Have you tried NTFS-3G? It really is very stable, no doubt due to the exhaustive testing regime on every release - see http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html - and is used by default in most Linux distros. It's a different codebase to the older Linux-NTFS and Captive NTFS projects, and has reasonably good performance.
Since ZFS is new, I don't think your scenario applies, and it's not intended for DVD/CD use.
Branding has little to do with Ubuntu's success - it is generally polished, and easy to set up on most systems. The solid Debian based, attention to usability, huge array of software in the repositories, and the very newbie-friendly forums are key too. Also, the sheer volume of people using Ubuntu now means that the forums have solutions for most common problems already written up, and the response time to questions on forums is generally very good.
Sure, it's not pretending 'not to have a bias' apart from the bold-italic part at the top of every page that goes:
'Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.'
See the 2nd word there? Sure he can say what he likes, but he needs to disclose this blatant conflict of interest, which renders him very biased indeed.
Education is about providing long-term skills. Teaching Office 2007 is simple short-term training - anyone with OpenOffice skills can easily pick up another office package such as Office 2007 very quickly.
I run Opera Mini on my Treo 680, but it's not well integrated with PalmOS (in fact, not at all integrated) - no clipboard sharing, no clicking on URL in email to launch Opera, and in latest version you can't even switch to another app without exiting Opera (unlike every other PalmOS app.
I really hope Google's Android OS/app stack takes off and is available on a range of Treo-like phones - Palm has taken far too long to renew its OS into a Linux-based system, so Palm Linux will probably not come out before Android.
I have an HP 6310 multi-function printer/scanner/copier - the printer works perfectly under Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty and Gutsy, and was very simple to set up. Just run the HPLIP Toolbox, which is pre-installed, and it discovers it, even over Ethernet, and does everything for you. An impressive contrast to Windows where the full download was quite enormous and took a long time to install...
I would generally go for HP as they have their own open-source projects for printer support, including HPLIP, and most printers should work well. Other vendors might work OK, but Canon iP5200 definitely doesn't without a commercial driver or (perhaps) a lot of setup.
Ubuntu has come a long way since 2005 when I struggled to get CUPS working with an HP Deskjet, and gave up.
Or you can use GNU ddrescue, which is similar to 'dd' in concept but efficiently handles disks with large numbers of bad blocks through binary search of the good and bad areas: http://directory.fsf.org/project/ddrescue/ Once you've backed up any critical files, just run ddrescue to recover and backup as much as you can onto a good hard disk.
This tool is invaluable when you have a dying hard disk - easy to use and very fast, compared to the similarly named dd_rescue (note underscore) and dd_rhelp. It's available as a package in Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros (sometimes package is called gddrescue), and it's part of the excellent SystemRescueCD, a compact recovery and rescue CD that includes many useful tools and includes support of virtually every Linux, Windows and Mac filesystem.
Grandparent comment is low scoring, but the important issue is that waking up the hard disk frequently is a cause of load/unload cycles, and (1) Ubuntu and most Linux distros use ext3 and (2) ext3 by default writes journal data every 5 seconds. However, it looks like Laptop Mode Tools, now used by Ubuntu, modifies the ext3 commit options: http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq - and it's easy enough to use "commit=N" to set the ext3 journal commit time to say 30 or even 90 seconds. When combined with noatime and avoiding fsync, this should help in reducing hard disk spinups.
The high load/unload cycle counts can come from the operating system, BIOS, or hard drive firmware. By default, Ubuntu does not enable 'laptop mode', so it does not do anything to affect load/unload cycle counts.
Although it's not clear that this will kill drives quickly (could be several years, and in my experience hard drives only last that long anyway - a Windows laptop hard disk died on me after 2.5 years on Friday), I do think this is a bug in Ubuntu laptop mode that needs fixing (and probably similar bugs exist in other Linux distros, and perhaps Windows and MacOS X too).
Ubuntu doesn't even write to your CMOS (and nor does Windows), so it's most likely this was a coincidental failure. Correlation does not mean causation.
This idea that software patents are not allowed in the EU is a myth, at least in the UK - there are many software patents out there (I know people who've been granted on) and they typically do it by talking about a hardware device that has the software embedded. However, such patents can be used against pure softwre. Once the patents are granted they would be used in the normal way and tested in court, but if they are done properly there's no reason to think they are not enforceable.
I agree that Ubuntu is a better desktop install option than Knoppix, which doesn't work well on the HD, but Knoppix has much better hardware detection even now - Knoppix's UI is not very different to Ubuntu's, it just has a lot of software installed.
I use NOD32 myself, and find it pretty good, although its UI is horrible. However, unless you are scanning with several tools and being generally vigilant about security, you won't know which malware your main AV and spyware tool are missing - no AV/spyware tool is 100% effective, and Storm in particular is morphing so fast that many variants still aren't detected.
The simplest and cheapest solution to staying secure at present is to use a Linux distro for most Internet purposes, and keep Windows only for apps that must run there, e.g. Windows only games that don't run on Cedega/Wine etc. These days, Firefox and other apps on Ubuntu or similar modern distros are very good. If you don't want to install Linux, just download the Knoppix live CD and use that - it's incredibly good at detecting your hardware and will let you browse more safely.
If you must use Windows, make sure you are a power user, or pay an expert for a few hours' setup, and maybe repeat calls every 3 months, and of course the cost of AV/spyware updates, and listen to their advice about not clicking on random URLs sent by friends. Windows really isn't a low cost option when you factor in the hassle of having to change all your passwords and worry about your cards or bank being raided, or the cost of paying for setup and software as here.
Here's a small and possibly unrepresentative datapoint from last weekend that would tend to suggest there are a lot of infected PCs out there, some of them with Storm. Basically, 2 of 3 PCs scanned had backdoor trojans and I didn't have time to debug the third PC enough to scan it.
I spyware scanned three PCs belonging to two friends/family households. Naturally, they were all Windows. I used Webroot Spysweeper which is pretty good but costs, and Kaspersky online scan, which is good but slow, and virus only.
- PC 1: infected with various spyware and a backdoor trojan (remote access by the bad guys) - had an up to date antivirus (AVG) that didn't spot any of this, but no anti-spyware installed.
- PC 2 (same network as 1): couldn't even install new software (error on running any new.EXE), ran out of time to debug this so did not install Webroot or any other tools. Also had AVG antivirus, which was up to date, and no anti-spyware. Presumed infected.
- PC 3: (2nd household) - infected with a different backdoor trojan and several viruses. Had Norton anti-virus that had not updated since 2004.
I would assume the average Windows PC has a high chance of some sort of infection, unless the users are very careful about installing third party software, some of which carries spyware or worse, and clicking on links in IE. Even Firefox had spyware on one of these machines.
Windows PCs run by power users (not the users here) can be somewhat secure, but it's painful to make them so. One colleague who's very techie still got infected by a PDF security hole recently, so you need Secunia PSI to run continuously, as well as monitoring some security blogs, and updating software regularly, as well as using a good anti-spyware tool, not using IE/Outlook, etc etc. However, once you are making this much effort, the work needed to install Ubuntu becomes much less of a hurdle - you might as well just switch over one PC so you have a safe PC for online shopping/banking etc.
The only good thing about this story is that nothing very important was being done on these PCs - little online shopping and no online banking... however, that's the users' self-reported status and they may well not want to admit they are at risk.
I don't do this for a living, I'm just a Windows and Linux user who wondered why there were so many popups on one of these PCs and ended up getting sucked into this when I should have been socialising - fortunately anti-spyware scans can run during dinner...
.DEBs are a bit like.MSIs, but there are some major differences - as you mention, you can use Gdebi to install arbitrary.DEBs bu8t it's a lot better if the package is actually in a repository already. The big difference is that for packages in a repository, you can install a whole set of packages (tens or hundreds) with a single operation, whether CLI or GUI.
Try doing that with Windows Installers - just keeping a Windows box up to date with security fixes (beyond Windows and MS Office) is quite time consuming, whereas on Ubuntu the system actually prompts you like Windows Update *for every app you have ever installed* from an Ubuntu repository...
You might also like to investigate Plucene and KinoSearch which are both Perl ports of the Lucene engine. It's also worth considering combining your search engine with Wikis where possible - then you can find documents by keywords and also navigate to a Wiki page providing context and ralted documents or Wiki pages. TWiki, which is the most popular open source enterprise Wiki engine, has plugins for both these engines, see http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEnginePluceneAddOn
Let's see about this "Windows just works" thing - yes, Windows apps are generally quite stable these days, and the system rarely bluescreens. However, on my 1 GB laptop with XP, running quite a few browser/office apps but nothing unusual, and fully patched as a corporate laptop, I have had the following issues
- have to forcibly reset the system every few weeks when it completely locks up - most recently this morning when I tried to do a standby and the whole system locked up
- install a new ATI driver to solve a bluescreen a few weeks ago - seems OK now, but I've never had a video driver crash on Linux
- on Saturday, found that every time I tried to run Windows Explorer, it crashed, taking down the main Explorer task bar - so I couldn't even browse filesystem to see what is wrong! Luckily I could work around this to discover that a particular copy protection DLL, which put itself in the temp directory, had been deleted by temp file cleanup, causing the crash. But why doesn't Explorer lock such DLLs? Of course, the copy protection DLL wouldn't be needed with open source apps, so this is something of an app bug.
- every few days I have to restart because Windows says 'insufficient memory to complete operation' - this is on a 1 GB box with a huge pagefile, and I'm only using 1.5-2 GB total! What on earth happened to virtual memory???
Meanwhile on my Ubuntu box, the admin is really zero now I'm using Feisty - my HP printer was discovered on the network by the HPLIP setup tool, and just worked. The only lockup I had was when Google's Picasa went mad and used 100% CPU, and even then I could kill it from an SSH login, so I didn't even need to restart X.
The point is that Windows does work, but it takes a huge amount of effort to keep it working, unless you have a very vanilla or locked-down system where you run only one or two apps and don't install third party software. Linux, and particularly Ubuntu or other distros with good package management, enables you to install a huge number of apps very easily *and they keep working*. My uptime on my Ubuntu box is regularly up in the months, but on my Windows box it's down to a few days, mostly due to the lockups.
BTW my Windows laptop above is behind a firewall but it isn't locked down fortunately. I'm sure a locked down Windows box is stable, but with Linux you can have a configurable, extensible system that can still be centrally administered for the core components and apps.
SuSE's whole 'we work better with Microsoft' is mostly marketing spin, and the Novell/Microsoft deal is incredibly dangerous. SuSE does apparently work well with MS networks, but so do some other distros, and there's nothing (apart from this sort of patent deal) preventing any distro picking up on SuSE's improvements.
Microsoft is not doing the Novell deal to help the Linux world - over time it will try to limit and encumber Linux with all sorts of required licenses, to control more and more of the Linux ecosystem.
WiMAX can use both licensed spectrum (e.g. Sprint, Clearwire) and unlicensed spectrum - the latter is more prone to interference of course, and is limited in the power you can use, so it's less useful for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) coverage (depending on how close you are to the WiMAX base station). See http://www.wimax.com/education/faq/faq48.
I'd expect the commercial WiMAX services to use licensed spectrum, but that doesn't stop someone setting up their own WiMAX network if they can find suitable hardware supporting spectrum that is unlicensed in their country.
Firefox has little if any code in common with Netscape 4.x - there was a complete rewrite of the layout engine (NGLayout, now called Gecko) as part of the Netscape 5 and 6 project, and this same Gecko engine is now used by Firefox. So there was no inheriting of broken code. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(layout_engine) and other pages for backup on this.
It's true that people in developing nations will be the most affected by the estimated 160,000 deaths a year due to global warming - see http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2003/09/6 0640. However, in France in 2003, over 15,000 people died from the heatwave, which is generally accepted to be a more common occurrence as global warming increases. In Greece recently, 60 people died in horrific fires over a major part of the Peloponnese, including some trying to escape in cars.
More prosaically, there will be wider impacts that are less likely to kill you, but could well affect your health (e.g. dengue fever and West Nile), wellbeing (more frequent hurricanes, droughts and other extreme weather) and wealth (the US economy will take a dive if it doesn't do anything about global warming). See http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons.asp for some impacts.
So don't be so damn smug and ill-informed - you will be affected in some way, and far more than by local air pollution.
In 'the real cost of Windows for most of us is less than $50', you aren't including the huge cost in time of keeping a Windows box up and running, and secure, and the costs of antivirus, anti-spyware, etc, etc. I spend most of my computer time at home maintaining the family Windows PC, not on keeping the Ubuntu PC working, which just stays up in that boring old Linuxy way.
Yes, there's inertia, but if you don't like Microsoft it's quite possible to buy alternatives - like a Mac for the less techie, or the various pre-installed Linux options for the more techie. Or you can just use OpenOffice at home, as a very easy step that saves money and promotes open document formats.
Carbon Dioxide is the most important pollutant
on
Green Cars You Can't Buy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This article completely ignores the fact that these are gas-burning cars that create just as much CO2 (it mentions they get the same gas/petrol mileage as non-PZEV cars). Localised pollution is in some ways a good thing to reduce global warming, although bad in more general sense, simply because this pollution reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth (aka global dimming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming, but note that there are some interactions between global warming and dimming).
Anyway - pretty pointless concentrating on the less important pollutants rather than on those that may irreversibly change the earth's climate through global warming...
You may now waste lots of time trying to convince me that global warming doesn't exist or is not caused by human activity. (FX: rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.)
EBCDIC wouldn't really be a problem - just work in ASCII and convert to/from EBCDIC as needed for I/O. There are many libraries to do this for C, Perl, etc. The real issue is any Voyager-specific I/O hardware.
This reminds me of my reaction to Linux on PCs about 15 years ago - I had a choice of UnixWare (from Novell) or Linux, and thought that Linux was very incomplete and wouldn't go anywhere. Today, UnixWare is almost dead, and many of the surviving Unixes are open source (the BSDs, Solaris, Darwin,...) due to the success of Linux on the server. I now run Linux on my main home PC, and customers of my (proprietary software) employer are now saying 'support Linux or Windows or you won't buy your software at all in 18 months time'.
Mobile phone Linux will develop just as Linux did on PCs, servers and embedded devices. See this article by Jim Ready, who helped create the RTOS industry in the 1980s, for more on how Linux became a mobile phone OS through reduced RAM usage, execute in place, power management, memory type based allocation, ARM Thumb instruction support for more compact code, DirectFB for nice GUIs without X's overhead, and real-time features: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9959043369.html
OpenMoko is explicitly documented as being a developer platform not a normal phone - maybe the title of the page you linked to, "Developer Preview", should have given you a clue there... If you want a Linux phone that is usable out of the box, there are quite a few available now even in the US, such as the Motorola Razr V8: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3724634466.html
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Have you tried NTFS-3G? It really is very stable, no doubt due to the exhaustive testing regime on every release - see http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html - and is used by default in most Linux distros. It's a different codebase to the older Linux-NTFS and Captive NTFS projects, and has reasonably good performance.
Since ZFS is new, I don't think your scenario applies, and it's not intended for DVD/CD use.
Branding has little to do with Ubuntu's success - it is generally polished, and easy to set up on most systems. The solid Debian based, attention to usability, huge array of software in the repositories, and the very newbie-friendly forums are key too. Also, the sheer volume of people using Ubuntu now means that the forums have solutions for most common problems already written up, and the response time to questions on forums is generally very good.
Sure, it's not pretending 'not to have a bias' apart from the bold-italic part at the top of every page that goes:
'Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.'
See the 2nd word there? Sure he can say what he likes, but he needs to disclose this blatant conflict of interest, which renders him very biased indeed.
Education is about providing long-term skills. Teaching Office 2007 is simple short-term training - anyone with OpenOffice skills can easily pick up another office package such as Office 2007 very quickly.
I run Opera Mini on my Treo 680, but it's not well integrated with PalmOS (in fact, not at all integrated) - no clipboard sharing, no clicking on URL in email to launch Opera, and in latest version you can't even switch to another app without exiting Opera (unlike every other PalmOS app.
I really hope Google's Android OS/app stack takes off and is available on a range of Treo-like phones - Palm has taken far too long to renew its OS into a Linux-based system, so Palm Linux will probably not come out before Android.
I have an HP 6310 multi-function printer/scanner/copier - the printer works perfectly under Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty and Gutsy, and was very simple to set up. Just run the HPLIP Toolbox, which is pre-installed, and it discovers it, even over Ethernet, and does everything for you. An impressive contrast to Windows where the full download was quite enormous and took a long time to install...
I would generally go for HP as they have their own open-source projects for printer support, including HPLIP, and most printers should work well. Other vendors might work OK, but Canon iP5200 definitely doesn't without a commercial driver or (perhaps) a lot of setup.
Ubuntu has come a long way since 2005 when I struggled to get CUPS working with an HP Deskjet, and gave up.
Or you can use GNU ddrescue, which is similar to 'dd' in concept but efficiently handles disks with large numbers of bad blocks through binary search of the good and bad areas: http://directory.fsf.org/project/ddrescue/ Once you've backed up any critical files, just run ddrescue to recover and backup as much as you can onto a good hard disk.
This tool is invaluable when you have a dying hard disk - easy to use and very fast, compared to the similarly named dd_rescue (note underscore) and dd_rhelp. It's available as a package in Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros (sometimes package is called gddrescue), and it's part of the excellent SystemRescueCD, a compact recovery and rescue CD that includes many useful tools and includes support of virtually every Linux, Windows and Mac filesystem.
Grandparent comment is low scoring, but the important issue is that waking up the hard disk frequently is a cause of load/unload cycles, and (1) Ubuntu and most Linux distros use ext3 and (2) ext3 by default writes journal data every 5 seconds. However, it looks like Laptop Mode Tools, now used by Ubuntu, modifies the ext3 commit options: http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq - and it's easy enough to use "commit=N" to set the ext3 journal commit time to say 30 or even 90 seconds. When combined with noatime and avoiding fsync, this should help in reducing hard disk spinups.
See http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug/ for useful comments on this.
The high load/unload cycle counts can come from the operating system, BIOS, or hard drive firmware. By default, Ubuntu does not enable 'laptop mode', so it does not do anything to affect load/unload cycle counts.
Although it's not clear that this will kill drives quickly (could be several years, and in my experience hard drives only last that long anyway - a Windows laptop hard disk died on me after 2.5 years on Friday), I do think this is a bug in Ubuntu laptop mode that needs fixing (and probably similar bugs exist in other Linux distros, and perhaps Windows and MacOS X too).
Ubuntu doesn't even write to your CMOS (and nor does Windows), so it's most likely this was a coincidental failure. Correlation does not mean causation.
This idea that software patents are not allowed in the EU is a myth, at least in the UK - there are many software patents out there (I know people who've been granted on) and they typically do it by talking about a hardware device that has the software embedded. However, such patents can be used against pure softwre. Once the patents are granted they would be used in the normal way and tested in court, but if they are done properly there's no reason to think they are not enforceable.
I agree that Ubuntu is a better desktop install option than Knoppix, which doesn't work well on the HD, but Knoppix has much better hardware detection even now - Knoppix's UI is not very different to Ubuntu's, it just has a lot of software installed.
I use NOD32 myself, and find it pretty good, although its UI is horrible. However, unless you are scanning with several tools and being generally vigilant about security, you won't know which malware your main AV and spyware tool are missing - no AV/spyware tool is 100% effective, and Storm in particular is morphing so fast that many variants still aren't detected.
The simplest and cheapest solution to staying secure at present is to use a Linux distro for most Internet purposes, and keep Windows only for apps that must run there, e.g. Windows only games that don't run on Cedega/Wine etc. These days, Firefox and other apps on Ubuntu or similar modern distros are very good. If you don't want to install Linux, just download the Knoppix live CD and use that - it's incredibly good at detecting your hardware and will let you browse more safely.
If you must use Windows, make sure you are a power user, or pay an expert for a few hours' setup, and maybe repeat calls every 3 months, and of course the cost of AV/spyware updates, and listen to their advice about not clicking on random URLs sent by friends. Windows really isn't a low cost option when you factor in the hassle of having to change all your passwords and worry about your cards or bank being raided, or the cost of paying for setup and software as here.
Here's a small and possibly unrepresentative datapoint from last weekend that would tend to suggest there are a lot of infected PCs out there, some of them with Storm. Basically, 2 of 3 PCs scanned had backdoor trojans and I didn't have time to debug the third PC enough to scan it.
.EXE), ran out of time to debug this so did not install Webroot or any other tools. Also had AVG antivirus, which was up to date, and no anti-spyware. Presumed infected.
I spyware scanned three PCs belonging to two friends/family households. Naturally, they were all Windows. I used Webroot Spysweeper which is pretty good but costs, and Kaspersky online scan, which is good but slow, and virus only.
- PC 1: infected with various spyware and a backdoor trojan (remote access by the bad guys) - had an up to date antivirus (AVG) that didn't spot any of this, but no anti-spyware installed.
- PC 2 (same network as 1): couldn't even install new software (error on running any new
- PC 3: (2nd household) - infected with a different backdoor trojan and several viruses. Had Norton anti-virus that had not updated since 2004.
I would assume the average Windows PC has a high chance of some sort of infection, unless the users are very careful about installing third party software, some of which carries spyware or worse, and clicking on links in IE. Even Firefox had spyware on one of these machines.
Windows PCs run by power users (not the users here) can be somewhat secure, but it's painful to make them so. One colleague who's very techie still got infected by a PDF security hole recently, so you need Secunia PSI to run continuously, as well as monitoring some security blogs, and updating software regularly, as well as using a good anti-spyware tool, not using IE/Outlook, etc etc. However, once you are making this much effort, the work needed to install Ubuntu becomes much less of a hurdle - you might as well just switch over one PC so you have a safe PC for online shopping/banking etc.
The only good thing about this story is that nothing very important was being done on these PCs - little online shopping and no online banking... however, that's the users' self-reported status and they may well not want to admit they are at risk.
I don't do this for a living, I'm just a Windows and Linux user who wondered why there were so many popups on one of these PCs and ended up getting sucked into this when I should have been socialising - fortunately anti-spyware scans can run during dinner...
.DEBs are a bit like .MSIs, but there are some major differences - as you mention, you can use Gdebi to install arbitrary .DEBs bu8t it's a lot better if the package is actually in a repository already. The big difference is that for packages in a repository, you can install a whole set of packages (tens or hundreds) with a single operation, whether CLI or GUI.
Try doing that with Windows Installers - just keeping a Windows box up to date with security fixes (beyond Windows and MS Office) is quite time consuming, whereas on Ubuntu the system actually prompts you like Windows Update *for every app you have ever installed* from an Ubuntu repository...
You might also like to investigate Plucene and KinoSearch which are both Perl ports of the Lucene engine. It's also worth considering combining your search engine with Wikis where possible - then you can find documents by keywords and also navigate to a Wiki page providing context and ralted documents or Wiki pages. TWiki, which is the most popular open source enterprise Wiki engine, has plugins for both these engines, see http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEnginePluceneAddOn
Let's see about this "Windows just works" thing - yes, Windows apps are generally quite stable these days, and the system rarely bluescreens. However, on my 1 GB laptop with XP, running quite a few browser/office apps but nothing unusual, and fully patched as a corporate laptop, I have had the following issues
- have to forcibly reset the system every few weeks when it completely locks up - most recently this morning when I tried to do a standby and the whole system locked up
- install a new ATI driver to solve a bluescreen a few weeks ago - seems OK now, but I've never had a video driver crash on Linux
- on Saturday, found that every time I tried to run Windows Explorer, it crashed, taking down the main Explorer task bar - so I couldn't even browse filesystem to see what is wrong! Luckily I could work around this to discover that a particular copy protection DLL, which put itself in the temp directory, had been deleted by temp file cleanup, causing the crash. But why doesn't Explorer lock such DLLs? Of course, the copy protection DLL wouldn't be needed with open source apps, so this is something of an app bug.
- every few days I have to restart because Windows says 'insufficient memory to complete operation' - this is on a 1 GB box with a huge pagefile, and I'm only using 1.5-2 GB total! What on earth happened to virtual memory???
Meanwhile on my Ubuntu box, the admin is really zero now I'm using Feisty - my HP printer was discovered on the network by the HPLIP setup tool, and just worked. The only lockup I had was when Google's Picasa went mad and used 100% CPU, and even then I could kill it from an SSH login, so I didn't even need to restart X.
The point is that Windows does work, but it takes a huge amount of effort to keep it working, unless you have a very vanilla or locked-down system where you run only one or two apps and don't install third party software. Linux, and particularly Ubuntu or other distros with good package management, enables you to install a huge number of apps very easily *and they keep working*. My uptime on my Ubuntu box is regularly up in the months, but on my Windows box it's down to a few days, mostly due to the lockups.
BTW my Windows laptop above is behind a firewall but it isn't locked down fortunately. I'm sure a locked down Windows box is stable, but with Linux you can have a configurable, extensible system that can still be centrally administered for the core components and apps.
SuSE's whole 'we work better with Microsoft' is mostly marketing spin, and the Novell/Microsoft deal is incredibly dangerous. SuSE does apparently work well with MS networks, but so do some other distros, and there's nothing (apart from this sort of patent deal) preventing any distro picking up on SuSE's improvements.
Microsoft is not doing the Novell deal to help the Linux world - over time it will try to limit and encumber Linux with all sorts of required licenses, to control more and more of the Linux ecosystem.
WiMAX can use both licensed spectrum (e.g. Sprint, Clearwire) and unlicensed spectrum - the latter is more prone to interference of course, and is limited in the power you can use, so it's less useful for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) coverage (depending on how close you are to the WiMAX base station). See http://www.wimax.com/education/faq/faq48.
I'd expect the commercial WiMAX services to use licensed spectrum, but that doesn't stop someone setting up their own WiMAX network if they can find suitable hardware supporting spectrum that is unlicensed in their country.
Firefox has little if any code in common with Netscape 4.x - there was a complete rewrite of the layout engine (NGLayout, now called Gecko) as part of the Netscape 5 and 6 project, and this same Gecko engine is now used by Firefox. So there was no inheriting of broken code. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(layout_engine) and other pages for backup on this.
It's true that people in developing nations will be the most affected by the estimated 160,000 deaths a year due to global warming - see http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2003/09/6 0640. However, in France in 2003, over 15,000 people died from the heatwave, which is generally accepted to be a more common occurrence as global warming increases. In Greece recently, 60 people died in horrific fires over a major part of the Peloponnese, including some trying to escape in cars.
More prosaically, there will be wider impacts that are less likely to kill you, but could well affect your health (e.g. dengue fever and West Nile), wellbeing (more frequent hurricanes, droughts and other extreme weather) and wealth (the US economy will take a dive if it doesn't do anything about global warming). See http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons.asp for some impacts.
So don't be so damn smug and ill-informed - you will be affected in some way, and far more than by local air pollution.
In 'the real cost of Windows for most of us is less than $50', you aren't including the huge cost in time of keeping a Windows box up and running, and secure, and the costs of antivirus, anti-spyware, etc, etc. I spend most of my computer time at home maintaining the family Windows PC, not on keeping the Ubuntu PC working, which just stays up in that boring old Linuxy way.
Yes, there's inertia, but if you don't like Microsoft it's quite possible to buy alternatives - like a Mac for the less techie, or the various pre-installed Linux options for the more techie. Or you can just use OpenOffice at home, as a very easy step that saves money and promotes open document formats.
This article completely ignores the fact that these are gas-burning cars that create just as much CO2 (it mentions they get the same gas/petrol mileage as non-PZEV cars). Localised pollution is in some ways a good thing to reduce global warming, although bad in more general sense, simply because this pollution reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth (aka global dimming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming, but note that there are some interactions between global warming and dimming).
Anyway - pretty pointless concentrating on the less important pollutants rather than on those that may irreversibly change the earth's climate through global warming...
You may now waste lots of time trying to convince me that global warming doesn't exist or is not caused by human activity. (FX: rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.)
EBCDIC wouldn't really be a problem - just work in ASCII and convert to/from EBCDIC as needed for I/O. There are many libraries to do this for C, Perl, etc. The real issue is any Voyager-specific I/O hardware.
This reminds me of my reaction to Linux on PCs about 15 years ago - I had a choice of UnixWare (from Novell) or Linux, and thought that Linux was very incomplete and wouldn't go anywhere. Today, UnixWare is almost dead, and many of the surviving Unixes are open source (the BSDs, Solaris, Darwin, ...) due to the success of Linux on the server. I now run Linux on my main home PC, and customers of my (proprietary software) employer are now saying 'support Linux or Windows or you won't buy your software at all in 18 months time'.
Mobile phone Linux will develop just as Linux did on PCs, servers and embedded devices. See this article by Jim Ready, who helped create the RTOS industry in the 1980s, for more on how Linux became a mobile phone OS through reduced RAM usage, execute in place, power management, memory type based allocation, ARM Thumb instruction support for more compact code, DirectFB for nice GUIs without X's overhead, and real-time features: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9959043369.html
OpenMoko is explicitly documented as being a developer platform not a normal phone - maybe the title of the page you linked to, "Developer Preview", should have given you a clue there... If you want a Linux phone that is usable out of the box, there are quite a few available now even in the US, such as the Motorola Razr V8: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3724634466.html