It's possible that the machine is actually more of an embedded system, acting as a front-end for a device whose drivers won't work in a VM.
dom
If it's a really embedded system, upgrading it is going to happen with a forklift or with not-inexpensive cooperation from the vendor.
If it's just an unsupported peripheral, contemporary virtualization software can(with an IOMMU) actually attach a physical device to a VM's bus. Very cute.
Some early customer focus groups have described the new UI as 'dubiously pocket friendly' and used such hurtful phrases as 'ugly' and 'Why does my phone need a team of medical technicians following me around?'.
A friendly reminder that Black and Decker makes the other major tool for improving the precision and SNR of brain activity data has so far been enough to shut them up.
is your next laptop going to ship with a 265 watt brick
If we had USB SS power specs, we would have never had laptop power bricks to begin with...
But how will my USB-powered laptop power its USB-powered peripherals? Are we going to have USB-power injectors, that pass the data lines through to the laptop and the power rails to a second wall wart?
(We already had a mini taste of this with the rPI, which ran from USB power, and so tended to have issues with brownouts on its own USB host ports).
Have fun connecting that printer to your laptop while battery powered...
A small prize will be awarded to the first rootkit that successfully uses only ACPI power-draw data to successfully recover the text being sent to a laser printer...
PoE had the advantage(in terms of safety) of being heavily designed around the "As much power as possible; but Do Not trip any limits that would cause this to be treated as a power cable, rather than a data cable, for regulatory or insurance reasons" constraint.
Since the whole point was to make it cheaper to operate small ethernet-connected peripherals, it was absolutely necessary that nothing happen that would cause all that twisted-pair running through the walls to suddenly void your fire insurance or require a licensed electrician to go over the place with a fine toothed comb(since, at that point, you are getting dangerously close to the cost of just running a few more AC jacks and using the cheap plugpacks).
Since USB's terrible length limits more or less entirely remove any in-wall or permanent installs(that don't run over proprietary converters, which are free to do whatever they want, since there is absolutely no expected standardization between brands, models, or even necessarily anything other than the two devices that shipped in the same box), they probably won't have the benefit of grim imaginary fire marshals standing over their shoulders.
TOSlink is sort of a weird one because it was optical; but usually over very short plastic runs, and at a data rate so low that even fairly pitiful copper has no trouble with it(which is why it is now commonly replaced by, or lives along side with, an RCA connector providing the same output in a copper flavor). I'm sure that there is some reason why optical was dragged in in the first place; but it's always a bit jarring to see.
While I'm not impressed by USB's mutations over the years, Firewire had the major drawback that(at least in practice, not sure if the paper demanded otherwise) there was a very, very heavy emphasis on 'up to' when it came to how much power could be delivered.
A small minority of actually-well-built workstations and the like wouldn't shrug at providing full specced power. More or less ordinary PCs usually had a floppy or molex connector to supplement PCI bus power; but didn't spring for a DC-DC converter, so (since 30v isn't readily available anywhere on the DC side of an ATX PSU) you generally got 12v, albeit at a decent amperage. Laptops? In practice, "firewire" pretty much meant 'whatever Apple did on the last couple of models of ibook and powerbook; because all the PCs omitted the power pins entirely for "i.link" or similar, which usually boiled down to ~19v, if on adapter, 12-ish if on battery.
The nominal maximum was certainly fairly spacious; but a powered firewire peripheral was essentially always on the hook for a DC-DC converter, and had to deal gracefully with(or simply refuse to work with, ideally in a documented way) substantially inferior power supplies from many devices.
5v 500ma was always pitiful; but (by virtue of being so pathetic) most devices actually did as well or better than they claimed to, and lots of peripherals could get away with only the cheapest of designs for handling bus power.
That's my bet for why "100watt USB" will suck. Sure, it'll be cute and all that POS hardware vendors can now have USB printers and things that are 'standards compliant' and will actually work if purchased 100% from approved vendors and plugged in just right; but everyone else will have wildly unpredictable actual power levels.
This "100watt USB!!!" nonsense has been floating around for a while, and it just never seems to get any better.
Uncertainty is Bad. 100watts is a lot of power. Your laptop's brick is almost certainly specced for less than that. Even a desktop PSU will likely be 250-350, outside of gamers and workstations(and often the upper end of the range is...optimistic... at best). Now, if we have this '100watt USB', what are devices going to do? is your next laptop going to ship with a 265 watt brick, so that it has the same 65 watts for itself as your current one does, and can handle both its ports being used? Is it going to ship with exactly the same brick and simply brown out the USB port at some unpredictable power level?(extra credit awarded if that unpredictable level depends on whether the battery is charging or not, and the current CPU load...) If "100watts" is actually "anywhere between ~15 watts and 100watts, largely unpredictable to the consumer", what are peripheral manufacturers going to target? What good is theoretical capacity that you can't actually use because a nontrival-but-hard-to-predict percentage of your customers can't actually deliver it?
Bus power is nice because it reduces cabling and complexity. However, if it isn't dependable, you can't rely on it, so you have to fall back on designs that pretend it isn't available. Now you have more expensive USB ports(in some devices) and wall warts or PSUs for your higher power peripherals! What a win!
This isn't to say that any increase in bus power is bad(given USB's use cases, 'enough power to spin up a 2.5 inch HDD' or 'enough power to charge a smartphone' are pretty useful things. However, you can't just keep pushing the ceiling without limit: the wider the uncertainty, the greater the costs(for devices that actually engineer to spec and include the capability to support the top of the range) and the greater the limits and confusion(for devices that target more realistic real-world output values, and for the poor bastards who think that 'USB' means 'works when plugged into my USB port').
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Not every device is going to draw 100W!
No; but if there is a nontrivial risk that any device is going to, every USB connector needs to be sturdy enough to handle being the lucky winner, and the power supply needs to be sufficient for at least one such device, along with a graceful, not-too-likely-to-result-in-user-rage-and/or-returns, mechanism for informing the user about power limits if the PSU isn't up to the task of multiple such devices.
I'm pretty sure that they can't repossess something for which no money is actually owed unless it was used as collateral for money that can't otherwise be retrieved.
The great thing about really 'downmarket' collections strategies is that you only use them on powerless poor people, so your...creative scope...is considerably broader than it might be under other circumstances.
Absolutely. However, it may be difficult to prove that specific individuals were liable for criminal acts (it may not be, I don't know the specifics of the case). It may not be possible to prove who was criminally liable for this action.
If I remember the script correctly, it goes like this:
If you ask about the powerless peons in the phone cubes, then they were just following orders.
If you ask about the C-levels, then it was the powerless peons acting outside the knowledge or authorization of management.
If the opposing attorney is particularly good; both are true simultaneously, and it's an instance of Schrodinger's malfeasance, which is simultaneously committed under orders and committed without due authorization.
Except for the purposes of being tried and sent to jail, of course... Then they are merely the vessels into which Hard Working Real Americans invest their retirement savings, and you wouldn't be mean enough to steal the food from Grandma's mouth, would you?
Hey, they have to leave room for the awesome crashing action that their pro-level competitors over at the V-22 project have been delivering so aggressively...
This looks eerily like a physicist who has just opened a biology textbook and is now restating the idea that 'intelligence' is the product of an evolutionary selection process because it's a uniquely powerful solution to the class of problems that certain ecological niches pose and is now attempting to add equations....
Is there something that I'm missing, aside from the 'being alive means grabbing enough energy to keep your entropy below background levels' and the 'we suspect biological intelligence of having evolved because it provides a fitness advantage in certain ecological niches' elements?
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
But 'pretty' is important when trying not to scare new users (aka 'non-professional' users) away.
Arguably, with contemporary hardware, every second between hitting the power button and seeing the login prompt is 'ugly' no matter how attractive the loading animation.
I certainly won't deny that throwing the results of a confused OpenBSD system, in some ghastly VGA legacy text mode, at the user on every boot is a good strategy; but if the hardware that a normal user is trying to boot(ie. no massive disk arrays or other things that Just Take Time to spin up and check) gives them long enough to start worrying, you have bigger problems.
Would this encourage these big companies to move out of California if this bill passes? Are they using that as leverage? Probably so. Probably very effective. Probably so effective...
Unless the legislators are total morons who know nothing about history, the law will be written to target people who do business in California, or do business with Californians, rather than businesses in California.
Jurisidiction-shopping is trival(which is why small British protectorates with sunny climates and...sparse... tax codes tend to have some extremely profitable PO boxes that somehow end up booking all the revenues that are definitely not generated by actual operations elsewhere); but that doesn't change the fact that you have to go where the customers are.
For the most part, all the multinationals have already jurisdiction-shopped everything that they can(just as Washington about how Microsoft mysteriously makes all its money in Nevada, despite having almost nobody there...); but they tend to do little more than bluster against laws of the form 'if you do business here, here's how you'll have to play'; because you have to do business where the customers are(and because the laws, no matter how apocalyptic the bluster, tend to be pretty toothless). California, in particular, is Not Exactly Small as a market, and has pretty good luck getting its way.
Hey! Be nice. Our good buddy Eric has a 100% consistent and hypocrisy-free commitment to the principle that surveillance technology should never be allowed into the hands of people who he might conceivably be vulnerable to...
Street-view cars and omnipresent online surveillance are OK; because those things are crazy expensive to operate usefully, and because if you don't want your house photographed you can just buy a larger plot of land, a higher fence, and more rentacops! Civilian drones, though, some bored kid with a couple hundred bucks could buzz his Betters for nothing more than the cost of electricity to recharge his little model airplane, and we just can't have that.
Sleazy lawyers are to the world of civil law what cops are to the world of criminal law.
They work hard for their bad reputations, and they don't tend to result in much money returning to the actual injured parties; but in a well-functioning society, they exist to deter people even worse than they are...
If you look at the list of companies on the letterhead, you'll see that companies you pay(often quite significantly) for, are not signed on to your distinction.
FROM: California Chamber of Commerce
American Insurance Association
American International Group
Association of California Life and Health Insurance Companies
California Bankers Association
California Cable and Telecommunications Association
California Grocers Association
California Land Title Association
California Manufacturers and Technology Association
California Retailers Association
Direct Marketing Association
Internet Alliance
NetChoice
Personal Insurance Federation of California
State Privacy and Security Coalition, Inc.
TechAmerica
TechNet
R. L. Polk & Co.
Reed Elsevier, PLC
In fact, the conventional 'free as in adsense' crowd is remarkably absent(or, rather, hiding behind a few industry pressure groups with 'tech' somewhere in the name).
The list is heavily dominated by outfits who are either overt spammers(DMA, looking at you), data-broker creeps(Reed Elsevier), and companies with a strong actuarial interest in everything about you(the insurance and banking entities).
This has essentially nothing to do with ad-supported internet stuff.
You almost have to admire the sociopathic chutzpah that it must take for AIG to comment, much less demand to get their way, on just about anything ever again ever...
In other news, the great and good of the world are demanding continued immunity from a hithertoo largely alien phenomenon referred to as 'consequences', widely believed to be some sort of communicable disease popular among people who don't matter. Important People warn of vaguely defined, but catastrophic, outcomes should these 'consequences' be allowed to spread from the squalid and undeserving sectors where they currently breed and into high value portions of society.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible that the machine is actually more of an embedded system, acting as a front-end for a device whose drivers won't work in a VM.
dom
If it's a really embedded system, upgrading it is going to happen with a forklift or with not-inexpensive cooperation from the vendor.
If it's just an unsupported peripheral, contemporary virtualization software can(with an IOMMU) actually attach a physical device to a VM's bus. Very cute.
Some early customer focus groups have described the new UI as 'dubiously pocket friendly' and used such hurtful phrases as 'ugly' and 'Why does my phone need a team of medical technicians following me around?'.
A friendly reminder that Black and Decker makes the other major tool for improving the precision and SNR of brain activity data has so far been enough to shut them up.
is your next laptop going to ship with a 265 watt brick
If we had USB SS power specs, we would have never had laptop power bricks to begin with...
But how will my USB-powered laptop power its USB-powered peripherals? Are we going to have USB-power injectors, that pass the data lines through to the laptop and the power rails to a second wall wart?
(We already had a mini taste of this with the rPI, which ran from USB power, and so tended to have issues with brownouts on its own USB host ports).
Have fun connecting that printer to your laptop while battery powered ...
A small prize will be awarded to the first rootkit that successfully uses only ACPI power-draw data to successfully recover the text being sent to a laser printer...
PoE had the advantage(in terms of safety) of being heavily designed around the "As much power as possible; but Do Not trip any limits that would cause this to be treated as a power cable, rather than a data cable, for regulatory or insurance reasons" constraint.
Since the whole point was to make it cheaper to operate small ethernet-connected peripherals, it was absolutely necessary that nothing happen that would cause all that twisted-pair running through the walls to suddenly void your fire insurance or require a licensed electrician to go over the place with a fine toothed comb(since, at that point, you are getting dangerously close to the cost of just running a few more AC jacks and using the cheap plugpacks).
Since USB's terrible length limits more or less entirely remove any in-wall or permanent installs(that don't run over proprietary converters, which are free to do whatever they want, since there is absolutely no expected standardization between brands, models, or even necessarily anything other than the two devices that shipped in the same box), they probably won't have the benefit of grim imaginary fire marshals standing over their shoulders.
TOSlink is sort of a weird one because it was optical; but usually over very short plastic runs, and at a data rate so low that even fairly pitiful copper has no trouble with it(which is why it is now commonly replaced by, or lives along side with, an RCA connector providing the same output in a copper flavor). I'm sure that there is some reason why optical was dragged in in the first place; but it's always a bit jarring to see.
Didn't firewire have a more-or-less-vapor 1600mb/s flavor that worked over fiber runs and existed pretty much nowhere at all?
While I'm not impressed by USB's mutations over the years, Firewire had the major drawback that(at least in practice, not sure if the paper demanded otherwise) there was a very, very heavy emphasis on 'up to' when it came to how much power could be delivered.
A small minority of actually-well-built workstations and the like wouldn't shrug at providing full specced power. More or less ordinary PCs usually had a floppy or molex connector to supplement PCI bus power; but didn't spring for a DC-DC converter, so (since 30v isn't readily available anywhere on the DC side of an ATX PSU) you generally got 12v, albeit at a decent amperage. Laptops? In practice, "firewire" pretty much meant 'whatever Apple did on the last couple of models of ibook and powerbook; because all the PCs omitted the power pins entirely for "i.link" or similar, which usually boiled down to ~19v, if on adapter, 12-ish if on battery.
The nominal maximum was certainly fairly spacious; but a powered firewire peripheral was essentially always on the hook for a DC-DC converter, and had to deal gracefully with(or simply refuse to work with, ideally in a documented way) substantially inferior power supplies from many devices.
5v 500ma was always pitiful; but (by virtue of being so pathetic) most devices actually did as well or better than they claimed to, and lots of peripherals could get away with only the cheapest of designs for handling bus power.
That's my bet for why "100watt USB" will suck. Sure, it'll be cute and all that POS hardware vendors can now have USB printers and things that are 'standards compliant' and will actually work if purchased 100% from approved vendors and plugged in just right; but everyone else will have wildly unpredictable actual power levels.
The original spec included a provision for 'fuck-youSB' power; but patent issues with Tazer inc. led to that being dropped...
This "100watt USB!!!" nonsense has been floating around for a while, and it just never seems to get any better.
Uncertainty is Bad. 100watts is a lot of power. Your laptop's brick is almost certainly specced for less than that. Even a desktop PSU will likely be 250-350, outside of gamers and workstations(and often the upper end of the range is...optimistic... at best). Now, if we have this '100watt USB', what are devices going to do? is your next laptop going to ship with a 265 watt brick, so that it has the same 65 watts for itself as your current one does, and can handle both its ports being used? Is it going to ship with exactly the same brick and simply brown out the USB port at some unpredictable power level?(extra credit awarded if that unpredictable level depends on whether the battery is charging or not, and the current CPU load...) If "100watts" is actually "anywhere between ~15 watts and 100watts, largely unpredictable to the consumer", what are peripheral manufacturers going to target? What good is theoretical capacity that you can't actually use because a nontrival-but-hard-to-predict percentage of your customers can't actually deliver it?
Bus power is nice because it reduces cabling and complexity. However, if it isn't dependable, you can't rely on it, so you have to fall back on designs that pretend it isn't available. Now you have more expensive USB ports(in some devices) and wall warts or PSUs for your higher power peripherals! What a win!
This isn't to say that any increase in bus power is bad(given USB's use cases, 'enough power to spin up a 2.5 inch HDD' or 'enough power to charge a smartphone' are pretty useful things. However, you can't just keep pushing the ceiling without limit: the wider the uncertainty, the greater the costs(for devices that actually engineer to spec and include the capability to support the top of the range) and the greater the limits and confusion(for devices that target more realistic real-world output values, and for the poor bastards who think that 'USB' means 'works when plugged into my USB port').
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Not every device is going to draw 100W!
No; but if there is a nontrivial risk that any device is going to, every USB connector needs to be sturdy enough to handle being the lucky winner, and the power supply needs to be sufficient for at least one such device, along with a graceful, not-too-likely-to-result-in-user-rage-and/or-returns, mechanism for informing the user about power limits if the PSU isn't up to the task of multiple such devices.
The uncertainty will be exciting.
fairly robust fibre optic solutions to date that carry data and are far more energy efficient. im confused as to why our peripherals dont use them
Given what users can do to strain-relief-equipped multistrand copper power cables, they may not be quite ready for optical fiber...
I'm pretty sure that they can't repossess something for which no money is actually owed unless it was used as collateral for money that can't otherwise be retrieved.
The great thing about really 'downmarket' collections strategies is that you only use them on powerless poor people, so your...creative scope...is considerably broader than it might be under other circumstances.
Absolutely. However, it may be difficult to prove that specific individuals were liable for criminal acts (it may not be, I don't know the specifics of the case). It may not be possible to prove who was criminally liable for this action.
If I remember the script correctly, it goes like this:
If you ask about the powerless peons in the phone cubes, then they were just following orders.
If you ask about the C-levels, then it was the powerless peons acting outside the knowledge or authorization of management.
If the opposing attorney is particularly good; both are true simultaneously, and it's an instance of Schrodinger's malfeasance, which is simultaneously committed under orders and committed without due authorization.
Corporations are people, my friend!
Except for the purposes of being tried and sent to jail, of course... Then they are merely the vessels into which Hard Working Real Americans invest their retirement savings, and you wouldn't be mean enough to steal the food from Grandma's mouth, would you?
Hey, they have to leave room for the awesome crashing action that their pro-level competitors over at the V-22 project have been delivering so aggressively...
This looks eerily like a physicist who has just opened a biology textbook and is now restating the idea that 'intelligence' is the product of an evolutionary selection process because it's a uniquely powerful solution to the class of problems that certain ecological niches pose and is now attempting to add equations....
Is there something that I'm missing, aside from the 'being alive means grabbing enough energy to keep your entropy below background levels' and the 'we suspect biological intelligence of having evolved because it provides a fitness advantage in certain ecological niches' elements?
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
But 'pretty' is important when trying not to scare new users (aka 'non-professional' users) away.
Arguably, with contemporary hardware, every second between hitting the power button and seeing the login prompt is 'ugly' no matter how attractive the loading animation.
I certainly won't deny that throwing the results of a confused OpenBSD system, in some ghastly VGA legacy text mode, at the user on every boot is a good strategy; but if the hardware that a normal user is trying to boot(ie. no massive disk arrays or other things that Just Take Time to spin up and check) gives them long enough to start worrying, you have bigger problems.
Would this encourage these big companies to move out of California if this bill passes? Are they using that as leverage? Probably so. Probably very effective. Probably so effective...
Unless the legislators are total morons who know nothing about history, the law will be written to target people who do business in California, or do business with Californians, rather than businesses in California.
Jurisidiction-shopping is trival(which is why small British protectorates with sunny climates and...sparse... tax codes tend to have some extremely profitable PO boxes that somehow end up booking all the revenues that are definitely not generated by actual operations elsewhere); but that doesn't change the fact that you have to go where the customers are.
For the most part, all the multinationals have already jurisdiction-shopped everything that they can(just as Washington about how Microsoft mysteriously makes all its money in Nevada, despite having almost nobody there...); but they tend to do little more than bluster against laws of the form 'if you do business here, here's how you'll have to play'; because you have to do business where the customers are(and because the laws, no matter how apocalyptic the bluster, tend to be pretty toothless). California, in particular, is Not Exactly Small as a market, and has pretty good luck getting its way.
Hey! Be nice. Our good buddy Eric has a 100% consistent and hypocrisy-free commitment to the principle that surveillance technology should never be allowed into the hands of people who he might conceivably be vulnerable to...
Street-view cars and omnipresent online surveillance are OK; because those things are crazy expensive to operate usefully, and because if you don't want your house photographed you can just buy a larger plot of land, a higher fence, and more rentacops! Civilian drones, though, some bored kid with a couple hundred bucks could buzz his Betters for nothing more than the cost of electricity to recharge his little model airplane, and we just can't have that.
Sleazy lawyers are to the world of civil law what cops are to the world of criminal law.
They work hard for their bad reputations, and they don't tend to result in much money returning to the actual injured parties; but in a well-functioning society, they exist to deter people even worse than they are...
The privacy invasion is the business model for the vapid bullshit.
If you look at the list of companies on the letterhead, you'll see that companies you pay(often quite significantly) for, are not signed on to your distinction.
FROM: California Chamber of Commerce
American Insurance Association
American International Group
Association of California Life and Health Insurance Companies
California Bankers Association
California Cable and Telecommunications Association
California Grocers Association
California Land Title Association
California Manufacturers and Technology Association
California Retailers Association
Direct Marketing Association
Internet Alliance
NetChoice
Personal Insurance Federation of California
State Privacy and Security Coalition, Inc.
TechAmerica
TechNet
R. L. Polk & Co.
Reed Elsevier, PLC
In fact, the conventional 'free as in adsense' crowd is remarkably absent(or, rather, hiding behind a few industry pressure groups with 'tech' somewhere in the name).
The list is heavily dominated by outfits who are either overt spammers(DMA, looking at you), data-broker creeps(Reed Elsevier), and companies with a strong actuarial interest in everything about you(the insurance and banking entities).
This has essentially nothing to do with ad-supported internet stuff.
You almost have to admire the sociopathic chutzpah that it must take for AIG to comment, much less demand to get their way, on just about anything ever again ever...
In other news, the great and good of the world are demanding continued immunity from a hithertoo largely alien phenomenon referred to as 'consequences', widely believed to be some sort of communicable disease popular among people who don't matter. Important People warn of vaguely defined, but catastrophic, outcomes should these 'consequences' be allowed to spread from the squalid and undeserving sectors where they currently breed and into high value portions of society.