Yes, the Frogs made less profit, and their business never recovered after the disaster. Prior to the disaster the Frogs had not done all the safety modifications around the wheel and undercarriage area, but BA had. I suspect that potential custorers of Air France got nervous, and rightly so, when that was revealed. I can't imagine the Frogs allowing anyone else to successfully operate something that they can't, which is why Airbus, having a Froggy bias, pulled the plug on the whole thing, despite offers from people like Sir Richard Branson to buy the aircraft. no support from the manufacturer means no certification, so you can't legally fly. It is theoretically possible for someone else to take on the responsibility, but that would have required a transfer of all the design information etc, from the archives at Airbus, where it was of no use to anyone, as they are not designing anything supersonic. I expect that it has all been destroyed now, just out of what is basically Froggy spite, "our national airline can't run it at a profit, so we will make sure no-one else can..." The documentation ought to have gone to a museum, or even better, be put in the public domain, but then of course they might not be able to stop someone in the future doing the necessaary work to be allowed to resume flying. What was produced largely at the taxpayers expense in the UK, and presumably in France, should not simply be dumped, it ought to belong to those who paid for it.
Aviation is a very dirty business at times, and it is always unwise to get involved in international projects where the French are a major participant. The UK could have built the Concord (no "e") alone, it would most probably have been cheaper, because the costs of collaboration are invariably grossly underestimated by the politicians (Eurofighter being the classic example, at least no Frogs are involved). Had we done so, it would still be flying.
As to fly by wire, the proven track record of disaster to Airbus FBW aircraft (all except 300 and 310 series) proves the point, and if you do a proper analysis, it can be shown to save no weight, not reduce costs (in fact they increase) and it provides many subtle traps to catch out unwary pilots. An Airbus which suffers major systems failure near the ground, and enters the ultimate reversionary mode, with loss of most control surfaces, and impaired control of others, will, in the hands of all but a test pilot (and even then, there is some doubt), crash. Reversion to the last set of mechanical backups has not been demonstrated except at safe altitude. Yet, the A330 in particular suffers from frequent total electrical failure (far more than the failure rate used to justify certification), this takes out all the FBW system, and leaves the crew with very minimal control.
The sheer hypocrisy of Boeing then creating the 777 says it all. That aircraft is only allowed to fly because the certicication authority (FAA) was unable to prove that it is unsafe, previous generations had to be proved to be safe, but with over-complexity that is no longer possible.
People who do the sums correctly know that in installing FBW, you save the weight and maintenance of some wires, pulleys and rods (actually lightweight carbon fibre tubes nowadays), you add a lot of heavy and expensive avionics boxes. So far, it may about balance out, but when you then add the beefing up of the electrical system (failure in the case of the A330), bigger batteries, generators, heavier cables, a bigger ram air turbine or other emergency power supply, etc, the advantage is firmly to the mechanical controls. Then there is the reliability of the avoinics, at least one box will need to be replaced every week or two.
Right now, Airbus has passed Boeing, but not by a great margin, it could be a very long time before a decisive winner emerges. Boeing's biggest mistake was to buy the remnant of McDonnell-Douglas, with their horrendously unsafe DC10, rebadged but still unsafe, as MD11. That lot should simply have been scrapped.
Aviation fuel is not taxed, much to the disadvantage of the environment. If it was taxed at the same rate as automotive fuel is in most of the world, flying would be priced where it should be, i.e. out of reach of most people, and there would be substantial environmental benefit.
Jet aircraft have done far more damage to the ozone layer than anything else.
And weight (of wiring etc) is probably one of the main reasons why the breakers are outside (might be to minimise the length between source and load), the other probably being that you would not want the wiring on the unprotected side of the breaker inside, because of what would happen if it shorted. At the very least, unpleasant smoke and fumes, possibly fire. Virtually every cable insulation will, given sufficient energy, burn or emit toxic fumes. The exceptions may be glass and ceramic, not really practicable.
And before anyone mentions PTFE (Teflon), well it may be OK in a frying pan, but a wiring fault would result in the release of fluorine gas, which would resct with moisture in the air to give hydrofluoric acid. Not good. A frying pan fire could presumably be very serious if the temperature got too high, IIRC about 400 deg C. If you inhale hydrofluoric acid, or get a small amount on the skin, you usually die, fairly unpleasantly. Someone who went to school with me died that way, many years ago, age about 22, from a small skin splash of HF even though it was quickly washed off.
Teflon has been, and probably still is, used in unmanned satellites, OK in the smaller ones where a total loss is not an absolute disaster, but I think it would be frowned upon in things which earn serious money and have to keep working, such as comms sattelites. There will be Teflon bits in the microwave equipment, and in some mechanisms, which can't otherwise be lubricated, but not necessarily on normal wiring.
I don't know what kind of wire NASA currently use, the aerospace industry has been through a variety. At one time, Kapton seemed good, we now know that it is lethal in circuits which have sufficient energy to initiate arcing.
BTW, Kapton and Teflon are OK where there is always insufficient energy available to seriously raise the temperature, in fact I like working with Teflon in particular, but only in the right place.
You can simplify that statement to read "The U.S. is not a democracy". No direct, it is either a democracy,or it is not, and what most of the posts here are showing is that it is not, and its electoral system is about as trustworthy as you would find in places like Zimbabwe, until it is fixed, which it can and must be.
It is sad that the work of Abraham Lincoln and others has been allowed to go into such decline. Maybe when they have proper, reliable, electronic voting everywhere, it might be time to tidy it up properly.
But, there is no point doing so until the vote-counting mechanisms are proved to be reliable. If that can't be done, a return to manual counting would be best, and would have avoided this controversy. It works well in the UK, although it really ought to be replaced to drag us into the 21st century.
It surely is not asking too much of any democracy to ensure that it has mechanisms in place to prevent voting by dead people, for example. Surely a death can be registered in the various systems automatically within a few hours at most. Same for other forms of abuse.
I know that a small amount of abuse happens in the UK, occasionally people are arrested and go to jail of pay a huge fine, and rightly so. With the increase in postal voting here, the amount of fraud is though to be increasing.
Until the civilised countries tidy up our own processes, we should not claim to have any right to try to impose our ideas of democracy (which are fundamentally good, if often flawed in detail) on other societies.
Maybe an independent (if there is such a thing) organisation ought to oversee voting worldwide to ensure that it is as good as it can be. I know that the U.N. often get involved in less stable parts of the world. Every process needs Quality Control, the workings of a democracy are a process, albeit an extraordinarily complex one.
The main weakness of the U.S. system is its complexity, like all complex systems it contains bugs, and is difficult to control and monitor properly. It must also be costly to administer. A simpler system would go wrong less often, and its integrity would be more visible to the public. Your other problem is that you really only have 2 political parties, a better choice would be a good thing. Maybe compulsory voting, as in Australia, would be a good idea too, I would like to see it in the UK also. (The option is available to vote for no-one, if you can't agree with the policies of any candidate, but you do have to make a choice, it prevents the complete apathy which exists elsewhere, especially in the UK, where our current incumbent was elected by well under 20% of the population, most likely because the greater part of the population, who knew that he was a scumbag, could not be bothered to do anything about it.)
A government truly elected by a clear majority of the eligible voting population has a clear mandate to govern, which gives it more credibility at an international level. That is how it should be, but not how it is at present.
For your information, the defence industry in the UK produces things which protect against certain catastrophes, as well as making weapons. The company I will be working for does not make weapons of any type, but certain of their products are used to, amongst other things, prevent meltdown of nuclear reactors. Given that nuclear reactors exist, it would be irresponsible of a competent person to not do his utmost to see that they were as safe as possible. There is a lot of spin-off into other things, even free software (look up tendra on Google if you don't believe me.) Again, there is anti-terrorist work, can anyone say that it would be wrong to devise things which might have prevented 9/11? Such work is for the protection of everyone, it is usually done by different departments, even different companies, from those who make bombs and guns, neither of which I know anything about. And, as I said, I would favour a BSD variant if software was going into any of these things. It is not, BTW, they were only examples of where it might be used, some things have to be done purely in hardware where ultimate safety is concerned, and yes, before you have some smart answer to that, I do know that some irresponsible people run both nuclear reactors and chemical plants on Windoze NT, which would be seriously illegal in the UK.
As it happens, I detest flying, but when I work on aircraft systems, the purpose is again to do as good a job as possible, so they are as safe as can be for those who insist on using the things. I don't pretend in any way whatsoever to be what I am not, unlike your non-president who has done more than anyone else who has ever lived to discredit your country.
I don't have a political view either, except to vote for who seems to be the most honest, in your country the whole system, which once was excellent, now is rotten with corruption. My only view is that it, and your legal system, both urgently need an overhaul (simplification for the legal system, for a start)for the benefit of all the people. Your political system clearly needs to be made to work in a way which removes all suggestions that politicians are open to bribery. At the moment, some scumbag like Sir Bill (and yes, I think my rotten UK government did a very bad thing there, however I think they will be dealt with by the proper democratic process fairly soon, like Dubya) can buy his way out of trouble by making substantial contributions to certain campaign funds. Whether it is true or not, it is seen that way by honest people inside and outside the US, and makes your political system look like some banana republic.
Bush senior was far more honest, and far more intelligent, than his imbecile of a son. It is sad that a bloodthirsty piece of trash like that (and I don't just mean Iraq, although Al Quaeda stupidly played right into his murderous little hands) ever achieved any public office, I guess the competition must have been equally mediocre. Of course in the UK we voted for that murderous little ex-schyster Tony B. Liar, maybe for the same reason, the opposition had utterly discredited themselves.
Still, that has changed, the result of our next election might be more reasonable. If not, I fear that the way will be open for either right or left-wing extremism, which will be a disaster.
That is the paradox of free software. It can be used in applications which the vast majority, who value freedom, would rather did not exist. But, if you attempt to re-write the GPL to limit use for obnoxious purposes, who would decide what is allowable or not? RMS? Eben Moglen? Linus? Even your non-elected imbecilic non-president? The first three have valid points of view, but they would all be wrong, as far as some section of the community was concerned. RMS would refuse to decide as it would reduce freedom. Eben would do whatever honest lawyers do, which likely would be to ensure that his clients, including the FSF, were not damaged, and no laws were broken, probably angering all dishonest lawyers in the process. Linus would want to have fun, and not limit other people's right to have fun. Dubya would not understand the issue, and would seek advice from a person that he wrongly imagines is an expert, but is certainly an expert in one field, that of creating Criminal Monopolies..... It would be even worse under repressive regimes as in China, suppression of democratic political ideas would have to be compiled into the kernel. Then there is the Iranian perspective, or the women's libbers, or......
I think this guy should not have resigned, he should instead have continued to advocate responsible uses, and ignored the bad uses. remember that all sorts of obnoxious people drive cars, eat food, watch TV..... You can't abstain from something just because some, in your opinion, bad guys also use it. If your abstention might force a change for the better, it might be different, and I would certainly advocate not using SCOundrel Unix right now, but that is a specific commercial product, not a free concept.
I also wonder why the military do not use BSD, or maybe some far-sighted person saw that it might allow a defence contractor to create a monopoly by keeping derived code to themselves? There could have been a contractual means of preventing that happening.
I would actually prefer BSD for this sort of thing (I am about to return to the defence industry, designing safety systems, not weapons) because the development model is more suitable (fewer releases, more closely controlled). Linux is great if you want, or need, to be at the leading edge, more often in military or industrial use a well-established version is more appropriate. My preference for this would have been OpenBSD, or NetBSD for embedded things, although I prefer Linux for general use.
The sad thing is that some of these problem areas, notably the structural use of aluminium, have had major safety implications, which no-one in authority seems to have noticed. Alloy wheels should not be allowed either, the problem is that the poor fatigue properties of all aluminium alloys make it unsafe in an uncontrolled environment, and only marginally safe in a tightly controlled environment with regular inspection and replacement, such as the aircraft industry. Clobber an obstacle once with your alloy wheel, and it, or the alloy suspension components, or their attachments to the alloy vehicle body, may have had almost all of their fatigue life used up...... You can't know, but the final failure is quite likely to happen at high speed, without warning.
Also, we know that ABS brakes, electronic throttle control, and other fancy features, heve been killing people. Some advances are OK, in fact the use of electronic ignition came at least 20 years after it had been proved to be reliable and beneficial, because the generally incompetent car manufacturers though it would be unreliable or cost more than the primitive system it replaced. They were eventually forced to adopt it to meet emission regulations, then realising that it was wonderful, they went mad and put electronics, often with inadequate software and/or EMC precautions, in all the wrong places also, so we get numerous accidents, mostly ascribed to "driver error", when a bit of trash code sees an unexpected input value for some reason, and locks out all of the brakes. Yes, it does happen, and with monotonous regularity.
I will not own a car which has ABS, traction control, or alloy wheels. None of them are necessary, and they all kill people. And I don't want lots of messy electronics controlling wing mirrors, sunroof, seat position, etc, because when it fails (it will!), a replacement, if available, will be hideously expensive, maybe 100 times or more than its original cost to the manufacturer.
It is interesting to note that in the UK at least, automotive hardware and software designers are paid what the rest of industry, and in particular safety-critical industry, regard as derisory salaries. I am sure you know the saying "pay peanuts, get monkeys...". Yet they pay their marketing men and stylists (neither of whom are necessary to make a good product) very well indeed.
As to aluminium bodies, the main influence there seems to be a certain grossly incompetent German manufacturer, whose dangerously unstable vehicles, using a long-obsolete layout which is guaranteed to produce dangerous instability in certain real-life situations, which have killed many people. I believe that in the US, the number of their most offensive product is the one you need to use to call the emergency services when it crashes. The same irresponsible company is responsible for stupid techniques such as rear-wheel steering (to try to overcome the gross effects of basic design incompetence) which in themselves cause more problems.
It is a pity that Ralph Nader did not finish the job he started many years ago, a lot of things ought to be outlawed for the benefit of public safety. The "green" movement ought to get a lot more outlawed, of course Dubya does not listen to them, but most of Europe at least does.
If you want to know why aluminium is a disastrously bad material for anything subject to random, varying stress, such as car bodies and suspension components, try to get a copy of a book called, IIRC, "The Science of Strong Materials" by Prof. J. E. Gordon, published by Pelican, and see what he says about its use in aircraft. The book was written long before anyone, apart from a few oddball experiments, thought about mass-producing cars from the material. The aluminium lobby is very powerful, they seem to get their material into lots of places where it does not belong, particularly now that they are being seueezed out of the aircraft industry by much safer composites.
Aluminium is a very good material, in the right place I have nothing against it. Lo
I don't know about ATI, but the Nvidia driver seems to contain a large block which is common to Windoze, Linux (and maybe BSD?), and another part which is GPLed and is the kernel interface, produced as a normal loadable module. Frankly, I don't care what happens inside the proprietary bit, if they want to keep it that way, that is their right, although it may be silly. If it helps them to quickly write one driver which works with any OS, that is good.
It would not actually help a competitor if they did reveal their driver code, after all, anyone who can design a huge ASIC is going to ba able to reverse engineer both the code and the silicon, if they want to, and it would be far better to publish the full spec, with as many copyrights and/or patents as they feel necessary. But, some managements (Canon come to mind, for a start) take a very immature view of the negative implications of full disclosure, imagining it to be a therat to their business. It is simply not so, if they get the FOSS community on board, they get, at no cost to themselves, an extra resource for debugging, amongst other things, and they maximise their market penetration, regardless of which way the OS wars go. It does matter, in some parts of the world, Linux is all but universal, or heading that way, and surely the major manufacturers want to sell their products in China, Brazil, India,.....
But, I guess that openness is something that some people simply can't understand.
Meanwhile, I am quite happy to use Nvidia cards. What is actually a nuisance is that certain Linux suppliers (SuSE comes to mind, I think there are others) do not supply the Nvidia driver, allegedly for legal reasons, while the Nvidia web site says that you can distribute it, or even repackage it or change the installer. That makes it a right pain to install, also the details about how you do it, to get Yast to recognise the new driver and be able to configure it, are buried deeply on the SuSE web site, and can not be found by a logical search through the support pages.
I think there is a lot of stupidity here, people need to talk to each other and sort this sort of thing out, then, binary or not, the Nvidia driver would be easily useable, and acceptable to most people. When it is installed, it tends to work rather well, certainly on my laptop (Gforce 2 Go) and the 2 desktops which have Nvidia cards, one with Twinview or Xinerama, or whatever they call it. (I can run it both ways, both screens identical, or giving a single wide screen, haven't needed the two fully independent screens yet).
As to the capabilities of Xfree86, my oldest machine is a K6/II-500 with an ATI Rage Fury card which was an absolute pig to configure and get working under Windoze 95/98/ME/XP, but it now runs Xandros, which despite certain deficiencies which I hope they fix soon, installed the X server with zero fuss and bother, and it works. But, I think X as we know it is getting old, and it is time for a complete re-think. This should happen with software, every so often you should throw away the old one and start again, it does not say that the old was bad, only that technology has advanced, so different methods might now be practicable. It is worth re-examining from first principles what we actually need a graphics card to do nowadays, and how work can be shared between the card and the CPU(s). Failed efforts like the Tablet PC might give rise to new ideas, these presumably have a CPU on the mobile bit, which could perhaps be reprogrammed as a full X server or equivalent, given a nice tidy protocol to work with, not messy Windoze GDI calls.
It is quite amazing what programmable logic can do nowadays, building a software and hardware prototype of a new graphical subsystem as an open-source project is not out of the question, although some of the fancy features, textures and bump mapping, for instance, might need to be left out at first. But, it would be nice to see a new, open architecture evolve, and the time may be right for this to happen.
The GPL licence as you say does not offer any warranty, but it clearly allows you or I, or Bill Gates, or Red Hat, SuSE or Xandros, as distributors of software, to offer a warranty to our customers, provided we do all the necessary support work. In effect, when you buy a distro with a support contract, that is what you get. If it is faulty, they will fix it, within defined limits, same as any other warranty. If it is broken and is not fit for use because of a nasty little bug in calloc() (that one was in an inferior closed-source OS), or can not be used because some SCOundrel claims copyright on some of the code, the effect is the same, it needs to be fixed, under warranty. The GPL purposely does not interfere in how that may be arranged, or not, as the case may be, nor should it, but it is fair that someone who sells GPL software provides something such as a warranty, or a support contract, or whatever you wish to call it.
Seriously though, it is important that alternatives such as the BSD family exist, it means that in the event of future legal action, people can switch fairly easily, if they have to in the short term. Even better, they should run a mixture now. Diversity is a good thing, it might even prevent everything being damaged by a single virus, or programming error in an update, for example. Thinking only about Linux is not much different from thinking only about Windoze. I have even kept Windoze 2000 (dumped XP, it was almost as useless as the vile bug-infested ME), although my serious work is mainly done in SuSE now.
I use SuSE and Xandros (latest versions of both), FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the differences to the average user, who does not look at kernel source or the mechanism of system calls, are not great, but each has its own particular strengths. The only thing I have against FreeBSD is that the ports collection is so vast, compared even to a typical Linux distro, that selecting everything that you might want to play with is a very long task......
If we have a choice, we should exercise it, otherwise developers may get fed up, and the choice will diminish, which would be a bad thing
I think you meant to say "sick businessmen like Bill Gates". The guy is not normal, and much of the trash we have to put up with is the output from his random paranoid delusions.
No-one has to put up with IE6. OpenOffice.org is freely available and much better, or if you must have a commercial product, Opera is also good, not to mention konqueror if you run Linux or BSD. And, I think there are a few more.
Not that I approve of illegal bundling by M$, but they only do it because people are too indolent to either care about their security or the quality of their browser. If everyone dumped IE6 and Lookout, it would cost M$ nothing, but it certainly would make the world a better and more secure place, and it might show Sir Bill that himself and his illegal monopoly are not so smart as he thinks they are.
They only got market share because people who could not make the effort to check the facts used the insecure, bug-ridden trash. The same goes for M$ Office, a truly hideous suite. The unthinking masses have got what they deserve, sadly it also affects those of us who know better. A bit like why the UK currently has a vile, quasi-fascist government which pretends to be socialist, and why previously we had a vile, quasi-fascist government which pretended to be conservative. I can't say that the US has the same situation, after all you did not actually elect the demented moron which illegally poses as president.
Democracy is a dangerous thing when the mass of decision-makers are ill-informed or simply cannot care, however it works wonderfully well when people are well-informed. sadly, when it comes to either choosing software or governments, or automobiles, or......, most people are in virtual ignorance, and can be relied on to do what will ultimately be seen to be the wrong thing. One of the reasons that M$ Office became dominant was that, certainly where I was working at the time, the IT department were truly ignorant and incompetent, and sadly so were a few of the engineers, who were encouraging them, one of whom got sacked for alcoholism shortly afterwards. The quality of the decision making process was abysmally bad, and of course the end users all found a huge learning curve, and soon realised that, particularly in the case of Excel, many of the things we had been doing with Word Perfect Office, and had to continue doing, were actually impossible.
The fact is that without a guiding intelligence, entropy will constantly increase, so software will continue to get worse. Sir Bill may note that he is certainly not that guiding intelligence.
Sorry to keep you waiting. I work and live a long way from home during the week, and the Xandros machine is at home, where I now am. My Slashdot address is my work address.....
Anyway, here goes:
First (you probably have done this already) check that your/etc/hosts file contains entries for every machine on the network, in a Win2000 machine for example it will be/Win23/system/drivers/etc/hosts or something like that, it is also called hosts on Win 9x trash but I can't remember where.... If edited by Notepad, watch out for the.txt which will get appended, and rename it correctly in explorer. Exactly the same file format is used (except for the/n, CR+LF oissue at the ends of lines like all DOS to Windoze text conversions). My/etc/hosts under Xandros looks like:
127.0.0.1 localhost hermione
192.168.0.1 hermione
192.168.0.220 scatty
192.168.0.200 denise
etc, where hermione is the ICS machine. Every machine should have its own name as the 127.0.0.1 localhost, and should have all machines including its own network interface listed. Naturally they all need to be on the same network address, and the netmask etc in the network card setup also needs to be OK. If you can ping any machine from any other, by name, then that is OK. No doubt you have got all that working already.
Now comes the easy bit (yes, really!).Make a little shell script,
#!/bin/bash
echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i ppp0 -m state --state NEW,INVALID -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -m state --state NEW,INVALID -j DROP
Run that file, manually or from one of the startup scripts, and you have ICS and a firewall. If you get the manual page for iptables, you can add any extra rules that you want, but as shown it silently blocks all uninvited incoming connections, just like Zone Alarm. It should work on any Linux with 2.4 kernel or later, with iptables compiled in.
This of course assumes that your modem link is ppp0, you will want to change that to whatever network address or pppoe device the broadband is on, if you have such.
I am slightly confused, because I seem to have Firestarter on my machine and don't remember downloading it. It seems to do much the same job, but crashes if invoked before the ppp connection, or left running after going off-line, and I don't know what it does behind the scenes.
Something to watch out for is that something, in some cases konnect, in others probably pppd, is adding unwanted entries to/etc/hosts each time you connect to a dialup, and not cleaning them out afterwards. I don't know if it happens every time or only if the connection is dropped by the ISP, but they need to be cleaned out periodically, easiest way would be to make a master copy of/etc/hosts somewhere and copy it over the working one. That could be automated, I don't have time to look at it yet, as my first priority is being able to resume interrupted downloads.
I will be away for a few days, but you might be able to get me at tiger@sardius.force9.co.uk if there are any problems. And, if you want to write that up properly and put it on a web page somewhere, please do, it is not copyrighted.
Redmond? Was that not renamed Lindows, or am I confused?
Or are you referring to an intellectually backward region on the outskirts of Seattle?
And yes, we should see these advances in *nix systems before the disfunctional monoploy, after all the X system being separate from the OS should make development faster. If not, why not? Or is it simply that no-one with the expertise is interested in that particular thing? (That is one of the few real problems of OSS, no marketing men, so programmers do their own thing. Great for job (or hobby) satisfaction, but it can leave some things undone for a while.)
Yes, in this case that sort of arrangement is quite acceptable. Because this is going into a commercial piece of hardware, the software needs to be controlled at one place, so even if it was Open Source, it would not be possible to get contributions from all and sundry. But it also shows something that such as Gates and Ballmer are incapable of realising, that you can freely expose the source of closed commercial code. It bears a copyright, so it can't be copied and used improperly, and more than can a binary. By showing your intellectual property, you actually make the detection of illegal copying easier, unlike the stupid SCOundrel case, where nothing has been shown, nor ever will be, therefore nothing can be proved.
Altogether it is much cleaner and tidier to show the source, in particular it does not involve giving away your intellectual property (but first you have to have some intellect, in order to develop some IP...) It clearly defines exactly what you have.
In a sensible world, there would always be the option to see source code, just as there used to be comprehensive maintenance manuals with many pages of circuit diagrams for hardware, which theoretically could have led to copying, but in practice did not. I used to love the Tektronix oscilloscope manuals, but judging by the mediocre performance of most of their competitors products, the fact that every design detail was exposed, to assist with maintenance, did not result in significant copying. However, it might have inspired lots of engineers in the way they designed other things, just the same as exposure to Minix (ugh!) source code may have inspired Linus. It might, and did, also result in some ingeneous modifications when the proper spare parts were not immediately available.....
I hope this disclosure is the beginning of a trend, it will benefit everyone, including the fact that the owners of the code can get some extra, free, code review.
It will not, of course, please RMS. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
I agree there have been far worse, and will continue to be, is some parts of the world. But, that does not excuse the richest country in the world being unable to run a reliable electoral system. (I hear that the atempts at electronic voting are proving to be very much worse, of course they are mostly based on trash software of very dubious origin, and it is quite wrong to get a Criminal Monopoly of proven incompetence involved in providing such things anyway.)
The fact is that the final recount showed conclusively that he lost, and the Supreme Court should have allowed the official counting to go on a bit longer, so the world would not have to suffer that warmongering fascist. And no, I am not a communist, and I doubt that the other guy would have been anything more than slightly better. I am just sick of the duopoly of malignant minds, Dubya and our Tony B. Liar, who went to war on the basis of a bunch of lies, which they at the time knew to be lies. That is without excuse, and I hope that in both cases the voters turn out to do what needs to be done. The only difference between the two is that Dubya has a very obvious mental problem, while B. Liar is simply malignant. Then there is his wife, the original Blair Witch, who illegally (not being elected) chairs cabinet meetings in his absence. I don't think the UK has seen such an abuse of power in living memory. At least, we don't seem to hear of misdeeds by Mrs. Dubya.
Such people only get elected because the public are sick of politics and politicians, and those who care, or even bother to think, are usually too fed up to bother to vote.
And finally, your electoral system is as stupid as ours, but at least they are different. Two the same as either would be worse.... Civilised countries mostly have proportional representation now, and the blatant bribery of making contributions to election campaigns in return for political favours is mostly outlawed. I admit that the European Pariament is a true pillar of corruption, some of the national governments are OK, others rotten.
The fact is that is someone was to invent a fair and efficient way of governing a country, they would not start with any of the existing models, and if someone was to pick people suitable for running a country, the existing political parties, of all varieties, would be the last place to look....
Or Bill-lint, if many published reports of his inadequate personal hygiene are true.
Of course a Bill-lint would check to ensure that you have a sufficient number of unckecked buffers, dangling pointers etc to guarantee access by hackers, and at least one BSOD every day. It would also check to ensure that the critical error handler code itself contained a critical error, that no attempt was being made to write-protect executable code, that no attempt was made to make a calloc() routine that actually returned cleared memory every single time, and that no attempt whatsoever was made to replicate the functionality of fork(). Forward slashes would also be outlawed in most circumstances, and program functionality would have to be distributed through a number of otherwise unrelated modules (compulsive commingling), and that is only for starters......
Good. His legal bill will get even bigger. He will get what he deserves in the end. This one is capable of being thrown out of court quickly, as it has already been settled once. What is more, Novell have confirmed that it was settled, and there was no unauthorised Unix code in any of the *BSDs that existed at that time. SCO acquired Unix long after that settlement, and knew all about it. You can't buy something, knowing its (very public) past history, then a few years later, demand redress. What he is doing is directly attacking the competence of the courts, they will not like it.
I have just checked my FreeBSD, and note that it appears not to have the SCO library modules included. One of the books suggests IIRC that you "may" be able to get these from the website, along with a licensed copy of SCO. I did that long ago, before they turned nasty, in fact I bought the media set, and the box says Caldera, so I would be able to use the libraries for personal use, if I coule be bothered (provided that I was not also running SCO at the same time, on one licence). Of course, I did manage to get two licences on seperate occasions, by mistake actually....
However, FreeBSD does have the raw API emulation, in the form of iBCS2, and guess who published that originally? AT&T? Novell? Caldera? SCO (old or new)? No!, it was Intel, and McFraud has no rights whatsoever in the matter.
The way the projects are run, it is unlikely that Linux contains any SCO code, and even more unlikely that any of the main BSD variants would do so. There is of course a little-known commercial BSD/OS, the original company were also party to the original settlement, but I can see why he would go after the present company, Wind River, as they were in direct competition with SCO for a share of a rapidly decreasing market in commercial Unix (sold without hardware, that which comes with hardware from Sun, HP, IBM, etc is doing very nicely), and they might have a modest amount of cash at their disposal. But, AFAIK they are a smallish operation and if he had any sense he would have bought them and their very useful expertise long ago. In any case they are reported to have discontinued BSD/OS, although it still seems to be on their website.
Taken to its (il)logical conclusion, the idiot would next be going after the Convicted Monopolist for daring to use BSD code, supposedly his property, in their TCP/IP stack and lots of other places..... Of course, that would be like a dog biting its own tail.
Gordon Brown can tax volunteer activity. It is of course immoral to do so, but he has managed to tax almost everything else that used to be free. He has few choices left now, maybe the air which we breathe?
I was hoping at one stage for a return of the Window Tax, with one modification consisting of a letter "s", but since it was Brown who proposed a Criminal Monopolist for a knighthood, I don't hold out much hope for that. In fact it gives considereble credence to this alleged April Fool, as Brown obviously favours M$,
Of course it will, M$ has nothing of substance, it is just all smoke and mirrors, and when the shareholders panic and start selling, the end will come quickly.
The sad thing is that before they reach that stage they are continuing to inflict serious damage on the world economy, destroy productivity, and wipe out honourable and legitimate competitors, and meanwhile some of us at work are forced to use their counterproductive trash.
I don't know which will start the slide into oblivion, zero uptake of Longhorn (because it will completely break compatability of almost everything, since the API set is cut down to about 20%, still far too bloated), or massive and expensive damage to a large and influential customer as a result of one of their security holes, or maybe something else entirely. The fact is that they are walking a tightrope, and gravity only pulls downwards....
But it is up to the informed public. As I say about the security hole known as Outlook (Lookout), no-one has to use it, ever. Same with their other trash products. It may well be that the people who specify business software are generally stupid, but I doubt that they all are, and some with embarassing balance sheets (or even some with excellent balance sheets who know they could do even better) will start to trim the expenditure by going to Linux/BSD (I hope they choose both, diversity is a good thing) and OpenOffice.org. They will not be disappointed, word will eventually get round in the business community.
M$ have already as good as lost a number of countries, when they lose businesses who are household names, the slide will accelerate.
It all comes down to the well-known fact that you can't fool all of the people all of the time..
True. Does that leave the way open for some sort of legalaction, such as simple fraud, if someone pays the money and gets a worthless document?
IMHO the day will never come when M$ does manage to correctly document anything, not at least till the root of the problem, the Chief Software Architect is gone.
I remember trying to make sense of the MessyDOS (as we immediately named it) manual of the early 1980s which was very difficult to get, had obviously been run off on the office photocopier at Redmond, and was full of errors. (The manual for Bill's bugg-ridden basic was much worse, simply some A4 (or would it have been US Letter) size paper stapled together with a thin card cover, written on a typewriter, in a font that had been smeared by umpteen generations of photo-copying, at least the MessyDOS manual was typeset originally, and in a loose-leaf binder). And that was for a simple, but incredibly messy OS, a mere fraction of the size of the CIFS protocol, for example. Despite Sir Bill's assertions about the number of actual bugs, they never did come even close to eliminating all bugs from the relatively small MessyDOS kernel.
BTW, are there not advertising laws in most civilised countries? "Common Internet File System" is a completely false description, CIFS, NETBEUI, Windows File Sharing, call bits of it what you will, has nothing at all to do with the Internet. The protocol is not routable, for a start. It is however a major security hole in the majority of Windoze computers that are misconfigured (out of the box, of course). Almost everything my firewall logs is CIFS related.
I didn't think that your unelected non-president, and illegal incumbent in the White House had sufficient brain to know what a computer is, far less use one, even a Mac. Our (elected but not by me) Tony B. Liar has a few more brain cells, but still not enough......
It is sad that Sir Bill has been able to effectively bribe politicians in the US and the UK, including both of those I just mentioned. It is even sadder that the (supposedly) elected rulers are so stupid that they pay any attention to a complete incompetent with an inflated ego, whose only achievemment ever has been to find new ways of creating an Illegal Monopoly.
True enough, and I hope that their ability to charge money for the APIs is overturned during the appeal process. I don't know if the EU are able to multiply the fine by 10 or even better, 100, on appeal. Really, the only way forward as far as the world at large is concerned is to break M$ and Sir Bill completely, or they will continue to behave as before.
They have lost virtually every case brought against them (STAC, DRDOS,.....) (OK some were settled out of court because they were clearly losing) yet not once have they paid the slightest attention to any court ruling. They have simply continued expanding their Criminal Monopoly at every opportunity.
Frankly, nothing will do any good unless it involves a prison sentence for their top directors. In countries which make decent attempts to regulate rogue companies, that would have happened long ago. The US needs to get some decent laws, not an indecent excess of lawyers, and the EU needs to swiftly enforce what it does have the power to do. Swift justice is the only thing that scumbags, and ego-maniacs understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Aviation is a very dirty business at times, and it is always unwise to get involved in international projects where the French are a major participant. The UK could have built the Concord (no "e") alone, it would most probably have been cheaper, because the costs of collaboration are invariably grossly underestimated by the politicians (Eurofighter being the classic example, at least no Frogs are involved). Had we done so, it would still be flying.
As to fly by wire, the proven track record of disaster to Airbus FBW aircraft (all except 300 and 310 series) proves the point, and if you do a proper analysis, it can be shown to save no weight, not reduce costs (in fact they increase) and it provides many subtle traps to catch out unwary pilots. An Airbus which suffers major systems failure near the ground, and enters the ultimate reversionary mode, with loss of most control surfaces, and impaired control of others, will, in the hands of all but a test pilot (and even then, there is some doubt), crash. Reversion to the last set of mechanical backups has not been demonstrated except at safe altitude. Yet, the A330 in particular suffers from frequent total electrical failure (far more than the failure rate used to justify certification), this takes out all the FBW system, and leaves the crew with very minimal control.
The sheer hypocrisy of Boeing then creating the 777 says it all. That aircraft is only allowed to fly because the certicication authority (FAA) was unable to prove that it is unsafe, previous generations had to be proved to be safe, but with over-complexity that is no longer possible.
People who do the sums correctly know that in installing FBW, you save the weight and maintenance of some wires, pulleys and rods (actually lightweight carbon fibre tubes nowadays), you add a lot of heavy and expensive avionics boxes. So far, it may about balance out, but when you then add the beefing up of the electrical system (failure in the case of the A330), bigger batteries, generators, heavier cables, a bigger ram air turbine or other emergency power supply, etc, the advantage is firmly to the mechanical controls. Then there is the reliability of the avoinics, at least one box will need to be replaced every week or two.
Right now, Airbus has passed Boeing, but not by a great margin, it could be a very long time before a decisive winner emerges. Boeing's biggest mistake was to buy the remnant of McDonnell-Douglas, with their horrendously unsafe DC10, rebadged but still unsafe, as MD11. That lot should simply have been scrapped.
BTW I think a typi
Jet aircraft have done far more damage to the ozone layer than anything else.
And before anyone mentions PTFE (Teflon), well it may be OK in a frying pan, but a wiring fault would result in the release of fluorine gas, which would resct with moisture in the air to give hydrofluoric acid. Not good. A frying pan fire could presumably be very serious if the temperature got too high, IIRC about 400 deg C. If you inhale hydrofluoric acid, or get a small amount on the skin, you usually die, fairly unpleasantly. Someone who went to school with me died that way, many years ago, age about 22, from a small skin splash of HF even though it was quickly washed off.
Teflon has been, and probably still is, used in unmanned satellites, OK in the smaller ones where a total loss is not an absolute disaster, but I think it would be frowned upon in things which earn serious money and have to keep working, such as comms sattelites. There will be Teflon bits in the microwave equipment, and in some mechanisms, which can't otherwise be lubricated, but not necessarily on normal wiring.
I don't know what kind of wire NASA currently use, the aerospace industry has been through a variety. At one time, Kapton seemed good, we now know that it is lethal in circuits which have sufficient energy to initiate arcing.
BTW, Kapton and Teflon are OK where there is always insufficient energy available to seriously raise the temperature, in fact I like working with Teflon in particular, but only in the right place.
It is sad that the work of Abraham Lincoln and others has been allowed to go into such decline. Maybe when they have proper, reliable, electronic voting everywhere, it might be time to tidy it up properly.
But, there is no point doing so until the vote-counting mechanisms are proved to be reliable. If that can't be done, a return to manual counting would be best, and would have avoided this controversy. It works well in the UK, although it really ought to be replaced to drag us into the 21st century.
It surely is not asking too much of any democracy to ensure that it has mechanisms in place to prevent voting by dead people, for example. Surely a death can be registered in the various systems automatically within a few hours at most. Same for other forms of abuse.
I know that a small amount of abuse happens in the UK, occasionally people are arrested and go to jail of pay a huge fine, and rightly so. With the increase in postal voting here, the amount of fraud is though to be increasing.
Until the civilised countries tidy up our own processes, we should not claim to have any right to try to impose our ideas of democracy (which are fundamentally good, if often flawed in detail) on other societies.
Maybe an independent (if there is such a thing) organisation ought to oversee voting worldwide to ensure that it is as good as it can be. I know that the U.N. often get involved in less stable parts of the world. Every process needs Quality Control, the workings of a democracy are a process, albeit an extraordinarily complex one.
The main weakness of the U.S. system is its complexity, like all complex systems it contains bugs, and is difficult to control and monitor properly. It must also be costly to administer. A simpler system would go wrong less often, and its integrity would be more visible to the public. Your other problem is that you really only have 2 political parties, a better choice would be a good thing. Maybe compulsory voting, as in Australia, would be a good idea too, I would like to see it in the UK also. (The option is available to vote for no-one, if you can't agree with the policies of any candidate, but you do have to make a choice, it prevents the complete apathy which exists elsewhere, especially in the UK, where our current incumbent was elected by well under 20% of the population, most likely because the greater part of the population, who knew that he was a scumbag, could not be bothered to do anything about it.)
A government truly elected by a clear majority of the eligible voting population has a clear mandate to govern, which gives it more credibility at an international level. That is how it should be, but not how it is at present.
As it happens, I detest flying, but when I work on aircraft systems, the purpose is again to do as good a job as possible, so they are as safe as can be for those who insist on using the things. I don't pretend in any way whatsoever to be what I am not, unlike your non-president who has done more than anyone else who has ever lived to discredit your country.
I don't have a political view either, except to vote for who seems to be the most honest, in your country the whole system, which once was excellent, now is rotten with corruption. My only view is that it, and your legal system, both urgently need an overhaul (simplification for the legal system, for a start)for the benefit of all the people. Your political system clearly needs to be made to work in a way which removes all suggestions that politicians are open to bribery. At the moment, some scumbag like Sir Bill (and yes, I think my rotten UK government did a very bad thing there, however I think they will be dealt with by the proper democratic process fairly soon, like Dubya) can buy his way out of trouble by making substantial contributions to certain campaign funds. Whether it is true or not, it is seen that way by honest people inside and outside the US, and makes your political system look like some banana republic.
Bush senior was far more honest, and far more intelligent, than his imbecile of a son. It is sad that a bloodthirsty piece of trash like that (and I don't just mean Iraq, although Al Quaeda stupidly played right into his murderous little hands) ever achieved any public office, I guess the competition must have been equally mediocre. Of course in the UK we voted for that murderous little ex-schyster Tony B. Liar, maybe for the same reason, the opposition had utterly discredited themselves.
Still, that has changed, the result of our next election might be more reasonable. If not, I fear that the way will be open for either right or left-wing extremism, which will be a disaster.
I think this guy should not have resigned, he should instead have continued to advocate responsible uses, and ignored the bad uses. remember that all sorts of obnoxious people drive cars, eat food, watch TV..... You can't abstain from something just because some, in your opinion, bad guys also use it. If your abstention might force a change for the better, it might be different, and I would certainly advocate not using SCOundrel Unix right now, but that is a specific commercial product, not a free concept.
I also wonder why the military do not use BSD, or maybe some far-sighted person saw that it might allow a defence contractor to create a monopoly by keeping derived code to themselves? There could have been a contractual means of preventing that happening.
I would actually prefer BSD for this sort of thing (I am about to return to the defence industry, designing safety systems, not weapons) because the development model is more suitable (fewer releases, more closely controlled). Linux is great if you want, or need, to be at the leading edge, more often in military or industrial use a well-established version is more appropriate. My preference for this would have been OpenBSD, or NetBSD for embedded things, although I prefer Linux for general use.
He is no-one's president. You have no president, not till next year at least. He was not elected, assuming you are speaking of the imbecile Dubya.
Also, we know that ABS brakes, electronic throttle control, and other fancy features, heve been killing people. Some advances are OK, in fact the use of electronic ignition came at least 20 years after it had been proved to be reliable and beneficial, because the generally incompetent car manufacturers though it would be unreliable or cost more than the primitive system it replaced. They were eventually forced to adopt it to meet emission regulations, then realising that it was wonderful, they went mad and put electronics, often with inadequate software and/or EMC precautions, in all the wrong places also, so we get numerous accidents, mostly ascribed to "driver error", when a bit of trash code sees an unexpected input value for some reason, and locks out all of the brakes. Yes, it does happen, and with monotonous regularity.
I will not own a car which has ABS, traction control, or alloy wheels. None of them are necessary, and they all kill people. And I don't want lots of messy electronics controlling wing mirrors, sunroof, seat position, etc, because when it fails (it will!), a replacement, if available, will be hideously expensive, maybe 100 times or more than its original cost to the manufacturer.
It is interesting to note that in the UK at least, automotive hardware and software designers are paid what the rest of industry, and in particular safety-critical industry, regard as derisory salaries. I am sure you know the saying "pay peanuts, get monkeys...". Yet they pay their marketing men and stylists (neither of whom are necessary to make a good product) very well indeed.
As to aluminium bodies, the main influence there seems to be a certain grossly incompetent German manufacturer, whose dangerously unstable vehicles, using a long-obsolete layout which is guaranteed to produce dangerous instability in certain real-life situations, which have killed many people. I believe that in the US, the number of their most offensive product is the one you need to use to call the emergency services when it crashes. The same irresponsible company is responsible for stupid techniques such as rear-wheel steering (to try to overcome the gross effects of basic design incompetence) which in themselves cause more problems.
It is a pity that Ralph Nader did not finish the job he started many years ago, a lot of things ought to be outlawed for the benefit of public safety. The "green" movement ought to get a lot more outlawed, of course Dubya does not listen to them, but most of Europe at least does.
If you want to know why aluminium is a disastrously bad material for anything subject to random, varying stress, such as car bodies and suspension components, try to get a copy of a book called, IIRC, "The Science of Strong Materials" by Prof. J. E. Gordon, published by Pelican, and see what he says about its use in aircraft. The book was written long before anyone, apart from a few oddball experiments, thought about mass-producing cars from the material. The aluminium lobby is very powerful, they seem to get their material into lots of places where it does not belong, particularly now that they are being seueezed out of the aircraft industry by much safer composites.
Aluminium is a very good material, in the right place I have nothing against it. Lo
It would not actually help a competitor if they did reveal their driver code, after all, anyone who can design a huge ASIC is going to ba able to reverse engineer both the code and the silicon, if they want to, and it would be far better to publish the full spec, with as many copyrights and/or patents as they feel necessary. But, some managements (Canon come to mind, for a start) take a very immature view of the negative implications of full disclosure, imagining it to be a therat to their business. It is simply not so, if they get the FOSS community on board, they get, at no cost to themselves, an extra resource for debugging, amongst other things, and they maximise their market penetration, regardless of which way the OS wars go. It does matter, in some parts of the world, Linux is all but universal, or heading that way, and surely the major manufacturers want to sell their products in China, Brazil, India,..... But, I guess that openness is something that some people simply can't understand.
Meanwhile, I am quite happy to use Nvidia cards. What is actually a nuisance is that certain Linux suppliers (SuSE comes to mind, I think there are others) do not supply the Nvidia driver, allegedly for legal reasons, while the Nvidia web site says that you can distribute it, or even repackage it or change the installer. That makes it a right pain to install, also the details about how you do it, to get Yast to recognise the new driver and be able to configure it, are buried deeply on the SuSE web site, and can not be found by a logical search through the support pages.
I think there is a lot of stupidity here, people need to talk to each other and sort this sort of thing out, then, binary or not, the Nvidia driver would be easily useable, and acceptable to most people. When it is installed, it tends to work rather well, certainly on my laptop (Gforce 2 Go) and the 2 desktops which have Nvidia cards, one with Twinview or Xinerama, or whatever they call it. (I can run it both ways, both screens identical, or giving a single wide screen, haven't needed the two fully independent screens yet).
As to the capabilities of Xfree86, my oldest machine is a K6/II-500 with an ATI Rage Fury card which was an absolute pig to configure and get working under Windoze 95/98/ME/XP, but it now runs Xandros, which despite certain deficiencies which I hope they fix soon, installed the X server with zero fuss and bother, and it works. But, I think X as we know it is getting old, and it is time for a complete re-think. This should happen with software, every so often you should throw away the old one and start again, it does not say that the old was bad, only that technology has advanced, so different methods might now be practicable. It is worth re-examining from first principles what we actually need a graphics card to do nowadays, and how work can be shared between the card and the CPU(s). Failed efforts like the Tablet PC might give rise to new ideas, these presumably have a CPU on the mobile bit, which could perhaps be reprogrammed as a full X server or equivalent, given a nice tidy protocol to work with, not messy Windoze GDI calls.
It is quite amazing what programmable logic can do nowadays, building a software and hardware prototype of a new graphical subsystem as an open-source project is not out of the question, although some of the fancy features, textures and bump mapping, for instance, might need to be left out at first. But, it would be nice to see a new, open architecture evolve, and the time may be right for this to happen.
The GPL licence as you say does not offer any warranty, but it clearly allows you or I, or Bill Gates, or Red Hat, SuSE or Xandros, as distributors of software, to offer a warranty to our customers, provided we do all the necessary support work. In effect, when you buy a distro with a support contract, that is what you get. If it is faulty, they will fix it, within defined limits, same as any other warranty. If it is broken and is not fit for use because of a nasty little bug in calloc() (that one was in an inferior closed-source OS), or can not be used because some SCOundrel claims copyright on some of the code, the effect is the same, it needs to be fixed, under warranty. The GPL purposely does not interfere in how that may be arranged, or not, as the case may be, nor should it, but it is fair that someone who sells GPL software provides something such as a warranty, or a support contract, or whatever you wish to call it.
Seriously though, it is important that alternatives such as the BSD family exist, it means that in the event of future legal action, people can switch fairly easily, if they have to in the short term. Even better, they should run a mixture now. Diversity is a good thing, it might even prevent everything being damaged by a single virus, or programming error in an update, for example. Thinking only about Linux is not much different from thinking only about Windoze. I have even kept Windoze 2000 (dumped XP, it was almost as useless as the vile bug-infested ME), although my serious work is mainly done in SuSE now.
I use SuSE and Xandros (latest versions of both), FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the differences to the average user, who does not look at kernel source or the mechanism of system calls, are not great, but each has its own particular strengths. The only thing I have against FreeBSD is that the ports collection is so vast, compared even to a typical Linux distro, that selecting everything that you might want to play with is a very long task......
If we have a choice, we should exercise it, otherwise developers may get fed up, and the choice will diminish, which would be a bad thing
I think you meant to say "sick businessmen like Bill Gates". The guy is not normal, and much of the trash we have to put up with is the output from his random paranoid delusions.
Not that I approve of illegal bundling by M$, but they only do it because people are too indolent to either care about their security or the quality of their browser. If everyone dumped IE6 and Lookout, it would cost M$ nothing, but it certainly would make the world a better and more secure place, and it might show Sir Bill that himself and his illegal monopoly are not so smart as he thinks they are.
They only got market share because people who could not make the effort to check the facts used the insecure, bug-ridden trash. The same goes for M$ Office, a truly hideous suite. The unthinking masses have got what they deserve, sadly it also affects those of us who know better. A bit like why the UK currently has a vile, quasi-fascist government which pretends to be socialist, and why previously we had a vile, quasi-fascist government which pretended to be conservative. I can't say that the US has the same situation, after all you did not actually elect the demented moron which illegally poses as president.
Democracy is a dangerous thing when the mass of decision-makers are ill-informed or simply cannot care, however it works wonderfully well when people are well-informed. sadly, when it comes to either choosing software or governments, or automobiles, or......, most people are in virtual ignorance, and can be relied on to do what will ultimately be seen to be the wrong thing. One of the reasons that M$ Office became dominant was that, certainly where I was working at the time, the IT department were truly ignorant and incompetent, and sadly so were a few of the engineers, who were encouraging them, one of whom got sacked for alcoholism shortly afterwards. The quality of the decision making process was abysmally bad, and of course the end users all found a huge learning curve, and soon realised that, particularly in the case of Excel, many of the things we had been doing with Word Perfect Office, and had to continue doing, were actually impossible.
The fact is that without a guiding intelligence, entropy will constantly increase, so software will continue to get worse. Sir Bill may note that he is certainly not that guiding intelligence.
Sorry to keep you waiting. I work and live a long way from home during the week, and the Xandros machine is at home, where I now am. My Slashdot address is my work address.....
Anyway, here goes:
First (you probably have done this already) check that your /etc/hosts file contains entries for every machine on the network, in a Win2000 machine for example it will be /Win23/system/drivers/etc/hosts or something like that, it is also called hosts on Win 9x trash but I can't remember where.... If edited by Notepad, watch out for the .txt which will get appended, and rename it correctly in explorer. Exactly the same file format is used (except for the /n, CR+LF oissue at the ends of lines like all DOS to Windoze text conversions). My /etc/hosts under Xandros looks like:
127.0.0.1 localhost hermione
192.168.0.1 hermione
192.168.0.220 scatty
192.168.0.200 denise
etc, where hermione is the ICS machine. Every machine should have its own name as the 127.0.0.1 localhost, and should have all machines including its own network interface listed. Naturally they all need to be on the same network address, and the netmask etc in the network card setup also needs to be OK. If you can ping any machine from any other, by name, then that is OK. No doubt you have got all that working already.
Now comes the easy bit (yes, really!).Make a little shell script,
#!/bin/bash
echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i ppp0 -m state --state NEW,INVALID -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -m state --state NEW,INVALID -j DROP
Run that file, manually or from one of the startup scripts, and you have ICS and a firewall. If you get the manual page for iptables, you can add any extra rules that you want, but as shown it silently blocks all uninvited incoming connections, just like Zone Alarm. It should work on any Linux with 2.4 kernel or later, with iptables compiled in.
This of course assumes that your modem link is ppp0, you will want to change that to whatever network address or pppoe device the broadband is on, if you have such.
I am slightly confused, because I seem to have Firestarter on my machine and don't remember downloading it. It seems to do much the same job, but crashes if invoked before the ppp connection, or left running after going off-line, and I don't know what it does behind the scenes.
Something to watch out for is that something, in some cases konnect, in others probably pppd, is adding unwanted entries to /etc/hosts each time you connect to a dialup, and not cleaning them out afterwards. I don't know if it happens every time or only if the connection is dropped by the ISP, but they need to be cleaned out periodically, easiest way would be to make a master copy of /etc/hosts somewhere and copy it over the working one. That could be automated, I don't have time to look at it yet, as my first priority is being able to resume interrupted downloads.
I will be away for a few days, but you might be able to get me at tiger@sardius.force9.co.uk if there are any problems. And, if you want to write that up properly and put it on a web page somewhere, please do, it is not copyrighted.
Have fun.
Tiger
Or are you referring to an intellectually backward region on the outskirts of Seattle?
And yes, we should see these advances in *nix systems before the disfunctional monoploy, after all the X system being separate from the OS should make development faster. If not, why not? Or is it simply that no-one with the expertise is interested in that particular thing? (That is one of the few real problems of OSS, no marketing men, so programmers do their own thing. Great for job (or hobby) satisfaction, but it can leave some things undone for a while.)
Altogether it is much cleaner and tidier to show the source, in particular it does not involve giving away your intellectual property (but first you have to have some intellect, in order to develop some IP...) It clearly defines exactly what you have.
In a sensible world, there would always be the option to see source code, just as there used to be comprehensive maintenance manuals with many pages of circuit diagrams for hardware, which theoretically could have led to copying, but in practice did not. I used to love the Tektronix oscilloscope manuals, but judging by the mediocre performance of most of their competitors products, the fact that every design detail was exposed, to assist with maintenance, did not result in significant copying. However, it might have inspired lots of engineers in the way they designed other things, just the same as exposure to Minix (ugh!) source code may have inspired Linus. It might, and did, also result in some ingeneous modifications when the proper spare parts were not immediately available.....
I hope this disclosure is the beginning of a trend, it will benefit everyone, including the fact that the owners of the code can get some extra, free, code review.
It will not, of course, please RMS. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
What highly qualified software testers? M$ always let the customer do the testing.......
The fact is that the final recount showed conclusively that he lost, and the Supreme Court should have allowed the official counting to go on a bit longer, so the world would not have to suffer that warmongering fascist. And no, I am not a communist, and I doubt that the other guy would have been anything more than slightly better. I am just sick of the duopoly of malignant minds, Dubya and our Tony B. Liar, who went to war on the basis of a bunch of lies, which they at the time knew to be lies. That is without excuse, and I hope that in both cases the voters turn out to do what needs to be done. The only difference between the two is that Dubya has a very obvious mental problem, while B. Liar is simply malignant. Then there is his wife, the original Blair Witch, who illegally (not being elected) chairs cabinet meetings in his absence. I don't think the UK has seen such an abuse of power in living memory. At least, we don't seem to hear of misdeeds by Mrs. Dubya.
Such people only get elected because the public are sick of politics and politicians, and those who care, or even bother to think, are usually too fed up to bother to vote.
And finally, your electoral system is as stupid as ours, but at least they are different. Two the same as either would be worse.... Civilised countries mostly have proportional representation now, and the blatant bribery of making contributions to election campaigns in return for political favours is mostly outlawed. I admit that the European Pariament is a true pillar of corruption, some of the national governments are OK, others rotten.
The fact is that is someone was to invent a fair and efficient way of governing a country, they would not start with any of the existing models, and if someone was to pick people suitable for running a country, the existing political parties, of all varieties, would be the last place to look....
Of course a Bill-lint would check to ensure that you have a sufficient number of unckecked buffers, dangling pointers etc to guarantee access by hackers, and at least one BSOD every day. It would also check to ensure that the critical error handler code itself contained a critical error, that no attempt was being made to write-protect executable code, that no attempt was made to make a calloc() routine that actually returned cleared memory every single time, and that no attempt whatsoever was made to replicate the functionality of fork(). Forward slashes would also be outlawed in most circumstances, and program functionality would have to be distributed through a number of otherwise unrelated modules (compulsive commingling), and that is only for starters......
I have just checked my FreeBSD, and note that it appears not to have the SCO library modules included. One of the books suggests IIRC that you "may" be able to get these from the website, along with a licensed copy of SCO. I did that long ago, before they turned nasty, in fact I bought the media set, and the box says Caldera, so I would be able to use the libraries for personal use, if I coule be bothered (provided that I was not also running SCO at the same time, on one licence). Of course, I did manage to get two licences on seperate occasions, by mistake actually....
However, FreeBSD does have the raw API emulation, in the form of iBCS2, and guess who published that originally? AT&T? Novell? Caldera? SCO (old or new)? No!, it was Intel, and McFraud has no rights whatsoever in the matter.
The way the projects are run, it is unlikely that Linux contains any SCO code, and even more unlikely that any of the main BSD variants would do so. There is of course a little-known commercial BSD/OS, the original company were also party to the original settlement, but I can see why he would go after the present company, Wind River, as they were in direct competition with SCO for a share of a rapidly decreasing market in commercial Unix (sold without hardware, that which comes with hardware from Sun, HP, IBM, etc is doing very nicely), and they might have a modest amount of cash at their disposal. But, AFAIK they are a smallish operation and if he had any sense he would have bought them and their very useful expertise long ago. In any case they are reported to have discontinued BSD/OS, although it still seems to be on their website.
Taken to its (il)logical conclusion, the idiot would next be going after the Convicted Monopolist for daring to use BSD code, supposedly his property, in their TCP/IP stack and lots of other places..... Of course, that would be like a dog biting its own tail.
I was hoping at one stage for a return of the Window Tax, with one modification consisting of a letter "s", but since it was Brown who proposed a Criminal Monopolist for a knighthood, I don't hold out much hope for that. In fact it gives considereble credence to this alleged April Fool, as Brown obviously favours M$,
The sad thing is that before they reach that stage they are continuing to inflict serious damage on the world economy, destroy productivity, and wipe out honourable and legitimate competitors, and meanwhile some of us at work are forced to use their counterproductive trash.
I don't know which will start the slide into oblivion, zero uptake of Longhorn (because it will completely break compatability of almost everything, since the API set is cut down to about 20%, still far too bloated), or massive and expensive damage to a large and influential customer as a result of one of their security holes, or maybe something else entirely. The fact is that they are walking a tightrope, and gravity only pulls downwards....
But it is up to the informed public. As I say about the security hole known as Outlook (Lookout), no-one has to use it, ever. Same with their other trash products. It may well be that the people who specify business software are generally stupid, but I doubt that they all are, and some with embarassing balance sheets (or even some with excellent balance sheets who know they could do even better) will start to trim the expenditure by going to Linux/BSD (I hope they choose both, diversity is a good thing) and OpenOffice.org. They will not be disappointed, word will eventually get round in the business community.
M$ have already as good as lost a number of countries, when they lose businesses who are household names, the slide will accelerate.
It all comes down to the well-known fact that you can't fool all of the people all of the time..
IMHO the day will never come when M$ does manage to correctly document anything, not at least till the root of the problem, the Chief Software Architect is gone.
I remember trying to make sense of the MessyDOS (as we immediately named it) manual of the early 1980s which was very difficult to get, had obviously been run off on the office photocopier at Redmond, and was full of errors. (The manual for Bill's bugg-ridden basic was much worse, simply some A4 (or would it have been US Letter) size paper stapled together with a thin card cover, written on a typewriter, in a font that had been smeared by umpteen generations of photo-copying, at least the MessyDOS manual was typeset originally, and in a loose-leaf binder). And that was for a simple, but incredibly messy OS, a mere fraction of the size of the CIFS protocol, for example. Despite Sir Bill's assertions about the number of actual bugs, they never did come even close to eliminating all bugs from the relatively small MessyDOS kernel.
BTW, are there not advertising laws in most civilised countries? "Common Internet File System" is a completely false description, CIFS, NETBEUI, Windows File Sharing, call bits of it what you will, has nothing at all to do with the Internet. The protocol is not routable, for a start. It is however a major security hole in the majority of Windoze computers that are misconfigured (out of the box, of course). Almost everything my firewall logs is CIFS related.
It is sad that Sir Bill has been able to effectively bribe politicians in the US and the UK, including both of those I just mentioned. It is even sadder that the (supposedly) elected rulers are so stupid that they pay any attention to a complete incompetent with an inflated ego, whose only achievemment ever has been to find new ways of creating an Illegal Monopoly.
They have lost virtually every case brought against them (STAC, DRDOS,.....) (OK some were settled out of court because they were clearly losing) yet not once have they paid the slightest attention to any court ruling. They have simply continued expanding their Criminal Monopoly at every opportunity.
Frankly, nothing will do any good unless it involves a prison sentence for their top directors. In countries which make decent attempts to regulate rogue companies, that would have happened long ago. The US needs to get some decent laws, not an indecent excess of lawyers, and the EU needs to swiftly enforce what it does have the power to do. Swift justice is the only thing that scumbags, and ego-maniacs understand.