A dictator seems to work quite well in Singapore. maybe their system is worth studying to see why. Of course, it is a small multi-racial country with lots of high-tech industry, so it might not be typical.
To see what is really going on, look up "Illuminati", "Bildeberg", "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" or "Trilateral Commission", and please don't connect any of them with real Jews, which they are not, and who I would not malign in any way.
The last time I mentioned one of these on/., the whole thread disappeared suddenly, I wonder what will happen this time......
We have a dictator in the UK. The only differences are that ours was actually elected, because the thinking members of society were all so bored with lying, corrupt politicians that they did not bother to vote, and ours is not mentally defective, but rather has the same syndrome as Bill Gates, a kind of megalomania. We also have a vile communist scumbag running London, again because nobody bothered to vote.
One answer might be to make voting compulsory.
One good thing is that your piece of trash and our piece of trash might well bring each other down. They both lied about Saddam, and other things, and it is coming out, slowly....
Oh dear, Red Ken and President/Pope/King Blair are now added to the list of people who are going to sue me.... Still, Blair's sidekick Brown has taken all my money in tax, so they will not be able to extract any more.
It makes me really glad that I live in the UK. We have laws such as the Data Protection Act. You US citizens need to start giving your politicians a lot of grief over this sort of thing. In a free society, one of the basic freedoms is that people's privacy can be protected. An official, or indeed anyone who did this kind of thing in the course of business, could expect a prison sentence, or at least a very large fine.
Maybe you would have been better off had you remained as a British Colony, you would not have this kind of governmental abuse. (But, I freely admit that you would have other problems, such as being ruled by "President" Blair....)
You are right, it will not happen. Things have got too complicated, it would just not be affordable. If they tried to build a new run of Saturn 5 and Apollo, to return to the moon, safety regulations, inavailability of key components, and lots of other things would kill it, not to mention the huge amount of software needed. IIRC the originals had about 32k of hard-coded program to do the lot. If they tried to do it now, it would involve 4GB of ram per cpu, running Win XP, and it would BSOD (literally) a few seconds after launch.
We in the UK could not build a new Concorde either, with or without the Frogs, for similar reasons. There was a window of opportunity once, it is more by luck than judgment that it happened at the right time.
I think that to keep up with existing workload, NASA urgently needs one or two new Shuttles, with all the problems fixed, before they start on anything ambitious. They also have to re-learn for at least the third time the principle that safety is paramount and may not, ever, be overridden by political or management expediency, a principle that at other times and with different and less complex management structures, was once applied rigorously.
I am just about old enough to remember Kennedy promising to put man on the moon within a decade, I certainly remember the result being achieved, with time to spare. Sadly, Kennedy was not around to see it, for reasons that remain controversial. I don't necessarily think he was a great leader, or even remotely honourable, but he did have a way of getting things done, unlike the present non-elected incumbent or did I really mean imbecile, idiot or incompetent, who knows about as much about ruling America as Bill Gates does about producing good software. I mean a binary digit, less than 1.
No, everything is against it, politics, economics, technology, environmentalists, lawyers especially. Talking of environmentalists, apparently Boron can be used as a super-efficient rocket fuel, you burn it with oxygen, or even better, fluorine. Now that will surely get the environmentalists going, if it is attempted..... It could be a good idea to get 10 million lawyers to observe the launch at close quarters, it might solve a problem.
Oh, I think I am going to have every lawyer in the world trying to sue me now, as well as Gates, McBride, NASA, Dubya, and everyone else I have justifiably maligned on/. Still, being only a poor, impoverished and overworked engineer, I don't have too much for them to take away.
The way this is going, I can see that after the courts worldwide deal with McBride, and the likely punitive damages, Novell might want to buy up the remains of SCO for about $1, so they can put all the good bits into SuSE, and indirectly into Linux as a whole, without any more problems.
If they tried, I would outbid them, I would go to $2.50, maybe even $5 if I was feeling generous. I always fancied owning Unix.
Seriously though, the way things have gone in recent years means that Unix really is only worth a modest sum. When something declines in value so badly, it becomes cheaper eventually to give it away than to maintain it, and I think Unix is at that point, or will be once McFraud is broken. At one time it would have been worth billions, as a certain part-owner of the Xenix (agruably perverted, like his other OSs) variety failed to realise. Just think what might have happened, had Bill done the sensible thing, and not wasted billions developing an inferior OS family, when he had a good one already. It would have been a tragedy - Unix 3.1, Unix 95, Unix 98, Unix ME (the worst of the lot, of course), Unix XP..... At least there would be no dispute over the parentage of the calloc() function, it would have been replaced by the buggy M$ version which stuffs the allocated memory with random data....
I don't know much about US law, but many countries have data protection legislation which would make this kind of thing, i.e. storing unnecessarily, or giving out personal information illegal. In the UK if someone does something like that, I simply email them demanding that they cease and desist at once, or they will be reported for possible prosecution under the Data Protection Act. No-one yet has failed to comply....
What would be the effect of putting a statement in all emails (e.g. in the sig file) which copyrights the email address? They would have to publish the whole address, not a little bit, so they could not claim it was "fair use". Copyright law seems to be very simple and straightforward to apply, if it can be applied here it would also give the same protection in most countries, not just the US. If you could establish some meaningful value to the address, maybe you could get punitive damages out of every spammer who used it. Now there's a thought....
IANAL, perhaps those who are might care to expand this idea, it it could be made to work. Lots of us would be very interested.
Can you trust Windoze Rights Management? I can't recall a single Microsoft security feature, EVER, that was secure.
To have any degree of confidence, the algorithm would need to be open to inspection by anyone, as is often stated by the experts. That can only be done in an open source environment.
It is amazing that people who have been caught out again and again by the defective junk produced by the Convicted Monopolist continue to believe that the next product will be better than what went before, when the track record is one of constant FAILURE. Yes, that is right, MICROSOFT AND PARTICULARLY BILL GATES ARE FAILURES. What is truly amazing is that people, by their stupid purchasing of junk, put these people there, and keep them there, and continue to imagine that their products are the best.
But, the automobile industry in several parts of the world including the US and the UK used to be like Microsoft, producing JUNK. (Junk for different reasons in these markets, the US junk were bloated, ugly, gas-guzzling, with bad handling, poor brakes, and lots of other problems, but might have been put together well, but the in UK were often elegant, economic designs which were actually nice to drive when they were working, but invariably put together very badly, due to a combination of mismanagement and union troubles. The common element in both cases was that there were always some details where the designers had been utterly negligent, and these never got fixed, even through many years of revisions and updates.) Look what hapened, Mr Honda, or maybe Mr. Toyota or Mr. Datsun had an idea one day, and said "let us implement proper QA systems and give proper attention to detail" or words to that effect. They first cleaned up their home market (their products had also been junk at one time) and then they clobbered the manufacturers of junk worldwide. None of their products were outstanding, often the handling was a bit dull, there was not a nice "European" feel, for example, nor did they have the edge where fuel consumption was concerned, but they were and are put together carefully, and for the first few years of their life were and still are extremely reliable. They almost wiped out the native US and UK industry, because their products, although a bit dull for the discerning driver, were simply reliable.
The same will happen to the junk software industry, one day soon it will only have a niche market, like Rover or maybe Chrysler, a mere shadow of its former self. The reason will be that people would prefer a slightly dull OS, without quite all the bells and whistles, that is reliable. Now, the Japanese, and indeed most Oriental nations, are embracing Linux and Open Source. It is quite obvious what will happen, PCs will start to come from the factories in the Orient with a good, stable, slightly stodgy software suite already installed. People will notice the stability, security, low cost, and will hardly notice a few missing features that they don't use anyway. Mircrosoft, just like Rover, will be selling off parts of their campus to property developers in order to survive.
And all because they systematically, over many years, FAILED to attend to the real issues.
No, to sub $0.00001.....
Your observations are otherwise correct, and a FALL in stock of a reputable company with an on-going workload and profitable operation means nothing either. I don't generally deal in stock, but a year ago invested about a days wages in a company which had come down by a factor of about 30, knowing full well that they would go up again. So far, they have multiplied by about 6. I knew what the company was producing, profitably, how the market had suffered a glitch, and was absolutely certain that they would recover.
I think that many investors remain ignorant of the inner workings of the industries in which they invest, but that is where a company stands or falls, not on an aberration like the stock price.
What actually matters is that a company can continue to sell its products at a profit. The.com frauds (because that clearly is what they were) had nothing but a huge marketing budget, not needed because web sites are remarkably cheap, but no underlying business model. The investors clearly imagined that a web site was a high-tech thing which in itself made money. Not so, it is a cheap and effective way of demonstrating the products and possibly selling on-line, and that is all.
Looking at SCO and McBride, I do not see a viable business model, when free software of the Linux or BSD variety can do everything that his expensive product can. Unix in itself never was a financially viable thing, it started off being free to universities, and it should have remained free. After many false starts (not all down to AT&T, they had to work within a monopoly judgment which did not take Unix into account properly), splits and divergences, the wheel has started to come full circle, even SCO make their software Linux-compatible. But there is not, and never will be now, a viable financial model for selling *nix as such, although there are great opportunities, which IBM, Novell, etc understand, of earning a good profit from support.
McBride has failed to adapt his business model to a changed world. He simply does not have the right kind of product, and has already failed. This case is SCO's last dying convulsion. They left it too late to adapt.
Sadly they will take a lot of hopeful investors down with them, but as I said, the investors need to understand the business.
The important conclusion is that it is very necessary, apart from reasons of cross-fertilisation, free choice, and preferences for one or another development model and/or licence, to ensure that the several versions of BSD continue to flourish, along with the free replacement for BeOS, and any others I have forgotten. As in any species, if you regard an OS as a species,with good diversity it is impossible for a disease like McBride to wipe out the entire race. It hardly matters which is best, the fact that all the variants exist ensures that many will survive.
This might encourage application coders to port to as many different OSs as possible, so that if one gets taken down (which BTW I think is very unlikely), then life can continue with only a momentary glitch, while everyone installs one of the alternatives.
I do wish IBM would buy Microsoft, but I bet it would be blocked because it would form a monopoly.....
Seriously though, IBM know how to produce good, reliable software. M$ never did, and never will. The only reason that M$ exist is that at one time IBM's management were so out of touch with reality that they did not realise how easy it would be for a smallish team of competent programmers to produce an OS for a microcomputer, so they went to someone who had zero competence and 100% unscrupulousness. Just look at the mess that has caused....
Those EULAs are illegal in many countries because they impose unfair and unreasonable terms. The problem is that in most countries, certainly the UK, the law only protects individual consumers, and no individual consumer is going to spend many years wages on a legal bill to get some compensation for a dud, useless thing like Windoze ME.
It is simply consumer economics that prevent these obnoxious EULAs being tested in court. Now, if someone was prepared to make the effort to organise a class action, I might be interested in joining....
BTW there is another line of attack in the UK, as software has been ruled as being "goods" in a dispute between St. Albans Council and ICL. That was "bespoke" software, it should stand up even more in the case of shrink-wrap. The implication is that the Sale of Goods Act applies, and thereofre the goods need to be of merchantable quality and fit for their purpose, which is clearly not the case for Win ME and a number of other vile products. It also means that the goods will have to be repaired or replaced for 7 years from the date of purchase if they were defective when purchased. Of course, software is either defective or not, it does not wear out, so that condition would be met for every single bug that affected functionality.
Then there are the CRIMINAL OFFENCES, the Computer Misuse Act, (certain installers which cripple other programs, for a start), and quite possibly the Data Protection Act where vile, insecure things like Passport are concerned.
If someone really wants to go for the jugular, in the case of companies who enforce the vile EULAs, why not go for CRIMINAL prosecution as well? There is a very good correlation between the vileness of the EULA and the trashiness of the product.
I think there would be much more chance of doing real damage to the more obnoxious elements of the software industry by persuing them in UK courts (and I hear that Australia may be another place to try, also Germany).
US law, or its interpretation by the courts, is blatantly biased towards the scumbags, monopolists, fraudsters, cheats and liars that operate as "Big Business". I think if people really want to break these vile corporations, they should do it in countries where the legal system is favourable.
I also think that there is a very good chance of breaking McBride in the UK (libel, for a start), and he has already been ruled against in Germany. Because computing is now international, thanks to the internet, you only need to break a scumbag in a few civilised countries to break him everywhere.
Exactly. It is dummies marketing to dummies. Accountants in particular have great difficulty in actually determining true costs, except retrospectively. They are rarely creative, pro-active or visionary (with a few honourable exceptions of course). They are, quite simply, high-class bean counters. With Linux there are no beans to count. They can't seem to get their minds round that idea at all. I guess they have been trained that there is no such thing as a free lunch, there are no friends in business, etc. The fact is that both of these ideas are untrue, there are free lunches, and friends, it is just that few of them are called Bill, or are Convicted Monopolists.
The fact is that some open source software is actually funded by businesses, they need something so greatly that they pay some developers to do it, and even if it then goes free to their potential competitors, they have already begun to enjoy its benefit.
The fact that everyone else gets a free lunch is less important than the fact that they have improved one of their own essential business processes. It is also quite common for businesses, especially small to medium size, to help one another out in various ways, by mutually advantageous co-operation, not ruthless, aggressive competition, knowing full well that if their sector of industry benefits, then so do they. But, such deals are done in the club or pub, or restaurant, or even the golf course, between real managers, not posers, accountants, lawyers or jumped-up office boys with grand titles.
People who actually understand what they are doing generally have no need to rip off others, they can survive and prosper in a co-operative environment.
As for the Convicted Monopolist being "a trusted name in the industry", it just shows how great a degree of tunnel vision these inept, pathetic attempts at being managers really have. Would any sane, ccompetent person ever trust a Convicted Monopolist, or an organisation with a solid, proven track record of failure to produce good, secure, stable products?
The only thing that the Monopolist has is marketing ability. Their products are worthless junk (but an accountant will see them as valuable because they cost serious money), in fact each has a true net cost of at least 10 times its purchase price. Even today I have wasted an hour working round yet another Word bug, which should not have happened. But, accountants have traditionally been worse than useless at spotting true hidden costs. They people who were good at spotting these things were once known as "time and motion experts", they would go into a factory with their stop-watches, spot the bottlenecks, causes of delay, etc, and produce a plan to sort it all out and boost productivity. They were not necessarily highly paid, but did bring a great deal of benefit. I don't know what the modern equivalent is called, but the equivalent could have a field day in the average office, just sitting there with the stop-watch measuring all the wasted time due to the Monopolist's products. I am sure that the conclusion would be that getting rid of M$ TRASH in its entirety would save money.
The fact is that every single office in the world can, right now (not literally please, don't overload the servers!) get a free Office suite that works, if their managers have the guts to do it. OpenOffice.org comes to mind, but there are others.
If they want support, let them mitigate the risk by buying Star Office. That will not break the bank.
There is not the slightest excuse for anyone anywhere to persist in using the bug-ridden, incompatible, user-belligerent virus-nutrient abomination called M$ Office.
I am a contractor, and wherever I go, I take OpenOffice.org. Usually I need it to rescue corrupt Word or Excel files that M$ software has created but can't open. I always leave it behind when I go. Others take copies home, some even continue to use it at work. In most cases the IT department will at least look the other way if it is contrary to official policy.
It only takes people to spread the package, and it will be adopted widely.
You are correct that it does not matter what people actually use, and IMHO an editor of any type (especially a plain text editor, where compatability is not an issue) ought to be chosen by the end user according to individual preference. Other packages are converging on the OOo file format for word processing, which seems to be the way to go, whether in the form of Koffice (OK, that is for Linux/Unix only at the moment), Abiword, the next version of Word Perfect etc. It is becoming an OPEN STANDARD. OPEN STANDARDs as you say ensure compatability. That is what matters.
But everyone can help support the rise of an OPEN STANDARD, by using it, talking about it, demonstrating it to the boss......The learning curve for OOo is negligible if you know how to drive Windoze programs (or Linux, if that is what you use, but that is another issue...) You could give it to a secretary and get useful output right away. That is what matters.
BTW, rtf is a reasonable substitute except that M$ tend to add non-standard features which break compatability. I would rather stick to text, HTML, pdf (avoiding new features which not all readers support, of course), XML, and of course the OpenOffice.org standard is based around zipped XML. It seems to be much more efficient than.doc, my files are quite often tiny.
Please, everyone, let this be the year when Bill's stranglehold on "office" software is broken for all time. Let us have action as well as words. If you are a manager, give it to some of your staff to try out. If you are a "mere" worker, show it to your manager. If he/she is not fully in the picture, get them to play with it for a while, and then ask them how much they think it costs! It catches out accountants every time.
What dilemma? The choice is obvious. If the so-called developed world does not wake up, we will continue to be held to ransom by the Convicted Monopolist who produces the leading brand of trash with all the security holes, while lots of less-well developed nations get ahead. It is as simple as that.
With OSS the customer can see what he is getting, which should be a basic requirement for government use. Safety is slightly different from security, but there too, if you can see the code, you can check that proper procedures have been followed. You can at any time have the code subjected to independent audit, which is often a legal or at least moral requirement.
If they think that Open Source is too controversial (politicians and decision makers rarely understand the real issues) they should at least insist on getting the source, for their own use, even under NDA. That would be better than nothing, and enought to give Bill a nightmare or two.
Some, notably the Germans with Kroupware, but many others also, have funded OSS development for good reason. It makes perfect sense to do so. If most governments, both local and national, and large to medium organisations, fund bits of things that they need, out of their budgets, but with one eye on what others are doing, the end result is that virtually everything needed gets developed somewhere, in a cost-effective manner, and can then be shared. So everyone is a winner, including OSS developers, who actually get paid to do what they like doing.
The fact is that the world can help itself towards being free of domination by M$ and others, it just needs decision makers with guts and a bit of copmprehension.
It is not uncommon to use a Peltier Effect cooler. This is basically a huge stack of thermocouples run in reverse. You put in a lot of current at low voltage, and it produces a temperature differential. If you heatsink the "hot" side to ambient air, the "cold" side may be well below zero. But, it is not very efficient (like all cooling systems), so you need to put in several times as many watts as it extracts from its "cold" side, and not surprisingly the total of both appears at the "hot" side, so you may need a very big heatsink with powerful fans.
I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but at a guess you would need 300 watts to cool a 100 watt CPU, so would need to dissiapte 400 watts to air.
It is inadvisable to make any attempt to get the chip below zero, obviously ice formation will happen, and when you switch off, it will melt. Should you switch on again, disaster is quite probable, unless the PCB had a good conformal coating and the socket has an interfacial seal. The conformal coating can be dealt with quite easily, but I have never seen a sealed CPU socket. BTW I usually work as an avionics designer, where we have to make things that will run from well below zero to well above, so I do know the problems.
Another issue is thermal fatigue. The temperature coefficient of expansion of silicon does not exactly match that of the (probably epoxy) package, every temperature cycle causes a stress cycle, which causes a strain cycle, until something breaks. Same for the motherboard itself of course, if you should cool the whole thing. That is also a good reason to never overclock anything, apart from the possibility of getting subtle data errors and increasingly buggy OS as a result of inadequate timing margins, you will definitely wear the thing out a lot quicker. Every 10 deg C roughly halves the life, or the number of on/off cycles it will survive, and if you do the calculations, the numbers are quite depressing for a modern PC.
If you really want a thumping great 64 bit processor (I certainly do, when the price comes down!), it would be best to calculate the cooling system, and maybe do some tests with thermocouples etc, to try to get the CPU chip to settle down at a relatively safe temperature, say 40 deg C, without getting ice formation on the coldest parts. The clever bit would be to get it to power on and off without any excursions below room temperature (often 20 deg C) or above 40 deg C. Heat soak when you switch off the CPU would be minimal, the mass of the chip itself is very small, but cold soak from a huge peltier block could be a problem, the CPU could be dragged down to -40 deg when you switch off, which is exactly what you don't need, for a long and reliable life.
The other thing to watch out for is that at low temperature the CPU internals will be out of spec. It is actually possible to get excessive current flow in some transistors, and local hot spots, because it is too cold. There may also be timing problems, data corruption,...... It is not possible to test properly that these things are not happening. It takes a smallish time to fully exercise an 8-bit processor to verify all possible data and instruction operations, but somewhere near the lifetime of the universe to do the same for 16 bits. Throw in onboard cache, 64 bits, etc, and it is just impossible. These things work statistically, AMD know how timing variations, for example, might vary across the chip, and allow sufficient margin, within the published clock frequency and temperature range, but deviate from these ratings and this is no longer true. If running at 1GHz, a 1 in 10e12 error rate would corrupt your data or OS code within 1000 seconds, just over 1/4 hour. The error rate required to run an OS for weeks at a time at several GHz defies all attempts at testing. Again, a very good deterrent to overclocking (BTW my non-overclocked ancient K6-350 had a meltdown due to fan failure, and as it died the corrupt Win XP blew away all the passwords so when I got a new CPU and fan, any of th
Yes, you are quite correct, and that is exactly why OSS projects which reach maturity are almost always of good quality. It is also why M$ will never produce software of good quality, or even if they do, the user interface will be awkward and annoying for serious users.
Most OSS programmers do so to fulfil their own need, they need (say) a good-quality driver for their photo-quality inkjet printer, so they go and do it. they will not like spots and blemishes on their photos, or the truly HORRIBLE colour rendering the M$ driver for one of my printers produces.
The number of small things containing software is increasing, and will continue to do so. There may be a decreasing demand for programming skills in the IT industry, but what about all these clever little things which are produced in what at first sight is a hardware industry? Microcontrollers, embedded web servers, set-top boxes, toys, clever central heating controls (energy efficient), engine management computers (just a few that I thought of...). There may be no big projects (who ever NEEDS a new OS, Bill please note!) but there will be an abundance of small ones. People who understand how to make software interact with the hardware will always be in demand.
This may of course be a symptom of stagnation in the large IT companies (the Convicted Monopolist stagnated at birth of course), with the shift towards small businesses who will produce small, useful things.
There may be falling demand for those who know only VB, or Access (I never bothered to learn either!), or maybe even Java, but I doubt that there will be a loss of demand for the more difficult things, and the need for high-quality, safety-critical software will continue to rise.
As I think you are saying, the mediocre with little interest in the job may need a career change, but those with the determination to adapt will not be short of work. I don't think that absolute ability is all that matters, you don't need to be a super-genius to pick up a few languages and instruction sets to a level where you can get fully up to speed on any one of them fairly quickly. Not so long ago, I was offered a job doing hardware and software design, programming a PIC in assembler. The interviewer knew I could do it, although I have never touched a PIC before. Had I accepted the job, I would have spent quite a few evenings studying the PIC data books..... If I wanted to be a C programmer again (it was a long time ago...) I would go and write a program or two, maybe a bit of OSS, just to get back up to speed. You really do have to be prepared to put in your own time and effort to stay on top.
I can't comment on anywhere but the UK, but we have a desparate shortage of plumbers. It is easy to earn a good living, so I am told. Again, something which you don't need to be a super-genius to learn. I have re-done 3 houses, and my manual skills are not the best. It would not be too hard to get up to speed in that area, for a complete change. I suspect that almost everyone has the capability to learn a second useful skill, possibly very different from your main job skill. NOW is the time to learn something else, just in case, or even for a bit of variety. It may even be fun!
We need both Linux and BSD to avoid creating a MONOPOLY, even in open source. Also, diversity helps to limit the spread of virii. It also seems to stimulate development more than having only one core OS.
The average user, sitting in front of a KDE desktop, would neither know nor care which kernel was actually in use, however the choice ought to be available. Nor would he or she care which licence applied, it is likely that most people have some GPL software on a BSD system and vice-versa. That is OK for end users, it is only if you are coding or distributing that you even need to read either licence. Most people will also have stuff licensed under Apache, or Netscape, or Sun........
It is fundamentally important to maintain choice, for those who wish to exercise it.
AFAIK (and I do run Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but don't usually look at the internals) the system call mechanisms of Linux and BSD are orthogonal, so you can put both into one kernel without them colliding. So most versions of Linux have the BSD kernel capabilities compiled in. I think the reverse is probably true also. The small amount of code which should be needed to do this can be written from scratch to avoid needing to put Linux GPL code into BSD or vice-versa. The only difficulties are the few system calls which do not have an exact correspondence between one OS and the other, these few will need most of the work. Any code that uses a standard subset of calls can be easily compiled for either OS without change, it is usual for applications to have conditional code to cover the difficult areas. All of this is much like the days when you had Unix from AT&T, Microport, SCO (first incarnation, part owned by Bill), HP, Plexus.... (some now long gone). The similarites far outweighed the differences, as they still do.
Sticking to a Unix-like OS is the way forward, since apart from the bug-ridden and insecure products of the Convicted Monopolist, all other current OSs are in a tiny minority, numerically at least. There is at the same time a high degree of commonality in the API set, and usually the user interface, and a great deal of diversity in the code base. The commonality benefits users and programmers, the diversity improves resistance to hackers and virii, (OpenBSD on my firewall, Linux on my server for example) and also avoids being tied to one hardware monopoly (although that one is being constantly challenged by AMD and the positions might reverse in the 64-bit world). There is far more commonality between Linux and BSD than between Win 9x and NT/2000. You really need to work very hard to make an application work on all versions ow Wincrash, it is a fairly predictable set of ifdefs etc for Linux/BSD or even the hated SCO.
If BSD were to become as popular as Linux, it would actually strengthen the position of both against the Monopolist. One does not detract from the other, rather they complement each other.
It is purely as a result of the well-known stupid court case between AT&T, later Unixware IIRC, and BSD (UCB), that Linux came into existence. That happened about the same time. I for one was wanting a Unix I could afford, and was impatiently waiting fore the court case to finish, so BSD would become available. I looked at the awful thing Linus was playing with (forgotten the name now, by Tannenbaum, not very efficient and no memory protection) and decided it was a waste of time, having wasted my money on the book. I waited a bit longer, and first to go public was Linus, but variants of BSD were not very far behind IIRC. So it may be just by accident that Linux is the leader (no bad thing, by the way), the positions could have been reversed if the legal process had been quicker. I sometimes wonder if Linus would have bothered, if he could have obtained BSD at the time, but am glad that he did. We need both. It is sad that the present owners of BeOS killed it off. I know that an open-source clone is in development, but BeOS woud have also been a worthy addition to the small group of free operating stystems which are worth using.
Yes, sadly they do. Sometimes it is because their eyes are on the passenger they are conversing with, not on the road, a bad habit which annoys and puzzles me every time I see it. I really don't understand why people are so stupid.
There is no substitute whatsoever for driver education, I think it could be greatly improved in most places.
Next time the small man with a small mind but big ideas in the White house wants a war, he will be able to send in Darl McFraud and his team of schysters......
They will not find the allegedly copied code, but in searching for it they might find a few Saddam-style ratholes with even more unpleasant things in them (or will they find alleged copies of US WMD?)....
Seriously though, Linux and other free or open source software is just the thing to help revive a badly damaged economy. I hope they don't fork the kernel into Shiite and Sunni versions.....
That is possibly slightly larger than this thing. I would be more concerned with face or body impact. People have been killed by normal-size model aircraft, maybe 3 kg mass, chest or abdominal impact at maybe 50 mph. A rotor blade across the face would ruin your day, maybe take your eyes out, and across the neck, maybe cut the jugular. Even with a quiet rotor, which would have large and fairly blunt tips, the hazard can not be ruled out. But, I doubt that this thing would chop a leg or head off completely.
I think a big, squidgy helium-filled airship with tiny little engines is a much safer proposition, and could hover for a much longer time anyway.
Re:They'd better have excellent control
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The problem is not the control systems, they can be made as safe as you like, with several levels of redundancy, and an automatic fly up and away from people if everything else is lost. Processing power gets cheaper all the time, electronics costs virtually nothing in the long term.
The problem is mechanical failure. If the engine dies, it will either fall like a brick, on someone's head, or make an autorotative descent, rotor spinning at full speed, ready to slash someone across the face. You would be fairly safe indoors if the rotor was generating lift, the blades would not be likely to rip through a roof or wall, but if it simply fell like a stone from 5000 feet....
I was under the impression that the Australians set the highest standards anywhere in aviation safety, but now I am beginning to wonder.
A midget airship will do many useful things with much less risk of injury to the public if it runs out of control. Just a big, squidgy helium balloon with sereral little engines with lightweight plastic propellors to move it about.
Re:What happens when it crashes.
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I doubt that it would go through the roof of a typical house, if flying, even aimlessly. The greatest danger is to crowds of people outdoors, it would slash a few with the rotor blades if it came down with engine running, or in autorotation. It could possibly be fatal. Likewise if it suffered a mechanical failure such as a broken rotor shaft, and a few kg of electronics and engine fell on your head. That might also penetrate the roof of a building, just like a falling brick.
If confined to things like chasing car thieves at night, in non-crowded areas, it might be OK, but not in daytime when there are lots of people outdoors, in the street for example, who would be at risk.
Unfortunately, these things are potentially very cheap, and will be deployed. There will be accidents, some quite horrible, however there may be net benefit to society (but try telling that to the victims....).
Yes, you have a point, but there are ways round most of the noise and vibration issues, starting with exotic blade shapes, elastomeric bearings in the rotor head, multi-cylinder engine or micro-turbine, with a decent silencer...... Lots of detail work needed, but not impossible. It could employ a few good engineers for a few years.
The far greater problem is SAFETY. These things are big enough to do serious injury. How can anyone guarantee that one will not fall into a crowd from 1000 feet, with rotor spinning?
There is a better way of doing all this, much less noise, much smaller engine, for manoeuvering and lift trimming only, much better stability, minimum vibration, and mostly soft, if it falls on anyone. It is called an AIRSHIP, or a BALLOON, or whatever the currently fashionable term is.
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but in the UK at one time (have not seen it for a year or two) a fairly modest airship was used as a TV platform for major events. It could hover safely (over Wembley Stadium, for example) where the equivalent helicopter could not. It was very much cheaper to run, and quieter. It was a bit bigger, but not ridiculously so. Scaled down, it would be much more useful, a thing like that can hover for many days on a single tank of fuel.
I know which I would prefer to be hovering above me....
However, for some applications, such as chasing criminals, but not in crowded areas, a miniature helicopter would be ideal. Following stolen cars, for example, which currently is done by full-size helicopters, which sadly do sometimes crash.
It is not a bad idea, if used carefully and sensibly, where the risks are not too great, but definitely not a universal panacea.
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A dictator seems to work quite well in Singapore. maybe their system is worth studying to see why. Of course, it is a small multi-racial country with lots of high-tech industry, so it might not be typical.
The last time I mentioned one of these on /., the whole thread disappeared suddenly, I wonder what will happen this time......
One answer might be to make voting compulsory.
One good thing is that your piece of trash and our piece of trash might well bring each other down. They both lied about Saddam, and other things, and it is coming out, slowly....
Oh dear, Red Ken and President/Pope/King Blair are now added to the list of people who are going to sue me.... Still, Blair's sidekick Brown has taken all my money in tax, so they will not be able to extract any more.
Maybe you would have been better off had you remained as a British Colony, you would not have this kind of governmental abuse. (But, I freely admit that you would have other problems, such as being ruled by "President" Blair....)
We in the UK could not build a new Concorde either, with or without the Frogs, for similar reasons. There was a window of opportunity once, it is more by luck than judgment that it happened at the right time.
I think that to keep up with existing workload, NASA urgently needs one or two new Shuttles, with all the problems fixed, before they start on anything ambitious. They also have to re-learn for at least the third time the principle that safety is paramount and may not, ever, be overridden by political or management expediency, a principle that at other times and with different and less complex management structures, was once applied rigorously.
I am just about old enough to remember Kennedy promising to put man on the moon within a decade, I certainly remember the result being achieved, with time to spare. Sadly, Kennedy was not around to see it, for reasons that remain controversial. I don't necessarily think he was a great leader, or even remotely honourable, but he did have a way of getting things done, unlike the present non-elected incumbent or did I really mean imbecile, idiot or incompetent, who knows about as much about ruling America as Bill Gates does about producing good software. I mean a binary digit, less than 1.
No, everything is against it, politics, economics, technology, environmentalists, lawyers especially. Talking of environmentalists, apparently Boron can be used as a super-efficient rocket fuel, you burn it with oxygen, or even better, fluorine. Now that will surely get the environmentalists going, if it is attempted..... It could be a good idea to get 10 million lawyers to observe the launch at close quarters, it might solve a problem.
Oh, I think I am going to have every lawyer in the world trying to sue me now, as well as Gates, McBride, NASA, Dubya, and everyone else I have justifiably maligned on /. Still, being only a poor, impoverished and overworked engineer, I don't have too much for them to take away.
If they tried, I would outbid them, I would go to $2.50, maybe even $5 if I was feeling generous. I always fancied owning Unix.
Seriously though, the way things have gone in recent years means that Unix really is only worth a modest sum. When something declines in value so badly, it becomes cheaper eventually to give it away than to maintain it, and I think Unix is at that point, or will be once McFraud is broken. At one time it would have been worth billions, as a certain part-owner of the Xenix (agruably perverted, like his other OSs) variety failed to realise. Just think what might have happened, had Bill done the sensible thing, and not wasted billions developing an inferior OS family, when he had a good one already. It would have been a tragedy - Unix 3.1, Unix 95, Unix 98, Unix ME (the worst of the lot, of course), Unix XP..... At least there would be no dispute over the parentage of the calloc() function, it would have been replaced by the buggy M$ version which stuffs the allocated memory with random data....
What would be the effect of putting a statement in all emails (e.g. in the sig file) which copyrights the email address? They would have to publish the whole address, not a little bit, so they could not claim it was "fair use". Copyright law seems to be very simple and straightforward to apply, if it can be applied here it would also give the same protection in most countries, not just the US. If you could establish some meaningful value to the address, maybe you could get punitive damages out of every spammer who used it. Now there's a thought....
IANAL, perhaps those who are might care to expand this idea, it it could be made to work. Lots of us would be very interested.
To have any degree of confidence, the algorithm would need to be open to inspection by anyone, as is often stated by the experts. That can only be done in an open source environment.
It is amazing that people who have been caught out again and again by the defective junk produced by the Convicted Monopolist continue to believe that the next product will be better than what went before, when the track record is one of constant FAILURE. Yes, that is right, MICROSOFT AND PARTICULARLY BILL GATES ARE FAILURES. What is truly amazing is that people, by their stupid purchasing of junk, put these people there, and keep them there, and continue to imagine that their products are the best.
But, the automobile industry in several parts of the world including the US and the UK used to be like Microsoft, producing JUNK. (Junk for different reasons in these markets, the US junk were bloated, ugly, gas-guzzling, with bad handling, poor brakes, and lots of other problems, but might have been put together well, but the in UK were often elegant, economic designs which were actually nice to drive when they were working, but invariably put together very badly, due to a combination of mismanagement and union troubles. The common element in both cases was that there were always some details where the designers had been utterly negligent, and these never got fixed, even through many years of revisions and updates.) Look what hapened, Mr Honda, or maybe Mr. Toyota or Mr. Datsun had an idea one day, and said "let us implement proper QA systems and give proper attention to detail" or words to that effect. They first cleaned up their home market (their products had also been junk at one time) and then they clobbered the manufacturers of junk worldwide. None of their products were outstanding, often the handling was a bit dull, there was not a nice "European" feel, for example, nor did they have the edge where fuel consumption was concerned, but they were and are put together carefully, and for the first few years of their life were and still are extremely reliable. They almost wiped out the native US and UK industry, because their products, although a bit dull for the discerning driver, were simply reliable.
The same will happen to the junk software industry, one day soon it will only have a niche market, like Rover or maybe Chrysler, a mere shadow of its former self. The reason will be that people would prefer a slightly dull OS, without quite all the bells and whistles, that is reliable. Now, the Japanese, and indeed most Oriental nations, are embracing Linux and Open Source. It is quite obvious what will happen, PCs will start to come from the factories in the Orient with a good, stable, slightly stodgy software suite already installed. People will notice the stability, security, low cost, and will hardly notice a few missing features that they don't use anyway. Mircrosoft, just like Rover, will be selling off parts of their campus to property developers in order to survive.
And all because they systematically, over many years, FAILED to attend to the real issues.
I think that many investors remain ignorant of the inner workings of the industries in which they invest, but that is where a company stands or falls, not on an aberration like the stock price.
What actually matters is that a company can continue to sell its products at a profit. The .com frauds (because that clearly is what they were) had nothing but a huge marketing budget, not needed because web sites are remarkably cheap, but no underlying business model. The investors clearly imagined that a web site was a high-tech thing which in itself made money. Not so, it is a cheap and effective way of demonstrating the products and possibly selling on-line, and that is all.
Looking at SCO and McBride, I do not see a viable business model, when free software of the Linux or BSD variety can do everything that his expensive product can. Unix in itself never was a financially viable thing, it started off being free to universities, and it should have remained free. After many false starts (not all down to AT&T, they had to work within a monopoly judgment which did not take Unix into account properly), splits and divergences, the wheel has started to come full circle, even SCO make their software Linux-compatible. But there is not, and never will be now, a viable financial model for selling *nix as such, although there are great opportunities, which IBM, Novell, etc understand, of earning a good profit from support.
McBride has failed to adapt his business model to a changed world. He simply does not have the right kind of product, and has already failed. This case is SCO's last dying convulsion. They left it too late to adapt.
Sadly they will take a lot of hopeful investors down with them, but as I said, the investors need to understand the business.
This might encourage application coders to port to as many different OSs as possible, so that if one gets taken down (which BTW I think is very unlikely), then life can continue with only a momentary glitch, while everyone installs one of the alternatives.
Seriously though, IBM know how to produce good, reliable software. M$ never did, and never will. The only reason that M$ exist is that at one time IBM's management were so out of touch with reality that they did not realise how easy it would be for a smallish team of competent programmers to produce an OS for a microcomputer, so they went to someone who had zero competence and 100% unscrupulousness. Just look at the mess that has caused....
It is simply consumer economics that prevent these obnoxious EULAs being tested in court. Now, if someone was prepared to make the effort to organise a class action, I might be interested in joining....
BTW there is another line of attack in the UK, as software has been ruled as being "goods" in a dispute between St. Albans Council and ICL. That was "bespoke" software, it should stand up even more in the case of shrink-wrap. The implication is that the Sale of Goods Act applies, and thereofre the goods need to be of merchantable quality and fit for their purpose, which is clearly not the case for Win ME and a number of other vile products. It also means that the goods will have to be repaired or replaced for 7 years from the date of purchase if they were defective when purchased. Of course, software is either defective or not, it does not wear out, so that condition would be met for every single bug that affected functionality.
Then there are the CRIMINAL OFFENCES, the Computer Misuse Act, (certain installers which cripple other programs, for a start), and quite possibly the Data Protection Act where vile, insecure things like Passport are concerned.
If someone really wants to go for the jugular, in the case of companies who enforce the vile EULAs, why not go for CRIMINAL prosecution as well? There is a very good correlation between the vileness of the EULA and the trashiness of the product.
I think there would be much more chance of doing real damage to the more obnoxious elements of the software industry by persuing them in UK courts (and I hear that Australia may be another place to try, also Germany).
US law, or its interpretation by the courts, is blatantly biased towards the scumbags, monopolists, fraudsters, cheats and liars that operate as "Big Business". I think if people really want to break these vile corporations, they should do it in countries where the legal system is favourable.
I also think that there is a very good chance of breaking McBride in the UK (libel, for a start), and he has already been ruled against in Germany. Because computing is now international, thanks to the internet, you only need to break a scumbag in a few civilised countries to break him everywhere.
The fact is that some open source software is actually funded by businesses, they need something so greatly that they pay some developers to do it, and even if it then goes free to their potential competitors, they have already begun to enjoy its benefit.
The fact that everyone else gets a free lunch is less important than the fact that they have improved one of their own essential business processes. It is also quite common for businesses, especially small to medium size, to help one another out in various ways, by mutually advantageous co-operation, not ruthless, aggressive competition, knowing full well that if their sector of industry benefits, then so do they. But, such deals are done in the club or pub, or restaurant, or even the golf course, between real managers, not posers, accountants, lawyers or jumped-up office boys with grand titles.
People who actually understand what they are doing generally have no need to rip off others, they can survive and prosper in a co-operative environment.
As for the Convicted Monopolist being "a trusted name in the industry", it just shows how great a degree of tunnel vision these inept, pathetic attempts at being managers really have. Would any sane, ccompetent person ever trust a Convicted Monopolist, or an organisation with a solid, proven track record of failure to produce good, secure, stable products?
The only thing that the Monopolist has is marketing ability. Their products are worthless junk (but an accountant will see them as valuable because they cost serious money), in fact each has a true net cost of at least 10 times its purchase price. Even today I have wasted an hour working round yet another Word bug, which should not have happened. But, accountants have traditionally been worse than useless at spotting true hidden costs. They people who were good at spotting these things were once known as "time and motion experts", they would go into a factory with their stop-watches, spot the bottlenecks, causes of delay, etc, and produce a plan to sort it all out and boost productivity. They were not necessarily highly paid, but did bring a great deal of benefit. I don't know what the modern equivalent is called, but the equivalent could have a field day in the average office, just sitting there with the stop-watch measuring all the wasted time due to the Monopolist's products. I am sure that the conclusion would be that getting rid of M$ TRASH in its entirety would save money.
If they want support, let them mitigate the risk by buying Star Office. That will not break the bank.
There is not the slightest excuse for anyone anywhere to persist in using the bug-ridden, incompatible, user-belligerent virus-nutrient abomination called M$ Office.
I am a contractor, and wherever I go, I take OpenOffice.org. Usually I need it to rescue corrupt Word or Excel files that M$ software has created but can't open. I always leave it behind when I go. Others take copies home, some even continue to use it at work. In most cases the IT department will at least look the other way if it is contrary to official policy.
It only takes people to spread the package, and it will be adopted widely.
You are correct that it does not matter what people actually use, and IMHO an editor of any type (especially a plain text editor, where compatability is not an issue) ought to be chosen by the end user according to individual preference. Other packages are converging on the OOo file format for word processing, which seems to be the way to go, whether in the form of Koffice (OK, that is for Linux/Unix only at the moment), Abiword, the next version of Word Perfect etc. It is becoming an OPEN STANDARD. OPEN STANDARDs as you say ensure compatability. That is what matters.
But everyone can help support the rise of an OPEN STANDARD, by using it, talking about it, demonstrating it to the boss......The learning curve for OOo is negligible if you know how to drive Windoze programs (or Linux, if that is what you use, but that is another issue...) You could give it to a secretary and get useful output right away. That is what matters.
BTW, rtf is a reasonable substitute except that M$ tend to add non-standard features which break compatability. I would rather stick to text, HTML, pdf (avoiding new features which not all readers support, of course), XML, and of course the OpenOffice.org standard is based around zipped XML. It seems to be much more efficient than .doc, my files are quite often tiny.
Please, everyone, let this be the year when Bill's stranglehold on "office" software is broken for all time. Let us have action as well as words. If you are a manager, give it to some of your staff to try out. If you are a "mere" worker, show it to your manager. If he/she is not fully in the picture, get them to play with it for a while, and then ask them how much they think it costs! It catches out accountants every time.
With OSS the customer can see what he is getting, which should be a basic requirement for government use. Safety is slightly different from security, but there too, if you can see the code, you can check that proper procedures have been followed. You can at any time have the code subjected to independent audit, which is often a legal or at least moral requirement.
If they think that Open Source is too controversial (politicians and decision makers rarely understand the real issues) they should at least insist on getting the source, for their own use, even under NDA. That would be better than nothing, and enought to give Bill a nightmare or two.
Some, notably the Germans with Kroupware, but many others also, have funded OSS development for good reason. It makes perfect sense to do so. If most governments, both local and national, and large to medium organisations, fund bits of things that they need, out of their budgets, but with one eye on what others are doing, the end result is that virtually everything needed gets developed somewhere, in a cost-effective manner, and can then be shared. So everyone is a winner, including OSS developers, who actually get paid to do what they like doing.
The fact is that the world can help itself towards being free of domination by M$ and others, it just needs decision makers with guts and a bit of copmprehension.
I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but at a guess you would need 300 watts to cool a 100 watt CPU, so would need to dissiapte 400 watts to air.
It is inadvisable to make any attempt to get the chip below zero, obviously ice formation will happen, and when you switch off, it will melt. Should you switch on again, disaster is quite probable, unless the PCB had a good conformal coating and the socket has an interfacial seal. The conformal coating can be dealt with quite easily, but I have never seen a sealed CPU socket. BTW I usually work as an avionics designer, where we have to make things that will run from well below zero to well above, so I do know the problems.
Another issue is thermal fatigue. The temperature coefficient of expansion of silicon does not exactly match that of the (probably epoxy) package, every temperature cycle causes a stress cycle, which causes a strain cycle, until something breaks. Same for the motherboard itself of course, if you should cool the whole thing. That is also a good reason to never overclock anything, apart from the possibility of getting subtle data errors and increasingly buggy OS as a result of inadequate timing margins, you will definitely wear the thing out a lot quicker. Every 10 deg C roughly halves the life, or the number of on/off cycles it will survive, and if you do the calculations, the numbers are quite depressing for a modern PC.
If you really want a thumping great 64 bit processor (I certainly do, when the price comes down!), it would be best to calculate the cooling system, and maybe do some tests with thermocouples etc, to try to get the CPU chip to settle down at a relatively safe temperature, say 40 deg C, without getting ice formation on the coldest parts. The clever bit would be to get it to power on and off without any excursions below room temperature (often 20 deg C) or above 40 deg C. Heat soak when you switch off the CPU would be minimal, the mass of the chip itself is very small, but cold soak from a huge peltier block could be a problem, the CPU could be dragged down to -40 deg when you switch off, which is exactly what you don't need, for a long and reliable life.
The other thing to watch out for is that at low temperature the CPU internals will be out of spec. It is actually possible to get excessive current flow in some transistors, and local hot spots, because it is too cold. There may also be timing problems, data corruption, ...... It is not possible to test properly that these things are not happening. It takes a smallish time to fully exercise an 8-bit processor to verify all possible data and instruction operations, but somewhere near the lifetime of the universe to do the same for 16 bits. Throw in onboard cache, 64 bits, etc, and it is just impossible. These things work statistically, AMD know how timing variations, for example, might vary across the chip, and allow sufficient margin, within the published clock frequency and temperature range, but deviate from these ratings and this is no longer true. If running at 1GHz, a 1 in 10e12 error rate would corrupt your data or OS code within 1000 seconds, just over 1/4 hour. The error rate required to run an OS for weeks at a time at several GHz defies all attempts at testing. Again, a very good deterrent to overclocking (BTW my non-overclocked ancient K6-350 had a meltdown due to fan failure, and as it died the corrupt Win XP blew away all the passwords so when I got a new CPU and fan, any of th
Most OSS programmers do so to fulfil their own need, they need (say) a good-quality driver for their photo-quality inkjet printer, so they go and do it. they will not like spots and blemishes on their photos, or the truly HORRIBLE colour rendering the M$ driver for one of my printers produces.
The number of small things containing software is increasing, and will continue to do so. There may be a decreasing demand for programming skills in the IT industry, but what about all these clever little things which are produced in what at first sight is a hardware industry? Microcontrollers, embedded web servers, set-top boxes, toys, clever central heating controls (energy efficient), engine management computers (just a few that I thought of...). There may be no big projects (who ever NEEDS a new OS, Bill please note!) but there will be an abundance of small ones. People who understand how to make software interact with the hardware will always be in demand.
This may of course be a symptom of stagnation in the large IT companies (the Convicted Monopolist stagnated at birth of course), with the shift towards small businesses who will produce small, useful things.
There may be falling demand for those who know only VB, or Access (I never bothered to learn either!), or maybe even Java, but I doubt that there will be a loss of demand for the more difficult things, and the need for high-quality, safety-critical software will continue to rise.
As I think you are saying, the mediocre with little interest in the job may need a career change, but those with the determination to adapt will not be short of work. I don't think that absolute ability is all that matters, you don't need to be a super-genius to pick up a few languages and instruction sets to a level where you can get fully up to speed on any one of them fairly quickly. Not so long ago, I was offered a job doing hardware and software design, programming a PIC in assembler. The interviewer knew I could do it, although I have never touched a PIC before. Had I accepted the job, I would have spent quite a few evenings studying the PIC data books..... If I wanted to be a C programmer again (it was a long time ago...) I would go and write a program or two, maybe a bit of OSS, just to get back up to speed. You really do have to be prepared to put in your own time and effort to stay on top.
I can't comment on anywhere but the UK, but we have a desparate shortage of plumbers. It is easy to earn a good living, so I am told. Again, something which you don't need to be a super-genius to learn. I have re-done 3 houses, and my manual skills are not the best. It would not be too hard to get up to speed in that area, for a complete change. I suspect that almost everyone has the capability to learn a second useful skill, possibly very different from your main job skill. NOW is the time to learn something else, just in case, or even for a bit of variety. It may even be fun!
The average user, sitting in front of a KDE desktop, would neither know nor care which kernel was actually in use, however the choice ought to be available. Nor would he or she care which licence applied, it is likely that most people have some GPL software on a BSD system and vice-versa. That is OK for end users, it is only if you are coding or distributing that you even need to read either licence. Most people will also have stuff licensed under Apache, or Netscape, or Sun........
It is fundamentally important to maintain choice, for those who wish to exercise it.
AFAIK (and I do run Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but don't usually look at the internals) the system call mechanisms of Linux and BSD are orthogonal, so you can put both into one kernel without them colliding. So most versions of Linux have the BSD kernel capabilities compiled in. I think the reverse is probably true also. The small amount of code which should be needed to do this can be written from scratch to avoid needing to put Linux GPL code into BSD or vice-versa. The only difficulties are the few system calls which do not have an exact correspondence between one OS and the other, these few will need most of the work. Any code that uses a standard subset of calls can be easily compiled for either OS without change, it is usual for applications to have conditional code to cover the difficult areas. All of this is much like the days when you had Unix from AT&T, Microport, SCO (first incarnation, part owned by Bill), HP, Plexus.... (some now long gone). The similarites far outweighed the differences, as they still do.
Sticking to a Unix-like OS is the way forward, since apart from the bug-ridden and insecure products of the Convicted Monopolist, all other current OSs are in a tiny minority, numerically at least. There is at the same time a high degree of commonality in the API set, and usually the user interface, and a great deal of diversity in the code base. The commonality benefits users and programmers, the diversity improves resistance to hackers and virii, (OpenBSD on my firewall, Linux on my server for example) and also avoids being tied to one hardware monopoly (although that one is being constantly challenged by AMD and the positions might reverse in the 64-bit world). There is far more commonality between Linux and BSD than between Win 9x and NT/2000. You really need to work very hard to make an application work on all versions ow Wincrash, it is a fairly predictable set of ifdefs etc for Linux/BSD or even the hated SCO.
If BSD were to become as popular as Linux, it would actually strengthen the position of both against the Monopolist. One does not detract from the other, rather they complement each other.
It is purely as a result of the well-known stupid court case between AT&T, later Unixware IIRC, and BSD (UCB), that Linux came into existence. That happened about the same time. I for one was wanting a Unix I could afford, and was impatiently waiting fore the court case to finish, so BSD would become available. I looked at the awful thing Linus was playing with (forgotten the name now, by Tannenbaum, not very efficient and no memory protection) and decided it was a waste of time, having wasted my money on the book. I waited a bit longer, and first to go public was Linus, but variants of BSD were not very far behind IIRC. So it may be just by accident that Linux is the leader (no bad thing, by the way), the positions could have been reversed if the legal process had been quicker. I sometimes wonder if Linus would have bothered, if he could have obtained BSD at the time, but am glad that he did. We need both. It is sad that the present owners of BeOS killed it off. I know that an open-source clone is in development, but BeOS woud have also been a worthy addition to the small group of free operating stystems which are worth using.
There is no substitute whatsoever for driver education, I think it could be greatly improved in most places.
They will not find the allegedly copied code, but in searching for it they might find a few Saddam-style ratholes with even more unpleasant things in them (or will they find alleged copies of US WMD?)....
Seriously though, Linux and other free or open source software is just the thing to help revive a badly damaged economy. I hope they don't fork the kernel into Shiite and Sunni versions.....
I think a big, squidgy helium-filled airship with tiny little engines is a much safer proposition, and could hover for a much longer time anyway.
The problem is mechanical failure. If the engine dies, it will either fall like a brick, on someone's head, or make an autorotative descent, rotor spinning at full speed, ready to slash someone across the face. You would be fairly safe indoors if the rotor was generating lift, the blades would not be likely to rip through a roof or wall, but if it simply fell like a stone from 5000 feet....
I was under the impression that the Australians set the highest standards anywhere in aviation safety, but now I am beginning to wonder.
A midget airship will do many useful things with much less risk of injury to the public if it runs out of control. Just a big, squidgy helium balloon with sereral little engines with lightweight plastic propellors to move it about.
If confined to things like chasing car thieves at night, in non-crowded areas, it might be OK, but not in daytime when there are lots of people outdoors, in the street for example, who would be at risk.
Unfortunately, these things are potentially very cheap, and will be deployed. There will be accidents, some quite horrible, however there may be net benefit to society (but try telling that to the victims....).
The far greater problem is SAFETY. These things are big enough to do serious injury. How can anyone guarantee that one will not fall into a crowd from 1000 feet, with rotor spinning?
There is a better way of doing all this, much less noise, much smaller engine, for manoeuvering and lift trimming only, much better stability, minimum vibration, and mostly soft, if it falls on anyone. It is called an AIRSHIP, or a BALLOON, or whatever the currently fashionable term is.
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but in the UK at one time (have not seen it for a year or two) a fairly modest airship was used as a TV platform for major events. It could hover safely (over Wembley Stadium, for example) where the equivalent helicopter could not. It was very much cheaper to run, and quieter. It was a bit bigger, but not ridiculously so. Scaled down, it would be much more useful, a thing like that can hover for many days on a single tank of fuel.
I know which I would prefer to be hovering above me....
However, for some applications, such as chasing criminals, but not in crowded areas, a miniature helicopter would be ideal. Following stolen cars, for example, which currently is done by full-size helicopters, which sadly do sometimes crash.
It is not a bad idea, if used carefully and sensibly, where the risks are not too great, but definitely not a universal panacea.
If it was POSIX compliant, why would you need a HUGE Cygwin dll to get something vaguely like Unix/Linux compatability?