But under Linux or BSD and KDE, you can have, IIRC 16 virtual desktops per login. The default is 4, and 4 buttons appear on the taskbar for quick switching. I think it is much the same with Gnome, but I don't use that so often.
And, you can have several logins, and switch with the F keys. Some can be X, others shells.
I have 3 monitors on my latest machine, all LCDs at 1280*1024. I will seriously need to see if it is efficient in view of this article. But I do like being able to see data sheets for the microprocessor etc on one screen while designing hardware or maybe software on the second, and maybe copying and pasting bits of code from the third. And, I can quickly toggle between that and several games of Mahjong!
I am only using cheap Nvidia cards, a dual head AGP and an old single head PCI, but SuSE was easy to set up (not using Sax, which trashes Nvidia setups) and BSD amounted to copying the SuSE XF86Config file over and making a few changes where things are different in BSD, not the hard bit like the monitor settings.
I don't know if it would work in Windoze, that machine has never seen any trash Monopoly code and never will.
You must be kidding? That may be true if the entire world uses exactly the same version of Wierd, but there is much misery when someone does not have the same version as you and the transfer messes up in one direction or the other, or even both.
It has been so since Wierd 2 for DOS, and the compatability issues have never been fixed properly. Yet the one-time competitor, WordPerfect, managed full backwards and forwards compatability for 10 years or more.
Yes, you are quite right, and on thinking about it, I don't see why they should be taxed. We don't generally watch TV on the internet at work, at least most of us!
It is a strange way of raising tax in any case, and one immediate effect might be that people living near the border might drive over it to use an untaxed internet cafe because it might be slightly cheaper, as there are no real borders within the EC now.
But thinking about it some more, it seems to me that there would be a good case for getting this law thrown out under European human rights legislation, which seems to get used for almost anything these days, especially where there is a degree of unfairness, as there may be here.
But I wonder if a large site with lots of PCs is covered by one TV licence, same as a household would be? In which case the cost to a large site would be negligible, and it would be very unfair to small businesses.
What you have not yet realised is that under the present undemocratically elected sub-human vegetable, the US has slowly drifted into a from of Fascism. B. Liar is taking the UK in the same direction.
Yes, but Bill and Steve simply do not know what goes on in every corner of their Monopoly. I don't think that they realise anything of the sort, indeed I believe that due to his obvious mental problems, Bill is actually incapable of realising such a thing, but a few people within the Criminal Monopoly obviously do understand the importance of Open Source.
I expect a major tantrum when Bill finds out about this!
I pay mine monthly by direct debit, it seems less significant that way!
And yes. national broadcasters need to be funded, but only by those who use their services. The UK model is not unreasonable, but remains controversial. It seems that some people would rather have adverts. But the advertising budget must be finite, it is paid for by purchasers of the products concerned, so I don't think that ever-increasing funding requirements would be satisfied in that way, so quality would go down.
BTW the BBC also still do R&D, and have involvement with F/OSS. I saw something the other day about a new video CODEC, for example. The licence fee in the past funded many aspects of research into radio, then TV, then digital broadcasting. I don't know how else progress would have been funded.
But I do wonder how many people in Germany, or in the UK if we adopted this licensing scheme, would actually have an internet connection and no TV? I am guessing that it will not be many. A PC with a TV card for example already needs a licence. I wonder if the Germans are spending more on administration than they will collect!
If someone finds a security hole in Mozilla, it gets fixed as quickly as possible, and a patch issued. Some of these such as the shell: exploit were in fact Windoze problems which the Moz developers kindly patched around. That one was a tiny download.
But the Criminal Monopoly simply don't care either about other people's security, or about their browser, which was only intended to kill Netscape. As that has been more or less accomplished, they are simply not interested any more. What is more, in common with other Monopoly products, the underlying codebase has probably become such a mess that it would be better to throw it away and start again, but the paranoid megalomaniac Bill would have too many tantrums if someone was brave enough to tell him the truth.
.... which is often lacking. Too may people just sit down and start to code.
Things like UML, and before that, Yourdon, and lots of others, are there as methods of expressing the design, before a single line of code is written. So are textual documents with pseudo-code, and informal sketches in the designer's log book, and lots of other things, which ought to be considered as vital parts of the source documentation. And of course, Requirements Specifications are absolutely vital in any branch of engineering. You really do need to know what you are designing!
The change control process needs to include everything that is used to generate the final code, so that it is all kept up to date.
I don't think that Sir Bill comprehends this, because otherwise the Criminal Monopoly would not be changing the fundamental requirements of Latehorn right now, ripping out bits that they can't implement, in the same way that every new piece of bugware they create is utterly lacking at the front end of the process, and is hacked and patched (in the derogatory sense) till it "seems" to work, at what should be the tail end of the development process. But there again, I don't think that Sir Bill understands anything that is remotely technical, but he does have better comprehension than most of new ways to run an Illegal Monopoly.
Why would they have to physically meet to implement any of that? Tools, procedures, tests, etc do not require that the coder, the tester, the manager, the QA person and anyone else involved are in close proximity.
A company I worked for recently, in the South of England, was having much of the testing done in India, via the internet, on real hardware which was in the lab in the UK. The testers could drive the emulators and debuggers as if they were present. Same for code reviews and all the other things.
This was safety-critical software to DO-178B Level 1, it does not get any higher!
It rather reminds me of the Win 3.1 days. where at the place I was working they still had a lot of MS-DOS programs (MessyDOS), includint the Multimate word processor, which was rock solid but with a terrible user interface. One day I not only changed the icon, but also the program's own title (must have used a hex editor, it was a long time ago) to read Multihate. It was greatly appreciated by the other engineers!
Shortly after, they moved to Word 2 (the time when every sub-version had serious file incompatability with the others, e.g. 2.0a would not read 2.0b, or 2.0 for that matter). Of course we all wanted Multihate back, as it was better, at least it was compatable with other minor variants of itself.
Sadly Word was too complex to hack with a text editor, or maybe I could not find the text in plain ascii, otherwise it might have been changed to Worse!
I don't think that much has changed since then, as regards the quality of M$ products.
Thanks for that useful piece of info. Just typical of M$ that something essential is undocumented. I have been assured by many people, and have looked in vain myself for a fork().
But on past performance from the Illegal Monopoly, this is about what can be expected, their own developers of course would know about it, and would therefore be at a very unfair advantage over everyone else. IIRC they had their knuckles rapped severely in several court cases, not just the monopoly trial, over that very thing. In fact I think the first time was the DR-DOS case, and that is a long time ago. Says it all really.
I saw a dog on TV in the UK maybe 15 years ago which could sniff out cancers with a high success rate. Medical professionals were involved. It may be that most cancers have something in common that the dog could smell. It just seemed to be able to sniff anyone, and go to the part of the body where the cancer was. Thinking about that, if there was something in common, the cure for most types might also have something in common. If only they knew exactly what the dog was smelling, or indeed what in the dog's nose was reacting.
I think the detection rate was quite high, well over 50%, but I don't know what became of it.
...and in quantities which could be extracted if the need arose, although not economic by today's standards. Rock formations which are as much as 0.01% uranium are quite common, 0.05% is still fairly common, if it was gold it would certainly be extracted at that concentration, or indeed far less.
I know of a few places in Scotland where it could be worked if necessary.
But there is no shortage right now, breeder reactors convert the otherwise unwanted U-238 to Pu-239, which can then be used in more reactors.... The supply is of course finite, but one of the reasons Pu reactors are not too common is that AFAIK less than 3kg, in the pure state, will make a bomb, so they don't want it in circulation. But recycling all the old nuclear weapons could help out power generation for a long time.
I think you would be talking about many thousands of years before the known economic reserves of uranium have been fully exploited.
Radioactivity does in fact last that long, and a lot more. The point is that with exponential decay, the amount halves every half life, but it never gets to zero. Some isotopes may have very long half-lives, after 20 half lives for example, the activity may have reduced by a factor of about a million, but might still not be negligible. But it should probably be safe to handle for short periods, but probably not ingest or inhale, after that time.
But this idea is not entirely new, in fact it would have first been mentioned in the 1960s if not before. Still, it is a good idea, whose time maybe has come at last.
What a stupid debate. Two decent, useable operating systems, but each optimised for different situations. You could bring in al least three BSD variants, AIX, HP/UX and I don't know how many more, and it would still be a pointless argument.
But one big factor is that the Solaris OS is based on hardware that is largely controlled by Sun, which gives them a big lead, potentially, on reliability and stability. It certainly helps to avoid over-complexity in the handling of hardware issues. Linux has to run on hardware that is often badly documented, if at all. Many of the reliability features of any OS need specific hardware provisions, which are simply not there in a PC.
So it is like comparing apples and oranges, or pears and bananas, or Saddam and Dubya. Actually on that last point I may be wrong, because neither was properly elected.....
If the standard is published, and the test suite are published, the standard is effectively public. An open standard is simply one that everyone can work to freely. If it is open to casual change, it is not a standard.
The fact that only Sun can change the standard is fairly immaterial, they don't control code written to comply with the standard.
I don't hear anyone shouting that ASCII code is a closed standard, and that there is anything wrong with that. But it can not be changed by absolutely anyone who wants to. In fact the most ardent suporters of F/OSS inevitably use either ASCII or Unicode, or both, depending on what they are doing. Unicode did tend towards being closed, last time I looked that seemed to have improved.
The same goes for lots of other standards that we work to, C or C++ for example.
The fact is that standards need to be set, by standards bodies or other organisations, so that they can't be changed haphazardly like the Windoze API. If Sun want to set a standard, fine. If another competent software developer, either a person or a company, wants to set a standard, fine. If they hand it over to a competent standards organisation, where all revisions will be properly controlled, good. If they control revisions in house, not quite so good but still OK. If M$ want to set a standard, I would suggest that on their past record they are incapable of doing so.....
The fact is that it works well, and the zip format is fairly universal, as of course is the XML. The files are tiny compared to M$ Office.
I happen to think that it is one of a number of acceptable alternative ways of doing it, there are other valid ways, or there is the total mess of M$ Office files....
I unzipped some OOo files a while ago, out of curiosity. Don't know what algorithm was actually used, but they unzipped in Winzip with no problems. The files inside were zipped up, with quite a large compression ratio (repetitive XML tags etc compress well), so the zip file is realy a container for zipped XML files. Some of the smaller component files may not actually have been zipped, the main one certainly was.
I was particularly amazed to see how small a complex timing diagram that I had drawn was, when saved as XML.
Where files are being emailed over slow links, OOo has a very big advantage over M$ Office.
Like you, I noticed that the unzip time was negligible, even on a K6/II-350, which is my oldest PC.
The only slow thing I notice is the startup time of the application, but that is largely because it does not cheat and load part of itself into RAM at boot time. You can configure the Quickstarter to do that, just like Monopoly Office, if you must, but really, a couple of seconds as you start a work session is hardly significant.
Maybe, it gets better with each version, so no doubt background saves are on the agenda. It should certainly be possible under *nix. But like the others here, I have not noticed a speed problem, and the files are tiny compared to Word.
But emulating fork() under Windoze is extremely inefficient. The Cygwin developers probably know more about that than anyone, but it tends to be a serious performance limitation. With *nix you get inheritance, i.e. the child process inherits most of its parameters from the parent, but that was a bit beyong the imagination of Billy-boy.
Not only that, some businesses simply will not, or are at least very nervous about, sending M$ documents all over the place due to the ever-present risk of virus transmission. The standard for read-only documents at the moment is Acrobat.pdf for that reason. Not a bad standard by any means. I for one would never, ever accept a document from anyone in a M$ format, despite having serious anti-virus precautions. The risk is simply too great.
The OOo file format addresses many, maybe all, of the security concerns, it is after all simply zipped text, structured in a particular way.
But we have seen in the last few days how trashware from the Monopoly allows virus transmission in a jpeg, no doubt their next generation Office will, unlike everyone else, have a secrity hole that can be activated by an XML file.
Yes, and that as I am sure you know, is one of the reasons why we should have standards.
It may be worth mentioning that the standard defines how the document is saved, it does not necessarily get involved with what toolbars and buttons you have, so it is possible to add features to the user interface without changing file formats. Actually, WordPerfect has been doing that for years, the latest version is still compatible both ways with 6.0, which was the first Windoze version. But a decent standard based on XML is the best way to go at this point in time. WP is moving that way already, they said a while ago that they intend to support the OOo file format, and I suspect Lotus will also, so with support from most proprietary packages, the Monopoly will be obliged to follow. But, as always, they will find a way of perverting the standard, as they did with Java and just about everything else they have ever touched.
Then you clearly have not needed some of the other mathematical features of Excel which are sadly lacking, or the ability to create decent user-defined functions. Yes,it works for some simple things, but I know from lots of frustrating experience that there are many things it cannot do. And, it messes up some kinds of graph badly, because of the usual M$ arrogance, it tries to do things their way, not your way, when that is not what you want. Same problem with Word, of course.
I think you should take a look again at the latest OOo, the limitations you observed may well have been fixed now.
Some features may be missing, or not in the same place, but as I think you are suggesting, those that people need, know and/or are willing to learn to use, are all there. No-one uses many of the obscure features of Word.
Not only that, but both Word and Excel mess up their own files and refuse to open them, but OOo often still can, as has been said by me and confirmed by others, or vice versa, here and elsewhere. And with OOo you get a fairly decent drawing program, which behaves itself better than Visio. The spreadsheet is better too, especially if you really need user-defined functions.
As it happens, a colleague has just bought a new PC, tomorrow I am bringing him a CD with OOo and Mozilla. One more! In particular, Inept Exploder and Lookout will be replaced by something more secure, and I think that OOo will be at least as useful as his copy of Office 97. Now if he tells his friends.......
The alarm bells should be ringing in Redmond, but they may be drowned out by the sound of Sir Bill's tantrum.
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And, you can have several logins, and switch with the F keys. Some can be X, others shells.
I have 3 monitors on my latest machine, all LCDs at 1280*1024. I will seriously need to see if it is efficient in view of this article. But I do like being able to see data sheets for the microprocessor etc on one screen while designing hardware or maybe software on the second, and maybe copying and pasting bits of code from the third. And, I can quickly toggle between that and several games of Mahjong!
I am only using cheap Nvidia cards, a dual head AGP and an old single head PCI, but SuSE was easy to set up (not using Sax, which trashes Nvidia setups) and BSD amounted to copying the SuSE XF86Config file over and making a few changes where things are different in BSD, not the hard bit like the monitor settings.
I don't know if it would work in Windoze, that machine has never seen any trash Monopoly code and never will.
It has been so since Wierd 2 for DOS, and the compatability issues have never been fixed properly. Yet the one-time competitor, WordPerfect, managed full backwards and forwards compatability for 10 years or more.
It is a strange way of raising tax in any case, and one immediate effect might be that people living near the border might drive over it to use an untaxed internet cafe because it might be slightly cheaper, as there are no real borders within the EC now.
But thinking about it some more, it seems to me that there would be a good case for getting this law thrown out under European human rights legislation, which seems to get used for almost anything these days, especially where there is a degree of unfairness, as there may be here.
But I wonder if a large site with lots of PCs is covered by one TV licence, same as a household would be? In which case the cost to a large site would be negligible, and it would be very unfair to small businesses.
Must be the most stupid bit of legislation ever.
Apparently being mentally sub-normal does not disqualify you either!
But minimum wage laws are necessary to prevent exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
What you have not yet realised is that under the present undemocratically elected sub-human vegetable, the US has slowly drifted into a from of Fascism. B. Liar is taking the UK in the same direction.
I expect a major tantrum when Bill finds out about this!
And yes. national broadcasters need to be funded, but only by those who use their services. The UK model is not unreasonable, but remains controversial. It seems that some people would rather have adverts. But the advertising budget must be finite, it is paid for by purchasers of the products concerned, so I don't think that ever-increasing funding requirements would be satisfied in that way, so quality would go down.
BTW the BBC also still do R&D, and have involvement with F/OSS. I saw something the other day about a new video CODEC, for example. The licence fee in the past funded many aspects of research into radio, then TV, then digital broadcasting. I don't know how else progress would have been funded.
But I do wonder how many people in Germany, or in the UK if we adopted this licensing scheme, would actually have an internet connection and no TV? I am guessing that it will not be many. A PC with a TV card for example already needs a licence. I wonder if the Germans are spending more on administration than they will collect!
But the Criminal Monopoly simply don't care either about other people's security, or about their browser, which was only intended to kill Netscape. As that has been more or less accomplished, they are simply not interested any more. What is more, in common with other Monopoly products, the underlying codebase has probably become such a mess that it would be better to throw it away and start again, but the paranoid megalomaniac Bill would have too many tantrums if someone was brave enough to tell him the truth.
Things like UML, and before that, Yourdon, and lots of others, are there as methods of expressing the design, before a single line of code is written. So are textual documents with pseudo-code, and informal sketches in the designer's log book, and lots of other things, which ought to be considered as vital parts of the source documentation. And of course, Requirements Specifications are absolutely vital in any branch of engineering. You really do need to know what you are designing!
The change control process needs to include everything that is used to generate the final code, so that it is all kept up to date.
I don't think that Sir Bill comprehends this, because otherwise the Criminal Monopoly would not be changing the fundamental requirements of Latehorn right now, ripping out bits that they can't implement, in the same way that every new piece of bugware they create is utterly lacking at the front end of the process, and is hacked and patched (in the derogatory sense) till it "seems" to work, at what should be the tail end of the development process. But there again, I don't think that Sir Bill understands anything that is remotely technical, but he does have better comprehension than most of new ways to run an Illegal Monopoly.
A company I worked for recently, in the South of England, was having much of the testing done in India, via the internet, on real hardware which was in the lab in the UK. The testers could drive the emulators and debuggers as if they were present. Same for code reviews and all the other things.
This was safety-critical software to DO-178B Level 1, it does not get any higher!
It rather reminds me of the Win 3.1 days. where at the place I was working they still had a lot of MS-DOS programs (MessyDOS), includint the Multimate word processor, which was rock solid but with a terrible user interface. One day I not only changed the icon, but also the program's own title (must have used a hex editor, it was a long time ago) to read Multihate. It was greatly appreciated by the other engineers!
Shortly after, they moved to Word 2 (the time when every sub-version had serious file incompatability with the others, e.g. 2.0a would not read 2.0b, or 2.0 for that matter). Of course we all wanted Multihate back, as it was better, at least it was compatable with other minor variants of itself.
Sadly Word was too complex to hack with a text editor, or maybe I could not find the text in plain ascii, otherwise it might have been changed to Worse!
I don't think that much has changed since then, as regards the quality of M$ products.
But on past performance from the Illegal Monopoly, this is about what can be expected, their own developers of course would know about it, and would therefore be at a very unfair advantage over everyone else. IIRC they had their knuckles rapped severely in several court cases, not just the monopoly trial, over that very thing. In fact I think the first time was the DR-DOS case, and that is a long time ago. Says it all really.
I think the detection rate was quite high, well over 50%, but I don't know what became of it.
I know of a few places in Scotland where it could be worked if necessary.
But there is no shortage right now, breeder reactors convert the otherwise unwanted U-238 to Pu-239, which can then be used in more reactors.... The supply is of course finite, but one of the reasons Pu reactors are not too common is that AFAIK less than 3kg, in the pure state, will make a bomb, so they don't want it in circulation. But recycling all the old nuclear weapons could help out power generation for a long time.
I think you would be talking about many thousands of years before the known economic reserves of uranium have been fully exploited.
But this idea is not entirely new, in fact it would have first been mentioned in the 1960s if not before. Still, it is a good idea, whose time maybe has come at last.
But one big factor is that the Solaris OS is based on hardware that is largely controlled by Sun, which gives them a big lead, potentially, on reliability and stability. It certainly helps to avoid over-complexity in the handling of hardware issues. Linux has to run on hardware that is often badly documented, if at all. Many of the reliability features of any OS need specific hardware provisions, which are simply not there in a PC.
So it is like comparing apples and oranges, or pears and bananas, or Saddam and Dubya. Actually on that last point I may be wrong, because neither was properly elected.....
The fact that only Sun can change the standard is fairly immaterial, they don't control code written to comply with the standard.
I don't hear anyone shouting that ASCII code is a closed standard, and that there is anything wrong with that. But it can not be changed by absolutely anyone who wants to. In fact the most ardent suporters of F/OSS inevitably use either ASCII or Unicode, or both, depending on what they are doing. Unicode did tend towards being closed, last time I looked that seemed to have improved.
The same goes for lots of other standards that we work to, C or C++ for example.
The fact is that standards need to be set, by standards bodies or other organisations, so that they can't be changed haphazardly like the Windoze API. If Sun want to set a standard, fine. If another competent software developer, either a person or a company, wants to set a standard, fine. If they hand it over to a competent standards organisation, where all revisions will be properly controlled, good. If they control revisions in house, not quite so good but still OK. If M$ want to set a standard, I would suggest that on their past record they are incapable of doing so.....
I happen to think that it is one of a number of acceptable alternative ways of doing it, there are other valid ways, or there is the total mess of M$ Office files....
I was particularly amazed to see how small a complex timing diagram that I had drawn was, when saved as XML.
Where files are being emailed over slow links, OOo has a very big advantage over M$ Office.
Like you, I noticed that the unzip time was negligible, even on a K6/II-350, which is my oldest PC.
The only slow thing I notice is the startup time of the application, but that is largely because it does not cheat and load part of itself into RAM at boot time. You can configure the Quickstarter to do that, just like Monopoly Office, if you must, but really, a couple of seconds as you start a work session is hardly significant.
But emulating fork() under Windoze is extremely inefficient. The Cygwin developers probably know more about that than anyone, but it tends to be a serious performance limitation. With *nix you get inheritance, i.e. the child process inherits most of its parameters from the parent, but that was a bit beyong the imagination of Billy-boy.
The OOo file format addresses many, maybe all, of the security concerns, it is after all simply zipped text, structured in a particular way.
But we have seen in the last few days how trashware from the Monopoly allows virus transmission in a jpeg, no doubt their next generation Office will, unlike everyone else, have a secrity hole that can be activated by an XML file.
It may be worth mentioning that the standard defines how the document is saved, it does not necessarily get involved with what toolbars and buttons you have, so it is possible to add features to the user interface without changing file formats. Actually, WordPerfect has been doing that for years, the latest version is still compatible both ways with 6.0, which was the first Windoze version. But a decent standard based on XML is the best way to go at this point in time. WP is moving that way already, they said a while ago that they intend to support the OOo file format, and I suspect Lotus will also, so with support from most proprietary packages, the Monopoly will be obliged to follow. But, as always, they will find a way of perverting the standard, as they did with Java and just about everything else they have ever touched.
I think you should take a look again at the latest OOo, the limitations you observed may well have been fixed now.
Not only that, but both Word and Excel mess up their own files and refuse to open them, but OOo often still can, as has been said by me and confirmed by others, or vice versa, here and elsewhere. And with OOo you get a fairly decent drawing program, which behaves itself better than Visio. The spreadsheet is better too, especially if you really need user-defined functions.
As it happens, a colleague has just bought a new PC, tomorrow I am bringing him a CD with OOo and Mozilla. One more! In particular, Inept Exploder and Lookout will be replaced by something more secure, and I think that OOo will be at least as useful as his copy of Office 97. Now if he tells his friends.......
The alarm bells should be ringing in Redmond, but they may be drowned out by the sound of Sir Bill's tantrum.