I'm not so sure that 115 are missing, the earliest series, and some other fairly early ones, were shown several times on one of the UK cable channels a few years ago. Copies had been located abroad, because various other broadcasters had either archived them properly, or left them around to be found by accident. I thought that the number still missing was in single figures now. But, I may be misinformed, although I know what I saw (and enjoyed!).
It is indeed sad that the BBC behaved like this, but corporate disasters are quite common in large organisations (NASA and 2 Shuttles for example) because "the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing", or as someone once expanded, because "the left hand does not know what the left hand is doing". Probably all large organisations suffer from corporate failure, many also suffer from corporate dishonesty, and a few from corporate greed. (Please note that I did not mention any company in Redmond as suffering from any or all of these, but I did not deny the possibility either.)
....if you set up the mounts correctly. It seems to want to mount the entire volume (/dev/xxxx or whatever it allocates instead of/dev/xxxx0 for the first partition etc) with some devices. I think that mainly happens with the smaller ones, so you might need to only have one partition on the disk.
Otherwise, SuSE 8.2 or 9.0 works OK with both IDE drives and other things such as CF Cards, which have a FAT filesystem and USB adaptor. You will need all the necessary things either compiled in the kernel or as modules, SuSE seems to have all these bits already but I can't comment on other distros. But, if you are experienced in recompiling kernels, or willing to learn, this is no big deal.
I don't have a disk with USB2 hardware attached yet, all my experience is with USB1 but so far, no significant problems.
Just remember to do a umount before pulling the USB plug out, and of course pull the plug out and switch off the power before swapping the IDE drive in the USB box. I assume you will be using some kind of removable drive cradle in conjunction with a USB to IDE converter.
Win 2000 and XP have a few problems, it is sometimes impossible to unmount the thing, except by brute force (pulling the USB plug out) and then you get nagged about unsafe removal. To get the drive to be seen again, it is sometimes, but not always, necessary to remove it in device manager, then get it to add a new device again. Same thing with CF memory card in a PCMCIA adaptor, it is obviously a fundamental M$ error which they can't fix.
There are hot-swappable IDE cradles which can mount into a PC, but there might not be a way of getting the OS to do the necessary. The extra logic in the cradle, and longer power and ground pins, only ensures that the hardware does not suffer a destructive latchup, you would possibly need to make the kernel run some of its initialisation code again every time you plugged the device in. Far easier to use USB, the plug and play code is fairly solid.
There are no filesystem issues if you use FAT or one of its variants (you might need to do a man mount to see if you need options to the mount command, or want to automount) but NTFS will almost certainly not work reliably, so please don't try with valuable data, you will probably trash the lot.
Well pointed out. I am Scottish, but live in London, and often forget how much better our legal system is in many ways. e.g. we had the office of Procurator Fiscal long before England had the fairly useless DPP, so prosecutions have tended to be handled a lot better.
There are sometimes suggestions that Scottish laws should be applied to England, mostly in connection with house purchase. What I don't understand is why they were not applied anyway, after all King James 6 (of Scotland), 1 (of England) was Scottish.
Anyway, it will be very interesting to see if he gets a hammering in court. Maybe he will get to share the luxury apartment in Barlinnie with the alleged Lockerbie bomber. (It was not him by the way, it was Syria and not Lybia, but that is rather off topic).
I'm sure Her Majesty will have great pleasure in accomodating Mr. McBride. AFAIK the royal web server runs Linux. Will he dare demand a licence fee?
IANAL, but our laws in the UK concering the conduct of business in general are much tighter here than they appear, from a distance, to be in the US. For a start, if he or his associates have been dealing in shares in SCO in response to his blatant manipulation of the market, he can expect a few years in jail. On past performance, an offence like this is unlikely to be dealt with simply by a fine. I think Wormwood Scrubbs is going to be his new home....
There was a guy in the UK who kept suing people, with ridiculous claims. The last judge to see him called him a "vexatious little litigant" and threw the case out. I would think that McBride is in the category of vexatious litigant.
BTW the good news about all this is that he is spreading himself very thin.... Remember why Hilter lost the war, by opening a second (in his case Russian) front? McFraud has already lost the battle in Germany, and maybe other parts of Europe. BTW, the Convicted Monopolist, and paymaster to McFraud, will also come unstuck there if they extend their anti-Linux advertising, because knocking competitors products in adverts is illegal in Germany.
The only difference this makes is that the FSF are the people who can take legal action if someone decides to violate the GPL. The copyright holder is the legal owner in that sense. It makes little or no difference as to who may use, contribute or develop it.
Naturally, I hope development will continue, much of my interest is in smaller things like microcontrollers where this is of use.
To get this accepted they simply have to raise an RFC, like any other piece of Internet technology. It will take its course from there, according to the democratic will of the majority, if it is any good. It is far quicker and cheaper doing that than involving a standards body. IIRC no standards body was involved directly in the creation of TCP/IP, HTTP or any of the things we use every day.
The fact is that anyone can raise a new standard, it will have to do something useful or it will simply be ignored, but it is hardly difficult to get the process started, by raising an Internet Draft, and in a case like this it should only take a few months to become a standard. The IETF work much more efficiently than any commercial standards body that I know of. The process is documented at ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2026.txt amongst other places, and surely must be the correct procedure to use. Who cases about ANSI, or BSI, or CENELEC, or any of these bodies that sell you a few pages of copyrighted standard for silly money? The RFCs are published for everyone to use, which is why ithe net works as well as it does, despite the efforts and intentions of some, such as the Convicted Monopolist (had to get him in somewhere..), to "de-commoditise the protocols".
There is no reason why they can't raise an Internet Draft right now and start using the thing, people can then follow the Draft at their own risk of having to do more work if it changes.
That is absolutely correct. Even human flesh will burn in pure oxygen, despite the water content, as will many metals and most plastics.
It is interesting that the fire hazard rises rapidly just above the normal atmospheric partial pressure, which is the optimum for organic life as we know it. But, as you imply, you can take away the nitrogen and the odd bit of Argon and CO2 without tangible effect.
I never did understand how the crew were supposed to cope with breathing a full atmosphere of oxygen anyway, it affects the brain amongst other things, and would surely impair the crew's ability to function very seriously, as they would be grossly hyper-ventilated. There is a word for that, but I can't remember it right now, anyway it is not a nice sensation at all, a bit like being drunk. I sniffed nominally pure oxygen once to see what would happen, not an experience worth repeating. I suspect that most people who have used welding equipment have had a sniff out of curiosity, a trick not to be tried with the acetylene!
Not a bad idea at all! Why not make the distro yourself?
I have often wondered why Linux did not do some of the things which are needed here. Some of these things are just starting to become possible now, e.g. there is a lot of attention to the Windoze driver issue. Here is roughly what I think you would need to be able to do, reliably:
1. Read the old.ini files, registry etc, to see what hardware is there, including non plug and play devices for which there is no auto-detection.
2. Round up all the user's data and put it somewhere safe.
3. Read screen resolution, background image settings, etc and save it all somewhere. Calculate equivalent settings for X. (Interesting problem, going from Windoze settings to Modelines, I have never found out how to do that or where Windoze stores the settings.)Get all the icon positions for shortcuts etc, the new Linux apps will go in the same places. The icing on the cake, but why not...
4. Identify all Windoze hardware drivers, if there is not an equivalent Linux driver, put a wrapper round the Windoze driver to make it look as Linux expects. (Hint to Linus & friends - could this be done in the kernel, i.e. built in a Windoze driver subsystem?) If the driver can not support preemptive multitasking, it might get a bit difficult......
5. Automatically run as many Windoze applications as possible, one last time, and get them to save all their files in acceptable formats.
6. Boot up into a minimal Linux, and test the drivers one at a time, then together, to make sure there are no conflicts.
7. Politely ask the user to disappear for several hours while the new distro installs, migrates all settings and data, and blows away every last trace of the existence of Bill Gates.
It would have to be absolutely bomb-proof at every stage, with the option to backtrack until everything had been tested. Can it be done, I wonder? An intermediate stage of development would be to read the hardware details and submit them to a central site (absolutely no personal information of course, only the necessary info), where it could be looked up in a database, and things that had not been configured before could be automatically added. For instance, the software to disassemble a Windoze driver, do some analysis, and build a new Linux driver, might be kept centrally to avoid exposing anything proprietary.
IMHO it is the way the industry should be heading, it is all very well building fancy new kernels which support 32 CPUs (it should be done, and some people really need that) (of course it can't be done without exotic resources and extra-special people according to McBride, so all the more reason to do it, just as people climb mountains because they are supposed to be unclimable), but the real challenge and the place where the battle will be won (or lost, in the sad case of Fedora, a distro which needs to be put out of its misery by sending it to/dev/null) will be in installation and desktop configuration.
I wonder if a merger, or at least an increased convergence between Gnome and KDE would help, but maybe not, because we don't want a monopoly. Or do we need a new desktop with OLE2, SOAP, ActiveX and all the other M$ junk built in? I hope not.
I feel sorry for them if they have gone for Fedora. It must be the worst distribution I have seen in several years. Its ultimate failing is that the majority of potential users worldwide are still on dialup modems, not always at 56k, with an ISP-imposed timeout of 2 hours or less, but if that is all you have, the update system can not work, because there are some huge RPMs (kernel source >80MB IIRC) and it does not recover after a dropped connection. I don't know why, haven't had time to look, the relevant program seems to be a binary, and for some reason it did not install source, but I thought most people did things like this with python or perl, and a liberal helping of wget, which I know can restart after a timeout, so it seems a very basic error. In fact it reminds me of the time the Convicted Monopolist's rubbish used to make a startup disk which would not do anything useful because his wonderful automatic configuration failed to put the eseential CD driver on the disk, or maybe next time round, when if your mouse was USB, you were similarly well and truly stuck. The RPM system is in any case extremely ugly, source patching is much more efficient and tidy, if automated properly.
I don't see why RH has never had decent configuration tools like SuSE, but still depends on editing lots of files by hand in a text editor like vi. I loaded it 3 weeks ago, on one machine only, off a magazine cover disc, and I still have not got basic things like Samba running, (or rather, according to top or ps it is running, but not sharing any files!) which are usually easy. Next weekend I will be replacing it with FreeBSD (the machine is dual boot with rock-solid hardware and is mainly a server and router, the data is all held in lots of 512MB (pre fat32) fat partitions dating from Windoze 95, then 98 SP2, then ME, which never worked for more than half a day,latterly served by XP, which was useless), at least the RPM problem will go away, because BSD basically downloads source patches in its highly automated update mechanism, the load on the net is minimal, and any moderm PC has enough power to compile as required.
Any newcomer wanting to move from Windoze will be put off for ever by Fedora. Best that they start with SuSE, its automatic configuration is a lot less buggy than Mandrake. But, once they have a bit of experience, they might well be better off using this wonderful program to convert to Debian, which has a lot of good points.
It seems to me that if IBM get to see SCO's source, and SCO get to see the AIX source, there will be no way of either company knowing that the other has not illegally copied some code in the future, unless they have a permanent agreement to share each other's source. I doubt that McFraud has the intellectual capacity to see the problem, but IBM will, and if by some chance a line of their proprietary bits of AIX gets into SCO at some future date, they will be able to wipe him out legally. Not that they should have to expose code to McFraud anyway, but that is another matter. When it comes to doing the same with Linux, what will they need to do? Get all kernel contributors, ever, in one room, under NDA, and swap all the source? It is ridiculous. I could be liable here, I once wrote "main() { " which I suspect occurs somewhere, so I must by implication have plagiarised SCO's source!
It is amazing how many potential problems simply can't happen if you stick to GPL code! The best way forward would be for all parties to publish their source (much as the BIOS for the original PC was published in, IIRC, the Advanced Users Guide, which anyone could purchase. It was copyright, you could look but not copy. That should be done here, to end the Source Wars for all time.
In fact, it would be a good idea to alter copyright law in such a way that software was protected only if the source was published. It would not allow anyone to clone it, but it would give full visibility of any copying that did occur, and also provide the ideal opportunity to detect bugs and security holes. It would also put software on an even footing with other products, which can mostly be seen, dissected and understood (e.g. you can dismantle your car engine and see how clever Ford or whoever have been, and you can generally repair it yourself, but you can not build an exact copy). Most industries do dismantle their competitors products to have a look, it helps them to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and drives them to do something slightly different, thus advancing technology. That is how it should be with software, and it would really end the nonsense. But, in the meantime, the principal advocates of closed-source, led by the Convicted Monopolist, simply continue to retard progress (which is all that M$ have ever done, not a single innovation except new ways of creating an illegal monopoly has ever come from there, or ever will.) It only makes work for lawyers, and it is notable that Gates senior is one of that deplorable species.
... the servers are so overloaded that I have not been able to read much of it. I wonder why?
But, having seen the first file, I really do wonder if McFraud believes CEOs of companies such as Novell really need to be told, in words of one syllable, what Linux is and why its development model differs from proprietary software. It seems to me that he is the one who fails to grasp the situation. He really seems to be unable to grasp that huge teams of programmers are not the way to develop good software (as the Convicted Monopolist has proved time and again...) he does not seem to comprehend that anyone with a brain, a PC and a compiler is able to develop good code, if they want to. Many of course would not bother with the learning curve, they would rather do other things, which is OK of course, but they probably could, if they wanted to. The clever people will certainly create bigger programs of better quality quicker, as we all know. But none of this involves the race of supermen, with super facilities, which McFraud seems to suggest are necessary. Mere mortals, with slowish PCs, simply take a bit longer, but because there are lots of them, each doing their own little bit, and putting the bits together occasionally, it still happens at a respectable pace.
I think that like another nasty piece of work we like to revile on/. (the one who missed the Internet for several years, despite prodding from his employees, who now calls himself the Chief Software Architect), he simply is too stupid to understands what it is all really about.
Unix as a money-spinner has had its day (and thanks to stupid commercial and legal issues it never did spin as much money as it could have), in fact the OS as such has had its day. Wise companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell realise that now, and know that the future for them is in building hardware (if they are in that business) and/or providing middleware and support. McFraud is simply living in the past. BTW, the next thing to expire as a money-spinner will be the "Office" suite, they are almost two-a-penny now (strictly, two for zero pennies for the pedantic), a far cry from the $400 spreadsheet or WP originally. The fact is that like commodity hardware, commodity software is starting to get very much cheaper. In fact hardware costs are the driving force. It once may have seemed reasonable to put a $400 Lotus 1-2-3 on a $4000 PC/AT (guessing at prices, from the vague recesses of my fading memory, they might not be quite right), but to put a $400 Office suite on a $300 PC is sheer folly. The economies of scale apply to software far more than to hardware, likely marginal cost of an Office suite about $1 for the box and CD, but the Monopolist, the Fraudster and such like have tried to conceal that fact from the gullible public.
I look forward to reading more of McFrauds rantings when the load on the servers subsides.
In any case, they will want to follow end-user preferences if they have any sense (which I suspect they have lots of). With a distro like SuSE you get lots of options. They will most likely have means of finding out what people actually want, and what they use, and will in due course make these the installation defaults. I think that Novell must have listened to their customers in order to last so long, despite the best attempts of the Convicted Monopolist to kill them off, and the same is likely true of SuSE.
The point is that no-one's choice is likely to be limited, and that is a good thing. It is also good that Ximian and KDE, and other things get adequately funded. Because of that, the desktop will continue to evolve and improve. The only negative impact would be if some good things got extinguished in the process, but I don't see that happening here.
Of course if they come up with an awful, childish looking desktop like Windoze XP, I will be very upset indeed, if it is made the default. We do not need dumbing down.
It will be interesting to look back in a few years and see what becomes of all this. Maybe Novell will have regained something of their former glory, while a little company no-one remembers in Redmond is the last remaining supplier of buggy basic interpreters, and automatic virus downloader programs, and still has a few hundred customers on their MSN..... Such things are influenced by detail like desktops and their implementation, as well as marketing.
Yes, you are right about long-term planning, if the politicians will listen, but history has proved in the case of volcanic eruptions, which are slightly more predictable than earthquakes, that they generally do not listen. If a quake is predicted in the next 7 days, and it actually arrives in 8, everyone will be back home, and the casualties will be enormous.
The only long term solution is to depopulate the vulnerable areas, locating all industry and housing in stable regions. The earthquake zones are OK for agriculture, provided the small number of buildings needed are properly designed.
Does anyone ever wonder why, in spite of many historical disasters, the US population in the principal earthquake regions continues to grow? Who profits from this? And who will benefit by allowing a situation lie this to continue, despite the certainty of there being 7-digit (yes, I mean 7-digit, a million or more) casualties in a major city within the next 50 years?
Look elsewhere, to Naples, and you will see the potential, indeed the certainty, of a million or more casualties if Mt. Vesuvius enters a new eruptive cycle, the first eruption of any cycle being likely to be massive, and pyroclastic. The time to evacuate the population is several days, from nothing to a much bigger than Mt. St. Helens eruption, only a few hours. Yet people live there... (In fairness to the Italian government, they are trying very hard, but have so far failed to slow down the population growth).
I ask myself why, when there are better places to live. Governments, including the US, should be planning a phased withdrawal from earthquake zones, instead they encourage the setup of vital industries in these regions. The Japanese are no better, remember the semiconductor shortage because one factory in the whole world that made a certain epoxy resin was situated in Kobe, and was out of action for many months? It all makes no sense.
Nor will the actions of the local government when a quake is predicted on the west coast of the US. Sadly, we will not have to wait long to find out how irresponsibly it will be handled.
Having said all this, my mother has recently moved house and lives on a fault line, the mighty Ochil Fault in Central Scotland. The vertical displacement of this fault is at least 5km (yes, really, over 3 miles, vertically, maybe a lot more, because even the coal mining industry has never bored deep enough to find out) at its maximum, and at least 3km wher it passes within 100 metres of the house. But, and it is a very big but, the last quake was about 2 on the Richter scale, way below the threshold where damage occurs, a few years ago. It is a very old fault, dating from the Carboniferous era or maybe before, and nowhere near a modern plate boundary. However, if that region did revert to its original level of activity, life would not be possible within 200 miles, or maye even nowhere in the UK, as there would also be massive pyroclastic volcanism. But, reactivation of such regions is unlikely, and certainly does not happen within a human time scale. However, it does make one think....
That should be the distinction, but for at least 40 years the IRA have been openly raising funds in the US to finance terrorism in N. Ireland and mainland UK. A number of US presidents, probably all of them in that period, have promised to their British counterparts that it would be stopped, but in reality no attempt whatsoever was made to do anything about it. The US government, for a long period of time, connived with terrorists who were targeting an allegedly friendly nation.
One may ask why the IRA activities were allowed, and the islamic ones not. The difference is in fact that the IRA had given an undertaking to the US government that they would not operate in the US. The US government will give any illegal assistance or cooperation to any terrorist organisation worldwide as long as it does not threaten them.
BTW, the last US presidential election was far from being legal, in case you had not noticed. To be pedantic, it was not in fact an election. The present pathetic, mentally subnormal little man, who is in the final phase of his September 11 tantrum, where he totally lost the plot, has no legal status whatsoever. Mental cases can be very dangerous in these circumstances, when backed into a corner, like rats, there is no telling what they will do, and legal issues will not matter.
Now, that would make it a CONSPIRACY in the laws of some countries, and if proved would almost certainly result in jail sentences for some company directors....
I don't know much about US law, and the US is where most of the action is on this case, but both parties (Microtrash and SCO) sell their products worldwide and have a presence in many countries. They need to be very careful....
McBride has already fallen foul of an excellent German law. I think that the authorities worldwide ought to be examining this for any signs of collusion, and if necessary going for an immediate criminal prosecution.
A few years in Wormwood Scrubbs (one of the less salubrious UK prisons) might teach these guys to behave themselves, as it is clear that nothing else will.
... they were threatened with the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, and are having to support it for 7 years, as required by law. If they have to support it in one country, they in effect end up supporting it everywhere.
The fact is, that is it is not of merchantable quality, or fit for the intended purpose, it has to be repaired, replaced (with what? XP will not run on most hardware that runs 98), or the purchase price refunded.
In the UK, a court case established that software is in fact goods. If someone has stitched them up with threats of a class action, which would result in them replacing or refunding every single copy of 98, all I can say is well done.
If it happened as a result of legal pressure somewhere else, again well done. The sad thing is that we may never know why, I sense the outcome of some out of court settlement with someone, somewhere, lying behind this.
Polite request to Bill: Can I please have my money back for the copy of ME which I purchased to try to get a bug fix for 98, but which in fact never worked properly? Or, do I have to take you to the UK Small Claims Court?
The laws of physics are very much against making white LEDs as efficient as compact fluorescents, so it will never happen.
LEDs are very much better than anythingelse where you need a monochromatic light, e.g railway signals, traffic lights,...., but NEVER as a source of general illumination, and particularly not where white is required.
It is hard to tell from the photos, but if they are really not pins, I anticipate very serious reliability problems indeed. The design of connectors is not something where you can take liberties, and discard all previously discovered solutions to problems. The existing ZIF sockets are designed to positively clamp against the sides of the pin when you actuate the locking lever, the fixed contact as it engages also slides slightly along the pin with a wiping action. All of that is vital, and it is very necessary to get a gas-tight fit at the interface, or corrosion, or cantamination, makes it fail very quickly indeed.
I have seen a number of attempts over the years to make face to face contact, and all have been extremely unreliable. One design of "butting connector" had to have both sets of contacts, which were gold-plated, and one half sprung, cleaned very carefully with iso-propyl alcohol immediately before making the connection, and even then there were numerous problems. The bayonet lampholder is a face to face connector, it is tolerable (just) because the hard brass spring-loaded pins tend to dig in to the soft solder pads on the base of the lamp.
End contact on a large array of tiny pins is a disaster waiting to happen. I suspect an optical illusion, and that they are conventional pins, if not, Intel are shooting themselves in the foot, as they have done on several occasions with packages which broke the rules of good mechanical engineering. I seem to remember certain "slot" rather than "socket" packages, where the whole thing was unstable and would break the processor, or the motherboard, if you were not extremely careful when transporting the PC.
There again, the mechanical design of the PC is itself a disaster. I guess that IBM must have let Bill have influence there as well as on the software.... Single-part edge connectors are banned in many applications because they are inherently unreliable, in any case it is cheaper to use a 2-part connector because only the vital part of the pins is gold-plated and you don't have to put the PCBs through the gold plating process. Tolerance build-ups between back of case, where the PCB bracket mounts, and the motherboard are still a nightmare.
As for the truly vile arrangement of PS2, serial, USB etc ports on a modern ATX board, well that is a disaster waiting to happen. I wonder how many people have trashed their motherboard by tripping over a cable?
The industry is based on producing junk, which is just as well for Bill because the hardware does not embarass his software too much!
Quite correct, and they are almost impossible to inspect to see that the joints are of good quality, and even more impossible to replace if they fail. IMHO an utterly diabolical invention, sadly (mis)used on a lot of motherboard chipsets and other things.
The safety-critical industries dread the fact that many new CPUs (microcontrollers etc) and other vital things are now only available in BGA.
It is actually possible to get a device removed from the board, re-balled with solder, and replaced, but after all that thermal stress it would be sheer folly to trust either the PCB or the chip again.
Personally, I HATE the things.
They can be, and are, sometimes socketed for development purposes, but the configuration breaks every rule of reliable connector design. Sensible people get them fitted to a little PCB, with pins attached, so you can plug them in, and throw away the chip and PCB if it breaks, but you can't always do that on high-frequency things.
So Germany is about the same as the UK then? I would never have guessed, I suppose I thought it would be electronic or at least mechanical. We get a few of our results out much quicker, and some, where the ballot boxes have to be collected from a large, sparsely-populated region with no fast roads, or even from the islands, take a lot longer. Because our method is to elect only one candidate, on the basis of the largest number of votes (no proportional representation) the counting itself is sometimes done in under an hour in a few places, (fiercely competitive to see who gets their results first, one of a small number of towns with favourable circumstances always wins!) but if it is a close thing, re-counts will continue all night, just in case a small error would elect the wrong person (as it did in the US!).
It is a very fair and reliable system because the reults can be checked and re-checked, and the papers are archived somewhere for a while, just in case. I am sure the German system will be equally thorough in its implementation.
But, these are far too costly in this day and age, and I don't see that an electronic system needs to be unreliable. It is simply that the wrong people, particularly a certain Convicted Monopolist, have been involved. It is not difficult to produce the exact equivalent of the paper system, keeping the parts of the "paper" which identify the voter and the votes cast strictly separate of course, and ensuring that the voter is given positive acknowledgement that his vote has been recorded. There are other features necessary as well, but it is by no means an intractable problem, not even a big problem, because we are talking about only 25,000 to 50,000 voters per constituency in the UK who bother to vote, and about 650 constituencies, 50 millon or so people in total.
Of course, if a government wants to employ me to run a program to introduce reliable electronic voting, I would be very interested, having experience in high-integrity system design, but instead they will get some uselessly incompetent civil servant to manage some incompetent, greedy and corrupt subcontractors.... The inevitable results will follow.
I would seriously recommend open-source software and hardware for a voting system so that it is entirely open to scrutiny. If it was funded by the EC for example, the cost to each country would be minimal, and in fact Europe could use a common pool of mobile voting hardware, as rarely would more than one or two countries need an election at the same time. In any case, a dedicated voting terminal could be made for about 1000 to 2000 dollars/euros/pounds if someone really wanted to, so cost would not really be the problem.
Why? Because I gave away lots of my old but good DOS programs, complete with licence of course, years ago. It would be nice to run almost bug-free, stable things like Word Perfect 5.2 again. (I did find one bug in that actually, but it was not too serious and did not cause data loss). Then there was a magazine cover disk with 50 free utilities, about 20 of which were actually useful and worked, and got used every day, and all the old C programs I wrote, which would compile and run on both DOS and Unix, but not for some reason, Windoze, even in a command window.
It would be nice to run non-bloated code again. I used to be amazed at the speed of spell-checking in WP 5.2 on a 286, it would most probably still beat Word 2000 on my Athlon 2.6GHz. Life was much less troublesome then, before truly abominable software, designed by idiots, for idiots, became dominant.
Now, if DOS could be combined with Unix version 7, that would be almost perfection.
In a school there are ALWAYS some unruly and destructive kids, and also as probably in this case. some who are curious or adventurous or simply bored because they know more about IT than the teacher.
The only way of stopping bad behaviour, and by allowing the bright, curious kids to remain interested, is to use a decent OS which provides adequate security and control over the facilities available, so that the morons can't do anything bad. The bright kids, or maybe all of them, will get their very own virtual OS to play in, where they can't damage anything. Give them a good sandbox, with lots of toys in it to play with.... Young kids are not able to discern the difference between playing and hacking, and it is not fair to expect it of them. But, they will learn far more if they are allowed some experimentation on their own than if they have to follow the teacher all the time.
User Mode Linux is one way of achieving this, another, more expensive, involves the use of multiple OS running on something like an IBM mainframe, which might be viable if shared between a group of schools. There are other methods also, but AFAIK none involve products of the Convicted Monopolist, who simply have not got the technology, and certainly not the security.
In view of the inevitable shortage of funds in education, a worldwide problem, the best way forward would be to use a Linux setup, with OpenOfice,org and various other nice packages. Most of the ancient DOS software used in education would still run, under emulation. The trick would be configuring the server so that the teacher could turn things like mail and instant messaging on and off easily, so that necessary things like sending messages to the whole class could be explicitly allowed when required as part of the curriculum, and blocked, because of nuisance value, at other times.
With *nix, the problem of keeping other people's work areas secure is nil, if the system is set up properly. It might be better to use *BSD rather than Linux, because the "wheel" group concept is useful, but that is mere detail. If the huge cost of Monopoly software is avoided when updates are due, education must benefit. Remembering that Win 98 support ends in a few days, many schools will be about to face huge costs, they should spend the money mainly on new hardware at Wal-Mart or wherever it is cheapest, and get some decent, free software.
This kid has been unfairly punished as a result of incompetence by his supposed educators. He will not have learned anything useful from this.
The only extension I personally need is not for a language per se, but for a spreadsheet. I really need to be able to run something in a spreadsheet cell which will do text processing like awk, or sed, or maybe like something else entirely, which as you all know is orders of magnitude more powerful than the pathetic string handling that Bill has deemed to give us. I really need good user-defined functions (and no, VBA will not do the job!), and I even need the facility to split a row containing a cell with a comma-separated list of things into multiple rows, one for each, with all the other cells replicated. No way known in VB, it can't add rows for example. I also really need a good case statement (like the dBase one, where you can test a lot more than a simple integer).
The only way I can do this is by using a database instead, and a lot of bothersome fiddling about. Neither a database nor a spreadsheet come close to what I really need, an entirely new dimension of programming capability is needed.
Even better if it would only work in OpenOffice.org, and under Linux or BSD, it would then provide a lever to move the management....
Some way of actually putting shell scripts into cells, and connect the variables to other cells, would be the ultimate perfection, because then any other functionality needed would be accessible.
I know what I need, but am not a good enough programmer to do it.
Now, I hope that this is not completely off topic, it is after all an extension, even if not to a language as such. I also hope it will inspire competent people to progress spreadsheets to the next dimension and get way ahead of M$.... Maybe a super-extended spreadsheet would be the very thing to make several open source spreadsheets give M$ Office the sound thrashing that it deserves.
Now here is a good thing, the spammers can bombard us with junk about language extensions instead of extensions to a part of the male anatomy, which at the moment seems to constitute 90% of all spam.
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It is indeed sad that the BBC behaved like this, but corporate disasters are quite common in large organisations (NASA and 2 Shuttles for example) because "the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing", or as someone once expanded, because "the left hand does not know what the left hand is doing". Probably all large organisations suffer from corporate failure, many also suffer from corporate dishonesty, and a few from corporate greed. (Please note that I did not mention any company in Redmond as suffering from any or all of these, but I did not deny the possibility either.)
Otherwise, SuSE 8.2 or 9.0 works OK with both IDE drives and other things such as CF Cards, which have a FAT filesystem and USB adaptor. You will need all the necessary things either compiled in the kernel or as modules, SuSE seems to have all these bits already but I can't comment on other distros. But, if you are experienced in recompiling kernels, or willing to learn, this is no big deal.
I don't have a disk with USB2 hardware attached yet, all my experience is with USB1 but so far, no significant problems.
Just remember to do a umount before pulling the USB plug out, and of course pull the plug out and switch off the power before swapping the IDE drive in the USB box. I assume you will be using some kind of removable drive cradle in conjunction with a USB to IDE converter.
Win 2000 and XP have a few problems, it is sometimes impossible to unmount the thing, except by brute force (pulling the USB plug out) and then you get nagged about unsafe removal. To get the drive to be seen again, it is sometimes, but not always, necessary to remove it in device manager, then get it to add a new device again. Same thing with CF memory card in a PCMCIA adaptor, it is obviously a fundamental M$ error which they can't fix.
There are hot-swappable IDE cradles which can mount into a PC, but there might not be a way of getting the OS to do the necessary. The extra logic in the cradle, and longer power and ground pins, only ensures that the hardware does not suffer a destructive latchup, you would possibly need to make the kernel run some of its initialisation code again every time you plugged the device in. Far easier to use USB, the plug and play code is fairly solid.
There are no filesystem issues if you use FAT or one of its variants (you might need to do a man mount to see if you need options to the mount command, or want to automount) but NTFS will almost certainly not work reliably, so please don't try with valuable data, you will probably trash the lot.
There are sometimes suggestions that Scottish laws should be applied to England, mostly in connection with house purchase. What I don't understand is why they were not applied anyway, after all King James 6 (of Scotland), 1 (of England) was Scottish.
Anyway, it will be very interesting to see if he gets a hammering in court. Maybe he will get to share the luxury apartment in Barlinnie with the alleged Lockerbie bomber. (It was not him by the way, it was Syria and not Lybia, but that is rather off topic).
IANAL, but our laws in the UK concering the conduct of business in general are much tighter here than they appear, from a distance, to be in the US. For a start, if he or his associates have been dealing in shares in SCO in response to his blatant manipulation of the market, he can expect a few years in jail. On past performance, an offence like this is unlikely to be dealt with simply by a fine. I think Wormwood Scrubbs is going to be his new home....
There was a guy in the UK who kept suing people, with ridiculous claims. The last judge to see him called him a "vexatious little litigant" and threw the case out. I would think that McBride is in the category of vexatious litigant.
BTW the good news about all this is that he is spreading himself very thin.... Remember why Hilter lost the war, by opening a second (in his case Russian) front? McFraud has already lost the battle in Germany, and maybe other parts of Europe. BTW, the Convicted Monopolist, and paymaster to McFraud, will also come unstuck there if they extend their anti-Linux advertising, because knocking competitors products in adverts is illegal in Germany.
Naturally, I hope development will continue, much of my interest is in smaller things like microcontrollers where this is of use.
The fact is that anyone can raise a new standard, it will have to do something useful or it will simply be ignored, but it is hardly difficult to get the process started, by raising an Internet Draft, and in a case like this it should only take a few months to become a standard. The IETF work much more efficiently than any commercial standards body that I know of. The process is documented at ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2026.txt amongst other places, and surely must be the correct procedure to use. Who cases about ANSI, or BSI, or CENELEC, or any of these bodies that sell you a few pages of copyrighted standard for silly money? The RFCs are published for everyone to use, which is why ithe net works as well as it does, despite the efforts and intentions of some, such as the Convicted Monopolist (had to get him in somewhere..), to "de-commoditise the protocols".
There is no reason why they can't raise an Internet Draft right now and start using the thing, people can then follow the Draft at their own risk of having to do more work if it changes.
It is interesting that the fire hazard rises rapidly just above the normal atmospheric partial pressure, which is the optimum for organic life as we know it. But, as you imply, you can take away the nitrogen and the odd bit of Argon and CO2 without tangible effect.
I never did understand how the crew were supposed to cope with breathing a full atmosphere of oxygen anyway, it affects the brain amongst other things, and would surely impair the crew's ability to function very seriously, as they would be grossly hyper-ventilated. There is a word for that, but I can't remember it right now, anyway it is not a nice sensation at all, a bit like being drunk. I sniffed nominally pure oxygen once to see what would happen, not an experience worth repeating. I suspect that most people who have used welding equipment have had a sniff out of curiosity, a trick not to be tried with the acetylene!
I have often wondered why Linux did not do some of the things which are needed here. Some of these things are just starting to become possible now, e.g. there is a lot of attention to the Windoze driver issue. Here is roughly what I think you would need to be able to do, reliably:
1. Read the old .ini files, registry etc, to see what hardware is there, including non plug and play devices for which there is no auto-detection.
2. Round up all the user's data and put it somewhere safe.
3. Read screen resolution, background image settings, etc and save it all somewhere. Calculate equivalent settings for X. (Interesting problem, going from Windoze settings to Modelines, I have never found out how to do that or where Windoze stores the settings.)Get all the icon positions for shortcuts etc, the new Linux apps will go in the same places. The icing on the cake, but why not...
4. Identify all Windoze hardware drivers, if there is not an equivalent Linux driver, put a wrapper round the Windoze driver to make it look as Linux expects. (Hint to Linus & friends - could this be done in the kernel, i.e. built in a Windoze driver subsystem?) If the driver can not support preemptive multitasking, it might get a bit difficult......
5. Automatically run as many Windoze applications as possible, one last time, and get them to save all their files in acceptable formats.
6. Boot up into a minimal Linux, and test the drivers one at a time, then together, to make sure there are no conflicts.
7. Politely ask the user to disappear for several hours while the new distro installs, migrates all settings and data, and blows away every last trace of the existence of Bill Gates.
It would have to be absolutely bomb-proof at every stage, with the option to backtrack until everything had been tested. Can it be done, I wonder? An intermediate stage of development would be to read the hardware details and submit them to a central site (absolutely no personal information of course, only the necessary info), where it could be looked up in a database, and things that had not been configured before could be automatically added. For instance, the software to disassemble a Windoze driver, do some analysis, and build a new Linux driver, might be kept centrally to avoid exposing anything proprietary.
IMHO it is the way the industry should be heading, it is all very well building fancy new kernels which support 32 CPUs (it should be done, and some people really need that) (of course it can't be done without exotic resources and extra-special people according to McBride, so all the more reason to do it, just as people climb mountains because they are supposed to be unclimable), but the real challenge and the place where the battle will be won (or lost, in the sad case of Fedora, a distro which needs to be put out of its misery by sending it to /dev/null) will be in installation and desktop configuration.
I wonder if a merger, or at least an increased convergence between Gnome and KDE would help, but maybe not, because we don't want a monopoly. Or do we need a new desktop with OLE2, SOAP, ActiveX and all the other M$ junk built in? I hope not.
I don't see why RH has never had decent configuration tools like SuSE, but still depends on editing lots of files by hand in a text editor like vi. I loaded it 3 weeks ago, on one machine only, off a magazine cover disc, and I still have not got basic things like Samba running, (or rather, according to top or ps it is running, but not sharing any files!) which are usually easy. Next weekend I will be replacing it with FreeBSD (the machine is dual boot with rock-solid hardware and is mainly a server and router, the data is all held in lots of 512MB (pre fat32) fat partitions dating from Windoze 95, then 98 SP2, then ME, which never worked for more than half a day,latterly served by XP, which was useless), at least the RPM problem will go away, because BSD basically downloads source patches in its highly automated update mechanism, the load on the net is minimal, and any moderm PC has enough power to compile as required.
Any newcomer wanting to move from Windoze will be put off for ever by Fedora. Best that they start with SuSE, its automatic configuration is a lot less buggy than Mandrake. But, once they have a bit of experience, they might well be better off using this wonderful program to convert to Debian, which has a lot of good points.
It is amazing how many potential problems simply can't happen if you stick to GPL code! The best way forward would be for all parties to publish their source (much as the BIOS for the original PC was published in, IIRC, the Advanced Users Guide, which anyone could purchase. It was copyright, you could look but not copy. That should be done here, to end the Source Wars for all time.
In fact, it would be a good idea to alter copyright law in such a way that software was protected only if the source was published. It would not allow anyone to clone it, but it would give full visibility of any copying that did occur, and also provide the ideal opportunity to detect bugs and security holes. It would also put software on an even footing with other products, which can mostly be seen, dissected and understood (e.g. you can dismantle your car engine and see how clever Ford or whoever have been, and you can generally repair it yourself, but you can not build an exact copy). Most industries do dismantle their competitors products to have a look, it helps them to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and drives them to do something slightly different, thus advancing technology. That is how it should be with software, and it would really end the nonsense. But, in the meantime, the principal advocates of closed-source, led by the Convicted Monopolist, simply continue to retard progress (which is all that M$ have ever done, not a single innovation except new ways of creating an illegal monopoly has ever come from there, or ever will.) It only makes work for lawyers, and it is notable that Gates senior is one of that deplorable species.
I do hope you are right!
But, having seen the first file, I really do wonder if McFraud believes CEOs of companies such as Novell really need to be told, in words of one syllable, what Linux is and why its development model differs from proprietary software. It seems to me that he is the one who fails to grasp the situation. He really seems to be unable to grasp that huge teams of programmers are not the way to develop good software (as the Convicted Monopolist has proved time and again...) he does not seem to comprehend that anyone with a brain, a PC and a compiler is able to develop good code, if they want to. Many of course would not bother with the learning curve, they would rather do other things, which is OK of course, but they probably could, if they wanted to. The clever people will certainly create bigger programs of better quality quicker, as we all know. But none of this involves the race of supermen, with super facilities, which McFraud seems to suggest are necessary. Mere mortals, with slowish PCs, simply take a bit longer, but because there are lots of them, each doing their own little bit, and putting the bits together occasionally, it still happens at a respectable pace.
I think that like another nasty piece of work we like to revile on /. (the one who missed the Internet for several years, despite prodding from his employees, who now calls himself the Chief Software Architect), he simply is too stupid to understands what it is all really about.
Unix as a money-spinner has had its day (and thanks to stupid commercial and legal issues it never did spin as much money as it could have), in fact the OS as such has had its day. Wise companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell realise that now, and know that the future for them is in building hardware (if they are in that business) and/or providing middleware and support. McFraud is simply living in the past. BTW, the next thing to expire as a money-spinner will be the "Office" suite, they are almost two-a-penny now (strictly, two for zero pennies for the pedantic), a far cry from the $400 spreadsheet or WP originally. The fact is that like commodity hardware, commodity software is starting to get very much cheaper. In fact hardware costs are the driving force. It once may have seemed reasonable to put a $400 Lotus 1-2-3 on a $4000 PC/AT (guessing at prices, from the vague recesses of my fading memory, they might not be quite right), but to put a $400 Office suite on a $300 PC is sheer folly. The economies of scale apply to software far more than to hardware, likely marginal cost of an Office suite about $1 for the box and CD, but the Monopolist, the Fraudster and such like have tried to conceal that fact from the gullible public.
I look forward to reading more of McFrauds rantings when the load on the servers subsides.
The point is that no-one's choice is likely to be limited, and that is a good thing. It is also good that Ximian and KDE, and other things get adequately funded. Because of that, the desktop will continue to evolve and improve. The only negative impact would be if some good things got extinguished in the process, but I don't see that happening here.
Of course if they come up with an awful, childish looking desktop like Windoze XP, I will be very upset indeed, if it is made the default. We do not need dumbing down.
It will be interesting to look back in a few years and see what becomes of all this. Maybe Novell will have regained something of their former glory, while a little company no-one remembers in Redmond is the last remaining supplier of buggy basic interpreters, and automatic virus downloader programs, and still has a few hundred customers on their MSN..... Such things are influenced by detail like desktops and their implementation, as well as marketing.
The only long term solution is to depopulate the vulnerable areas, locating all industry and housing in stable regions. The earthquake zones are OK for agriculture, provided the small number of buildings needed are properly designed.
Does anyone ever wonder why, in spite of many historical disasters, the US population in the principal earthquake regions continues to grow? Who profits from this? And who will benefit by allowing a situation lie this to continue, despite the certainty of there being 7-digit (yes, I mean 7-digit, a million or more) casualties in a major city within the next 50 years?
Look elsewhere, to Naples, and you will see the potential, indeed the certainty, of a million or more casualties if Mt. Vesuvius enters a new eruptive cycle, the first eruption of any cycle being likely to be massive, and pyroclastic. The time to evacuate the population is several days, from nothing to a much bigger than Mt. St. Helens eruption, only a few hours. Yet people live there... (In fairness to the Italian government, they are trying very hard, but have so far failed to slow down the population growth).
I ask myself why, when there are better places to live. Governments, including the US, should be planning a phased withdrawal from earthquake zones, instead they encourage the setup of vital industries in these regions. The Japanese are no better, remember the semiconductor shortage because one factory in the whole world that made a certain epoxy resin was situated in Kobe, and was out of action for many months? It all makes no sense.
Nor will the actions of the local government when a quake is predicted on the west coast of the US. Sadly, we will not have to wait long to find out how irresponsibly it will be handled.
Having said all this, my mother has recently moved house and lives on a fault line, the mighty Ochil Fault in Central Scotland. The vertical displacement of this fault is at least 5km (yes, really, over 3 miles, vertically, maybe a lot more, because even the coal mining industry has never bored deep enough to find out) at its maximum, and at least 3km wher it passes within 100 metres of the house. But, and it is a very big but, the last quake was about 2 on the Richter scale, way below the threshold where damage occurs, a few years ago. It is a very old fault, dating from the Carboniferous era or maybe before, and nowhere near a modern plate boundary. However, if that region did revert to its original level of activity, life would not be possible within 200 miles, or maye even nowhere in the UK, as there would also be massive pyroclastic volcanism. But, reactivation of such regions is unlikely, and certainly does not happen within a human time scale. However, it does make one think....
One may ask why the IRA activities were allowed, and the islamic ones not. The difference is in fact that the IRA had given an undertaking to the US government that they would not operate in the US. The US government will give any illegal assistance or cooperation to any terrorist organisation worldwide as long as it does not threaten them.
BTW, the last US presidential election was far from being legal, in case you had not noticed. To be pedantic, it was not in fact an election. The present pathetic, mentally subnormal little man, who is in the final phase of his September 11 tantrum, where he totally lost the plot, has no legal status whatsoever. Mental cases can be very dangerous in these circumstances, when backed into a corner, like rats, there is no telling what they will do, and legal issues will not matter.
I don't know much about US law, and the US is where most of the action is on this case, but both parties (Microtrash and SCO) sell their products worldwide and have a presence in many countries. They need to be very careful....
McBride has already fallen foul of an excellent German law. I think that the authorities worldwide ought to be examining this for any signs of collusion, and if necessary going for an immediate criminal prosecution.
A few years in Wormwood Scrubbs (one of the less salubrious UK prisons) might teach these guys to behave themselves, as it is clear that nothing else will.
The fact is, that is it is not of merchantable quality, or fit for the intended purpose, it has to be repaired, replaced (with what? XP will not run on most hardware that runs 98), or the purchase price refunded.
In the UK, a court case established that software is in fact goods. If someone has stitched them up with threats of a class action, which would result in them replacing or refunding every single copy of 98, all I can say is well done.
If it happened as a result of legal pressure somewhere else, again well done. The sad thing is that we may never know why, I sense the outcome of some out of court settlement with someone, somewhere, lying behind this.
Polite request to Bill: Can I please have my money back for the copy of ME which I purchased to try to get a bug fix for 98, but which in fact never worked properly? Or, do I have to take you to the UK Small Claims Court?
LEDs are very much better than anythingelse where you need a monochromatic light, e.g railway signals, traffic lights,...., but NEVER as a source of general illumination, and particularly not where white is required.
I have seen a number of attempts over the years to make face to face contact, and all have been extremely unreliable. One design of "butting connector" had to have both sets of contacts, which were gold-plated, and one half sprung, cleaned very carefully with iso-propyl alcohol immediately before making the connection, and even then there were numerous problems. The bayonet lampholder is a face to face connector, it is tolerable (just) because the hard brass spring-loaded pins tend to dig in to the soft solder pads on the base of the lamp.
End contact on a large array of tiny pins is a disaster waiting to happen. I suspect an optical illusion, and that they are conventional pins, if not, Intel are shooting themselves in the foot, as they have done on several occasions with packages which broke the rules of good mechanical engineering. I seem to remember certain "slot" rather than "socket" packages, where the whole thing was unstable and would break the processor, or the motherboard, if you were not extremely careful when transporting the PC.
There again, the mechanical design of the PC is itself a disaster. I guess that IBM must have let Bill have influence there as well as on the software.... Single-part edge connectors are banned in many applications because they are inherently unreliable, in any case it is cheaper to use a 2-part connector because only the vital part of the pins is gold-plated and you don't have to put the PCBs through the gold plating process. Tolerance build-ups between back of case, where the PCB bracket mounts, and the motherboard are still a nightmare.
As for the truly vile arrangement of PS2, serial, USB etc ports on a modern ATX board, well that is a disaster waiting to happen. I wonder how many people have trashed their motherboard by tripping over a cable?
The industry is based on producing junk, which is just as well for Bill because the hardware does not embarass his software too much!
The safety-critical industries dread the fact that many new CPUs (microcontrollers etc) and other vital things are now only available in BGA.
It is actually possible to get a device removed from the board, re-balled with solder, and replaced, but after all that thermal stress it would be sheer folly to trust either the PCB or the chip again.
Personally, I HATE the things.
They can be, and are, sometimes socketed for development purposes, but the configuration breaks every rule of reliable connector design. Sensible people get them fitted to a little PCB, with pins attached, so you can plug them in, and throw away the chip and PCB if it breaks, but you can't always do that on high-frequency things.
It is a very fair and reliable system because the reults can be checked and re-checked, and the papers are archived somewhere for a while, just in case. I am sure the German system will be equally thorough in its implementation.
But, these are far too costly in this day and age, and I don't see that an electronic system needs to be unreliable. It is simply that the wrong people, particularly a certain Convicted Monopolist, have been involved. It is not difficult to produce the exact equivalent of the paper system, keeping the parts of the "paper" which identify the voter and the votes cast strictly separate of course, and ensuring that the voter is given positive acknowledgement that his vote has been recorded. There are other features necessary as well, but it is by no means an intractable problem, not even a big problem, because we are talking about only 25,000 to 50,000 voters per constituency in the UK who bother to vote, and about 650 constituencies, 50 millon or so people in total.
Of course, if a government wants to employ me to run a program to introduce reliable electronic voting, I would be very interested, having experience in high-integrity system design, but instead they will get some uselessly incompetent civil servant to manage some incompetent, greedy and corrupt subcontractors.... The inevitable results will follow.
I would seriously recommend open-source software and hardware for a voting system so that it is entirely open to scrutiny. If it was funded by the EC for example, the cost to each country would be minimal, and in fact Europe could use a common pool of mobile voting hardware, as rarely would more than one or two countries need an election at the same time. In any case, a dedicated voting terminal could be made for about 1000 to 2000 dollars/euros/pounds if someone really wanted to, so cost would not really be the problem.
It would be nice to run non-bloated code again. I used to be amazed at the speed of spell-checking in WP 5.2 on a 286, it would most probably still beat Word 2000 on my Athlon 2.6GHz. Life was much less troublesome then, before truly abominable software, designed by idiots, for idiots, became dominant.
Now, if DOS could be combined with Unix version 7, that would be almost perfection.
The only way of stopping bad behaviour, and by allowing the bright, curious kids to remain interested, is to use a decent OS which provides adequate security and control over the facilities available, so that the morons can't do anything bad. The bright kids, or maybe all of them, will get their very own virtual OS to play in, where they can't damage anything. Give them a good sandbox, with lots of toys in it to play with.... Young kids are not able to discern the difference between playing and hacking, and it is not fair to expect it of them. But, they will learn far more if they are allowed some experimentation on their own than if they have to follow the teacher all the time.
User Mode Linux is one way of achieving this, another, more expensive, involves the use of multiple OS running on something like an IBM mainframe, which might be viable if shared between a group of schools. There are other methods also, but AFAIK none involve products of the Convicted Monopolist, who simply have not got the technology, and certainly not the security.
In view of the inevitable shortage of funds in education, a worldwide problem, the best way forward would be to use a Linux setup, with OpenOfice,org and various other nice packages. Most of the ancient DOS software used in education would still run, under emulation. The trick would be configuring the server so that the teacher could turn things like mail and instant messaging on and off easily, so that necessary things like sending messages to the whole class could be explicitly allowed when required as part of the curriculum, and blocked, because of nuisance value, at other times.
With *nix, the problem of keeping other people's work areas secure is nil, if the system is set up properly. It might be better to use *BSD rather than Linux, because the "wheel" group concept is useful, but that is mere detail. If the huge cost of Monopoly software is avoided when updates are due, education must benefit. Remembering that Win 98 support ends in a few days, many schools will be about to face huge costs, they should spend the money mainly on new hardware at Wal-Mart or wherever it is cheapest, and get some decent, free software.
This kid has been unfairly punished as a result of incompetence by his supposed educators. He will not have learned anything useful from this.
The only way I can do this is by using a database instead, and a lot of bothersome fiddling about. Neither a database nor a spreadsheet come close to what I really need, an entirely new dimension of programming capability is needed.
Even better if it would only work in OpenOffice.org, and under Linux or BSD, it would then provide a lever to move the management....
Some way of actually putting shell scripts into cells, and connect the variables to other cells, would be the ultimate perfection, because then any other functionality needed would be accessible.
I know what I need, but am not a good enough programmer to do it.
Now, I hope that this is not completely off topic, it is after all an extension, even if not to a language as such. I also hope it will inspire competent people to progress spreadsheets to the next dimension and get way ahead of M$.... Maybe a super-extended spreadsheet would be the very thing to make several open source spreadsheets give M$ Office the sound thrashing that it deserves.
Now here is a good thing, the spammers can bombard us with junk about language extensions instead of extensions to a part of the male anatomy, which at the moment seems to constitute 90% of all spam.