I remember fron school chemistry many years ago that sulphur melts normally at a relatively modest temperature, and is clearly liquid, then as you keep heating, at a certain temperature the viscosity rises until it becomes first very viscous like treacle, and then almost, but not quite, solid. Eventually it starts to oxidise or burn. I don't know what happens in the absence of oxygen, whether it becomes liquid again as the temperature rises, or goes straight from very viscous to vapour. Maybe someone else has tried the extended experiment, and knows the answer?
But the point is that it is a fairly similar but not so extreme anomaly, but in a simple chemical element.
Yes, and I don't see why you could not run an entire GUI in the GPU. Maybe not right now, but if the chip manufacturers wanted to make it possible it would not be too difficult. Just imagine, X running in the GPU, the CPU(s) free to get on with non-graphical tasks....
It is one place that an OS architecture which makes a clean separation of GUI and kernel would win over the mess of sundry.dlls from the Criminal Monopoly. The other place would have been the ill-fated tablet computer, had it been correctly designed, with the X serevr on the portable bit.
Because simple single-processor relatively high-performance silicon is now very affordable, the time is right to go back to parallelism, dedicated I/O and graphics processors, etc, to get even better performance.
It would be nice to have a GPU compiler to run ordinary code, such as X, but the compiler would be different for each architecture, not like AMD vs Intel, where you can use the same compiler with just the optimisations tweaked. But my thinking is to replicate a full CPU in the GPU chip or at least on the graphics card. You could put a Pentium/Athlon there, feeding the gPU as usual, fed itself from the AGP bus or its successor via a big FIFO.
But whatever way things go, I do think we are in for some big steps forward in graphics processing, at least. I am not into shaders and so on, I don't need fast 3-D or anything like that, but I know that many people do, and not just for games. But if it offloads things from my main CPU, I would find immediate benefit.
I think your life estimates are a bit optimistic. But, on the other hand, as CF cards are mapped like a hard disk to the OS, maybe bad sectors are marked to be avoided, in the same way, so with some loss of capacity as blocks fail, you might get 100k cycles.
Serious industrial and aerospace users design for more like 10k cycles max, and even then don't use them in critical applications. One particular CF card manufacturer's claims, which I think you may have seen, are known to have no basis in fact whatsoever! The semiconductor chip manufacturers, and they are the people who should know, usually tell a more truthful story.
To get good life it is generally accepted as necessary to spread the usage over the whole memory array, you don't want it to fill up from address 0, like a well defragged hard disk. In fact you want it to be as fully fragmented as possible, it has no effect on speed as there is no rotation or head movement.
Nevertheless these new devices will be very interesting, I would like to be able to fit a huge Flash and a huge RAM in my PDA for example. With sensible usage for program storage, not constantly changing data, the life is more than adequate, but a swap file, for example, would probably kill it in under an hour. But it will be several years before the cost is acceptible, as is always the case. Even then, conventional hard disks are still improving, and will have the lead for as long as anyone can reasonably predict.
IANAL, but I think the Computer Misuse Act is a very useful weapon against all sorts of abuse. It should be used more often, some things like Windoze installers are clearly in violation, for example you install Linux in one or more partitions, then load XP and it trashes the boot sector, rendering Linux inoperable, temporarily or permanently, as I believe the Act states. Interestingly the only apparent defence is that it was done in ignorance, i.e. not a delibarate act. I would really love to see Sir Bill in the Old Bailey, having to admit that he is ignorant....
You are most probably right, it might not apply here, but if the fascists deploy any type of spybot or mobile code to try to catch violations of something which is in any case not illegal in the UK, they would immediately be in violation. The penalty usually involves time in one of Her Majesty's not too pleasant establishments.
UK law is sometimes wonderful, we can still play DVDs on our Linux PCs (at least I could if I could find the DeCSS code somewhere!), and technically backward idiots like the RIAA and MPAA would not get very far. The problems they are allegedly having with piracy are mostly due to their own backward ideas, the invention of the DVD dragged them screaming into the 20th century. We are now in the 21st century, but they seem to be stuck in a time warp. They should wake up and introduce new technology and modern business models instead of persecuting the innocents.
But I think laws relating to libel, slander, defamation, harrassment etc in various countries could be used to good effect...... In some circumstances, if they are trying to bring fraudulent prosecutions, and if several people in the organisation, and/or their schysters, were involved in the UK the charge might just about be Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice, which can in theory result in life imprisonment. Now that would be almost as disproportionate as fining school kids tens of thousnads of dollars for copying a CD or two, as seems to have been happening, but it would be well deserved. Executives of organisations which behave like a bunch of Nazis deserve to be punished severely.
The Convicted Monopolist is lying when they say this is necessary to avoid the security problem caused by portable storage devices. The only things that are necessary to solve that problem are a properly secure OS (which the Monopoly is not capable of making) and/or a way to lock plug and play so only administrators can add new devices (which the Monopoly is not capable of imagining, although I think they could probably code it).
Control over plug and play is highly desireable for other reasons, such as debugging problems, as well as security. It is not limited to USB. serial and parallel port devices cause just as many problems, and it would be very easy to tap into the network interface, but that could be dealt with by a simple hardware lock making it difficult to unplug network cables to gain access, without leaving evidence. Otherwise you just need a smallish PDA or similar with an ethernet interface, running Linux and Samba, to pose as the Primary Domain Controller, and whatever else the Monopoly OS needs to see in order to log a user in. In fact, you could have a fake server which would validate the user as an administrator!
Of course in Linux, or BSD, it is straightforward to remove a few bits from the kernel source (if necessary, the USB handling may be in userland, again things can be removed or modified) so that unknown or unauthorised devices can not be accessed. The Convicted Monopolist is reacting in their usual incompetent and deceitful way to the fact that once again, something can be done in most free OSs that is lacking in Windoze. A medium to large organisation can easily customise their Linux desktops any way they want, including locking the floppy, USB and anything else down as tight as they require.
The proper way to do the thing might be for the workstation OS to have to ask the server, hopefully secure, for permission to add a device. Surely that is simple to implement?
It is also probable that the major semicinductor manuafcturers, who by making the hardware, or otherwise, actually control the realisation of the USB standard, will have nothing to do with this. Why spend millions re-engineering every USB chip, some of which sell for negligible cost. The semiconductor industry is far, far bigger than Sir Bill's ego, never mind his bank balance. They need to make profit, even on low-margin commodity items. And why would they, and the peripheral manuafacturers, some of whom are also semiconductor manufacturers, want to risk adverse publicity due to the usual round of bugs that will happen when this is introduced? And, of course, with the rise of Linux, extrapolated from current trends, they would lose 10 to 20% of possible sales volume. It makes no sense whatsoever from the hardware point of view, when it is (or should be) far, far easier to fix the OS.
I work in a secure environment with a private network, and have a separate PC nearby for outside access. The biggest risk to security is the floppy drive. I have somewhere an adaptor which I used with my old digital camera to read potentially large memory cards in a floppy drive, it also had write capability.... Win2000 is set up to need administrator privilege for just about everything, and I don't think it would allow a USB drive, although I am not willing to try, as I would lose my job and probably go to jail, even if no data was stolen. But I might ask the IT department to try it on Monday, just to prove that the system is already secure against casual attempts at least. We all know that a determined hacker could penetrate any Monopoly OS, given time and a way to get to the hardware.
I do wish they would standardise on frequency allocations worldwide, as I live in the UK and might have a use for one of these, as it might be cheaper than what we have, the 458MHz band where things like this have been around for a long time, similar power, same baud rate, similar range with a directional antenna. I note that this one seems to be specified with a 4dB external antenna gain. Now that would be about a 4 element yagi, or a helix or dish, but maybe more as you would have a lot of attenuation in the coax unless it was very short, so the whole package is actually not so small as it seems.
But we have seen better than this on Slashdot, not so many weeks ago someone had fitted up dish antennae to a standard WiFi card IIRC, and were getting better range on less power (100mW?), and very much greater bandwidth, but of course very directional. That too ought to be allowed worldwide but probably is not.
This thing is not by any means a technical breakthrough, except possibly in terms of power efficiency, and even there I think the improvement is marginal.
I don't think so, if the offence is committed, in part, in Germany, which it is unless they have found a new way of limiting access, and if the organisation concerned has a presence in Germany, then I think action could and would be taken.
I am not German, but I would like to see their advertising laws adopted elsewhere, as I think they are good. The US, Australia and some other countries are far too lax about false and misleading adverts, bogus claims about competitors (e.g. what M$ says about Linux), and various other things. Here in the UK they try to do something about the most blatant instances of such things, but there seems to be insufficient ability to apply punishment, so scumbags like M$ are not deterred.
But a big part of this and many other issues is that the internet crosses national boundaries, so it really needs its own globally applicable set of laws, so there is a uniform policy on things like spam. However getting the politicians of over 200 countries to agree on anything would be well-nigh impossible.
I think you would need a big spot size to hit the target at that distance. But given that the actual distance of the source can not be measured, and its size is not known, there is a tiny probability that I am wrong.
Astronomers tend to estimate (and that is all it is) distance by parallax, if sufficiently close, or by red shift. At the frequency concerned, the beamwidth of any credible dish or other antenna is too wide to use parallax at a distance of light years, i.e. interstellar. Red shift is simply Doppler shift due to an expanding universe, it is of no value at all if you don't know what the source is, and what exactly controls its frequency. In any case its velocity may be in any direction, you do find blue shifts on some distant objects that presumably are not moving along with the generally assumed, but not provable, expansion of the universe. (there are other possible causes of red shift).
I would be very surprised if this is not quickly found to be caused by either equipment problems or a practical joker with a not very stable oscillator. Remember, all antennae, however big, have sidelobes. The only other credible explanation is a natural phenomenon, if they are in any way near (within several orders of magnitude!) to the distance, the power required approximates the output of an average star, which suggests that that is exactly what it is, a star of sorts.
But to establish anything at all, they need another telescope on the job, and for some significant time. So far, there is no credible evidence of anything out of the ordinary, because there is no corroboration. A bit like cold fusion....... (Actually I happen to think that that one does achieve something novel, but due to faulty experimental technique, i.e. understanding what things matter, attempts at duplication have not really done so, and some other attemps which are quite different do seem to show something odd.)
Maybe so, but having experienced the alternatives, I am quite clear that no Microsoft product is "good enough" to succeed on its merits in a free market. And they were definitely not the lowest price, compared to any of those you name, ever.
The fact is that they got where they are by a number of illegal practices, and the gullibility of those who purchase software. Many IT staff are in fact useless, and their managers even worse, which is a large part of the problem. The IT people tend to lag 5 years behind state of the art, and the managers 10 years, so to them M$'s popularity is still rising. In fact, serious users are sick of all the bugs, security holes, and evidence that M$ are utterly incompetent.
Obviously as far as I am concerned, the quicker FOSS wipes them out, the better. The world would have been a better place if Bill had never existed, or had taken up some career within his intellectual capability, such as sweeping floors in McDonald's. Note, I did not say grilling hamburgers, he is not good enough for that, and as a programmer is utterly useless, which is why M$ development methodology is all wrong and basically guarantees trash products.
It is very strange indeed that such useless and deficient products, far inferior to those that were already available elsewhere, ever captured any significant market share.
But a free market economy produced 20 years of trash from Microsoft, which in fact, due mainly to the serious decline in efficiency caused by Monopoly Office, coupled with extraordinarily high support costs due to the bugginess and instability of their products, has seriously undermined the free market economy which apparently created it.
It seems to me that Bill must be a Communist saboteur.
But to return to the point, no country needs anything from M$ because there are cheaper, more reliable alternatives, many don't have any support at all in their local language, and even more simply can't affort to squander their finite resources on trash. FOSS such as KDE takes care of most of the difficulties rather well, as full internationilisation was part of the plan from the beginning.
That may be true, but I am reliably informed that it is a serious criminal offence in Germany to make that kind of comparison to a competitor. I presume there is no way of blocking this in Germany, so I can forsee a criminal prosecution against the Vile Monopoly.
it is an order of magnitude estimate based on many years of experience, and is very approximately true in every branch of engineering, although it might be expressed in different ways.
Thanks for that piece of info. I will update it when I get a chance. My FreeBSD machine is dual-boot with SuSE, so I have not yet tried to write a DVD under FreeBSD, although all the other KDE stuff seems to be in good order.
I will say one thing about k3b, it does not mess with the system and cause bugs and instability the way Adaptec/Roxio used to, and apparently still does, on Windoze. Of course Open Source users and developers simply would not tolerate that, it would have to be fixed, either by the original developer, or by someone who could tolerate the problems no longer. But my DVD burning machine has never seen Windoze, so it does not have that problem. Sometimes, as here, Open Source really is better, sometimes there is little difference. But altogether I am very pleased with KDE, (for example Konqueror really is an integrated web and file browser, which works, like what M$ tried to achieve) and although I have much less experience of Gnome, it looks rather good too.
When I last stuck a blank DVD in the drive some weeks ago, it just worked. k3b did indeed open, it was so uncannily like the way a certain broken OS works for CD writing, if something like Roxio is installed.
I become more impressed with kde each time I use it, which is daily. The level of integration must surely be the equal of its closed-source rivals.
BTW I do most of my work on SuSE 9.1, but it (kde) seems much the same on the other machines, Xandros, FC2 and even FreeBSD (although I have not yet tried DVD writing on the latter).
I get the impression that each of kde and gnome is in itself a much bigger achievement than the kernel, and certainly they are important because new users or prospective users see the GUI first. They don't care about the window manager, or the X implementation, or even the kernel. But Linux distros are clearly doing something right.
BTW my DVD writer is multi-mode (+/-R and RW, and RAM) and the type of blank disc was correctly identified without any messing about by me, much to my surprise, as I have seen the "other" OS have problems.
Exactly the point, and I have found it to work about 12 times so far, with no failures, in fairly similar (i.e. last-minute panic) situations. It might not work every time of course, but definitely worth a try, which is why it should be on every Windoze machine as well as every Linux machine (where it mostly is already, standard in the majority of distros). Works on Excel as well, maybe 6 times so far.
You know, and I know, as do the owners of a number of documents, that it works. Sadly the trolls will never understand.....
I was speaking of the main kernel tree. I do know how the GPL operates, etc. But mods that I make on my home PCs for example are unlikely to be accepted in the main tree, although this remains untested as so far the mods are to applications, I have not touched the kernel yet. Sooner or later I will need an oddball driver for some bit of hardware I have hacked together, but I don't see how code for a one-off bit of hardware would belong in the main tree. In that sense my contribution would not be valid and sensible, although it might be to me for my purposes.
So, I will concede, I was ambiguous in my choice of words, and as you say, anyone can make modifications, sensible or not, and no doubt many do.
Good point. I wish all ISPs would be required by law to do something like that because it would catch the spammers as well as certain types of virii and trojans.
It is a bit like the algorithms used by some mobile phone networks to detect that your phone has been stolen, and block its use, by detecting a very abnormal usage pattern.
But the ultimate answer is to sub-contract the suppression of virii etc to the RIAA, after all they have shown how (not!) to tackle minor amounts of illegal file copying.....
.... fairly inevitable that it was too difficult to make it work reliably under the vilest piece of closed-source trash ever written.
But there might have been another way, after all Zone Alarm manages to insert itself between the core of Windoze and the outside world (as presumably do all software firewalls, even the ones that don't work properly, like Symantec). I guess that would need code so radically different from the *nix version that it would be an entirely different thing.
On the other hand, if you want to make a good security product, it is best to start with a stable, secure, fairly neat and tidy OS, not put it on top of Billware/Bugware/Bloatware. In fact that goes for any application, start with a stable underlying platform with a tidy API set, and the development costs are reduced enormously. Windoze programmers that I know tell me that productivity is abysmally low because they spend a lot of time writing conditional code to cope with the unique bugs and stupid API variations in every Windoze variant, together with system calls that don't actually work as documented, on the rare occasions that they are documented. All of this is largely unknown, and has been since about 1970, in the *nix world, where the basic API set is very consistent and in conformance with the documentation, which usually includes the Posix specs.
HP know very well that they don't own Linux. It was simply a not very well put way of saying they can't change Windoze because they don't control the source, but they can change Linux, as indeed can anyone with a valid and sensible contribution to make.
I don't think there is the slightest danger of HP becoming the next SCOundrel, unless they want their share price to go the same way...... The SCOundrel strategy failed to generate revenue except from a few idiots who paid up, it would not have paid for one member of staff to be employed to collect the protection money. It was, and while SCO still exists, is simply a protection racket, and is self-defeating.
But I think that like IBM, HP will indeed generate revenue from Linux.
As you mention cameras, it is worth noting that they present the fewest problems, since generally they use a CF card or some other type of memory card, which contains a DOS file system and can be read in any USB card reader. Also, most that I have seen, although they do not claim Linux compatability, do in fact work as USB storage devices if you simply plug in the USB lead. SuSE handles this quite well, and I think other distros do also.
Neither of my cameras has the slightest pretensions of Linux compatability, both work!
There might be a possible difficulty if you use the manufacturer's "raw" file format, but that will need a file conversion utility, not a driver, maybe a new Gimp plug-in. But as most people use jpegs most of the time, and some cameras will use tiff if needed, it does not seem to be a major problem. But some people will know otherwise, if so, write it up and publish. That is what this new site is for, after all.
Scanners sadly are another ball game altogether, despite conceptually resembling cameras..... The scanner equivalent of the Winmodem or GDI printer is the most hopeless of course, and like the modem and printer is best avoided even for Windoze users, as the tiny cost saving is far outweighed by the performance penalty.
Besides that, did we not all go to school to learn to write properly, which included at least basic grammar? Too much dumbing-down will cause us to forget how we should do basic things. A word processor is a tool for creating documents, but it should not intervene in the way the user does that, by modifying grammar.
An excellent point. The issue of trashed formatting, often by deleting something at the end of a paragraph by accident, because you can't see where the containers start and end, should have been addressed many years ago. M$ are entirely without excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember fron school chemistry many years ago that sulphur melts normally at a relatively modest temperature, and is clearly liquid, then as you keep heating, at a certain temperature the viscosity rises until it becomes first very viscous like treacle, and then almost, but not quite, solid. Eventually it starts to oxidise or burn. I don't know what happens in the absence of oxygen, whether it becomes liquid again as the temperature rises, or goes straight from very viscous to vapour. Maybe someone else has tried the extended experiment, and knows the answer?
But the point is that it is a fairly similar but not so extreme anomaly, but in a simple chemical element.
Are there any more, I wonder?
... where we all download IEradicator or the appropriate litepc for our OS, and simultaneously eradicate the trash from out computers.
(www.litepc.com)
It is one place that an OS architecture which makes a clean separation of GUI and kernel would win over the mess of sundry .dlls from the Criminal Monopoly. The other place would have been the ill-fated tablet computer, had it been correctly designed, with the X serevr on the portable bit.
Because simple single-processor relatively high-performance silicon is now very affordable, the time is right to go back to parallelism, dedicated I/O and graphics processors, etc, to get even better performance.
It would be nice to have a GPU compiler to run ordinary code, such as X, but the compiler would be different for each architecture, not like AMD vs Intel, where you can use the same compiler with just the optimisations tweaked. But my thinking is to replicate a full CPU in the GPU chip or at least on the graphics card. You could put a Pentium/Athlon there, feeding the gPU as usual, fed itself from the AGP bus or its successor via a big FIFO.
But whatever way things go, I do think we are in for some big steps forward in graphics processing, at least. I am not into shaders and so on, I don't need fast 3-D or anything like that, but I know that many people do, and not just for games. But if it offloads things from my main CPU, I would find immediate benefit.
Serious industrial and aerospace users design for more like 10k cycles max, and even then don't use them in critical applications. One particular CF card manufacturer's claims, which I think you may have seen, are known to have no basis in fact whatsoever! The semiconductor chip manufacturers, and they are the people who should know, usually tell a more truthful story.
To get good life it is generally accepted as necessary to spread the usage over the whole memory array, you don't want it to fill up from address 0, like a well defragged hard disk. In fact you want it to be as fully fragmented as possible, it has no effect on speed as there is no rotation or head movement.
Nevertheless these new devices will be very interesting, I would like to be able to fit a huge Flash and a huge RAM in my PDA for example. With sensible usage for program storage, not constantly changing data, the life is more than adequate, but a swap file, for example, would probably kill it in under an hour. But it will be several years before the cost is acceptible, as is always the case. Even then, conventional hard disks are still improving, and will have the lead for as long as anyone can reasonably predict.
But as they say, it is horses for courses.
You are most probably right, it might not apply here, but if the fascists deploy any type of spybot or mobile code to try to catch violations of something which is in any case not illegal in the UK, they would immediately be in violation. The penalty usually involves time in one of Her Majesty's not too pleasant establishments.
UK law is sometimes wonderful, we can still play DVDs on our Linux PCs (at least I could if I could find the DeCSS code somewhere!), and technically backward idiots like the RIAA and MPAA would not get very far. The problems they are allegedly having with piracy are mostly due to their own backward ideas, the invention of the DVD dragged them screaming into the 20th century. We are now in the 21st century, but they seem to be stuck in a time warp. They should wake up and introduce new technology and modern business models instead of persecuting the innocents.
But I think laws relating to libel, slander, defamation, harrassment etc in various countries could be used to good effect...... In some circumstances, if they are trying to bring fraudulent prosecutions, and if several people in the organisation, and/or their schysters, were involved in the UK the charge might just about be Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice, which can in theory result in life imprisonment. Now that would be almost as disproportionate as fining school kids tens of thousnads of dollars for copying a CD or two, as seems to have been happening, but it would be well deserved. Executives of organisations which behave like a bunch of Nazis deserve to be punished severely.
Control over plug and play is highly desireable for other reasons, such as debugging problems, as well as security. It is not limited to USB. serial and parallel port devices cause just as many problems, and it would be very easy to tap into the network interface, but that could be dealt with by a simple hardware lock making it difficult to unplug network cables to gain access, without leaving evidence. Otherwise you just need a smallish PDA or similar with an ethernet interface, running Linux and Samba, to pose as the Primary Domain Controller, and whatever else the Monopoly OS needs to see in order to log a user in. In fact, you could have a fake server which would validate the user as an administrator!
Of course in Linux, or BSD, it is straightforward to remove a few bits from the kernel source (if necessary, the USB handling may be in userland, again things can be removed or modified) so that unknown or unauthorised devices can not be accessed. The Convicted Monopolist is reacting in their usual incompetent and deceitful way to the fact that once again, something can be done in most free OSs that is lacking in Windoze. A medium to large organisation can easily customise their Linux desktops any way they want, including locking the floppy, USB and anything else down as tight as they require.
The proper way to do the thing might be for the workstation OS to have to ask the server, hopefully secure, for permission to add a device. Surely that is simple to implement?
It is also probable that the major semicinductor manuafcturers, who by making the hardware, or otherwise, actually control the realisation of the USB standard, will have nothing to do with this. Why spend millions re-engineering every USB chip, some of which sell for negligible cost. The semiconductor industry is far, far bigger than Sir Bill's ego, never mind his bank balance. They need to make profit, even on low-margin commodity items. And why would they, and the peripheral manuafacturers, some of whom are also semiconductor manufacturers, want to risk adverse publicity due to the usual round of bugs that will happen when this is introduced? And, of course, with the rise of Linux, extrapolated from current trends, they would lose 10 to 20% of possible sales volume. It makes no sense whatsoever from the hardware point of view, when it is (or should be) far, far easier to fix the OS.
I work in a secure environment with a private network, and have a separate PC nearby for outside access. The biggest risk to security is the floppy drive. I have somewhere an adaptor which I used with my old digital camera to read potentially large memory cards in a floppy drive, it also had write capability.... Win2000 is set up to need administrator privilege for just about everything, and I don't think it would allow a USB drive, although I am not willing to try, as I would lose my job and probably go to jail, even if no data was stolen. But I might ask the IT department to try it on Monday, just to prove that the system is already secure against casual attempts at least. We all know that a determined hacker could penetrate any Monopoly OS, given time and a way to get to the hardware.
I do wish they would standardise on frequency allocations worldwide, as I live in the UK and might have a use for one of these, as it might be cheaper than what we have, the 458MHz band where things like this have been around for a long time, similar power, same baud rate, similar range with a directional antenna. I note that this one seems to be specified with a 4dB external antenna gain. Now that would be about a 4 element yagi, or a helix or dish, but maybe more as you would have a lot of attenuation in the coax unless it was very short, so the whole package is actually not so small as it seems.
But we have seen better than this on Slashdot, not so many weeks ago someone had fitted up dish antennae to a standard WiFi card IIRC, and were getting better range on less power (100mW?), and very much greater bandwidth, but of course very directional. That too ought to be allowed worldwide but probably is not.
This thing is not by any means a technical breakthrough, except possibly in terms of power efficiency, and even there I think the improvement is marginal.
I am not German, but I would like to see their advertising laws adopted elsewhere, as I think they are good. The US, Australia and some other countries are far too lax about false and misleading adverts, bogus claims about competitors (e.g. what M$ says about Linux), and various other things. Here in the UK they try to do something about the most blatant instances of such things, but there seems to be insufficient ability to apply punishment, so scumbags like M$ are not deterred.
But a big part of this and many other issues is that the internet crosses national boundaries, so it really needs its own globally applicable set of laws, so there is a uniform policy on things like spam. However getting the politicians of over 200 countries to agree on anything would be well-nigh impossible.
Astronomers tend to estimate (and that is all it is) distance by parallax, if sufficiently close, or by red shift. At the frequency concerned, the beamwidth of any credible dish or other antenna is too wide to use parallax at a distance of light years, i.e. interstellar. Red shift is simply Doppler shift due to an expanding universe, it is of no value at all if you don't know what the source is, and what exactly controls its frequency. In any case its velocity may be in any direction, you do find blue shifts on some distant objects that presumably are not moving along with the generally assumed, but not provable, expansion of the universe. (there are other possible causes of red shift).
I would be very surprised if this is not quickly found to be caused by either equipment problems or a practical joker with a not very stable oscillator. Remember, all antennae, however big, have sidelobes. The only other credible explanation is a natural phenomenon, if they are in any way near (within several orders of magnitude!) to the distance, the power required approximates the output of an average star, which suggests that that is exactly what it is, a star of sorts.
But to establish anything at all, they need another telescope on the job, and for some significant time. So far, there is no credible evidence of anything out of the ordinary, because there is no corroboration. A bit like cold fusion....... (Actually I happen to think that that one does achieve something novel, but due to faulty experimental technique, i.e. understanding what things matter, attempts at duplication have not really done so, and some other attemps which are quite different do seem to show something odd.)
The fact is that they got where they are by a number of illegal practices, and the gullibility of those who purchase software. Many IT staff are in fact useless, and their managers even worse, which is a large part of the problem. The IT people tend to lag 5 years behind state of the art, and the managers 10 years, so to them M$'s popularity is still rising. In fact, serious users are sick of all the bugs, security holes, and evidence that M$ are utterly incompetent.
Obviously as far as I am concerned, the quicker FOSS wipes them out, the better. The world would have been a better place if Bill had never existed, or had taken up some career within his intellectual capability, such as sweeping floors in McDonald's. Note, I did not say grilling hamburgers, he is not good enough for that, and as a programmer is utterly useless, which is why M$ development methodology is all wrong and basically guarantees trash products.
It is very strange indeed that such useless and deficient products, far inferior to those that were already available elsewhere, ever captured any significant market share.
It seems to me that Bill must be a Communist saboteur.
But to return to the point, no country needs anything from M$ because there are cheaper, more reliable alternatives, many don't have any support at all in their local language, and even more simply can't affort to squander their finite resources on trash. FOSS such as KDE takes care of most of the difficulties rather well, as full internationilisation was part of the plan from the beginning.
That may be true, but I am reliably informed that it is a serious criminal offence in Germany to make that kind of comparison to a competitor. I presume there is no way of blocking this in Germany, so I can forsee a criminal prosecution against the Vile Monopoly.
it is an order of magnitude estimate based on many years of experience, and is very approximately true in every branch of engineering, although it might be expressed in different ways.
I will say one thing about k3b, it does not mess with the system and cause bugs and instability the way Adaptec/Roxio used to, and apparently still does, on Windoze. Of course Open Source users and developers simply would not tolerate that, it would have to be fixed, either by the original developer, or by someone who could tolerate the problems no longer. But my DVD burning machine has never seen Windoze, so it does not have that problem. Sometimes, as here, Open Source really is better, sometimes there is little difference. But altogether I am very pleased with KDE, (for example Konqueror really is an integrated web and file browser, which works, like what M$ tried to achieve) and although I have much less experience of Gnome, it looks rather good too.
I become more impressed with kde each time I use it, which is daily. The level of integration must surely be the equal of its closed-source rivals.
BTW I do most of my work on SuSE 9.1, but it (kde) seems much the same on the other machines, Xandros, FC2 and even FreeBSD (although I have not yet tried DVD writing on the latter).
I get the impression that each of kde and gnome is in itself a much bigger achievement than the kernel, and certainly they are important because new users or prospective users see the GUI first. They don't care about the window manager, or the X implementation, or even the kernel. But Linux distros are clearly doing something right.
BTW my DVD writer is multi-mode (+/-R and RW, and RAM) and the type of blank disc was correctly identified without any messing about by me, much to my surprise, as I have seen the "other" OS have problems.
You know, and I know, as do the owners of a number of documents, that it works. Sadly the trolls will never understand.....
So, I will concede, I was ambiguous in my choice of words, and as you say, anyone can make modifications, sensible or not, and no doubt many do.
.... wasting all your time programming for a trash OS.
It is a bit like the algorithms used by some mobile phone networks to detect that your phone has been stolen, and block its use, by detecting a very abnormal usage pattern.
But the ultimate answer is to sub-contract the suppression of virii etc to the RIAA, after all they have shown how (not!) to tackle minor amounts of illegal file copying.....
:-)
But there might have been another way, after all Zone Alarm manages to insert itself between the core of Windoze and the outside world (as presumably do all software firewalls, even the ones that don't work properly, like Symantec). I guess that would need code so radically different from the *nix version that it would be an entirely different thing.
On the other hand, if you want to make a good security product, it is best to start with a stable, secure, fairly neat and tidy OS, not put it on top of Billware/Bugware/Bloatware. In fact that goes for any application, start with a stable underlying platform with a tidy API set, and the development costs are reduced enormously. Windoze programmers that I know tell me that productivity is abysmally low because they spend a lot of time writing conditional code to cope with the unique bugs and stupid API variations in every Windoze variant, together with system calls that don't actually work as documented, on the rare occasions that they are documented. All of this is largely unknown, and has been since about 1970, in the *nix world, where the basic API set is very consistent and in conformance with the documentation, which usually includes the Posix specs.
I don't think there is the slightest danger of HP becoming the next SCOundrel, unless they want their share price to go the same way...... The SCOundrel strategy failed to generate revenue except from a few idiots who paid up, it would not have paid for one member of staff to be employed to collect the protection money. It was, and while SCO still exists, is simply a protection racket, and is self-defeating.
But I think that like IBM, HP will indeed generate revenue from Linux.
And yes, the juxtaposition of the unfortunate person's name is very funny.
Neither of my cameras has the slightest pretensions of Linux compatability, both work!
There might be a possible difficulty if you use the manufacturer's "raw" file format, but that will need a file conversion utility, not a driver, maybe a new Gimp plug-in. But as most people use jpegs most of the time, and some cameras will use tiff if needed, it does not seem to be a major problem. But some people will know otherwise, if so, write it up and publish. That is what this new site is for, after all.
Scanners sadly are another ball game altogether, despite conceptually resembling cameras..... The scanner equivalent of the Winmodem or GDI printer is the most hopeless of course, and like the modem and printer is best avoided even for Windoze users, as the tiny cost saving is far outweighed by the performance penalty.
Besides that, did we not all go to school to learn to write properly, which included at least basic grammar? Too much dumbing-down will cause us to forget how we should do basic things. A word processor is a tool for creating documents, but it should not intervene in the way the user does that, by modifying grammar.
An excellent point. The issue of trashed formatting, often by deleting something at the end of a paragraph by accident, because you can't see where the containers start and end, should have been addressed many years ago. M$ are entirely without excuse.