Yes, some very necessary extensions would beat Sir Bill at his own game, but then he would cry "foul" and set an army of schysters upon the whole FOSS community, or get his puppet Darl to do it for him....
Seriously though, go for it! Someone with the ability, please make a list of things that are really needed, and M$ has failed to deliver. Set up a project..... Preferably patent each and every idea, and licence them freely to FOSS, but for big money, or not at all, to Criminal Monopolies.
Not so sure about that. My criteria would involve comparing a full-size drawing (A0 size in Europe, don't know what they use in the US) to what you can see on the screen. CAD has hitherto been very inefficient because you don't have full visibility and resolution simultaneously. This may get close to it. I don't have exact paper sizes to hand, but multiplying up from A4, which IIRC is 297*220mm, A0 would be 1188*880mm. Now, I have seen 0.2mm drawing pens used, maybe even 0.15mm, which suggests that you would need about 6000*4500 or maybe 7500*5600 approx, to get what can be done with pen and ink.
I observed 20 years ago that CAD would become more efficient when the equivalent to a drawing board was available, now we are close but not quite there yet. Put a touch screen on this, with decent software to follow the stylus, and it would be getting fairly close in terms of usefulness.
I had no idea how long it would take to get this far, of course. However, it is a commendable achievement.
Now, as my Dell laptop, now about 3 years old, has a 1600*1200 screen, why can't I get at least as much resoultion in a cheap desktop LCD? I think there are marketing issues as well as technical involved somehow. I have never used less than 1280*1024 at home, it seems the bare minimum for serious work, even wordprocessing, yet they still sell utterly useless 800*600 screens, both LCD and CRT. It is a strange business.....
In several years, when and if they are affordable, I will want one. Hopefully the graphics cards will be up to the job by then, it obviously needs an entirely new interface design. But we might be back to the days, not seen since the 286 era, of Autocad taking 20 minutes to move a layer in a drawing......
CPU and bus designers beware, there will be new constraints to satisfy, you may need a 1024-bit wide memory bus, for example.
You got it right. No need for MS, ever! Their junk is a complete irrelevance to the progress of computing, their one "innovation" was simply a new way to operate an illegal monopoly.
I sincerely hope that this project hastens the adoption of decent, secure (well, nearly, nothing is perfect), standards-compliant browsers.
I think Tendra is not used because not too many people have heard of it. You have partially rectified that!
Of course, it may be because of its origin in the UK defence industry, some people may have their prejudices, either because it does not originate in Redmond, or because they object to anything military.
However, I take the view that it was funded partly by UK taxpayers so we may as well get use from it. I was thinking about using it myself, when I get round to writing some code.
Yes, you don't hear of many people who seriously try things like Mozilla or OpenOffice.org and then want to change back. I know of one who tried Mozilla two years ago and noticed "some bugs", so he went back to IE, with many documented and undocumented security holes. Some people do strange things, but most of those I know who made serious efforts are still using the FOSS products. The first time they try to access a badly designed web site, designed for IE at 800*600, with fixed size fonts, on a high-resolution screen, they will appreciate the text zoom of Mozilla. That should be enough to convince anyone. Or maybe they will have had a Word or Excel file irretreivably corrupted by M$, and find it can be recovered in OpenOffice.org, saving days of work.....
It is harder to persuade them to try a new OS, because its installation is more disruptive. Realistically we should let people get used to the easier things to change first, browser, email client, Office suite, then when they are convinced, go for the OS. It is sad, but the deciding factor for some will be the number of free games you get with an average Linux distro!
Having said that, some distros are becoming a bit like the shovelware of MessyDOS days, with far too many things that no-one will ever use, but you don't have to install it all, and disk space is cheap.
....they want to have another attempt to make a secure system which can't be hacked, and modified to run Linux. Bill had to virtually give the things away, every one modified was aiding the competition.
I wonder how long it will take to find the security hole in the XB2?
I think Pratt & Whitney probably make more than GE, but the modern way is for engines to be made by a consortium of companies so no one takes all the risk, so it is quite hard to tell who is really making what. It is the same with the airframe, it is very rare now for the main manufacturer, whether Airbus, Boeing, or Bombardier, to name numbers 1, 2 and 3, (Don't know which order numbers 1 and 2 are in this week, no. 3 is fairly certain) to make an entire fuselage or wing, at least some of the bits will be subcontracted all over the world. IIRC, Shorts in Belfast, or whatever they are named this week, makes bits for Boeing in Seattle, for example. The Bombardier (de Havilland Canada) Dash8-400 fuselage is made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, and so on.
But, what distinguishes the aircraft industry from a trash industry like M$, is that they work rigorously and scrupulously to specifications, so that a bit made in Japan fits directly to the other bit made in Toronto, for example. Interfaces are rigidly defined, and not changed because suddenly Sir Bill has a good idea (which in itself would be a novel event!)
Many bits are made to common specifications, you can for instance swap certain avionics boxes for those of another manufacturer with no problems. The aircraft will be certified for either, the wiring will be compatible, but the internal components might not be. Aircraft of all sizes and performance also operate successfully in the air traffic control system, and can be refuelled at any major airport. Things like refuelling and ground power connections are standard.
There is a very big lesson there for the software industry, which most open-source developers, and competent companies with proper development practices and QA, such as IBM, Sun, Oracle etc are well aware of. But, no M$ operating system can even read a competitor's disk format.... Mostly, everyone else can.
So, the aircraft analogy is very damaging to the credibility of M$, such as it is.
No they can not, and one particular act has resulted in a number of prosecutions, however for some years now it has been legal between men. I think that the particular piece of spam is illegal on other grounds also.
To add to that, if you don't want to buy a firewall, and you have an old PC handy, configure it with something like OpenBSD. For the minimal cost of a second network card, you have a firewall, in fact a much better one, because you can configure it any way you want. OK, it is larger than the Linksys, but you can dispense with the screen, keyboard and mouse (in fact you don't need a mouse anyway, it can be configured in text mode) once it is set up. The big advantage is that bug fixes will be available very quickly.
But of course I will never install any M$ product again, ever, I have already wasted far too much time.....
Even Zone Alarm (probably the best software firewall, don't use XP's own, it is useless) on any Windoze box with dialup shows an alarming number of serious intrusion attempts. No-one should ever be on-line without at least Zone Alarm, if they must go on line at all with Windoze. I do all my browsing and email in SuSE Linux now, my Windoze PC is only for a few programs that really need it, and they are being used less and less.
The sad thing is that the vast majority of the public don't read Slashdot, or anything else for that matter, and so don't have a clue about the risks they are taking and the effect they are having on others. We are probably all agreed that spam from (usually) broadband-connected PCs with one or more trojans is a very real menace. It seems that in the UK (and likely the same in most places) 1 in 3 PCs is infected with at least one trojan, doing the work of the bulk spammers. I for one am sick of it, so I tend to tell everyone, at every opportunity, to get a properly configured firewall, and of course fully up to date anti-virus software. Even Linux users have to take these precautions, root access to a Linux box on broadband would be a hacker's delight.
We may need laws to enforce safe use of the internet, if present trends continue. I had not checked my email for 4 days, when I did, there were about 50 spam emails showing an act that in the UK is illegal between male and female. I really do not want that kind of thing. I am quite sure that most of them had come via trojaned PCs. In fact under existing UK law, the owners could probably be prosecuted.
The vast majority who leave their wireless networks unsecured are even more culpable. A spammer sitting in his car with a laptop will not be caught except by accident, one who operates illegally on-line with a direct connection might be.
Ah, a real limitation, or maybe a bug, at last! Nothing is perfect...
I have just tried it in OOo 1.1.0 on my Windoze XP box, which is not up to date, seems OK to me, but it might depend on a lot of factors. I can't try the Linux box right now, as I am in the middle of upgrading to SuSE 9.1. I just made up 3 columns, the first filled with numbers, which became X values, the second and third had formulae applied to give me two diverging curves. Your situation may of course have been more complex.
I was using OOo at work a year ago (I had a very enlightened boss who did not care what I used, and an IT department who did not care what I loaded as long as I did not break the network), and the anomalies were few and far between. I used to do all the spreadsheet editing in OOo and then convert the final work to Excel. It did involve graphs with more than one series.
You could submit a bug report, it might get fixed fairly quickly, or at least in the next major release.
Some Excel bugs are still there from the first version! Some even cause serious data loss.
I currently work on a "secure", or rather, independent, network, detatched from everything else, so that our work cannot be corrupted. (BTW it is very pleasant working that way, no spam on the main work PC! Every company should have one for their real work.) We have to independently verify all calculations (safety-critical), if done by hand they will be checked manually by another engineer. Those done by spreadsheet also have to be checked, the calculations performed by the spreadsheet cannot be trusted as it is an unvalidated tool. It is probable that we will be using OOo to do the checking, it will read the same input data, and hopefully produce the same answers as Excel, but as Excel is closed-source there can be no commonality of code, so no common errors. (We do have to check what maths libraries OOo uses, if complied with Visual C++ we may instead have to use the Linux version, or recompile with a different compiler, to get true independence).
Exactly! Sadly, most Windoze users think they "have" to use IE, or the other security hole, Lookout Express. Many believe that nothing else will work with their ISP, or will put them at risk of viruses (the exact reverse of the truth!), or have a huge number of unquantifiable or unexpressible reasons why not....
They should give the alternatives a try, like you I think they will be pleased with what they find. But, people can have strange prejudices......
But, you are right, full standards compliance is very important. Mozilla and Opera, also Konqueror and maybe others, are trying hard. IE is nowhere near.
OpenOffice is viable now. It has every feature that people actually need, and it is the best (only?) recovery tool for both Word and Excel files that the M$ junk has corrupted.
It may lack a few obscure features which do not work very well in M$ anyway, but everything the average user needs is there. The drawing package is basic, but compared to the pathetic effort made by Word, it is truly excellent.
It does need a good database, integration with MySQL or similar will no doubt come. Already, the spreadsheet is better than Excel in many ways.
It may be slow, but if it is low-cost, that may not matter. There is a place in the UK (Parys Mountain, Anglesey, North Wales) where they used to, until quite recently, precipitate copper from mine drainage water by using scrap iron, a very slow process. It cost very little and did eventually produce copper.
I suspect these bacteria would do the job more effectively. Now, for coal mine waste water, which is often excessively rich in iron, a suitable bacteria would do a better job than today's technology, however due to the low cost of iron, you would need to get enrichment to about 30% to be economically viable.
I know of places where lead and zinc need to be dealt with, there are always traces of other metals, especially silver.
Ah yes, David Irving. I was trying to remember the name in connection with the behaviour of a certain Ken Brown of ADTI..... But, my memory for names is bad, so thanks for reminding me.
I am sure you can all see the similarities, not to compare the Holocaust with the behaviour of M$, or SCO for that matter, but more that certain people when confronted with the truth again and again, utterly refuse to see it. Maybe they are actually incapable of doing so. Sadly, I have met people like that.
.....when they have finally got rid of all their SCOundrel systems. I have been boycotting them since it emerged, either here or on Groklaw, I can't remember which, that their systems for running tills etc were based on Xenix.
.... like all other similar claims over the years. Even if a short antenna is resonated correctly, which is standard practice, and seems to be what is being claimed here, and if it reaches 100% efficiency, it is not as good as a long antenna, because both the bandwidth and the directional properties are necessarily inferior.
The "gain" of an antenna comes purely from directional effects, in a transmitter, which is easier to understand, more of the radiation goes out near the horizontal, where it is useful, the apparent gain in receive mode is identical due to the reciprocity theorem. In any situation involving electromagnetic radiation, such as light, or even pressure waves such as sound, the directional properties are always limited by the dimension of the antenna, loudspeaker, lens, etc, in the case of a verticle monopole you really need height to get lots of low-angle radiation, for the same reason that radio telescopes of high angular resolution have several dishes spread out over a great distance, sometimes hundreds of miles. It is also why a 15 inch PA loudspeaker will give, on axis, maybe 102dB at 1 metre with 1 watt input, while an 8 inch hi-fi speaker may give only about 80dB. even though both are equally well made and have had similar attention to loss mechanisms. Likewise the best searchlights have large-diameter lenses....A human eye is large in comparison to the wavelenght of light, so it can resolve lots of detail, the eye of an insect can distinguish only vague impressions of light or colour. There are lots more examples.
Some years ago, the Crossed Field Antenna, which purported to be even smaller, made similar claims, backed up by real-life tests.... I am sure that Google will find lots of references, so why does every AM broadcast station not use one? Maybe 10 to 20 feet high, not too heavy, no expensive materials, yet do you ever see them? Again, it was correctly resonated, but it did not have the height.
In any case I am sure there will be a very large amount of prior art on this one, a fair proportion of CB antennae for instance use loading coils and helixes in just about every combination imaginable. The current distribution of monopole antennae has been widely studied for many years. I would like to see a picture of the thing, to see what, if anything, is new.
Also, the microwave end of the spectrum has no need of smaller antennae, no mobile phone I have seen in recent years has had an external antenna at all, and you can only make a phone so small.. You have to hold the thing, after all. If it is not entirely self-supporting in air, dielectric losses will be serious.
But of course software is easily copied. Physical entities like arms and munitions get to where they should not (although they should be, and are, state-controlled in most places), if you can't lock up guns and tanks and bombs, there is little chance of locking up am intangible thing like a stream of bytes.
Sadly, there is no such thing as absolute security. Consider how the inmates of prisons have access to drugs, and in a few cases even guns, for example. It is all of course down to a combination of human error and corruption, which limits any attempt to regulate anything for the good of all. Someone always finds a weakness. Even in the food industry, for example, in every civilised country there are cases where condemned meat has been sold for human consumption, because there is always someone with no scruples.
I think the best place to tackle this problem is in hardware which is "impossible" to modify, such as inside a large custom chip forming a vital part of every scanner and printer. That pushes the cost of engineering a workaround into the region of millions of dollars, most serious criminals will not consider it worth the effort, and the petty crooks will be completely outdone by the technology. It will mean the disappearance of the very cheapest scanners, with no built-in intelligence, and the "Winprinter" or GDI printer, good riddance to those!
I just use OpenBSD for the firewall at the moment, it does not come with the seeming millions of interesting ports which FreeBSD has. Altogether there is far less to mess about with, I don't use a GUI although it would work if I could be bothered to configure it. Not for Nvidia cards at the moment, without some work on the makefile I think, although the binary part or the driver should be OK.
Upgrades are a problem, I only have a dialup with 2-hour timeout at the moment, and it is impossible to do any major update such as teh kernel, so security constantly decreases from the date of installation. Not staisfactory.I have complained to Xandros, who ignored me, and to SuSE, likewise. The latest SuSE, 9.1, has just been installed, some improvement, when you stop Yast (click on the button in the top right of the window border) it pops up an invitation to resume or abort, ignore, etc, if you select try again, it backtracks slightly through the file and starts downloading again, but it still will not download a kernel (140MB), it may be that the servers don't support resuming (I have tried all the mirrors).
Thgey are not using wget or its relations, any of which are capable of handling this. I have not done enough digging into the code to see what is wrong, yet.
Xandros is worse, it uses apt-get which is much better than rpm when it works, but the proprietary embellishments prevent you from seeing what is really happening, and the program which I assume configures pppd is unbeleivably buggy, so it is well-nigh impossible to set up the dialer to automatically resume. Even if you do, the download stalls and all is lost.Now Xandros does use wget, I have tried moving wget elsewhere and putting a shell script in its place, to get control of the situation, but as I don't have source (if it is on the two CDs, I can't find it, due to a bug in Xandros Networks, if it has to be downloaded, well, first fix the downloader.....
My general impression is that people are just getting distros out the door as fast as possible, exactly like M$, and we are seeing the consequences. Most of the code in both Linux and every BSD variant is rock-solid, it is the bits which the distros have added that are the problem, they have simply not been tested in real life situations. At least 90% of potential users do not have broadband, and will not have it for at least 5 to 10 years, so making distros that can only be updated via broadband is sheer folly, yet they all do it. I think source patching is far better, the downloads are usually very small, no problem for most people to compile locally, and it could all be automated, but binary patching is utterly stupid, yet that is what RH, SuSE and Xandros do.
As I now have support for SuSE 9.1, for a few weeks anyway, I will register the same complaint again, but I am not optimistic that it will be actioned, some developer will just test it on a broadband connection again, and see that it works, so it must be OK.....
As for RH, it has been useful in the past, but always was a horrid mixture of editing config files for some things and using GUI tools for others, an awful mess. I tried Fedora Core 1 for 2 days, got rid of it immediately because the configuration was so haphazard and none of the old problems had been fixed.
SuSE are all hung up on legal issues, which don't actually exist, for the Nvidia driver, which can be freely distributed according to Nvidia. OK, much of it is closed-source and in fact is the same as a large piece of the Windoze driver, but that should not be a problem, yet they don't supply it, you have to download it from Nvidia, and of course after running the Nvidia installer (following SuSE's instructions exactly, which have often been wrong), when you try to configure teh monitors etc with SAX, it trashes the XF86Config every single time, at which point an inexperienced user would have a non-working PC, as the default graphical login would be useless.
I am about to do an Nvidia installation in FreeBSD, that should be fun. It has been runni
Re:Still a vaporware?
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OQO Examined
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Most current in a CPU is used in charging and discharging capacitance. Now the energy of a charged capacitor is 0.5*C*V^2, if you go down from 5V to 1.8V (and possibly less), the energy goes down to 13% of what it was at 5V. If you then take care to shut down all bits of the CPU that are not needed at that moment, it goes down a bit more, at the expense of some delay when an inactive function needs to be activated. There are many more tricks which also help.
I don't think comparison with a standard 5V CPU is what matters any more, the technology is so very different. A low-voltage CPU might not be as reliable in an industrial environment, less noise immunity.
I am not so sure about the commercial prospects for this device, technically it seems to me, as a hardware designer, to be a viable proposition, but it is expensive. Get rid of Monopoly software and it might be more viable, what is wrong with OpenOffice.org, Linux etc? Most users of PDAs etc don't care about the OS, they just want the thing to work, and exchange data with their PC. No need to reproduce XP exactly, with all its serious deficiencies,
I use Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and none of the published security problems have had any direct relevance to my systems either, although I do apply the patches, but mainly on the supposition that if errors are corrected the system will be more reliable, not just because of the security aspect.
There will be successful attacks on Linux etc, but it will generally need a combination of several factors (such as doing something as root without good cause, plus misconfiguring something else..) for them to be able to do any real harm.
*nix systems are usually secure by default, you have to actually turn on services that open ports (not true of every distro, but most are getting better), whereas even now, Windoze seems to default to having every service running and every port open, the occasional patch to restrict something is not the way to do it, rather they should start with a closed system out of the box. But, when you see what breaks when you close down some apparently irrelevant services, you see that Windoze services are a complete mess of commingled code, which is where the problem begins.
M$ having solid support? What planet do you live on? The vast majority of bugs are never fixed, often because they can't be without a full redesign of the trash OS, and of course no-one will dare tell Sir Incompetent Bill that such a thing is necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, go for it! Someone with the ability, please make a list of things that are really needed, and M$ has failed to deliver. Set up a project..... Preferably patent each and every idea, and licence them freely to FOSS, but for big money, or not at all, to Criminal Monopolies.
In any case, just watch how quickly bug fixes and security holes get fixed in Mono, as compared to Monopoly.
I observed 20 years ago that CAD would become more efficient when the equivalent to a drawing board was available, now we are close but not quite there yet. Put a touch screen on this, with decent software to follow the stylus, and it would be getting fairly close in terms of usefulness.
I had no idea how long it would take to get this far, of course. However, it is a commendable achievement.
Now, as my Dell laptop, now about 3 years old, has a 1600*1200 screen, why can't I get at least as much resoultion in a cheap desktop LCD? I think there are marketing issues as well as technical involved somehow. I have never used less than 1280*1024 at home, it seems the bare minimum for serious work, even wordprocessing, yet they still sell utterly useless 800*600 screens, both LCD and CRT. It is a strange business.....
In several years, when and if they are affordable, I will want one. Hopefully the graphics cards will be up to the job by then, it obviously needs an entirely new interface design. But we might be back to the days, not seen since the 286 era, of Autocad taking 20 minutes to move a layer in a drawing......
CPU and bus designers beware, there will be new constraints to satisfy, you may need a 1024-bit wide memory bus, for example.
I sincerely hope that this project hastens the adoption of decent, secure (well, nearly, nothing is perfect), standards-compliant browsers.
Of course, it may be because of its origin in the UK defence industry, some people may have their prejudices, either because it does not originate in Redmond, or because they object to anything military.
However, I take the view that it was funded partly by UK taxpayers so we may as well get use from it. I was thinking about using it myself, when I get round to writing some code.
It is harder to persuade them to try a new OS, because its installation is more disruptive. Realistically we should let people get used to the easier things to change first, browser, email client, Office suite, then when they are convinced, go for the OS. It is sad, but the deciding factor for some will be the number of free games you get with an average Linux distro!
Having said that, some distros are becoming a bit like the shovelware of MessyDOS days, with far too many things that no-one will ever use, but you don't have to install it all, and disk space is cheap.
I wonder how long it will take to find the security hole in the XB2?
But, what distinguishes the aircraft industry from a trash industry like M$, is that they work rigorously and scrupulously to specifications, so that a bit made in Japan fits directly to the other bit made in Toronto, for example. Interfaces are rigidly defined, and not changed because suddenly Sir Bill has a good idea (which in itself would be a novel event!)
Many bits are made to common specifications, you can for instance swap certain avionics boxes for those of another manufacturer with no problems. The aircraft will be certified for either, the wiring will be compatible, but the internal components might not be. Aircraft of all sizes and performance also operate successfully in the air traffic control system, and can be refuelled at any major airport. Things like refuelling and ground power connections are standard.
There is a very big lesson there for the software industry, which most open-source developers, and competent companies with proper development practices and QA, such as IBM, Sun, Oracle etc are well aware of. But, no M$ operating system can even read a competitor's disk format.... Mostly, everyone else can.
So, the aircraft analogy is very damaging to the credibility of M$, such as it is.
Polls Royce plc is into a lot of engineering things, but not cars, as you rightly observe. It is more than just aero engines.
No they can not, and one particular act has resulted in a number of prosecutions, however for some years now it has been legal between men. I think that the particular piece of spam is illegal on other grounds also.
But of course I will never install any M$ product again, ever, I have already wasted far too much time.....
Even Zone Alarm (probably the best software firewall, don't use XP's own, it is useless) on any Windoze box with dialup shows an alarming number of serious intrusion attempts. No-one should ever be on-line without at least Zone Alarm, if they must go on line at all with Windoze. I do all my browsing and email in SuSE Linux now, my Windoze PC is only for a few programs that really need it, and they are being used less and less.
The sad thing is that the vast majority of the public don't read Slashdot, or anything else for that matter, and so don't have a clue about the risks they are taking and the effect they are having on others. We are probably all agreed that spam from (usually) broadband-connected PCs with one or more trojans is a very real menace. It seems that in the UK (and likely the same in most places) 1 in 3 PCs is infected with at least one trojan, doing the work of the bulk spammers. I for one am sick of it, so I tend to tell everyone, at every opportunity, to get a properly configured firewall, and of course fully up to date anti-virus software. Even Linux users have to take these precautions, root access to a Linux box on broadband would be a hacker's delight.
We may need laws to enforce safe use of the internet, if present trends continue. I had not checked my email for 4 days, when I did, there were about 50 spam emails showing an act that in the UK is illegal between male and female. I really do not want that kind of thing. I am quite sure that most of them had come via trojaned PCs. In fact under existing UK law, the owners could probably be prosecuted.
The vast majority who leave their wireless networks unsecured are even more culpable. A spammer sitting in his car with a laptop will not be caught except by accident, one who operates illegally on-line with a direct connection might be.
Seriously though, this needs time to mature.
I have just tried it in OOo 1.1.0 on my Windoze XP box, which is not up to date, seems OK to me, but it might depend on a lot of factors. I can't try the Linux box right now, as I am in the middle of upgrading to SuSE 9.1. I just made up 3 columns, the first filled with numbers, which became X values, the second and third had formulae applied to give me two diverging curves. Your situation may of course have been more complex.
I was using OOo at work a year ago (I had a very enlightened boss who did not care what I used, and an IT department who did not care what I loaded as long as I did not break the network), and the anomalies were few and far between. I used to do all the spreadsheet editing in OOo and then convert the final work to Excel. It did involve graphs with more than one series.
You could submit a bug report, it might get fixed fairly quickly, or at least in the next major release.
Some Excel bugs are still there from the first version! Some even cause serious data loss.
I currently work on a "secure", or rather, independent, network, detatched from everything else, so that our work cannot be corrupted. (BTW it is very pleasant working that way, no spam on the main work PC! Every company should have one for their real work.) We have to independently verify all calculations (safety-critical), if done by hand they will be checked manually by another engineer. Those done by spreadsheet also have to be checked, the calculations performed by the spreadsheet cannot be trusted as it is an unvalidated tool. It is probable that we will be using OOo to do the checking, it will read the same input data, and hopefully produce the same answers as Excel, but as Excel is closed-source there can be no commonality of code, so no common errors. (We do have to check what maths libraries OOo uses, if complied with Visual C++ we may instead have to use the Linux version, or recompile with a different compiler, to get true independence).
They should give the alternatives a try, like you I think they will be pleased with what they find. But, people can have strange prejudices......
But, you are right, full standards compliance is very important. Mozilla and Opera, also Konqueror and maybe others, are trying hard. IE is nowhere near.
It may lack a few obscure features which do not work very well in M$ anyway, but everything the average user needs is there. The drawing package is basic, but compared to the pathetic effort made by Word, it is truly excellent.
It does need a good database, integration with MySQL or similar will no doubt come. Already, the spreadsheet is better than Excel in many ways.
I suspect these bacteria would do the job more effectively. Now, for coal mine waste water, which is often excessively rich in iron, a suitable bacteria would do a better job than today's technology, however due to the low cost of iron, you would need to get enrichment to about 30% to be economically viable.
I know of places where lead and zinc need to be dealt with, there are always traces of other metals, especially silver.
We will be hearing more of this, I think.
I am sure you can all see the similarities, not to compare the Holocaust with the behaviour of M$, or SCO for that matter, but more that certain people when confronted with the truth again and again, utterly refuse to see it. Maybe they are actually incapable of doing so. Sadly, I have met people like that.
Meanwhile I have felt much healthier......
The "gain" of an antenna comes purely from directional effects, in a transmitter, which is easier to understand, more of the radiation goes out near the horizontal, where it is useful, the apparent gain in receive mode is identical due to the reciprocity theorem. In any situation involving electromagnetic radiation, such as light, or even pressure waves such as sound, the directional properties are always limited by the dimension of the antenna, loudspeaker, lens, etc, in the case of a verticle monopole you really need height to get lots of low-angle radiation, for the same reason that radio telescopes of high angular resolution have several dishes spread out over a great distance, sometimes hundreds of miles. It is also why a 15 inch PA loudspeaker will give, on axis, maybe 102dB at 1 metre with 1 watt input, while an 8 inch hi-fi speaker may give only about 80dB. even though both are equally well made and have had similar attention to loss mechanisms. Likewise the best searchlights have large-diameter lenses....A human eye is large in comparison to the wavelenght of light, so it can resolve lots of detail, the eye of an insect can distinguish only vague impressions of light or colour. There are lots more examples.
Some years ago, the Crossed Field Antenna, which purported to be even smaller, made similar claims, backed up by real-life tests.... I am sure that Google will find lots of references, so why does every AM broadcast station not use one? Maybe 10 to 20 feet high, not too heavy, no expensive materials, yet do you ever see them? Again, it was correctly resonated, but it did not have the height.
In any case I am sure there will be a very large amount of prior art on this one, a fair proportion of CB antennae for instance use loading coils and helixes in just about every combination imaginable. The current distribution of monopole antennae has been widely studied for many years. I would like to see a picture of the thing, to see what, if anything, is new.
Also, the microwave end of the spectrum has no need of smaller antennae, no mobile phone I have seen in recent years has had an external antenna at all, and you can only make a phone so small.. You have to hold the thing, after all. If it is not entirely self-supporting in air, dielectric losses will be serious.
Sadly, there is no such thing as absolute security. Consider how the inmates of prisons have access to drugs, and in a few cases even guns, for example. It is all of course down to a combination of human error and corruption, which limits any attempt to regulate anything for the good of all. Someone always finds a weakness. Even in the food industry, for example, in every civilised country there are cases where condemned meat has been sold for human consumption, because there is always someone with no scruples.
I think the best place to tackle this problem is in hardware which is "impossible" to modify, such as inside a large custom chip forming a vital part of every scanner and printer. That pushes the cost of engineering a workaround into the region of millions of dollars, most serious criminals will not consider it worth the effort, and the petty crooks will be completely outdone by the technology. It will mean the disappearance of the very cheapest scanners, with no built-in intelligence, and the "Winprinter" or GDI printer, good riddance to those!
Upgrades are a problem, I only have a dialup with 2-hour timeout at the moment, and it is impossible to do any major update such as teh kernel, so security constantly decreases from the date of installation. Not staisfactory.I have complained to Xandros, who ignored me, and to SuSE, likewise. The latest SuSE, 9.1, has just been installed, some improvement, when you stop Yast (click on the button in the top right of the window border) it pops up an invitation to resume or abort, ignore, etc, if you select try again, it backtracks slightly through the file and starts downloading again, but it still will not download a kernel (140MB), it may be that the servers don't support resuming (I have tried all the mirrors).
Thgey are not using wget or its relations, any of which are capable of handling this. I have not done enough digging into the code to see what is wrong, yet.
Xandros is worse, it uses apt-get which is much better than rpm when it works, but the proprietary embellishments prevent you from seeing what is really happening, and the program which I assume configures pppd is unbeleivably buggy, so it is well-nigh impossible to set up the dialer to automatically resume. Even if you do, the download stalls and all is lost.Now Xandros does use wget, I have tried moving wget elsewhere and putting a shell script in its place, to get control of the situation, but as I don't have source (if it is on the two CDs, I can't find it, due to a bug in Xandros Networks, if it has to be downloaded, well, first fix the downloader.....
My general impression is that people are just getting distros out the door as fast as possible, exactly like M$, and we are seeing the consequences. Most of the code in both Linux and every BSD variant is rock-solid, it is the bits which the distros have added that are the problem, they have simply not been tested in real life situations. At least 90% of potential users do not have broadband, and will not have it for at least 5 to 10 years, so making distros that can only be updated via broadband is sheer folly, yet they all do it. I think source patching is far better, the downloads are usually very small, no problem for most people to compile locally, and it could all be automated, but binary patching is utterly stupid, yet that is what RH, SuSE and Xandros do.
As I now have support for SuSE 9.1, for a few weeks anyway, I will register the same complaint again, but I am not optimistic that it will be actioned, some developer will just test it on a broadband connection again, and see that it works, so it must be OK.....
As for RH, it has been useful in the past, but always was a horrid mixture of editing config files for some things and using GUI tools for others, an awful mess. I tried Fedora Core 1 for 2 days, got rid of it immediately because the configuration was so haphazard and none of the old problems had been fixed.
SuSE are all hung up on legal issues, which don't actually exist, for the Nvidia driver, which can be freely distributed according to Nvidia. OK, much of it is closed-source and in fact is the same as a large piece of the Windoze driver, but that should not be a problem, yet they don't supply it, you have to download it from Nvidia, and of course after running the Nvidia installer (following SuSE's instructions exactly, which have often been wrong), when you try to configure teh monitors etc with SAX, it trashes the XF86Config every single time, at which point an inexperienced user would have a non-working PC, as the default graphical login would be useless.
I am about to do an Nvidia installation in FreeBSD, that should be fun. It has been runni
I don't think comparison with a standard 5V CPU is what matters any more, the technology is so very different. A low-voltage CPU might not be as reliable in an industrial environment, less noise immunity.
I am not so sure about the commercial prospects for this device, technically it seems to me, as a hardware designer, to be a viable proposition, but it is expensive. Get rid of Monopoly software and it might be more viable, what is wrong with OpenOffice.org, Linux etc? Most users of PDAs etc don't care about the OS, they just want the thing to work, and exchange data with their PC. No need to reproduce XP exactly, with all its serious deficiencies,
I use Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and none of the published security problems have had any direct relevance to my systems either, although I do apply the patches, but mainly on the supposition that if errors are corrected the system will be more reliable, not just because of the security aspect.
There will be successful attacks on Linux etc, but it will generally need a combination of several factors (such as doing something as root without good cause, plus misconfiguring something else..) for them to be able to do any real harm.
*nix systems are usually secure by default, you have to actually turn on services that open ports (not true of every distro, but most are getting better), whereas even now, Windoze seems to default to having every service running and every port open, the occasional patch to restrict something is not the way to do it, rather they should start with a closed system out of the box. But, when you see what breaks when you close down some apparently irrelevant services, you see that Windoze services are a complete mess of commingled code, which is where the problem begins.
M$ having solid support? What planet do you live on? The vast majority of bugs are never fixed, often because they can't be without a full redesign of the trash OS, and of course no-one will dare tell Sir Incompetent Bill that such a thing is necessary.