raised to replace it. {The exception is game, but we can assume due to its comparative rarity from the dinner table that humans accounts for a tolerable proportion of predation of such species. The same would apply to fish if commercial fishing were reduced or eliminated} This is merely a consequence of private ownership of land; but it is a happy one.
When someone takes a fish out of the ocean, what steps do they take to ensure that another fish will replace it? Even the most hardened capitalist can see that privatising the oceans is never going to work.
Land meat is usually slaughtered quickly. This is a pragmatic, rather than strictly humane, requirement -- you generally don't want to annoy a pig or cow, lest it attempt to retaliate with the full force of its fight-or-flight response adrenalin rush; but the consequences are, again, fortunate.
And yet there are still people who claim they are "vegetarians"; yet they persist in eating fish, which have spent their lives ingesting toxic heavy metals which their bodies cannot excrete, died slowly of suffocation on the deck of a trawler, and not been replaced to ensure a supply for future generations.
I always count my socks into the washer in pairs and don't seem to have a problem. I guess a sock could conceivably be thrown against the port-hole and work its way down between the front of the inner {revolving} drum and the {outer} static drum, but there isn't a lot of room there on modern machines -- you want to minimise the amount of water not doing much {although its cleaning power is diminished by having taken some dirt, so you will never be able to reduce water consumption below a certain minimum -- unless you incorporate a micro-filter, and not the kind that comes with an ADSL-over-phone-line kit -- and that is likely to end up creating worse problems than excessive water consumption}.
.....
Anyway, it's unlikely. To be absolutely sure, you could get one of those continental-style machines, where the clothes are loaded not through the open front end of the drum, but through a hatch in the side of the drum. But you can't put one of these machines under a worktop, or stack a drier on top. Actually, the last time I saw one of these machines was a good five years ago, and I bet even the continentals have gone back to building normal washing machines.
You could, of course, adopt Albert Einstein's own solution to the problem
I have never got along with the whole object-oriented thing anyway -- I'd rather tell the computer how to process the data, than tell the data how to let the computer process it. Assembly language will always be free, of course; but not everybody thinks in the same way, and learning a programming language can be as big a job as actually writing a programme in it.
Java really is as close as it gets to open source without being open source -- and it still isn't close enough. There is also the question of whether Java would have matured so well without someone keeping a tight rein over it. Sometimes you have to protect your little ones while they are growing -- but you have to realise that the thing about children is that they eventually grow up and learn to live without you. Sun once has a lot to lose by opening the Java source, but today it has far less to lose in doing so. There soon will be "clean" Java interpreters that contain no Sun code anyway, and the choice for Sun will be whether to free up Java or break it.
But there is always the option of multiple-licencing. Sun's licence restrictions -- particularly the bit about not distributing competing products -- are there deliberately to keep Microsoft from spoiling Java. What if some Linux vendor were to negotiate a separate licence from Sun, permitting them to distribute Sun's Java interpreter ready-to-go with OpenOffice.org and their Web browser?
Their distribution probably would be "tainted" and not freely redistributable in its entirety {thus introducing logistical difficulties, but not insurmountable ones}; but at least it would give Sun a toe in the waters of open source.
Well, if Microsoft have a proprietary alternative to BIND, then that might explain a few things. I've noticed that one or two ISPs -- one a known Microsoft apologist -- have been running broken nameservers, which don't update properly. One of our nameservers' zonefiles is quite dynamic, so it has a short expiry interval; but the serial number is not updated every time the file is edited. Now, the standard for DNS says that if a downstream nameserver sees that the zonefile has expired, then it has expired and must be reloaded -- even whether or not the serial number has changed.
Merely appending new lines to the zonefile without touching the serial number has worked for us for years without a problem. But lately, these few ISPs' nameservers haven't always been updating properly, necessitating manual intervention. The frightening thing is we don't really know the full extent of the problem, because our LAN obviously uses our own nameservers so we can see everything fine.
I had always thought that Microsoft's name server was ripped off lock, stock and barrel from FreeBSD's implementation. But if they have actually gone and tried to write their own, it's no bloody wonder name services are breaking right, left and centre.
So you don't have a mail transport agent or nameserver, then?
Stinks, doesn't it? Why can't we be more like the Continent, where you can be fined or sent to prison for putting recyclable goods in the wrong bin? I'm just glad I try to avoid disposable batteries as far as possible.
Environmental concerns aside, let's follow the money and see how cheap batteries really are.
- From the mains, one kilowatt-hour costs about 6.5p.
- My petrol powered portable generator costs about 90p. per kWh when you factor in the oil which has to be mixed in with the fuel. {I probably could reclaim the petrol tax from HM Customs and Excise, since it is a non-road-going application; but apart from the words "blood" and "stone" springing to mind, I don't really want to draw their attention to me.}
- A pair of alkaline AA cells might be rated at 4Ah, making 2 * 1.5 * 4 = 12Wh. If they cost 99p {which would be a very good deal for 4Ah batteries BTW} then the cost for a full kWh would be 99 / 0.012 = 8520p = GBP85.20.
I know cheap transformer PSUs are lossy, mostly due to having to magnetise and demagnetise a hefty lump of cheap steel fifty times a second; but there's no way they could ever work out more expensive than batteries. And many modern mobile phone rechargers &c. are actually switch mode units.Hmm ..... so I bet if you have some weirdy chromosome setup such as XXY or XO (not XYY) then you could get interesting stuff happening. XXY could conceivably be tetrachromatic, XO would be as likely as XY or XYY to have colour blindness. But I wouldn't know whether the XO/XXY base is large enough in and of itself to get a meaningful sample.
Which just goes to support my theory that anything, no matter how outrageous, will work -- just so long as nobody points out a reason why it shouldn't.
Unshielded Twisted Pair. But the idea is that whenever one wire goes up from 0V to 5V {putting out a pulse of RF}, the other goes down from 5V to 0V {putting out an equal and opposite pulse of RF} so the two should cancel one another out, as long as the wires remain in intimate proximity.
Um, you know, you could be right with that one, especially since I upgraded from thin co-ax to Cat5. Although I thought the twisted pairs had some sort of a shielding effect. And also, most of my kit seems to give off plenty of RF noise, so maybe that helps to mask it.
An ordinary radio set gives only a qualitative estimate. To recover the actual data, you'd need equipment costing more than any of my data is worth {but I wouldn't put it past the M.I.B. to sue me for wasting their time with junk data}. You'd also probably need to be inside my house {which is usually occupied, due to become occupied soon, or locked} and near the actual segment carrying the data; and, since the ADSL connection goes off into who knows where, that would probably be the easier target.
Also, the military deliberately go overboard on security so as in order to make people think things are less secure than they really are. Overkill is just part of the theatre: it makes the top brass feel important, and it cultivates insecurity among the lower ranks.
I've often wondered exactly how rigid the "400-700nm is visible" rule applies. We know that some animals can see infra-red and ultra-violet. But just how well-defined is the wavelength range for human beings? I mean, our bodies are different shapes and sizes, our voices have different pitches, our ears have varying ranges, some of us are allergic to certain substances that others are not ..... but has anyone ever investigated the phenomenon of what wavelengths humans can see? Is it a person-to-person variable, or is it constant for everyone? Can some people see IR, red and green, for instance, instead of red, green and blue? Or green, blue and UV, for that matter ..... and what would it look like?
I'm glad I still have my old 3210. As long as it continues to make a noise when someone dials it and transmit my voice and their voice in mutually opposite directions when answered, then I have no reason to replace it.
When you're sending data over the air, then you have no way of knowing who is listening. That's why my home LAN is wired -- so I at least know if anyone is tapping me, then they must be on the inside. And I wouldn't trust the phone companies to build in any kind of security either; MI5 would never let them get away with it. You should assume any part of the network you can't see is tappable if not actually tapped. The best form of telephone security is to keep all messages short and hope they aren't listening when you're speaking.
Yeah, I have my old Amiga schematics somewhere. But didn't the Video Toaster use some extra hardware as well? IIRC the Amiga's frame buffer ran synchronously to the processor, and it took some high-order mucking aroud to sync it to an external timing signal such as you would get from a video source.
So now we have the source code for the software, will we get the schematics for the hardware? This could breathe new life in to old Amigas. There must be a few in the backs of wardrobes all over the land .....
How easy would it be to get a real standardisation body to draw up a standard for Open Source software?
.....
Obviously, ISO would be the biggie, but maybe it would be more realistic to begin with a national standards body {German DIN [?] for instance} first, even if only to give the others something to use as a template?
What I'm thinking of is a standard literally for openness of source; so claiming compliance with the standard would oblige vendors to certify that they were giving you permission to copy and modify. Standards bodies themselves do not necessarily do the testing {though many will rent you testing facilities}; but rather, publish the specifications -- and a list of approved test procedures -- and anyone can test and certify their own products, though in doing so they are accepting responsibility for the consequences. The standardisation body gets the right to sue you {for misappropriation of trademarks} if you apply its mark to products that do not meet the standard.
A "standards-compliant" sticker on Open Source software might carry some clout with purchasing authorities, too