mm22

I wouldn't even believe that this came from a company like Microsoft. As some pointed out there are advantages using Windows over Linux, as well as there are disadvantages. I just don't see why they have to make up a "comparison" like that, pointing out things that are misleading if not false.If you have never used a Linux based OS you will certainly be disoriented at first, and it's probably true that most customers are happy enough with Windows and its inefficiencies. Most people in fact wouldn't even consider getting a Linux computer and will go straight to familiar Windows if given the choice. Unless Linux and its most recent distribution like Ubuntu is really seen as a threat and Microsoft is taking preventive measures to fend off attack by the penguin... in that case that could be good news for the Linux community.

I thought I would share this should it be of use to anyone.

I used Linux Ubuntu 7.10 for some time, not having an internet connection I was never able to run apt-get or any other update manager in order to get upgrades. So my version of the software was pretty much the official first release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon in October 2007. I only used that system occasionally, mainly to get familiar with Ubuntu and changed a few settings overtime.

When I had a chance to get an internet connection on that computer I decided to start updating my Ubuntu system and start running "apt-get update" in order to update the list of packages. It never went smoothly, instead I always encountered problems when retrieving the list of packages, either through terminal or graphical package manager (Synaptic Package Manager or similar). As a result I messed around quite a bit with /etc/apt/sources.list file in order to get a few packages downloaded. Among others I managed to install Skype after installing the required libraries (for example libQt4).

Since Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) was no longer supported (Ubuntu releases are usually supported for up to 18months) I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron through the Update Manager (in topbar menu System>Administration). The installer had to download some 500MB of new packages and took a few hours to do that. Everything seemed fine during the installation process until right at the end a few packages failed to install. The installation completed but the damage caused by the missing packages was apparently too serious and I was left with a "your system might be unusable" message. In fact it was still usable, although a few things looked funny here and there. After rebooting though the boot loader could not load Ubuntu at all, supposedly because the kernel had changed and grub had not been amended accordingly.

Possibly other things would have gone wrong even if I had fixed the boot loader instructions, so I just decided to go for a CD installation (I have a Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installation disk). I wanted to check if this could clear up the mess and install a working system which is two releases away from the original 7.10. The first time I started the system live from Ubuntu CD. It is nice to have a working system readily available with no need to install anything. It even configured my Wi-Fi card correctly, something that always takes some time on Windows.

I launched a 8.10 install and made sure I use the same partition where 7.10 (and now a broken version of 8.04) was installed. I did not format that partition and chose to keep my documents and data from that installation as the installer asked. All went smoothly until it was time to install Grub boot loader, i.e. what takes care of your system booting into one OS or the other. Since a fatal error occurred (the boot loader could not be written or similar error message) the installer exited and I was left again with a non-bootable system. I did not investigate whether I could manually change grub settings (grub was already installed before and configured for dual boot Ubuntu plus XP). Instead I reinstalled the whole thing again, this time disabling the "install boot loader" option. I wanted to see if the problem was only related to grub installation.

The installation of 8.10 went smoothly this time but the system was still not bootable because the boot loader tried to access the wrong kernel (the one for 7.10 instead of the updated one). So what I did was boot once again in Live mode and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst which contains the instructions for the boot loader. Note that you need to edit the file with root privileges in order to be able to save it, for example:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

I changed the line calling the kernel for 7.10

kernel		  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-generic [...]

to

kernel		  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic [...]

which is the most recent kernel found in /boot

This time the system boots and Ubuntu 8.10 is finally up and running. I am now running apt-get again to upgrade the packages and I will then try to fix a few things which are misbehaving right now, including firefox (menu bar not working properly).

The best part of all this is that my documents and settings are still there, even Apache server, php and MySQL (lampp server installed in /opt) are still working.

Over all it would certainly have been faster to just go for the CD installation, especially on a slow connection. Automated distribution upgrade through Update Manager is probably a good option if the system is already up to date and all the important packages are properly configured. I plan to do that when upgrading to version 9.xx (Ubuntu versions are numbered after the year.month of release).

A little update. It wasn't the CMOS battery... well it was because the voltage reading was definitely low (~1.5V), but changing to a new one doesn't seem to fix anything. The same behaviour is still displayed.I am guessing the problem is somewhere in the motherboard or the CMOS itself. I have taken out all removable stuff (RAM, wireless module, DVD drive, HDD, etc.) so I think I am going to try to find some voltage regulator on the motherboard and check if it is working. That's about all I can do I think without going into a specific electronic debugging process.

Background story

--------------------

 

So I have this 6-year-old laptop, a small 12" from NEC (Versa S900) which started to slow down at times, then more often until it was clear the problem was related to the hard drive. Finally it could not boot off the hard drive and you could hear sounds/ticks coming out of the hard disk. I left it alone for a few months powering it up occasionally to see if by any chance the hd would fix itself... eventually it started rattling every time the computer was powered up. In the meantime I booted the computer several time with Bart PE live WinXP CD, trying to find a way to use the computer without hard drive. I considered installing XP on a USB pen drive as reported by others, eventually I realized the BIOS did not support booting from USB drive (at first I thought it did, but I overlooked the fact it was USB FDD i.e. floppy drive not USB disk/pen).

 

Changing the hard drive

----------------------------

 

I got a working hard drive and replaced it. Went into the BIOS, the new hard drive was correctly identified, set boot sequence to CD-ROM first and HDD second and rebooted. First off I didn't insert any CD and as expected I got a message that there was no booting device. That message somehow looked unusual, stating something like "choose the proper boot device" instead of "non-system disk, replace and press a key". I thought that might depend on a different BIOS. I then rebooted with a WinXP boot CD inserted and to my surprise I was presented with the same message (i.e. no boot disk found). I rebooted a few times with the same result. I am quite sure that CD works as I used it many times, however I thought it may be damaged or something and I tried with another one. I could not see the result because by now the laptop wouldn't boot at all.

 

Current problem

-------------------

 

So now I have a laptop that doesn't boot at all. When I press the power button the power LED lights up and the HD is heard starting as well. One or two seconds later the power is cut off, the HD stops and everything goes silent. After one or two seconds more the HD starts again and so does the LED. However nothing happens after this. Through the whole process there is no activity on the screen (no flickering, nothing) and the fan also does not start. The same behavior seems to happen regardless of the power source (AC, battery or both). Very occasionally (1 out of 20 perhaps) the fan starts and the power drop does not occur, the boot up sounds quite normal except that there is not activity on the screen whatsoever, and very limited activity on the HD.

 

What I tried

--------------

 

First off I thought the LCD might be not working so I tried connecting an external monitor, no activity on that one either. In case it could be a display card problem, anyway I don't think that is the case because as I said the strange behavior is not limited to the blank screen.

 

What happens seems similar to when the battery is almost empty and cannot sustain the computer starting up. I checked the AC adapter and the output seems alright, however I could not test it while loaded. Anyway I don't think that is the problem because the battery can be seen charging (red LED) and after sometime the charging process stops. At this point the battery should have at least a little bit of charge left. The battery could power the laptop for over an hour before, so it should still be in good working condition.

 

I removed the CD drive (which comes out easily) to see if that caused any trouble. No luck.

 

Possible causes

------------------

 

I came down to two main candidates, an empty BIOS/CMOS battery or a faulty motherboard (possibly in the power supply part).

 

I read about the CMOS battery being necessary in the first stage of the boot process, telling the CPU what to do next. If the battery were really out of charge it would not be able to guide the boot process, so the CPU wouldn't know what to do. This is currently my main hope (i.e. a relatively easy fix) also because I noticed the clock in the BIOS was previously showing the wrong date. However the information I saved into the BIOS was still there a few days later. But multiple boots and the age of the laptop could have caused the battery to go empty.

 

A more serious problem could be lng somewhere in the motherboard, perhaps in the circuit which is supposed to provide +5 or -5 to the various components. It seems strange to me that this showed up exactly after I changed the hard drive, unless the malfunctioning of the previous HD had somehow put a strain on the power supply. Or the current HD draws to much current, which I find unlikely. Moreover I tried removing the HD, putting the old one back etc. with no results.

 

Your opinion?

---------------

 

Should I go on changing the CMOS battery (hope it is easily accessible) or do you think the problem really lies somewhere else?

 

Thank you for your time.

Also, if you landed on a page through a search engine, it would be missing the site navigation so the users would not know how to browse through the other pages of the site. Some people would try taking off the page filename from the URL in an attempt to find the default page, but when the websites had subfolders this would simply lead to a directory listing or even a Not Authorized error for the web servers that had directory listing disabled.

Yes that was undoubtedly a big problem, not easily solved unless something was done by search engines to prevent indexing single frames. But then again you would lose information in that case as the URL would be the same for many different pages.

I did find the handling of back and front navigation by web browsers for websites with frames quite impressive though. If you changed the page loaded in a frame and clicked the back button, you would see the browser only load the previous page of that particular frame, rather than loading the previous website considering that the parent page of the website hadn't changed.

Didn't know that, surely smart of browser designers. After all frames were one of the first concept being introduced into web page design so early browsers must have been well prepared for them.

True, what someone said, if you have a digital camera and a continuous shooting mode you can use that. Hopefully in a hundred frames you will have captured a couple of lightnings... but yes that takes a bit the fun away, I agree the best to do this kind of things is a film camera. A good SLR with not a bit of electronics will work in (almost) any weather condition and all you have to do is experimenting with aperture and timing. Yes it is possible to physically lock the shutter open, use a small aperture and as soon as a lightning strikes it will breach into the small hole and impress the film. This method is about the best in my opinion as it gives sharply clear pictures without the need for any photoshopping.On the other hand my Nikon digital SLR also has a 30-second (or more) exposure mode but as someone pointed out it takes some time to process the image and it may not necessarily be a good one in the end. My camera has an "unlimited exposure" mode but that only works with a remote, which I don't have, so I have never tried that.Experimenting and fantasy are sometimes all you need anyway, in most cases you don't really need expensive equipment to take good shots. I remember once I took a very good picture of a solar eclipse by holding a cheap fixed focus film camera onto the viewing lens of a cheap telescope. I just needed to find the right orientation.

frames are no longer really necessary or beneficial? Are they considered ugly and obtrusive?

I think nowadays most things that can be done with frames can also be done using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which allow for greater flexibility. When I first looked at web design frames looked to me like the natural solution to placing content where you want on the page. Another obvious way to do that is by using tables and encapsulate our content in there. Well, both ways are now deprecated by most designer because they say slow down rendering of the page and, in the case of frames, might be interpreted differently by different browsers.

 

However cross browser compatibility is also an issue when using CSS. So I think the real disadvantage of frames is that you end up with several pages having the same URL which will affect your ranking in search engines and also the possibility of bookmarking every single page of your site. That is because the URL may be that of the html page containing the frameset and encapsulating other html pages. As the content changes in one of the frames this does not reflect on to the URL seen in the browser address bar which will continue displaying the address of the frameset.

 

I have found a few websites that still use frames and I think in some cases they really help or at least simplify design. One of them is http://zhongwen.com/ where frames are used to independently move sections of the page up and down, which is particularly useful for a dictionary. Yet in this website it is not possible to directly address one particular word in the dictionary, when browsing to different words the URL will keep on displaying the URL of the homepage. This limits the functionality of the dictionary.

Ever wondered how the content from Xisto reaches your computer. Obviously it has to go through some physical cables somewhere in the world so that every time you request some content your request will go from your home computer all the way there and all the way back.

 

Understandably a certain amount of delay can occur in such return journey, also due to the fact that the signal has to go through several routers on its way there and the way back. Those routers belongs to different providers and their response time can vary a lot. Also the signal will not take the same route all the time, some system will take care of routing your request to the first available route or better to the fastest available route after a real-time evaluation.

 

There is a simple way in Windows XP to check the path that your request, it is the tracert which can be called from the command prompt. You can open the command prompt from Start>>Run and type cmd and press Enter.

 

The following command

 

tracert Xisto.com

will give the following output (the request was sent from a computer in Hong Kong in this case)

 

Tracing route to Xisto.com [208.87.242.120]over a maximum of 30 hops:  1	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.178.29  2	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.252.31  3	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.254.61  4	<1 ms	<1 ms	<1 ms  158.132.12.20  5	 2 ms	 1 ms	 1 ms  203.188.117.65  6	 1 ms	 1 ms	 2 ms  203.188.118.6  7	 2 ms	 2 ms	 2 ms  ge9-14.br01.hkg05.pccwbtn.net [63.218.145.197]  8   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  te6-2.1140.ar4.LAX1.gblx.net [64.211.206.225]  9   295 ms   180 ms   180 ms  ber1-ge-4-4.losangeles.savvis.net [208.173.55.197] 10   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  bbr02-xe-5-4.lax02.us.xeex.net [216.152.255.61] 11   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  bbr01-gi-2-8.lax02.us.xeex.net [216.151.129.198] 12   180 ms   180 ms   180 ms  Xisto.com [208.87.242.120]

The program tries to access the same router three times (that is why you see 3 columns of ms values) and reports the milliseconds elapsed at each attempt. If the connection times out you will see a * instead of a number.

 

This simple command could be useful to troubleshoot connection problems. You can immediately spot whether the problem is within your local network, your local internet service provider or on the overseas side.

 

As a comparison a ping command

 

ping Xisto.com

will give the following output

 

Pinging Xisto.com [208.87.242.120] with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=181ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Reply from 208.87.242.120: bytes=32 time=180ms TTL=53Ping statistics for 208.87.242.120:	Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:	Minimum = 180ms, Maximum = 181ms, Average = 180ms

We see the traveling time is 180ms which corresponds to any of the values returned by the tracert command. This makes me think that the those returned by the tracert command are actually parallel routes which the data will alternatively take to get to our desired destination.

This is really good in its semplicity, it allows you to make something without really knowing much about programming or VB. I didn't know Windows lets you create things with simple 'tricks' like this. This looks a bit like inline C programming in Linux. And yes it would be nice to have more tutorials like this for Windows.

It make the computer more serious I guess, in movies there are lots of "funny" stuff which you can always ask or wonder, it's the same as why do actors talk to them self or before doing something most of the time they will say what they will do or what they are doing.
Without the beeping of the computer and etc. it will be silent and no effect for the people watching that movie.

Yes I guess that is one of the reasons, fill up the gaps and let viewers know what is going on... that is certainly true for actors talking to themselves! same for the clicking sound of the keyboard, much easier to here compared to a click of a mouse, that's probably why they seem to use the keyboard for operations that are normally done using the mouse... also using the keyboard looks somehow more professional and gives the idea of a very advanced software application

Ok, not the most constructive topic to talk about... but I have been thinking about it for some time, and I am sure others have done the same!So every time I watch a movie, or better a TV series (CSI and the like), I can't help but focusing on the sounds/beeps those computers always make. I am referring to computers the characters use for investigating a crime, following the path of a tornado, locate a GPS signal and so on. Every single time a query is launched, a graph shown, etc. the action is accompanied by all sort of beeps and chimes. Now I have been using all sort of computers, but I haven't heard any beeping like that since the time of DOS-based videogames where sounds came out of the PC speaker...So I wonder, do they really use those computer in those places (police departments, etc) so that the office is full of noise from such beeping?? and moreover do they really use those fancy looking graphical interfaces, or instead do they build their graphs on pure simple Excel spreadsheets??anyone from LAPD out there...?

Hi!
@mm22

You do draw an interesting perspective there - changing jobs to do what you do best. When you do change jobs, it would take you time to learn what your new work environment and job have to offer. Developing your skills to reach a competent level and practicing your skills would take at least a year or two.

If you do feel the need to switch firms very often for developing your skills, you could join a consultancy firm that would put you on different projects and have you working with different clients. You get the benefit without really having to cast a shadow of doubt over your resume.

Regards,
Nitin Reddy

I agree one or two years is the minimum time required to really take advantage of a working experience, in most cases at least. This is what I had in mind when i said change jobs frequently, as opposed to stay 10-15 years in the same firm. Less than one year I wouldn't even consider, unless it's an internship or a temporary transfer within the same company.

You are right consultancy firms might be the only chance we have to experience different types of responsibilities and work on something new all the time. I think it's something everyone should try for some time if he or she is interested in many things.

I have been using TrueCrypt for a couple of months now. It is really great! The best part of it is it s flexibility. As Plenoptic describes it can be used in many different ways and you can create many volumes (effectively looking like logic partitions on your hard drive) with different security levels. You may for example share one of the passwords with colleagues or friends and keep some others just for yourself.One thing I use it for right now is for... running Firefox! I like to keep my firefox tabs from one session to another so that I can quickly go back to work even if I switch off my computer in between. I will have my mailboxes already open, my Xisto logged in etc. The problem with that is that I don't really like to leave all that signed in on a computer even if that is my personal computer, even less if it is a shared one. After trying different methods, including hiding my firefox profile files between sessions, not really practical, until I found TrueCrypt. With it I can create an encrypted volume using the "container file method". The file will look something like "mycontainer.abc" or whatever you like, and you can even make it hidden if you like. When I start my computer all I do is run TrueCrypt, browse to this file, mount it with my password and I will have my K: drive letter (or whatever you like) available. On this volume I have a copy of Firefox Portable, which has the peculiarity of having all of its files in a single path. Running Firefox Portable from this volume (can create a shortcut, it won't work unless I mount the volume first) will bring up my previous session just the way I want it.Of course it can also be used for hiding your documents, photos or whatever you like. Another good point is that it is available for Windows and Linux (maybe Mac too, not sure). So you just need to have the program (very small) on your USB drive and you can then encrypt the rest of your USB pen if you like and mount it on the fly whenever you need those files.A slightly negative note, you need administrator privileges on Windows to be able to mount the encrypted volumes. So it cannot exactly be used on all computers, thus excluding a lot of public computers.

Unfortunately, "global warming" is also a convenient excuse to promote political agendas under the guise of "saving the environment".  We definitely should do everything we can to create, as you say, "a sustainable relationship between man and the environment," but as I see it, we seem to have inadvertently created the problem of global whining in our quest to stop global warming.
I think 50 years from now we'll be laughing at ourselves when everyone is worried about global cooling. 

Yes you are probably right on that. After all it is unrealistic to think of anything we and our leaders do as unlinked from political agendas. What I say is that among all possible agendas this is the one that could benefit the environment and help building a better mindset in the next generation. Sure people might be overwhelmed by all the noise that "global whining" has created but that's a risk we have to take, the alternative is a society that grows more and more consumerist and places the environment out of the agenda (at least now it is at the bottom of it...)

I wouldn't be surprised if a "global cooling" were soon to gain momentum, I think that was feared to be the trend a few decades ago. On the other hand the term "global warming" itself is well imprecise as many regions could actually face severe cooling if processes linked with it were to take hold. I think "climate change" is a better name for it.

The main problems with using heat from down in the Earth is that in a lot of places, it is difficult to reach, it is not extremely reliable, and it is potentially dangerous. With that being said, extracting heat from the core is also a bad idea. The magnetic field that surrounds the earth is generated by the movement of our molten core. It has already been demonstrated that the core of the planet is cooling down. Do we really want to accelerate that by drawing energy from it?
The molten core powers our magnetic field. This field protects us from cosmic rays and other radiation that comes from outer space. Mars has no magnetic field because its core cooled down and is now solid. Oh and nothing lives there.

Maintaining a molten core is rather important, and given that at the current rate of cooling, our core will die before the sun leaves its current nice yellow stage, its a possibility that messing around with the core is a bad idea. Although, looking at it a different way, when the core solidifies completely, the mantle will no longer be molten and we won't have earthquakes anymore, since everything will just be stuck in place and the tectonic plates will no longer be floating.

That is a very informative post. Well I guess there is a reason if nobody has ever thought of building this kind of power plant, one that can extract and use the heat from inside the Earth. It seems far less complicated to try to use a fraction of the heat that come from above, that is to say the Sun.

I am undoubtedly sceptical about global warming. Trends undeniably show the general temperatures around the earth rising in what, technically, could be called global warming. Of course, it is so frequently the extent to which humans actions are causing this that are taken as synonymous with rising temperatures and I think this is the critical issue.

 

Pumping certain gases into the environment does damage the environment. Cutting down trees does raise the level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Anything saying they don't is propaganda.

 

I think there is insufficient evidence of an absolutely causal relationship between our actions and rising temperatures because there are so many other variables and cycles to account for. THE GENERAL TREND OF RISING AND FALLING GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, for example.

Yes, you have touched two important points. One is that the global trend in rising temperatures (aka global warming) may well be due to a series of reasons and not only to human activities. The other point is that no matter what the answer to the first point is, what we are doing to the environment is by no means good and justifiable by saying "You know natural cycles happen anyway..."

 

The fact that global warming is so popular now is the best chance we've ever had to promote a global understanding of a sustainable relationship between man and the environment. No matter whether humans have or have not caused global warming it can be used as an "excuse" to set a few things right and stop hiding behind inevitability to perpetrate our assault to the environment.

Unfortunately, that's the price you have to pay for good, clean energy. Nuclear power is the only way forward - there's lots of U-235 left and it's totally reliable, whereas solar power, for instance, isn't.

How can you say that when there are millions of watts of solar energy out there every day, just waiting to be taken? By 'reliable' I figure something which is there when you need it, and you can trust it will always be there. I think that can be said of solar light, at least as long as the Sun shines. If the Sun stops shining, well I think we'll have more serious problems by then.

 

About nuclear power, it's true it is a powerful source and it is somehow more convenient to harness when compared to solar power. But is it really reliable? First of all the raw materials (e.g. uranium) are not evenly distributed on the planet, therefore their supplies are subject to change in the event of international political tensions, transportation delays, natural catastrophes and so on. Secondly the energy itself needs to be transported over sometimes long distance, we can't really have nuclear plants in every town. This gives rise to energy loss and more potential issues (both environmental and security/reliability of the supply).

 

The way I see it the power of solar energy lies in its intrinsic distribution all over the planet. It is the most "democratic" form of energy, there are few places on Earth that cannot potentially survive on solar energy. On the other hand nuclear energy should not be banned completely, I agree it should be an important part of the energy mix. I can imagine for example a nuclear plant powering up a large city and smaller distributed solar installations taking care of the needs of smaller towns and rural areas. They both can coexist and offer their best features and compensate each others' faults.

 

Another point to consider is that nuclear power plants require a large investment and sometimes several years before they can operate and be profitable. Small scale solar installations are much more flexible and can be operating within a shorter time.

Since I am making this post, I think I will refute two popular arguments made by denialists.

Really good post jaychant. I think it would be just as easy to prove that most arguments used by deniers are groundless. Even if there were some good arguments there is not doubt there are much more important arguments in favor of a quick and clear acknowledgment that something has to be done in order to slow down global warming. It is probably true we cannot stop it, but we can probably slow it down and give the Earth the time to recover itself, it has done it before, it can do it again.

And it is not much about saving Earth. Earth will survive no matter what we do to it, as long as the Sun is there and no major astronomical events happen. It's about saving ourselves and the progress we have made during our era, increased democracy and on average more possibilities for individuals. Yes we won't be extinct but is it worth sacrificing part of what we have achieved for mere greed or convenient denial?

I think the biggest barrier to getting people in these organizations to use Linux for at least some tasks is how to make this change relatively easy and pain-free. There has to be better measures for transitioning not only software and data, which is the relatively easy part, but also users and their knowledge, which is far more difficult. Someone who has trained with, for example, Windows and Office, will have a certain learning curve going to, for example, Ubuntu and OpenOffice, even if the latter products seem to be using a similar design and interface. There's just a lot of smaller things that users have picked up over the years that they would not be happy to leave behind.

Yes that's probably the main point, as long as most people are introduced to the Windows environment (virtually their "mother tongue") it is unrealistic to think of a large scale substitution. However companies use often specific system which require a learning curve anyway, so in that case it may not make a big difference whether the underlying system is Windows or Linux.

Even if you're not a computer addict and do not have a computer at home, chances are that you may have to run into a computer pretty soon to get some work done. Even if you don't have to operate it yourself, you still have to depend on it to get the work done! Now howz that?

Yes that is certainly true. It is virtually impossible to claim you are not having any contact with computers in your every day life. If we only talk about "direct contact" though it is possible to rid ourselves of them if we really want too. But I don't really the point of that, I think there are many other things we should get rid of, with better reasons, before putting our computers aside.

I refer to this piece of news. Microsoft is backtracking from previous announcements and is now offering XP support until at least April 2011 for new PCs equipped with the Microsoft OS. As support for Vista is still poor and Windows 7 still some time away, many organization have been sticking to Windows XP for their software deployments. The way it works is buying a license for Windows Vista (and later on perhaps Windows 7) and downgrade it to XP, this is already done by computer manufacturers. The previous cutoff time for this practice was April 2010.

This got me wondering: Where is exactly the reason why companies don't turn to Linux systems for their computers? After all that would save them thousands of dollars in licensing and those dollars could be invested in purchasing nice and hassle-free Linux distributions. I think the answer will be software compatibility as most specialized software is only available for Windows.

Can that change in the near future? Could it make any sense for developers and software houses to start developing with Linux in mind when it comes to specialized software to be deployed to large companies?

Apple has always been as monopolistic as Microsoft - it's just that they haven't had much success till recently.

And that is exactly what has always stopped me from buying an Apple/Mac and start using it. I'd rather invest time in learning and debugging Linux or tolerate the inefficiencies of Windows, at least in their monopole the Microsoft guys close their eyes when it comes to check who is actually using their software and on which platform. It doesn't matter as long as Windows spreads and more developers are more or less forced to develop applications for it. The spread of pirated versions is also not a big issue to them, I would say that has been their undeclared strategy to make sure everyone was running their OS.

Personally I don't feel right knowing I am being very bad to the Earth, either by littering or driving just down the road. That is to say being it global warming or not we don't have the right to abuse the Earth resources especially when we plan on squeezing 6 billion people (and counting) on it. It might be hard for some people to realize but all upon which we have built our modern society is a big exaggeration. Bigger houses, bigger cars and fancier malls. Buy today and trash tomorrow. This is not how the equilibrium between humans and the planer has been preserved for thousands of years. Sure you might say the world is now more democratic, it is not only a few (kings, emperors, etc) exceeding their needs and hitting hard on the Earth resources. It is now more and more people having a chance to "be kings" and being able to afford things that were unthinkable a few decades ago, like "buy today and trash tomorrow". Things had to be treasured back then, you'd never know what was going to happen and you'd better be prepared to the next challenge.All that is not to say progress has been evil, I am actually pro-progress generally speaking. That is to say that progress can be used in a better way than "buy today and trash tomorrow" and "drive down the alley" mottoes. We have the technology to make both we humans and the planet keep our dignities intact and proceed to the next generations with a more positive outlook.Speaking out of metaphors all those wind farms and small solar installations are only a drop in the ocean, but the ocean has many many inhabitants and if only half of those inhabitants were able to produce their own energy, and most importantly to reduce their resource usage within reasonable limits... (sorry for falling into metaphor again) That said it doesn't help if people keep denying global warming just to feel more comfortable with themselves pretending they are not being a part of the Earth degradation. I say that even if global warming were a "natural cycle" all the steps taken to counteract it would only benefit the Earth and ultimately its inhabitants, that is to say us all.

Well this is one of the most original ideas i have ever heard, and it makes sense to a certain extent. As someone points out it might be hard to handle the huge magnetic field created but if that is only applied when needed... But the idea of extracting heat from deep within the Earth has implications far beyond its use to "lift buildings". It would be an almost inexhaustible energy source, whose potential is now being used in a tiny fraction by geothermal power plants that use the heat from inside the Earth in those region where the heat is available very near to the surface, for example in Iceland.Being able to use more of the internal heat of the Earth could be compared to being able to use more of the enormous amount of energy that the Sun radiates to us everyday. Between the two I would say using the Sun is still a better idea, I see less technological issues and well the Sun comes anyway as opposed to extracting heat from inside the Earth which we are not really supposed to mess up with. I think the effect of extracting heat on a large scale could be hard to predict and could potentially destabilize the Earth crust thus causing more earthquakes and the like.

I had totally forgotten about Encarta until I read this post... Encarta was one of the first CD-ROM I've got more than 10 years ago, the CD-ROM stopped being readable after sometime and at that time I couldn't afford a CD burner so that was it. After using the internet for a while the need to purchase encyclopedias or similar products became superfluous and I didn't even know there is an online version of Encarta, for sure I have never found anything linked to it. I opened it just now and well seeing the MSN logo puts me off already. With so much information out there there is little point having such a structured and mono-source piece of information. If you want information which is 100% reliable you go and look for it in the appropriate place, for example a library, the website of a company etc. The power of Wikipedia is to express the views and collect the knowledge of the online community around the world, as such it cannot possibly be fully consistent and accurate. But it is a great tool and resource if we know how to use it and we keep a critic eye when reading it.