I don't think that the pernicious evil of communism has anything to do with this, but a lot more to do with the state extracting as much work as possible, and then a bit more, from each individual, while providing as little reward as possible, lots of compulsion but no incentives. That is why the industry in communist countries was a bad joke, the output was trash.... (Actually that reminds me of an organisation in Redmond, I wonder if Sir B. is a latent communist, the company output is certainly trash, as usually is his own verbal output...) FOSS works because individuals do what they want, when they want, to make it work, with no compulsion whatsoever (except for the few paid developers, who are not actually necessary to the process, although it helps that people like IBM do pay developers...). Most of these guys have another job, often a fairly well paid one, because they are of above average ability. they develop software in their own time, often because they have a need than canot be filled by the junk products of a rotten industry controlled by a single Criminal Monopoly of very low technical ability.
FOSS will be around long after Microtrash is forgotten.
There are organisations who collect old PCs (often not very old, certainly even 500MHz machines are being chucked out by large organisations who are upgrading) and ship them out to Africa etc. Now, maybe someone should organise the software side a bit better. No point burdening the non-existent economy with the cost of a windoze licence.
A standard configuration of Linux with OpenOffice, Mozilla, and other useful things could be put together quite easily, volunteers could copy a few CDs to help the effort.....
Give them network cards and they can learn about networking, even if they don't have a decent link to the outside world, the local community can still have its own web server. It would have educational use, particularly health education. I don't think that there are all that many developers yet in Africa, but give them the tools and in a few years the next generation will be. But first, or in parallel with this, they need to be rid of murderous scumbags like Mugabe, they need reliable supplies of water and food, etc.
It would not actually cost the western world very much to set the ball rolling in these areas. The African continent is fully capable of being self-sufficient if it was allowed to be, with a bit of guidance along the way. They have the potential for producing food, energy and vital raw materials.
It is because of nasty, evil, self-opinionated, racist morons like you, whom I suspect of being white, and other nasty, evil, self-opinionated, racist morons like Mugabe, who as we know is black, that the problems of Africa continue. Cut it out now, this blatant racism has gone far enough. There is no need to hate people of a different colour, or in Mugabe's case, same colour, different tribe. It achieves nothing except death and destruction in the end.
It is far too late to stop the perceived problems spreading to Europe, in fact many of the problems of Africa came from Europe in the first place. And don't use the word "nigger", you can face prosecution for doing so, certainly in the UK.
And before you ask, I am white, not that it should matter, any decent person would feel the same about your vile attitude.
Someone please moderate this imbecile into oblivion.
If we need a new category it should be "Vile Scumbags" and you should be sent there at once.
I guess you live in the US, where you seem to have had free, or at least fixed-price, unlimited time local calls since you had telephones (well maybe not quite...). Most of the world actually pays by the minute, in the UK, BT and the useless cable company NTL charge by the minute for telephone calls, however many ISPs have an 0800 number which gives you free calls to them, that is paid for out of your monthly fee to the ISP instead. However, only serious internet users pay for their ISP, most have a "free" ISP and pay for the phone call, on a 0845 number, the ISP then gets paid a small amount by the phone company.
I would prefer the US model, but would like it even more if NTL, who have been ripping me off with a digital cable TV box for several years now, would finally deliver their promise of broadband. Now, that would be somewhat more expensive, but not timed, although they have been rumoured to be capping the monthly download.
None of us has a perfect system, but I do feel sorry for these guys in Zimbabwe, with a useless, malevolent dictator like Mugabe, who is at least as evil as Saddam, they are not likely to get their internet arrangements improved any time soon.
I hope someone discovers oil in Zimbabwe, so the cretin Dubya and his puppet Tony B. Liar have an excuse to rid the world of him, preferably with a single bullet, without involving the country in a war. The people of Zimbabwe deserve to have the same human rights as anyone else, they should be able to rely on someone to rid them of that monster. Now, we say the other day that in Lithuania, internet access is regarded as a basic human right.....
I always try to buy a distro, it is far better to have some support and it avoids hundreds of hours of download time. Also, some of the money helps fund development, and you may get a few extra bits which are not free.
I think that very many people do this, and always have, otherwise SuSE, Xandros, etc would not exist. Those who do not buy a boxed set quite possibly borrow one from a friend instead.
But, if and when I get broadband, I will be downloading a lot more, although I still intend to buy SuSE 9.1 when it becomes available, and I have a subscription for FreeBSD CDs.
Convenience is the thing, I don't have lots of surplus cash, but I do think it is worth paying to avoid a lot of hassle. But those who want, or need, to download should still do so.
You could look at it another way perhaps, and consider that when you can walk into any computer shop and buy a Linux distro off the shelf, alongside Windoze, it has really become a credible OS. we are not quite there yet, not every shop stocks it, but my copy of SuSE 9.0 came from Foyles, a large bookshop in London, who don't really sell much software, yet they had 2 or 3 Linux distros, but no Windoze.
As to the manuals, yes, in a good variety of languages, but the thought of printing all that and then binding it like a book (A5 size?) is quite off-putting, and I do have 2 good printers, a Kyocera laser for B&W, and a Minolta laser for colour. But working with a huge A4 size folder is not very nice. It would be better for those in third-world countries, and developing countries like Egypt, where this discussion began, to get a local printer to run off a few hundred or thousand copies, they are often geared up to do that with quantities of textbooks and so on that a western printer would not consider.
Maybe the answer is to simply produce the CD/DVD centrally (for efficiency, a nice bulk run) and package up the distro locally with a boot floppy which will set the local language, or at least ask the question in the local language, and a locally printed manual.
...than what you have to pay to get a specification for USB, or PCMCIA cards, or many other things. The cost of getting the documentation kills many small projects before they begin, this at least is priced within the reach of most people who will actually need it.
But, I expect I will not be one of them, I am not into that kind of programming. However, I would like to get at proper USB, PCI and PCMCIA specifications right now, and others from time to time, without paying silly money. Oh yes, and a proper, complete and accurate set of Windoze API documentation...... (even the Monopolist probably does not have such a thing!) Now, about SCO Unix..........
Those who really can't afford the book or only need a few bits of info can always use the web site, no such ability with the othrs I have mentioned. Standards should be accessible to everyone at a fair price, preferably free, that way they can be worked to accurately, so everyone benefits. A book like this is at the high end of the price range, but worth every cent if it helps someone write less buggy code.
Outlook is a major security hole, which lots of people would be glad to get rid of, and it needs an expensive Exchange server, again a buggy and insecure piece of excrement from Redmond. It is also not very good at what it does, and its user interface is far from perfect.
There are alternatives, the German government part-funded Kroupware, I think Ximian are doing something, SuSE can also provide something, and do IBM not now own Lotus, of Notes fame? And some people put Wikis and similar on their intranet, there are also lots of other possibilities for using web-based interfaces with a bit of php and mysql on the intranet server. So, I don't think that an exact Outlook clone is a thing which is needed. In fact, if you give people one interface, the web browser, you simplify things.
You could actually run an entire desktop from a slightly customised Mozilla, with some extra buttons to start OpenOffice etc, they would never see the underlying OS except maybe XDM or similar to log in. or you could run the whole thing from a slightly modified OpenOffice......
Either way, it would not take much effort to create a fully integrated office desktop. Maybe Sun have already done that, I have not seen their product yet.
It was actually Win 3.1 applications, and yes, they did run very much better, and the OS did not fall over several times each day. The split between Bill and IBM happened before Windoze 95.
The only thing that I remember as being wrong with OS/2 was the installation, at a time when few people had a CD drive, I think there must have been nearly 50 floppies in the box. Admittedly a few of them were not needed every time, but...... Yet the installed system ran beautifully on a 486DX33 with 16MB RAM, and 340MB HDD (SCSI, which Windoze does not handle very well). WordPerfect ran perfectly, also lots of DOS programs, in fact the claim that it was a better DOS than DOS was certainly true.
Sad that it failed as a result of deceptive tactics by the Monopolist, not for any technical reason. And, of course, the Monopolist got a licence fee, rumoured to be about $20, for the Windoze content, for every copy sold.
That could, and probably does happen, but most people who contract out their manufacturing to other fabs seem to do all right. The original ARM chips were made that way, for example. (Now the technology is simply licensed to anyone who will pay the money, they can get their own fab or someone else to make it). I guess that Transmeta must also be using someone else's fab, evidently fairly successfully. Quantity and ease of manufacture and test may have a lot to do with it. Given a huge market, the fabs would be competing with each other for the business, and price cutting would follow, like anything else, but with a small market, the fabs can take it or leave it, they have plenty of other work, so they can charge a premium price.
Collusion between fabs to force the price up would be illegal in many countries, but not trying very hard to get the price down would be legal, and understandable in the circumstances. Collusion may well have happened, it would be hard to prove, but there are unscrupulous people in every business, and not necessarily the most senior management, who do not necessarily know all that goes on. But I think it was simple economics. It would have been different if half of the top PC manufacturers had committed fully to RAMBUS, the fabs would have been actively chasing the business.
I think that RAMBUS was a bad idea anyway, simple as that, and the apparent McBride-like ethics involved did absolutely nothing to enhance its business case. It is effectively dead. But, it may be time for a new technology that actually works properly, and is sufficiently simple to be manufacturable at low cost. To gain acceptance, it will need to be licensed on a sensible basis. Any ideas?
Yes, it is spelled "it", but as you already got it right, why ask?
But, I think you might mean hypocrisy which Sir Bill's fairly mediocre spellchecker seems to accept. Of course, that might be the US spelling, not necessarily correct English.
Also, there is no inventive step, it is obvious to anyone skilled in the art (i.e. any gardener, fruit-grower, plant biologist, casual observer....), and there is an indeterminate amount of prior art, these mutants may have been seen before.
Most countries would reject an application like this immediately. The US patents system is rapidly sinking into international disrepute, mainly due to one Convicted Monopolist and their associates. If Dubya or his properly elected successor cares about the reputation of their country, they will do something about it.
Meanwhile, I would not trust anything from M$ to be free of bugs, hidden costs, or toxic effects, so I would not touch one. If Sir Bill wants to be the human guineau-pig, fine......
I hereby declare that all of my DNA is copyright, and may not be reproduced without consent, which will not normally be given, for any purpose whatsoever, including but without limitation, use in any application for any patent for anything whatsoever, tangible or intangible.
There now, Sir Bill can't patent me, at least.......
Yes, and please do dual-licence under GPL and BSD, especially if it is something useful like a device driver, which can benefit all major free operating systems.
The simple expedient of doing all modifications and enhancements under the BSD licence and then contributing the result back as GPL code will keep the process legal for ever, no need to fork. So, the source tree should be BSD. Simple.
That way, there is maximum benefit for everyone, but the greater mass (at the moment) of Linux use will help to discourage any proprietary forks. And, it might help achieve a better balance between BSD and Linux, both are needed, both are good, both represent the labours of lots of highly competent people, but each is optimum in a different application area. Anyway, maintaining choice is a good thing.
This seems to me to be a little bit excessive, unnecessary, and making it a human rights issue seems to me to be an excessive but understandable reaction to having emerged from the horrific opression of communism.
In the UK we do not have full cellphone coverage, the fact that there are 5 competing operators makes it even less economically viable to equip remote or mountainous areas where, perversely, they are more likely to be needed in cases of genuine emergency. Having full internet coverage by any means, except maybe by hovering airships, which is being seriously considered to cover rural areas, is simply impossible. Maybe Estonia has suddenly become very rich, if so, well and good, but I think in most countries there would be more pressing needs. Nonetheless technically it is quite an achievement to have got so far, and I am impressed.
So why can't my cable company, NTL, give me broadband? I live in London, the largest city in the UK, if not Europe. It really makes me sick, maybe I should move to Estonia, or make it a human rights issue when we are freed from the horrific oppression of Blairism.
Yes, and I seem to remember SuSE and possibly Xandros doing much the same, but the range of languages was fairly limited, which could be quite hard on some people. I would guess that Debian have been more conscientious than anyone else about this, although most distros probably try quite hard. But then you come up against the fact that the printed manuals, which you do need sometimes (well, I do, some clever people may manage very well without...) are only available in a limited range of languages.
I guess that the answer is that as much of the localisation work as possible should be done locally, including the printing. In any case, locals always know their own language best, think of how many manuals for Japanese equipment that you see translated very badly into English, for example! I don't think that Egyptians would think much of Windoze manuals (such as they are!) written in best Redmond Arabic either, especially as Sir Bill and some of his senior people seem to have trouble with English. But I digress...
Thinking about this, much of the localisation work could be done by older schoolchildren as a project, after all, a fair number will be learning English and at least some computing skills, and they need worthwhile things to do.
A very fair comment! I wish I had the programming expertise to do just that, and a few other things too, or lots of money so I could employ a programmer to do these things!
I can just about program in C on Linux, or small embedded systems, or anywhere else that supports a reasonably simple set of system calls or direct hardware access, but comprehending the gigantic mess known as Windoze is well beyond me. One of the difficulties is the lack of documentation......
But, maybe, if I get seriously back into programming again, I will have another look, but don't expect to see anything very soon, if ever. There a few other things I would like to fix also....
I did have a quick look at some Windoze monitor "drivers", which are really only settings, there is no code involved (obviously!) for a monitor, but so far I could not see anything which would help me to compute a modeline, for example. Now I can just about visualise how a foreign OS could search out things like.inf and.ini files in the Windoze partition, in fact that would be quite easy, a shell script could do it, albeit not very efficiently, but good for initial experiments, and perl, in which I am not proficient, might be useful in parsing these files and extracting interesting bits. Maybe the Wine project has code for reading the registry..... But it seems to me to be a fairly major task to put it all together. Still, I am feeling more motivated, I will give it another look asap.
Well, maybe you could have volunteered to do a bit of the translation?
There is one problem, if installing from CD/DVD for example, how do you tell it what language to use before the first text, usually in English, is on the screen? If you are doing a dual boot with Windoze for example, the installer could be made to be sufficiently intelligent to pick up the language settings from the existing Windoze (why the X server, amongst other things, doesn't try to get it's settings that way remains a mystery to me, the Windoze registry and.ini files contain lots of useful things, the video settings are typical of what might be useful, same for networking things, printer etc). But, to get a standalone boot with correct language selection, would really need something in the BIOS.
Most distros of course have a very long pick list by country, but the initial instructions to do something remain in English, usually of the Americanised sort with words like colour spelled wrongly.
How about a world map? Is there any universal symbol that would invite people to click on their country on the map, without any knowledge of any foreign (to them) language?
No, it is a hardware problem, you reverse the leads to the spindle motor. Software can't fix everything.....
Heeeee-Heeeee
Seriously though, I think you will find internationalisation in Linux is far more advanced than in Windoze, and I would point out that a fair proportion of the Egyptian population are Jewish, the Arabs are a different race to the native Egyptians, and there are others, each with their own dialects and preferences, and a lot also speak English, certainly for business use, which may have implications on the language support needed. Was there not a recent problem with M$ support of Hebrew, which caused them to be banned from somewhere?
In any case, Egypt is a country of sufficient resources, together with their neighbours, to be able to find enough people to tackle the internationalisation of bits that might not have been done already.
The point about Open Source is that even for the smallest linguistic populations, it is viable to do the necessary work. There are not too many Icelandic speakers, and I am told that has been done. Closed source tends to be racist, or at best discriminatory, not by intent, but by result, because it can't viably accomodate everyone.
Of course the offence may not have been committed in the UK, and it may not be possible to extradite him, even if caught. But, under the Computer Misuse Act he would face a very severe sentence. Technically, anything that interferes with the operation of another computer program, temporarily or permanently, constitutes a criminal offence, however there is a defence of ignorance in the very common case of bugs and other programming errors.
Certain M$ programs, which blow away or cripple other installed software (even the act of installing Windoze into a partition blows away the MBR, which may have been set up for Linux, BSD etc in other partitions, clearly constitutes an offence, it would be nice to get Sir Bill in court to invoke the only possible offence, which is to admit ignorance....). The law is applied to hackers when caught, AFAIK there are a few in prison now, and others have faced huge fines.
Even before this excellent law was introduced, they used to get you for the catch-all of "stealing electricity", which was also used for phone hackers etc. The fact is that now, if it is a deliberate act, as writing, and then releasing a virus would be, there is no defence, and rightly so.
If he was involved with any other people and there was the slightest intention to cripple the coastguard, or anything else, the charge of "conspiracy" would also stick, if it extened to "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice", i.e. disrupting any part of the legal system, police, (and I think that would include Coastguard) etc, the maximum sentence AFAIK is life imprisonment, and it would be well-deserved.
I would hope that in cases like this, every civilised country would apply their maximum penalty (in China that consists of summary execution, and the family get the bill for the bullet, maybe a little extreme, but I did say civilised country), it is the only way that viruses will be brought under control.
Of course, using any M$ system for anything critical is extreme folly, and if someone was injured or killed, could be alleged to be criminal negligence. So might be the act of connecting a nominally secure system to a public network without good cause and extremely good firewalls.
I usually work in safety-critical industries, aircraft, railway at the moment, and shortly nuclear, and the thought of using any M$ product in any of these areas is quite horrific. It has been said that certain imbecilic people in the US and elsewhere do control nuclear reactors, oil/gas installations, chemical plants etc with NT, and I know that some years ago, M$ were trying to get into aircraft systems. All of this would be illegal in the UK, none of the relevant certification authorities would allow such a thing, however there may be a gap between the perception of things which would directly cause disaster if the software failed, and those which are part of a management system. If the emergency services lose functionality and an ambulance is not promptly dispatched to the scene of an accident, someone may die, (and tragically have very recently, only I don't know if computer systems were involved or if it was a human foul-up or just inadequate resourcing, the enquiry will determine which), and the same here for the rescue side of the coastguard. But, I don't know that what are basically management systems, need or get any kind of certification by any competent authority. Even the banks, who stand to lose billions, have insecure systems, again no proper certification, because the only bodies who are able to introduce mandatory standards enforceable by law are the various government agencies concerned with air, rail and nuclear safety, for example.
There are big issues which need to be addressed, involving not only software, but adequately redundant hardware, power supplies, etc, and it would be useful (but sadly unlikely) if there were common world-wide standards which people could work to. Food for thought?
Can a twice Convicted Monopolist who is not showing the slightest sign of reform be trusted with anything like this? And will the whitelsit be reliable and secure? Or was that a silly question, words like "reliable" and "secure" do not belong in the same sentence as "Microsoft", or "Gates".
I confidently predict, based on very consistent past behaviour by the Criminal Monopolist, that the whole thing will be a technical and security disaster, and will inflict massive damage and disruption worldwide.
Meanwhile, surely any attempt to extend Sir Scumbag's monopoly should surely result in action by the court? This is clearly an attempt (again, and again, and again...., like everything they do now, having long ago run out of anything approximating to innovation) to use their confirmed monopoly in one field to leverage the extension of it to another. The Scumbag basically wants to control all email in the world, in fact he needs to, because his paranoid psychotic mind compels him to, as it has compelled him to dominate every market he touches. He must be stopped.
That is the simple answer. It is a rotten, outdated, bug-infested and insecure piece of trash which was only cobbled together in a hurry to trash Netscape and has now been abandoned (i.e. Sir Bill has lost interest....)
Why does anyone anywhere still use it? And why do grossly incompetent web designers still make sites that only work properly in IE? (Likely they are the same bunch of no-hopers who also use small fixed-size fonts so those of us with high-res screens and IE can't read the text.... Funnily enough, Mozilla has a text zoom for such situations, IE only zooms non-fixed text! No doubt they also use feeble tools like Frontpage.)
We have, very predictably, been hit very badly today at work, the IT Dept are blissfully unaware of the issues which reliance on the combination of trash products of the Convicted Monopolist, and the unreliable anti-virus protection of McAFraud can cause. Cost of cleanup today, maybe 5000. Cost of issuing everyone with Mozilla and IEradicator, zero. But will they do it?
Think of the amount that would be saved if governments passed laws forbidding the use of IE or Lookout, or if shareholders held company directors responsible for the losses due to their incompetence in allowing use of such junk.
This technique has been around for some time, and is unsafe because it uses high ultrasonic power levels. To generate audio frequencies, you need to generate a beat frequency between two ultrasonic frequency, simply adding does not work, there has to be a non-linear element involved (as in RF mixing for example, in the front end of a radio receiver). The non-linear element is the air itself, but only if you push the level up way above 120dB. Now, many authorities believe that the safe pressure level is the same at ultrasonic frequencies as in the audio band, or maybe marginally higher, but there is not the slightest evidence to suggest that what you can't hear will not to damage, far more evidence says that it will. 120dB is the level at which damage begins almost immediately in the audio band. It is well-established that ultrasonic intruder alarms (about 125dB at 1 metre) cause headaches (I know this from direct experience), and seem to have fallen into disuse in most places. Same for most other high-power ultrasonics, you rarely see them nowadays. (Medical ultrasonics propagate through the liquid elements of the body, the power level is quite high, but the vast impedance mismatch at the air/liquid boundary causes a huge amount of attenuation so very little energy becomes airborne, same effect as why when you swim under water you can't hear people talking on the surface, but in reverse).
I would be very alarmed indeed if I saw someone attempting to generate an acoustic pressure of over 120dB (I think they need 150dB to make this work well), and not just for my ears, to say nothing of the effects on certain animals, bats etc.
This whole thing is just speculation and hype, with total disregard for safety and environmental issues.
I thought that M$ were being closely supervised to see that they did not increase their monopoly any further. It is disgraceful that this is being allowed. It is of course the beginning of the end for M$, Longhorn will be late, incompatible, bug-ridden and insecure, like all that went before, and their credibility is at an all-time low. Like the SCOundrel, they have seen that when a company has run out of creative ideas (the only one they ever had was to make a monoploy anyway), the only way it can survive is by getting into a situation where they can sue anyone and everyone who dares to compete.
Of course, software patents have no legal validity in most of the world, what may happen is that development of competing products will simply be done elsewhere, and they will be sold by download over the net, with very little chance of the Convicted Monopolist being able to prevent it, short of imposing censorship on the US part of the internet.
I hope that when the psychotic moron currently posing as president is kicked out, things will change and the law concerning monopolies and patents will be properly enforced in the US. Most of the software patents which are granted are illegal due to prior art, the patent examiners are so overloaded and under-funded that they slip through the net. But, bully-boys like the scumbags in Redmond have the money to bankrupt any challenger by delaying tactics to the point where the legal fees escalate. The patent problem must be dealt with at source, not by allowing a Convicted Monopolist to ride roughshod over everyone else.
Don't confuse the words "deprecated" and "depreciated". You seem to be using the wrong one in your sig, although both might apply to things being discussed here.
Well, they did not publicise that very well. It does not say a lot about their marketing!
It still does not inspire me to acquire a copy, I can't see any advantage at all. OK, some people may want to run Windoze apps, AFAIK it has full support with Wine etc, but does that make it better than Xandros, or Codeweavers Crossover Office (if I have got the name right)?
It gives me the general impression of being a triumph of marketing over engineering, like various other fairly grim products I can think of (Porsche 911, Windoze ME,.........)
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FOSS will be around long after Microtrash is forgotten.
A standard configuration of Linux with OpenOffice, Mozilla, and other useful things could be put together quite easily, volunteers could copy a few CDs to help the effort.....
Give them network cards and they can learn about networking, even if they don't have a decent link to the outside world, the local community can still have its own web server. It would have educational use, particularly health education. I don't think that there are all that many developers yet in Africa, but give them the tools and in a few years the next generation will be. But first, or in parallel with this, they need to be rid of murderous scumbags like Mugabe, they need reliable supplies of water and food, etc.
It would not actually cost the western world very much to set the ball rolling in these areas. The African continent is fully capable of being self-sufficient if it was allowed to be, with a bit of guidance along the way. They have the potential for producing food, energy and vital raw materials.
It is far too late to stop the perceived problems spreading to Europe, in fact many of the problems of Africa came from Europe in the first place. And don't use the word "nigger", you can face prosecution for doing so, certainly in the UK.
And before you ask, I am white, not that it should matter, any decent person would feel the same about your vile attitude.
Someone please moderate this imbecile into oblivion.
If we need a new category it should be "Vile Scumbags" and you should be sent there at once.
I would prefer the US model, but would like it even more if NTL, who have been ripping me off with a digital cable TV box for several years now, would finally deliver their promise of broadband. Now, that would be somewhat more expensive, but not timed, although they have been rumoured to be capping the monthly download.
None of us has a perfect system, but I do feel sorry for these guys in Zimbabwe, with a useless, malevolent dictator like Mugabe, who is at least as evil as Saddam, they are not likely to get their internet arrangements improved any time soon.
I hope someone discovers oil in Zimbabwe, so the cretin Dubya and his puppet Tony B. Liar have an excuse to rid the world of him, preferably with a single bullet, without involving the country in a war. The people of Zimbabwe deserve to have the same human rights as anyone else, they should be able to rely on someone to rid them of that monster. Now, we say the other day that in Lithuania, internet access is regarded as a basic human right.....
I think that very many people do this, and always have, otherwise SuSE, Xandros, etc would not exist. Those who do not buy a boxed set quite possibly borrow one from a friend instead.
But, if and when I get broadband, I will be downloading a lot more, although I still intend to buy SuSE 9.1 when it becomes available, and I have a subscription for FreeBSD CDs.
Convenience is the thing, I don't have lots of surplus cash, but I do think it is worth paying to avoid a lot of hassle. But those who want, or need, to download should still do so.
You could look at it another way perhaps, and consider that when you can walk into any computer shop and buy a Linux distro off the shelf, alongside Windoze, it has really become a credible OS. we are not quite there yet, not every shop stocks it, but my copy of SuSE 9.0 came from Foyles, a large bookshop in London, who don't really sell much software, yet they had 2 or 3 Linux distros, but no Windoze.
As to the manuals, yes, in a good variety of languages, but the thought of printing all that and then binding it like a book (A5 size?) is quite off-putting, and I do have 2 good printers, a Kyocera laser for B&W, and a Minolta laser for colour. But working with a huge A4 size folder is not very nice. It would be better for those in third-world countries, and developing countries like Egypt, where this discussion began, to get a local printer to run off a few hundred or thousand copies, they are often geared up to do that with quantities of textbooks and so on that a western printer would not consider.
Maybe the answer is to simply produce the CD/DVD centrally (for efficiency, a nice bulk run) and package up the distro locally with a boot floppy which will set the local language, or at least ask the question in the local language, and a locally printed manual.
But, I expect I will not be one of them, I am not into that kind of programming. However, I would like to get at proper USB, PCI and PCMCIA specifications right now, and others from time to time, without paying silly money. Oh yes, and a proper, complete and accurate set of Windoze API documentation...... (even the Monopolist probably does not have such a thing!) Now, about SCO Unix..........
Those who really can't afford the book or only need a few bits of info can always use the web site, no such ability with the othrs I have mentioned. Standards should be accessible to everyone at a fair price, preferably free, that way they can be worked to accurately, so everyone benefits. A book like this is at the high end of the price range, but worth every cent if it helps someone write less buggy code.
There are alternatives, the German government part-funded Kroupware, I think Ximian are doing something, SuSE can also provide something, and do IBM not now own Lotus, of Notes fame? And some people put Wikis and similar on their intranet, there are also lots of other possibilities for using web-based interfaces with a bit of php and mysql on the intranet server. So, I don't think that an exact Outlook clone is a thing which is needed. In fact, if you give people one interface, the web browser, you simplify things.
You could actually run an entire desktop from a slightly customised Mozilla, with some extra buttons to start OpenOffice etc, they would never see the underlying OS except maybe XDM or similar to log in. or you could run the whole thing from a slightly modified OpenOffice......
Either way, it would not take much effort to create a fully integrated office desktop. Maybe Sun have already done that, I have not seen their product yet.
The only thing that I remember as being wrong with OS/2 was the installation, at a time when few people had a CD drive, I think there must have been nearly 50 floppies in the box. Admittedly a few of them were not needed every time, but...... Yet the installed system ran beautifully on a 486DX33 with 16MB RAM, and 340MB HDD (SCSI, which Windoze does not handle very well). WordPerfect ran perfectly, also lots of DOS programs, in fact the claim that it was a better DOS than DOS was certainly true.
Sad that it failed as a result of deceptive tactics by the Monopolist, not for any technical reason. And, of course, the Monopolist got a licence fee, rumoured to be about $20, for the Windoze content, for every copy sold.
Collusion between fabs to force the price up would be illegal in many countries, but not trying very hard to get the price down would be legal, and understandable in the circumstances. Collusion may well have happened, it would be hard to prove, but there are unscrupulous people in every business, and not necessarily the most senior management, who do not necessarily know all that goes on. But I think it was simple economics. It would have been different if half of the top PC manufacturers had committed fully to RAMBUS, the fabs would have been actively chasing the business.
I think that RAMBUS was a bad idea anyway, simple as that, and the apparent McBride-like ethics involved did absolutely nothing to enhance its business case. It is effectively dead. But, it may be time for a new technology that actually works properly, and is sufficiently simple to be manufacturable at low cost. To gain acceptance, it will need to be licensed on a sensible basis. Any ideas?
But, I think you might mean hypocrisy which Sir Bill's fairly mediocre spellchecker seems to accept. Of course, that might be the US spelling, not necessarily correct English.
Most countries would reject an application like this immediately. The US patents system is rapidly sinking into international disrepute, mainly due to one Convicted Monopolist and their associates. If Dubya or his properly elected successor cares about the reputation of their country, they will do something about it.
Meanwhile, I would not trust anything from M$ to be free of bugs, hidden costs, or toxic effects, so I would not touch one. If Sir Bill wants to be the human guineau-pig, fine......
I hereby declare that all of my DNA is copyright, and may not be reproduced without consent, which will not normally be given, for any purpose whatsoever, including but without limitation, use in any application for any patent for anything whatsoever, tangible or intangible.
There now, Sir Bill can't patent me, at least.......
The simple expedient of doing all modifications and enhancements under the BSD licence and then contributing the result back as GPL code will keep the process legal for ever, no need to fork. So, the source tree should be BSD. Simple.
That way, there is maximum benefit for everyone, but the greater mass (at the moment) of Linux use will help to discourage any proprietary forks. And, it might help achieve a better balance between BSD and Linux, both are needed, both are good, both represent the labours of lots of highly competent people, but each is optimum in a different application area. Anyway, maintaining choice is a good thing.
In the UK we do not have full cellphone coverage, the fact that there are 5 competing operators makes it even less economically viable to equip remote or mountainous areas where, perversely, they are more likely to be needed in cases of genuine emergency. Having full internet coverage by any means, except maybe by hovering airships, which is being seriously considered to cover rural areas, is simply impossible. Maybe Estonia has suddenly become very rich, if so, well and good, but I think in most countries there would be more pressing needs. Nonetheless technically it is quite an achievement to have got so far, and I am impressed.
So why can't my cable company, NTL, give me broadband? I live in London, the largest city in the UK, if not Europe. It really makes me sick, maybe I should move to Estonia, or make it a human rights issue when we are freed from the horrific oppression of Blairism.
I guess that the answer is that as much of the localisation work as possible should be done locally, including the printing. In any case, locals always know their own language best, think of how many manuals for Japanese equipment that you see translated very badly into English, for example! I don't think that Egyptians would think much of Windoze manuals (such as they are!) written in best Redmond Arabic either, especially as Sir Bill and some of his senior people seem to have trouble with English. But I digress...
Thinking about this, much of the localisation work could be done by older schoolchildren as a project, after all, a fair number will be learning English and at least some computing skills, and they need worthwhile things to do.
I can just about program in C on Linux, or small embedded systems, or anywhere else that supports a reasonably simple set of system calls or direct hardware access, but comprehending the gigantic mess known as Windoze is well beyond me. One of the difficulties is the lack of documentation......
But, maybe, if I get seriously back into programming again, I will have another look, but don't expect to see anything very soon, if ever. There a few other things I would like to fix also....
I did have a quick look at some Windoze monitor "drivers", which are really only settings, there is no code involved (obviously!) for a monitor, but so far I could not see anything which would help me to compute a modeline, for example. Now I can just about visualise how a foreign OS could search out things like .inf and .ini files in the Windoze partition, in fact that would be quite easy, a shell script could do it, albeit not very efficiently, but good for initial experiments, and perl, in which I am not proficient, might be useful in parsing these files and extracting interesting bits. Maybe the Wine project has code for reading the registry..... But it seems to me to be a fairly major task to put it all together. Still, I am feeling more motivated, I will give it another look asap.
There is one problem, if installing from CD/DVD for example, how do you tell it what language to use before the first text, usually in English, is on the screen? If you are doing a dual boot with Windoze for example, the installer could be made to be sufficiently intelligent to pick up the language settings from the existing Windoze (why the X server, amongst other things, doesn't try to get it's settings that way remains a mystery to me, the Windoze registry and .ini files contain lots of useful things, the video settings are typical of what might be useful, same for networking things, printer etc). But, to get a standalone boot with correct language selection, would really need something in the BIOS.
Most distros of course have a very long pick list by country, but the initial instructions to do something remain in English, usually of the Americanised sort with words like colour spelled wrongly.
How about a world map? Is there any universal symbol that would invite people to click on their country on the map, without any knowledge of any foreign (to them) language?
Heeeee-Heeeee
Seriously though, I think you will find internationalisation in Linux is far more advanced than in Windoze, and I would point out that a fair proportion of the Egyptian population are Jewish, the Arabs are a different race to the native Egyptians, and there are others, each with their own dialects and preferences, and a lot also speak English, certainly for business use, which may have implications on the language support needed. Was there not a recent problem with M$ support of Hebrew, which caused them to be banned from somewhere?
In any case, Egypt is a country of sufficient resources, together with their neighbours, to be able to find enough people to tackle the internationalisation of bits that might not have been done already.
The point about Open Source is that even for the smallest linguistic populations, it is viable to do the necessary work. There are not too many Icelandic speakers, and I am told that has been done. Closed source tends to be racist, or at best discriminatory, not by intent, but by result, because it can't viably accomodate everyone.
Has anyone done a Klingon implementation yet?
Certain M$ programs, which blow away or cripple other installed software (even the act of installing Windoze into a partition blows away the MBR, which may have been set up for Linux, BSD etc in other partitions, clearly constitutes an offence, it would be nice to get Sir Bill in court to invoke the only possible offence, which is to admit ignorance....). The law is applied to hackers when caught, AFAIK there are a few in prison now, and others have faced huge fines.
Even before this excellent law was introduced, they used to get you for the catch-all of "stealing electricity", which was also used for phone hackers etc. The fact is that now, if it is a deliberate act, as writing, and then releasing a virus would be, there is no defence, and rightly so.
If he was involved with any other people and there was the slightest intention to cripple the coastguard, or anything else, the charge of "conspiracy" would also stick, if it extened to "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice", i.e. disrupting any part of the legal system, police, (and I think that would include Coastguard) etc, the maximum sentence AFAIK is life imprisonment, and it would be well-deserved.
I would hope that in cases like this, every civilised country would apply their maximum penalty (in China that consists of summary execution, and the family get the bill for the bullet, maybe a little extreme, but I did say civilised country), it is the only way that viruses will be brought under control.
Of course, using any M$ system for anything critical is extreme folly, and if someone was injured or killed, could be alleged to be criminal negligence. So might be the act of connecting a nominally secure system to a public network without good cause and extremely good firewalls.
I usually work in safety-critical industries, aircraft, railway at the moment, and shortly nuclear, and the thought of using any M$ product in any of these areas is quite horrific. It has been said that certain imbecilic people in the US and elsewhere do control nuclear reactors, oil/gas installations, chemical plants etc with NT, and I know that some years ago, M$ were trying to get into aircraft systems. All of this would be illegal in the UK, none of the relevant certification authorities would allow such a thing, however there may be a gap between the perception of things which would directly cause disaster if the software failed, and those which are part of a management system. If the emergency services lose functionality and an ambulance is not promptly dispatched to the scene of an accident, someone may die, (and tragically have very recently, only I don't know if computer systems were involved or if it was a human foul-up or just inadequate resourcing, the enquiry will determine which), and the same here for the rescue side of the coastguard. But, I don't know that what are basically management systems, need or get any kind of certification by any competent authority. Even the banks, who stand to lose billions, have insecure systems, again no proper certification, because the only bodies who are able to introduce mandatory standards enforceable by law are the various government agencies concerned with air, rail and nuclear safety, for example.
There are big issues which need to be addressed, involving not only software, but adequately redundant hardware, power supplies, etc, and it would be useful (but sadly unlikely) if there were common world-wide standards which people could work to. Food for thought?
I confidently predict, based on very consistent past behaviour by the Criminal Monopolist, that the whole thing will be a technical and security disaster, and will inflict massive damage and disruption worldwide.
Meanwhile, surely any attempt to extend Sir Scumbag's monopoly should surely result in action by the court? This is clearly an attempt (again, and again, and again...., like everything they do now, having long ago run out of anything approximating to innovation) to use their confirmed monopoly in one field to leverage the extension of it to another. The Scumbag basically wants to control all email in the world, in fact he needs to, because his paranoid psychotic mind compels him to, as it has compelled him to dominate every market he touches. He must be stopped.
Well said Ian!
Why does anyone anywhere still use it? And why do grossly incompetent web designers still make sites that only work properly in IE? (Likely they are the same bunch of no-hopers who also use small fixed-size fonts so those of us with high-res screens and IE can't read the text.... Funnily enough, Mozilla has a text zoom for such situations, IE only zooms non-fixed text! No doubt they also use feeble tools like Frontpage.)
We have, very predictably, been hit very badly today at work, the IT Dept are blissfully unaware of the issues which reliance on the combination of trash products of the Convicted Monopolist, and the unreliable anti-virus protection of McAFraud can cause. Cost of cleanup today, maybe 5000. Cost of issuing everyone with Mozilla and IEradicator, zero. But will they do it?
Think of the amount that would be saved if governments passed laws forbidding the use of IE or Lookout, or if shareholders held company directors responsible for the losses due to their incompetence in allowing use of such junk.
I would be very alarmed indeed if I saw someone attempting to generate an acoustic pressure of over 120dB (I think they need 150dB to make this work well), and not just for my ears, to say nothing of the effects on certain animals, bats etc.
This whole thing is just speculation and hype, with total disregard for safety and environmental issues.
Of course, software patents have no legal validity in most of the world, what may happen is that development of competing products will simply be done elsewhere, and they will be sold by download over the net, with very little chance of the Convicted Monopolist being able to prevent it, short of imposing censorship on the US part of the internet.
I hope that when the psychotic moron currently posing as president is kicked out, things will change and the law concerning monopolies and patents will be properly enforced in the US. Most of the software patents which are granted are illegal due to prior art, the patent examiners are so overloaded and under-funded that they slip through the net. But, bully-boys like the scumbags in Redmond have the money to bankrupt any challenger by delaying tactics to the point where the legal fees escalate. The patent problem must be dealt with at source, not by allowing a Convicted Monopolist to ride roughshod over everyone else.
Don't confuse the words "deprecated" and "depreciated". You seem to be using the wrong one in your sig, although both might apply to things being discussed here.
It still does not inspire me to acquire a copy, I can't see any advantage at all. OK, some people may want to run Windoze apps, AFAIK it has full support with Wine etc, but does that make it better than Xandros, or Codeweavers Crossover Office (if I have got the name right)?
It gives me the general impression of being a triumph of marketing over engineering, like various other fairly grim products I can think of (Porsche 911, Windoze ME,.........)