The point is that this is a backward step, and so does not justify the risk, and must be of questionable legality. Just watch the lawyers if any non-participant is injured or killed, which is quite likely.
.... and I don't mean the report, I mean that the IETF can publish something, and then Cisco can come along and patent something first published by the IETF. If I have understood correctly, this is the biggest abuse ever of the patent system. It would have to be thrown out under UK law, so I guess we will be free to use it here.
It would do everyone a big favour if an impartial body lkie the IETF were to automatically file patent applications for everything they publish, then issue a free licence to everyone. The cost of the patents could be funded by levying a small charge on each ISP, via their upstream provider, and/or from domain name registrars, per user it would be utterly negligible and impossible to collect.
Until, of course, Dubya is kicked out (I mean properly non-elected, not like last time) and the new incumbent reforms the USPTO, then this sort of thing should not happen again.
The sideways swinging definitely has prior art. It should not have been allowed.
Of course in many parts of the UK we don't have swings now, because they are considered to be dangerous, by the fascists at the Health and Safety Executive, or maybe because the owner simply has not the time to do a risk assessment, as required by law.
Well, it is quite OK to levy import duty on imports, that is what it is for after all, but it is not fair to discriminate against India. If it applies to one, it must apply to all. Meanwhile, Europe and the rest of the world will apply the same level of duty to imports from the US. (I certainly hope they do, they will mainly hurt the Convicted Monopolist.)
However, duty is traditionally charged as a percentage of the cost of the item, now to what does that give considerable advantage, I wonder......
So although I am against stupid taxation, I am all for this one. Or, they could of course simply impose a punitive tax on every company with wealth above a certain threshold, that would be even fairer to the general public and the world at large.
But the guy behind this clearly has the same sort of mental problem as Darl or Dubya, he is only going to hurt his own state. Maybe there are few software developers in that part of the world, but there must be lots of end users who really need custom software. If he had even half a brain, he would see that the one to tax is in another state, on the west coast, if he went a stage further and banned their vile, bug-infested, insecure products in the state, then he might actually achieve positive benefit.
....that people are going to be killed. It takes a lot to put a person into space and get him or her back safely, it is not likely to happen without a huge budget and access to lots of technology.
I am surprised that the FAA or NTSB do not stop this, or is there some loophole in the law which puts it out of their jurisdiction?
Maybe, but on a 100 meg network (no-one used 10 MHz now, surely?) with a decent switch rather than hub, it might be OK. But, in any case I would imagine that when properly developed, local caching would be used, programmers generally like efficiency (unless they work for M$ of course). But, any low-bandwidth things would simply need the browser, plain, simple, easy to debug. The higher-bandwidth tasks could be implemented in Java, so there was still no specific requirement placed on the workstation, the Java would run in the browser, but most people would use some sort of JIT compiler, so it would be fast. No doubt I am re-inventing what Sun are doing already, I have not seen their Java Desktop so I don't know.
The point is that browser-based things are simple to get working, that is all, and I admit that they will not be efficient in every case. But, I like simplicity, maybe because I have a chance of understanding it. We hopefully don't need bloatware to do normal daily tasks.
Thanks for the suggestion, IIRC it was compiled into the kernel, but I will check just in case, when I get home at the weekend. It is interseting that it does not really see the BSD slices, dmesg does not report anything interesting, but I can mound a FAT partition in SuSE, or in BSD, that is actually within the BSD slice, I think. How confusing.... But, as both OSs can see the partition when it is FAT, it is in the right place, at least. But I am inclined to think now that it is the UFS/UFS2 issue, if so when Suse 9.1 arrives (should be by the weekend) it may be resolved, in the BSD to SuSE direction, because the 2.6 kernel is supposed to support UFS2.
I think I need to compile a BSD kernel again, likely I missed something there. Meanwhile there are other alternative file systems to try.
When I get this fixed I will definitely write it up and post it on a web site somewhere, it is bound to be useful to others. The existing Howtos don't quite seem to cover the problem, which makes me think it probably used to work till UFS2 came along, or something else broke it.
I might be trying it next weekend, but don't yet know if it is suited to a read/write environment. It is obviously supported by Linux and FreeBSD, and I like the thought of it being governed by an ISO standard, so all implementations should interoperate properly.
I have done some more research into my problem, it seems that BSD is probably using UFS2 which is in Linux from kernel 2.6, of course with SuSE 9.0, it is kernel 2.4 at the moment, which explains why SuSE can't see the UFS2 partition, only plain UFS.
I think that there may be other file systems also worth looking at, but I will never, ever install another Windoze, certainly on this machine, so don't care that the Monopolist can't read foreign file systems. I have 3 partitions which can be shared, so might try whatever other file systems seem to be supported by both sides, IIRC there may be XFS, maybe even JFS etc. But if your suggestion of iso9660 turns out to work, I might stick with it.
I think you miss the point, home users don't need an Exchange server to handle email etc, so for them it has been, if anything, easier to use Linux than in an office environment, where Outlook may be necessary. I think that was the point. I do not have, or need, an Exchange server at home, although I do have servers, running Linux and FreeBSD.
Basically all I am saying is that a home user has a free choice, and with the exception of some games (which don't interest me) anything you might want to do is covered by a Linux app, usually several, so it is easy to make the choice and go for Linux. At work there are other issues.
Yes, I quite agree, but for what I was doing, neither permissions nor timestamping mattered. But, as you say, they are vital in a decent OS, and I have been used to having them since Unix V7, which must have been about 1978 or thereabouts, the very first time I had a computer at work. There have been many backward steps since, all originating from Redmond.
When I was happily doing software and hardware intergation on my Tektronix development system, based around a DEC LSI11/23 board, the people who did simulation got some of the first PC/ATs. I nearly fell over laughing! They used to come to me to read foreign disk formats (8 inch floppy in those days), we eventually drilled a hole through the wall and put in a serial connection. My machine could do anything (almost). It spent 2 weeks running a background process to get some large prime numbers with specific characteristics. We cobbled up a "compiler" for a HLL for programming test gear that we were designing, using not much other than sed and awk. It helped prepare wiring schedules, again with a bit of awk and other things. Occasionally it even did the job it was purchased for.
Many of the things we did easily on that machine can not be done even now, under Windoze, without a major programming exercise. The key to the whole thing is the OS, and that one ran Tnix, which was a slightly modified version of Unix V7.
Having learned computing on something decent, and in its day very advanced, I hate using backward things like MessyDOS. Funnily enough, in 1978 we compared kernels, MessyDOS was about 52k, almost exactly the same as Tnix, a pre-emptable, multi-tasking, multi-user OS with proper file system and memory management. Enough said, I think.
Sadly I had to actually make a FAT partition the other day, because neither SuSE 9.0 nor the latest FreeBSD could see each other, i.e. FreeBSD grumbled about an invald partition table, or something similar, when I tried to mount an ext2, while SuSE grumbled, in almost the same words, when I tried to mount UFS, yet each supposedly had all the correct options in the kernel.
Hopefully SuSE 9.1 will fix it, meanwhile my common area between both OSs is FAT, thanks to a certain Mr. Patterson who created QDOS, no thanks at all to the scumbag who ripped him off, now a Sir....
I maust say that FAT is grim, there is no proper control over capitalisation of file names, but it looks as if when SuSE writes in lower case, that is what is recorded on the disk, so that is what FreeBSD sees also. It looks as if it is only MessyDOS and Windoze that mess with capitalisation.
Yes, the objective should be to get rid of Outlook on the desktop, to get rid of the worm threat. It looks as if that will be the next phase of either Novell's plan, or a culmination of other bits and pieces that are in development.
It seems to me that all the functionality of Outlook could be provided in a browser interface with a bit of clever stuff on the server. If that browser is not IE, then many of the problems simply go away. I don't see that anything Outlook provides can't be done in a better way.
I am looking forward to the next phase of development, a few major breakthroughs on FOSS look like co-inciding with Longhorn being late......
Are you serious? With no need for an exchange server at home to handle web browsing and pop3 email, and with much less risk of getting viruses than with M$ junk, I would have thought it was more likely to be even more viable at home than at work. OpenOffice.org meets all normal requirements in that department, Mozilla (or Opera, Konqueror...)are more up to date browsers than IE, etc.
Now, even I can answer that, and I am not a Wine developer. What does Windzoze really lack? Try a fork(), proper pipes, a proper shell (or several), multiple virtual terminals, a protocol like X which can be sent across a network tolerably well, the ability to at least read foreign file systems, a way of shutting down not involving a START button, journalling filesystems, a choice of window manager,............
Oh, I forgot, we have all of these already, many of them since about 1970. I must have been dreaming that there was only one OS, and it came from Redmond.
Yes, the ill-fated WABI, it never really was finished properly IIRC. I assume you were running on a SPARC, if instructions had to be interpreted, that would explain the lack of speed.
Wine, in all its variants, commercial or otherwise, runs basically at full speed, after all what is in the Windoze code is 32-bit protected mode (usually), the only things that are completely perverse are the way memory is (mis)managed and of course every single one of the 60,000 odd API calls, many scattered through assorted uncontrolled versions of.dlls (there is no proper concept of a kernel). Only a few map easily to Linux calls, the rest involve a lot of work, but I doubt that most programs spend sufficient time doing system calls to get even a factor of 2 slowdown.
My sympathy goes out to the guys working on Wine, it must be very frustrating trying to accurately emulate a piece of Sir Bill's excrement, with all the bugs accurately emulated, so that programs with bug work-arounds don't break.
Actually I did not get hit, and have not been hit for a very long time now, but my work was disrupted because the corporate network got hit.
I will not say that my systems at home are totally immune, but I have OpenBSD, FreeBSD and two Linux boxes, and the only Windoze machine, which is the laptop, runs a fully up to date Win2000 (won't touch XP with Raw Sockets!), and is never connected directly.
Even before then, when I did access the net from Windoze, I was only hit twice, which showed me that certain anti-virus software, even when kept up to date, is worthless, both were fairly old virii. One was a Word macro, I do not run Word and so theoretically was immune, except that Norton had not bothered to analyse the thing correctly, and in my case I had the free Word Viewer program, which of course opened the file. Now supposedly there was no menas by which macro code could be executed, but this virus obviously had another mechanism, which Norton had not bothered to analyse, which trashe dmy machine instantly.
The second one was a stupid one that simply closed the browser, if Javascript was turned on. I proved that Netscape was seeing and reacting to the virus before Norton saw it, so there was clearly something wrong, but Norton support staff lied and said that I was protected, yet I could reproduce the effect again and again, simply by turning Javascript on and going to the relevant web page. Funnily enough, a scan of the downloaded file by Norton was positive every time.
I have had a pC trashed by Panda, so has everyone else I know who has tried it, and practically everyone who used McAfraud seems to have been hit, sooner rather than later. I have a very low opinion of the anti-virus industry as you might gather, and an even lower opinion of the scumbag Monopolists who deliberately add features which destroy any hope of security. No doubt I will get hit again (not for about 5 years now) despite my OpenBSD packet-filtering firewall, and only using the Mozilla browser, keeping everything up to date, running F-Prot antivirus, no trace of Outlook or IE to be seen anywhere, even on the laptop, but it will not happen nearly as often as if I continued to use a trash OS, browser and mail client.
So sorry to disappoint you, I did not get hit, and don't expect to get hit very often, but I still think they should throw the book at scumbags like this. And I agree, those who do not keep their computers up to date do endanger other people, I am sick of the number of infected emails I get from PCs which have been infected. They can't do anything, it is just annoying having to delete them, and tehy are about 50% of my mail. But if anyone looks like an idiot, it is the one who jumped to the conclusion that I had been hit, when I gave no such indication. If I had been hit by that one, it would be my own fault, fairly and squarely, the same for anyone who is stupid enough to use Lookout, or its perverted, cut-down relative as their email client, or to use IE as their browser. They deserve what they get.
Keeping a PC up to date, both with the buggy patches from the Monopolist and the antivirus software gives absolutely zero protection against new threats. The underlying OS and the mail client and browser also need to make decent attempts at security, or everything else is in vain.
... or you will destroy your amplifier. Note that he says that you need to join the left and right channels together to get mono, if you are only making one speaker. Two low-impedance sources carrying different voltages......
In any case it would work far better if the coil was kept within its original magnet, and the edge glued to a diaphragm. It is designed to work that way! If you were only wanting a woofer, you could simply attach the diphragm to the existing head arm, but don'y expect any response above a few 100 Hz.
I honestly wonder why anyone bothers with something so stupid anyway.
You don't need much more than analogue hardware or maybe a Z80 processor, with lots of backups, preferabbly totally dissimilar, to manage fast breeder reactors. Reliability and redundancy are the key issues. You don't want anything that can have a BSOD of course.... The thing you probably are confusing it with is simulating weapons to get the design right, before you build one, that really does need a vast array of processors, maybe something like a Beowulf would do. Such simulation is probably also used for modern conventional weapons, to assist the design process, in the same way that it is now used in simulating crash testing of cars, and many other complex 3-D problems.
There again, it has been said that no new design of atomic bomb ever failed at the first attempt, and that was mostly before the computing era, so I think that what it avoids is countless implosion tests to get the high explosive bit correct. I think that some H-bombs may have been a disappointment, they are apparently many orders of magnitude more difficult. Much info is published on web sites.... I don't think that it should be, or in books for that matter, but the stable door can't be closed now, the horse was allowed to bolt many years ago.
I can understand 1600*1200, in fact I am using it now, to get a lot of info on the screen, but over 100fps provides no tangible benefit except to the graphics card manufacturers. There is no point in paying to display what the eye can't distinguish.
... there are a few snags, such as the fact that a GPU will not have (because it normally does not need) memory management and protection, so it is really only safe to run one task at a time. And, does this not need the knowledge of the architecture and instruction set that Nvidia seem to be unable or unwilling to disclose, hence the continuing controversy over the binary-only Linux drivers?
However I do know that a lot of people had been wondering about this for a while, could it be done, and was it worth attempting, so now we know. Maybe we shall soon see PCI cards containing an array of GPUs, I imagine the cooling arrangements will be quite interesting!
There are other things which are faster than a typical CPU, are not some of the processors in games machines 128-bit? Again, you could in theory put some of these together as a co-processor of some sort.
This was a good piece of work technically, but it says something about society that the fastest mass-produced processors, whether for GPUs or games consoles, exist because people want a higher frame rate in Quake. I can't think of any professional application that needs really fast graphics output, but many that could use faster processing. So why can't Intel and AMD stop putting everything in the one CPU (multiple CPUs with one memory are not really much better), and make co-processors again, which will do fast matrix operations on very large arrays, etc, for those who need them? The ultimate horror of the one CPU philosophy was the winmodem and winprinter, both ridiculous. Silicon is in fact quite cheap, as Nvidia have proved, people's time while they wait for long calculations to finish is not.
Maybe we are going to see an architectural change coming, I expect it will be supported by FOSS long before Longhorn, just like the AMD64.
Well said, and I think the mandatory sentence should always be life imprisonment, because the damage far eexceeds any other crime, being on a worldwide scale, and as you say, puts people's life at risk, eg, the UK Coastguard.
But, it should also be a criminal offence to connect critical systems to any public network in such a way that they can he hacked, or to use M$ software, with all its unnecessary security risks, on such systems.
I was horrified to learn the other day that banks are using Win XP in ATM machines, it is totally inappropriate. Such a thing needs only a small embedded microcontroller with no real OS as such, in fact the more removed from mainstream PCs that the thing is, the less likely it is to be hacked, especially if it has no capability to be reprogrammed without access to the hardware from the inside of the bank.
Same with other systems, they might need to get data online but should have no facility to download program code of any sort
Of course almost all of these incidents would be avoided if people dumped IE and Lookout, and used decent browser and email software, and in the case of really critical systems, a secure OS like OpenBSD, instead of Monopoly trash.
But the chances are that the author did in fact use Windoze XP as the OS on his development machine. If not, it would have been Win 2000 or 9X......
Nothing to do with how he was caught of course. He most likely was sufficiently stupid to upload the virus from his own machine, has he used an Internet Cafe or an insecure wireless network he would have been untraceable.
It would be a good idea if people had to show ID to use an Internet Cafe, and wireless networks were banned entirely. I rate security higher than the imagined need, dreamed up by marketing men, to be able to use a PC anywhere, with no wires. Now I am going well off topic, but security matters, and a generic right to upload what you want, where you want, with no positive check on your ID, is a serious threat to other people's security and should not be allowed.
I don't know how severely German law can punish this scumbag, but life imprisonment with no hope of parole sounds about right to me. There must be an effective deterrent.
Yes, but these guys had virtually no computers to support their work. Nowadays anyone can build a Beowulf cluster, but I suspect that if you are not in too much of a hurry, a standard PC is capable of simulating lots of things that the Manhattan Project team could only guess at, or measure by a series of tedious experiments. Also, much more is known about explosives nowadays, "simple" shaped charge theory should be sufficient to get a spherical implosion, the rest apart from the neutron source to ensure efficent explosion, is fairly straightforward using published information.
One evil genius and a small team of good technicians could do it, given the plutonium. A basic weapon would not need to be all that much bigger than the plutonium core, depending on how fast the detonation velocity of the conventional explosive is. The yield-enhancement features which make the thing much bigger would not be too important to a terrorist. In fact, a low explosive yield, tons rather than kilotons, of TNT equivalent, might be of more use to a terrorist, AFAIK the fall-out from unreacted plutonium etc would be very much worse, and the area might be uninhabitable for a very long time. Apparently there was minimal fallout in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, people were mostly injured or killed by radiation absorbed by their bodies in the few microseconds of the blast, although the horrific deaths are probably continuing to this day. I strongly suspect that a low-yield weapon in a modern city would kill a lot more people, maybe a few hundred by blast and direct radiation, but a million might inhale plutonium dust before they could be evacuated, all of them would die, mostly of lung cancer.
However,if you want to get it past radiation detectors, you have to do a lot more, although AFAIK most of the output from the plutonium, and probably the polonium in the initiator, is alpha and easily stopped.
But, my guess is that an inexperienced team who could get sufficient plutonium might try a cylindrical configuration, it might be even easier to get the simulations correct, and it might fit more easily in a briefcase, but it would use more material.
As computers are widespread, and everything you need to know to build a weapon is published (why that was ever allowed, I don't understand!), the only means of control is to restrict the circulation of plutonium. It makes me sick to think that enough for maybe 50 or 100 weapons has simply been allowed to go missing over the years. Much of it might simply be lost, not in the hands of the wrong people, but where is it, and who is it polluting?
I would be even more worried if large amounts of U235 went missing, an idiot could make a uranium bomb using published information, nothing remotely high-tech is required, but that one would be heavy. Even worse, a suicidal maniac with 2 pieces of U235 could create a "fizzle" with no extra hardware, it would kill a lot of people if used in a crowded place such as a city. Note that the Hiroshima bomb was untested, they knew it must work, even in 1945, with no simulation. The test at Alamogordo was for the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki.
BTW you are right about the silver in Fort Knox, but it got recycled afterwards, and was used because of a wartime shortage of copper. I don't think a terrorist would go that route, they would not need a uranium enrichment plant for a plutonium weapon, AFAIK plutonium is "relatively" easily separated from used reactor fuel rods by a chemical process. But, stealing used fuel rods would be suicidal, and it would need very elaborate robotic handling to be able to do the processing. I think that any makeshift processing facility would leak so much radiation that it would soon be discovered.
I think that society as a whole needs to think about installing many more radiation detectors (they can be cheap and unobtrusive) so that unauthorised movements of radioactive materials will be spotted. They will also help prevent accidents such as the one in the US some years ago when a cobalt source was melted d
True, but I overlooked that, maybe I thought he meant the sort of non-lethal electric fence you use to keep animals in part of a field, but on closer examination he probably means a lethal fence, Not a nice guy at all. I once had the displeasure of working beside someone like that, he was full of criticism of the way certain ethnic minorities behaved in some South London ghettos at the time (this was before the Brixton riots, may have been about 1977). Then he went and behaved exactly the same way..... Such hatred, and sheer hypocrisy, he was fairly useless at his job, with a totally irresponsible attitude (we were doing safety-critical work, he did not care how badly he did things), full of hatred and malice.....
I see some sensible person has modded him down.
The good thing is that if someone like that opened his mouth at work nowadays, and ethnic minorities were present, as they usually are in a moderate-sized company, he would have to be fired immediately, or the company could be in very serious legal trouble for racism. But that type still air their views elsewhere, simply stirring up mistrust, hatred and offence where none need exist.
Most places I have worked since have been singularly free of that sort of attitude, I am glad to say, and, being Scottish, I don't get as much abuse from the English as was common once upon a time. Some things are improving, but not sadly in certain parts of the world, where they still revile each over over petty differences of ethnic origin, or even less.
But I still say that the UK, with or without the US or the UN, ought to get rid of Mugabe, to protect the general public in Zimbabwe. Actually we have a prison in the UK that could hold the guy, a real luxury apartment, AFAIK they built two super deluxe cells for the Lockerbie bombers and only one was found guilty, or maybe that cell is reserved for Saddam? But only oil money matters to our elected rulers, not morality, public safety or human rights. Sad..... A bit of fair and impartial justice would work wonders in Africa, it would help pave the way for things we are discussing here such as better internet access.
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The point is that this is a backward step, and so does not justify the risk, and must be of questionable legality. Just watch the lawyers if any non-participant is injured or killed, which is quite likely.
It would do everyone a big favour if an impartial body lkie the IETF were to automatically file patent applications for everything they publish, then issue a free licence to everyone. The cost of the patents could be funded by levying a small charge on each ISP, via their upstream provider, and/or from domain name registrars, per user it would be utterly negligible and impossible to collect.
Until, of course, Dubya is kicked out (I mean properly non-elected, not like last time) and the new incumbent reforms the USPTO, then this sort of thing should not happen again.
Of course in many parts of the UK we don't have swings now, because they are considered to be dangerous, by the fascists at the Health and Safety Executive, or maybe because the owner simply has not the time to do a risk assessment, as required by law.
It gets realy stupid sometimes.....
However, duty is traditionally charged as a percentage of the cost of the item, now to what does that give considerable advantage, I wonder......
So although I am against stupid taxation, I am all for this one. Or, they could of course simply impose a punitive tax on every company with wealth above a certain threshold, that would be even fairer to the general public and the world at large.
But the guy behind this clearly has the same sort of mental problem as Darl or Dubya, he is only going to hurt his own state. Maybe there are few software developers in that part of the world, but there must be lots of end users who really need custom software. If he had even half a brain, he would see that the one to tax is in another state, on the west coast, if he went a stage further and banned their vile, bug-infested, insecure products in the state, then he might actually achieve positive benefit.
I am surprised that the FAA or NTSB do not stop this, or is there some loophole in the law which puts it out of their jurisdiction?
The point is that browser-based things are simple to get working, that is all, and I admit that they will not be efficient in every case. But, I like simplicity, maybe because I have a chance of understanding it. We hopefully don't need bloatware to do normal daily tasks.
I think I need to compile a BSD kernel again, likely I missed something there. Meanwhile there are other alternative file systems to try.
When I get this fixed I will definitely write it up and post it on a web site somewhere, it is bound to be useful to others. The existing Howtos don't quite seem to cover the problem, which makes me think it probably used to work till UFS2 came along, or something else broke it.
I have done some more research into my problem, it seems that BSD is probably using UFS2 which is in Linux from kernel 2.6, of course with SuSE 9.0, it is kernel 2.4 at the moment, which explains why SuSE can't see the UFS2 partition, only plain UFS.
I think that there may be other file systems also worth looking at, but I will never, ever install another Windoze, certainly on this machine, so don't care that the Monopolist can't read foreign file systems. I have 3 partitions which can be shared, so might try whatever other file systems seem to be supported by both sides, IIRC there may be XFS, maybe even JFS etc. But if your suggestion of iso9660 turns out to work, I might stick with it.
Basically all I am saying is that a home user has a free choice, and with the exception of some games (which don't interest me) anything you might want to do is covered by a Linux app, usually several, so it is easy to make the choice and go for Linux. At work there are other issues.
When I was happily doing software and hardware intergation on my Tektronix development system, based around a DEC LSI11/23 board, the people who did simulation got some of the first PC/ATs. I nearly fell over laughing! They used to come to me to read foreign disk formats (8 inch floppy in those days), we eventually drilled a hole through the wall and put in a serial connection. My machine could do anything (almost). It spent 2 weeks running a background process to get some large prime numbers with specific characteristics. We cobbled up a "compiler" for a HLL for programming test gear that we were designing, using not much other than sed and awk. It helped prepare wiring schedules, again with a bit of awk and other things. Occasionally it even did the job it was purchased for.
Many of the things we did easily on that machine can not be done even now, under Windoze, without a major programming exercise. The key to the whole thing is the OS, and that one ran Tnix, which was a slightly modified version of Unix V7.
Having learned computing on something decent, and in its day very advanced, I hate using backward things like MessyDOS. Funnily enough, in 1978 we compared kernels, MessyDOS was about 52k, almost exactly the same as Tnix, a pre-emptable, multi-tasking, multi-user OS with proper file system and memory management. Enough said, I think.
Hopefully SuSE 9.1 will fix it, meanwhile my common area between both OSs is FAT, thanks to a certain Mr. Patterson who created QDOS, no thanks at all to the scumbag who ripped him off, now a Sir....
I maust say that FAT is grim, there is no proper control over capitalisation of file names, but it looks as if when SuSE writes in lower case, that is what is recorded on the disk, so that is what FreeBSD sees also. It looks as if it is only MessyDOS and Windoze that mess with capitalisation.
It seems to me that all the functionality of Outlook could be provided in a browser interface with a bit of clever stuff on the server. If that browser is not IE, then many of the problems simply go away. I don't see that anything Outlook provides can't be done in a better way.
I am looking forward to the next phase of development, a few major breakthroughs on FOSS look like co-inciding with Longhorn being late......
Are you serious? With no need for an exchange server at home to handle web browsing and pop3 email, and with much less risk of getting viruses than with M$ junk, I would have thought it was more likely to be even more viable at home than at work. OpenOffice.org meets all normal requirements in that department, Mozilla (or Opera, Konqueror...)are more up to date browsers than IE, etc.
But, you are right about everything else.
I think others have made the point well. You seem to have fallen for the Redmond marketing machine in a very big way. Or are you actually Bill Gates?
Oh, I forgot, we have all of these already, many of them since about 1970. I must have been dreaming that there was only one OS, and it came from Redmond.
Wine, in all its variants, commercial or otherwise, runs basically at full speed, after all what is in the Windoze code is 32-bit protected mode (usually), the only things that are completely perverse are the way memory is (mis)managed and of course every single one of the 60,000 odd API calls, many scattered through assorted uncontrolled versions of .dlls (there is no proper concept of a kernel). Only a few map easily to Linux calls, the rest involve a lot of work, but I doubt that most programs spend sufficient time doing system calls to get even a factor of 2 slowdown.
My sympathy goes out to the guys working on Wine, it must be very frustrating trying to accurately emulate a piece of Sir Bill's excrement, with all the bugs accurately emulated, so that programs with bug work-arounds don't break.
I will not say that my systems at home are totally immune, but I have OpenBSD, FreeBSD and two Linux boxes, and the only Windoze machine, which is the laptop, runs a fully up to date Win2000 (won't touch XP with Raw Sockets!), and is never connected directly.
Even before then, when I did access the net from Windoze, I was only hit twice, which showed me that certain anti-virus software, even when kept up to date, is worthless, both were fairly old virii. One was a Word macro, I do not run Word and so theoretically was immune, except that Norton had not bothered to analyse the thing correctly, and in my case I had the free Word Viewer program, which of course opened the file. Now supposedly there was no menas by which macro code could be executed, but this virus obviously had another mechanism, which Norton had not bothered to analyse, which trashe dmy machine instantly.
The second one was a stupid one that simply closed the browser, if Javascript was turned on. I proved that Netscape was seeing and reacting to the virus before Norton saw it, so there was clearly something wrong, but Norton support staff lied and said that I was protected, yet I could reproduce the effect again and again, simply by turning Javascript on and going to the relevant web page. Funnily enough, a scan of the downloaded file by Norton was positive every time.
I have had a pC trashed by Panda, so has everyone else I know who has tried it, and practically everyone who used McAfraud seems to have been hit, sooner rather than later. I have a very low opinion of the anti-virus industry as you might gather, and an even lower opinion of the scumbag Monopolists who deliberately add features which destroy any hope of security. No doubt I will get hit again (not for about 5 years now) despite my OpenBSD packet-filtering firewall, and only using the Mozilla browser, keeping everything up to date, running F-Prot antivirus, no trace of Outlook or IE to be seen anywhere, even on the laptop, but it will not happen nearly as often as if I continued to use a trash OS, browser and mail client.
So sorry to disappoint you, I did not get hit, and don't expect to get hit very often, but I still think they should throw the book at scumbags like this. And I agree, those who do not keep their computers up to date do endanger other people, I am sick of the number of infected emails I get from PCs which have been infected. They can't do anything, it is just annoying having to delete them, and tehy are about 50% of my mail. But if anyone looks like an idiot, it is the one who jumped to the conclusion that I had been hit, when I gave no such indication. If I had been hit by that one, it would be my own fault, fairly and squarely, the same for anyone who is stupid enough to use Lookout, or its perverted, cut-down relative as their email client, or to use IE as their browser. They deserve what they get.
Keeping a PC up to date, both with the buggy patches from the Monopolist and the antivirus software gives absolutely zero protection against new threats. The underlying OS and the mail client and browser also need to make decent attempts at security, or everything else is in vain.
In any case it would work far better if the coil was kept within its original magnet, and the edge glued to a diaphragm. It is designed to work that way! If you were only wanting a woofer, you could simply attach the diphragm to the existing head arm, but don'y expect any response above a few 100 Hz.
I honestly wonder why anyone bothers with something so stupid anyway.
There again, it has been said that no new design of atomic bomb ever failed at the first attempt, and that was mostly before the computing era, so I think that what it avoids is countless implosion tests to get the high explosive bit correct. I think that some H-bombs may have been a disappointment, they are apparently many orders of magnitude more difficult. Much info is published on web sites.... I don't think that it should be, or in books for that matter, but the stable door can't be closed now, the horse was allowed to bolt many years ago.
I can understand 1600*1200, in fact I am using it now, to get a lot of info on the screen, but over 100fps provides no tangible benefit except to the graphics card manufacturers. There is no point in paying to display what the eye can't distinguish.
However I do know that a lot of people had been wondering about this for a while, could it be done, and was it worth attempting, so now we know. Maybe we shall soon see PCI cards containing an array of GPUs, I imagine the cooling arrangements will be quite interesting!
There are other things which are faster than a typical CPU, are not some of the processors in games machines 128-bit? Again, you could in theory put some of these together as a co-processor of some sort.
This was a good piece of work technically, but it says something about society that the fastest mass-produced processors, whether for GPUs or games consoles, exist because people want a higher frame rate in Quake. I can't think of any professional application that needs really fast graphics output, but many that could use faster processing. So why can't Intel and AMD stop putting everything in the one CPU (multiple CPUs with one memory are not really much better), and make co-processors again, which will do fast matrix operations on very large arrays, etc, for those who need them? The ultimate horror of the one CPU philosophy was the winmodem and winprinter, both ridiculous. Silicon is in fact quite cheap, as Nvidia have proved, people's time while they wait for long calculations to finish is not.
Maybe we are going to see an architectural change coming, I expect it will be supported by FOSS long before Longhorn, just like the AMD64.
But, it should also be a criminal offence to connect critical systems to any public network in such a way that they can he hacked, or to use M$ software, with all its unnecessary security risks, on such systems.
I was horrified to learn the other day that banks are using Win XP in ATM machines, it is totally inappropriate. Such a thing needs only a small embedded microcontroller with no real OS as such, in fact the more removed from mainstream PCs that the thing is, the less likely it is to be hacked, especially if it has no capability to be reprogrammed without access to the hardware from the inside of the bank.
Same with other systems, they might need to get data online but should have no facility to download program code of any sort
Of course almost all of these incidents would be avoided if people dumped IE and Lookout, and used decent browser and email software, and in the case of really critical systems, a secure OS like OpenBSD, instead of Monopoly trash.
Nothing to do with how he was caught of course. He most likely was sufficiently stupid to upload the virus from his own machine, has he used an Internet Cafe or an insecure wireless network he would have been untraceable.
It would be a good idea if people had to show ID to use an Internet Cafe, and wireless networks were banned entirely. I rate security higher than the imagined need, dreamed up by marketing men, to be able to use a PC anywhere, with no wires. Now I am going well off topic, but security matters, and a generic right to upload what you want, where you want, with no positive check on your ID, is a serious threat to other people's security and should not be allowed.
I don't know how severely German law can punish this scumbag, but life imprisonment with no hope of parole sounds about right to me. There must be an effective deterrent.
One evil genius and a small team of good technicians could do it, given the plutonium. A basic weapon would not need to be all that much bigger than the plutonium core, depending on how fast the detonation velocity of the conventional explosive is. The yield-enhancement features which make the thing much bigger would not be too important to a terrorist. In fact, a low explosive yield, tons rather than kilotons, of TNT equivalent, might be of more use to a terrorist, AFAIK the fall-out from unreacted plutonium etc would be very much worse, and the area might be uninhabitable for a very long time. Apparently there was minimal fallout in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, people were mostly injured or killed by radiation absorbed by their bodies in the few microseconds of the blast, although the horrific deaths are probably continuing to this day. I strongly suspect that a low-yield weapon in a modern city would kill a lot more people, maybe a few hundred by blast and direct radiation, but a million might inhale plutonium dust before they could be evacuated, all of them would die, mostly of lung cancer.
However,if you want to get it past radiation detectors, you have to do a lot more, although AFAIK most of the output from the plutonium, and probably the polonium in the initiator, is alpha and easily stopped.
But, my guess is that an inexperienced team who could get sufficient plutonium might try a cylindrical configuration, it might be even easier to get the simulations correct, and it might fit more easily in a briefcase, but it would use more material.
As computers are widespread, and everything you need to know to build a weapon is published (why that was ever allowed, I don't understand!), the only means of control is to restrict the circulation of plutonium. It makes me sick to think that enough for maybe 50 or 100 weapons has simply been allowed to go missing over the years. Much of it might simply be lost, not in the hands of the wrong people, but where is it, and who is it polluting?
I would be even more worried if large amounts of U235 went missing, an idiot could make a uranium bomb using published information, nothing remotely high-tech is required, but that one would be heavy. Even worse, a suicidal maniac with 2 pieces of U235 could create a "fizzle" with no extra hardware, it would kill a lot of people if used in a crowded place such as a city. Note that the Hiroshima bomb was untested, they knew it must work, even in 1945, with no simulation. The test at Alamogordo was for the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki.
BTW you are right about the silver in Fort Knox, but it got recycled afterwards, and was used because of a wartime shortage of copper. I don't think a terrorist would go that route, they would not need a uranium enrichment plant for a plutonium weapon, AFAIK plutonium is "relatively" easily separated from used reactor fuel rods by a chemical process. But, stealing used fuel rods would be suicidal, and it would need very elaborate robotic handling to be able to do the processing. I think that any makeshift processing facility would leak so much radiation that it would soon be discovered.
I think that society as a whole needs to think about installing many more radiation detectors (they can be cheap and unobtrusive) so that unauthorised movements of radioactive materials will be spotted. They will also help prevent accidents such as the one in the US some years ago when a cobalt source was melted d
I see some sensible person has modded him down.
The good thing is that if someone like that opened his mouth at work nowadays, and ethnic minorities were present, as they usually are in a moderate-sized company, he would have to be fired immediately, or the company could be in very serious legal trouble for racism. But that type still air their views elsewhere, simply stirring up mistrust, hatred and offence where none need exist.
Most places I have worked since have been singularly free of that sort of attitude, I am glad to say, and, being Scottish, I don't get as much abuse from the English as was common once upon a time. Some things are improving, but not sadly in certain parts of the world, where they still revile each over over petty differences of ethnic origin, or even less.
But I still say that the UK, with or without the US or the UN, ought to get rid of Mugabe, to protect the general public in Zimbabwe. Actually we have a prison in the UK that could hold the guy, a real luxury apartment, AFAIK they built two super deluxe cells for the Lockerbie bombers and only one was found guilty, or maybe that cell is reserved for Saddam? But only oil money matters to our elected rulers, not morality, public safety or human rights. Sad..... A bit of fair and impartial justice would work wonders in Africa, it would help pave the way for things we are discussing here such as better internet access.