I imagine the novelty of staring at the Earth from space and bouncing around in zero gravity wears off after the first 10 or 15 hours of having nothing else to do.
I'm pretty sure most OEM builds of Windows do ship with some sort of DVD player for exactly this reason, so the average person would never know that Windows can't play DVDs out of the box.
I'm equally sure, however, that NASA almost certainly use their own customised Windows install which very likely does not include DVD playback software.
The word "muffin" (which originally referred to one of these) was applied to cupcakes without icing so Americans could eat cake for breakfast without feeling guilty.
The Norwegian Government, in a moment of clarity, decided to embrace open standards. From January 1 2009 all departments, institutions, schools and public sites; should deliver and accept all documents that are ODF, PDF or HTML (which ever is appropriate for the information in question). This doesn't bare those sites and institutions from putting up, or accepting, Microsoft document formats; but at everything have to be there in Open Standards first and foremost.
You'll forgive my cynicism, I trust, but does that actually happen or is it on the statute books but neither followed nor enforced? I'd be particularly interested to know if they make a lot of things available in ODF format.
First: You must make everything as self-documenting as possible. Label every server, every cable, every power lead to within an inch of its life. And establish processes which say "when a cable is moved or added, labelling is updated accordingly". If you don't have a labelling machine, buy one.
That deals with basic "what's plugged in where" and is far more likely to stay up to date than a spreadsheet or wiki page.
Second: Whatever you choose, it must be something which can scale to your needs and which you can live with.
It will need regular updating - and quite frankly, very few people are able or willing to regularly update a single 200 page Word document complete with embedded spreadsheets, diagrams and photographs. A wiki - or even Sharepoint, if that's your thing - may be better. But if you do take the Wiki route, make sure you keep hard copies of the documentation which says "If the sh1t hits the fan, this is what you need to do to recover".
Others have said "don't bother, your successor won't read it" - I say balls. Documenting is more than just helping your successor - it also helps you remember what is set up, clarify how things work and as part of the process you start to look at things and think "hang on a minute.... this document I've written describes something quite absurd. Are we really doing that?"
Whether or not your successor reads it is really not your problem.
That's probably about the worst example you could have picked - it's easy enough to SSH into the box and kill X.
Shame, really, because most of the other drivers actually live in kernel space so it's quite possible for a poor sound driver to cause the machine to kernel panic and genuinely crash.
Be that as it may, Microsoft could just as easily have invented their own printer language, rendered onscreen using this language and dictated that drivers need to turn this language into something the printer can understand. Just like, oh, EVERY OTHER DAMN OS IN EXISTENCE.
HP make perfectly adequate printers, but some moron discovered just how many perfectly stable, acceptable things in Windows a driver writer is free to replace with their own code and decided to replace all of them.
For further examples, look at most wireless drivers pre-installed on laptops at the factory.
It should be widely known by the dumbest thieves (at least in the UK) that stolen mobile phones don't work because their IMEI gets blacklisted as soon as they're reported stolen.
This doesn't appear to have reduced mobile phone thefts to zero.
Viruses in the original almost invisible file-infector sense of the word are, IMO, virtually extinct.
The word has become an umbrella term referring to almost any sort of malware you can think of - trojans, worms, rootkits, the works. And most of those today spread through one of a couple of mechanisms:
1. Fake banner ads on sites. "Your PC is slow, click here to speed it up!", "You are our 1,000,000th visitor, click here to claim your prize".
2. Emailed attachments (though these are becoming less common as more ISPs and mail providers like hotmail are starting to filter email) containing "LEsbianPorn.jpg.exe" or somesuch.
3. Sites with some sort of browser hack script running which hijacks the computer as soon as you visit it.
Note that none of these intrinsically requires Windows in order to work. (1) just requires gullible users, (2) requires a gullible user and - optionally - a badly written email client, (3) requires a web browser with a suitable exploit.
It wasn't them that I was thinking of specifically.
There are plenty of applications of databases (particularly MIS-type things) which don't really lend themselves to multithreading that well in the first place.
(BTW, Postgres only uses one thread per query and changing that, the last time I checked, was part of some significant work which is only just taking place right now)
Microsoft were competing unfairly long before they became a monopoly, and this is also illegal.
Competing unfairly in ways like only offering discounts to companies that don't stock competing products - discounts so large that anyone who wanted to stock a competing product basically could not hope to sell anything by Microsoft at a competitive price.
Knowing the general gist of how cellular protocols work, I don't think there is anything they're not telling us. It's just that most phones don't have reprogrammable IMEIs, for very obvious reasons.
Although, I didn't think GSM phones even authenticated via the IMEI normally,
They certainly do as part of the initial authentication otherwise it would be impossible for the network operator to blacklist stolen phones.
A number of people in IT seem to believe that the only acceptable form of security - particularly as it relates to anything remotely important - is one which is not susceptible to any sort of attack, real or theoretical, until some time after the heat death of the universe.
Banks don't. They know full well that there will always be a certain amount of fraud no matter what you do.
Every change you want to make to the bank's system costs - in man hours to develop, test and deploy the fix and also in terms of the risk of something going wrong when you come to deploy, Most of these costs can be boiled down to cold hard cash. If making the necessary changes will cost more than the amount of fraud it's expected to prevent, don't be surprised to see nothing change.
Rest assured that these people count cash all day long, they can certainly work out exactly how much such changes will cost.
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She's been dead some years now, but my late Gran's house was older than your country.
And yes, I emailed Osama. Now what? They don't log the contents of an email.
Now they think that you may be worth watching.
Let us know how you get on with any upcoming flights you have booked, particularly to to US.
I imagine the novelty of staring at the Earth from space and bouncing around in zero gravity wears off after the first 10 or 15 hours of having nothing else to do.
I'm pretty sure most OEM builds of Windows do ship with some sort of DVD player for exactly this reason, so the average person would never know that Windows can't play DVDs out of the box.
I'm equally sure, however, that NASA almost certainly use their own customised Windows install which very likely does not include DVD playback software.
I do so wish George Orwell were alive to see the UK now.
It's probably just as well he isn't, the shock would kill him.
Do you mean like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_MotionPlus
Because religion has been doing that for thousands of years.
Or Apple could take advantage of the TPM chip that's been present in Macs since almost immediately after they moved to the x86 platform.
The word "muffin" (which originally referred to one of these) was applied to cupcakes without icing so Americans could eat cake for breakfast without feeling guilty.
The Norwegian Government, in a moment of clarity, decided to embrace open standards. From January 1 2009 all departments, institutions, schools and public sites; should deliver and accept all documents that are ODF, PDF or HTML (which ever is appropriate for the information in question). This doesn't bare those sites and institutions from putting up, or accepting, Microsoft document formats; but at everything have to be there in Open Standards first and foremost.
You'll forgive my cynicism, I trust, but does that actually happen or is it on the statute books but neither followed nor enforced? I'd be particularly interested to know if they make a lot of things available in ODF format.
Only when I labelled them. Otherwise I follow them.
First: You must make everything as self-documenting as possible. Label every server, every cable, every power lead to within an inch of its life. And establish processes which say "when a cable is moved or added, labelling is updated accordingly". If you don't have a labelling machine, buy one.
That deals with basic "what's plugged in where" and is far more likely to stay up to date than a spreadsheet or wiki page.
Second: Whatever you choose, it must be something which can scale to your needs and which you can live with.
It will need regular updating - and quite frankly, very few people are able or willing to regularly update a single 200 page Word document complete with embedded spreadsheets, diagrams and photographs. A wiki - or even Sharepoint, if that's your thing - may be better. But if you do take the Wiki route, make sure you keep hard copies of the documentation which says "If the sh1t hits the fan, this is what you need to do to recover".
Others have said "don't bother, your successor won't read it" - I say balls. Documenting is more than just helping your successor - it also helps you remember what is set up, clarify how things work and as part of the process you start to look at things and think "hang on a minute.... this document I've written describes something quite absurd. Are we really doing that?"
Whether or not your successor reads it is really not your problem.
Neither. I trust following the cabling and what the switch itself thinks is going on.
That horse bolted over 10 years ago, and today trying to explain that there was ever a horse there in the first place is an exercise in futility.
That's probably about the worst example you could have picked - it's easy enough to SSH into the box and kill X.
Shame, really, because most of the other drivers actually live in kernel space so it's quite possible for a poor sound driver to cause the machine to kernel panic and genuinely crash.
Be that as it may, Microsoft could just as easily have invented their own printer language, rendered onscreen using this language and dictated that drivers need to turn this language into something the printer can understand. Just like, oh, EVERY OTHER DAMN OS IN EXISTENCE.
HP make perfectly adequate printers, but some moron discovered just how many perfectly stable, acceptable things in Windows a driver writer is free to replace with their own code and decided to replace all of them.
For further examples, look at most wireless drivers pre-installed on laptops at the factory.
It should be widely known by the dumbest thieves (at least in the UK) that stolen mobile phones don't work because their IMEI gets blacklisted as soon as they're reported stolen.
This doesn't appear to have reduced mobile phone thefts to zero.
Viruses in the original almost invisible file-infector sense of the word are, IMO, virtually extinct.
The word has become an umbrella term referring to almost any sort of malware you can think of - trojans, worms, rootkits, the works. And most of those today spread through one of a couple of mechanisms:
1. Fake banner ads on sites. "Your PC is slow, click here to speed it up!", "You are our 1,000,000th visitor, click here to claim your prize".
2. Emailed attachments (though these are becoming less common as more ISPs and mail providers like hotmail are starting to filter email) containing "LEsbianPorn.jpg.exe" or somesuch.
3. Sites with some sort of browser hack script running which hijacks the computer as soon as you visit it.
Note that none of these intrinsically requires Windows in order to work. (1) just requires gullible users, (2) requires a gullible user and - optionally - a badly written email client, (3) requires a web browser with a suitable exploit.
It wasn't them that I was thinking of specifically.
There are plenty of applications of databases (particularly MIS-type things) which don't really lend themselves to multithreading that well in the first place.
(BTW, Postgres only uses one thread per query and changing that, the last time I checked, was part of some significant work which is only just taking place right now)
Seriously, even Windows NT 4 had SMP support in 1997.
I don't know what year Linux first had support for SMP, but the 2.0 kernel supports SMP, apparently even on a 486. Just imagine a Beowulf made of 486 class SMP machines!
Making good use of multiple CPUs requires more than just OS support.
"or flagrant violation of antitrust laws"
hint: they had to become a monopoly power first!
Microsoft were competing unfairly long before they became a monopoly, and this is also illegal.
Competing unfairly in ways like only offering discounts to companies that don't stock competing products - discounts so large that anyone who wanted to stock a competing product basically could not hope to sell anything by Microsoft at a competitive price.
Because they're more concerned about having something that works for everything they need than any particular freedom idea?
Knowing the general gist of how cellular protocols work, I don't think there is anything they're not telling us. It's just that most phones don't have reprogrammable IMEIs, for very obvious reasons.
Although, I didn't think GSM phones even authenticated via the IMEI normally,
They certainly do as part of the initial authentication otherwise it would be impossible for the network operator to blacklist stolen phones.
A number of people in IT seem to believe that the only acceptable form of security - particularly as it relates to anything remotely important - is one which is not susceptible to any sort of attack, real or theoretical, until some time after the heat death of the universe.
Banks don't. They know full well that there will always be a certain amount of fraud no matter what you do.
Every change you want to make to the bank's system costs - in man hours to develop, test and deploy the fix and also in terms of the risk of something going wrong when you come to deploy, Most of these costs can be boiled down to cold hard cash. If making the necessary changes will cost more than the amount of fraud it's expected to prevent, don't be surprised to see nothing change.
Rest assured that these people count cash all day long, they can certainly work out exactly how much such changes will cost.