Volunteers generally make better soldiers being typically more highly motivated, longer serving and thus more highly trained than conscripts - who typically just want to get their period of enlistment over.
There also appears to be an element of point scoring, with attempts to portray the Iraq war as a new Vietnam, this conscription bill - which is sponsored by a Democrat senator - seems to be another attempt to scare people that there sons and daughters will be coming home in pine boxes.
The bill passing through the senate to reintroduce the draft is sponsored by none other than Senator Fritz Hollings, a Democrat who is quite famous for his attempts to cripple PC's so that Disney can keep Mickey safe from those evil internet people. I don't think this can really be construed as an attempt by the current US government to reintroduce conscription - it sounds more likely that it's just another attempt to make political hay.
From what I've seen of the FTA (this mornings paper had an interesting summary) most of it is beneficial to Australia. It does benefit the manufacturing sector more than agriculture but manufacturing is in dollar terms about ten times the size. For that matter neither would be worse off than if the agreement didn't exist. The alterations for copyright are annoying but IMHO not fatal, its extension of software patents that has me worried.
So we're flying a large, noisy, semi-empty garage in space, and it is so under-staffed (2 people instead of 2.5 required to maintain it) that we can't even use it for scientific experiments. The only reason it got built is that NASA had spread out pork in too many states to kill it, and the space shuttle needed something to do. Meanwhile, the only reason the space shuttle will fly again is to finish the ISS. And to top it off, both are death traps and we don't even have accurate building plans any more...?
Don't forget the bit about being in the wrong orbital inclination making it useless as a staging point on trips to other planets.
On the other hand, we're cancelling the Hubble servicing mission because of safety concerns - which are very real concerns, but unfixable only because of a political decision that we'd rather go to Mars.
Now this I have to disagree with, the shuttle is a deathtrap because it's an overcomplicated compromise between disparate goals and every attempt to produce a replacement has been deliberately killed off - after all, it's not the McDonnell Douglas people who crashed the DC-X.
The orbital space plane is basically an update of the 1960s era X-20 DynaSoar with a more streamlined look about it. It cant replace the shuttle because it has almost no cargo capacity.
IMNSHO what is required is something like the DC-X, a new fully reusable design which can be turned around in a matter of days instead of months, but with enough capacity to replace the cargo hauling now being done by the shuttle. If it's done well enough hopefully flying to orbit could be as safe and routine as international passenger flights are today.
I hope they've done all the sums involved with regards to moving the base of the cable around a bit, wouldn't want it to get severed by a LEO satellite.
One suggestion I have heard is using a converted oil drilling platform or similar specially built ship as the anchor. This would allow the base of the elevator to be shifted by the simple expedient of moving the whole platform.
The now defunct www.highliftsystems.com website had a faq where thay had examined a number of failure modes of a nanotube ribbon space elevator. They had concluded that any fragments entering the earths atmosphere would probably shatter into small pieces rather than coming down in large chunks.
The figures the article quotes are that the cable would be about 100,000km long, one meter wide and way app. 650 tons, that would mean each square metre would be 6.5 grams, thats about a tenth of the mass per square meter of standard photocopy paper.
"But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there "could be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the settlement.
"So you want royalties from FreeBSD as well?" I asked. Sontag responded that "there may or may not be issues. We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)." SCO Owns Your Computer by Trevor Marshall
So yes, I do think that the BSD people are still exposed to some extent - I don't think SCO have a leg to stand on, but I don't think they have a leg to stand on with IBM either and that sure hasn't stopped them.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) it doesn't exist (IMHO of course.) SCO are just using the argument that Dynix and AIX are derivatives of System V and so all the code belongs to them. IANAL but I have studied a little bit of (Australian - hell it's all the Berne convention anyway) copyright law, certainly enough to conclude that SCO are utterly barking mad.
Until the court case is played out to it's grim and ugly conclusion (I give them a miniscule but non-zero chance of winning) this is going to keep hanging over the heads of everyone who uses Linux - or BSD for that matter.
SCO has still not given us exact line numbers or snippets of code.
This is no longer true. As part of the IBM court case discovery process, SCO has revealed a number of lines of code it claims are infringing - primarily RCU code from DYNIX (don't forget that this code is owned by IBM after the sequent acquisition and that they own the patents that cover RCU as well. SCO are still claiming that this is a significant misuse of their "IP", and that as soon as IBM provides them with the code to AIX they will be able to show much more infringing code.)
According to Groklaw SCO are now also using DMCA threats against Linux using companies.
That sort of thing makes businesses nervous.
There is definately still some assembly required. Cygwin allows Unix software to be run in a windows environment in the same way that a native app would, so we ended up writing a batch file that would fire up the x server and use XDMCP to contact our unix box. Stick a shortcut on the desktop and your average end user just has to double click and log in.
Havent tried rootless mode yet since thats not really what our users were after. Likewise I don't know how well cutting and pasting works between X and windows apps (I have a vague memory that it does work out of the box, but don't quote me on it.)
Note the following is my opinion, I don't claim to have all the answers or any more insight than regularly reading IT news...
The biggest difference (IMNSHO) between the open source community (including what is commonly referred to as the Linux community) and Microsoft is cultural. MS is a marketing driven organisation - features are chosen and development is directed based on what will shift boxes - even the current security initiatives are aimed at minimizing the amount of damage the reputation of the company was incurring due to its repeated and high profile security problems.
OSS projects seem to come in a huge range of styles and with a similarly huge number of objectives, however there is a larger emphasis on technical merit. Linus has a reputation for being draconian in what he will allow into the kernel, he is entirely willing to throw patches away that don't meet his standards no matter how wonderful the functionality they provide may be.
The result of this is that although OSS is generally not as "shiny" as MS products tend to be, it seems to be built on a much more solid foundation. Whether that is enough of an advantage for it to take a sizeable bite out of MS' market share remains to be seen.
Of course MS also seem to be their own biggest enemy. The new licensing arrangements and product activation seem to be designed to make life difficult for businesses. Likewise the way they seem to alternate between smear campaigns against Linux and running scared any time a business talks about moving there desktops over to an OSS solution has been raising the profile of alternatives to people who would not have otherwise heard of them.
Truly we live in interesting times (in both senses of the phrase.)
I can second this. The University I work at has a number of unix machines used for data analysis, in the past we have used both exceed and xwin with at best mixed results. We are now starting to use Xfree running under cygwin because it just works significantly better.
Cygwin can also use openssh to tunnel an X session from machines that only have the secure shell port open - a function that seems to be missing from many windows Xservers. note: this may require the use of the -X (enable X forwarding) option depending on your ssh config.
Finally if you want to get really cute you can use XDMCP to get a full Unix desktop running in your X session.
According to those busy beavers at groklaw the kernel version they are referring to is *not* a vanilla kernel. It's vanilla-2.4.1 with rclock-2.4.2-01.patch from http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rclock.html applied.
Looking at the patch, IBM is listed as the copyright holder. The code also acknowledges that it is based on the Dynix implementation.
But nice try to stir up fears by mentioning "uranium" How about pointing to a scientific study of DU toxicity (some have been done, by opponents of DU, even, and found what I have said above) instead of pointing to propaganda?
This page by the Federation of American Scientists has a nice summary of depleted uranium related research. After taking a look through the links, it seems that several studies have been undertaken into the toxicity of DU and it's affects on veterans. This page looks particularly interesting:
Although any increase in radiation to the human body can be calculated to be harmful from extrapolation from higher levels, there are no peer reviewed published reports of detectable increases of cancer or other negative health effects from radiation exposure to inhaled or ingested natural uranium at levels far exceeding those likely in the Gulf. This is mainly because the body is very effective at eliminating ingested and inhaled natural uranium and because the low radioactivity per unit mass of natural uranium and DU means that the mass of uranium needed for significant internal exposure is virtually impossible to obtain.
DEPLETED URANIUM
A Review of the Scientific Literature
As It Pertains to Gulf War Illnesses
The amusing thing is that the opposition party claims that they would be acting differently if they were in power - After all Paul Keating was the person who set us down the path of economic rationalism in the first place.
Looking at the 2002/2003 export statistics, it appears that the largest area is manufactured goods. At $A 45,590M it comes to a smidgen under 40% of total exports. Agriculture is listed as bringing in $A 2,403M or only 2% of the total. So if the agreement drops tarrifs on manufactured goods, I think overall Australia will end up ahead.
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs%40.nsf/94713ad4 45ff1425ca25682000192af2/367070b227b17db2ca256df10 0755a3a!OpenDocument
Netware 7 will ship with the Linux kernel as an option, from 8 onwards it will be linux only. Novell is currently in the process of integrating Ximians Red Carpet with the Zenworks desktop management product so patches can be rolled out to linux machines automatically. If you want to use a pure open source solution your probably best off with LDAP and Samba. Samba can now operate as a PDC in a windows environment and full active directory support is currently being developed. The only thing missing for me is good support for NCPFS over TCP/IP.
Slashdot Mirror
My 6 month old HP NX9005 is now basically fully supported - CPU throttling, ACPI and 3d acceleration all work fine. I found this pageto be invaluable.
Volunteers generally make better soldiers being typically more highly motivated, longer serving and thus more highly trained than conscripts - who typically just want to get their period of enlistment over.
There also appears to be an element of point scoring, with attempts to portray the Iraq war as a new Vietnam, this conscription bill - which is sponsored by a Democrat senator - seems to be another attempt to scare people that there sons and daughters will be coming home in pine boxes.
The bill passing through the senate to reintroduce the draft is sponsored by none other than Senator Fritz Hollings, a Democrat who is quite famous for his attempts to cripple PC's so that Disney can keep Mickey safe from those evil internet people. I don't think this can really be construed as an attempt by the current US government to reintroduce conscription - it sounds more likely that it's just another attempt to make political hay.
From what I've seen of the FTA (this mornings paper had an interesting summary) most of it is beneficial to Australia. It does benefit the manufacturing sector more than agriculture but manufacturing is in dollar terms about ten times the size. For that matter neither would be worse off than if the agreement didn't exist.
The alterations for copyright are annoying but IMHO not fatal, its extension of software patents that has me worried.
Now this I have to disagree with, the shuttle is a deathtrap because it's an overcomplicated compromise between disparate goals and every attempt to produce a replacement has been deliberately killed off - after all, it's not the McDonnell Douglas people who crashed the DC-X.
The orbital space plane is basically an update of the 1960s era X-20 DynaSoar with a more streamlined look about it. It cant replace the shuttle because it has almost no cargo capacity.
IMNSHO what is required is something like the DC-X, a new fully reusable design which can be turned around in a matter of days instead of months, but with enough capacity to replace the cargo hauling now being done by the shuttle. If it's done well enough hopefully flying to orbit could be as safe and routine as international passenger flights are today.
The now defunct www.highliftsystems.com website had a faq where thay had examined a number of failure modes of a nanotube ribbon space elevator. They had concluded that any fragments entering the earths atmosphere would probably shatter into small pieces rather than coming down in large chunks.
The figures the article quotes are that the cable would be about 100,000km long, one meter wide and way app. 650 tons, that would mean each square metre would be 6.5 grams, thats about a tenth of the mass per square meter of standard photocopy paper.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) it doesn't exist (IMHO of course.) SCO are just using the argument that Dynix and AIX are derivatives of System V and so all the code belongs to them. IANAL but I have studied a little bit of (Australian - hell it's all the Berne convention anyway) copyright law, certainly enough to conclude that SCO are utterly barking mad.
Until the court case is played out to it's grim and ugly conclusion (I give them a miniscule but non-zero chance of winning) this is going to keep hanging over the heads of everyone who uses Linux - or BSD for that matter.
According to Groklaw SCO are now also using DMCA threats against Linux using companies.
That sort of thing makes businesses nervous.
There is definately still some assembly required. Cygwin allows Unix software to be run in a windows environment in the same way that a native app would, so we ended up writing a batch file that would fire up the x server and use XDMCP to contact our unix box. Stick a shortcut on the desktop and your average end user just has to double click and log in.
Havent tried rootless mode yet since thats not really what our users were after. Likewise I don't know how well cutting and pasting works between X and windows apps (I have a vague memory that it does work out of the box, but don't quote me on it.)
Note the following is my opinion, I don't claim to have all the answers or any more insight than regularly reading IT news...
The biggest difference (IMNSHO) between the open source community (including what is commonly referred to as the Linux community) and Microsoft is cultural. MS is a marketing driven organisation - features are chosen and development is directed based on what will shift boxes - even the current security initiatives are aimed at minimizing the amount of damage the reputation of the company was incurring due to its repeated and high profile security problems.
OSS projects seem to come in a huge range of styles and with a similarly huge number of objectives, however there is a larger emphasis on technical merit. Linus has a reputation for being draconian in what he will allow into the kernel, he is entirely willing to throw patches away that don't meet his standards no matter how wonderful the functionality they provide may be.
The result of this is that although OSS is generally not as "shiny" as MS products tend to be, it seems to be built on a much more solid foundation. Whether that is enough of an advantage for it to take a sizeable bite out of MS' market share remains to be seen.
Of course MS also seem to be their own biggest enemy. The new licensing arrangements and product activation seem to be designed to make life difficult for businesses. Likewise the way they seem to alternate between smear campaigns against Linux and running scared any time a business talks about moving there desktops over to an OSS solution has been raising the profile of alternatives to people who would not have otherwise heard of them.
Truly we live in interesting times (in both senses of the phrase.)
I can second this. The University I work at has a number of unix machines used for data analysis, in the past we have used both exceed and xwin with at best mixed results. We are now starting to use Xfree running under cygwin because it just works significantly better.
Cygwin can also use openssh to tunnel an X session from machines that only have the secure shell port open - a function that seems to be missing from many windows Xservers. note: this may require the use of the -X (enable X forwarding) option depending on your ssh config.
Finally if you want to get really cute you can use XDMCP to get a full Unix desktop running in your X session.
According to those busy beavers at groklaw the kernel version they are referring to is *not* a vanilla kernel. It's vanilla-2.4.1 with rclock-2.4.2-01.patch from http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rclock.html applied.
Looking at the patch, IBM is listed as the copyright holder. The code also acknowledges that it is based on the Dynix implementation.
This page looks particularly interesting:
The amusing thing is that the opposition party claims that they would be acting differently if they were in power - After all Paul Keating was the person who set us down the path of economic rationalism in the first place.4 45ff1425ca25682000192af2/367070b227b17db2ca256df10 0755a3a!OpenDocument
Looking at the 2002/2003 export statistics, it appears that the largest area is manufactured goods. At $A 45,590M it comes to a smidgen under 40% of total exports. Agriculture is listed as bringing in $A 2,403M or only 2% of the total. So if the agreement drops tarrifs on manufactured goods, I think overall Australia will end up ahead.
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs%40.nsf/94713ad
Netware 7 will ship with the Linux kernel as an option, from 8 onwards it will be linux only.
Novell is currently in the process of integrating Ximians Red Carpet with the Zenworks desktop management product so patches can be rolled out to linux machines automatically.
If you want to use a pure open source solution your probably best off with LDAP and Samba. Samba can now operate as a PDC in a windows environment and full active directory support is currently being developed.
The only thing missing for me is good support for NCPFS over TCP/IP.