So far anything on the market ran either both Windose and Linux or just Windoze.
IMO what got MSFT really scared is that many of the crop of the new and cheap PCs went as far as not being bothered to be Windows compatible on release. Asus is a prime example - it could not run Windows XP as shipped without MSFT doing some work on it. Half of the UMPCs are on its heels as well.
This is not something Microsoft has ever experienced in its history since the days of DOS vs CPM - the hottest PC product on the market based on customer demand for the Christmas season to be Windows incompatible.
It is not the linux market penetration that they are worried about, it is the change of attitude in major OEMs. The entire MSFT business is based around a B&D relationship with OEMs which keeps OEMs doing exactly what MSFT wants. An OEM rebellion is what MSFT is most scared of and it will do anything and give out any candy it can to prevent it.
The questions are usually copyrighted so you need someone to write a new set of questions, get them certified by the education department, get the app written, the app certified by the education department and so on. All this is subject to junkets, sometimes money changing hands, lobbying and so on.
Educational and testing software is an area which is nearly impossible for a newcomer to break in. Competition is virtually inexistent, quality is crap and there is bugger all that can be done about it.
The wonderful world of educational software. It is usually written by the most clueless and incompetent lowlife out there. It runs only on Windows, only on a specific version and is mandated and approved by the relevant government as mandatory.
It is the _REAL_ reason on why Microsoft is so prevalent.
Most content on the Internet has been recoded into lower resolution. Subtitles are usually stripped and so on.
While this may do for watching it on a computer, it is usually not enough for a proper viewing experience using a media center system especially if you have it hooked up to a HD screen.
So given a choice of ripping it and storing it native (and/or recoding it to _MY_ settings) and Internet I would actually chose the rip.
No. It is a matter of court precedent, nothing else.
Once upon a time a FAX-ed signature was acknowledged as a contractually binding signature by the courts (we can probably dig out who and when). This was before people understood how to falsify it and how to fake it. From there on it has been accepted as valid till today.
Email never got the same treatment, because the earliest attempts to use it as evidence were countered by experts who knew how to fake it.
And this is all about this. The power of precedent especially in the Anglo-Saxon legal system. Nothing more, nothing less.
Dunno about MaBell and do not care. I neither work for them (I actually work for a telco), nor use them.
As far as Bittorent being throttled, it depends how and where is it throttled.
I have been doing some simulation work on what different QoS methods do to Bittorent and it poses an interesting problem specific to Cable companies and companies which have an oversubscribed shared LAN for uplink.
The problem is fairly specific to Cable and if Cable had the same whosale reqs forced on them as we do they would not have had it. They would have had their network engineered in a way where it is possible to control it. As they have managed to avoid such regulation everywhere except Germany they will not reap what they have sawn.
Actually, they still have plenty of technological leverage (there is a lot that can be used in the DOCSIS specs) to handle the problem intelligently, but they do not seem to be keen on doing so.
Still, economics as a method is many times better than sticks, lawsuits and "reasonable" traffic management.
I moved to my company broadband offer to "eat my dogfood" recently. Prior to that I was with 2 independent ISPs for nearly 7 years. In both cases I had 50G caps with off-peak periods and free upload. I used on average 3-5G a month at most even while running off-site backups for several friends. If we take the off-site backup out my usage (unless it was a Debian release month) was under 1G. So 40G is not particularly bad.
This is much better than the current large telco pactice of throwing people off the network or throttling them. Make people pay for the capacity they use and let economics sort it out. As a matter of fact most small ISPs around EU have been running this as a standard practice for ages with a considerable degree of success The approach is either a tiered system like this or a system where if you exceed your monthly quota your traffic gets the lowest possible priority on the network. There are also various variations on this using daily peak periods and so on. In any case, while introducing them at first has always caused a few grumbles on the overall, the users like them. As a result the network is not hogged by 5% who pay the same as the remaining 95% while using 99% of the capacity.
Yep, add to that jabber thread support and a few others. IMO, they probably use dice to decide if they allocate resources to a specific bug or feature.
Probably correct for a single standalone machine, definitely incorrect for anything from 5 to 500, probably correct again for 500+.
Even with AD+loads of third party software Windows has a higher SMB maintenance overhead than a correctly set-up system of linux clients using NIS+autofs.
This becomes especially prominent when dealing with hardware failures. If a machine fails under Windows your only choice is to tell the user to wait until you build him one and personalise it which even if you regularly backup and ghost them takes time. Compared to that in a correctly managed NIS+autofs or LDAP+autofs environment you just point the user to an unused linux machine he sits down and it loads all of his settings, software and works.
Once again - this is for correctly installed and managed Windows and Linux installations with up to 500 machines. Most admins out there do not have a clue how to manage either one of them
Once you get into the realm of 500+ it all becomes a matter of choice. If the admin team is a bunch of imbeciles who would like to manage the network "flat" and have all clients identical in a 500+ client environment your choice is between Windows and Windows. If the network is departamentalised Linux again starts to shine. It is simply a better system for an enterprise environment in the 5-500 user/workstation range. This is once again - if you know how to set it up. If you do not, nothing will help you.
Thanks for the info. This sounds plausible as Elonex has a history of shipping Via based kit and hiding the bleeding obvious behind marketing bollocks.
This puts the One more or less in the right frame. Assuming this is C3, model 8 of C3 is a fairly low on the pecking order. Model 7 is classic Eden with no AES. Dunno what is model 8 is as I have only 8 and 10+ around the house, but it is likely to be more of an Eden than C7. 300MHz is lower than what is usually used for fanless Via Thin clients (400 for the HP based ones), but not entirely out of whack.
If it is Via at 300 MHz it can just about load a non-OO wordprocessor and be used as a general purpose typewriter, mp3 player and a note taking machine. By the time it has loaded a modern OpenOffice install you might as well go to the coffee shop and come back. Older Via CPUs need at least 1GHz to play MPEG2 video so this is out of the question as well. It will however have an excellent power consumption. I would not be surprised if it manages sub-3W for the CPU. If Via has fixed the errata for their DMA when changing CPU frequency it can also throttle even further to around 200 or less.
Overall, IMO this is probably too under-spec for a sublaptop. I would not buy it for that purpose. It is however a very reasonable spec for a machine to run specialised education software and/or a machine to run lab automation. In fact if I have to do lab automation again this looks like a perfect choice (with the splash-proof keyboard).
Oh, and this is definitely a linux only project. Even W2K will struggle on this one. 300MHz pre-P3-like CPU is too low for anything but linux.
I got two of these installed into the roof last week. I have not seen any non-uniform lighting situations with them so far. They use "privacy" glass on the room end of the tunnel to ensure that the light is diffused.
Talking of becket: you should watch "The End of the Game" with a good cast... Though make sure you have a good samaritan friend handy for the next couple of days or you may end up hanging from a tree somewhere.
Talking of the desktop EE this looks like the perfect thin client and/or set-top box for a linux/vlc based media distribution system. Rip out the hard disk and voila. It should have enough grunt to decode SD and scale it to 1344x768 without skipping frames. After all 4 year old Via can do that and Geode can probably even do HD (it can do SD at 10% CPU load) so it will be laughable if Intel cannot deliver a low-power CPU capable of this.
That's because US immigration policy is more rational.
True, but you don't often hear that. You do not often hear that because it is more rational only when compared to the UK.
You can get into the US if you have a job offer.
Or just walk across the border. The uk situation on this is not not what everyone else in this thread claims.
First of all, till last year uneducated national minorities were imported in nearly unlimited quantities "for the needs" of the catering industry. Their lobby group is putting a mighty scream now, but frankly I do not see why anyone besides the cook in an ethnic restaurant needs to belong to the restaurant ethnicity.
Second, the situation with qualified labour is not as difficult as people claim. Sorting out a work permit or work permit transfer for qualified personnel is trivial. The problem is not the government throwing spanners in the works. The problem is that the average british HR department does not give a flying f***. A testament to this are companies like Unisys (or Nortel in the late 90-es). They have done the effort to organise their supply chain to hire highly qualified people from Eastern Europe, Russia, etc and they have whole departments consisting mostly of foreigners. It is also not a question of "cheap labour". They are quite often payed more than a brit in the same position.
As far as the assylum seekers they are a minority. The majority till recently were the ethnic catering and "through relative" imports.
You can use crypto not just for data privacy. You can use it for integrity.
If the "interesting" files on a FS are cryptographically signed with a signature that also covers at least some of their FS info (name, fs, allocation, etc) you can happily read them, but you cannot modify them and move them around.
The funniest bit here is that Vista has the relevant crypto framework in place and has everything it needs to do this. Windows has been cryptographically verifying stuff for ages. As the video shows, it however, does not use it everywhere.
IMO it is a classic lesson on security design which can be summarised using one of my high school CS prof quotes. He used to say: "Miss, there is no such thing as a bit pregnant". You either do something everywhere or you do not bother.
With the level of DRM and certificates they have unleashed on the luser they could have easily avoided that particular attack.
All it takes to thwart this attack is to sign the executables including the executable name in the signature. This of course would have required the OS designers to try use DRM for something useful instead of sucking up to the MAFIAA.
It's still moronic that they're trying to enforce fun.
Welcome to the UK mate. And we laugh at Germans about their ordnung and organisation...
We should just look at ourselves. We run "mandatory entertainment" during kids birthdays, "entertainment" is regularyly brought to the nurseries for all notable occasions. And the kids that refuse to participate are tagged for referral to the SENCO (for the non-brits: Special Educational Needs COodinator) for fast track to meet the child psychologist.
No wonder some people after that go and decide that when fun is delivered it has to be mandated. All I can say: Welcome to Britain and enjoy your stay.
I have had Theo personally admit that he is wrong. Straight away. Immediately. Without any personal attacks.
He did swear a bit about AMD being preferential to Linux and not releasing specs, but he HAD A POINT there. That was indeed the case and the hardware RNG support for the AMD chipsets in OpenBSD is not based on chipset specs, but on looking at the linux driver. The reason for this is that AMD treated the linux developers preferentially at the time (intentionally or unintentionally - do not care, result is what counts).
I cannot say anything about one of the numerous linux vs XXXBSD SCSI and network drivers debacles you are most possibly referring to. Which one in particular and can we also have all off-list communication quoted in that case.
Based on personal experience Theo tends to reply off-list first to make sure that he will not speak rubbish after that in public. I would not be surprised that it was not him who started the flamefest at least on some of those occasions.
Now once the flamefest has started he can compete head to head with Linus and Al Viro for the title of the "flame of the day" title. This is even without Dave Miller's references to "Anastasia International" staff when naming machines and so on. And that is the reality of Unix. You can grep for the F word and be sure that you will find it. Lots of it in some places
Actually there is a BIG difference between the two.
Theo admits if he is wrong straight away - been there done it, proved him wrong on the hardware RNG support in AMD chipsets a while ago.
Making DJB admit anything takes deploying half of the ex-SU nuclear arsenal and you are still more likely to turn half the world into a desert than succeed.
They are also different on another major count. Theo tries to make the entire platform become better and he does not mind people taking his improvements and using them. DJB cares solely about his stuff and instead of improving the underlying platform he replaces it at a whim. Not invented here and reinvent the wheel to the hilt and then some.
At 125$+ per barrel wind power no longer needs tax breaks to be competitive vs other energy sources (coal and gas use rises in oil prices to raise their prices accordingly and some are contractually tied up to oil price).
At 150$+ per barrel solar will also stop needing tax breaks.
In that case why don't they bloody bring something useful like the Steller Cow. While trying to bring back the some of the native Australian species is a great achievement none of them would have the direct economic impact of having a sustainable see grazer capable of living in cold water.
Slashdot Mirror
So far anything on the market ran either both Windose and Linux or just Windoze.
IMO what got MSFT really scared is that many of the crop of the new and cheap PCs went as far as not being bothered to be Windows compatible on release. Asus is a prime example - it could not run Windows XP as shipped without MSFT doing some work on it. Half of the UMPCs are on its heels as well.
This is not something Microsoft has ever experienced in its history since the days of DOS vs CPM - the hottest PC product on the market based on customer demand for the Christmas season to be Windows incompatible.
It is not the linux market penetration that they are worried about, it is the change of attitude in major OEMs. The entire MSFT business is based around a B&D relationship with OEMs which keeps OEMs doing exactly what MSFT wants. An OEM rebellion is what MSFT is most scared of and it will do anything and give out any candy it can to prevent it.
Really?
The questions are usually copyrighted so you need someone to write a new set of questions, get them certified by the education department, get the app written, the app certified by the education department and so on. All this is subject to junkets, sometimes money changing hands, lobbying and so on.
Educational and testing software is an area which is nearly impossible for a newcomer to break in. Competition is virtually inexistent, quality is crap and there is bugger all that can be done about it.
The wonderful world of educational software. It is usually written by the most clueless and incompetent lowlife out there. It runs only on Windows, only on a specific version and is mandated and approved by the relevant government as mandatory.
It is the _REAL_ reason on why Microsoft is so prevalent.
Most content on the Internet has been recoded into lower resolution. Subtitles are usually stripped and so on.
While this may do for watching it on a computer, it is usually not enough for a proper viewing experience using a media center system especially if you have it hooked up to a HD screen.
So given a choice of ripping it and storing it native (and/or recoding it to _MY_ settings) and Internet I would actually chose the rip.
No. It is a matter of court precedent, nothing else.
Once upon a time a FAX-ed signature was acknowledged as a contractually binding signature by the courts (we can probably dig out who and when). This was before people understood how to falsify it and how to fake it. From there on it has been accepted as valid till today.
Email never got the same treatment, because the earliest attempts to use it as evidence were countered by experts who knew how to fake it.
And this is all about this. The power of precedent especially in the Anglo-Saxon legal system. Nothing more, nothing less.
Dunno about MaBell and do not care. I neither work for them (I actually work for a telco), nor use them.
As far as Bittorent being throttled, it depends how and where is it throttled.
I have been doing some simulation work on what different QoS methods do to Bittorent and it poses an interesting problem specific to Cable companies and companies which have an oversubscribed shared LAN for uplink.
The problem is fairly specific to Cable and if Cable had the same whosale reqs forced on them as we do they would not have had it. They would have had their network engineered in a way where it is possible to control it. As they have managed to avoid such regulation everywhere except Germany they will not reap what they have sawn.
Actually, they still have plenty of technological leverage (there is a lot that can be used in the DOCSIS specs) to handle the problem intelligently, but they do not seem to be keen on doing so.
Still, economics as a method is many times better than sticks, lawsuits and "reasonable" traffic management.
I moved to my company broadband offer to "eat my dogfood" recently.
Prior to that I was with 2 independent ISPs for nearly 7 years. In both cases I had 50G caps with off-peak periods and free upload. I used on average 3-5G a month at most even while running off-site backups for several friends. If we take the off-site backup out my usage (unless it was a Debian release month) was under 1G. So 40G is not particularly bad.
This is much better than the current large telco pactice of throwing people off the network or throttling them. Make people pay for the capacity they use and let economics sort it out.
As a matter of fact most small ISPs around EU have been running this as a standard practice for ages with a considerable degree of success The approach is either a tiered system like this or a system where if you exceed your monthly quota your traffic gets the lowest possible priority on the network. There are also various variations on this using daily peak periods and so on. In any case, while introducing them at first has always caused a few grumbles on the overall, the users like them. As a result the network is not hogged by 5% who pay the same as the remaining 95% while using 99% of the capacity.
Yep, add to that jabber thread support and a few others. IMO, they probably use dice to decide if they allocate resources to a specific bug or feature.
OSI layer 8 configuration problems Is this a new name for PEBKAC?
Probably correct for a single standalone machine, definitely incorrect for anything from 5 to 500, probably correct again for 500+.
Even with AD+loads of third party software Windows has a higher SMB maintenance overhead than a correctly set-up system of linux clients using NIS+autofs.
This becomes especially prominent when dealing with hardware failures. If a machine fails under Windows your only choice is to tell the user to wait until you build him one and personalise it which even if you regularly backup and ghost them takes time. Compared to that in a correctly managed NIS+autofs or LDAP+autofs environment you just point the user to an unused linux machine he sits down and it loads all of his settings, software and works.
Once again - this is for correctly installed and managed Windows and Linux installations with up to 500 machines. Most admins out there do not have a clue how to manage either one of them
Once you get into the realm of 500+ it all becomes a matter of choice. If the admin team is a bunch of imbeciles who would like to manage the network "flat" and have all clients identical in a 500+ client environment your choice is between Windows and Windows. If the network is departamentalised Linux again starts to shine. It is simply a better system for an enterprise environment in the 5-500 user/workstation range. This is once again - if you know how to set it up. If you do not, nothing will help you.
Thanks for the info. This sounds plausible as Elonex has a history of shipping Via based kit and hiding the bleeding obvious behind marketing bollocks.
This puts the One more or less in the right frame. Assuming this is C3, model 8 of C3 is a fairly low on the pecking order. Model 7 is classic Eden with no AES. Dunno what is model 8 is as I have only 8 and 10+ around the house, but it is likely to be more of an Eden than C7. 300MHz is lower than what is usually used for fanless Via Thin clients (400 for the HP based ones), but not entirely out of whack.
If it is Via at 300 MHz it can just about load a non-OO wordprocessor and be used as a general purpose typewriter, mp3 player and a note taking machine. By the time it has loaded a modern OpenOffice install you might as well go to the coffee shop and come back. Older Via CPUs need at least 1GHz to play MPEG2 video so this is out of the question as well. It will however have an excellent power consumption. I would not be surprised if it manages sub-3W for the CPU. If Via has fixed the errata for their DMA when changing CPU frequency it can also throttle even further to around 200 or less.
Overall, IMO this is probably too under-spec for a sublaptop. I would not buy it for that purpose. It is however a very reasonable spec for a machine to run specialised education software and/or a machine to run lab automation. In fact if I have to do lab automation again this looks like a perfect choice (with the splash-proof keyboard).
Oh, and this is definitely a linux only project. Even W2K will struggle on this one. 300MHz pre-P3-like CPU is too low for anything but linux.
Really? If you use the right ones...
http://www.velux.co.uk/Products/SUN+TUNNELS/Product/
I got two of these installed into the roof last week. I have not seen any non-uniform lighting situations with them so far. They use "privacy" glass on the room end of the tunnel to ensure that the light is diffused.
Talking of becket: you should watch "The End of the Game" with a good cast... Though make sure you have a good samaritan friend handy for the next couple of days or you may end up hanging from a tree somewhere.
Talking of the desktop EE this looks like the perfect thin client and/or set-top box for a linux/vlc based media distribution system. Rip out the hard disk and voila. It should have enough grunt to decode SD and scale it to 1344x768 without skipping frames. After all 4 year old Via can do that and Geode can probably even do HD (it can do SD at 10% CPU load) so it will be laughable if Intel cannot deliver a low-power CPU capable of this.
True, but you don't often hear that. You do not often hear that because it is more rational only when compared to the UK. You can get into the US if you have a job offer.
Or just walk across the border. The uk situation on this is not not what everyone else in this thread claims.
First of all, till last year uneducated national minorities were imported in nearly unlimited quantities "for the needs" of the catering industry. Their lobby group is putting a mighty scream now, but frankly I do not see why anyone besides the cook in an ethnic restaurant needs to belong to the restaurant ethnicity.
Second, the situation with qualified labour is not as difficult as people claim. Sorting out a work permit or work permit transfer for qualified personnel is trivial. The problem is not the government throwing spanners in the works. The problem is that the average british HR department does not give a flying f***. A testament to this are companies like Unisys (or Nortel in the late 90-es). They have done the effort to organise their supply chain to hire highly qualified people from Eastern Europe, Russia, etc and they have whole departments consisting mostly of foreigners. It is also not a question of "cheap labour". They are quite often payed more than a brit in the same position.
As far as the assylum seekers they are a minority. The majority till recently were the ethnic catering and "through relative" imports.
You can use crypto not just for data privacy. You can use it for integrity.
If the "interesting" files on a FS are cryptographically signed with a signature that also covers at least some of their FS info (name, fs, allocation, etc) you can happily read them, but you cannot modify them and move them around.
The funniest bit here is that Vista has the relevant crypto framework in place and has everything it needs to do this. Windows has been cryptographically verifying stuff for ages. As the video shows, it however, does not use it everywhere.
IMO it is a classic lesson on security design which can be summarised using one of my high school CS prof quotes. He used to say: "Miss, there is no such thing as a bit pregnant". You either do something everywhere or you do not bother.
Well...
With the level of DRM and certificates they have unleashed on the luser they could have easily avoided that particular attack.
All it takes to thwart this attack is to sign the executables including the executable name in the signature. This of course would have required the OS designers to try use DRM for something useful instead of sucking up to the MAFIAA.
Welcome to the UK mate. And we laugh at Germans about their ordnung and organisation...
We should just look at ourselves. We run "mandatory entertainment" during kids birthdays, "entertainment" is regularyly brought to the nurseries for all notable occasions. And the kids that refuse to participate are tagged for referral to the SENCO (for the non-brits: Special Educational Needs COodinator) for fast track to meet the child psychologist.
No wonder some people after that go and decide that when fun is delivered it has to be mandated. All I can say: Welcome to Britain and enjoy your stay.
The video decoder is in the chipset which shares heatsink with the CPU. So there is no free lunch here.
However, via has extremely good thermal throttling. It can probably run for a year without a heatsink.
This is a marketing scam, not a test. They know it is least likely to fail.
I have had Theo personally admit that he is wrong. Straight away. Immediately. Without any personal attacks.
He did swear a bit about AMD being preferential to Linux and not releasing specs, but he HAD A POINT there. That was indeed the case and the hardware RNG support for the AMD chipsets in OpenBSD is not based on chipset specs, but on looking at the linux driver. The reason for this is that AMD treated the linux developers preferentially at the time (intentionally or unintentionally - do not care, result is what counts).
I cannot say anything about one of the numerous linux vs XXXBSD SCSI and network drivers debacles you are most possibly referring to. Which one in particular and can we also have all off-list communication quoted in that case.
Based on personal experience Theo tends to reply off-list first to make sure that he will not speak rubbish after that in public. I would not be surprised that it was not him who started the flamefest at least on some of those occasions.
Now once the flamefest has started he can compete head to head with Linus and Al Viro for the title of the "flame of the day" title. This is even without Dave Miller's references to "Anastasia International" staff when naming machines and so on. And that is the reality of Unix. You can grep for the F word and be sure that you will find it. Lots of it in some places
Actually there is a BIG difference between the two.
Theo admits if he is wrong straight away - been there done it, proved him wrong on the hardware RNG support in AMD chipsets a while ago.
Making DJB admit anything takes deploying half of the ex-SU nuclear arsenal and you are still more likely to turn half the world into a desert than succeed.
They are also different on another major count. Theo tries to make the entire platform become better and he does not mind people taking his improvements and using them. DJB cares solely about his stuff and instead of improving the underlying platform he replaces it at a whim. Not invented here and reinvent the wheel to the hilt and then some.
Anyway - one person's view can be "Religion", another "Cult" and a third it can be "Lifestyle".
Though shalt not mis-quote Lazarus!
One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_RHeinlein.htm
Actually it does.
IIRC (I remember seeing this somewhere).
At 125$+ per barrel wind power no longer needs tax breaks to be competitive vs other energy sources (coal and gas use rises in oil prices to raise their prices accordingly and some are contractually tied up to oil price).
At 150$+ per barrel solar will also stop needing tax breaks.
So it is evil capitalism at its best.
Yep. Though probably you are thinking of the wrong Orwell
After all the church has spent a considerable amount of money on wooing that particular police department.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/22/freedomofinformation.religion
It is the "All animals are equal, some are more equal than the other" bit of Orwell.
In that case why don't they bloody bring something useful like the Steller Cow. While trying to bring back the some of the native Australian species is a great achievement none of them would have the direct economic impact of having a sustainable see grazer capable of living in cold water.