CDBurnerXP is good. Robust, reasonably fast, and it works well with.iso images unlike most CD burning programs for Windows, which seem intent on only making audio or file CD's without the ability to duplicate or work from CD images.
CDBurnerXP works pretty well with DVD's, too.
First, the thieves are wholesale. They are both the perople who download and illegally use stuff they know to be pirated, and the ones who simply do sell fake CD's and fake copies of software. We see a huge amount of that of Microsoft Office, which is one of the most expensive and popular softwares both to purchase and to pirate. We also see huge amounts of corporate larceny, where a company will buy "100 copies" of software, get an unlocked installation package, and install it on 200 machines. I've certainly seen that in industry and especially in universities. When I've raised the illegal issue and the dangers of getting trapped into using such software, I've been verbally criticized for daring to put my complaint in writing, then had my next job review seriously hurt for "not being a team player", even though I gave them a superior and free open-source replacement for the illegal software.
This is basically true. But preventing leakage is not just due to the thickness of the insulator. The inevitable flaws in the insulator, and the unevenness of its formation, are a big source of leakage. Just as eggs stick to the pan and burn where you failed to put enough cooking oil, you can fix it by adding more oil (which you may not want to do on your diet), or by heating the pan first and swirling the oil around to spread it evenly before you add the eggs.
The process these gentleman describe involves spreading the insulator more effectively, and does seem reasonable. Whether it's cost effective and works in production is another story.
Of course power flows through capacitors! You've got charges, you've got voltages, you have that charges flowing from one side to the other with a voltage on them in a certain amount of time, charge * voltage / time = power. If you couldn't transmit or modulate some power, you couldn't transmit or modify a signal. That's basic thermodynamics: if you can't transmit power, you can't transmit a signal.
The "work done" is, to some extent, recoverable when you change the state of the MOS transistor by discharging them. But that work is usually wasted and thrown away by simply discharging it to ground, then recharging it from the power supply, and that energy has to go somewhere and come from somewhere. But that can happen more in the power supply, and to some extent happens as electromagnetic radiation. You can't get rid of those two problems until you start playing with superconductors.
The heat and loss issues these researchers try to deal with are wasted work, trickle currents of keeping the transistor gate signals charged up as electrons leak away from the gate part of the transistor into the signal part of the transistor. They're nasty problems, taking constant current to keep even static signals active and wasting power as heat that has to be dealt with by some means.
One big reason for the reduction in necessary applicances to serve the web traffic is the increase in network speeds, that now let home users download many megabytes of patches in only a few minutes rather than the continuous hours it took before. Another reason is web proxies, that cache the bundles en route and redistribute it from local proxy servers. Another is that few Windows clients have microsoft.com as their home page anymore: services like Yahoo automatically reset the user's home pages to something more useful, which takes load off those servers.
Given all that, a reduction in the number of servers needed is not shocking.
Forget copying. We just saw the problems with Sony insisting that you use their software to play their CD's, and that software installed a rootkit. RIAA, the MPAA, and their peers want to force you to only use their authorized viewers and their authorized tools to enforce their ability to prevent legal backup copies, playing their stuff without wasting your time seeing previews and ads and copyright notices that waste your time, to install monitoring and spyware to report to their motherships when you view their materials, avoid video formats that are not patent protected and don't require additional software purchases to view, and the big one:
PREVENT VIEWING MULTI-REGION DVD'S ANYWHERE YOU WANT.
The whole multi-region business model falls apart if you're not using the "authorized" crippleware these DVD manufacturers provide.
We need version 3 because a lot of commercial developers are wary of the version 2 license: cleaning up some of the language and making very clear what it means for the future, along with some minor concessions for wary developers, can encourage them to use the software and participate in its development.
We see this now with Novell and their evolution client, and we've seen copyright vagaries with X-windows, SSH, Kerberos, and other technologies in the past. Good clear language with weird exceptions addressed carefully is the hallmark of OSS.
That's at the core of "Trusted Computing". It can, and will, control access to hardware as well as to the most basic operating system functions such as using a boot loader or kernel. Microsoft plans to provide and manage the keys for almost everything, much the way Verisign manages most SSL keys today either directly or through authorized proxies.
Or doing cluster computing with NFS-based Linux distributions. I've seen a few, and they can work well as long as you don't need too much of what the cheap boxes lack, such as high-speed local disk.
Agreed. Along with turning off the monitor an hour after you're gone, the electricity saved and the life of the monitor extended easily let you save up your money for your next new monitor.
Consider that the horse swill they're drinking probably contains one medicinal molecule per keg of beer, as opposed to any real beer that provides a full dose in a single mug.
Cloning is not a direct stem cell research problem. Fetal stem cells are harvested from fetuses: there's no shortage of such tissue, from abortions or potentially from cultured embryos otherwise discarded from in-vitro fertilization attempts, so cloning is an unnecessary expense and complication in such work.
But your friend may be in better luck than you realize. There is some fascinating work going on, involving the use of adult stem cells which naturally transform into specific tissues when the system needs them. This doesn't seem to require fetal cells from donors, but has been done for successful treatment of diabetes in some lab animals. If it turns out to be possible to get nerve cells to reform with stem cells at all, it may be possible to use adult stem cells from your friend to help create new nerve tissue.
CAD? Windows. Games? Windows. Calendaring software? Windows. Tools for filling out forms for government offices?
Let's be honest, there are things that take a lot of work and practice to get right that are much more developed in the Windows world. For the underlying servers, use Linux or UNIX, but give Windows its due.
There's a number of huge distinctions between the open source community, such as the FSF, and Microsoft. One of them is money: the other is that Microsoft has been caught tiime and time again lying in court, under oath, and breaking the clearest laws of intellectual property ownership, trade secret theft, coercion of witnesses, and fraud.
The FSF keeps its nose squeaky clean, because they know they have to to keep any respect from their members and from the world at large.
Hardware from Microsoft? You want him to buy an Xbox?
More seriously, there is actually a way past a lot of this. The fraudulent vendor may have replaced the BIOS on the motherboards, to lie about the specs of the hardware to the display screens and in turn to the operating system. Some interesting hacks are available that way to set the system clocks to one speed, and lie about it to the OS. Alternatively, they've simply replaced the bits of Windows that display the processor characteristics.
To get past the Windows operating system flaws, use a Knoppix live CD/DVD to boot the system and record its characteristics. To get past BIOS whackiness, you need an open source BIOS. BIOS's are currently a closed source nightmare, stuffed with legacy features they don't need at the cost of features they should have. But the LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS projects are doing good work, and I'd love to see them polished up enough to use commercially. This would flat-out solve a lot of problems talking to the guts of your hardware from the operating system level, to read its temperature or read out things like the actual chipsets while the system is running, even resetting the BIOS options while the system is running and without needing someone sitting there with a keyboard and monitor at the next reboot.
Plenty: we've not yet recovered from the dot-bomb vacancies, and a lot of spaces are still under-utilized. Given the redundancy of Google's underlying structure, you don't need expensive redundant power and cooling, just basic cooling and power that can be started immediately with whatever is already available, then scaled up as more of the cluster is activated and it starts carrying traffic and helping generate revenue.
If correctly set up, it can also be used for cheap cluster computing: expect to see Hollywood renting time on these things to run their computer animation.
That's *EXACTLY* why it should be ripped out. It's not at all part of the Windows shell, it's deeply woven into the GUI. It's not strictly necessary even for that, the function of it is available through any decent GUI.
Firefox does surprisingly well in Windows, except when the Microsoft loss-leader web authoring tools generate extensively and exclusively IE capable web pages. If you think this isn't a problem, I urge you to look at a dozen local government office websites under Firefox and watch at least 3 of them not work properly under Firefox.
You need to pay attention. It's impossible to install Windows, and nearly impossible to get the Microsoft published updates for their terribly secure OS, without Internet Explorer. It's also nearly impossible to take Internet Explorer out. And any hardware vendor that tried to install Netscape or now Firefox as their default browser or even include it on the desktop as an alternate to Internet Explorer suddenly finds its OEM license prices raised, and threatened by lawsuit if they reveal the predatory pricing. MS got caught repeatedly doing this sort of stunt.
The same sort of monopoly predation just got revealed in court, if OEM vendors produced systems with the Real multi-media software installed instead of or even in addition to the Windows Media players. It's nasty, and it's illegal in most country's anti-monopoly or anti-trust laws. The difficulty is in getting Microsoft all the way through the courts: actually pressing suit against a company the size of Microsoft is no small feat. Unfortunately, judges like Judge White in the most recent US anti-trust case against them are far too willing to ignore blatant criminatlity, even revealed in their own court room, in the interests of "promoting competition".
I urge you to go investigate the courtroom dealings of companies like this over at http://www.groklaw.net./ The behavior is quite scary.
This is only because the rootkit was deeply woven into the guts of that unfortunate security nightmare, Windows device drivers. Since MS wrote them, they're in the best position to clean up the mess and restore the drivers to their original functions, especially the weird bits that muck with your CD drivers.
Disabling CD drives is clearly not something that anybody but Microsoft is in a position to clean up after they do it, even accidentally as part of cleaning up the Sony cruft.
There's a third excuse for this lawsuit: SpyMon could be scared of various filters openly detecting them as spyware, and sees a real loss of business from it. Spyware and adware companies have been filing suit for years, now, complaining about their classifications. This is just another logical step to protect their "business models", especially since if they can protect it by law, they don't have to actually write good software that avoids detection or removal by third parties.
You won't get tenure, and you won't teach science in Kansas if this goes on. You'll face the same fate as teachers who resisted teaching McCarthy style American history or Kansas teachers who actually wanted to teach evolution during the time of the Scopes monkey trial.
You may, however, become an excellent house painter or go into other lines of work while the school boards get their heads on straight, in order to make enough to eat and feed your kids or keep a roof over you head. More power to you if you can do it: dealing with school board bureaucracy is one of the hardest tasks a teacher can face.
They could raise illegal drugs: more profitable than wheat, and it worked for Afghanistan for years after they ran the Russians out, and it's worked for Iran for decades after the fall of the US-supported puppet, the Shah. It doesn't take much of an economy to run a theocracy: it just takes an outside enemy to point your valiant followers at.
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CDBurnerXP is good. Robust, reasonably fast, and it works well with .iso images unlike most CD burning programs for Windows, which seem intent on only making audio or file CD's without the ability to duplicate or work from CD images.
CDBurnerXP works pretty well with DVD's, too.
First, the thieves are wholesale. They are both the perople who download and illegally use stuff they know to be pirated, and the ones who simply do sell fake CD's and fake copies of software. We see a huge amount of that of Microsoft Office, which is one of the most expensive and popular softwares both to purchase and to pirate. We also see huge amounts of corporate larceny, where a company will buy "100 copies" of software, get an unlocked installation package, and install it on 200 machines. I've certainly seen that in industry and especially in universities. When I've raised the illegal issue and the dangers of getting trapped into using such software, I've been verbally criticized for daring to put my complaint in writing, then had my next job review seriously hurt for "not being a team player", even though I gave them a superior and free open-source replacement for the illegal software.
This is basically true. But preventing leakage is not just due to the thickness of the insulator. The inevitable flaws in the insulator, and the unevenness of its formation, are a big source of leakage. Just as eggs stick to the pan and burn where you failed to put enough cooking oil, you can fix it by adding more oil (which you may not want to do on your diet), or by heating the pan first and swirling the oil around to spread it evenly before you add the eggs.
The process these gentleman describe involves spreading the insulator more effectively, and does seem reasonable. Whether it's cost effective and works in production is another story.
Of course power flows through capacitors! You've got charges, you've got voltages, you have that charges flowing from one side to the other with a voltage on them in a certain amount of time, charge * voltage / time = power. If you couldn't transmit or modulate some power, you couldn't transmit or modify a signal. That's basic thermodynamics: if you can't transmit power, you can't transmit a signal.
The "work done" is, to some extent, recoverable when you change the state of the MOS transistor by discharging them. But that work is usually wasted and thrown away by simply discharging it to ground, then recharging it from the power supply, and that energy has to go somewhere and come from somewhere. But that can happen more in the power supply, and to some extent happens as electromagnetic radiation. You can't get rid of those two problems until you start playing with superconductors.
The heat and loss issues these researchers try to deal with are wasted work, trickle currents of keeping the transistor gate signals charged up as electrons leak away from the gate part of the transistor into the signal part of the transistor. They're nasty problems, taking constant current to keep even static signals active and wasting power as heat that has to be dealt with by some means.
One big reason for the reduction in necessary applicances to serve the web traffic is the increase in network speeds, that now let home users download many megabytes of patches in only a few minutes rather than the continuous hours it took before. Another reason is web proxies, that cache the bundles en route and redistribute it from local proxy servers. Another is that few Windows clients have microsoft.com as their home page anymore: services like Yahoo automatically reset the user's home pages to something more useful, which takes load off those servers.
Given all that, a reduction in the number of servers needed is not shocking.
Forget copying. We just saw the problems with Sony insisting that you use their software to play their CD's, and that software installed a rootkit. RIAA, the MPAA, and their peers want to force you to only use their authorized viewers and their authorized tools to enforce their ability to prevent legal backup copies, playing their stuff without wasting your time seeing previews and ads and copyright notices that waste your time, to install monitoring and spyware to report to their motherships when you view their materials, avoid video formats that are not patent protected and don't require additional software purchases to view, and the big one:
PREVENT VIEWING MULTI-REGION DVD'S ANYWHERE YOU WANT.
The whole multi-region business model falls apart if you're not using the "authorized" crippleware these DVD manufacturers provide.
We need version 3 because a lot of commercial developers are wary of the version 2 license: cleaning up some of the language and making very clear what it means for the future, along with some minor concessions for wary developers, can encourage them to use the software and participate in its development.
We see this now with Novell and their evolution client, and we've seen copyright vagaries with X-windows, SSH, Kerberos, and other technologies in the past. Good clear language with weird exceptions addressed carefully is the hallmark of OSS.
That's at the core of "Trusted Computing". It can, and will, control access to hardware as well as to the most basic operating system functions such as using a boot loader or kernel. Microsoft plans to provide and manage the keys for almost everything, much the way Verisign manages most SSL keys today either directly or through authorized proxies.
Or doing cluster computing with NFS-based Linux distributions. I've seen a few, and they can work well as long as you don't need too much of what the cheap boxes lack, such as high-speed local disk.
Agreed. Along with turning off the monitor an hour after you're gone, the electricity saved and the life of the monitor extended easily let you save up your money for your next new monitor.
Consider that the horse swill they're drinking probably contains one medicinal molecule per keg of beer, as opposed to any real beer that provides a full dose in a single mug.
Unless they're being homeopathic as well.
Fascinating. Is Adminmenu in some ways superior to Webmin? Should anyone even bother with it when Webmin is available?
Cloning is not a direct stem cell research problem. Fetal stem cells are harvested from fetuses: there's no shortage of such tissue, from abortions or potentially from cultured embryos otherwise discarded from in-vitro fertilization attempts, so cloning is an unnecessary expense and complication in such work.
But your friend may be in better luck than you realize. There is some fascinating work going on, involving the use of adult stem cells which naturally transform into specific tissues when the system needs them. This doesn't seem to require fetal cells from donors, but has been done for successful treatment of diabetes in some lab animals. If it turns out to be possible to get nerve cells to reform with stem cells at all, it may be possible to use adult stem cells from your friend to help create new nerve tissue.
CAD? Windows.
Games? Windows.
Calendaring software? Windows.
Tools for filling out forms for government offices?
Let's be honest, there are things that take a lot of work and practice to get right that are much more developed in the Windows world. For the underlying servers, use Linux or UNIX, but give Windows its due.
There's a number of huge distinctions between the open source community, such as the FSF, and Microsoft. One of them is money: the other is that Microsoft has been caught tiime and time again lying in court, under oath, and breaking the clearest laws of intellectual property ownership, trade secret theft, coercion of witnesses, and fraud.
The FSF keeps its nose squeaky clean, because they know they have to to keep any respect from their members and from the world at large.
Hardware from Microsoft? You want him to buy an Xbox?
More seriously, there is actually a way past a lot of this. The fraudulent vendor may have replaced the BIOS on the motherboards, to lie about the specs of the hardware to the display screens and in turn to the operating system. Some interesting hacks are available that way to set the system clocks to one speed, and lie about it to the OS. Alternatively, they've simply replaced the bits of Windows that display the processor characteristics.
To get past the Windows operating system flaws, use a Knoppix live CD/DVD to boot the system and record its characteristics. To get past BIOS whackiness, you need an open source BIOS. BIOS's are currently a closed source nightmare, stuffed with legacy features they don't need at the cost of features they should have. But the LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS projects are doing good work, and I'd love to see them polished up enough to use commercially. This would flat-out solve a lot of problems talking to the guts of your hardware from the operating system level, to read its temperature or read out things like the actual chipsets while the system is running, even resetting the BIOS options while the system is running and without needing someone sitting there with a keyboard and monitor at the next reboot.
The new version of a GUI menu has as much to do with excellent gameplay as a talking paperclip has to do with document writing.
Congratulations, Microsoft, on creating another wonderful and capable platform, then putting a tire boot on it to interfere with its use.
Plenty: we've not yet recovered from the dot-bomb vacancies, and a lot of spaces are still under-utilized. Given the redundancy of Google's underlying structure, you don't need expensive redundant power and cooling, just basic cooling and power that can be started immediately with whatever is already available, then scaled up as more of the cluster is activated and it starts carrying traffic and helping generate revenue.
If correctly set up, it can also be used for cheap cluster computing: expect to see Hollywood renting time on these things to run their computer animation.
That's *EXACTLY* why it should be ripped out. It's not at all part of the Windows shell, it's deeply woven into the GUI. It's not strictly necessary even for that, the function of it is available through any decent GUI.
Firefox does surprisingly well in Windows, except when the Microsoft loss-leader web authoring tools generate extensively and exclusively IE capable web pages. If you think this isn't a problem, I urge you to look at a dozen local government office websites under Firefox and watch at least 3 of them not work properly under Firefox.
You need to pay attention. It's impossible to install Windows, and nearly impossible to get the Microsoft published updates for their terribly secure OS, without Internet Explorer. It's also nearly impossible to take Internet Explorer out. And any hardware vendor that tried to install Netscape or now Firefox as their default browser or even include it on the desktop as an alternate to Internet Explorer suddenly finds its OEM license prices raised, and threatened by lawsuit if they reveal the predatory pricing. MS got caught repeatedly doing this sort of stunt.
The same sort of monopoly predation just got revealed in court, if OEM vendors produced systems with the Real multi-media software installed instead of or even in addition to the Windows Media players. It's nasty, and it's illegal in most country's anti-monopoly or anti-trust laws. The difficulty is in getting Microsoft all the way through the courts: actually pressing suit against a company the size of Microsoft is no small feat. Unfortunately, judges like Judge White in the most recent US anti-trust case against them are far too willing to ignore blatant criminatlity, even revealed in their own court room, in the interests of "promoting competition".
I urge you to go investigate the courtroom dealings of companies like this over at http://www.groklaw.net./ The behavior is quite scary.
This is only because the rootkit was deeply woven into the guts of that unfortunate security nightmare, Windows device drivers. Since MS wrote them, they're in the best position to clean up the mess and restore the drivers to their original functions, especially the weird bits that muck with your CD drivers.
Disabling CD drives is clearly not something that anybody but Microsoft is in a position to clean up after they do it, even accidentally as part of cleaning up the Sony cruft.
There's a third excuse for this lawsuit: SpyMon could be scared of various filters openly detecting them as spyware, and sees a real loss of business from it. Spyware and adware companies have been filing suit for years, now, complaining about their classifications. This is just another logical step to protect their "business models", especially since if they can protect it by law, they don't have to actually write good software that avoids detection or removal by third parties.
You won't get tenure, and you won't teach science in Kansas if this goes on. You'll face the same fate as teachers who resisted teaching McCarthy style American history or Kansas teachers who actually wanted to teach evolution during the time of the Scopes monkey trial.
You may, however, become an excellent house painter or go into other lines of work while the school boards get their heads on straight, in order to make enough to eat and feed your kids or keep a roof over you head. More power to you if you can do it: dealing with school board bureaucracy is one of the hardest tasks a teacher can face.
They could raise illegal drugs: more profitable than wheat, and it worked for Afghanistan for years after they ran the Russians out, and it's worked for Iran for decades after the fall of the US-supported puppet, the Shah. It doesn't take much of an economy to run a theocracy: it just takes an outside enemy to point your valiant followers at.
You've never used a keyboard condom? They're awfully handy for keeping contaminating fluids out of your keyaobrd.