..... or are you using Wine or Crossover Office? The Monopoly does not use inodes.
But yes, you are typical of many people who have had their documents trashed. Quite often they can be recovered by using OpenOffice.org, simply by opening, and re-saving, where the Monopoly product has failed.
Says it all really.
OOo is the best M$ Office disaster recovery tool you can have, it should be on everyone's PC for that reason alone.
Yes, a sandbox, and it works better in an OS where by default files and directories are not writeable by the whole world. The Monopoly OS has no write protection whatsoever on the system files, it will not even run with them set to read-only, a very serious error.
If you have a sandbox on top of a secure, properly designed OS, then your problems would be minimal. But you would not of course be using either Windoze or Incompetent Exploder, but you could be using almost any other modern OS.
The email system as we know it and the underlying protocols do not guarantee delivery, therefore any business absolutely relying on email is very stupid indeed.
It is in principle possible to produce a reliable email system, but only if a receipt is returned to the sender when the recipient actually reads the mail, not when it arrives at his ISP for example.
Sadly some businesses do rely implicitly on things that usually, but not always, work, such as mobile phones, pagers, and text messaging. It may have been the same with pigeons, a predator might get the bird! Businesses should set up foolproof systems if they want to do well, a quick phone call to confirm receipt of critical items, for example. The occasional email, even now, takes many hours or even several days to arrive, there is no guarantee whatsoever of time of arrival, but again some seem to think it is "instant", because it very often is. Managers should be aware of these issues, sadly some are not.
But I hope this anti-spam firewall is a brilliant success, and that if it has minor shortcomings there will be satisfactory work-arounds. I am sick of spam, but the ultimate answer must be to ensure that it does not pay, i.e. that the probability of being caught multiplied by the fine greatly exceeds the potential profit. That requires legislation worldwide and some conceptually simple additions to existing mail servers, with care taken to protect the privacy of normal users. Given the political will, and some competent leaders (not Dubya or B. Liar, for a start) it should be easy.
Yes, you are right. I showed a SuSE/KDE desktop to a follower of the Monopolist a while back, and he dismissed it as "being just like Windows".
There must be the potential to do the UI or GUI in a radically different way, and maybe make it adapt to the expertise of the user, so that there is not just a minimalist shell for experts or a full bloated GUI for beginners. There might be something to learn from Plan 9, at least it is different.
But it seems to me that already the useability and the problems of Windoze are well-developed in FOSS, some new concepts of user interaction might be useful. For example, the mouse. (I use a trackball, the Logitech spotted ball type, because it is better, I have a mouse on some of my machines, the principle is similar.) Is the mouse relevant, should we use a touch screen (probably not, because of fingerprints, unless you want to spend half your day cleaning it...), maybe a graphics pad, eyeball tracking, a panel of knobs and switches...... Now the screen, text is text, and that will not change, but do we need icons and toolbars to edit it? Maybe extra mouse buttons could be more efficient? (WordPerfect for DOS was a truly excellent program in its day, I never read the manual, it was all done by a template on the F-keys, far better than what we have now.)
The problem is one of both input and output. It is difficult for a small developer to devise a new display device but not so difficult for simple input devices if complex mechanisms can be avoided, or improvised from existing bits. How about a two-ball trackball? And what could you do with the second ball? I ask because I see that when my thumb is not on the ball, it could just as easily be resting on some other control, if there was one. Maybe some foot pedals?
As for output devices, sound is already there, and a nuisance in the wrong circumstances. But, maybe some visual things like extra lights and meters (maybe bargraph LEDs) could live in the space above or below the screen, so as not to waste precious pixels, but attract the user's attention. (I really hate when everything grinds to a halt because some kind of dialogue box has popped up on the main screen and promptly been hidden, a problem that can surely be fixed!)
Chewing over these sorts of ideas, I am starting to think that maybe the F-keys could have programmable captions, so the menu functions are down on the keyboard. This would be done either by a LED matrix in each key, or replace the whole row of keys with a long, narrow touch screen LCD or plasma display.
Just some random ideas, others might be able to devise better, even without fancy hardware.
I don't agree. Other distros successfully include the Nvidia driver, and SuSE do includxe non-free software. The NV driver is useless, the Nvidia driver is not particularly buggy, and does get fixed, but the SuSE installation is, in fact Sax2 is guaranteed to trash an Nvidia configuration (I know, I have tried it on several PCs with very different configurations). It is a case, almost always. of editing XF86Config by hand, and never, ever running Sax2. Recovery is well-nigh impossible for a beginner, which is why I think they should avoid it. But with other supported graphics cards I think SuSE is the best for beginners.
I base my conclusions on direct experience with SuSE from versions 7.2 up to 9.1, and an assortment of Nvidia clones, some with one monitor, others with 2, and one with 3 monitors, one twin-head AGP card and one PCI card, all Nvidia. But, right now, it works really well for me, with no noticeable driver bugs for a long while, maybe a year or more.
I would recommend SuSE 9.1, for general ease of use, and I do run Fedora Core 2 (FC1 was rubbish, FC2 quite good), Xandros and Mandrake also.
But if you are a beginner, and have an Nvidia graphics card, Mandrake might be best. SuSE's Nvidia support is based on a mis-understanding of Nvidia's licensing terms, they could bundle the driver with the distro if they wanted to.
Don't know how long updates last for, but by the time SuSE lose interest in support, a beginner might have reached the stage of downloading and installing their own stuff anyway, so it might not matter. Anyway, what is wrong with an update every couple of years? They should be well used to it if they have used Windoze.........
Yes, you are technically correct, but we both know what I mean. But in that case he was not elected by a democracy, their legitimate votes did not count, because they were not counted properly. The electorate of nime were not representatibve of the democracy in any tangible way.
Anyway, for all our sakes, I hope he will be democratically un-elected in November. He is the most stupid world leader I can remember. His father, who on the whole performed reasonably well, managed to conduct a war against Saddam exactly as authorised by the UN. He knew when to stop. His idiot son, imagining that he could do better and finish the job, went to war on the basis of lies and falsehoods, along with his crony Tont B. Liar. All they have achieved is to create more trouble, another mini-Vietnam. If the electorates on both sides of the Atlantic have any sense, they will get rid of lying scumbags like these.
Interesting point, but US law seems to be focussed on the things the RIAA have told the government to attend to. The UK law is simple, it applies to anything, including books etc, and makes no special provision (nor should it need to) for file sharing etc.Copyright is copyright, simple as that. No special priviledge for the RIAA or other quasi-fascist organisations!
A bit of private file sharing can result in you being sued for damages, but almost every time just a nasty "cease and desist" warning letter, because taking a private individual with little money to court is pointless, and in any case the damages awarded would be maybe three times the damage done, not usually a big sum of money. But a commercial organisation, or criminal gang, are on very shaky ground indeed, they can be convicted of a crime, jailed, and then also sued for damages.....
My point really was that the UK law is really only directed against criminal activity, and can, and does, punish it very severely. UK law pays no special respect to big business, although sadly that may be changing. US law appears to never be applied to "business" activities such as the SCO case, if they have been illegally using other people's code, it tends to end up simply with them being sued for damages as a civil matter, the criminal side seems not to be enforced by the authorities. Yet it is against teenage kids who swap a few files.
Something is wrong somewhere, and I suspect that Tony B. Liar will allow such stupid law in the UK shortly. But in the meantime I am sure one of our prisons could find room in a shared cell for Darl......
It is encouraging that this time round, people seem to be grasping that copyright simply prevents copying, by default, and the author can choose (or not) to licence use on any legal terms (s)he wants, the GPL being one such licence, and a good one. In past debates there seems to have been confusion on this point, it was often suggested that if the GPL was found to be invalid, unscrupulous people could copy as much as they want and exploit it commercially by turning it into closed source. This time around, the true situation is being brought out, in particular that if the SCOundrel repudiate or breach the GPL, there is nothing to allow them to copy or use.
If someone really wants to go for the jugular, they should try a UK court, most software including SCO is sold worldwide of course. The reason I suggest this is that under UK law, violating copyright for commercial purposes is a criminal offence, punishable by a very large fine and/or jail, whereas a violation for non-commercial purposes is a civil matter, you can be sued for damages which would typically be small. IMHO (IANAL) there is a good chance of a term in one of Her Majesty's Penal Establishments for some directors of SCO if a case were to be brought here.
I understand they just recently decided to close their UK office, I wonder if this is because of the possible legal consequences of their criminal activity?
Maybe. Some people are predicting that, but as the intended geographic region is fairly pro LInux, we shall see. Either way, I think the Monopoly has made themselves look stupid, and has had a negative effect on their own revenues. But we can only speculate, time will tell.....
No, you are wrong, BSD is Unix therefore it was written by AT&T and is now owned by SCO, as that nice Mr. McBride will be only too pleased to confirm.:)
They are not, but the USPTO is so overloaded, and a daresay incompetent at upper managerial level, that almost anything gets through without proper checks for prior art. Groklaw is one place to go for info on that.
Ah yes, Cygwin! I don't know if it works that way or not, but it might be a good starting point. That way it is easy to make the transition to a real OS with native (not emulated with difficulty) fork() when the uselessness of Monoploy Crippleware becomes obvious.
But they will try to "decommoditise the protocols", as per Halloween Memo no. 1. Sadly for Sir Bill, almost every Internet router/gateway etc down to the machines serving modem pools at the ISPs tend to run some kind of *nix, not expensive trash like IIS, so it might not be as simple as he thinks.
They still seem to be developing both, as far as I can see. I have Mozilla 1.7 suite on one machine here now, Firefox on another, both fully up to date.
I have always used Netscape/Mozilla at home, since about 1994 or whenever the web became popular, and have never had any of the horrible problems that IE users get regularly. My last Mozilla download was a 1KB patch to fix a Windoze security hole, very impressive in terms of both size and effect. M$ would do themselves a big favour by killing off IE, and making Mozilla the default. But I don't suppose any of the competent people in Redmond are brave enough to tell Sir Bill!
I think I had at least double that number running under Desqview on a 286 before Windoze first appeared. Of course, I used Unix before that, admittedly there was not yet a GUI, but no significant limitation on the number of processes.
In computing, backward things simply do not sell. The only reason Windoze caught on was that few had seen either Desqview or GEM, the latter was much more efficient than the earlier versions of Windoze. Even my 80186 coprocessor for my old BBC Micro, with 512KB RAM, could run more than 3 programs at once.
And just think how many programs a modern PC can run simultaneously under any *nix, whether Linux, a BSD variant, or even SCOundrel or Solaris.
This ill-conceived piece of marketing, which has actually cost money in making the cut-down version, and saves nothing, will simply drive dissatisfied customers towards Linux etc.
I don't use these particular applications. It is perfectly OK with a very large number of things I have installed, which says something about what these apps are doing, I think. As far as I know, it likely crippples a lot of on-line games, instant messengers and other things which are utterly insecure, at least I hope so. It a porogram is insecure because of what it does, or because of sheer negligence (both apply to M$ of course) then any firewall is useless unless it blocks it completely, That certainly applies to botheMule and Shareaza, they would not be allowed on any network which had even vague pretensions of being secure, because of what they do.
But I do serious work in Linux and BSD, and am on a secure (i,e. totally isolated) network at work, for very good reasons. my Windoze machine is on line for about 40 hours a week, for other reasons, and has not been compromised once since I loaded ZA, some years ago.
I wonder how many trojans are on your machine, and how much damage it is doing, quite illegally, to other people? I bet you don't even know.
I am sick of the problems caused by filesharers, I just wish you would all go away and play with something else which does not damage other people.
Yes, it also seems to cause problems with recent programs intended to be secure such as Mozilla Firefox. But I simply gave up on trying to get mine to run as Administrator, because it was a bad idea anyway, for obvious reasons! Works very well as a normal user, of course.
The sad thing is that to use Windoze Update, I have to go on-line as Administrator (very bad practice) using IE (utterly insecure), which largely negates any other attempts at security.
But this new Billwall is a complete joke, leaving Netbios ports, which do not belong on the Internet, ever, unblocked, and with no outbound protection, not even to stop naughty programs like Real Player.
Exactly right! And it would appear to impose less overhead, so less performance loss. Iptables works well for me, a very few commands stealths everything, and lets through only what you want. But a nice user interface would make it more attractive to those who don't want to think too hard about technicalities. Having said that, I find Zone Alarm Pro to be very effective on Windoze, despite what some are saying. Maybe they are not using the latest version. I keep mine up to date, so far never a problem, in several years, and many thousands of attacks.
The really worrying thing about the M$ firewall, apart from it not blocking outbount connections at all, is that it does not block the troublesome group of netbios ports, which in my log files are the most probed of all. Netbios is supposedly a non-routable protocol, its presence on an internet connection can be only one of two things, a deliberate hack attempt or a bug-ridden IIS server at the ISP. Either way, it should be blocked utterly, in and out, by every TCP/IP stack on the planet, in much the same way that yout TCP/IP stack should not be forwarding addresses like 192.168.0.1 to the outside world, because it is an error.
Yes, but please don't be deluded into thinking you are secure. You are not! A lot of rogue programs, Real Player being the most obvious, initiate connections to the outside world which are not stopped by anything from M$. Despite what has been said by others, Zone Alarm Pro works, and stops all of these unless you give them explicit permission. In fact it is worth having just to keep Real Player under control!
I also note that a lot of M$ programs seem to want to connect somewhere or other, Bill's firewall will allow them to do so, whether you want them to or not. Then there are the trojans which inevitably slip past virus scanners in the time (hours or days) before the virus scanner is updated (even if you do so scrupulously). A firewall blocking outbound connections will stop almost all of these.
The never-ending email spam is largely coming from PCs which have been trojaned, and have no outbound firewall protection. Yours may be one....
Yes, that would certainly explain it. But, if they priced it at say $100, they might sell 10,000, which would easily cover the development costs. The biggest single cost for a thing like this is tooling for the plastic mouldings, the PCB, microcontroller, etc, are only a couple of weeks work at the most. Most of the keys look fairly standard, there may be a split spacebar, and some semi-custom engraving or hot stamping.
The last time I was involved in the design of a product in a mouled case, the tools for the case cost about $60k, admittedly it was more complex than this ought to be inside.
The tradeoff between price and quantity is not a simple matter!
Yes, you are right about power steering, although in some cases due to exceptionally poor design, control is very marginal indeed (i.e. you need to be the Incredible Hulk) if pressure is lost, pump drive belt breaks, etc, when on the move. There have been a number of accidents, no idea how many, but they still keep happening even on new car designs.
Now SAAB once played with a drive by wire system. I saw the system diagram, and was horrified to see that although the electronics and hydraulics was duplicated, there was a single-point failure which would cause a total failure. Fortunately that never made it into production. Funnily enough, their Grippen aircraft suffered two crashes due to fly by wire problems around this time....... (the same poor test pilot had to eject twice, IIRC. No doubt he had a few choice comments to make, the second time!)
The control loads are small on a car-sized aircraft (i.e. 4 seats or so) so the stick needs no power assistance, but in any case it is often quite long, a little PC-sized stick would not be useful. There is another issue, you can apply more force fore and aft than laterally on a stick, a yoke or partial wheel on most aircraft restores some of the balance, rather than a simple stick, which is always used on helicopters because the sense of operation of a wheel would be unnatural.
But I think you could use a stick in a car, a fairly long one with non-linear gearing so there was plenty of travel and therefore mecnanical advantage available in the small region used in high-speed driving. The power system, hydraulic or otherwise, would only be needed for large steering angles, where the gearing would reduce to avoid needing excess control travel, at angles which would not be reached except in slow-speed manoeuvers. That might enable the safety problems to be overcome satisfactorily, but the same non-linear type of system would be just as useful with a wheel (say 30 degrees either way in normal driving, but full lock at 60 degrees instead of maybe two full turns, to make parking etc, where you need large but not precise wheel angles quicker).
But I suspect a wheel would still be the first choice for ease of use, maybe handlebars as on a bike would also be useful.
I don't see why it costs $600, even in smallish quantities compared to normal keyboards. $100 might have been reasonable, the extra embedded software cost will be fairly minimal and it is just a slight rearrangement of a standard keyboard.
Sad that people profit so much from disabilities, things like that should be free, or almost free, for those who need them.
Maybe so, but someone forgot to tell Sir Bill a long time ago about how engineers develop software. Of course, he is not an engineer, so it might not have helped......
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But yes, you are typical of many people who have had their documents trashed. Quite often they can be recovered by using OpenOffice.org, simply by opening, and re-saving, where the Monopoly product has failed.
Says it all really.
OOo is the best M$ Office disaster recovery tool you can have, it should be on everyone's PC for that reason alone.
If you have a sandbox on top of a secure, properly designed OS, then your problems would be minimal. But you would not of course be using either Windoze or Incompetent Exploder, but you could be using almost any other modern OS.
It is in principle possible to produce a reliable email system, but only if a receipt is returned to the sender when the recipient actually reads the mail, not when it arrives at his ISP for example.
Sadly some businesses do rely implicitly on things that usually, but not always, work, such as mobile phones, pagers, and text messaging. It may have been the same with pigeons, a predator might get the bird! Businesses should set up foolproof systems if they want to do well, a quick phone call to confirm receipt of critical items, for example. The occasional email, even now, takes many hours or even several days to arrive, there is no guarantee whatsoever of time of arrival, but again some seem to think it is "instant", because it very often is. Managers should be aware of these issues, sadly some are not.
But I hope this anti-spam firewall is a brilliant success, and that if it has minor shortcomings there will be satisfactory work-arounds. I am sick of spam, but the ultimate answer must be to ensure that it does not pay, i.e. that the probability of being caught multiplied by the fine greatly exceeds the potential profit. That requires legislation worldwide and some conceptually simple additions to existing mail servers, with care taken to protect the privacy of normal users. Given the political will, and some competent leaders (not Dubya or B. Liar, for a start) it should be easy.
There must be the potential to do the UI or GUI in a radically different way, and maybe make it adapt to the expertise of the user, so that there is not just a minimalist shell for experts or a full bloated GUI for beginners. There might be something to learn from Plan 9, at least it is different.
But it seems to me that already the useability and the problems of Windoze are well-developed in FOSS, some new concepts of user interaction might be useful. For example, the mouse. (I use a trackball, the Logitech spotted ball type, because it is better, I have a mouse on some of my machines, the principle is similar.) Is the mouse relevant, should we use a touch screen (probably not, because of fingerprints, unless you want to spend half your day cleaning it...), maybe a graphics pad, eyeball tracking, a panel of knobs and switches...... Now the screen, text is text, and that will not change, but do we need icons and toolbars to edit it? Maybe extra mouse buttons could be more efficient? (WordPerfect for DOS was a truly excellent program in its day, I never read the manual, it was all done by a template on the F-keys, far better than what we have now.)
The problem is one of both input and output. It is difficult for a small developer to devise a new display device but not so difficult for simple input devices if complex mechanisms can be avoided, or improvised from existing bits. How about a two-ball trackball? And what could you do with the second ball? I ask because I see that when my thumb is not on the ball, it could just as easily be resting on some other control, if there was one. Maybe some foot pedals?
As for output devices, sound is already there, and a nuisance in the wrong circumstances. But, maybe some visual things like extra lights and meters (maybe bargraph LEDs) could live in the space above or below the screen, so as not to waste precious pixels, but attract the user's attention. (I really hate when everything grinds to a halt because some kind of dialogue box has popped up on the main screen and promptly been hidden, a problem that can surely be fixed!)
Chewing over these sorts of ideas, I am starting to think that maybe the F-keys could have programmable captions, so the menu functions are down on the keyboard. This would be done either by a LED matrix in each key, or replace the whole row of keys with a long, narrow touch screen LCD or plasma display.
Just some random ideas, others might be able to devise better, even without fancy hardware.
I base my conclusions on direct experience with SuSE from versions 7.2 up to 9.1, and an assortment of Nvidia clones, some with one monitor, others with 2, and one with 3 monitors, one twin-head AGP card and one PCI card, all Nvidia. But, right now, it works really well for me, with no noticeable driver bugs for a long while, maybe a year or more.
But if you are a beginner, and have an Nvidia graphics card, Mandrake might be best. SuSE's Nvidia support is based on a mis-understanding of Nvidia's licensing terms, they could bundle the driver with the distro if they wanted to.
Don't know how long updates last for, but by the time SuSE lose interest in support, a beginner might have reached the stage of downloading and installing their own stuff anyway, so it might not matter. Anyway, what is wrong with an update every couple of years? They should be well used to it if they have used Windoze.........
Of course there is always FreeBSD......
Anyway, for all our sakes, I hope he will be democratically un-elected in November. He is the most stupid world leader I can remember. His father, who on the whole performed reasonably well, managed to conduct a war against Saddam exactly as authorised by the UN. He knew when to stop. His idiot son, imagining that he could do better and finish the job, went to war on the basis of lies and falsehoods, along with his crony Tont B. Liar. All they have achieved is to create more trouble, another mini-Vietnam. If the electorates on both sides of the Atlantic have any sense, they will get rid of lying scumbags like these.
A bit of private file sharing can result in you being sued for damages, but almost every time just a nasty "cease and desist" warning letter, because taking a private individual with little money to court is pointless, and in any case the damages awarded would be maybe three times the damage done, not usually a big sum of money. But a commercial organisation, or criminal gang, are on very shaky ground indeed, they can be convicted of a crime, jailed, and then also sued for damages.....
My point really was that the UK law is really only directed against criminal activity, and can, and does, punish it very severely. UK law pays no special respect to big business, although sadly that may be changing. US law appears to never be applied to "business" activities such as the SCO case, if they have been illegally using other people's code, it tends to end up simply with them being sued for damages as a civil matter, the criminal side seems not to be enforced by the authorities. Yet it is against teenage kids who swap a few files.
Something is wrong somewhere, and I suspect that Tony B. Liar will allow such stupid law in the UK shortly. But in the meantime I am sure one of our prisons could find room in a shared cell for Darl......
It is encouraging that this time round, people seem to be grasping that copyright simply prevents copying, by default, and the author can choose (or not) to licence use on any legal terms (s)he wants, the GPL being one such licence, and a good one. In past debates there seems to have been confusion on this point, it was often suggested that if the GPL was found to be invalid, unscrupulous people could copy as much as they want and exploit it commercially by turning it into closed source. This time around, the true situation is being brought out, in particular that if the SCOundrel repudiate or breach the GPL, there is nothing to allow them to copy or use.
If someone really wants to go for the jugular, they should try a UK court, most software including SCO is sold worldwide of course. The reason I suggest this is that under UK law, violating copyright for commercial purposes is a criminal offence, punishable by a very large fine and/or jail, whereas a violation for non-commercial purposes is a civil matter, you can be sued for damages which would typically be small. IMHO (IANAL) there is a good chance of a term in one of Her Majesty's Penal Establishments for some directors of SCO if a case were to be brought here.
I understand they just recently decided to close their UK office, I wonder if this is because of the possible legal consequences of their criminal activity?
Yes, but not democratically elected by a majority. Hopefully the idiot will not be president for much longer.
Maybe. Some people are predicting that, but as the intended geographic region is fairly pro LInux, we shall see. Either way, I think the Monopoly has made themselves look stupid, and has had a negative effect on their own revenues. But we can only speculate, time will tell.....
No, you are wrong, BSD is Unix therefore it was written by AT&T and is now owned by SCO, as that nice Mr. McBride will be only too pleased to confirm. :)
They are not, but the USPTO is so overloaded, and a daresay incompetent at upper managerial level, that almost anything gets through without proper checks for prior art. Groklaw is one place to go for info on that.
Ah yes, Cygwin! I don't know if it works that way or not, but it might be a good starting point. That way it is easy to make the transition to a real OS with native (not emulated with difficulty) fork() when the uselessness of Monoploy Crippleware becomes obvious.
Really? Microtrash? I don't think so.
But they will try to "decommoditise the protocols", as per Halloween Memo no. 1. Sadly for Sir Bill, almost every Internet router/gateway etc down to the machines serving modem pools at the ISPs tend to run some kind of *nix, not expensive trash like IIS, so it might not be as simple as he thinks.
I have always used Netscape/Mozilla at home, since about 1994 or whenever the web became popular, and have never had any of the horrible problems that IE users get regularly. My last Mozilla download was a 1KB patch to fix a Windoze security hole, very impressive in terms of both size and effect. M$ would do themselves a big favour by killing off IE, and making Mozilla the default. But I don't suppose any of the competent people in Redmond are brave enough to tell Sir Bill!
I think I had at least double that number running under Desqview on a 286 before Windoze first appeared. Of course, I used Unix before that, admittedly there was not yet a GUI, but no significant limitation on the number of processes.
In computing, backward things simply do not sell. The only reason Windoze caught on was that few had seen either Desqview or GEM, the latter was much more efficient than the earlier versions of Windoze. Even my 80186 coprocessor for my old BBC Micro, with 512KB RAM, could run more than 3 programs at once.
And just think how many programs a modern PC can run simultaneously under any *nix, whether Linux, a BSD variant, or even SCOundrel or Solaris.
This ill-conceived piece of marketing, which has actually cost money in making the cut-down version, and saves nothing, will simply drive dissatisfied customers towards Linux etc.
Well done, Steve and Sir Bill!
But I do serious work in Linux and BSD, and am on a secure (i,e. totally isolated) network at work, for very good reasons. my Windoze machine is on line for about 40 hours a week, for other reasons, and has not been compromised once since I loaded ZA, some years ago.
I wonder how many trojans are on your machine, and how much damage it is doing, quite illegally, to other people? I bet you don't even know.
I am sick of the problems caused by filesharers, I just wish you would all go away and play with something else which does not damage other people.
The sad thing is that to use Windoze Update, I have to go on-line as Administrator (very bad practice) using IE (utterly insecure), which largely negates any other attempts at security.
But this new Billwall is a complete joke, leaving Netbios ports, which do not belong on the Internet, ever, unblocked, and with no outbound protection, not even to stop naughty programs like Real Player.
The really worrying thing about the M$ firewall, apart from it not blocking outbount connections at all, is that it does not block the troublesome group of netbios ports, which in my log files are the most probed of all. Netbios is supposedly a non-routable protocol, its presence on an internet connection can be only one of two things, a deliberate hack attempt or a bug-ridden IIS server at the ISP. Either way, it should be blocked utterly, in and out, by every TCP/IP stack on the planet, in much the same way that yout TCP/IP stack should not be forwarding addresses like 192.168.0.1 to the outside world, because it is an error.
I also note that a lot of M$ programs seem to want to connect somewhere or other, Bill's firewall will allow them to do so, whether you want them to or not. Then there are the trojans which inevitably slip past virus scanners in the time (hours or days) before the virus scanner is updated (even if you do so scrupulously). A firewall blocking outbound connections will stop almost all of these.
The never-ending email spam is largely coming from PCs which have been trojaned, and have no outbound firewall protection. Yours may be one....
The last time I was involved in the design of a product in a mouled case, the tools for the case cost about $60k, admittedly it was more complex than this ought to be inside.
The tradeoff between price and quantity is not a simple matter!
Now SAAB once played with a drive by wire system. I saw the system diagram, and was horrified to see that although the electronics and hydraulics was duplicated, there was a single-point failure which would cause a total failure. Fortunately that never made it into production. Funnily enough, their Grippen aircraft suffered two crashes due to fly by wire problems around this time....... (the same poor test pilot had to eject twice, IIRC. No doubt he had a few choice comments to make, the second time!)
The control loads are small on a car-sized aircraft (i.e. 4 seats or so) so the stick needs no power assistance, but in any case it is often quite long, a little PC-sized stick would not be useful. There is another issue, you can apply more force fore and aft than laterally on a stick, a yoke or partial wheel on most aircraft restores some of the balance, rather than a simple stick, which is always used on helicopters because the sense of operation of a wheel would be unnatural.
But I think you could use a stick in a car, a fairly long one with non-linear gearing so there was plenty of travel and therefore mecnanical advantage available in the small region used in high-speed driving. The power system, hydraulic or otherwise, would only be needed for large steering angles, where the gearing would reduce to avoid needing excess control travel, at angles which would not be reached except in slow-speed manoeuvers. That might enable the safety problems to be overcome satisfactorily, but the same non-linear type of system would be just as useful with a wheel (say 30 degrees either way in normal driving, but full lock at 60 degrees instead of maybe two full turns, to make parking etc, where you need large but not precise wheel angles quicker).
But I suspect a wheel would still be the first choice for ease of use, maybe handlebars as on a bike would also be useful.
Sad that people profit so much from disabilities, things like that should be free, or almost free, for those who need them.
Maybe so, but someone forgot to tell Sir Bill a long time ago about how engineers develop software. Of course, he is not an engineer, so it might not have helped......