If only they were named after a snake... renaming it to Bean may be more appropriate. Just no idea what to do with all the spam and eggs references in the documentation, in such a situation.
At the time there was no competition, and the end users definitely had no idea on what is possible in this area. It was the managers they had to work with. And besides, DOS worked really well back in its day. At least it was stable and fast.
The problem of "clueless managers on the other side" they solved already in the form of Nokia, which was not so long ago the undisputed market leader in mobile phones.
They are not legal tender (like US dollars are in the USA, and Euros in large parts of Europe), and they will never be. They are not illegal - and it's going to be hard to make it illegal without breaking many other closely related practices.
I have been to many pop festivals and clubs, and many sell plastic coins at the door, and accept those coins as payment for drinks and/or food. That makes the coins a kind of currency - not legal tender. People can trade those coins between them, if they like. Just don't expect to be able to go to a regular bank and deposit them in a bank account.
People can settle payment between them in any way they like. Bartering (you paint my house, I iron your clothes), pretty sea shells, whatever. Bitcoin is very much like that. A virtual currency, some "object" (for lack of a better word) that can be bought and sold between people, and that some may accept as payment for certain goods or services.
The real arrogance is of course that he expects nothing more than being market leader.
This alone is unrealistic. Of course it's a good target, but being happy with anything less is crazy. Now the point that they can't even be a good second or even a good third, that's the true tragedy for MS. Now Windows Mobile is virtually nothing compared to iOS and Android.
And really I'd hope they can do better than this. Not because I like MS, but because I like more viable options in the marketplace. Competition keeps things moving, and two players is just not enough for healthy competition.
Assuming one uses good quality components, the ultra capacitor and crank-powered charge pump should outlast the spring solution, for the simple reason that it has less mechanical parts. And the parts that can break are the crank and the generator - and those are present in the spring version as well, so any repairs are just as hard.
What used to be high tech 40 years ago, or didn't even exist yet, is normal off-the-shelf tech now.
Actually I have read several patents over the years, including a few as part of a literature research on some subject I was working on.
And I mostly did understand what was going on - as a GP mentioned a lot of the text will be phrases like "the preferred will be but may be within ". The "preferred" part is what is interesting, the rest you can ignore as it's there indeed just for preventing easy circumventions.
The same for the drawings, it is very often "for example, a spring", where you just ignore the "for example" part and go with the "spring" part.
The patents I've read had to do with polymers and chemical reactions and processes related to them, which is my field of expertise. For fun I've actually sometimes looked at patents in totally different fields, and then indeed I couldn't understand much of what was written.
The real trouble starts with software and business method patents as they are so vague and do not involve proper technical inventions that they indeed are quite impossible to understand. Another matter may be design patents, I've never (tried to) read one of those, that's yet a whole different category. But then design patents are supposed to be very specific actually.
The skin of his hands was white and black due to the burns.
But:
Nah it wasn't powerful enough to kill somebody, made sure of that.
That is totally contradictory.
A quick look at some web sites gives me answers of 15 mA across the heart to be the minimum lethal current, while burns can be expected at currents of 200 mA and above. That are huge currents to run through one's body, and if any vital organs are in the way (e.g. hand to foot - drawer to ground) it's simply lethal.
Cattle fences give nasty shocks, yet work at far lower voltages than 170 kV (2-10 kV usually), and give pulses of just microseconds in length instead of being constant on like you do.
Lightning strikes produce burns while victims often actually survive, thanks to this being a very short pulse and the current is usually running mostly along the skin, and not through the body. Of course we all know lightning can very well be lethal. High voltages are just not something to fool around with.
Doors indeed should open in the escape direction - people have lost their lives for not being able to open the door due to pressure from the crowd behind them.
Yet in malls many shop doors open to the inside of the shop units: then at least you don't have the doors sticking out in the hallways, but nicely out of the way in the shop. And those doors are usually open all the time when the shop is opened. Also usually not that many people in an individual small shop at one time.
I buy computers for less than $2380 here. And that are HK dollars, at 7.8 to the US dollar. So no idea what dollars you use, but if you talking about USD I think you're a few decades behind the times.
The kernel message logging uses some 10 kB, but it is not kept, every time the computer boots the old logs are overwritten. The developers also know there is only 64 kB available (as per specs) which they can use.
Being able to run on a somewhat modern computer (they all come with SATA drives and USB ports nowadays - no support for those two basic technologies means your kernel just won't work on any hardware that's not totally obsolete by now), and being able to actually use all the hardware in that computer, is a fairly important feature of a useable OS, imho.
The spec may say that there should be at least 64K available, but that doesn't mean that it is. That is available for something to write into, so if the UEFI already writes something there, 36K or less could fill it.
True; making the test even easier. Just write until it's full. Should give some kind of error message; should not stop the thing from booting.
It actually seems to be a forewarning of future problems. 28K have already been used up by something, it's already 44% through its life. If it's a fairly new machine, that doesn't look so good for it's longevity.
No idea why you suggest that UEFI memory use and longevity of a computer are related, or how they even could be related.
That'd be easy to test using the script posted. Just increase the 36-variable number to something much bigger, and write write write until something breaks.
FTA, UEFI specs say there should be at least 64 kB of memory available for writing data to. So start with that. This shoud ALWAYS work - 36 kB is well under that limit. Some UEFI systems may have more than that available of course, fill that up as well.
And when the memory is full, try to write some more.
Now honestly I have no idea what UEFI specs say it's supposed to do when you write more data to it than it has memory, some kind of "out of memory" error message sounds the most appropriate. At least attempting to fill up its memory with random data should never result in other data being overwritten, or it not being able to boot for not enough free memory to work with, or whatever.
Well, yes, in a way, they are intentionally bricking their laptops. And I would hope they can get a new one under warranty.
Reason being of course that they are trying to figure out what causes Linux to brick those laptops. And to figure that out, first of all you need to figure out what triggers that bug. Unfortunately in this case the triggering of that bug means you're destroying a perfectly good piece of hardware.
Only when you know exactly what causes a bug, can you start figuring out how to fix it. The problem seemed to be Linux related - now it's proven that is not the case, the actual bug is in the UEFI. It's not a Linux bug, it can be triggered using any OS. Windows software may do this as well - and I can really think of people wanting to write data into UEFI memory, particularly those in the malware/DRM business - and as a result bricking the machine.
And now it's up to Samsung to actually fix their UEFI firmware code.
Which is far better than this UEFI issue as Windows while misbehaving doesn't crash, and can actually be recovered (and if you don't know how, a simple reboot will fix it ).
Isn't UEFI just a BIOS v2? It has the same basic purpose (bootstrap the system, so it can start loading the OS from an external memory). That's BIOS plus added functionality, including a thorough break from all legacy restrictions. And of course a new name to not leave a bad taste.
And maybe, just maybe, people would start to wake up again to the real threats of malware, and would demand higher levels of security. Not likely, but you never know.
If only you had read the headline of the summary you would've known that it is not related to Linux as such.
Linux is just doing something to the UEFI (writing data to the UEFI memory) that is fully within the specs and which UEFI explicitly has been designed for to support. It is just that Windows normally doesn't use this feature. Yet bricking using Windows is just as easy or even easier than bricking using Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
If only they were named after a snake... renaming it to Bean may be more appropriate. Just no idea what to do with all the spam and eggs references in the documentation, in such a situation.
At the time there was no competition, and the end users definitely had no idea on what is possible in this area. It was the managers they had to work with. And besides, DOS worked really well back in its day. At least it was stable and fast.
The problem of "clueless managers on the other side" they solved already in the form of Nokia, which was not so long ago the undisputed market leader in mobile phones.
And even if it is made illegal in the US, there is a huge world out there where it is not illegal.
They are not legal tender (like US dollars are in the USA, and Euros in large parts of Europe), and they will never be. They are not illegal - and it's going to be hard to make it illegal without breaking many other closely related practices.
I have been to many pop festivals and clubs, and many sell plastic coins at the door, and accept those coins as payment for drinks and/or food. That makes the coins a kind of currency - not legal tender. People can trade those coins between them, if they like. Just don't expect to be able to go to a regular bank and deposit them in a bank account.
People can settle payment between them in any way they like. Bartering (you paint my house, I iron your clothes), pretty sea shells, whatever. Bitcoin is very much like that. A virtual currency, some "object" (for lack of a better word) that can be bought and sold between people, and that some may accept as payment for certain goods or services.
The real arrogance is of course that he expects nothing more than being market leader.
This alone is unrealistic. Of course it's a good target, but being happy with anything less is crazy. Now the point that they can't even be a good second or even a good third, that's the true tragedy for MS. Now Windows Mobile is virtually nothing compared to iOS and Android.
And really I'd hope they can do better than this. Not because I like MS, but because I like more viable options in the marketplace. Competition keeps things moving, and two players is just not enough for healthy competition.
Assuming one uses good quality components, the ultra capacitor and crank-powered charge pump should outlast the spring solution, for the simple reason that it has less mechanical parts. And the parts that can break are the crank and the generator - and those are present in the spring version as well, so any repairs are just as hard.
What used to be high tech 40 years ago, or didn't even exist yet, is normal off-the-shelf tech now.
Actually I have read several patents over the years, including a few as part of a literature research on some subject I was working on.
And I mostly did understand what was going on - as a GP mentioned a lot of the text will be phrases like "the preferred will be but may be within ". The "preferred" part is what is interesting, the rest you can ignore as it's there indeed just for preventing easy circumventions.
The same for the drawings, it is very often "for example, a spring", where you just ignore the "for example" part and go with the "spring" part.
The patents I've read had to do with polymers and chemical reactions and processes related to them, which is my field of expertise. For fun I've actually sometimes looked at patents in totally different fields, and then indeed I couldn't understand much of what was written.
The real trouble starts with software and business method patents as they are so vague and do not involve proper technical inventions that they indeed are quite impossible to understand. Another matter may be design patents, I've never (tried to) read one of those, that's yet a whole different category. But then design patents are supposed to be very specific actually.
It is powerful enough for this:
The skin of his hands was white and black due to the burns.
But:
Nah it wasn't powerful enough to kill somebody, made sure of that.
That is totally contradictory.
A quick look at some web sites gives me answers of 15 mA across the heart to be the minimum lethal current, while burns can be expected at currents of 200 mA and above. That are huge currents to run through one's body, and if any vital organs are in the way (e.g. hand to foot - drawer to ground) it's simply lethal.
Cattle fences give nasty shocks, yet work at far lower voltages than 170 kV (2-10 kV usually), and give pulses of just microseconds in length instead of being constant on like you do.
Lightning strikes produce burns while victims often actually survive, thanks to this being a very short pulse and the current is usually running mostly along the skin, and not through the body. Of course we all know lightning can very well be lethal. High voltages are just not something to fool around with.
Be happy that you're still around posting the results here, instead of sitting in jail for murder.
Doors indeed should open in the escape direction - people have lost their lives for not being able to open the door due to pressure from the crowd behind them.
Yet in malls many shop doors open to the inside of the shop units: then at least you don't have the doors sticking out in the hallways, but nicely out of the way in the shop. And those doors are usually open all the time when the shop is opened. Also usually not that many people in an individual small shop at one time.
Wow. My business account costs far less than US$80 a month. More like USD$ 35 a month. But then I only get 20 Mb (up/down symmetric)...
I buy computers for less than $2380 here. And that are HK dollars, at 7.8 to the US dollar. So no idea what dollars you use, but if you talking about USD I think you're a few decades behind the times.
Using what as source? The keyboard?
How else can you install an OS (other than what is pre-installed and has some kind of recovery partition on the hard disk) onto a new computer?
IDE is for optical drives maybe? I don't know, I don't have any of those any more.
USB is a necessity to install the OS, for lack of any other removable drives.
The kernel message logging uses some 10 kB, but it is not kept, every time the computer boots the old logs are overwritten. The developers also know there is only 64 kB available (as per specs) which they can use.
Being able to run on a somewhat modern computer (they all come with SATA drives and USB ports nowadays - no support for those two basic technologies means your kernel just won't work on any hardware that's not totally obsolete by now), and being able to actually use all the hardware in that computer, is a fairly important feature of a useable OS, imho.
The spec may say that there should be at least 64K available, but that doesn't mean that it is. That is available for something to write into, so if the UEFI already writes something there, 36K or less could fill it.
True; making the test even easier. Just write until it's full. Should give some kind of error message; should not stop the thing from booting.
It actually seems to be a forewarning of future problems. 28K have already been used up by something, it's already 44% through its life. If it's a fairly new machine, that doesn't look so good for it's longevity.
No idea why you suggest that UEFI memory use and longevity of a computer are related, or how they even could be related.
That'd be easy to test using the script posted. Just increase the 36-variable number to something much bigger, and write write write until something breaks.
FTA, UEFI specs say there should be at least 64 kB of memory available for writing data to. So start with that. This shoud ALWAYS work - 36 kB is well under that limit. Some UEFI systems may have more than that available of course, fill that up as well.
And when the memory is full, try to write some more.
Now honestly I have no idea what UEFI specs say it's supposed to do when you write more data to it than it has memory, some kind of "out of memory" error message sounds the most appropriate. At least attempting to fill up its memory with random data should never result in other data being overwritten, or it not being able to boot for not enough free memory to work with, or whatever.
Well, yes, in a way, they are intentionally bricking their laptops. And I would hope they can get a new one under warranty.
Reason being of course that they are trying to figure out what causes Linux to brick those laptops. And to figure that out, first of all you need to figure out what triggers that bug. Unfortunately in this case the triggering of that bug means you're destroying a perfectly good piece of hardware.
Only when you know exactly what causes a bug, can you start figuring out how to fix it. The problem seemed to be Linux related - now it's proven that is not the case, the actual bug is in the UEFI. It's not a Linux bug, it can be triggered using any OS. Windows software may do this as well - and I can really think of people wanting to write data into UEFI memory, particularly those in the malware/DRM business - and as a result bricking the machine.
And now it's up to Samsung to actually fix their UEFI firmware code.
Which is far better than this UEFI issue as Windows while misbehaving doesn't crash, and can actually be recovered (and if you don't know how, a simple reboot will fix it ).
Isn't UEFI just a BIOS v2? It has the same basic purpose (bootstrap the system, so it can start loading the OS from an external memory). That's BIOS plus added functionality, including a thorough break from all legacy restrictions. And of course a new name to not leave a bad taste.
And maybe, just maybe, people would start to wake up again to the real threats of malware, and would demand higher levels of security. Not likely, but you never know.
If only you had read the headline of the summary you would've known that it is not related to Linux as such.
Linux is just doing something to the UEFI (writing data to the UEFI memory) that is fully within the specs and which UEFI explicitly has been designed for to support. It is just that Windows normally doesn't use this feature. Yet bricking using Windows is just as easy or even easier than bricking using Linux.
Under a tree with a cold beer those temperatures are generally manageable.