I think you should apologise for that disgraceful post. My information, from someone who visits Iraq, is that it is not so. Unlike Afghanistan where women have been seriously oppressed for a long time, Iraq was essentially a secular society. They have women doctors, and had a biological warfare expert IIRC. My friend used to know three Kurdish women, definitely an oppressed minority, yet all with degrees.
The fact is that everyone except the former ruling scumbag class has been oppressed, but I see illiteracy on Slashdot every day, as there is everywhere.
It will get worse if Shia Muslims become the new ruling class, then women will be oppressed.
That does not seem to be required in the US, if other bad examples which have been debated here are anything to go by. It should also fail as a result of prior art, however that seems to not be taken into account either.
However, this will fail in large parts of the world, especially Europe. How can you have a patent on the internet, which by definition is worldwide, vaild in one country and not any others? It is stupid.
A new worldwide patents system is urgently needed, if only to deal with internet-related issues, and it would properly be run along the lines of the bodies which already control technical standards, domain allocation, etc, all of which work very well indeed with hardly a single schyster needing to be involved. A disputed application should be put to a democratic vote, quite easy as the net facilitates that sort of thing (or is that patented?).
The politicians could save themselves a lot of unnecessary problems by learning how the internet came to be (oh, I forgot, was it not a certain US politician who "invented" it?) without politicians, lawyers or big business having any major involvment, and that is why it happened quickly and successfully. They should learn that it is capable of governing itself too, and it should be left to do so in a democratic way, making its own legislation to prevent abuse as well as controlling any relevant patents. No western democracy seems to have a legal system which is capable of acting sufficiently quickly to be of any possible use, where technology advances quickly, and in fact have proved to be of no use even where technology progresses backwards, under the control of a Convicted Monopoly. A jury of internet users could have tried M$, found them guilty by a large majority verdict, and banned the pathetic web browser which was the cause of the problem, from the net by issuing a patch for servers to reject it. Likewise they would have the power to democratically ban Lookout, and hence cripple the vast majority of email virii. If estimates of the cost of the current epedemic are in any way realistic, the world could have saved $30 billion at least.
Politicians and schysters have a long and well-established history of being utterly useless and incompetent (with maybe a dozen very honourable exceptions) when it comes to dealing with technology. They should get out of that area, and leave it to those who understand what it is about.
100,000,000 is far too small. The punishment needs to have a strong deterrent value so that Bill will finally stop ignoring all court rulings, and cease and desist from running a Criminal Monopoly. It must hit him so hard that he will not dare do it again.
IMHO it needs to be something like half of Microtrash's net assets in order to be effective.
You are absolutely correct about the technology generally used at that time. Microprocessors were very slow to get used for that sort of thing, partly because the performance was not there yet, but also that industry, like all safety-critical industries, tends to be very conservative.
The simple fact is that certain semiconductor manufacturers (still in existence, so no names....) were allowing reject chips to leave their plant, they were then re-tested and if they worked after a fashion, were re-labelled as genuine, by some dodgy business somewhere. I remember being on the receiving end of a batch of faulty 741 op-amps, which had made their way from somewhere in the US, via Egypt and I forget where else, eventually ending up on the UK market. Re-marking supposed military-grade components was much more lucrative. But, at least two major semiconductor manufacturers were themselves fined for cheating on some part of the testing process of military components.
As for microprocessors, a lot of junk came out of the major manuafacturers anyway, because process control was not what it is today, and only so much testing was possible. They were no doubt doing their best, with a new technology, but I know that EPROM, RAM and for some reason clock generator (surely the simplest?) chips from one manufacturer had an abnormally high proportion of defects.
The story of this explosion is just that, a story created to fit the known facts of a very real and tragic accident, caused by human error.
Are they mentally subnormal, or what? Why can't you run a firewall, which you control, for your own protection? These guys are clearly unfit to run anything, far less a state legislature.
Yes, the illegally commingled code, which was delibarately done in such a way that the court could not make them untangle it, is the root of the problem.
Sound programming practice, as used by everyone everywhere (except in Redmond) who develops serious programs is to have a modular layout with diverse things separated, in separate dlls for example, and not all mixed up the way it currently is. It is a true reflection of Bill's random mind.
As for Longhorn, they are cutting down the APIs drastically so it will break almost every existing application. It will be their downfall, when poeple find that what will no longer run on a M$ OS will run on Linux under Wine or one of its variants.
In certain European countries company directors do not enjoy the immunity from some aspects of the law that they do in the UK, and even more so, the US.
I wonder if this means that Sir Bill is heading for the Bastille?
Not if you remove the BIOS write enable jumper, if you have one. ALL PCs should have one, most do not because it costs $0.000something, so the motherboard manufacturers prefer to leave it out. In most cases the PCB tracks are there, and it will be shown as an option in the motherboard manual. It is not impossible, given reasonable soldering skill, to fit one. Depending which way it works, you may have to cut a track if it is open to protect, if it is closed to protect you just put the link on the pins.
Many motherboards now have a dual BIOS, however this is switched in the BIOS at boot time, as is the protection, which must be assumed to be useless, as it is software controlled.
The hardware protection is total, with no write signal (or no programming voltage if that is what is switched) to the chip, it can't be written.
We should start a campaign to bring back the jumpers as standard!
That is what it cost, and an impressively small budget it is too. Now, how much has it saved? Ten, a hundred, a thousand times the cost?
Invest $5900 to save $xxxxxxxxx. It has got to be good.
Sadly most accountants and many managers fail to see the savings, they see it as extra undesireable cost, till they get badly hit by a virus, then it is all the IT guy's fault, not theirs for not spending the money.
A bit like the Millennium Bug, the expenditure, which was quite large worldwide, is still complained about, yet if the work had not been done the costs would have been enormous, maybe even in human lives. The fact that nothing, or very little, happened proved that most of the work had been done correctly. It too was money well spent.
The true cost is far, far higher, equalling the total value of the business if the worst happens....
On average, I would believe 58k, many as low as 1k to 2k, quite a few as high as 500k, depending on how much delay happens to vital work.
A sizeable project in any field can have a thousand people dependent on the system, one lost day is easily 50 to 100k, and if contractual obligations can not be met, it only gets worse. Likewise the output from a factory can be upwards of 100k per day (up to many millions) so a few hours lost production can be very expensive indeed. A lot of software people seem to think that the only costs incurred are in their own little world, but it actually gets much, much worse when physical processes are affected.
If you stand to lose millions or billions, it follows that the defences must be of the very highest standard possible (diverse means of protection for a start) and all of that, and the time taken to look after it, and learn how to look after it, all adds up.
We now know most of what he did not invent, which leaves just what?
IMHO, the only thing he ever invented was a new way of creating an Illegal Monopoly. There is not the slightest trace of any technical innovation anywhere. It was all prior art, shamelessly copied, stolen or bought at an artificially low price by deception.
Maybe I am wrong, no-one has yet confessed to inventing the BSOD, so perhaps we should give him credit for that one, unless anyone knows differently. Of course, they are supposed not to happen.....
Ideally you would not make anything visible including the general type of OS, but unfortunately then Netcraft surveys would not be able to compare the rise of Apache to the hopefully terminal decline of IIS.
However, to make life complicated for hackers, it might be useful to declare the server and OS to be quite different to what they actually are. How about a really tightly secured OpenBSD server posing as IIS, if that is possible, for example? It would keep the nasty little scumbags busy for a while, maybe for long enough to get caught.
Actually your car probably has 100 to 1000 times more computing power than an Apollo module. I can't think of anything which has about the same computing power, most things are eitehr much less or much more nowadays.
The fact is that a moon mission today is impossible despite the rantings of the non-elected, intellectually challenged, presidential impostor, because the software and other complexity issues would make it cost far too much, take far too long, and probably suffer a BSOD.....
Another factor to consider is that in those days the semiconductor industry did support aerospace, which basically they do not nowadays, (it would be less than 0.2% of the total industry output) there are hardly any components fully screened as part of the manufacturing process for example. The surface mount packaging we have to use today has many reliability problems in adverse environments, particularly in coping with temperature cycling, and the packages are not even moisture-proof (not that it matters in space, but it does on the ground!). It would be impossible today to duplicate the reliability of an Apollo computer. BTW I currently work as a Reliability Analyst in a safety-critical industry, so I might know a little bit about the subject.
I have an article in front of me which suggests that the failure rate of the Apollo Guidance Computer was less than 10 in a billion hours, that equates to about the same as one small to medium chip or 5 to 10 best-quality transistors nowadays.
Why? Blame the consumer industry, PCs and mobile phones, areas where solid-state electronics is of no vital importance, but which dominate the semiconductor market. In all fairness, it is true to say that the quality of a normal commercial quality components has improved greatly over the years, but this can rarely be proved, and there is simply no way of getting the extreme reliability rtequired for manned missions, unless by using a much greater degree of redundancy, and therefore more complexity, than used to be the case.
Not only that, but with the increase in bloat in complex systems, overall software reliability is declining, hastened by "unsafe" languages like C++, and the tendency to use "junk" operating systems (we all know which, it has been debated here many times...) in critical applications.
This generation is making backward progress, and with the rise in the use of cannabis and other mind-damaging drugs as a direct result of corrupt government policy, it will soon be impossible to get sufficient fully sane people to undertake a major project anyway.
No more so than the smoothness of a modern aircraft wing. When you push the limits of performance, or economy, shape matters. If you just want to get off the ground, almost anything will do.
A few odd pimples or gouges in the surface would probably have made only minor difference, certainly higher temperature locally, but we are talking here about a very large deviation from the intended shape.
Of course we all know they were not running Microsoft software, well-designed software would have been coded to cope with all normal inputs, all abnormal but survivable inputs, and as big a margin as possible beyond. The input sensors (rate gyros etc) or the control surface actuators would eventually saturate, at that point no software would be of much use, although I do think that control would have passed from the 4 primary to the one secondary computers by then. The computers would have been programmed to eventually give up gracefully and give direct manual control to the crew as a last resort.
Much of what would happen in the software is not too far removed, in principle at least, from the flight control systems of an Airbus or Boeing 777, however the track record of fly by wire aircraft in recovering from adverse situations has not been at all impressive, and fundamental system design errors have resulted in a number of accidents, because the system/software developers had tried to be to clever or were not as knowledgable of aircraft as they should have been or possibly did not provide safe default states when all else has failed.
It seems that in recent times NASA have had a number of corporate failings, which ultimately lay behind both shuttle disasters, but many things they did, and still do, very well indeed, and safety-critical software is one area where they excel, in contrast to the fact that someone should have done some calculations and tests on the effect of flying chunks of foam a long time ago.
They should be made to disclose fully the workings of the NTFS file system. this is important for lots of reasons, data recovery comes to mind, as well as compatability with Linux etc.
Depending who you believe, it is still not safe to write to a NTFS partition from Linux, funnily enough this sort of thing ONLY happens with Bill's trash. Almost every other OS can read every other OS's files reliably, and that is how it should be. After all, we have interchangeable media (Zip, Jazz, etc) and even interchangeadle hard drives. Some of us need this.
Bill's trash of course has no capability to read foreign file systems, his OS in all its guises is about as backward as they come.
You should not be using IE at all, paid for or not, if you value the security of your computer, and those of others. Same for Outlook. Those are a bit like using a car with dangerous design errors (Corvair? Renault Dauphine? Porsche 911?) just because you can't be bothered to get a free replacement that works properly and conforms to published standards.
You forget that the standards for these graphics cards are dictated by the HARDWARE designers, and area in which M$ expertise is measured in negative numbers. These same cards will run in MACs or anything that uses a PCI or AGP bus.
The fact is that huge amounts of time are wasted every day as a result of trash like M$ Office trying to be too clever. There have been some published studies. I was using computers running Unix V7 just before MSDOS became popular, and moving to PCs was an utterly ridiculous backward step. No M$ opertaing system can yet do some of the many useful things I could easily accomplish then.
The fact is that these Scumbags have gravely damaged the world economy for far too long.
OK, so they need to clobber him totally, clean out his bank account, and his kids piggy banks.
For someone who behaves the way Bill does, nothing but a prison sentence of several years is a deterrent anyway. That is what it should be, preferably in an uncomfortable old prison, surrounded by Linux PCs. To save taxpayers money, he could share the cell with Darl McFraud.....
It makes me sick. Of course, it takes a Scumbag to recommend another Scumbag for a knighthood. With his solid track record of illegal dealings from day one, numerous convictions and adverse court rulings in the US, and the case going through the EC, even ignoring the grossly advers effect his junk products have had on economic growth, he should never have been considered, but evidently Gordon Brown does not care what he does to the reputation of the Monarchy by this vile act.
Still, this is the week when UK Scumbag No. 1 will fall from a great height, I refer of course to Tory B. Liar. I expect the Hutton report, due tomorrow, will expose him as the vile, corrupt little liar that most members of the public now consider him to be. I hope that his downfall hastens the fall of the chief non-elected US Scumbag. We do not need people like that in positions of authority.
What an excellent system, but it does help to explain the high cost of living in Norway. To get good social welfare and other services, you have to put money in.....
In the UK our Legal Aid system may assist the very poor, and the hardened criminals, the very rich don't need it, and anyone in the middle (most) is likely to be bankrupted by the cost if they ever get caught up unwittingly in a case of any complexity.
I still wonder why this case was brought anyway, it always seemed to me to be a delibarate attempt to try what is basically a US issue somewhere else. AFAIK, the US was the only country to pass a STUPID law as in the case of DeCSS, and it should have remained there. Why should the Scumbags of the entertainment industry go throwing their weight about wherever they like?
....trust their business to anything from the Convicted Monopolist, considering their truly abysmal track record of stability, reliability and security?
Company directors have a liability to their shareholders, if this goes horribly wrong (guaranteed!) it can destroy entire businesses, the directors may then be held personally liable, having installed this trash.
Of course it will be designed to interoperate badly, or not at all, with anyone else's systems. It will simply be another intolerable burden, a Bill Tax, like their junk Office suite, which wastes hours every day per user.
Why will the purchasers of such systems not grow up, and spend their money on something useful instead?
This is all very well and I like to see Linux dominate, certainly to squeeze WinCE out of every possible application, but I do wonder if anything as powerful as Linux or any other mainstream OS is really appropriate anyway. Now I know it costs nothing, and they are likely using a very minimal kernel with lots of bits removed, but even so, IMHO it is overkill.
It does depend of course on how far it can be cut down and still be recognisable as Linux. It is one area where it may be worth forking, because the mainstream kernel will keep growing useful facilities which are likely to be inappropriate in embedded applications. I don't see why the big advances in kernel 2.6 for example would be needed here. In fact, embedded systems could probably do with a freeze every 2 to 3 years, and have separate maintainers, toolsets etc.
I think that by having a very limited number of forks, for good reasons, the overall advance would be faster, because people could focus more on their own area of expertise.
I prefer the GPL as a licence, but am a bit surprised that xBSD has not gone into this sort of area, due to its licence which favours closing all or bits of the source, and going fully commercial. There is not a lot to choose between Linux and xBSD on performance grounds, one excels at some things, another at other things.....
I predict that a big advance will be made soon in developing a new, compact GUI to replace X in small applications. There have been worthwhile attempts, IMHO a better one will come soon, hopefully small enough to run as a kernel module. Minimise the GUI and you minimise the bloat, making it even more attractive than anything from Redmond.
As for the desktop, Linux is not there yet due to so many buggy or hard to configure distros. SuSE is close, but not quite yet, when they can properly configure the most popular brand of graphics card (Nvidia) without making feeble and incorrect excuses about licensing terms, them maybe, but having tried an evaluation version of Xandros, and just ordered the full boxed version, I think we are almost there.... It is definitely getting very close. However, I saw a cheap PC on sale the other day, it had Windoze but no M$ Office, instead it came with OOo or maybe Star, at a ridiculously low price in the supermarket. Now by getting rid of Bill's expensive bit of buggy bloatware, they make it almost competitive with a Linux implementation, so the situation is not clear-cut. We have a mixed Gates/free system competing with totally free or total Billness, which muddies the waters a bit. The ill-informed public will hardly know tha difference, but it may hinder the uptake of fully free systems.
Still, Linux and Apache are near a monopoly situation in web servers. It makes me wonder whether Bill can take legal action against a perceived monopoly, after all it is doing to IIS (and deservedly so!) what he did to Notscrape and others. It would be a challenge finding the right person or organisation to sue.
That is what I found too. I inherited my turbodiesel, and find it brilliant, possibly the fastest car (by a small margin) that I have ever owned, certainly the most stable at speed, but yes, it can stall occasionally. Don't find the clutch particularly noticeable one way or the other.
In the UK insurance on the Focus is relatively cheap, because it tends not to be involved in accidents and/or is cheap and easy to repair, compared to some of its competitors.
The US market gets junk cars, with horrid handling, because the average consumer has no appreciation of proper roadholding and handling, and will not buy anything that handles properly, because it inevitably feels much firmer than what they are used to. That is not their fault, it is a product of generations of indoctrination and acquired habit as a result of the real junk Detroit gave them for many years, and they do not realise that it need not be so. Nowadays Detroit can build decent cars if they want to, they have at last, in the face of Japanese competition, had to adapt, but if they make them too good, only a very few will buy them. Isn't it sad? I have noticed that many US citizens visiting the UK or mainland Europe seem to have great difficulty adapting to something that holds the road as if stuck by superglue in comparison to their squidgy models. No doubt Ford have deliberatey downgraded the suspension on the US model accordingly.
I find it all very sad that the country that leads the world in many areas is very backward in some, and this is one. They gave the rest of the world the technology to mass-produce cars, but never made decent ones themselves, and don't even know how far removed from modern reality their products are.
You cannot be serious! He has retarded and damaged global enterprise for 20 years, and his company is an unscrupulous, uncontrollable, Convicted Monopolist.
However he is a crony of Tony B Liar (he bought his way in with a small donation to UK eductaion costing him less than nothing by getting kids hooked on Windoze), and Tony B Liar needs something else to distract the voting public this week. No doubt he is hoping that the controversy over knighting that vile scumbag will bury the Hutton Report and the vote on student loans.....
No don't install the patch, take the more sensible route and get rid of that failed attempt at a web browser called IE. No-one has to use it, and it has been so badly discredited that I don't know why anyone bothers. There will always be security holes in it, and the patches will always be lagging weeks, if not months behind.
If a web site does not work except in IE, then let them know, there is no excuse whatsoever for not being standards-compliant, especially if the site is selling something and needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Any webmaster who makes his site work in IE only is a danger to everyone's security and should be dismissed from his job at once.
The same goes for that disgraceful email client and automatic virus installer Outlook, and its Express variant. These things should have no place on any computer, anywhere.
If you have to use these vile things at work, I would suggest that your IT department needs to be replaced as a matter of urgency.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that everyone except the former ruling scumbag class has been oppressed, but I see illiteracy on Slashdot every day, as there is everywhere.
It will get worse if Shia Muslims become the new ruling class, then women will be oppressed.
However, this will fail in large parts of the world, especially Europe. How can you have a patent on the internet, which by definition is worldwide, vaild in one country and not any others? It is stupid.
A new worldwide patents system is urgently needed, if only to deal with internet-related issues, and it would properly be run along the lines of the bodies which already control technical standards, domain allocation, etc, all of which work very well indeed with hardly a single schyster needing to be involved. A disputed application should be put to a democratic vote, quite easy as the net facilitates that sort of thing (or is that patented?).
The politicians could save themselves a lot of unnecessary problems by learning how the internet came to be (oh, I forgot, was it not a certain US politician who "invented" it?) without politicians, lawyers or big business having any major involvment, and that is why it happened quickly and successfully. They should learn that it is capable of governing itself too, and it should be left to do so in a democratic way, making its own legislation to prevent abuse as well as controlling any relevant patents. No western democracy seems to have a legal system which is capable of acting sufficiently quickly to be of any possible use, where technology advances quickly, and in fact have proved to be of no use even where technology progresses backwards, under the control of a Convicted Monopoly. A jury of internet users could have tried M$, found them guilty by a large majority verdict, and banned the pathetic web browser which was the cause of the problem, from the net by issuing a patch for servers to reject it. Likewise they would have the power to democratically ban Lookout, and hence cripple the vast majority of email virii. If estimates of the cost of the current epedemic are in any way realistic, the world could have saved $30 billion at least.
Politicians and schysters have a long and well-established history of being utterly useless and incompetent (with maybe a dozen very honourable exceptions) when it comes to dealing with technology. They should get out of that area, and leave it to those who understand what it is about.
IMHO it needs to be something like half of Microtrash's net assets in order to be effective.
The simple fact is that certain semiconductor manufacturers (still in existence, so no names....) were allowing reject chips to leave their plant, they were then re-tested and if they worked after a fashion, were re-labelled as genuine, by some dodgy business somewhere. I remember being on the receiving end of a batch of faulty 741 op-amps, which had made their way from somewhere in the US, via Egypt and I forget where else, eventually ending up on the UK market. Re-marking supposed military-grade components was much more lucrative. But, at least two major semiconductor manufacturers were themselves fined for cheating on some part of the testing process of military components.
As for microprocessors, a lot of junk came out of the major manuafacturers anyway, because process control was not what it is today, and only so much testing was possible. They were no doubt doing their best, with a new technology, but I know that EPROM, RAM and for some reason clock generator (surely the simplest?) chips from one manufacturer had an abnormally high proportion of defects.
The story of this explosion is just that, a story created to fit the known facts of a very real and tragic accident, caused by human error.
They even make Tony B. Liar look good....
Sound programming practice, as used by everyone everywhere (except in Redmond) who develops serious programs is to have a modular layout with diverse things separated, in separate dlls for example, and not all mixed up the way it currently is. It is a true reflection of Bill's random mind.
As for Longhorn, they are cutting down the APIs drastically so it will break almost every existing application. It will be their downfall, when poeple find that what will no longer run on a M$ OS will run on Linux under Wine or one of its variants.
I wonder if this means that Sir Bill is heading for the Bastille?
Many motherboards now have a dual BIOS, however this is switched in the BIOS at boot time, as is the protection, which must be assumed to be useless, as it is software controlled.
The hardware protection is total, with no write signal (or no programming voltage if that is what is switched) to the chip, it can't be written.
We should start a campaign to bring back the jumpers as standard!
Invest $5900 to save $xxxxxxxxx. It has got to be good.
Sadly most accountants and many managers fail to see the savings, they see it as extra undesireable cost, till they get badly hit by a virus, then it is all the IT guy's fault, not theirs for not spending the money.
A bit like the Millennium Bug, the expenditure, which was quite large worldwide, is still complained about, yet if the work had not been done the costs would have been enormous, maybe even in human lives. The fact that nothing, or very little, happened proved that most of the work had been done correctly. It too was money well spent.
On average, I would believe 58k, many as low as 1k to 2k, quite a few as high as 500k, depending on how much delay happens to vital work.
A sizeable project in any field can have a thousand people dependent on the system, one lost day is easily 50 to 100k, and if contractual obligations can not be met, it only gets worse. Likewise the output from a factory can be upwards of 100k per day (up to many millions) so a few hours lost production can be very expensive indeed. A lot of software people seem to think that the only costs incurred are in their own little world, but it actually gets much, much worse when physical processes are affected.
If you stand to lose millions or billions, it follows that the defences must be of the very highest standard possible (diverse means of protection for a start) and all of that, and the time taken to look after it, and learn how to look after it, all adds up.
IMHO, the only thing he ever invented was a new way of creating an Illegal Monopoly. There is not the slightest trace of any technical innovation anywhere. It was all prior art, shamelessly copied, stolen or bought at an artificially low price by deception.
Maybe I am wrong, no-one has yet confessed to inventing the BSOD, so perhaps we should give him credit for that one, unless anyone knows differently. Of course, they are supposed not to happen.....
However, to make life complicated for hackers, it might be useful to declare the server and OS to be quite different to what they actually are. How about a really tightly secured OpenBSD server posing as IIS, if that is possible, for example? It would keep the nasty little scumbags busy for a while, maybe for long enough to get caught.
The fact is that a moon mission today is impossible despite the rantings of the non-elected, intellectually challenged, presidential impostor, because the software and other complexity issues would make it cost far too much, take far too long, and probably suffer a BSOD.....
Another factor to consider is that in those days the semiconductor industry did support aerospace, which basically they do not nowadays, (it would be less than 0.2% of the total industry output) there are hardly any components fully screened as part of the manufacturing process for example. The surface mount packaging we have to use today has many reliability problems in adverse environments, particularly in coping with temperature cycling, and the packages are not even moisture-proof (not that it matters in space, but it does on the ground!). It would be impossible today to duplicate the reliability of an Apollo computer. BTW I currently work as a Reliability Analyst in a safety-critical industry, so I might know a little bit about the subject.
I have an article in front of me which suggests that the failure rate of the Apollo Guidance Computer was less than 10 in a billion hours, that equates to about the same as one small to medium chip or 5 to 10 best-quality transistors nowadays.
Why? Blame the consumer industry, PCs and mobile phones, areas where solid-state electronics is of no vital importance, but which dominate the semiconductor market. In all fairness, it is true to say that the quality of a normal commercial quality components has improved greatly over the years, but this can rarely be proved, and there is simply no way of getting the extreme reliability rtequired for manned missions, unless by using a much greater degree of redundancy, and therefore more complexity, than used to be the case.
Not only that, but with the increase in bloat in complex systems, overall software reliability is declining, hastened by "unsafe" languages like C++, and the tendency to use "junk" operating systems (we all know which, it has been debated here many times...) in critical applications.
This generation is making backward progress, and with the rise in the use of cannabis and other mind-damaging drugs as a direct result of corrupt government policy, it will soon be impossible to get sufficient fully sane people to undertake a major project anyway.
A few odd pimples or gouges in the surface would probably have made only minor difference, certainly higher temperature locally, but we are talking here about a very large deviation from the intended shape.
Of course we all know they were not running Microsoft software, well-designed software would have been coded to cope with all normal inputs, all abnormal but survivable inputs, and as big a margin as possible beyond. The input sensors (rate gyros etc) or the control surface actuators would eventually saturate, at that point no software would be of much use, although I do think that control would have passed from the 4 primary to the one secondary computers by then. The computers would have been programmed to eventually give up gracefully and give direct manual control to the crew as a last resort.
Much of what would happen in the software is not too far removed, in principle at least, from the flight control systems of an Airbus or Boeing 777, however the track record of fly by wire aircraft in recovering from adverse situations has not been at all impressive, and fundamental system design errors have resulted in a number of accidents, because the system/software developers had tried to be to clever or were not as knowledgable of aircraft as they should have been or possibly did not provide safe default states when all else has failed.
It seems that in recent times NASA have had a number of corporate failings, which ultimately lay behind both shuttle disasters, but many things they did, and still do, very well indeed, and safety-critical software is one area where they excel, in contrast to the fact that someone should have done some calculations and tests on the effect of flying chunks of foam a long time ago.
Depending who you believe, it is still not safe to write to a NTFS partition from Linux, funnily enough this sort of thing ONLY happens with Bill's trash. Almost every other OS can read every other OS's files reliably, and that is how it should be. After all, we have interchangeable media (Zip, Jazz, etc) and even interchangeadle hard drives. Some of us need this.
Bill's trash of course has no capability to read foreign file systems, his OS in all its guises is about as backward as they come.
You should not be using IE at all, paid for or not, if you value the security of your computer, and those of others. Same for Outlook. Those are a bit like using a car with dangerous design errors (Corvair? Renault Dauphine? Porsche 911?) just because you can't be bothered to get a free replacement that works properly and conforms to published standards.
The fact is that huge amounts of time are wasted every day as a result of trash like M$ Office trying to be too clever. There have been some published studies. I was using computers running Unix V7 just before MSDOS became popular, and moving to PCs was an utterly ridiculous backward step. No M$ opertaing system can yet do some of the many useful things I could easily accomplish then.
The fact is that these Scumbags have gravely damaged the world economy for far too long.
For someone who behaves the way Bill does, nothing but a prison sentence of several years is a deterrent anyway. That is what it should be, preferably in an uncomfortable old prison, surrounded by Linux PCs. To save taxpayers money, he could share the cell with Darl McFraud.....
Still, this is the week when UK Scumbag No. 1 will fall from a great height, I refer of course to Tory B. Liar. I expect the Hutton report, due tomorrow, will expose him as the vile, corrupt little liar that most members of the public now consider him to be. I hope that his downfall hastens the fall of the chief non-elected US Scumbag. We do not need people like that in positions of authority.
In the UK our Legal Aid system may assist the very poor, and the hardened criminals, the very rich don't need it, and anyone in the middle (most) is likely to be bankrupted by the cost if they ever get caught up unwittingly in a case of any complexity.
I still wonder why this case was brought anyway, it always seemed to me to be a delibarate attempt to try what is basically a US issue somewhere else. AFAIK, the US was the only country to pass a STUPID law as in the case of DeCSS, and it should have remained there. Why should the Scumbags of the entertainment industry go throwing their weight about wherever they like?
Company directors have a liability to their shareholders, if this goes horribly wrong (guaranteed!) it can destroy entire businesses, the directors may then be held personally liable, having installed this trash.
Of course it will be designed to interoperate badly, or not at all, with anyone else's systems. It will simply be another intolerable burden, a Bill Tax, like their junk Office suite, which wastes hours every day per user.
Why will the purchasers of such systems not grow up, and spend their money on something useful instead?
It does depend of course on how far it can be cut down and still be recognisable as Linux. It is one area where it may be worth forking, because the mainstream kernel will keep growing useful facilities which are likely to be inappropriate in embedded applications. I don't see why the big advances in kernel 2.6 for example would be needed here. In fact, embedded systems could probably do with a freeze every 2 to 3 years, and have separate maintainers, toolsets etc.
I think that by having a very limited number of forks, for good reasons, the overall advance would be faster, because people could focus more on their own area of expertise.
I prefer the GPL as a licence, but am a bit surprised that xBSD has not gone into this sort of area, due to its licence which favours closing all or bits of the source, and going fully commercial. There is not a lot to choose between Linux and xBSD on performance grounds, one excels at some things, another at other things.....
I predict that a big advance will be made soon in developing a new, compact GUI to replace X in small applications. There have been worthwhile attempts, IMHO a better one will come soon, hopefully small enough to run as a kernel module. Minimise the GUI and you minimise the bloat, making it even more attractive than anything from Redmond.
As for the desktop, Linux is not there yet due to so many buggy or hard to configure distros. SuSE is close, but not quite yet, when they can properly configure the most popular brand of graphics card (Nvidia) without making feeble and incorrect excuses about licensing terms, them maybe, but having tried an evaluation version of Xandros, and just ordered the full boxed version, I think we are almost there.... It is definitely getting very close. However, I saw a cheap PC on sale the other day, it had Windoze but no M$ Office, instead it came with OOo or maybe Star, at a ridiculously low price in the supermarket. Now by getting rid of Bill's expensive bit of buggy bloatware, they make it almost competitive with a Linux implementation, so the situation is not clear-cut. We have a mixed Gates/free system competing with totally free or total Billness, which muddies the waters a bit. The ill-informed public will hardly know tha difference, but it may hinder the uptake of fully free systems.
Still, Linux and Apache are near a monopoly situation in web servers. It makes me wonder whether Bill can take legal action against a perceived monopoly, after all it is doing to IIS (and deservedly so!) what he did to Notscrape and others. It would be a challenge finding the right person or organisation to sue.
In the UK insurance on the Focus is relatively cheap, because it tends not to be involved in accidents and/or is cheap and easy to repair, compared to some of its competitors.
The US market gets junk cars, with horrid handling, because the average consumer has no appreciation of proper roadholding and handling, and will not buy anything that handles properly, because it inevitably feels much firmer than what they are used to. That is not their fault, it is a product of generations of indoctrination and acquired habit as a result of the real junk Detroit gave them for many years, and they do not realise that it need not be so. Nowadays Detroit can build decent cars if they want to, they have at last, in the face of Japanese competition, had to adapt, but if they make them too good, only a very few will buy them. Isn't it sad? I have noticed that many US citizens visiting the UK or mainland Europe seem to have great difficulty adapting to something that holds the road as if stuck by superglue in comparison to their squidgy models. No doubt Ford have deliberatey downgraded the suspension on the US model accordingly.
I find it all very sad that the country that leads the world in many areas is very backward in some, and this is one. They gave the rest of the world the technology to mass-produce cars, but never made decent ones themselves, and don't even know how far removed from modern reality their products are.
However he is a crony of Tony B Liar (he bought his way in with a small donation to UK eductaion costing him less than nothing by getting kids hooked on Windoze), and Tony B Liar needs something else to distract the voting public this week. No doubt he is hoping that the controversy over knighting that vile scumbag will bury the Hutton Report and the vote on student loans.....
I seriously hope this is a hoax.
If a web site does not work except in IE, then let them know, there is no excuse whatsoever for not being standards-compliant, especially if the site is selling something and needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Any webmaster who makes his site work in IE only is a danger to everyone's security and should be dismissed from his job at once.
The same goes for that disgraceful email client and automatic virus installer Outlook, and its Express variant. These things should have no place on any computer, anywhere.
If you have to use these vile things at work, I would suggest that your IT department needs to be replaced as a matter of urgency.