On the one hand they attempt, seemingly quite diligently, to promote Open Source for government use, on the other they create a situation where a Convicted Momnopolist can now demand royalties from anyone who attempts to be interoperable with his trash products.
And where is the DOJ, their settlement IIRC was supposed to include publishing the APIs (BTW many years after the DRDOS case outlawed the practice of secret APIs which still continues).
These scumbags have set themselves up as being above all democratically elected (or in the case of Dubya, non-elected) authority worldwide. They must be stopped. Stupidity, ignorance and incompetence by the DOJ and the EU is not what is required, nor is the imposition of a fine so small that it will be paid from the petty cash, or the slush fund to bribe corrupt US senators, without anyone even noticing.
It is time that someone somewhere dealt properly with this global manace.
A very clear demonstration of Sir Bill's serious mental problems, for a start an ego larger than the known universe, and a complete inability to distinguish between truth and fiction.
Are the criminally insane allowed to be company directors in the US?
More likely, 99.99% of calls turn out to be due to Sir Bill's complete incompetence.
If what you say is true (which will hopefully be confirmed in due course) then it is better than I at first thought. There needs to be a way of rapidly hitting them every time they step out of line.
It looks as if they are incapable of accepting any ruling of any court anywhere, so hopefully if that continues, they will eventually be destroyed completely, much to the benefit of the software industry, and the world as a whole. But maybe not, maybe they will just get rid of their chief scumbag, insatiably greedy incompetent, and software architect, and his bully-boy chief executive (or whatever his title is these days) who is known for brandishing baseball bats in meetings. The shareholders ought to be demanding that they go.
They are already breaking the law by dumping the Xbox. Action should be taken now, and if he did then cut it to zero, that would then be a clear contempt of court, which would probaably result in a prison sentence for at least one M$ executive.
Look what happens when something else is dumped, RAM for example. It gets a very fast response from the regulators.
The fact is that nothing but a very severe punitive sentence has any effect on the average scumbag, corporate or not.
BTW Intel is not quite a monopoly, in fact their main competitor on the processor front (AMD) is keeping them very worried, as they should be, by being technically ahead. Intel may fall irretreivably from their present position over the 64-bit issue, they will not be completely wiped out of course. If Intel tried by illegal means to undermine AMD, then they would be in the same position as the scumbags of Redmond, but as far as I am aware, their only methods have been legitimate, if you can call excessive advertising legitimate.
The fact is that the slap on the wrist in the US had no effect at all, and the Criminal Monopoly continues to expand into other areas. Itwill be the same here, unless the EU puts very severe constraints in place and is prepared, very quickly, to impose much higher fines if the abuse continues.
The next one should be about $10 billion, so it really hurts, the final one should destroy M$ if they have not learnded to behave, and should involve imprisonment of chief executives. That is what would be likely to happen with a lesser organisation flouting financial laws.
Maybe true, but very sad. I don't mean those who can not learn different things, we all have a finite capacity, I mean those who will not. I suspect it starts very young, with the "yob culture" of willful ignorance because they think it is smart.....
Of course there are many who do indeed stick to a single uninteresting job for life, and have many and diverse interests and hobbies. Maybe they have learned to detach their mind from their work, and occupy it elsewhere. That I can understand, someone has to do the boring work, and sometimes it even pays quite well. But to have a boring job, and boring life...... It can't be healthy in the long term.
I have seen some homes where there is no reading material visible anywhere, not because they are extremely tidy. It makes me wonder, I suppose they just sit in front of the 26 inch (or maybe the 42 inch plasme screen) life support system all evening, probably bored by the junk they are watching, not even bothering to make conversation.
Of course their children will mostly turn out to be the same. That may be the fault of the eductaion system, a good teacher can inspire people to have some curiosity and desire to find out things for themselves, which should stay with them for life. But, of course, the politically correct minority have seen to it that education is dumbed down. That will eventually result in a race of zombies if taken to its logical conclusion.
...and my virtual typos, for which I apologise. I usually do check my spelling.
As for redundancy, I wonder when Sir Bill's will come. At least, when the shareholders have sued his wealth out of existence, Melinda has sufficient competence to earn enough to feed the kids....
In many respects that is true, Xerox PARC did not seem to have any connection between research and marketing, so thousands of good ideas were just lost, others went elsewhere, Apple as you say being one beneficiary (and indirectly the Monopolist, who never invented, indeed is incapable of inventing anything, except a greatly inflated ego and a greatly inflated Criminal Monopoly, but plagiarised the ideas of others).
Unix is different, that was hindered by an inappropriate anti-trust settlement, the root cause of which had nothing to do with Unix, perhaps excusable because the judge would not have been particularly software-aware in those days. Nevertheless, the settlement was wrong, and for a long time Unix was not marketed effectively as a result. That in fact set the scene, many years later, for the unedifying spectacle of McBride and his gang behaving the way they are, but along the way, Linus created a kernel because Unix was inaccessible to him and BSD was in limbo due to on-going legal battles..... If a Unix source licence had been affordable, or BSD not bogged down in a court case, I wonder if he would have bothered, there were other things he could have made, like a better GUI. But, history happened the way it did, and we are no worse, in fact much better, having a variety of free OSs as a result. But, as you say, all of this was at little profit to Bell Labs, and it is not going to profit the SCOundrel McBride either. He should learn from past history.
....that 1.5 was fast enough, stable, and immune to most of the security holes which infest the obsolete trash produced by the non-competitive (he can't compete technically) product of the Convicted Monopoly!
I can't be bothered installing 1.6, I will wait till 1.7 is stable. No point doing it twice within a few weeks.
I must say that Mozilla really does seem to move forwards consistently, when was their an actual improvement to Inept Exploder? It serves to confirm my suspicion that some people (Netscape, Mozilla, countless developers...) simply want to make a good browser, whereas Sir Bill simply wanted a default installation of his Illegally Commingled Code that barely worked but would be sufficient to wipe out Netscape.
It will backfire on him shortly, the general public are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Criminal Monopoly do not set standards or control either the web or the email system, and that their vile, bug-ridden, insecure and obsolete products are simply not neded.
I can confirm that. I use the full, allegedly bloated Mozilla on Win2000, and (although I am dumping it soom) the abominable Win XP (Xtra Pathetic), Mozilla and/or Konqueror on Linux, with Ximian Evolution as the regular email client.
A certian leading anti-virus product (well, several, I have dumped most of them) failed consistently to catch a 2-year old virus, their support staff lied about it, but the main thing was that it only affected Incompetent Exploder, which is almost as bad as Lookout.
It amazes me that anyone can pass off that insecure, bug-ridden trash as a browser, of course it was only developed to further the Criminal Monopoly.
What scares me is that I have to use IE, abd turn off Zone Alarm, to run Windoze Update, at least I do it behind a Linux firewall now, so there is some protection.
The remaining XP and Win2000 will be going soon, I dumped 98 and ME off 2 PCs with considerable pleasure some time ago.
The answer as you indicate is to simply not run trash OS or applications... I had better not start on Word...... Suffice it to say that I use Star Office (paid for, don't mind value for money) and OpenOffice.org (kept up to date) so I don't need that trash either.
When the collapse of M$ comes, hopefully very soon, it will be as a result of their greed and negligence.
Get rid of Outlook and its perverted cut-down relation, Outlook Express. They are not necessary. A lot of people use them because their ISP says so, but email is controlled by open protocols which are nothing whatsoever to do with M$, and any email client will work.
It is amazing how the Convicted Monopolist has managed to make a near-monopoly of the email client, and how people are so easily fooled into using such dangerous, insecure, bug-ridden trash. It does not even have a particularly good user interface.
The answer is in your hands!
Note to Sir Bill: You can't fool all of the people all of the time.... The end of your illegal monopolistic reign will come shortly, when your shareholders rebel, after the European judgment causes a collapse in the share price. And don't bother trying to get a job in software anywhere, your incompetence is not wanted anywhere.
They are once more continuing towards Sir Bill's evil ambition of having a monopoly of everything.
The trial, which M$ lost decisively, seems to be of no effect whatsoever, and nothing at all is being done to ensure better behaviour in the future. This has entirely discredited the US legal system.
Hopefully, if they really do try to acquire AOL, it will be blocked in Europe and the UK. Our laws, or maybe our judges, have a sharper set of teeth.
Hopefully when the EC are finished with them, there will be no more M$, the world will be a ssfer and more secure place when their vile, bug-infested, unstable and insecure products have gone. If the penalty in the existing case in Europe is sufficiently high, it will cause the share price to collapse, the beginning of the end. They will follow SCO into well-deserved oblivion. It looks as if SCO's share price is collapsing now, it is only held up by idiots who don't find out what is really going on, and believe certain incompetent "analysts". The Convicted Monopolist will not be too far behind.
Which administration, the non-elected non-president (who tries to act as if he is) with no brain, or Tory B. Liar, the elected non-president (who acts as if he is) with no integrity?
Yes, and I think that it means that certain long overdue bug fixes in Yast may happen. On the whole, it is fairly good, but not perfect. Effort into improving areas like this will be make a very important contribution towards the acceptance of Linux on the desktop.
Good. When the price is right, I will go the 64 bit route. It will be Linux, if it dual-boots with anything else, it will be one of the BSD family, or maybe BeOS if the free version is complete, and availabe in 64 bit form. (I would willingly buy a new copy of commercial BeOS if I could, money is not the issue).
I realise that this is not the entire solution to the virus problem, but at least if data areas are seperate from program code, such that you can't execute data, a mechanism for stupid things happening has been removed. It will IMHO do more to trap programming errors than viruses, and should, if I have understood correctly, help to stamp out some of the worst programming practices such as self-modifying code. All in all, it is a good feature, long overdue, but realistically, there will still be programming errors in the OS , even Linux. Work on preventing these, which can be tackled at compiler level, or with secondary tools such as lint, the old *nix program checker, will continue for a long time yet. gcc can do a lot, but only if you use it properly. It is quite depressing to tun a kernel compile, and get about 100 warnings due to comparisons between unsigned and int, for example. They might all be harmless, but effort to get rid of them all, and get clean complies with the strictest checking, would not go amiss.
When I used to be a C programmer, back in 1986 (part-time and as an adjunct to my real job of hardware design) we would never let anything out unless it could pass lint with no warnings.
My latest PC has never been exposed to the rubbish that comes from Redmond, nor will any others in the future. 10 years of misery, crashes, security holes, deliberate incompatabilities, and programs that try to be too clever and do things Sir Bill's way, when that is not what is needed, was quite enough!
Exactly! I did once buy a 486DX33, when it was very leading edge. Mine had a 340MB SCSI HDD, 17 inch monitor, lots and lots of RAM (16MB!), etc, because I wanted to run CAD and circuit simulation. It cost a huge amount of money and was barely adequate, although very leading edge at the time, thanks to the bloatware of the day, the absoluitely new Win 3.1. DR-DOS improved it noticeably, especially where use of the bottom 640Kb was concerned.
Hardware has improved faster than incompetents like M$ can add bloat and slow down the software, so although a leading-edge machine would be nice, it is by no means essential now for any serious use that I can imagine, and I don't see why games players get excited about getting more than 70 frames per second, your eye can't tell the difference. For larger problems, a Beowulf cluster might be the cost-effective way to go.
The P4 never has been on my agenda, I have used Athlons for some time now, there is no point in paying top money for a product that is not any better.
I do tend to upgrade my PCs throughout their life, it might not save anything overall, but it spreads the cost nicely. The 64 will have to be entirely new of course, I don't have a case and PSU that will become spare in the near future, and it is time to move to serial ATA for the disks (I always fit two, at least, for efficiency, swap on the one with the least load).
I don't bother with state of the art graphics cards either, just a well-supported model of a year to 18 months ago is fine, because serious software tends to not use 3D textures and bump mapping and all that, it mainly spends its time drawing simple 2D graphs and diagrams. Opening and closing windows (of the X sort, M$ is not on my current best PC, and will not be on the next one either) is about the heaviest graphics load that I envisage. OK, maybe I will watch the odd DVD, even that will not push one of last year's cards very hard.
But when it is cost-effective to make the jump to 64 bit, I will enjoy doing so, although I expect that my heaviest application (SPICE) will have to be recompiled to take advantage of the upgrade.
This will be a major jump in performance, there will not be much incentive for a big upgrade again until 128 bit, or something radically different, without the old x86 baggage, comes along.
I expect that my biggest purchases in the next year or two will in fact not be PCs, but LCD monitors. Having 1600*1200 on my laptop, I would like it on the main PCs, but probably about 21 inch size, that will as of now cost serious money. If I can scrape up the money for an even higher resolution I will do so. My first monitor, a NEC 17 inch, which runs at 1280*1024, original cost about 700 pounds (UK)is still going strong, but is big, heavy and ugly by todays standard.
The point is that if you buy leading edge, it loses value very fast indeed, if you wait a bit till the price has stabilised at a reasonable level, you lose less, if you don't immediately need the performance.
Yes and no. Skylab was not almost solid, mostly sheet metal I would imagine. You are right about the kinetic energy, it would be about half for an orbiter, compared to something that had come from a standing start at "infinity", accelerated by the Earth's gravity alone. Also, Skylab was essentially spiralling, it was heated relatively slowly for a longer time.
A fast, dense object will have time for its outer layers only to get really hot, it will lose some mass, possibly by explosion due to trapped gas, so bits may be ejected violently, but no way will the centre of a large object get hot, so most of it will remain intact. But, a small object will be heated right through and will melt, vapourise or shatter. I think the size of solid needs to be to reach the ground is measured in inches, or a few feet at the very most, if it is a dense solid.
With this one, 100 feet diameter, it might lose a few feet but there would still be the equivalent of a very large nuclear explosion, except that any fallout will only be basically muck and dirt, as long as it does not hit a nuclear power station of course.
An object this size could wipe out a small to medium country, so much depends on the relative velocity, squared, so there is quite a bit of room for variation as you indicate. Now, if it was in a retrograde (backwards) orbit, the closing speed could be enormous.....
No, it would definitely not burn up. Large hollow metallic things might, but solid rock, or iron, or nickel, will only lose a little bit of its diameter. This thing could wipe out a medium-sized country, or if it hit in the sea, drown many thousands of miles of coastline.
It might even send a shock wave right through the earth to trigger a massive volcanic eruption on the other side. (Note that the Yucatan meteorite and the vast eruption of the Deccan plateau lavas in India are thought to be of about the same age, case not proved, but I wonder...)
An object of this size is in the region where very serious damage is inevitable if it hits, but probably well short of complete destruction.
The real danger would be if it was in a reversed orbit so the closing speed was much higher. Most objects in the solar system orbit in the same direction, and as such, the closing speed may be quite low, so there should be time to see it, and if the technology was available, to deal with it, but coming in the opposite direction, i.e. head-on, I have my doubts.
A 100 foot object would of course be rendered relatively harmless by a suitable nuclear warhead, given the means to deliver it, which might not exist, because it would need to get very close to escape velocity, unlike an ICBM, to intercept an asteroid at a safe distance.
Personally I would wait a year, so they are cheaper. Certainly socket 939 is a "must", but I always take the view that where computers are concerned, if you wait till the last possible moment before you really must have something, you save a lot of money.
I definitely don't need one right now, but in a year, when it is a mainstream product, I will find some excuse to persuade myself to buy one. By that time the OS (Linux of course) will have been very well debugged.
Splendid, it will now just be up to programmers to use that facility, which I assume has to be configured by software. It has been needed for a long time.
Now who is going to have the first kernel which sets it all up properly to be secure? Linux? OpenBSD? FreeBSD? Or will it be that backward little company in Redmond who have major quality and security problems with everything they do?
They, meaning in particular Sir Bill and Ballmer, are scumbags and should be treated as such. They might just about understand a severe prison sentence, very little else will have any effect on their over-inflated egos.
Barely enough to have any effect, unless it somehow triggers a class action by the shareholders against the directors, if the share price plunges, in which case all I can say is good riddance, Sir Bill.
I don't know how the European and UK operations are structured, but think that they should be going for the directors personally, and in particular Gates and Ballmer, if they want it to have any permanent effect. Those guys are criminals, even if they try to hide behind a corporate body. In certain European countries, France being one, directors are far more exposed to legal liability that they are in the UK. Those guys have destroyed legitimate businesses with their Illegal Monopoly. They personally should go to jail. Anything less is not justice.
Come on now, admit that the Atari 400 was much more fun than the Cray!
Yes, adaptability has kept me in work too. I am amazed that many engineers don't seem to see that. I would strongly advocate that everyone learns a few spare skills, for the day you are out of work, because we live in a changing society. I will be 54 in a week, and think that maybe there will still be several new areas to explore before I retire, maybe I will finally learn Java, which I have been thinking about for years. I have started on VHDL, got an inexpensive little development board from Xilinx, so I will be sharpening up my digital skills.
It is difficult sometimes to convince a prospective employer that you can do something different to your last job. Once, I was out of work, and went for a job doing flight safety analysis (that part was OK) but I had to use dBase, which I had never seen before. It was the wrong tool for the job anyway, but that was not my decision. Anyway, I got the job, and spent my evenings for the first several weeks with the dBase manuals. The job got done, and later I got invited back twice to the same company. It really is worth making substantial effort in your own time to keep up with whatever you need to know, those who just sit in front of the TV every evening are doing themselves no favours when it comes to adaptability.
My interest is mainly hardware, and then mainly analogue, but the same considerations apply, nice clean, tidy little things that work well and are accomplished with minimum fuss and bother can be immensely satisfying, especially if you know of cumbersome solutions that others have wasted time and effort on.
In the UK there is a desperate shortage of plumbers, and I have done a bit of that, completely re-doing 3 houses over the years, so if all else failed, it would not be all that hard to get a proper qualification.
It is sad that some people actually manage, even nowadays, to get through their entire working life doing one thing, it must be very boring after the first 30 years, and a waste of undeveloped talent.
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And where is the DOJ, their settlement IIRC was supposed to include publishing the APIs (BTW many years after the DRDOS case outlawed the practice of secret APIs which still continues).
These scumbags have set themselves up as being above all democratically elected (or in the case of Dubya, non-elected) authority worldwide. They must be stopped. Stupidity, ignorance and incompetence by the DOJ and the EU is not what is required, nor is the imposition of a fine so small that it will be paid from the petty cash, or the slush fund to bribe corrupt US senators, without anyone even noticing.
It is time that someone somewhere dealt properly with this global manace.
Are the criminally insane allowed to be company directors in the US?
More likely, 99.99% of calls turn out to be due to Sir Bill's complete incompetence.
It looks as if they are incapable of accepting any ruling of any court anywhere, so hopefully if that continues, they will eventually be destroyed completely, much to the benefit of the software industry, and the world as a whole. But maybe not, maybe they will just get rid of their chief scumbag, insatiably greedy incompetent, and software architect, and his bully-boy chief executive (or whatever his title is these days) who is known for brandishing baseball bats in meetings. The shareholders ought to be demanding that they go.
Look what happens when something else is dumped, RAM for example. It gets a very fast response from the regulators.
The fact is that nothing but a very severe punitive sentence has any effect on the average scumbag, corporate or not.
BTW Intel is not quite a monopoly, in fact their main competitor on the processor front (AMD) is keeping them very worried, as they should be, by being technically ahead. Intel may fall irretreivably from their present position over the 64-bit issue, they will not be completely wiped out of course. If Intel tried by illegal means to undermine AMD, then they would be in the same position as the scumbags of Redmond, but as far as I am aware, their only methods have been legitimate, if you can call excessive advertising legitimate.
The next one should be about $10 billion, so it really hurts, the final one should destroy M$ if they have not learnded to behave, and should involve imprisonment of chief executives. That is what would be likely to happen with a lesser organisation flouting financial laws.
Of course there are many who do indeed stick to a single uninteresting job for life, and have many and diverse interests and hobbies. Maybe they have learned to detach their mind from their work, and occupy it elsewhere. That I can understand, someone has to do the boring work, and sometimes it even pays quite well. But to have a boring job, and boring life...... It can't be healthy in the long term.
I have seen some homes where there is no reading material visible anywhere, not because they are extremely tidy. It makes me wonder, I suppose they just sit in front of the 26 inch (or maybe the 42 inch plasme screen) life support system all evening, probably bored by the junk they are watching, not even bothering to make conversation.
Of course their children will mostly turn out to be the same. That may be the fault of the eductaion system, a good teacher can inspire people to have some curiosity and desire to find out things for themselves, which should stay with them for life. But, of course, the politically correct minority have seen to it that education is dumbed down. That will eventually result in a race of zombies if taken to its logical conclusion.
As for redundancy, I wonder when Sir Bill's will come. At least, when the shareholders have sued his wealth out of existence, Melinda has sufficient competence to earn enough to feed the kids....
Unix is different, that was hindered by an inappropriate anti-trust settlement, the root cause of which had nothing to do with Unix, perhaps excusable because the judge would not have been particularly software-aware in those days. Nevertheless, the settlement was wrong, and for a long time Unix was not marketed effectively as a result. That in fact set the scene, many years later, for the unedifying spectacle of McBride and his gang behaving the way they are, but along the way, Linus created a kernel because Unix was inaccessible to him and BSD was in limbo due to on-going legal battles..... If a Unix source licence had been affordable, or BSD not bogged down in a court case, I wonder if he would have bothered, there were other things he could have made, like a better GUI. But, history happened the way it did, and we are no worse, in fact much better, having a variety of free OSs as a result. But, as you say, all of this was at little profit to Bell Labs, and it is not going to profit the SCOundrel McBride either. He should learn from past history.
I can't be bothered installing 1.6, I will wait till 1.7 is stable. No point doing it twice within a few weeks.
I must say that Mozilla really does seem to move forwards consistently, when was their an actual improvement to Inept Exploder? It serves to confirm my suspicion that some people (Netscape, Mozilla, countless developers...) simply want to make a good browser, whereas Sir Bill simply wanted a default installation of his Illegally Commingled Code that barely worked but would be sufficient to wipe out Netscape.
It will backfire on him shortly, the general public are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Criminal Monopoly do not set standards or control either the web or the email system, and that their vile, bug-ridden, insecure and obsolete products are simply not neded.
A certian leading anti-virus product (well, several, I have dumped most of them) failed consistently to catch a 2-year old virus, their support staff lied about it, but the main thing was that it only affected Incompetent Exploder, which is almost as bad as Lookout.
It amazes me that anyone can pass off that insecure, bug-ridden trash as a browser, of course it was only developed to further the Criminal Monopoly.
What scares me is that I have to use IE, abd turn off Zone Alarm, to run Windoze Update, at least I do it behind a Linux firewall now, so there is some protection.
The remaining XP and Win2000 will be going soon, I dumped 98 and ME off 2 PCs with considerable pleasure some time ago.
The answer as you indicate is to simply not run trash OS or applications... I had better not start on Word...... Suffice it to say that I use Star Office (paid for, don't mind value for money) and OpenOffice.org (kept up to date) so I don't need that trash either.
When the collapse of M$ comes, hopefully very soon, it will be as a result of their greed and negligence.
It is amazing how the Convicted Monopolist has managed to make a near-monopoly of the email client, and how people are so easily fooled into using such dangerous, insecure, bug-ridden trash. It does not even have a particularly good user interface.
The answer is in your hands!
Note to Sir Bill: You can't fool all of the people all of the time.... The end of your illegal monopolistic reign will come shortly, when your shareholders rebel, after the European judgment causes a collapse in the share price. And don't bother trying to get a job in software anywhere, your incompetence is not wanted anywhere.
The trial, which M$ lost decisively, seems to be of no effect whatsoever, and nothing at all is being done to ensure better behaviour in the future. This has entirely discredited the US legal system.
Hopefully, if they really do try to acquire AOL, it will be blocked in Europe and the UK. Our laws, or maybe our judges, have a sharper set of teeth.
Hopefully when the EC are finished with them, there will be no more M$, the world will be a ssfer and more secure place when their vile, bug-infested, unstable and insecure products have gone. If the penalty in the existing case in Europe is sufficiently high, it will cause the share price to collapse, the beginning of the end. They will follow SCO into well-deserved oblivion. It looks as if SCO's share price is collapsing now, it is only held up by idiots who don't find out what is really going on, and believe certain incompetent "analysts". The Convicted Monopolist will not be too far behind.
Which administration, the non-elected non-president (who tries to act as if he is) with no brain, or Tory B. Liar, the elected non-president (who acts as if he is) with no integrity?
Or maybe not, but its remains must certainly be somewhere.
Yes, and I think that it means that certain long overdue bug fixes in Yast may happen. On the whole, it is fairly good, but not perfect. Effort into improving areas like this will be make a very important contribution towards the acceptance of Linux on the desktop.
I realise that this is not the entire solution to the virus problem, but at least if data areas are seperate from program code, such that you can't execute data, a mechanism for stupid things happening has been removed. It will IMHO do more to trap programming errors than viruses, and should, if I have understood correctly, help to stamp out some of the worst programming practices such as self-modifying code. All in all, it is a good feature, long overdue, but realistically, there will still be programming errors in the OS , even Linux. Work on preventing these, which can be tackled at compiler level, or with secondary tools such as lint, the old *nix program checker, will continue for a long time yet. gcc can do a lot, but only if you use it properly. It is quite depressing to tun a kernel compile, and get about 100 warnings due to comparisons between unsigned and int, for example. They might all be harmless, but effort to get rid of them all, and get clean complies with the strictest checking, would not go amiss.
When I used to be a C programmer, back in 1986 (part-time and as an adjunct to my real job of hardware design) we would never let anything out unless it could pass lint with no warnings.
My latest PC has never been exposed to the rubbish that comes from Redmond, nor will any others in the future. 10 years of misery, crashes, security holes, deliberate incompatabilities, and programs that try to be too clever and do things Sir Bill's way, when that is not what is needed, was quite enough!
Hardware has improved faster than incompetents like M$ can add bloat and slow down the software, so although a leading-edge machine would be nice, it is by no means essential now for any serious use that I can imagine, and I don't see why games players get excited about getting more than 70 frames per second, your eye can't tell the difference. For larger problems, a Beowulf cluster might be the cost-effective way to go.
The P4 never has been on my agenda, I have used Athlons for some time now, there is no point in paying top money for a product that is not any better.
I do tend to upgrade my PCs throughout their life, it might not save anything overall, but it spreads the cost nicely. The 64 will have to be entirely new of course, I don't have a case and PSU that will become spare in the near future, and it is time to move to serial ATA for the disks (I always fit two, at least, for efficiency, swap on the one with the least load).
I don't bother with state of the art graphics cards either, just a well-supported model of a year to 18 months ago is fine, because serious software tends to not use 3D textures and bump mapping and all that, it mainly spends its time drawing simple 2D graphs and diagrams. Opening and closing windows (of the X sort, M$ is not on my current best PC, and will not be on the next one either) is about the heaviest graphics load that I envisage. OK, maybe I will watch the odd DVD, even that will not push one of last year's cards very hard.
But when it is cost-effective to make the jump to 64 bit, I will enjoy doing so, although I expect that my heaviest application (SPICE) will have to be recompiled to take advantage of the upgrade.
This will be a major jump in performance, there will not be much incentive for a big upgrade again until 128 bit, or something radically different, without the old x86 baggage, comes along.
I expect that my biggest purchases in the next year or two will in fact not be PCs, but LCD monitors. Having 1600*1200 on my laptop, I would like it on the main PCs, but probably about 21 inch size, that will as of now cost serious money. If I can scrape up the money for an even higher resolution I will do so. My first monitor, a NEC 17 inch, which runs at 1280*1024, original cost about 700 pounds (UK)is still going strong, but is big, heavy and ugly by todays standard.
The point is that if you buy leading edge, it loses value very fast indeed, if you wait a bit till the price has stabilised at a reasonable level, you lose less, if you don't immediately need the performance.
A fast, dense object will have time for its outer layers only to get really hot, it will lose some mass, possibly by explosion due to trapped gas, so bits may be ejected violently, but no way will the centre of a large object get hot, so most of it will remain intact. But, a small object will be heated right through and will melt, vapourise or shatter. I think the size of solid needs to be to reach the ground is measured in inches, or a few feet at the very most, if it is a dense solid.
With this one, 100 feet diameter, it might lose a few feet but there would still be the equivalent of a very large nuclear explosion, except that any fallout will only be basically muck and dirt, as long as it does not hit a nuclear power station of course.
An object this size could wipe out a small to medium country, so much depends on the relative velocity, squared, so there is quite a bit of room for variation as you indicate. Now, if it was in a retrograde (backwards) orbit, the closing speed could be enormous.....
It might even send a shock wave right through the earth to trigger a massive volcanic eruption on the other side. (Note that the Yucatan meteorite and the vast eruption of the Deccan plateau lavas in India are thought to be of about the same age, case not proved, but I wonder...)
An object of this size is in the region where very serious damage is inevitable if it hits, but probably well short of complete destruction.
A 100 foot object would of course be rendered relatively harmless by a suitable nuclear warhead, given the means to deliver it, which might not exist, because it would need to get very close to escape velocity, unlike an ICBM, to intercept an asteroid at a safe distance.
I definitely don't need one right now, but in a year, when it is a mainstream product, I will find some excuse to persuade myself to buy one. By that time the OS (Linux of course) will have been very well debugged.
I wonder when the move to 128-bit will come?
Now who is going to have the first kernel which sets it all up properly to be secure? Linux? OpenBSD? FreeBSD? Or will it be that backward little company in Redmond who have major quality and security problems with everything they do?
They, meaning in particular Sir Bill and Ballmer, are scumbags and should be treated as such. They might just about understand a severe prison sentence, very little else will have any effect on their over-inflated egos.
I don't know how the European and UK operations are structured, but think that they should be going for the directors personally, and in particular Gates and Ballmer, if they want it to have any permanent effect. Those guys are criminals, even if they try to hide behind a corporate body. In certain European countries, France being one, directors are far more exposed to legal liability that they are in the UK. Those guys have destroyed legitimate businesses with their Illegal Monopoly. They personally should go to jail. Anything less is not justice.
Yes, adaptability has kept me in work too. I am amazed that many engineers don't seem to see that. I would strongly advocate that everyone learns a few spare skills, for the day you are out of work, because we live in a changing society. I will be 54 in a week, and think that maybe there will still be several new areas to explore before I retire, maybe I will finally learn Java, which I have been thinking about for years. I have started on VHDL, got an inexpensive little development board from Xilinx, so I will be sharpening up my digital skills.
It is difficult sometimes to convince a prospective employer that you can do something different to your last job. Once, I was out of work, and went for a job doing flight safety analysis (that part was OK) but I had to use dBase, which I had never seen before. It was the wrong tool for the job anyway, but that was not my decision. Anyway, I got the job, and spent my evenings for the first several weeks with the dBase manuals. The job got done, and later I got invited back twice to the same company. It really is worth making substantial effort in your own time to keep up with whatever you need to know, those who just sit in front of the TV every evening are doing themselves no favours when it comes to adaptability.
My interest is mainly hardware, and then mainly analogue, but the same considerations apply, nice clean, tidy little things that work well and are accomplished with minimum fuss and bother can be immensely satisfying, especially if you know of cumbersome solutions that others have wasted time and effort on.
In the UK there is a desperate shortage of plumbers, and I have done a bit of that, completely re-doing 3 houses over the years, so if all else failed, it would not be all that hard to get a proper qualification.
It is sad that some people actually manage, even nowadays, to get through their entire working life doing one thing, it must be very boring after the first 30 years, and a waste of undeveloped talent.