I'm not sure what type of Z80 you were planning on using, but you might find PICs easier to use and lower power. This is just my thoughts on the matter, but a lot of people who breadboard fairly complex circuits like the Z80 and its interfaces do not have the resources to build for good noise suppression, making things a bit unreliable. Microcontrollers with on-chip EEProm contain far more of the critical signal lines inside the chip and it is much easier to build a reliable circuit. Unless you are planning on designing a 2-layer board with ground plane, which is a bit overkill for a one off project.
Another option would be an 8031-based design.
Microcontrollers also tend to have architectures better optimised for bit diddling and display driving.
Since you ask, in the 17th Century the English fought a Civil War at the end of which they executed a King. They then had a Revolutionary government which turned them from an obscure island to a major European power. The revolutionary government then collapsed and the Stuarts returned (back to the old corruption, in fact). In 1688 they turned out the Stuarts and started Constitutional Monarchy. In roughly a 40 year period they had a Revolution, a Cultural Revolution under a militaristic dictator, a reconquest by the Stuarts and the emergence of constitutional democracy in which the Commons held the power in the country. There is a rough parallel with the recent history of China except that we are still waiting for the democratic revolution. Given how the Glorious Revolution occurred, the nearest parallel might be the invasion of China by Taiwan, (England was invaded by a political faction in the Netherlands) so don't hold your breath.
I'm simplifying, it's more complicated than this.
Also the French went through just as much change between 1793 and 1815 - the Revolution and Napoleon. And (since this is not any kind of rebuttal Godwin's Law is not invoked) what about Germany between 1933 and 1945?
A chart is only cool if it presents data in a way that allows it to be understood. "Cool looking charts" rarely do that. In recent months I've had to ask people why they put 3D on simple bar charts (the "3d" lumps at the end distort the apparent size of the items), why they use pie charts for an ordered set (a circle presented at an apparent angle to the plane has no order around its circumference, every point is equivalent), and why auto-generated bar charts have no logic in the sequence of colours for the bars (do the colours mean anything? They are appropriate only for overlaid lines where they improve legibility.)
This guy needs to be beaten over the head with the complete works of Edward Tufte.
Before the Russian "invasion" of Afghanistan (believe it or not they actually were invited in by a secular government to deal with Islamic extremists...except in those days we, the good guys, supported the extremists because at least they weren't Communists), embassy staff in London went round buying up old history books on the Afghan wars. A bookseller tried to tell the Foreign Office but they didn't want to know - John Le Carre is spot on about UK and US intelligence inadequacies.
So the role call so far is:
British underestimate Afghans, lose war.
Russians underestimate Afghans, lose war.
US and British underestimate Afghans, are still in process of losing war.
Who was it said the only thing we learn from history is that people do not learn from history>
Sorry, it doesn't work like that at all. Ships have massive economies of scale because the surface area that causes the drag only increases as the 2/3 power of the mass. That's why ships are big. There is also a complicated rule about the power needed to achieve a given speed which also fuels the demand for size.
Your container ship would need between 50000 and 100000 sq ft of sail. Given the size of those mothers, that's not unreasonable, especially if the sails are of suitable design rather than scaled-up small boat rigs.
Me? I'd put the sails on big offshore wind farms and offset the fuel savings to the ships, simply because a huge turbine with big anchors is safer than a sailing ship in a gale. The net effect would be much the same, especially as you put the wind farms where the wind is while the best sailing route is not necessary the shortest and safest route if you do not need sail.
In fact, I have just bought an in-water external radiator for my boat and it is made of copper nickel alloy with silver solder. Although it is more expensive than stainless steel, the claimed benefit is that it does not suffer from fouling because algae and invertebrates will not attach.
I'll report back in five years as to whether it is true or not - if I'm still around, and if Slashdot is still around.
Small minded government bureaucracy, data insecurity, petty crime, and an economy funded by house price rises, immigration and "financial services". I live here because (a) I have family and (b) I've made enough to live on and (c) I have a house in a good part of the country, but where there are few jobs. I really feel sorry for the rising generation.
The interesting thing is why it is so difficult. The distillation of alcohol is fairly easy because the alcohol is the lighter component which boils off first (in effect, it is much more complicated in reality). The distillation of deuterium oxide is difficult because it is the heavier component and therefore you have to boil off almost all the lighter component to get any
concentration at all.
BTW I didn't mean to cause upset with my analogy. In general, you wouldn't expect NRA members to shoot their ex-wives because it would give ammunition to the anti-gun lobby. I was just looking for an example of a conflicted person in possession of a potentially dangerous device, since if anybody ever finds a male teenager without inner conflicts, he will have stopped breathing some time previously. It was meant to be light hearted, not an attack on the NRA. Since I stopped being a frequent visitor to the US a few years back, everything seems (from this side of the pond) to have become much more polarised.
Because somebody modded this informative. Anybody with a flame, a flask, infinite quantities of energy and infinite patience might be able to get some modestly concentrated heavy water this way, but it is going to be groaningly slow. Which is why the usual method requires differential electrolysis.
Alternatively, he might have bought a small quantity from a scientific supplier. Even the Government is going to realise, especially if his teachers wrote in, that the size of fusion bomb you can build with a couple of grammes of heavy water and the tritium from a beta light is less of a threat to the US than one NRA member with a hangover and a grudge against his ex-wife.
The problem in Palestine is Israelis that believe that Palestine, once conquered by Jews, is theirs forever. Despite the Exile and the Golah, they believe they have a permanent right to Biblical Israel. Plenty of rabbis have argued against this; there are plenty of threads of respectable Judaism that have held for many years that Israel does not depend on a particular piece of territory but is the spiritual heritage of the entire Jewish people. It is recorded that when the State of Israel was announced, an orthodox sect actually living in Palestine regarded it as a blasphemous act.
If you wanted to show a visitor from Mars the greatest achievment of the most intellectually prominent religious group the world has ever known, where would you go? Israel or New York? If you wanted to point to the highest pinnacle of Medieval civilisation, where would you go? The Catholic corruption in Rome and Avignon? Or the advanced civilisation in Granada where Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together successfully?
The problem is all the warlords, gang leaders and child abusers that band together in the name of a particular religion and project their territorial imperatives and hatreds onto others. There are plenty of Christian examples and Muslim examples. There are, and for some reason it particularly makes me sad, Jewish examples. But no group has a monopoly of good or evil.
It's worth remembering that when Israel started, the then King of Jordan thought it was a good thing because it could kick start the modernisation of the Middle East. Israel began in exactly the sort of moderate level factional war that is now taking place in Iraq, and one interpretation of history is that the founders of Israel behaved in such a way as to alienate the Jordanians because, even then, their ultimate goal was not peace and stability but expansionism and hegemony (another interpretation is that they were not diplomats but, basically, inexperienced ex-soldiers with similar motivations to the IRA. Lacking the skills to negotiate their way to a solid position in the Middle East, they went straight to a military solution.)
Israeli governments seem to learn nothing from their history. Their solution to every problem is higher walls and more powerful weapons. This latest proposal, however, is to develop something which has proliferation implications as nasty as nasty as nuclear or chemical weapons. How is Israel going to contain it (even if their intention is not to earn foreign dollars by selling on to "friendly" states?)
Weapons of this type are destroyers of democracy. They mean that politicians have to hide behind ever stronger defences until they are incapable of living as normal people and cannot relate to them. It is an absolute tragedy that the people whose ideas are so much of the bedrock of modern civilisation seem to have an offshoot who are determined to undermine it.
They actually assume growing oil consumption with rising output followed by a period of decline in which there will be peaks and troughs as ways are found to exploit less accessible reserves. Whether or not they are paid for by the oil industry, they are making a rational case that the "peak oil" theory is invalid.
Their axe to grind is quite obvious. It is not in the interests of the oil industry that we spend lots of money on alternative energy which then becomes cheaper than oil just as it becomes apparent that the world oil supply is in good shape. They want to persuade us not to support the investment in alternatives.
But not everything the oil industry wants is necessarily bad. A decision to base transport on progressively smaller and more efficient vehicles could be quite rational. Many options like fuel cells or solar power are basically most suited to city dwellers in developed countries. A Chinese peasant is more likely to be lifted out of poverty by a 50cc Honda than a Prius with a rechargeable battery. Developing a version of that Honda with an iron rather than an aluminum engine, perhaps on a direct injection or Diesel cycle, could have a huge impact on manufacturing and operating fuel consumption. What is more, its manufacture will be more environmentally friendly than anything currently involving batteries.
If the oil industry is doing some special pleading, I suspect it is aligned to things like tax breaks for exploration, extraction research and additional refining capability. The perception to be attacked is that as we have reached peak oil, there is no need to invest in these things because there will be no return.
Personally, I believe that the threat of global warming is real and needs to be addressed. But rational thinking is called for. We are not all going to be driving solar powered cars in five, or even fifty, years time. We need to invest in things that will make a difference in the 10-30 year timescale. These people are suggesting that, with good management, we can sustain much of the present economy for that long, allow the rise of China and India, and so we should not panic.
Actually, she is really a 19th century ship, built using the latest technology at the very end of the 18th and rebuilt more than once. But yes, it is good that we still have such things.
It also makes it clear that the tests could be defeated by anybody with statistical knowledge, and that in the long term they could be defeated by extensive collusion. My belief is that this approach will simply lead to a gradual slide in standards owing to the incentive to everybody in the system to cheat as a whole rather than individually.
There is only one answer, really. It is to treat teaching like any other career, and seek to recruit and promote the best by proper incentives. Such schemes already exist (Teach First in the UK, which was founded by the guy who introduced it in the US)
Disclaimer: one of my kids is on the scheme. But at least this allows me to say that he is getting the kind of training and support that would be expected from a corporate graduate development scheme, and that it shows.
If you give teachers in deprived areas the same attention and status that you would give to a new army officer, or a graduate trainee with Proctor & Gamble, you will attract the sort of people who will rise to the challenge.
Don't forget, good teachers are real wealth creators. If they were paid according to the value of the wealth they create, there would be no recruitment problems.
Sorry about that stupid post. Yes of course the Shuttle computers are programmed in HAL and in fact I knew that, if I only had woken up my older brain cells.
Given the vintage of the Shuttle computers I suspect that they are programmed in assembler. There are all kinds of possible issues; what makes you think that the internal representation of time is anything that involves days, or how dates received from outside are translated?
All right, I realise you were trying to be funny but it is a serious point. Progress is systems design is so rapid that stuff from the 70s and 80s is like something from another world - when the Shuttle software was being written, I was working on a reasonably state of the art system in which every critical function had to be written in assembler and the compiler output had to be hand edited - even after we had upgraded the CPU specification to the point that the EMP people were complaining that the only components on the CPU board that they had in their library were the resistors.
Getting really philosophical for a moment, how about this for a sobering thought? We still have the materials and skills to maintain medieval cathedrals. We could probably, without too much trouble, crew and maintain an 18th century ship. We can easily maintain a 19th century railroad engine. We still have early 20th century motor ships in service. We can (with difficulty) keep aircraft from WW2 flying. But keeping a 1980s reusable spacecraft going is extremely difficult, and a 10 year old mobile phone is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
Only individuals and tiny companes pay it. Companies buy assets without having to pay tax, because large corporations would kick up too much stink. As a result if you are self-employed you have to register and do the paperwork to avoid paying sales tax on your business assets.
First, companies and governments spend lots of money on paying people more than they have to. They do this to deny skills to the competition, and to buy loyalty. Because they do not truly know the motivation of their workers, this will involve overpaying. This is an example of asymmetric information. Unfortunately free and transparent markets exist only in the minds of academics with tenure, who are free from having to worry about reality.
As for labo(u)r, only the basic kinds of labour are commodities (ditch digging.) The nature of a commodity is that, with a few minor scaling parameters, it is the same everywhere (I can buy wheat given only a few basic numbers like moisture content; if I have an ISO certificate of compliance I can buy, say, 316 alloy set screws anywhere in the world. These are commodities.) IT labour is not a commodity because of factors like language, culture, the difficulty of evaluating different degree courses and experience in different companies, and social skills factors. You cannot switch in 50 CS graduates from Mumbai and switch out 50 CS graduates from Imperial College London and expect anything like the same results on a given project. If IT labour was a commodity, you could do precisely that. Hence Google's recruitment system.
God preserve us from people who believe economics 101 without any real world experience.
There ought to be some kind of celebration that this wonderful (and actually quite useful) word has actually made it into print, in what seems to be a government report. Literacy is not yet dead. And in Australia, even better.
Perhaps the most suitable punishment for lying lobbyists (is there another kind?) would be to be beaten over the head with philosophy textbooks until they coluld tell their episteme from their noesis.
The problem I have, as a part-time researcher in a specific area, is obtaining information given that I have chosen to live in a rural area. To a certain extent the Internet has made this decision feasible, and Wikipedia helps. But I have to interpret it in the light of my own background knowledge. In the past we did not have quite so much uninformation floating around, partly because idiots (of whom there are many) had to make the effort to visit libraries and search paper books to support their ideas, and this was hard work.
I don't argue that there should not be a Wikipedia, but I would love to see an academic version with some real clout (which would include the legal right to slap cease and desist on anybody copying its content instead of linking to it.)
Angel is a brilliant mirror designer, but given that's what he spends his time thinking about, how much credibility would you give his ideas on fixing global warming? He is probably about as qualified to make suggestions on the subject as Mrs. Guy Ritchie. Or me.
Some of this is shooting the messenger. The truth is that throughout history much of the information available to human beings has been incorrect, lies, spin, and shameless self-promotion. One reason we have universities and the complex structures of peer review and official publication is to try and establish a gold standard for reliable knowledge and discourse about it, and it is clear from the way that universities have evolved that they have to have political independence to work.
There are two special difficulties with the Internet. First, the sheer ease and untraceablity of publication which makes life so easy for the irresponsible. And second, the growing tendency of even responsible people to quote or link to other information without thinking. And there is a special problem with Wikipedia; the absence of any proper oversight. It's significant (at least to me) that the major on-line newspapers, the NYT and the UK Guardian, both have stringent procedures for responding to reader complaints.
It would be really good if the major world universities would actually get together and produce something like this, perhaps with a clearly delimited three-tier approach:
Highest tier, fact checked academic publication rendered to encyclopedia level.
Second tier: Reviewed and monitored information not from academic sources, like the CIA yearbook.
Third tier: reader contributed unverified information clearly labelled as such.
Oh, disinformation does get started on the Internet!
Baron is a family name not a title (there are plenty of people called Earl or surnamed King in the US, this should hardly be surprising.) AFAIK he is the son of rather distinguished psychologists. Which may be where he gets some of his ideas from, if you think about it. I'd take his heredity over the descendant of some successful thief who was able to buy a minor peerage, any day.
I have now had to replace Ubuntu twice, and both times for the same reason. An automatic update screwed X and I was not able to recover it. Obviously no data was lost, but the tedium of reinstalling a whole load of applications wasn't, in the end, worth it. Getting VMWare and NetBeans and DB2 was taking far longer than the Ubuntu install. Much as I dislike XP, it has been extremely stable.
I don't have the technical ability to write Norton Ghost for Linux, or a way of undoing updates from the terminal, but those are surely what is needed. And a few other things. I would like an easy way to set up partitions to hold my email and database so I can reinstall without having to backup and restore data. One that does not require a deep understanding of manual configuration. And I would like a way to create a simple Windows share as part of the install process.
As a developer, in the last few years I am beginning to feel that MS is finally getting things right. Vista may actually be a step in the wrong direction, but I suspect there is a Plan B. No, I think it is still very much on the multi-CPU server that Linux is a threat to MS. On the desktop it is still a cloud no bigger than a Gnome icon.
Slashdot Mirror
Another option would be an 8031-based design.
Microcontrollers also tend to have architectures better optimised for bit diddling and display driving.
I'm simplifying, it's more complicated than this.
Also the French went through just as much change between 1793 and 1815 - the Revolution and Napoleon. And (since this is not any kind of rebuttal Godwin's Law is not invoked) what about Germany between 1933 and 1945?
This guy needs to be beaten over the head with the complete works of Edward Tufte.
"Syntax error near ','"
So the role call so far is:
- British underestimate Afghans, lose war.
- Russians underestimate Afghans, lose war.
- US and British underestimate Afghans, are still in process of losing war.
Who was it said the only thing we learn from history is that people do not learn from history>Your container ship would need between 50000 and 100000 sq ft of sail. Given the size of those mothers, that's not unreasonable, especially if the sails are of suitable design rather than scaled-up small boat rigs.
Me? I'd put the sails on big offshore wind farms and offset the fuel savings to the ships, simply because a huge turbine with big anchors is safer than a sailing ship in a gale. The net effect would be much the same, especially as you put the wind farms where the wind is while the best sailing route is not necessary the shortest and safest route if you do not need sail.
I'll report back in five years as to whether it is true or not - if I'm still around, and if Slashdot is still around.
Small minded government bureaucracy, data insecurity, petty crime, and an economy funded by house price rises, immigration and "financial services". I live here because (a) I have family and (b) I've made enough to live on and (c) I have a house in a good part of the country, but where there are few jobs. I really feel sorry for the rising generation.
BTW I didn't mean to cause upset with my analogy. In general, you wouldn't expect NRA members to shoot their ex-wives because it would give ammunition to the anti-gun lobby. I was just looking for an example of a conflicted person in possession of a potentially dangerous device, since if anybody ever finds a male teenager without inner conflicts, he will have stopped breathing some time previously. It was meant to be light hearted, not an attack on the NRA. Since I stopped being a frequent visitor to the US a few years back, everything seems (from this side of the pond) to have become much more polarised.
Alternatively, he might have bought a small quantity from a scientific supplier. Even the Government is going to realise, especially if his teachers wrote in, that the size of fusion bomb you can build with a couple of grammes of heavy water and the tritium from a beta light is less of a threat to the US than one NRA member with a hangover and a grudge against his ex-wife.
If you wanted to show a visitor from Mars the greatest achievment of the most intellectually prominent religious group the world has ever known, where would you go? Israel or New York? If you wanted to point to the highest pinnacle of Medieval civilisation, where would you go? The Catholic corruption in Rome and Avignon? Or the advanced civilisation in Granada where Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together successfully?
The problem is all the warlords, gang leaders and child abusers that band together in the name of a particular religion and project their territorial imperatives and hatreds onto others. There are plenty of Christian examples and Muslim examples. There are, and for some reason it particularly makes me sad, Jewish examples. But no group has a monopoly of good or evil.
Israeli governments seem to learn nothing from their history. Their solution to every problem is higher walls and more powerful weapons. This latest proposal, however, is to develop something which has proliferation implications as nasty as nasty as nuclear or chemical weapons. How is Israel going to contain it (even if their intention is not to earn foreign dollars by selling on to "friendly" states?)
Weapons of this type are destroyers of democracy. They mean that politicians have to hide behind ever stronger defences until they are incapable of living as normal people and cannot relate to them. It is an absolute tragedy that the people whose ideas are so much of the bedrock of modern civilisation seem to have an offshoot who are determined to undermine it.
Their axe to grind is quite obvious. It is not in the interests of the oil industry that we spend lots of money on alternative energy which then becomes cheaper than oil just as it becomes apparent that the world oil supply is in good shape. They want to persuade us not to support the investment in alternatives.
But not everything the oil industry wants is necessarily bad. A decision to base transport on progressively smaller and more efficient vehicles could be quite rational. Many options like fuel cells or solar power are basically most suited to city dwellers in developed countries. A Chinese peasant is more likely to be lifted out of poverty by a 50cc Honda than a Prius with a rechargeable battery. Developing a version of that Honda with an iron rather than an aluminum engine, perhaps on a direct injection or Diesel cycle, could have a huge impact on manufacturing and operating fuel consumption. What is more, its manufacture will be more environmentally friendly than anything currently involving batteries.
If the oil industry is doing some special pleading, I suspect it is aligned to things like tax breaks for exploration, extraction research and additional refining capability. The perception to be attacked is that as we have reached peak oil, there is no need to invest in these things because there will be no return.
Personally, I believe that the threat of global warming is real and needs to be addressed. But rational thinking is called for. We are not all going to be driving solar powered cars in five, or even fifty, years time. We need to invest in things that will make a difference in the 10-30 year timescale. These people are suggesting that, with good management, we can sustain much of the present economy for that long, allow the rise of China and India, and so we should not panic.
Actually, she is really a 19th century ship, built using the latest technology at the very end of the 18th and rebuilt more than once. But yes, it is good that we still have such things.
There is only one answer, really. It is to treat teaching like any other career, and seek to recruit and promote the best by proper incentives. Such schemes already exist (Teach First in the UK, which was founded by the guy who introduced it in the US)
Disclaimer: one of my kids is on the scheme. But at least this allows me to say that he is getting the kind of training and support that would be expected from a corporate graduate development scheme, and that it shows.
If you give teachers in deprived areas the same attention and status that you would give to a new army officer, or a graduate trainee with Proctor & Gamble, you will attract the sort of people who will rise to the challenge.
Don't forget, good teachers are real wealth creators. If they were paid according to the value of the wealth they create, there would be no recruitment problems.
Sorry about that stupid post. Yes of course the Shuttle computers are programmed in HAL and in fact I knew that, if I only had woken up my older brain cells.
All right, I realise you were trying to be funny but it is a serious point. Progress is systems design is so rapid that stuff from the 70s and 80s is like something from another world - when the Shuttle software was being written, I was working on a reasonably state of the art system in which every critical function had to be written in assembler and the compiler output had to be hand edited - even after we had upgraded the CPU specification to the point that the EMP people were complaining that the only components on the CPU board that they had in their library were the resistors.
Getting really philosophical for a moment, how about this for a sobering thought? We still have the materials and skills to maintain medieval cathedrals. We could probably, without too much trouble, crew and maintain an 18th century ship. We can easily maintain a 19th century railroad engine. We still have early 20th century motor ships in service. We can (with difficulty) keep aircraft from WW2 flying. But keeping a 1980s reusable spacecraft going is extremely difficult, and a 10 year old mobile phone is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
Only individuals and tiny companes pay it. Companies buy assets without having to pay tax, because large corporations would kick up too much stink. As a result if you are self-employed you have to register and do the paperwork to avoid paying sales tax on your business assets.
First, companies and governments spend lots of money on paying people more than they have to. They do this to deny skills to the competition, and to buy loyalty. Because they do not truly know the motivation of their workers, this will involve overpaying. This is an example of asymmetric information. Unfortunately free and transparent markets exist only in the minds of academics with tenure, who are free from having to worry about reality.
As for labo(u)r, only the basic kinds of labour are commodities (ditch digging.) The nature of a commodity is that, with a few minor scaling parameters, it is the same everywhere (I can buy wheat given only a few basic numbers like moisture content; if I have an ISO certificate of compliance I can buy, say, 316 alloy set screws anywhere in the world. These are commodities.) IT labour is not a commodity because of factors like language, culture, the difficulty of evaluating different degree courses and experience in different companies, and social skills factors. You cannot switch in 50 CS graduates from Mumbai and switch out 50 CS graduates from Imperial College London and expect anything like the same results on a given project. If IT labour was a commodity, you could do precisely that. Hence Google's recruitment system.
God preserve us from people who believe economics 101 without any real world experience.
Perhaps the most suitable punishment for lying lobbyists (is there another kind?) would be to be beaten over the head with philosophy textbooks until they coluld tell their episteme from their noesis.
I don't argue that there should not be a Wikipedia, but I would love to see an academic version with some real clout (which would include the legal right to slap cease and desist on anybody copying its content instead of linking to it.)
Angel is a brilliant mirror designer, but given that's what he spends his time thinking about, how much credibility would you give his ideas on fixing global warming? He is probably about as qualified to make suggestions on the subject as Mrs. Guy Ritchie. Or me.
There are two special difficulties with the Internet. First, the sheer ease and untraceablity of publication which makes life so easy for the irresponsible. And second, the growing tendency of even responsible people to quote or link to other information without thinking. And there is a special problem with Wikipedia; the absence of any proper oversight. It's significant (at least to me) that the major on-line newspapers, the NYT and the UK Guardian, both have stringent procedures for responding to reader complaints.
It would be really good if the major world universities would actually get together and produce something like this, perhaps with a clearly delimited three-tier approach:
Highest tier, fact checked academic publication rendered to encyclopedia level.
Second tier: Reviewed and monitored information not from academic sources, like the CIA yearbook.
Third tier: reader contributed unverified information clearly labelled as such.
Baron is a family name not a title (there are plenty of people called Earl or surnamed King in the US, this should hardly be surprising.) AFAIK he is the son of rather distinguished psychologists. Which may be where he gets some of his ideas from, if you think about it. I'd take his heredity over the descendant of some successful thief who was able to buy a minor peerage, any day.
I don't have the technical ability to write Norton Ghost for Linux, or a way of undoing updates from the terminal, but those are surely what is needed. And a few other things. I would like an easy way to set up partitions to hold my email and database so I can reinstall without having to backup and restore data. One that does not require a deep understanding of manual configuration. And I would like a way to create a simple Windows share as part of the install process.
As a developer, in the last few years I am beginning to feel that MS is finally getting things right. Vista may actually be a step in the wrong direction, but I suspect there is a Plan B. No, I think it is still very much on the multi-CPU server that Linux is a threat to MS. On the desktop it is still a cloud no bigger than a Gnome icon.