You really don't need, and definitely don't want a Program Files folder. In fact you don't want any folders at all, folder is a dumbed-down name for what has been since the beginning of heirarchial file systems (pre Unix even...) been called a directory. There is no need to folow the dumbing-down imposed on the world by a mere Convicted Monopolist, in fact why should anyone listen to such an entity at all? Programs are segregated into/bin//usr/bin//usr/local/bin,/sbin etc for good reasons, however it is not difficult to make your own directory for things that you add, as long as you put it in the path.
I think that where issues like installation are concerned, you should try Xandros, with SuSE a close second. Xandros is based on Debian, hence uses a much better packaging system, SuSE is a derivative of Red Hat a long way back, and so uses RPM, which is fairly unpleasant. Xandros puts a pretty face upon the underlying Debian system, it is not yet perfect but quite reasonable.
Of course if you get a full, comprehensive distro like SuSE Professional, there are so many applications supplied that you will not be wanting to load any new ones for a long while.....
I use several distros including Xandros 2 and SuSE 9.0. They are both OK, and easier to configure than most others. If you are inexperienced, best to avoid SuSE if you have an Nvidia graphics card, until they sort out a stupid, long-running problem with broken configuration utilities. Otherwise, SuSE has a lot more in the distro, but most of it might not get used. Count the text editors, you will see what I mean....
You will want one or more docking stations if you regularly connect to networks, monitors, real keyboard or whatever, in one or more regular places. They tend to be slightly expensive.
IMHO a real keyboard and in my case trackball (mouse if you must) is necessary for long-term work and although there does not seem to have been a test case in the courts about the meaning of long-term yet, would seem to be a requirement of the Display Screen Regulations in the UK, and sensible anywhere else. You will not want to develop RSI.
I rarely, almost never, use an external monitor, the laptop screen is 1600*1200, and I would definitely recommend that resolution for serious work.
I also have a plug-in Zip drive, which was a waste of money as it never gets used, plug-in floppy which shares space with a second battery, and a CF memory card in PCMCIA/CF adaptor. The last item is very useful indeed if you have a camera. My largest card is 512MB, beats the Zip drive any day, and I put a CF thing in my main desktop so I can also use it for data interchange.....
I also have a backpack for carrying the laptop and accessories, that gets used regularly, usually in briefcase mode but about 10% of the time, on my back.
You will need a backup device, possibly on your network, but many laptops have a combined CD writer/DVD reader. I use mine quite a lot.
Oh, and concerning trivia, as mine is a Dell Inspiron (which I would recommend) I got a set of coloured wrist pads, to make it obviously different from my friend's similar model. I fitted the yellow ones, his are purple.
It is potentially lethal, and in many countries illegal to use mains-powered equipment in the bathroom, except in the case of electric razors where a small isolating transformer is provided.
An ethernet connection effectively brings any mains potential appearing on the IT equipment into the bathroom. It would also be illegal and very dangerours. The standard of electrical safety in IT equipment is not that good, compared to equipment for use in adverse environments. The voltage on a telephone line in normal conditions (to say nothing of induced or direct lightning, or power-line shorts) is also potentially lethal, a phone should not be able to reach to the vicinity of the bath, so no modems. Cordless are OK of course, if you don't mind the insecurity and keep the charger somewhere else.
I have only ever seen a normal power socket in a bathroom in Australia, when I expressed my horror, the lady concerned assured me that Australian electricity was safer than British electricity..... (the evidence is to the contrary, actually.)
It is OK to use a laptop, on battery power, but steam and condensation may harm the machine, and if it uses a battery of more than 32 volts, it would be a very bad idea, especially if it fell into the bath. People have been killed with 32 volts (rarely) but not any lower AFAIK.
To add to these excellent comments, I would point out that in certain weather and sunspot conditions a decent radio receiver in the UK will pick up a great confused mass of gibberish, which is the summation of many US and other CB transmissions. Odd words and phrases can usually be discerned, but generally so many signals are being received simultaneously that there is no way of homing in on any one transmission.
Given lots and lots of powerline comms in the US and elsewhere, the rms sum of (in this case inadvertently) radiated interference is likely to be much greater than a few thousand CB sets all transmitting at once. The point is that HF communications will be disrupted worldwide (not all the world all the time, but some of the world some of the time) by attempts at abusing power lines in this way. Those who are behind these schemes are either ignorant (probably true if they are managers, or software engineers), or are wilfully ignoring the ionosphere.
Attempts have been made to use this technology in the UK, amateur radio and other things were wiped out locally, and doubtless at some great distance according to the prevailing conditions. I suspect that they measured interference up to some distance (a few miles?) from the source, and forgot all about the ionosphere. These tests also violated UK law about the amount of noise allowed on power lines (the signals are noise to legitimate spectrum users).
This must be stopped, or a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum will be gone for ever. It is in any case a very inefficient way to provide data communications. any progressive regime would be insisting on running fibre optics to every home or office. In the UK, BT (who had money at the time, and were ready and willing to run a fibre into every home) wanted to do just that some years ago, but the vile Mrs. Thatcher, allegedly a scientist, blocked it because it would give BT a monopoly. True, it would have, for a while, except that it could easily have been handled the same way as BT's copper wires now, via FRIACO, where other providers can get access. Of course the vile old hag had insufficient imagination to forsee that possibility, and in any case where networks and other large physical things are concerned, a monopoly, at least in any locality, is necessarily much more efficient. We could have had fibre 20 years ago (BT led the way in low-loss fibre) but for a singularly incompetent and particularly vile old bag. (Technology moves on, but a fibre good for 100MHz or more would not need replacing for a long time, even if the bits on each end were upgraded from time to time.) The same nasty piece of work also legislated to prevent mast sharing by the mobile networks (anti-competitive....) although our BBC and independent TV networks, in fierce competition, had efficiently shared transmitter sites for decades.
20 years later, I am still waiting, and have been for 3 years now, for NTL to make my cable TV bi-directional. They have done half the job, providing a digital set top (actually set bottom in most cases) box, with a network socket on the back, and increasing the rental, but they have not done the street cabinet or its links to the outside world yet. That evil old piece of malice has set the UK back about 20 years, almost as much damage as Bill Gates has done.
The moral of all this is that politicians who profess to have been scientists or other similar professionals were in fact failures in their earlier carreer, understand less than nothing about technology, and are utterly unfit to make any decision about anything of real importance. I fear this issue will be decided by some similarly incompetent piece of nastiness (although in the US the Unelected Warmongering Retard is likely to be demonstrably unelected this time), and teh damage will be done.
In terms of patents etc, is this any different from putting two different langauges e.g. php amd Javascript in an HTML file?
There is lots of prior art on that, in fact it is very common in sites which use php.
If anyone wants to be pedantic, I know that one executes on the server and the other on the client, but there is nothing to stop the client and server being the same machine.
There are also other combinations of things you could embed which would both execute in the same place.
IIRC, some of the old DEC PDP-8 operating systems were either public domain or copyright free because thay had been written for the government. Certainly they were free to the end user. I never saw source code, don't know on what terms that would have been available, but as was the practice in those days it probably came for the cost of a tape plus a handling charge. I am sure some other older people out there will remember. That was not true on later PDP-8s with floppy drives, which used a proprietary DEC OS.
The reason I found this out BTW was that I wanted to build myself a computer. We had a PBP-8 at work (with discs and licensed OS), but to get some sort of commonality I was thinking about using the Intersil IM-6100, which was a PDP-8 on a chip, and I needed an OS. I found that some of the DEC stuff was available, what finally killed the project was the cost of the optos for a paper tape reader, needed to load the bootstrap and then the OS. IIRC the phototransistor array for the reader head was going to cost about 50 UKP, which was a lot of money at the time, so I never built my own PDP-8.
Maybe the government-funded PDP-8 software actually started open source,in the sense of a commodity product which achieved significant distribution. Certainly the user group, DECUS, were the first such thing of any importance.
...than Fedora Core 1, which was utterly useless,even to me, a fairly experienced Linux user. Most of the configuration utilities were either just not there, or badly broken, the sort of thing that really puts new people off. I could make it do most things that I wanted by editing config files, but there is just not enough time for all that, even if, to me, it is quite easy.
I do wish they, and all distros, would dump RPM, which is the cause of most of the problems, and also ensure that updates can be downloaded by those with only a modem and an ISP that times out every 2 hours. FC1 offered me some updates of over 100MB (one file), and the download could not be resumed after timeout. I even tried doing it, with fixed local IP address, from behind another machine running IP Masquerading, that re-dialed quickly every time, and FC1 should only have seen a pause in connectivity, yet it stopped completely every time. That was the final nail in the coffin.
I was far too busy to investigate, but know that, for example, wget can be configured to resume partial downloads, so I guess they were not using wget, which I must confess is one of my favourite little utilities, because it works well.
All of this could have been avoided by a decent automated mechanism for source patching, the downloads would only be incremental. In most of the world it is far, far easier and cheaper to have enough CPU speed and disk space to do compiles than to get a broadband link, and it will remain so for some time to come. It is time that the various distros recognised this, which is one of the main remaining problems which will limit growth of Linux on the desktop. We don't need any more half-finished distros, just a few finished ones, which are easier to install and configure than a popular but badly broken OS. It is not much of a task to do better than M$, surely? Come on developers, let us see this side of things fixed once and for all.
"When you rely on free or low-cost products, you often get the shaft..."
Isn't that what you are guaranteed to get with the Convicted Monopolist? You might get it with some of the poorer Linux distros, but they can always be replaced, and if all else failed, Linux could be replaced with BSD with little change as far as the end users were concerned.
This guy is either very naive, or simply a liar. The fact is that any government, even of a "Banana Republic", can afford to employ a few competent software engineers, if they use the money they save on not funding Bill's gang of cowboys. These software engineers can review the code for holes, and can fix and customise the way they want, to make a better experience for all. However, they may not need so many low-grade support staff, whose job function is to apply the constant stream of Service Packs from Redmond.
It actually makes more carreer opportunities, those who have been confined to menial support work can start to fix things themselves, many will show unsuspected talent, in much tha same way that in the bad old days of early mainframes, more than a few of those employed in the menial position of "operator" learned programming skills in their spare time (after all, they had a computer to play with...) and advanced to more rewarding positions.
DEC may be gone, but they became part of Compaq, which became part of HP, which uses Unix....
Oh, the complexity of it all.
Strange that NT has never had the stability of VMS, or maybe not so strange, if the reports are to be believed that after NT3.51, some Silly Billy has the device drivers moved into kernel space to make it faster.........
It is sad that DEC is gone, but it was entirely predictable because the semiconducter industry, mainly Intel, is in a position to undercut anyone who only manufactures computers. They actually lasted longer than I expected. I had nothing against DEC, in fact I thought some of their early stuff (PDP8, 11) were actually quite decent at the time, and they were positively generous with documentation and manuals, certainly to educational and research users, but it was clear that their approach had had its day, with teh advent of the 386, or certainly the 486. Compare the cost of a complete top of the range PC to the biggest VAX, with a tiny fraction of the CPU performance, and you will see why.....
Having said that, I have worked quite efficiently, some years ago, on a VAX shared with a hundred users, using Word Perfect on a serial terminal. It was surprisingly usable.
Re:There appears to be a typographical error in #5
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Correct, and you have got the original name of the company correct also. His product was a "4k" basic, which was very buggy, badly documented, needed 6k and was very late, thus setting the standard for everything that was to follow.....
Re:I've got one reason to choose Linux over UNIX-S
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The position of BSD is not quite as clear as that. All BSDs are thought to be unencumbered (although the court did not make a ruling, that one was sensibly settled out of court). Also, no BSDs are thought to contain any code claimed to belong to McFraud, in fact it may turn out that his code came from BSD and is therefore subject to the minimal restrictions of the BSD licence.
Minix is not anywhere in the family tree, I am glad to say. Its limited kernel bears no relation to any of the others, and was created from scratch. Linux sort of came from Minix, although it seems that Linus sensibly threw away all the Minix code very near the beginning. Solaris is influenced by the original BSD, pre the BSD court case. What we now know as BSD of the Free, Open or Net varieties, is unencumbered and therefore has little of Unix as such in its parentage. Don't know about the commercial BSD, I ahven't even seen it advertised for a while....
Now SCO's stupid advert does reveal something that I had not noticed before.
While some application programming interfaces ("API Code") have been made available over the years through POSIX and other open standards, the UNIX(R) ABI Code has only been made available under copyright restrictions. AT&T made these binary interfaces available in order to support application development to UNIX(R) operating systems and to assist UNIX(R) licensees in the development process. The UNIX(R) ABIs were never authorized for unrestricted use or distribution under the GPL in Linux(R). As the copyright holder, SCO has never granted such permission. Nevertheless, many of the ABIs contained in Linux(R), and improperly distributed under the GPL, are direct copies of our UNIX(R) copyrighted software code.
They are alleging that the ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces) are at the centre of their case. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but an ABI definition tells you what to put in which registers and how to make the system call. BSD and Linux use different mechanisms for this, including how the registers and stack are used, and which interrupt. Because of that, and in particular the use of a different interrupt, it is conceptually simple to run BSD code on Linux or vice versa, by adding a handler for the alternative interrupt which shifts the call parameters to where they should be, on the stack or in registers, and invokes the native system call. Now, SCO has a Linux Personality Module, which does the same sort of thing. For this to be possible, without horrendously complex programming causing inefficiency, SCO must be using an ABI set which is entirely different to Linux. Now, the SCO ABIs can not be the same as BSD either, because Linux has a module to enable SCO (and other) Unix code to run, and it is not the same as the BSD module.
So, if we have three orthogonal sets of ABIs, how do they think they have a case? At most, the module, or kernel compile option, to allow SCO code to be run, would be the only place where there was any kind of ABI issue, and of course SCO are using a GPL ABI, and probably some of the associated code, in their Linux Personality Module.
So, on what precisely is SCO's allegation based? Or has Darl confused ABIs with APIs, which are similar in every *nix?
If using similar ABIs or APIs was in any case a copyright issue, would the Convicted Monopolist not have sued DRDOS, Freedos etc out of existence many years ago, and now be taking action against Wine? Or is this a small-scale test by M$ (who after all have funded SCO) to see if they will be able to win a case like that in court? IIRC there have already been court rulings to the contrary, involving M$.
Anyone notice the typo?
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On the stupid SCO page, they call the Greater Manchester Police the "Great Manchester Police". I think that some of the locals might disagree with that assessment of the quality of their local constabulary.
I will eat at Burger King from now on...
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Thinking some more about this, were there not once upon a time devices which played gramaphone records on insertion into a slot? It must have been quite a mechanical challenge, but I do seem to remember seeing such a thing when I was very young, which would be mid 1950s, and I suspect it had been done long before that.
I assume that would constitute prior art. And when was the ill-fated 8 track cartridge tape invented? The only player I ever had definitely auto-played on insertion.
I seem to remember that in the early days of MessyDOS, small TSR programs could be loaded which would do that when a floppy was inserted. Don't know the exact year they would have been first used, but it was pre-286 IIRC.
What about other computers? The microprocessor dates from about 1972, realistically about 1975 before they were much used, but computers with removable storage date from (very approximately) 1950. Maybe some of the early ones started a process on inserting a punched tape?
There is got to be vast amounts of prior art, again it seems that patents are handed out willy-nilly without any proper checks. That should be illegal, and the relevant patent office ought to be responsible for the results of their negligence, after all they have charged a fee for issuing something worthless.
I still say that all patent applications (except in a very few special cases) should be initially published worldwide on the internet, as the most reliable and efficient way of finding any claims to prior art. Then this sort of thing could not happen. Because technology is sold worldwide, the patent system needs to operate on a worldwide basis, and if it was done that way, there might be sufficient patent examiners to do the job properly. Instead of the limited resources in each country being used, duplicating effort, a patent would only need to be examined once (or better, twice, in two countries as an independent check).
But it would need politicians in the leading economies to agree to make it work, and first you need a politician with sufficient intelligence to comprehend the issue. The leading (non-elected, at least legally!) politician in the leading economy certainly does not fall into that category.
Sadly the cost of solid-state memory lags, in terms of time, about 12 years behind roatating magnetic disks. Please do correct me if that number is wrong, but it will not be out by more than a couple of years either way.
In terms of immediate cost, it must be a ratio of about 300, given that you can't buy an 8 gid standard HDD any more, but if you could it would be about $20 or less if it was proportional to larger disks.
It has always been so, to a fair approximation, and no doubt some corollary to Moore's Law says that it will always be so.
Pity, because I could use one of these right now if it cost under $100.
Sometimes the old ways are best. Within its rated operating life (say 5 years), a reputable brand of HDD is also more reliable.
I don't see this changeing any time soon, there are lots of new ideas around for storage devices but none of them seem to come to fruition. This is just an extension of yesterday's technology, more of the same (not to belittle the achievement, these things take money, hard work and expertise in abundance), but not a radical breakthrough.
IMHO holographic memories, with lots of inherent redundancy, and therefore reliability, are the way forward, but we have been hearing that for at least 10 years now. I think there will be a real breakthrough of some sort within 10 years, what it will be is not immediately obvious. What is certain is that this is not it. But, in about 6 years, when my income has doubled and 8 gig costs $200, I will buy one, if nothing better comes along. Of course, it will then only hold about 2 picturtes from the latest gigapixel camera, which is what I would likely use it for....... The problem will move, but will not go away.
Corporate identity and image matter very much. A few years ago, in the UK at least, there was a stupid fashion for mucking about with corporate identities, the sort of useless and incompetent advice that marketing consultancies charge vast sums of money to provide. Anyway, a number of large companies fell for it, including British Airways. Gone were the Union Jacks on the tails, to be replaced by seemingly random, meaningless bits of colour, different on every aircraft. Soon after, they made their biggest ever loss. The same happened to a number of others. Guess what? The Union Jacks are coming back again.
The image and the brand are everything to an organisation whose products are basically junk. Without the image, M$ are nothing.
It is not the existence or otherwise of Lindows that matters here, only the fact that if Windows ceases to be a trademark, Bill's only real asset is gone. Coinciding with the rise of Linus and other OSS, and the fact that people are sick of the security holes and constant expensive upgrades, plus the fact that Longhorn will break compatability just about everywhere, the next 2 years or so are very risky for the Convicted Monopolist. I predict that they will go down. I said that once about DEC, round about the time that a PC with a decent OS started to outperform a VAX at 50 times the cost. That prediction would have been made round about the time of the 386. I was out by about a year, they went quicker than I expected, to be swallowed up by Compaq. For similar reasons, I predict that M$ will be gone in less than 5 years, to be swallowed up by.....
I have seen one, it was not of any significant use. IIRC it was in grayscale, and the windows could not be overlapped or tiled. It looked like a failed attempt at making a Desqview clone!
The internet and the web came into being without any direct help from the low life forms known as politicians, lawyers or bankers.
It came into being because people wanted to cooperate and share information. None of these people would ever do such a thing.
The politicians may have allocated budgets in general terms, but would not have had a clue about how the money was being used. No beaurocracy can ever be creative. It took a long list of innovators to make it happen. Had it been a political decision, they would still be debating it now, and it would not happen. Things like the internet put politicians at risk......
I will give Al Gore credit for one thing, he invented a new lie, which makes him almost equal with a certain obnoxious spolit brat who invented a new way of creating an Illegal Monopoly. He did not invent the internet, or anything else either.
I think I need to get Darl McBride ito this as well, but can't think of any of his real or imaginary achievements right now.
Sadly, you are right although I sense that you don't want to be.....
There are very many badly designed sites still, but the problem is that M$ is not compatible with M$, never has been, and never will be, where different versions are concerned. That well-known problem afflicts Word, for example, and forces every mug to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.....
That is why standards compliance is so important, it can end all that nonsense. M$ do not set standards, never have, and never will.
As for commerial sites which don't work in any particular browser, that is completely without excuse, it causes the business concerned to lose money, and sloppy developers like that should lose their jobs.
It is quite simple. Most people have been brainwashed by the Convicted Monopolist's marketing machine to believe that there is only One True Way, and that alternatives are full of security holes and compatability problems. Of course you don't think that way, nor do I, but the many who have believed the lies do need a lot of time and gentle persuasion.
The things I use at home also work. The OS may still have a few rough edges where configuration is concerned, but things such as Ximian Evolution, and Mozilla and its relatives, and for that matter Konqueror or Opera, just work, and work, and work.....
Please tell your friends and acquaintances that there is life beyond M$.
"The Gecko layout engine seems unbreakable and is reportedly more standards compliant than Internet Explorer." The understatement is the latter part of the sentence, for those who may be new to this issue.
The Convicted Monopolist, having supposedly wiped out opposing browsers, have been utterly negligent with Incompetent Exploder for years now. It has fallen way behind in useful features, and it never made any attempt at standards compliance. As for the security holes..... I know they claimed the other day that it was now the most secure because they had fixed so many problems, but anyone who has ever done any software QA will know the utter incompetence of statements like that, in fact the number of bugs discovered is more likely to correlate with th elack of quality of the underlying code, much of which still remains, so it is almost certainly still very bad indeed. IE was another case of "decommoditising the protocols", as described in the infamous Halloween Memos, delibarately breaking standards compliance and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator of quality and interoperability.
The big problem is that ignorant or indolent web designers have churned out buggy code that works (sort of) in Inept Eradicator, but will fail in any standards-compliant browser, the closest to that ideal of standards compliance being Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror (not in any order, and apologies to any I missed). Some designers have apparently used that other utterly useless M$ product, Frontpage, which AFAIK has never had a good review in any magazine. Standards compliance is absolutely essential, that is why the Web grew so quickly, but now growth is jeapordised by the ill-defined non-standard set by the Monopolist and the fact that incompetents have chosen to work to it.
The way forward is of course to make sites which are fully standards-compliant (relatively easy, there are lots of better tools than Frontpage, some of them free, and a free validation service at w3c.org.) The trash that went before such as IE is best forgotten, otherwise we will forever be infested with bugs, security holes and Billisms. (A Billism is a feature which is illogical, unwanted and ineptly implemented, which forces itself upon you because Sir Bill presumes to know better than you what you want to do. Word is particularly full of Billisms.)
Mozilla and its relatives, not forgetting Netscape is an excellent base from which to move forward once more, without deviating into the closed, unstable and constantly changing world of Illegal Monopolies and their badly deficient producta. (Point to ponder - a monopoly is only necessary when a company can not succeed on the strenghts of its products, therefore th eneed to create one is in fact an admission of abject failure.) I use Mozilla at home, as do all my friends, and we are all quite keen to recommend it to others. It has also been getting favourable reports in the press. Long may it continue.
I don't see why not! Or even Linux Windows, (need Linus's permission of course as he owns the Linux trademark), or Red Hat Windows, SuSE Windows, Xandros Windows, Debian Windows, IBM Windows, SCO Windows......
No, there must be a law somewhere against the last one!
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I think that where issues like installation are concerned, you should try Xandros, with SuSE a close second. Xandros is based on Debian, hence uses a much better packaging system, SuSE is a derivative of Red Hat a long way back, and so uses RPM, which is fairly unpleasant. Xandros puts a pretty face upon the underlying Debian system, it is not yet perfect but quite reasonable.
Of course if you get a full, comprehensive distro like SuSE Professional, there are so many applications supplied that you will not be wanting to load any new ones for a long while.....
I use several distros including Xandros 2 and SuSE 9.0. They are both OK, and easier to configure than most others. If you are inexperienced, best to avoid SuSE if you have an Nvidia graphics card, until they sort out a stupid, long-running problem with broken configuration utilities. Otherwise, SuSE has a lot more in the distro, but most of it might not get used. Count the text editors, you will see what I mean....
IMHO a real keyboard and in my case trackball (mouse if you must) is necessary for long-term work and although there does not seem to have been a test case in the courts about the meaning of long-term yet, would seem to be a requirement of the Display Screen Regulations in the UK, and sensible anywhere else. You will not want to develop RSI.
I rarely, almost never, use an external monitor, the laptop screen is 1600*1200, and I would definitely recommend that resolution for serious work.
I also have a plug-in Zip drive, which was a waste of money as it never gets used, plug-in floppy which shares space with a second battery, and a CF memory card in PCMCIA/CF adaptor. The last item is very useful indeed if you have a camera. My largest card is 512MB, beats the Zip drive any day, and I put a CF thing in my main desktop so I can also use it for data interchange.....
I also have a backpack for carrying the laptop and accessories, that gets used regularly, usually in briefcase mode but about 10% of the time, on my back.
You will need a backup device, possibly on your network, but many laptops have a combined CD writer/DVD reader. I use mine quite a lot.
Oh, and concerning trivia, as mine is a Dell Inspiron (which I would recommend) I got a set of coloured wrist pads, to make it obviously different from my friend's similar model. I fitted the yellow ones, his are purple.
Hope this helps.
An ethernet connection effectively brings any mains potential appearing on the IT equipment into the bathroom. It would also be illegal and very dangerours. The standard of electrical safety in IT equipment is not that good, compared to equipment for use in adverse environments. The voltage on a telephone line in normal conditions (to say nothing of induced or direct lightning, or power-line shorts) is also potentially lethal, a phone should not be able to reach to the vicinity of the bath, so no modems. Cordless are OK of course, if you don't mind the insecurity and keep the charger somewhere else.
I have only ever seen a normal power socket in a bathroom in Australia, when I expressed my horror, the lady concerned assured me that Australian electricity was safer than British electricity..... (the evidence is to the contrary, actually.)
It is OK to use a laptop, on battery power, but steam and condensation may harm the machine, and if it uses a battery of more than 32 volts, it would be a very bad idea, especially if it fell into the bath. People have been killed with 32 volts (rarely) but not any lower AFAIK.
Given lots and lots of powerline comms in the US and elsewhere, the rms sum of (in this case inadvertently) radiated interference is likely to be much greater than a few thousand CB sets all transmitting at once. The point is that HF communications will be disrupted worldwide (not all the world all the time, but some of the world some of the time) by attempts at abusing power lines in this way. Those who are behind these schemes are either ignorant (probably true if they are managers, or software engineers), or are wilfully ignoring the ionosphere.
Attempts have been made to use this technology in the UK, amateur radio and other things were wiped out locally, and doubtless at some great distance according to the prevailing conditions. I suspect that they measured interference up to some distance (a few miles?) from the source, and forgot all about the ionosphere. These tests also violated UK law about the amount of noise allowed on power lines (the signals are noise to legitimate spectrum users).
This must be stopped, or a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum will be gone for ever. It is in any case a very inefficient way to provide data communications. any progressive regime would be insisting on running fibre optics to every home or office. In the UK, BT (who had money at the time, and were ready and willing to run a fibre into every home) wanted to do just that some years ago, but the vile Mrs. Thatcher, allegedly a scientist, blocked it because it would give BT a monopoly. True, it would have, for a while, except that it could easily have been handled the same way as BT's copper wires now, via FRIACO, where other providers can get access. Of course the vile old hag had insufficient imagination to forsee that possibility, and in any case where networks and other large physical things are concerned, a monopoly, at least in any locality, is necessarily much more efficient. We could have had fibre 20 years ago (BT led the way in low-loss fibre) but for a singularly incompetent and particularly vile old bag. (Technology moves on, but a fibre good for 100MHz or more would not need replacing for a long time, even if the bits on each end were upgraded from time to time.) The same nasty piece of work also legislated to prevent mast sharing by the mobile networks (anti-competitive....) although our BBC and independent TV networks, in fierce competition, had efficiently shared transmitter sites for decades.
20 years later, I am still waiting, and have been for 3 years now, for NTL to make my cable TV bi-directional. They have done half the job, providing a digital set top (actually set bottom in most cases) box, with a network socket on the back, and increasing the rental, but they have not done the street cabinet or its links to the outside world yet. That evil old piece of malice has set the UK back about 20 years, almost as much damage as Bill Gates has done.
The moral of all this is that politicians who profess to have been scientists or other similar professionals were in fact failures in their earlier carreer, understand less than nothing about technology, and are utterly unfit to make any decision about anything of real importance. I fear this issue will be decided by some similarly incompetent piece of nastiness (although in the US the Unelected Warmongering Retard is likely to be demonstrably unelected this time), and teh damage will be done.
There is lots of prior art on that, in fact it is very common in sites which use php.
If anyone wants to be pedantic, I know that one executes on the server and the other on the client, but there is nothing to stop the client and server being the same machine.
There are also other combinations of things you could embed which would both execute in the same place.
The reason I found this out BTW was that I wanted to build myself a computer. We had a PBP-8 at work (with discs and licensed OS), but to get some sort of commonality I was thinking about using the Intersil IM-6100, which was a PDP-8 on a chip, and I needed an OS. I found that some of the DEC stuff was available, what finally killed the project was the cost of the optos for a paper tape reader, needed to load the bootstrap and then the OS. IIRC the phototransistor array for the reader head was going to cost about 50 UKP, which was a lot of money at the time, so I never built my own PDP-8.
Maybe the government-funded PDP-8 software actually started open source,in the sense of a commodity product which achieved significant distribution. Certainly the user group, DECUS, were the first such thing of any importance.
I do wish they, and all distros, would dump RPM, which is the cause of most of the problems, and also ensure that updates can be downloaded by those with only a modem and an ISP that times out every 2 hours. FC1 offered me some updates of over 100MB (one file), and the download could not be resumed after timeout. I even tried doing it, with fixed local IP address, from behind another machine running IP Masquerading, that re-dialed quickly every time, and FC1 should only have seen a pause in connectivity, yet it stopped completely every time. That was the final nail in the coffin.
I was far too busy to investigate, but know that, for example, wget can be configured to resume partial downloads, so I guess they were not using wget, which I must confess is one of my favourite little utilities, because it works well.
All of this could have been avoided by a decent automated mechanism for source patching, the downloads would only be incremental. In most of the world it is far, far easier and cheaper to have enough CPU speed and disk space to do compiles than to get a broadband link, and it will remain so for some time to come. It is time that the various distros recognised this, which is one of the main remaining problems which will limit growth of Linux on the desktop. We don't need any more half-finished distros, just a few finished ones, which are easier to install and configure than a popular but badly broken OS. It is not much of a task to do better than M$, surely? Come on developers, let us see this side of things fixed once and for all.
Isn't that what you are guaranteed to get with the Convicted Monopolist? You might get it with some of the poorer Linux distros, but they can always be replaced, and if all else failed, Linux could be replaced with BSD with little change as far as the end users were concerned.
This guy is either very naive, or simply a liar. The fact is that any government, even of a "Banana Republic", can afford to employ a few competent software engineers, if they use the money they save on not funding Bill's gang of cowboys. These software engineers can review the code for holes, and can fix and customise the way they want, to make a better experience for all. However, they may not need so many low-grade support staff, whose job function is to apply the constant stream of Service Packs from Redmond.
It actually makes more carreer opportunities, those who have been confined to menial support work can start to fix things themselves, many will show unsuspected talent, in much tha same way that in the bad old days of early mainframes, more than a few of those employed in the menial position of "operator" learned programming skills in their spare time (after all, they had a computer to play with...) and advanced to more rewarding positions.
Oh, the complexity of it all.
Strange that NT has never had the stability of VMS, or maybe not so strange, if the reports are to be believed that after NT3.51, some Silly Billy has the device drivers moved into kernel space to make it faster.........
It is sad that DEC is gone, but it was entirely predictable because the semiconducter industry, mainly Intel, is in a position to undercut anyone who only manufactures computers. They actually lasted longer than I expected. I had nothing against DEC, in fact I thought some of their early stuff (PDP8, 11) were actually quite decent at the time, and they were positively generous with documentation and manuals, certainly to educational and research users, but it was clear that their approach had had its day, with teh advent of the 386, or certainly the 486. Compare the cost of a complete top of the range PC to the biggest VAX, with a tiny fraction of the CPU performance, and you will see why.....
Having said that, I have worked quite efficiently, some years ago, on a VAX shared with a hundred users, using Word Perfect on a serial terminal. It was surprisingly usable.
Correct, and you have got the original name of the company correct also. His product was a "4k" basic, which was very buggy, badly documented, needed 6k and was very late, thus setting the standard for everything that was to follow.....
Minix is not anywhere in the family tree, I am glad to say. Its limited kernel bears no relation to any of the others, and was created from scratch. Linux sort of came from Minix, although it seems that Linus sensibly threw away all the Minix code very near the beginning. Solaris is influenced by the original BSD, pre the BSD court case. What we now know as BSD of the Free, Open or Net varieties, is unencumbered and therefore has little of Unix as such in its parentage. Don't know about the commercial BSD, I ahven't even seen it advertised for a while....
Now SCO's stupid advert does reveal something that I had not noticed before.
While some application programming interfaces ("API Code") have been made available over the years through POSIX and other open standards, the UNIX(R) ABI Code has only been made available under copyright restrictions. AT&T made these binary interfaces available in order to support application development to UNIX(R) operating systems and to assist UNIX(R) licensees in the development process. The UNIX(R) ABIs were never authorized for unrestricted use or distribution under the GPL in Linux(R). As the copyright holder, SCO has never granted such permission. Nevertheless, many of the ABIs contained in Linux(R), and improperly distributed under the GPL, are direct copies of our UNIX(R) copyrighted software code.
They are alleging that the ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces) are at the centre of their case. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but an ABI definition tells you what to put in which registers and how to make the system call. BSD and Linux use different mechanisms for this, including how the registers and stack are used, and which interrupt. Because of that, and in particular the use of a different interrupt, it is conceptually simple to run BSD code on Linux or vice versa, by adding a handler for the alternative interrupt which shifts the call parameters to where they should be, on the stack or in registers, and invokes the native system call. Now, SCO has a Linux Personality Module, which does the same sort of thing. For this to be possible, without horrendously complex programming causing inefficiency, SCO must be using an ABI set which is entirely different to Linux. Now, the SCO ABIs can not be the same as BSD either, because Linux has a module to enable SCO (and other) Unix code to run, and it is not the same as the BSD module.
So, if we have three orthogonal sets of ABIs, how do they think they have a case? At most, the module, or kernel compile option, to allow SCO code to be run, would be the only place where there was any kind of ABI issue, and of course SCO are using a GPL ABI, and probably some of the associated code, in their Linux Personality Module.
So, on what precisely is SCO's allegation based? Or has Darl confused ABIs with APIs, which are similar in every *nix?
If using similar ABIs or APIs was in any case a copyright issue, would the Convicted Monopolist not have sued DRDOS, Freedos etc out of existence many years ago, and now be taking action against Wine? Or is this a small-scale test by M$ (who after all have funded SCO) to see if they will be able to win a case like that in court? IIRC there have already been court rulings to the contrary, involving M$.
On the stupid SCO page, they call the Greater Manchester Police the "Great Manchester Police". I think that some of the locals might disagree with that assessment of the quality of their local constabulary.
...because apparently McDonalds are using SCO.
I assume that would constitute prior art. And when was the ill-fated 8 track cartridge tape invented? The only player I ever had definitely auto-played on insertion.
I seem to remember that in the early days of MessyDOS, small TSR programs could be loaded which would do that when a floppy was inserted. Don't know the exact year they would have been first used, but it was pre-286 IIRC.
What about other computers? The microprocessor dates from about 1972, realistically about 1975 before they were much used, but computers with removable storage date from (very approximately) 1950. Maybe some of the early ones started a process on inserting a punched tape?
There is got to be vast amounts of prior art, again it seems that patents are handed out willy-nilly without any proper checks. That should be illegal, and the relevant patent office ought to be responsible for the results of their negligence, after all they have charged a fee for issuing something worthless.
I still say that all patent applications (except in a very few special cases) should be initially published worldwide on the internet, as the most reliable and efficient way of finding any claims to prior art. Then this sort of thing could not happen. Because technology is sold worldwide, the patent system needs to operate on a worldwide basis, and if it was done that way, there might be sufficient patent examiners to do the job properly. Instead of the limited resources in each country being used, duplicating effort, a patent would only need to be examined once (or better, twice, in two countries as an independent check).
But it would need politicians in the leading economies to agree to make it work, and first you need a politician with sufficient intelligence to comprehend the issue. The leading (non-elected, at least legally!) politician in the leading economy certainly does not fall into that category.
In terms of immediate cost, it must be a ratio of about 300, given that you can't buy an 8 gid standard HDD any more, but if you could it would be about $20 or less if it was proportional to larger disks.
It has always been so, to a fair approximation, and no doubt some corollary to Moore's Law says that it will always be so.
Pity, because I could use one of these right now if it cost under $100.
Sometimes the old ways are best. Within its rated operating life (say 5 years), a reputable brand of HDD is also more reliable.
I don't see this changeing any time soon, there are lots of new ideas around for storage devices but none of them seem to come to fruition. This is just an extension of yesterday's technology, more of the same (not to belittle the achievement, these things take money, hard work and expertise in abundance), but not a radical breakthrough.
IMHO holographic memories, with lots of inherent redundancy, and therefore reliability, are the way forward, but we have been hearing that for at least 10 years now. I think there will be a real breakthrough of some sort within 10 years, what it will be is not immediately obvious. What is certain is that this is not it. But, in about 6 years, when my income has doubled and 8 gig costs $200, I will buy one, if nothing better comes along. Of course, it will then only hold about 2 picturtes from the latest gigapixel camera, which is what I would likely use it for....... The problem will move, but will not go away.
Reading the responses would be a bit of an intellectual challenge for Dubya. Best if everyone keeps to words of one syllable.
They don't actually have it to defend. No-one does. They have mis-appropriated something that in fact is generic and therefore in the public domain.
The image and the brand are everything to an organisation whose products are basically junk. Without the image, M$ are nothing.
It is not the existence or otherwise of Lindows that matters here, only the fact that if Windows ceases to be a trademark, Bill's only real asset is gone. Coinciding with the rise of Linus and other OSS, and the fact that people are sick of the security holes and constant expensive upgrades, plus the fact that Longhorn will break compatability just about everywhere, the next 2 years or so are very risky for the Convicted Monopolist. I predict that they will go down. I said that once about DEC, round about the time that a PC with a decent OS started to outperform a VAX at 50 times the cost. That prediction would have been made round about the time of the 386. I was out by about a year, they went quicker than I expected, to be swallowed up by Compaq. For similar reasons, I predict that M$ will be gone in less than 5 years, to be swallowed up by.....
I have seen one, it was not of any significant use. IIRC it was in grayscale, and the windows could not be overlapped or tiled. It looked like a failed attempt at making a Desqview clone!
It came into being because people wanted to cooperate and share information. None of these people would ever do such a thing.
The politicians may have allocated budgets in general terms, but would not have had a clue about how the money was being used. No beaurocracy can ever be creative. It took a long list of innovators to make it happen. Had it been a political decision, they would still be debating it now, and it would not happen. Things like the internet put politicians at risk......
I will give Al Gore credit for one thing, he invented a new lie, which makes him almost equal with a certain obnoxious spolit brat who invented a new way of creating an Illegal Monopoly. He did not invent the internet, or anything else either.
I think I need to get Darl McBride ito this as well, but can't think of any of his real or imaginary achievements right now.
There are very many badly designed sites still, but the problem is that M$ is not compatible with M$, never has been, and never will be, where different versions are concerned. That well-known problem afflicts Word, for example, and forces every mug to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.....
That is why standards compliance is so important, it can end all that nonsense. M$ do not set standards, never have, and never will.
As for commerial sites which don't work in any particular browser, that is completely without excuse, it causes the business concerned to lose money, and sloppy developers like that should lose their jobs.
The things I use at home also work. The OS may still have a few rough edges where configuration is concerned, but things such as Ximian Evolution, and Mozilla and its relatives, and for that matter Konqueror or Opera, just work, and work, and work.....
Please tell your friends and acquaintances that there is life beyond M$.
The Convicted Monopolist, having supposedly wiped out opposing browsers, have been utterly negligent with Incompetent Exploder for years now. It has fallen way behind in useful features, and it never made any attempt at standards compliance. As for the security holes..... I know they claimed the other day that it was now the most secure because they had fixed so many problems, but anyone who has ever done any software QA will know the utter incompetence of statements like that, in fact the number of bugs discovered is more likely to correlate with th elack of quality of the underlying code, much of which still remains, so it is almost certainly still very bad indeed. IE was another case of "decommoditising the protocols", as described in the infamous Halloween Memos, delibarately breaking standards compliance and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator of quality and interoperability.
The big problem is that ignorant or indolent web designers have churned out buggy code that works (sort of) in Inept Eradicator, but will fail in any standards-compliant browser, the closest to that ideal of standards compliance being Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror (not in any order, and apologies to any I missed). Some designers have apparently used that other utterly useless M$ product, Frontpage, which AFAIK has never had a good review in any magazine. Standards compliance is absolutely essential, that is why the Web grew so quickly, but now growth is jeapordised by the ill-defined non-standard set by the Monopolist and the fact that incompetents have chosen to work to it.
The way forward is of course to make sites which are fully standards-compliant (relatively easy, there are lots of better tools than Frontpage, some of them free, and a free validation service at w3c.org.) The trash that went before such as IE is best forgotten, otherwise we will forever be infested with bugs, security holes and Billisms. (A Billism is a feature which is illogical, unwanted and ineptly implemented, which forces itself upon you because Sir Bill presumes to know better than you what you want to do. Word is particularly full of Billisms.)
Mozilla and its relatives, not forgetting Netscape is an excellent base from which to move forward once more, without deviating into the closed, unstable and constantly changing world of Illegal Monopolies and their badly deficient producta. (Point to ponder - a monopoly is only necessary when a company can not succeed on the strenghts of its products, therefore th eneed to create one is in fact an admission of abject failure.) I use Mozilla at home, as do all my friends, and we are all quite keen to recommend it to others. It has also been getting favourable reports in the press. Long may it continue.
No, there must be a law somewhere against the last one!