***I come from Norway. We drive normal cars, including lots of Japanese compacts, even when the snow is meter high, because we've actually heard of things like ploughs, and winter-tyres, combined with chains for the wheels if things get extreme.***
Absolutely. I live in Northwest Vermont. We get snow. Sometimes lots of it. We have a foot (30cm) of snow on the ground right now and will probably get another foot tonight. Back when cars were RWD, I carried chains and had to use them maybe twice a year. Don't bother now that cars are all FWD. Some people do drive AWD-4WD vehicles -- especially if they have steep driveways. Personally, like many folks around here I drive regular cars with all weather radials and don't have much in the way of trouble . I don't have any idea why so many Americans think they need 4WD SUVs in any climate where snowflakes are ever seen. But there appears to be no way to bring those folks into contact with reality.
***can't recall more than 5 problems upgrading from 95 to 98 back in the days***
That's probably because there wasn't that much difference between Win98 and Win95 OSR2. And there were no DRM issues. And the systems were simpler back then.
As I recall the only major issue with Window 98 relative to 95 was mediocre performance (due to IE integration) and that 98 would often hang during shutdown because of what turned out to be about five dozen separate and distinct configuration specific bugs. But those didn't matter all that much.
The procedure for installing Vista SP1 sounds byzantine. I wonder how bad it will be in practice. Is this sort of creeping paralysis from too much complexity (if that's really the problem) going to get worse? Is it going to affect Apple and Linux also eventually as they add capabilities?
***Small meteors usually don't make it to the ground with enough velocity to knock over a blade of grass.***
A bit more than that I think. Terminal velocity in fact. Bigger pieces have enough MV^2 to punch through the roof of a house or the trunk metal on a car -- both have happened. Smaller pieces -- probably enough to puncture the skin and maybe enough to penetrate a bone. Apparently enough to embed themselves in tooth enamel. People have been injured and even killed by bullets fired into the air -- some of which have penetrated skulls.
The thinking behind all this looks to have a way to go. In order for fragments of an object to strike sites in both Siberia and Michigan simultaneously, it would have to break up at an altitude of several thousand kilometers -- way above the atmosphere -- would it not? And if that happened, the small pieces would, under normal circumstances, burn up in the atmosphere, no?
Maybe separate low altitude burst events? If the burst were near the animal -- say a few hundred meters away, the velocity of the fragments could be more like the (relatively high) terminal velocity of a large object than the (lower) terminal velocity for the individual fragments.
***I know "US Government Caught Manipulating Wikipedia" is a cool title, but seriously, does anyone think the US government, the CIA or the Vatican would be stupid enough to get caught if they actually wanted to influence a wikipedia article?***
As one who spent about three decades working on various government projects, let me assure you that they are every bit of dumb enough to both do stupid things and get caught at it. Google "Bay of Pigs", "Watergate", "Iran-Contra", or "Gary Powers" if you don't believe me. In fact the government is composed of people as was Enron and whatever company/ies are going to become the poster children for the slow speed financial trainwreck that is currently unfolding. People do dumb things sometimes.
However, the House of representatives is NOT the government in the way we usually think of the government. It consists of about 100 dedicated public servants and 350 whack jobs, crooks, and assorted lowlifes who have managed to latch onto good paying jobs that require no skills whatsoever except a modest ability to keep track of who paid what bribes. Like a candidate up here in Vermont said a few years ago. "Where else can a guy with a sixth grade education hope to get a job with health insurance?". You should not be surprised at anything originating in the House of Representatives. Keep in mind, for example that one member is currently vigorously defending his constitutional right to keep $90000 in small unmarked bills of unknown origin in his freezer. Not only that, a bunch of his buddies in the house protested when the guy was stripped of his committee assignments.
I don't work in an OR, so I don't know how easy it is to count things or how many there are to count. If we're talking three things, counting is probably easy. If we are talking twenty three, then maybe not.
Here's another simplistic solution: Make sure that all the tools and objects used in the surgery contain some iron. Comes time to sew up, wave a metal detector or magnetic field detector over the area to make sure there is no metal where there should not be metal. In cases where that won't work (e.g. the intent of the surgery was to insert a steel pin) fall back to counting.
Frankly, given the erratic nature of bar code readers, I have trouble envisioning an operating room staff waiting patiently with a patient who is in fragile health and has been under anesthesia too long while a nurse tries to persuade a recalcitrant bar code reader to scan a bloody sponge. But, what do I know?
***If you are running as a normal (non-administrative) user such compromise can compromise anything you do. If you are running as an administrative user...***
All the data that I actually care about compromising is in my user account so it's at risk no matter what. I suppose that I really should move my financial and other sensitive stuff to a different user account that never uses the internet. I don't know anyone who does that and I've never seen it in a list of security suggestions.
And I don't see anything that prevents my user account from being used in Denial Of Service attacks against external servers. Or that prevents my user account from attacking servers of any sort on my local PC or on the intranet. And what -- other than the fact that it's probably not necessary -- is to stop the virus maker from including a selection of privilege escalation exploits in his bundle of aggravation?
Overall, I think that the Don't_Run_As_Admin_And_You'll_Be_OK lot are another bunch of folks with a false sense of security. I'd fault them because unlike naive users, they should know better. (However, running as admin in a multiuser environment really does put other users at additional risk).
While we're talking about false sense of security, let's don't forget the smug Mac and Linux users. We don't need virus checkers. More accurate would be We don't need virus checkers yet. Both systems are built with the same flawed by design technologies used to build Windows. If we insist in coding in a language that permits buffer overflows, we are probably going to have buffer overflows. Same for many other attacks on sloppy/incomplete/nonexistent legality checking, etc. Carbon/Cocoa/Linux are by no means immune from these problems even if there are few current attacks.
I also strongly suspect that the biggest current positive factor preventing a total PC security meltdown is the use of NAT routing which strongly discourages unsolicited attacks on non-server PCs. What's going to happen when/if ipv6 comes along and NAT routing goes away?
***So, yes, UAV's do offer an advantage to manned aircraft. They can be made much smaller because they don't need to fit a human being inside them!***
For terrorists, they will be a Godsend. Just imagine if just one of these ten cheap UAVs we have here makes it through, we can blow up a airliner or fighter on the ground at any airport in the world where we can get line of sight to the UAV. Or knock down most any bridge. Or blow up any oil refinery.
And, I expect UAVs aren't limited to military applications. Imagine the potential for, carrying compact, high value loads -- narcotics, for example -- through potentially hostile environments -- The US border for example.
And I suppose that one could use them for avacado picking as well.
***Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting "let them eat cake" sort of message to the world's poor?***
Oh, probably. But not very many I'd guess. OLPC is a computer that is designed to provide cheap, effective computing in countries without a first world infrastructure. I have my doubts about it as an educational tool. But if I were looking for a computer to help with running a village store or garage or other local business someplace where news arrives on the afternoon bus (assuming that it doesn't break down again) and the power line (if any) is more or less a joke, an OLPC would look to be ideal. If you ask me, the third world could probably use as many insults like this as the first world can contrive.
If it actually is an insult then I'd imagine that they won't buy them.
***They're crazy if they think truckers will just turn around and go another way if the road says "no trucks".***
Apparently part of the problem is that trucks from all over the EU go through these tiny towns and the drivers don't always have all that good a grasp of English. Perhaps a couple of steel posts set in the road far enough apart that only vehicles that can get through town can pass between them would get the message across. But that's probably too simple-minded to ever get done.
***Honestly if you are close enough to employ this technique (including operating the kind of hardware necessary to do this undeniably cool hack) then you are close enough to shoulder surf long enough to get the guy's password.***
I'd imagine that the creepy dude in the next apartment gets a quite usable signal from your wireless keyboard. As does the hippie type upstairs and the guy across the hall with too many teeth, two expensive cars, and no visible means of support. Then there are the fake cable company employees out in the parking lot. Maybe they are using that 27 element yagi on top of the van for something other than tracking errant cable TV signals down.
I don't think it is something to be overly paranoid about unless you are in charge of security for a company with real secrets to protect, but here's a link http://cryptome.org/tempest-leak.htm.
Note that TEMPEST is mostly concerned with inadvertent radiation from equipment that is supposed to be hard wired. Wireless stuff deliberately puts out an RF signal, so its range is probably going to be a lot greater.
Not disagreeing with your main point, but there is no such thing as a machine that will run all Windows software. Never has been. My guess is that there never will be although virtual machines may yet suprise me. About the best I've ever been able to do is 75-80% of Windows applications running properly on any given Windows machine. And that required a lot of tinkering with configuration files and the #$@(* Registry. XP might currently be a bit better than that because the extraordinarily long delay between XP and Vista and the poor acceptance of Vista seems to have slowed the ordinarily rapidly moving Windows target to a crawl for a while. But the circus seems to be reving up again. Not my problem. I've been off XP for a couple of years and should be shutting down the last few apps on the W98 machine in four to six months.
Surely any country that didn't investigate just how vulnerable it and other countries are to attacks from the internet would be pretty foolish. Even if your country is someplace like Iceland or New Zealand that has few enemies and is unlikely to be attacked, you'd probably like to know what Denmark or Fiji could do to your information infrastructure if they chose to.. and how you could retaliate if you chose to.
Countries -- no names -- who think their national identity requires them to be the world's biggest bully have even more reason to be looking into cyber war. Never can tell when the perceived need to push someone around will come up. And it might not be a bad idea to find out how pushees might retaliate.
***They need to do a better job of recruitment. On any given night I can find better bands playing at local clubs then I hear on the radio.***
That's the problem of course. When they published hundreds of songs from talented song writers and musicians in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, the music industry did fine. Now that they don't, they are in trouble. When was the last time you turned on the radio and heard a new song with meaningful insights into the human condition, or a song making fun of politicians (Between Reagan, Clinton and Bush II there has surely been material enough to last for centuries), or even a little story like "Love Potion Number Nine" that was and is fun to listen to occasionally? Been a while. Decades in fact. No damn wonder the industry is in trouble. They don't have a product. Bound to affect sales sooner or later.
I don't buy many CDs. But it is not because of downloading. It's because there is nothing much worth buying. I think I'm far from alone.
***At the risk of sounding like the geezer that I actually am, they used to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." HTML is simple as dirt! If you can't code HTML you need a job at the McBurger Factory.***
I'm half with you. Simple HTML is fine and works pretty well for presenting information and some simple user interface stuff. I'm perfectly willing to live with that myself. It's all I need. And I can live with (or code around) the browsers that think that three 33% images require two lines of picture boxes. After all, they didn't promise me anything other than that they would use my markup as a guide to presentation.
The problem is that lots of folks really want or actually need an Internet Presentation Language, not a markup language -- something where they can tell the "browser" to put this here paragraph there, in a non-serif font with a fourteen point capital letter for the first (indented) paragraph. I don't have anything against that. But I won't ever do that, and neither will a lot of other folks.
So how about we define an HTML for simpletons like myself. Call it anything you want HTML6, HTML2007, HTML-mini... whatever. Take all the dubious "features" like SCRIPT (how can that possibly ever work 'right' or even well except in a controlled environment with a captive browser?) out. Define a language that even Microsoft can't screw up very badly. OK, then take everything else and put it into another language that includes every conceivable feature that anyone could want. Call that HTML 5.0 or HTML 7.0. Or IAPL 1.0 and spend the next decade or three trying to get it to work well? Is there some reason that won't/can't work?
***The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.***
I certainly wouldn't criticize anyone who has never encountered sudo's strange default configuration for assuming that a security feature popping up an administrative password box during setup would want the root password rather than the (pointless, no?) user password. Confused me also when I first encountered it years ago. Does Ubuntu ship with the default sudo configuration? Betcha not. (I'm a Slackware-xfce user myself).
***He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.***
My reading was that he thought that Flash should have been preinstalled on a consumer PC. Seemed reasonable to me. Still seems reasonable to me. Is there some sort of licensing thing that mandates that Flash be user installed?
***He can't find the "log out" menu item...***
Looking at the screen shot, neither can I. This is supposed to be an OS for non-technical users, no? His point is probably that a non-technical user is likely going to turn the silly thing off with the power switch or power cord. That would be OK if this were a sensibly designed consumer device, but being a computer it almost certainly isn't OK. I'm with him. When I encounter a "control" panel that looks like that, I install something I can understand. (BTW Is the '"F" you' at the bottom right end of the panel some sort of oddball joke? Almost makes me want to buy one of these things just so I can click it).
***He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.***
Ehrr, no. He thought that the Exalt didn't give him proper access to his WiFi configuration whereas he believed (correctly apparently) that Gnome Network Manager would.
Let me summarize the article for those who won't/can't read it.
The machine is not actually available in some Walmart stores at this time, but you can mail order it and get it shipped to your local store (aside: No way in hell -- I'd rather drive in Boston than navigate the parking lot at that place). Everex has this in other stores besides Walmart now. What Walmart has in your local Walmart store maybe is a $300 version that runs Vista. A Monitor is extra in all cases so it's really a $400-500 PC.
Hardware is fine -- really. Power consumption is OK. Not great, but OK. OS has some rough edges including, but not limited to, no obvious way to shut the thing down. The author scrapped the included gOS and installed vanilla Ubuntu which is, he thinks, what most users should do.
All things considered he says, it's OK except for the OS.
***IN EVERY INSTANCE where the data has been captured, at least 95% of the mortality decrease has occurred before the vaccine introduction. Sanitation and nutrition are far more responsible for the reduction in communicable disease than vaccines.***
Smallpox? Polio? Have you totally taken leave of your senses? If you want to express doubts about the efficacy and safety of some vaccines, be my guest. You may well be right about many of them. But keep some sense of proportion, quit telling others (incorrectly) that they don't know what they are talking about, and get a grip on reality.
I think perhaps you're a couple of decades out of date on this one.
Some third world countries, maybe a lot of them, seem to have agriculture, medicine, etc down well enough. Cuba has a medical delivery system about as effective as first world countries at a cost annual cost of $275 per person. Poppy farmers in Afghanistan have little trouble raising their crops and getting them to market despite the active opposition of the world's best equipped and most expensive military. What third world countries seem to lack is honest, effective governments and non-disfunctional social systems. For the most part, both capitalism and socialism seem to have failed them dismally. Countries who put their trust in God don't fare any better. Apparently God expects the faithful to apply a bit of common sense as well as the Bible, Koran or whatever.
The Earth would still have substantial tides without a moon. If I recall correctly, the solar component of tides is about 25% of the lunar component. But that'd still be significant. It's the reason that some high tides are higher than others.
And I might as well throw my other comments in here as well:
1. The slowing of the Earth's rotation due to tidal friction is well established. It's good physics and there is even some evidence for slowing of about 2 hours in the past 370 million years based on counting growth rings on Devonian corals. (That's not as straightforward as it probably sounds). Yes, without the moon, days would surely be a lot shorter. But probably not so dramatically so as to impede the evolution of life.
2. The formation of planets is poorly understood. Obviously it happens. Last time I looked -- about a decade or so ago --The situation had not moved much beyond where it was four centuries ago when Issac Newton and Rene Descartes disagreed about planetary formation. Descartes was, as it turns out, correct, that newly formed stars can be surrounded by rotating disks of material from which planets apparently accrete. It's an absolute certainty that essentially everything astronomical spins. However, Newton was correct that gravity alone can not account for the rotation. And neither, so far as I know, can anything else. At least not on the observed scale.
3. The theory that the Earth-Moon pair results from a planetary collision is just that -- a theory, not an absolute fact. It is based on a computer simulation done a couple of decades ago. For some reason the same people who have surely seen hundreds of faulty computer simulations in a wide variety of situations have bought into this one en masse. Why? Beats me. I'm not saying that it's wrong. Just that I'd not be astonished if it turns out not to be remotely correct.
4. I find it illuminating occasionally to reflect on the fact that perhaps 30% of the science (including much of the Astronomy and most of the Geology) I was taught in High School in the 1950s is no longer operative. I expect that about the same percentages will hold for those of today's high school students who make it through to 2057.
***The results say the current number of respondents is 10941 (and counting). Where did the figure of 20,000 come from?***
Rounding Error?
Probably related to the logic that has 139.5% of the users reporting in already.
In any case, we certainly are not going to blame these little arithmetical peculiarities on Linux. How about we blame Vista, Internet Explorer, the RIAA, George W Bush, and Intel? Don't worry. Ron Paul, Ubuntu, the second amendment and the free market will pull us all through this little computational rough spot.
***BTW, I've yet to meet someone who hates Microsoft Office (the "junk" as you call it, lol), as per your assertion.***
Maybe hate is too strong a word, but I sure as hell don't like MS Office. It was sort of OK a decade ago when the alternatives also sucked. But the world has moved on, and MS Office hasn't much.
***I guess since OpenOffice is an exact clone of it [MSOffice]***
In fact, OO is not an exact clone. First noticeable difference -- the Clipboard in OO Calc complies with the Common User Access Specification that Windows software is supposed to comply with. That's unlike the Clipboard in Excel which never has been compliant at least up through Office 2K and probably still isn't. The Excel people are very proud of their (gawdawful) user interface. I can't think why.
OO Calc has it's problems. For example, legends are prone to get overlaid onto other chart components. But overall, it's free. It's no worse than Excel (what could be? [actually, I know the answer to that--Kspread]) and it comes without licensing hassles. I haven't used OO Writer since Star Office days when it was about comperable to MS word in many areas, but a bit buggy in others -- e.g. Labels. I assume those are fixed. If so, I can't think of a single reason that anyone who doesn't have a fortune invested in VBA Macros would want to upgrade MSOffice rather than switching to Open Office. Those who choose to stick with Office 97 or Office 2000 and can live with a Excel won't be changing to either of course.
In any case, OO is the obvious choice for a $200 PC user. It'll surely do everything they need. Probably as well as MSOffice. Maybe better. And much more cheaply.
***Unless we can get to a point where we can just put all vehicular operation into the hands of computers, aircraft operation should be restricted to highly trained pilots only. Most people are just too stupid and irresponsible to handle it.***
My thinking as well. I'm not a pilot, but my impression is that aircraft (other than maybe lighter than air) are not as forgiving of carelessness or stupidity as cars are. OTOH, I think that reliable computer control of small aircraft could be achieved in as little as a couple of decades (as long as we don't let either Microsoft or "Detroit" anywhere near the code). So maybe PAVs aren't a lost cause just on the basis of pilot capability.
***Ah. However, while I'm no housing engineer or architect, I would think the roof would be able to repel less force than the walls, so the weight difference may just wind up in the same amount of destruction.***
Maybe in LA or Florida. In places where significant snow loads are expected, roofs are built stronger than sides.
***Seriously...does anybody really think this can work?***
Sure it can work. I expect it'll be a mediocre aircraft and a worse car. At $150K per copy, I don't expect there to be riots in the showrooms caused by too many people trying to buy too few vehicles. But I think they have a reasonable chance of selling a few before they run out of capital.
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Absolutely. I live in Northwest Vermont. We get snow. Sometimes lots of it. We have a foot (30cm) of snow on the ground right now and will probably get another foot tonight. Back when cars were RWD, I carried chains and had to use them maybe twice a year. Don't bother now that cars are all FWD. Some people do drive AWD-4WD vehicles -- especially if they have steep driveways. Personally, like many folks around here I drive regular cars with all weather radials and don't have much in the way of trouble . I don't have any idea why so many Americans think they need 4WD SUVs in any climate where snowflakes are ever seen. But there appears to be no way to bring those folks into contact with reality.
That's probably because there wasn't that much difference between Win98 and Win95 OSR2. And there were no DRM issues. And the systems were simpler back then.
As I recall the only major issue with Window 98 relative to 95 was mediocre performance (due to IE integration) and that 98 would often hang during shutdown because of what turned out to be about five dozen separate and distinct configuration specific bugs. But those didn't matter all that much.
The procedure for installing Vista SP1 sounds byzantine. I wonder how bad it will be in practice. Is this sort of creeping paralysis from too much complexity (if that's really the problem) going to get worse? Is it going to affect Apple and Linux also eventually as they add capabilities?
A bit more than that I think. Terminal velocity in fact. Bigger pieces have enough MV^2 to punch through the roof of a house or the trunk metal on a car -- both have happened. Smaller pieces -- probably enough to puncture the skin and maybe enough to penetrate a bone. Apparently enough to embed themselves in tooth enamel. People have been injured and even killed by bullets fired into the air -- some of which have penetrated skulls.
The thinking behind all this looks to have a way to go. In order for fragments of an object to strike sites in both Siberia and Michigan simultaneously, it would have to break up at an altitude of several thousand kilometers -- way above the atmosphere -- would it not? And if that happened, the small pieces would, under normal circumstances, burn up in the atmosphere, no?
Maybe separate low altitude burst events? If the burst were near the animal -- say a few hundred meters away, the velocity of the fragments could be more like the (relatively high) terminal velocity of a large object than the (lower) terminal velocity for the individual fragments.
As one who spent about three decades working on various government projects, let me assure you that they are every bit of dumb enough to both do stupid things and get caught at it. Google "Bay of Pigs", "Watergate", "Iran-Contra", or "Gary Powers" if you don't believe me. In fact the government is composed of people as was Enron and whatever company/ies are going to become the poster children for the slow speed financial trainwreck that is currently unfolding. People do dumb things sometimes.
However, the House of representatives is NOT the government in the way we usually think of the government. It consists of about 100 dedicated public servants and 350 whack jobs, crooks, and assorted lowlifes who have managed to latch onto good paying jobs that require no skills whatsoever except a modest ability to keep track of who paid what bribes. Like a candidate up here in Vermont said a few years ago. "Where else can a guy with a sixth grade education hope to get a job with health insurance?". You should not be surprised at anything originating in the House of Representatives. Keep in mind, for example that one member is currently vigorously defending his constitutional right to keep $90000 in small unmarked bills of unknown origin in his freezer. Not only that, a bunch of his buddies in the house protested when the guy was stripped of his committee assignments.
Here's another simplistic solution: Make sure that all the tools and objects used in the surgery contain some iron. Comes time to sew up, wave a metal detector or magnetic field detector over the area to make sure there is no metal where there should not be metal. In cases where that won't work (e.g. the intent of the surgery was to insert a steel pin) fall back to counting.
Frankly, given the erratic nature of bar code readers, I have trouble envisioning an operating room staff waiting patiently with a patient who is in fragile health and has been under anesthesia too long while a nurse tries to persuade a recalcitrant bar code reader to scan a bloody sponge. But, what do I know?
All the data that I actually care about compromising is in my user account so it's at risk no matter what. I suppose that I really should move my financial and other sensitive stuff to a different user account that never uses the internet. I don't know anyone who does that and I've never seen it in a list of security suggestions.
And I don't see anything that prevents my user account from being used in Denial Of Service attacks against external servers. Or that prevents my user account from attacking servers of any sort on my local PC or on the intranet. And what -- other than the fact that it's probably not necessary -- is to stop the virus maker from including a selection of privilege escalation exploits in his bundle of aggravation?
Overall, I think that the Don't_Run_As_Admin_And_You'll_Be_OK lot are another bunch of folks with a false sense of security. I'd fault them because unlike naive users, they should know better. (However, running as admin in a multiuser environment really does put other users at additional risk).
While we're talking about false sense of security, let's don't forget the smug Mac and Linux users. We don't need virus checkers. More accurate would be We don't need virus checkers yet. Both systems are built with the same flawed by design technologies used to build Windows. If we insist in coding in a language that permits buffer overflows, we are probably going to have buffer overflows. Same for many other attacks on sloppy/incomplete/nonexistent legality checking, etc. Carbon/Cocoa/Linux are by no means immune from these problems even if there are few current attacks.
I also strongly suspect that the biggest current positive factor preventing a total PC security meltdown is the use of NAT routing which strongly discourages unsolicited attacks on non-server PCs. What's going to happen when/if ipv6 comes along and NAT routing goes away?
For terrorists, they will be a Godsend. Just imagine if just one of these ten cheap UAVs we have here makes it through, we can blow up a airliner or fighter on the ground at any airport in the world where we can get line of sight to the UAV. Or knock down most any bridge. Or blow up any oil refinery.
And, I expect UAVs aren't limited to military applications. Imagine the potential for, carrying compact, high value loads -- narcotics, for example -- through potentially hostile environments -- The US border for example.
And I suppose that one could use them for avacado picking as well.
Oh, probably. But not very many I'd guess. OLPC is a computer that is designed to provide cheap, effective computing in countries without a first world infrastructure. I have my doubts about it as an educational tool. But if I were looking for a computer to help with running a village store or garage or other local business someplace where news arrives on the afternoon bus (assuming that it doesn't break down again) and the power line (if any) is more or less a joke, an OLPC would look to be ideal. If you ask me, the third world could probably use as many insults like this as the first world can contrive.
If it actually is an insult then I'd imagine that they won't buy them.
Apparently part of the problem is that trucks from all over the EU go through these tiny towns and the drivers don't always have all that good a grasp of English. Perhaps a couple of steel posts set in the road far enough apart that only vehicles that can get through town can pass between them would get the message across. But that's probably too simple-minded to ever get done.
I'd imagine that the creepy dude in the next apartment gets a quite usable signal from your wireless keyboard. As does the hippie type upstairs and the guy across the hall with too many teeth, two expensive cars, and no visible means of support. Then there are the fake cable company employees out in the parking lot. Maybe they are using that 27 element yagi on top of the van for something other than tracking errant cable TV signals down.
I don't think it is something to be overly paranoid about unless you are in charge of security for a company with real secrets to protect, but here's a link http://cryptome.org/tempest-leak.htm.
Note that TEMPEST is mostly concerned with inadvertent radiation from equipment that is supposed to be hard wired. Wireless stuff deliberately puts out an RF signal, so its range is probably going to be a lot greater.
There's a reason for the term "DLL Hell".
Countries -- no names -- who think their national identity requires them to be the world's biggest bully have even more reason to be looking into cyber war. Never can tell when the perceived need to push someone around will come up. And it might not be a bad idea to find out how pushees might retaliate.
That's the problem of course. When they published hundreds of songs from talented song writers and musicians in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, the music industry did fine. Now that they don't, they are in trouble. When was the last time you turned on the radio and heard a new song with meaningful insights into the human condition, or a song making fun of politicians (Between Reagan, Clinton and Bush II there has surely been material enough to last for centuries), or even a little story like "Love Potion Number Nine" that was and is fun to listen to occasionally? Been a while. Decades in fact. No damn wonder the industry is in trouble. They don't have a product. Bound to affect sales sooner or later.
I don't buy many CDs. But it is not because of downloading. It's because there is nothing much worth buying. I think I'm far from alone.
I'm half with you. Simple HTML is fine and works pretty well for presenting information and some simple user interface stuff. I'm perfectly willing to live with that myself. It's all I need. And I can live with (or code around) the browsers that think that three 33% images require two lines of picture boxes. After all, they didn't promise me anything other than that they would use my markup as a guide to presentation.
The problem is that lots of folks really want or actually need an Internet Presentation Language, not a markup language -- something where they can tell the "browser" to put this here paragraph there, in a non-serif font with a fourteen point capital letter for the first (indented) paragraph. I don't have anything against that. But I won't ever do that, and neither will a lot of other folks.
So how about we define an HTML for simpletons like myself. Call it anything you want HTML6, HTML2007, HTML-mini ... whatever. Take all the dubious "features" like SCRIPT (how can that possibly ever work 'right' or even well except in a controlled environment with a captive browser?) out. Define a language that even Microsoft can't screw up very badly. OK, then take everything else and put it into another language that includes every conceivable feature that anyone could want. Call that HTML 5.0 or HTML 7.0. Or IAPL 1.0 and spend the next decade or three trying to get it to work well? Is there some reason that won't/can't work?
I certainly wouldn't criticize anyone who has never encountered sudo's strange default configuration for assuming that a security feature popping up an administrative password box during setup would want the root password rather than the (pointless, no?) user password. Confused me also when I first encountered it years ago. Does Ubuntu ship with the default sudo configuration? Betcha not. (I'm a Slackware-xfce user myself).
***He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.***
My reading was that he thought that Flash should have been preinstalled on a consumer PC. Seemed reasonable to me. Still seems reasonable to me. Is there some sort of licensing thing that mandates that Flash be user installed?
***He can't find the "log out" menu item...***
Looking at the screen shot, neither can I. This is supposed to be an OS for non-technical users, no? His point is probably that a non-technical user is likely going to turn the silly thing off with the power switch or power cord. That would be OK if this were a sensibly designed consumer device, but being a computer it almost certainly isn't OK. I'm with him. When I encounter a "control" panel that looks like that, I install something I can understand. (BTW Is the '"F" you' at the bottom right end of the panel some sort of oddball joke? Almost makes me want to buy one of these things just so I can click it).
***He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.***
Ehrr, no. He thought that the Exalt didn't give him proper access to his WiFi configuration whereas he believed (correctly apparently) that Gnome Network Manager would.
The machine is not actually available in some Walmart stores at this time, but you can mail order it and get it shipped to your local store (aside: No way in hell -- I'd rather drive in Boston than navigate the parking lot at that place). Everex has this in other stores besides Walmart now. What Walmart has in your local Walmart store maybe is a $300 version that runs Vista. A Monitor is extra in all cases so it's really a $400-500 PC.
Hardware is fine -- really. Power consumption is OK. Not great, but OK. OS has some rough edges including, but not limited to, no obvious way to shut the thing down. The author scrapped the included gOS and installed vanilla Ubuntu which is, he thinks, what most users should do.
All things considered he says, it's OK except for the OS.
Smallpox? Polio? Have you totally taken leave of your senses? If you want to express doubts about the efficacy and safety of some vaccines, be my guest. You may well be right about many of them. But keep some sense of proportion, quit telling others (incorrectly) that they don't know what they are talking about, and get a grip on reality.
Some third world countries, maybe a lot of them, seem to have agriculture, medicine, etc down well enough. Cuba has a medical delivery system about as effective as first world countries at a cost annual cost of $275 per person. Poppy farmers in Afghanistan have little trouble raising their crops and getting them to market despite the active opposition of the world's best equipped and most expensive military. What third world countries seem to lack is honest, effective governments and non-disfunctional social systems. For the most part, both capitalism and socialism seem to have failed them dismally. Countries who put their trust in God don't fare any better. Apparently God expects the faithful to apply a bit of common sense as well as the Bible, Koran or whatever.
I agree that's a bit more than Vista is really worth, but maybe they'll give up another 20-40% on volume orders.
And I might as well throw my other comments in here as well:
1. The slowing of the Earth's rotation due to tidal friction is well established. It's good physics and there is even some evidence for slowing of about 2 hours in the past 370 million years based on counting growth rings on Devonian corals. (That's not as straightforward as it probably sounds). Yes, without the moon, days would surely be a lot shorter. But probably not so dramatically so as to impede the evolution of life.
2. The formation of planets is poorly understood. Obviously it happens. Last time I looked -- about a decade or so ago --The situation had not moved much beyond where it was four centuries ago when Issac Newton and Rene Descartes disagreed about planetary formation. Descartes was, as it turns out, correct, that newly formed stars can be surrounded by rotating disks of material from which planets apparently accrete. It's an absolute certainty that essentially everything astronomical spins. However, Newton was correct that gravity alone can not account for the rotation. And neither, so far as I know, can anything else. At least not on the observed scale.
3. The theory that the Earth-Moon pair results from a planetary collision is just that -- a theory, not an absolute fact. It is based on a computer simulation done a couple of decades ago. For some reason the same people who have surely seen hundreds of faulty computer simulations in a wide variety of situations have bought into this one en masse. Why? Beats me. I'm not saying that it's wrong. Just that I'd not be astonished if it turns out not to be remotely correct.
4. I find it illuminating occasionally to reflect on the fact that perhaps 30% of the science (including much of the Astronomy and most of the Geology) I was taught in High School in the 1950s is no longer operative. I expect that about the same percentages will hold for those of today's high school students who make it through to 2057.
Rounding Error?
Probably related to the logic that has 139.5% of the users reporting in already.
In any case, we certainly are not going to blame these little arithmetical peculiarities on Linux. How about we blame Vista, Internet Explorer, the RIAA, George W Bush, and Intel? Don't worry. Ron Paul, Ubuntu, the second amendment and the free market will pull us all through this little computational rough spot.
Maybe hate is too strong a word, but I sure as hell don't like MS Office. It was sort of OK a decade ago when the alternatives also sucked. But the world has moved on, and MS Office hasn't much.
***I guess since OpenOffice is an exact clone of it [MSOffice]***
In fact, OO is not an exact clone. First noticeable difference -- the Clipboard in OO Calc complies with the Common User Access Specification that Windows software is supposed to comply with. That's unlike the Clipboard in Excel which never has been compliant at least up through Office 2K and probably still isn't. The Excel people are very proud of their (gawdawful) user interface. I can't think why.
OO Calc has it's problems. For example, legends are prone to get overlaid onto other chart components. But overall, it's free. It's no worse than Excel (what could be? [actually, I know the answer to that--Kspread]) and it comes without licensing hassles. I haven't used OO Writer since Star Office days when it was about comperable to MS word in many areas, but a bit buggy in others -- e.g. Labels. I assume those are fixed. If so, I can't think of a single reason that anyone who doesn't have a fortune invested in VBA Macros would want to upgrade MSOffice rather than switching to Open Office. Those who choose to stick with Office 97 or Office 2000 and can live with a Excel won't be changing to either of course.
In any case, OO is the obvious choice for a $200 PC user. It'll surely do everything they need. Probably as well as MSOffice. Maybe better. And much more cheaply.
My thinking as well. I'm not a pilot, but my impression is that aircraft (other than maybe lighter than air) are not as forgiving of carelessness or stupidity as cars are. OTOH, I think that reliable computer control of small aircraft could be achieved in as little as a couple of decades (as long as we don't let either Microsoft or "Detroit" anywhere near the code). So maybe PAVs aren't a lost cause just on the basis of pilot capability.
Maybe in LA or Florida. In places where significant snow loads are expected, roofs are built stronger than sides.
Sure it can work. I expect it'll be a mediocre aircraft and a worse car. At $150K per copy, I don't expect there to be riots in the showrooms caused by too many people trying to buy too few vehicles. But I think they have a reasonable chance of selling a few before they run out of capital.