And since any new sovereign nation founded on an artificial island is presumable not a signatory to this convention, then this convention has no authority over them.
I am an insider in the drive industry, so while I need to be vague on some things, I can add clarification on others.
A hard drive is a very complex subsystem inside your computer, more complex than many people realize. A hard drive contains one or more CPUs, memory, firmware, and dedicated hardware devoted to the functions of storing and retrieving data.
There is no single "right" way to draw the line between what is firmware and what is hardware in a hard drive. Algorithms could be coded in VHDL or Verilog and synthesized into the silicon, or they could be compiled in C (or hand coded in assembly) and be embedded in firmware. Each drive company has their own philosophy for where to draw the line.
Some drive companies choose to implement only fundamental functions in silicon, and implement everything else in firmware. For these companies, comparing their firmware to the BIOS in a PC is a poor analogy. A better analogy would be to compare the firmware to the operating system.
In a system with "lite" firmware, the firmware typically would be responsible for configuring a few control registers and buffers, and then the hardware would take over. But for a system with "heavy" firmware, the firmware behaves much more like a kernel. Data is not going to be moved in or out of buffers, or be sent to and from platters, without the active involvement of the firmware scheduling and ordering that activity.
The author of the OP wrote "it is highly unusual for (firmware) to affect sequential throughput". The author is wrong. In a system with "heavy" firmware, all performance is highly dependent on the firmware. It can easily make the same difference in performance as you would see running Windows 95 v. Windows XP v. Windows Vista v. RH 7.2 v. RHEL 3.0 on the same PC hardware.
I do not know if the Seagate drive in question is a "heavy" or "lite" firmware drive, but I do know that the assumption that firmware takes a minor role in hard drive performance is mistaken.
If Sony doesn't want to fall into distant third in this round of the console wars, they need to get off their backside and take action to get this pig selling.
The formula is simple:
Nintendo has made a bold statement with a $250 console. Sony should "see and raise" Nintendo's position.
- Sell the 80-GB console for $199.95 (The Wii killer)
- Announce a 300-GB console with bundled DVR software and lifetime subscription to channel guide for $499 (The Tivo killer)
- Announce free signing for any GPL Linux Distributions (The PC killer)
Badda-bing, Nintendo is back to sucking hind teat.
It make me a little sad to see someone who was once on the side of good (the EFF) turn to the side of evil (Wikipedia). I guess everybody has their price.
Hopefully, once he sees Wikipedia from the inside, he will join the exodus of ex-insiders who have walked away from Jimbo's empire.
As most slashdotters know, there is often a mistaken impression that the "World Wide Web" and HTML equal the internet. Web browsers processing HTML are just one application that rides on the internet, and it wasn't even the first application that did so.
The importance of HTML was that it was the "killer app" that drove internet connections to people's homes. Naturally, the initial implementation of connectivity was tuned to HTML; particularly the standard implementation where bandwidth into the home far exceeds bandwidth out of the home, but also with regards to some ISPs blocking ports or shaping traffic.
As internet applications continue to evolve, it is only natural that the web will someday become only a tiny fraction of internet traffic.
The challenge for ISPs is to react to this, and provide the services that their customers need before their competitors do. Who knows, perhaps someday soon we will see a standard home connection where outbound bandwidth is 10x inbound bandwidth.
The EULA only allows "producing sound directly from the record". I don't think that would allow playing it on a record player, as the player is a device that indirectly produces sound.
You could probably wave the record in the air and listen to the wind whistling through the hole.
No, the customer of their service is the hiring employer. The person receiving the call is not being asked to purchase anything, therefore it is not telemarketing.
The definition of telemarketing in 16 CFR 310 says "..induce the purchase of goods or services.."
Recruiters are not telemarketers, and are therefore not subject to the "do not call" regulations.
You need to get more creative.
I would first ask "why is this a problem"? Do your employees just find the calls annoying, or have you lost any employees to the recruiters. If you have lost employees, then I would say the recruiters are performing a valid service of helping people find jobs that they are more satisfied with. In this case, you need to address the problems that encourage your people to leave. Doubling their salaries might be a good start.
If your employees just find the calls annoying, and not a single employee has said anything encouraging to the recruiters, one has to wonder why they keep calling. You would think that if nobody ever talks to them, provides a resume, takes an interview, or moves to a new job, they would eventually move on to greener pastures.
How about holding a contest? Encourage your employees to record the calls and curse the recruiters in the most explicit language possible. Play back the recordings in your next company-wide meeting, and give cash rewards to the employees who are most insulting to the recruiters.
When they say they have "revoked the key", they mean they have revoked the device key for a specific software player. They have not done anything about the processing key that is floating around.
The biggest shortcoming of the current internet (to me) is that anonymity wasn't designed in from the ground up.
Hopefully, this "next big thing" will be designed so there is no information (like IP address) that can be used to trace an internet persona to an actual person or geographic area.
First, I'll give the disclaimer that I am a hardware engineer, not a software engineer.
My experience has been that when bringing up new hardware, when you don't yet have a stable bootloader, let alone a compiler or operating system, then being able to write in assembly is very valuable.
More accurately I think I should say that being able to write in machine language is very valuable, as you might not even have a working assembler depending on what you are working on.
Being able to peek and poke a few registers, hand code a loop or two, and maybe write some sequential values across a bus can go a long way in helping you get the hardware going. Hook a logic analyzer to the bus and you're golden.
Even if you do have a whole infrastructure of compilers, device drivers, and operating systems available, none of that helps you when the first damn batch of prototypes (made of the first revision of the PCB, containing the first ever silicon of a new CPU, and the first ever silicon of the the new chipset) won't even boot, and you are trying to get to root-cause ASAP because you've got a whole army of testers ready to have at the hardware as soon as you get it running code.
In short, if you are the guy designing the raw iron that the software is going to talk to, you better be able to step up and take control of the raw iron when the software can't.
You beat me to the punch, but I was going to post the same thing. I found the Garmin interface to be much easier to use than the competitors at the time (like Magellan), mainly because the "buttons on top" made it simpler to operate one handed.
The disadvantage is that if you have the device mounted (on the dashboard of your car, or on a panel of your boat), your hand tends to block the screen while you punch the buttons. Buttons on bottom works better if you need constant view of the screen while you operate the device.
I think the article noted that the last time this came up for vote by the community, the community voted it down. I think it also notes that this is something that Jimbo Wales dictated, and not something that went through the normal community approval process.
Why?
Why would Wales simply dictate this change be made?
Because Wikipedia is a source of high-quality links. Editors have increasingly been making sure to put high-quality references in articles, mainly as links to other web sites. A single Wikipedia article can often contain links to the best websites related to that subject.
So ask yourself why would Wales want to make those links private, and no longer harvested by Google.
Is it that hard to figure out?
If you still don't know, then ask yourself what business Wales has announced that he wants to pursue with his new for profit company, Wikia?
Search Engines.
In the words of Paul Harvey, now you know the REST of the story.
Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate, has been perfectly clear in all of his public speaking what his intentions with regard to Maxtor are.
The old Maxtor products are going away. Period. Seagate has no intention to ship these products any longer than they contractually have to.
The Maxtor brand on the other hand, may continue on for some time, but it will only be a label on Seagate products. Maxtor had greater brand equity among consumers than Seagate does, and there is no reason to throw away that brand recognition.
Anybody here saying things that imply that Maxtor is going to continue to operate within seagate as a seprate entity isn't paying attention. Watkins has publicly said he eventually plans to let 90% of Maxtor people go. Here is an example for desktop products in particular, which used to be designed by Maxtor in Colorado. Seagate has already let go 640 of the 850 people who used to work at that site and the building is effectively gutted.
Who on earth would graph federal spending and not show the "non discretionary" portion?
That's like me telling my wife that we have to cut back on groceries and diapers, because they consume 84% of our discretionary spending. Meanwhile, I'm spending 8 times as much on heroin, crack, hookers, and video games and calling it "non discretionary".
Social Security and Medicare are going to bankrupt us a lot faster than tomahawk missiles.
I wonder what is included in the "Financial Services" category. Some posters seem to assume this is just all the online brokers. I bet it is more than that.
One of the most frequent (and annoying) class of advertisers I see on Yahoo are the seedy mortgage brokers, with all their ads for "teaser rate" interest only adjustable rate mortgages.
Now that the bottom is falling out of the mortgage industry, the brokers are getting more desperate for new suckers, er I mean "clients". There are less of those to go around and naturally the advertising is going to fall off.
Maybe Yahoo should just lift their prohibition against advertising porn. I bet they are leaving a lot of dollars on the table by not being willing to have a crotch shot on their home page. At least that industry is more ethical than the people who have been selling negative amortization adjustable rate mortgages on over assessed homes to people who least understand (and can least afford) what they were being set up for.
I thought the headline read "Intel Announces Lawyers On a Chip", and I was really scared for a moment. God forbid Intel unleash billions of transistor-powered attorneys on the world!
It's already been written over and over on the interweb, and several other posters have said it here. No DRM crippled format is going to sell, until it has been demonstrated that the DRM does not interfere with the traditional things consumers do with their media - INCLUDING making back-up copies.
Bonus corollary: Whichever of the new HD DVD formats is the first to have the DRM cracked, will be the format that succeeds in the marketplace.
I've got a great idea for a business. I want to start a factory that makes air, bottle it, ship it to people's houses, and let them breathe it. The problem is, there is already too much air around, and it is all free.
Shouldn't I be able to lobby Congress to ban all this free air, so that my business model can succeed? Think of all the tax dollars my air sales will bring in?
The example you set up is quite similar. You have proposed a stupid business model, and then ask us how to make it work. The fact that this model appeared to work for part of the twentieth century was a quirk of technology. There just happened to be a slim window in the development of technology where the tools of reproduction were too expensive for the common man, and multiple businesses sprang up to distort and manipulate this flaw in technology. Now that technology has improved, those businesses want to hold onto their out-of-date business model.
Buggy whips went away, slide rules went away, and those businesses are next.
I imagine that if we ever invent a food replicator like on Star Trek, all the farmers, grocery stores, and restaurant owners will want their obsolete business models protected as well. But too bad, technology marches forward.
A primary reason for the difference between US security standards and European security standards is the compute environment, and hence, the assumption of trust given to the terminal.
In the US, most users are accessing their accounts from their work or home computers. Although keyloggers may be present on these machines, it isn't very common yet. In northern europe, the use of internet terminals in cafes or kiosks is much more common. On these machines, it is likely that keyloggers will be present, so it is conservative to assume that everything the user does will be logged someone.
This assumption (everything the user does is logged) drives the need to require access to some thing (PIN grid, token generator, etc) that is needed in addition to the normal username and password. The higher level of justified paranoia drives a higher perception of security requirements.
One tremendous downside to this: loss of one of the best features of online banking - ease of use and portability. I personally have about ten online accounts with different banks, and I use all those accounts frequently. Everything I need to know to manage my personaly finances is carried in my head, and I can access my accounts from any computer anywhere in the world with nothing more than the knowledge I possess. Having to carry any sort of physical object to access my accounts would be a tremendous loss, one that would probably drive me to seek another bank, or a bank in another country, to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
And since any new sovereign nation founded on an artificial island is presumable not a signatory to this convention, then this convention has no authority over them.
I am an insider in the drive industry, so while I need to be vague on some things, I can add clarification on others.
A hard drive is a very complex subsystem inside your computer, more complex than many people realize. A hard drive contains one or more CPUs, memory, firmware, and dedicated hardware devoted to the functions of storing and retrieving data.
There is no single "right" way to draw the line between what is firmware and what is hardware in a hard drive. Algorithms could be coded in VHDL or Verilog and synthesized into the silicon, or they could be compiled in C (or hand coded in assembly) and be embedded in firmware. Each drive company has their own philosophy for where to draw the line.
Some drive companies choose to implement only fundamental functions in silicon, and implement everything else in firmware. For these companies, comparing their firmware to the BIOS in a PC is a poor analogy. A better analogy would be to compare the firmware to the operating system.
In a system with "lite" firmware, the firmware typically would be responsible for configuring a few control registers and buffers, and then the hardware would take over. But for a system with "heavy" firmware, the firmware behaves much more like a kernel. Data is not going to be moved in or out of buffers, or be sent to and from platters, without the active involvement of the firmware scheduling and ordering that activity.
The author of the OP wrote "it is highly unusual for (firmware) to affect sequential throughput". The author is wrong. In a system with "heavy" firmware, all performance is highly dependent on the firmware. It can easily make the same difference in performance as you would see running Windows 95 v. Windows XP v. Windows Vista v. RH 7.2 v. RHEL 3.0 on the same PC hardware.
I do not know if the Seagate drive in question is a "heavy" or "lite" firmware drive, but I do know that the assumption that firmware takes a minor role in hard drive performance is mistaken.
If Sony doesn't want to fall into distant third in this round of the console wars, they need to get off their backside and take action to get this pig selling.
The formula is simple:
Nintendo has made a bold statement with a $250 console. Sony should "see and raise" Nintendo's position.
- Sell the 80-GB console for $199.95 (The Wii killer)
- Announce a 300-GB console with bundled DVR software and lifetime subscription to channel guide for $499 (The Tivo killer)
- Announce free signing for any GPL Linux Distributions (The PC killer)
Badda-bing, Nintendo is back to sucking hind teat.
It make me a little sad to see someone who was once on the side of good (the EFF) turn to the side of evil (Wikipedia). I guess everybody has their price.
Hopefully, once he sees Wikipedia from the inside, he will join the exodus of ex-insiders who have walked away from Jimbo's empire.
As most slashdotters know, there is often a mistaken impression that the "World Wide Web" and HTML equal the internet. Web browsers processing HTML are just one application that rides on the internet, and it wasn't even the first application that did so.
The importance of HTML was that it was the "killer app" that drove internet connections to people's homes. Naturally, the initial implementation of connectivity was tuned to HTML; particularly the standard implementation where bandwidth into the home far exceeds bandwidth out of the home, but also with regards to some ISPs blocking ports or shaping traffic.
As internet applications continue to evolve, it is only natural that the web will someday become only a tiny fraction of internet traffic.
The challenge for ISPs is to react to this, and provide the services that their customers need before their competitors do. Who knows, perhaps someday soon we will see a standard home connection where outbound bandwidth is 10x inbound bandwidth.
The EULA only allows "producing sound directly from the record". I don't think that would allow playing it on a record player, as the player is a device that indirectly produces sound.
You could probably wave the record in the air and listen to the wind whistling through the hole.
No, the customer of their service is the hiring employer. The person receiving the call is not being asked to purchase anything, therefore it is not telemarketing.
Read the law and CFR yourself...
The definition of telemarketing in 16 CFR 310 says "..induce the purchase of goods or services.."
Recruiters are not telemarketers, and are therefore not subject to the "do not call" regulations.
You need to get more creative.
I would first ask "why is this a problem"? Do your employees just find the calls annoying, or have you lost any employees to the recruiters. If you have lost employees, then I would say the recruiters are performing a valid service of helping people find jobs that they are more satisfied with. In this case, you need to address the problems that encourage your people to leave. Doubling their salaries might be a good start.
If your employees just find the calls annoying, and not a single employee has said anything encouraging to the recruiters, one has to wonder why they keep calling. You would think that if nobody ever talks to them, provides a resume, takes an interview, or moves to a new job, they would eventually move on to greener pastures.
How about holding a contest? Encourage your employees to record the calls and curse the recruiters in the most explicit language possible. Play back the recordings in your next company-wide meeting, and give cash rewards to the employees who are most insulting to the recruiters.
Are you saying there is some way to use illegal aliens as fuel? Please elaborate.
I was well aware of using them as tires, but they keep puncturing a lung and going flat.
I believe that food demand is artificially keeping prices for Ethanol high.
If we could eliminate 90% of the demand for food, wouldn't ethanol prices fall?
Can anyone produce an economically sound argument to the contrary?
They (the AACS-LA) are playing games with words.
When they say they have "revoked the key", they mean they have revoked the device key for a specific software player. They have not done anything about the processing key that is floating around.
The biggest shortcoming of the current internet (to me) is that anonymity wasn't designed in from the ground up.
Hopefully, this "next big thing" will be designed so there is no information (like IP address) that can be used to trace an internet persona to an actual person or geographic area.
First, I'll give the disclaimer that I am a hardware engineer, not a software engineer.
My experience has been that when bringing up new hardware, when you don't yet have a stable bootloader, let alone a compiler or operating system, then being able to write in assembly is very valuable.
More accurately I think I should say that being able to write in machine language is very valuable, as you might not even have a working assembler depending on what you are working on.
Being able to peek and poke a few registers, hand code a loop or two, and maybe write some sequential values across a bus can go a long way in helping you get the hardware going. Hook a logic analyzer to the bus and you're golden.
Even if you do have a whole infrastructure of compilers, device drivers, and operating systems available, none of that helps you when the first damn batch of prototypes (made of the first revision of the PCB, containing the first ever silicon of a new CPU, and the first ever silicon of the the new chipset) won't even boot, and you are trying to get to root-cause ASAP because you've got a whole army of testers ready to have at the hardware as soon as you get it running code.
In short, if you are the guy designing the raw iron that the software is going to talk to, you better be able to step up and take control of the raw iron when the software can't.
You beat me to the punch, but I was going to post the same thing. I found the Garmin interface to be much easier to use than the competitors at the time (like Magellan), mainly because the "buttons on top" made it simpler to operate one handed.
The disadvantage is that if you have the device mounted (on the dashboard of your car, or on a panel of your boat), your hand tends to block the screen while you punch the buttons. Buttons on bottom works better if you need constant view of the screen while you operate the device.
Captcha: mating
My understanding is that Congress passes laws. Can anybody explain how the Mint (a part of the executive branch) could outlaw anything?
Links explaining this would be welcome.
I think the article noted that the last time this came up for vote by the community, the community voted it down. I think it also notes that this is something that Jimbo Wales dictated, and not something that went through the normal community approval process.
Why?
Why would Wales simply dictate this change be made?
Because Wikipedia is a source of high-quality links. Editors have increasingly been making sure to put high-quality references in articles, mainly as links to other web sites. A single Wikipedia article can often contain links to the best websites related to that subject.
So ask yourself why would Wales want to make those links private, and no longer harvested by Google.
Is it that hard to figure out?
If you still don't know, then ask yourself what business Wales has announced that he wants to pursue with his new for profit company, Wikia?
Search Engines.
In the words of Paul Harvey, now you know the REST of the story.
That is clear from the article.
You say "anarchist" like it is a bad thing.
No person or group of people has any moral authority over any other person. An anarchist is simply a person who understands this.
If your parents led you to this understanding early, you should thank them, not insult them.
Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate, has been perfectly clear in all of his public speaking what his intentions with regard to Maxtor are.
The old Maxtor products are going away. Period. Seagate has no intention to ship these products any longer than they contractually have to.
The Maxtor brand on the other hand, may continue on for some time, but it will only be a label on Seagate products. Maxtor had greater brand equity among consumers than Seagate does, and there is no reason to throw away that brand recognition.
Anybody here saying things that imply that Maxtor is going to continue to operate within seagate as a seprate entity isn't paying attention. Watkins has publicly said he eventually plans to let 90% of Maxtor people go. Here is an example for desktop products in particular, which used to be designed by Maxtor in Colorado. Seagate has already let go 640 of the 850 people who used to work at that site and the building is effectively gutted.
Who on earth would graph federal spending and not show the "non discretionary" portion?
That's like me telling my wife that we have to cut back on groceries and diapers, because they consume 84% of our discretionary spending. Meanwhile, I'm spending 8 times as much on heroin, crack, hookers, and video games and calling it "non discretionary".
Social Security and Medicare are going to bankrupt us a lot faster than tomahawk missiles.
I wonder what is included in the "Financial Services" category. Some posters seem to assume this is just all the online brokers. I bet it is more than that.
One of the most frequent (and annoying) class of advertisers I see on Yahoo are the seedy mortgage brokers, with all their ads for "teaser rate" interest only adjustable rate mortgages.
Now that the bottom is falling out of the mortgage industry, the brokers are getting more desperate for new suckers, er I mean "clients". There are less of those to go around and naturally the advertising is going to fall off.
Maybe Yahoo should just lift their prohibition against advertising porn. I bet they are leaving a lot of dollars on the table by not being willing to have a crotch shot on their home page. At least that industry is more ethical than the people who have been selling negative amortization adjustable rate mortgages on over assessed homes to people who least understand (and can least afford) what they were being set up for.
I thought the headline read "Intel Announces Lawyers On a Chip", and I was really scared for a moment. God forbid Intel unleash billions of transistor-powered attorneys on the world!
It's already been written over and over on the interweb, and several other posters have said it here. No DRM crippled format is going to sell, until it has been demonstrated that the DRM does not interfere with the traditional things consumers do with their media - INCLUDING making back-up copies.
Bonus corollary: Whichever of the new HD DVD formats is the first to have the DRM cracked, will be the format that succeeds in the marketplace.
I've got a great idea for a business. I want to start a factory that makes air, bottle it, ship it to people's houses, and let them breathe it. The problem is, there is already too much air around, and it is all free.
Shouldn't I be able to lobby Congress to ban all this free air, so that my business model can succeed? Think of all the tax dollars my air sales will bring in?
The example you set up is quite similar. You have proposed a stupid business model, and then ask us how to make it work. The fact that this model appeared to work for part of the twentieth century was a quirk of technology. There just happened to be a slim window in the development of technology where the tools of reproduction were too expensive for the common man, and multiple businesses sprang up to distort and manipulate this flaw in technology. Now that technology has improved, those businesses want to hold onto their out-of-date business model.
Buggy whips went away, slide rules went away, and those businesses are next.
I imagine that if we ever invent a food replicator like on Star Trek, all the farmers, grocery stores, and restaurant owners will want their obsolete business models protected as well. But too bad, technology marches forward.
A primary reason for the difference between US security standards and European security standards is the compute environment, and hence, the assumption of trust given to the terminal.
In the US, most users are accessing their accounts from their work or home computers. Although keyloggers may be present on these machines, it isn't very common yet. In northern europe, the use of internet terminals in cafes or kiosks is much more common. On these machines, it is likely that keyloggers will be present, so it is conservative to assume that everything the user does will be logged someone.
This assumption (everything the user does is logged) drives the need to require access to some thing (PIN grid, token generator, etc) that is needed in addition to the normal username and password. The higher level of justified paranoia drives a higher perception of security requirements.
One tremendous downside to this: loss of one of the best features of online banking - ease of use and portability. I personally have about ten online accounts with different banks, and I use all those accounts frequently. Everything I need to know to manage my personaly finances is carried in my head, and I can access my accounts from any computer anywhere in the world with nothing more than the knowledge I possess. Having to carry any sort of physical object to access my accounts would be a tremendous loss, one that would probably drive me to seek another bank, or a bank in another country, to avoid.