I agree about the Science Museum, but I think you'll find the planetarium a disappointment - they've shut down! Instead, consider a visit to Greenwich which *does* have a working planetarium.
Also - don't bother with the London Eye - it's very expensive and mind crushingly dull.
Since you are in London for 2 weeks, consider a trip to Oxford or Cambridge, both are possible as day trips. Cambridge has a great little museum of scientific equipment that I can highly recommend. (http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/).
Actually, everyone is familiar with Office 2003 - Office 2007 is a massive UI change, OpenOffice is not. I think my Mum would find the Office 2003 -> OpenOffice transition much easier than Office 2003 -> Office 2007. Heck, even I found myself wasting so much time finding functionality I was familiar with in old versions of Office that I downloaded OpenOffice to use instead!
Speaking as someone who is employed to maintain a nasty mess of a Windows application, I can guarantee you that a simple re-compile will not work in my case. Heck, the compiler is spitting out *lots* of warnings about code that will break under a x86_64 compile - I haven't tried a 64 bit compile, but I very much doubt it will work. Arm? Forget about it!
And there is the problem - a lot of these vital Windows apps are badly maintained spaghetti code that, frankly, would not survive in the competitive world of FOSS - any sane developer would scratch the whole thing and start again. That's not a viable option for a business that is only interested in paying developers to do stuff that directly brings in cash.
I couldn't agree more. It annoys me when people compare a clean Windows PC *without anti-virus* to a *nix/OS X/whatever. Many years ago now I had a problem with InstallShield taking hours to build a CAB file. Turning off the anti-virus reduced the build time from several hours down to about 10 minutes. Anti-virus software has a very real impact on performance, especially when your software is doing lots of small writes - e.g. compilers.
With regard to the suggestion that users should run as Admin and not use anti-virus... well, even the guy you linked to recommends you run 'anti-malware' if it doesn't require elevated privileges.
I may be missing something here, but I've always thought that a much simpler hack exists - albeit you would need to steal the card too, but we are talking about criminals here.
1a) Create a fake terminal that looks and operates like a genuine terminal. All the terminal does is record the 4 digit PIN.
or
1b) Place a camera such that it films the terminal as the card owner types in their 4 digit PIN.
2) Steal the card
3) Use the card + pin
In short, the terminal verifies itself to the credit card company, but not to me, the card owner. I don't trust 'em.
Maybe I'm reading more between the lines than they intended, but I understood that by MIT they meant music, imagary and touch but not prayer. This will no doubt make hospital radio DJs up and down the country thrilled as they can now claim to be a part of the healing process! If only hospital catering could create food that was nice to look at and touch (well, chew at least!), then I'm sure survival rates would surge! (Yes, I'm in the UK. Our hospital food is something else...)
Surely the corollary of Pascal's wager in this instance is that you could enfuriate the Real God by praying to the wrong deity and thus make matters worse for your sister-in-law?
Wireless chipsets is a case in point: I know some manufacturers would love to release Linux drivers for their wireless network cards but can't because it would be too easy to tweak the driver to break FCC power/spectrum rules. If they did release an open source driver, they would be forced to take their product of the market.
That website is sensationalist rubbish, but to be fair the point its trying to make is not that we are about to run out of oil, but that we are about to run of cheap oil. This is a distinct possibility driven not by declining supplies bit rapidly rising demand, especially from China and India.
Extracting oil from sand deposits is very expensive. I believe there were some attempts to extract oil from oil sands in Florida (I think, don't count me on this!) during the oil crisis of the late 70's. Once that blew over, it was abandoned as too expensive. If oil prices keep rising, it may become economical again, though in real terms we're still a long way from the late 70's oil crisis. However, were that to happen, it wouldn't be cheap oil, and by implication oil in general wouldn't be cheap. In other words, we would have run out of cheap oil.
I wouldn't start panicing just yet though.
The last time I checked, YaST worked just as well from a console (albeit using ncurses) as it did from X.
I'm definitely going to take a look at OpenSuSE. Having spent the last year on Gentoo learning how things work under the hood, I think I'm just about ready to move back to a more polished distribution. Not that I'm digging at Gentoo - it has some great features too!
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Also - don't bother with the London Eye - it's very expensive and mind crushingly dull.
Since you are in London for 2 weeks, consider a trip to Oxford or Cambridge, both are possible as day trips. Cambridge has a great little museum of scientific equipment that I can highly recommend. (http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/).
Adverts coming from an internet server? A quick fix to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts should fix that...
Actually, everyone is familiar with Office 2003 - Office 2007 is a massive UI change, OpenOffice is not. I think my Mum would find the Office 2003 -> OpenOffice transition much easier than Office 2003 -> Office 2007. Heck, even I found myself wasting so much time finding functionality I was familiar with in old versions of Office that I downloaded OpenOffice to use instead!
Problem solved? I don't have a copy of Windows to try this, so maybe it is to slow/unstable.
Speaking as someone who is employed to maintain a nasty mess of a Windows application, I can guarantee you that a simple re-compile will not work in my case. Heck, the compiler is spitting out *lots* of warnings about code that will break under a x86_64 compile - I haven't tried a 64 bit compile, but I very much doubt it will work. Arm? Forget about it! And there is the problem - a lot of these vital Windows apps are badly maintained spaghetti code that, frankly, would not survive in the competitive world of FOSS - any sane developer would scratch the whole thing and start again. That's not a viable option for a business that is only interested in paying developers to do stuff that directly brings in cash.
Wine is available for Windows too now... I wonder if running Spotify in wine for Windows would exhibit the same bug/feature?
I couldn't agree more. It annoys me when people compare a clean Windows PC *without anti-virus* to a *nix/OS X/whatever. Many years ago now I had a problem with InstallShield taking hours to build a CAB file. Turning off the anti-virus reduced the build time from several hours down to about 10 minutes. Anti-virus software has a very real impact on performance, especially when your software is doing lots of small writes - e.g. compilers. With regard to the suggestion that users should run as Admin and not use anti-virus... well, even the guy you linked to recommends you run 'anti-malware' if it doesn't require elevated privileges.
1a) Create a fake terminal that looks and operates like a genuine terminal. All the terminal does is record the 4 digit PIN.
or
1b) Place a camera such that it films the terminal as the card owner types in their 4 digit PIN.
2) Steal the card
3) Use the card + pin
In short, the terminal verifies itself to the credit card company, but not to me, the card owner. I don't trust 'em.
Maybe I'm reading more between the lines than they intended, but I understood that by MIT they meant music, imagary and touch but not prayer. This will no doubt make hospital radio DJs up and down the country thrilled as they can now claim to be a part of the healing process! If only hospital catering could create food that was nice to look at and touch (well, chew at least!), then I'm sure survival rates would surge! (Yes, I'm in the UK. Our hospital food is something else...)
Surely the corollary of Pascal's wager in this instance is that you could enfuriate the Real God by praying to the wrong deity and thus make matters worse for your sister-in-law?
Wireless chipsets is a case in point: I know some manufacturers would love to release Linux drivers for their wireless network cards but can't because it would be too easy to tweak the driver to break FCC power/spectrum rules. If they did release an open source driver, they would be forced to take their product of the market.
That website is sensationalist rubbish, but to be fair the point its trying to make is not that we are about to run out of oil, but that we are about to run of cheap oil. This is a distinct possibility driven not by declining supplies bit rapidly rising demand, especially from China and India. Extracting oil from sand deposits is very expensive. I believe there were some attempts to extract oil from oil sands in Florida (I think, don't count me on this!) during the oil crisis of the late 70's. Once that blew over, it was abandoned as too expensive. If oil prices keep rising, it may become economical again, though in real terms we're still a long way from the late 70's oil crisis. However, were that to happen, it wouldn't be cheap oil, and by implication oil in general wouldn't be cheap. In other words, we would have run out of cheap oil. I wouldn't start panicing just yet though.
The last time I checked, YaST worked just as well from a console (albeit using ncurses) as it did from X. I'm definitely going to take a look at OpenSuSE. Having spent the last year on Gentoo learning how things work under the hood, I think I'm just about ready to move back to a more polished distribution. Not that I'm digging at Gentoo - it has some great features too!