A good 35 film neg will contain around 3k of resolution. This is generally scanned at 4k to preserve all the detail.
For low-light motion picture film, I'd agree, but slower film can eke out 8K resolution.
And then there's still 70mm. 60-year-old Cinerama, Todd-AO, and other large format negatives still don't have any digital capture system that can come close to the resolution.
Glad you brought up the RFCs - isn't a proper rDNS entry for a server a requirement?
It's a "SHOULD", not a "MUST", as it's perfectly legal for an RFC-compliant email system to not have a hostname. Such a system would introduce itself (in its greeting and in HELO to other servers) as "[aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd]" with the actual IP address replacing the placeholders.
Likewise, it is a "MUST NOT" for rejecting based on not having reverse DNS.
The latter is (AFAIK) difficult because you can't do binary masks on decimal numbers in zone files, so if you have a zone that isn't a/24 (or/16), your ISP has to about the same amount of work as if they were doing it for you.
Recent BIND implementations support zone delegation for PTR records on classless routes (i.e., on any number of bits, not just on octet boundaries). Google for "DNS PTR delegation" for some references.
It takes five minutes to configure the HELO and DNS records to be the same if you know what you're doing.
It works, just not the way you wish it works. HELO = DNS or you don't get to send me email.
This violates the RFC. The only check you can do is for the correct HELO syntax.
The argument to HELO is supposed to be an FDQN (although an IP-address literal is also valid, but a bare IP address is not). It does not have to resolve, nor does any PTR record have to return that same FQDN.
Luckily, you're not doing much harm. I ran my mail servers for over a year checking (logged only) for both whether the HELO resolved at all, and if it matched the PTR lookup from the connecting IP. Since I reject for bad HELO syntax, it turns out that the other checks on the HELO argument would reject less than 1% of remaining connections. Greylisting deals with everything that would have been rejected by HELO argument checks, plus a lot more, so that's what I stick with.
The owner of the IP address, usually the ISP, is authoritative for the reverse zone. It can't be arbitrarily manipulated without gaining authority over the zone anymore than a forward zone could be manipulated.
So, what you're saying is that because so many ISPs provide some sort of default reverse DNS (host132.newyork.example.com), then choosing to reject e-mail based on the lack of a PTR record will not only lose legitimate e-mail if the ISP doesn't create a default, but also only rarely block spam.
Amazon would collect and remit the payment to State B. Sales tax is collected against where the customer is at.
Apparently, you didn't read the post you replied to, in which there is some question as to "where the customer is at".
If you pay Amazon with a credit card that has a billing address in New Jersey, but have the order shipped to a verified address in Texas, where is "the customer"? If they are in Texas at the time the order is made, then Texas (state "C" in the OP) has a strong case for the customer being there.
Likewise, I pay for purchases from Newegg using PayPal, so Newegg has no clue where I "am". All they know is that they are shipping to an address that PayPal has verified I have some kind of control over. Newegg doesn't know if that's my legal state of residence, nor do they know if it has anything to do with my credit card billing address. In this case, Newegg could not send money to state "B", because they don't know anything about state "B"...they only have information about state "A" (where Newegg is) and state "C" (where the order is being shipped).
The reason this becomes important is that states with more permanent residents (and thus more likely to have credit card billing addresses associated with them) might argue as you do (that state "B" should get the money), while states with more transient residents would argue for the shipping address controlling the payment.
Or are you under the false assumption sales-tax are meant as a tax on consumers?
Since in every state I know, consumers are liable for paying sales tax if it was not collected by the seller, I can't see how you can claim sales tax is not a tax on consumers.
Yes, but Walmart.com does deal with the thousands without a lick of trouble.
You don't know whether they have any trouble or not.
I would not be surprised to see them fail a detailed audit of their tax collection, even though any mistakes might be minimal. The various governments probably don't care as long as they see tax money coming from WalMart, and it seems to be in the right ballpark. They might even "cheat" by pretending that online orders are actually local purchases at the nearest physical WalMart in the same state as the purchaser, thus meaning they don't have to worry about all the tax jurisdictions they don't already deal with.
The big issue with tax on mail-order or Internet purchases is that although databases exist for the sales tax rules, those databases all assume that the end user inputs the jurisdiction(s) as a constant that applies to every transaction (since the stores don't move). And, it's easy to know what jurisdiction your store is in, because it's a one-time question. But, there are no complete databases that contain every address in the country mapped to the sales tax jurisdiction, because there is no need for them. Even if you went to your local government, they might not be able to correctly answer the question of "what sales tax should I charge on sales at __RANDOM RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS__?"
Whereas in other jurisdictions the cop would lose their job, or end up in jail themselves
What a quaint belief.
Cops in every jurisdiction don't even get their hand slapped unless they start doing things that are orders of magnitude beyond what would cause normal citizens to be thrown in jail for 10 years. Yes, there are a few examples made, but generally those are going to be people that the rest of the cops didn't like for some other reason.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon. I read this book nearly 7 years ago because I wanted to understand the economics of open source by using a basis case of the arts.
Any book written over 7 years ago is likely far out of date with respect to the economics of the Internet.
Historically, gatekeepers like book publishers, record companies, and movie studios were the only way to get content widely distributed. This meant that if you did not fit the mold of what those gatekeepers were looking for, your content would never be consumed by more than a few people.
Today, those gatekeepers are becoming less and less meaningful, as "self-publishing" on the Internet can allow someone to reach a large enough audience to have their content be found by enough people who like it to make even small amounts of money per consumer add up to a reasonable paycheck. Yes, you are still going to have the "Angry Birds"/Beatles effect, where there are huge hits that skew the average, and you will have content that will be ignored. But, you no longer need to be able to convince some big company executive that your content will appeal to millions of people just to get it produced and available for 99% of people to reject (because all but the biggest "hits" are still only consumed by a tiny fraction of the population). With 7 billion people in the world, having 5% of people in the world consume your content means that you are more popular than Avatar, which only had about 3% or so people consume it, and that gave it over $2 billion in box office. On the other hand, having 100,000 fans (meaning 99.9986% of the world doesn't care about your content) can give you a nice solid living.
Just try writing a story about a basketball game for your newspaper without a letter in the paper's files from the NBA saying you can publish it.
Yes, newspapers and other media outlets have agreements with sports teams that give them extra access as long as they follow "the rules", and sometimes stupid teams will pull access from one or more reporters (or even entire companies).
Teams that do that are stupid because today big media actually has the upper hand, as if the NBA pissed off ESPN enough so that ESPN reduced coverage of the NBA to what they could get without that extra access, the NBA would suffer more than ESPN.
Since these rules are not law, but are merely part of the contract, nothing else can happen to the media company or reporter other than losing "special" access.
Now you know. They can, and do, lie about the law.
FTFY
First of all, the whole "express written consent" spiel is there to make sure that nobody tries to re-broadcast the game and claim "Joe from marketing said it was OK". Second, it only applies to the exact broadcast you are watching (like all copyright)...if you are sitting in the stands, you can legally give a play-by-play over your phone, as you own the copyright on that speech. Third, despite what it the spiel about "any rebroadcast", etc., fair use still applies, so you can legally do things like use snippets from broadcasts without any permission.
Trademark is a different issue, and indeed is why the word "Superbowl" is only used in advertising by its owners.
No, "Super Bowl" is not used in advertising by other entities because they can't afford lawyers smart enough to understand trademark law.
Trademarks are used to prevent confusion, so nobody other than the NFL can hold a sporting event called "Super Bowl". On the other hand, it's perfectly legal to put something like "come down to Joe's Appliances and buy a new TV so you can watch the Super Bowl in HDTV" in your ad. The only reason this doesn't happen is because we don't have a strong enough "loser pays" system for litigation, so the NFL can pull out millions of dollars worth of lawyers to intimidate Joe.
Intel in its infinite wisdom disabled VT-d in the i5 2500K and i7 2600K.
Intel really needs to stop the desktop/server differentiation for it's CPUs.
With 8GB of RAM common, and 16-24GB fairly easy to find in "desktop" configurations, ECC is becoming more important, yet Intel still sees it as a server-only feature. Virtualization will quickly become the same, and Intel needs to accept that the last real server distinction should be multiple sockets (yes, high-end workstations have that, but people who need that know that it's really a mini-server).
The problem with GPL is that nobody can take the code private and make money selling it.
There are several companies that have no problem making a wad of cash from GPL software without changing the license. At least one has two or three other groups giving away the same software for free, and yet is still doing just fine.
Sitting with only 3 tabs open (iGoogle, The Daily WTF, and Techdirt), Firefox 7 keeps increasing memory usage to about 900MB. At that point my system becomes so slow (due to having only 3GB of total RAM) that editing this post causes the system to pause for about 5 seconds after every 10 or so characters typed. So, I restart Firefox and it's OK again for a day. But, if I leave it running overnight right after a restart with just those 3 tabs open, by the next morning it's at 700MB.
This only happens on my Windows XP machine at work...64-bit XP at home with the same tabs open grows to about 300MB then holds steady for weeks. So, it's not universal, but it still leaks in some cases. And, yes, I've reproduced this with no add-ons enabled.
Probably Not going to be coming to joystick ports anytime soon; but is considered a feature of interest for things like high speed NICs, GPUs, and other such devices
With the IOMMU virtualization in current Intel and AMD chips, any PCI device can be slaved to a VM. The trick is that things like joystick ports aren't usually their own device, but rather hang off of a PCI bridge that can't handle single-root virtualization, but is part of an aggregate root device that can. So, you wouldn't always be able to pick and choose just one device.
In Linux, use "lspci -vt" to see the device tree. Any device that is just one level off the root can generally be slaved to a to a VM. I use this feature for an eSATA card and video capture cards and it works fine.
A few months ago, we had to restore it. It took THREE DAYS. Why? Because MySQL's backup and restore workflow has basically gone nowhere in 5 years, and hasn't scaled well to accommodate gigabyte-sized partitioned databases.
Use InnoDB and set "innodb_file_per_table" to "ON", and you can back up and restore database files without using SQL INSERT commands.
It's still going to take a while with 100GB of data, but it's just hard drive (and maybe network) speed and no CPU.
Add in domain knowledge (e.g., the database must be quiesced before the snapshot of the filesystem is taken, and you rsync from the snapshot) and with the "--backup" flag, you can even keep mutliple versions without duplication, which acts the same as a full/incremental tape rotation. This gives you an easy to maintain, reliable backup system. And, if you still need your crutch, you could back up the rsync copy to tape.
Periodic full-image backups are essential
That depends on the hosting company. If they let you load any OS, then maybe, but if they provide you with a clone of their standard image, then only the changes made by the customer need to be backed up...any "full-image" restore would start by restoring from the source image.
Simply because any technology used on a tablet is also available for a desktop PC, but without any of the restrictions. So, if tablets get "faster than a desktop", then desktop PCs can get even faster using that same technology, because battery life, heat, and size are all unimportant (within reason...nobody wants a room-sized compter today, but as long as you are in the normal ATX form factor ballpark, it would be fine).
For example, if next week Apple comes out with amazing new technology that allows the iPad 3 to have a quad-core processor that is faster than any desktop while still keeping a 10-hour battery life, then a month later some desktop will have an 8-core version of the same processor, and a month after that you'd have 16 cores.
4: Use an offsite provider. The usual stuff about losing access, security, and reliability of the offsite provider apply.
As people get more and more connected, the best way would be to pool with your friends and store offsite at their homes. A 2-4TB external drive is fairly cheap, and although some people might have more data, it should work to store the truly "cannot be reproduced" data (e.g., not ripped CDs, as you should still have the original).
CrashPlan is free for this kind of backup (as well as local backup), and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, which should cover most real-world users (although FreeBSD is specifically not supported).
I don't want it searching from the URL box any more than I want it searching from my login screen.
So, set "keyword.enabled" to false in about:config and Firefox will not search from the urlbar (that's what the code calls it, so that's what I call it...if they don't call it "awesome" in the code, then even the developers don't believe it is).
Although Firefox 3 didn't expose every option to allow full control of the urlbar, by 3.5 they were pretty much all there, and you can now set just about any combination of behavior you want. I do think more config options should be exposed in the "options" dialog, but even an addition of a help on the context menu forr about:config options would be enough for most power users (assuming that every configurable option is listed there, and it should be, even if it is set at the default).
Slashdot Mirror
A good 35 film neg will contain around 3k of resolution. This is generally scanned at 4k to preserve all the detail.
For low-light motion picture film, I'd agree, but slower film can eke out 8K resolution.
And then there's still 70mm. 60-year-old Cinerama, Todd-AO, and other large format negatives still don't have any digital capture system that can come close to the resolution.
The rest of the conversation has been edited out, but it related seek times to finding shoes that match your outfit.
This post makes me feel like I'm reading a Douglas Adams book. Well done.
Glad you brought up the RFCs - isn't a proper rDNS entry for a server a requirement?
It's a "SHOULD", not a "MUST", as it's perfectly legal for an RFC-compliant email system to not have a hostname. Such a system would introduce itself (in its greeting and in HELO to other servers) as "[aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd]" with the actual IP address replacing the placeholders.
Likewise, it is a "MUST NOT" for rejecting based on not having reverse DNS.
The latter is (AFAIK) difficult because you can't do binary masks on decimal numbers in zone files, so if you have a zone that isn't a /24 (or /16), your ISP has to about the same amount of work as if they were doing it for you.
Recent BIND implementations support zone delegation for PTR records on classless routes (i.e., on any number of bits, not just on octet boundaries). Google for "DNS PTR delegation" for some references.
It takes five minutes to configure the HELO and DNS records to be the same if you know what you're doing. It works, just not the way you wish it works. HELO = DNS or you don't get to send me email.
This violates the RFC. The only check you can do is for the correct HELO syntax.
The argument to HELO is supposed to be an FDQN (although an IP-address literal is also valid, but a bare IP address is not). It does not have to resolve, nor does any PTR record have to return that same FQDN.
Luckily, you're not doing much harm. I ran my mail servers for over a year checking (logged only) for both whether the HELO resolved at all, and if it matched the PTR lookup from the connecting IP. Since I reject for bad HELO syntax, it turns out that the other checks on the HELO argument would reject less than 1% of remaining connections. Greylisting deals with everything that would have been rejected by HELO argument checks, plus a lot more, so that's what I stick with.
The owner of the IP address, usually the ISP, is authoritative for the reverse zone. It can't be arbitrarily manipulated without gaining authority over the zone anymore than a forward zone could be manipulated.
So, what you're saying is that because so many ISPs provide some sort of default reverse DNS (host132.newyork.example.com), then choosing to reject e-mail based on the lack of a PTR record will not only lose legitimate e-mail if the ISP doesn't create a default, but also only rarely block spam.
In my opinion, if they are serious about this exercise, they will need to jam GPS.
OK, so install a GPS jammer with a range of 500 yards on each ship, and then turn it on to simulate enemy jamming.
Anybody who isn't part of the exercise and is within 500 yards of a naval vessel during an exercise deserves whatever might happen.
Amazon would collect and remit the payment to State B. Sales tax is collected against where the customer is at.
Apparently, you didn't read the post you replied to, in which there is some question as to "where the customer is at".
If you pay Amazon with a credit card that has a billing address in New Jersey, but have the order shipped to a verified address in Texas, where is "the customer"? If they are in Texas at the time the order is made, then Texas (state "C" in the OP) has a strong case for the customer being there.
Likewise, I pay for purchases from Newegg using PayPal, so Newegg has no clue where I "am". All they know is that they are shipping to an address that PayPal has verified I have some kind of control over. Newegg doesn't know if that's my legal state of residence, nor do they know if it has anything to do with my credit card billing address. In this case, Newegg could not send money to state "B", because they don't know anything about state "B"...they only have information about state "A" (where Newegg is) and state "C" (where the order is being shipped).
The reason this becomes important is that states with more permanent residents (and thus more likely to have credit card billing addresses associated with them) might argue as you do (that state "B" should get the money), while states with more transient residents would argue for the shipping address controlling the payment.
Or are you under the false assumption sales-tax are meant as a tax on consumers?
Since in every state I know, consumers are liable for paying sales tax if it was not collected by the seller, I can't see how you can claim sales tax is not a tax on consumers.
Yes, but Walmart.com does deal with the thousands without a lick of trouble.
You don't know whether they have any trouble or not.
I would not be surprised to see them fail a detailed audit of their tax collection, even though any mistakes might be minimal. The various governments probably don't care as long as they see tax money coming from WalMart, and it seems to be in the right ballpark. They might even "cheat" by pretending that online orders are actually local purchases at the nearest physical WalMart in the same state as the purchaser, thus meaning they don't have to worry about all the tax jurisdictions they don't already deal with.
The big issue with tax on mail-order or Internet purchases is that although databases exist for the sales tax rules, those databases all assume that the end user inputs the jurisdiction(s) as a constant that applies to every transaction (since the stores don't move). And, it's easy to know what jurisdiction your store is in, because it's a one-time question. But, there are no complete databases that contain every address in the country mapped to the sales tax jurisdiction, because there is no need for them. Even if you went to your local government, they might not be able to correctly answer the question of "what sales tax should I charge on sales at __RANDOM RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS__?"
Whereas in other jurisdictions the cop would lose their job, or end up in jail themselves
What a quaint belief.
Cops in every jurisdiction don't even get their hand slapped unless they start doing things that are orders of magnitude beyond what would cause normal citizens to be thrown in jail for 10 years. Yes, there are a few examples made, but generally those are going to be people that the rest of the cops didn't like for some other reason.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon. I read this book nearly 7 years ago because I wanted to understand the economics of open source by using a basis case of the arts.
Any book written over 7 years ago is likely far out of date with respect to the economics of the Internet.
Historically, gatekeepers like book publishers, record companies, and movie studios were the only way to get content widely distributed. This meant that if you did not fit the mold of what those gatekeepers were looking for, your content would never be consumed by more than a few people.
Today, those gatekeepers are becoming less and less meaningful, as "self-publishing" on the Internet can allow someone to reach a large enough audience to have their content be found by enough people who like it to make even small amounts of money per consumer add up to a reasonable paycheck. Yes, you are still going to have the "Angry Birds"/Beatles effect, where there are huge hits that skew the average, and you will have content that will be ignored. But, you no longer need to be able to convince some big company executive that your content will appeal to millions of people just to get it produced and available for 99% of people to reject (because all but the biggest "hits" are still only consumed by a tiny fraction of the population). With 7 billion people in the world, having 5% of people in the world consume your content means that you are more popular than Avatar, which only had about 3% or so people consume it, and that gave it over $2 billion in box office. On the other hand, having 100,000 fans (meaning 99.9986% of the world doesn't care about your content) can give you a nice solid living.
Just try writing a story about a basketball game for your newspaper without a letter in the paper's files from the NBA saying you can publish it.
Yes, newspapers and other media outlets have agreements with sports teams that give them extra access as long as they follow "the rules", and sometimes stupid teams will pull access from one or more reporters (or even entire companies).
Teams that do that are stupid because today big media actually has the upper hand, as if the NBA pissed off ESPN enough so that ESPN reduced coverage of the NBA to what they could get without that extra access, the NBA would suffer more than ESPN.
Since these rules are not law, but are merely part of the contract, nothing else can happen to the media company or reporter other than losing "special" access.
Now you know. They can, and do, lie about the law.
FTFY
First of all, the whole "express written consent" spiel is there to make sure that nobody tries to re-broadcast the game and claim "Joe from marketing said it was OK". Second, it only applies to the exact broadcast you are watching (like all copyright)...if you are sitting in the stands, you can legally give a play-by-play over your phone, as you own the copyright on that speech. Third, despite what it the spiel about "any rebroadcast", etc., fair use still applies, so you can legally do things like use snippets from broadcasts without any permission.
Trademark is a different issue, and indeed is why the word "Superbowl" is only used in advertising by its owners.
No, "Super Bowl" is not used in advertising by other entities because they can't afford lawyers smart enough to understand trademark law.
Trademarks are used to prevent confusion, so nobody other than the NFL can hold a sporting event called "Super Bowl". On the other hand, it's perfectly legal to put something like "come down to Joe's Appliances and buy a new TV so you can watch the Super Bowl in HDTV" in your ad. The only reason this doesn't happen is because we don't have a strong enough "loser pays" system for litigation, so the NFL can pull out millions of dollars worth of lawyers to intimidate Joe.
Then you need an Oracle product to make the transition.
Hmmm...using an Oracle product or having to reboot once a month....
Looks like a win/win for the reboot option.
Intel in its infinite wisdom disabled VT-d in the i5 2500K and i7 2600K.
Intel really needs to stop the desktop/server differentiation for it's CPUs.
With 8GB of RAM common, and 16-24GB fairly easy to find in "desktop" configurations, ECC is becoming more important, yet Intel still sees it as a server-only feature. Virtualization will quickly become the same, and Intel needs to accept that the last real server distinction should be multiple sockets (yes, high-end workstations have that, but people who need that know that it's really a mini-server).
The problem with GPL is that nobody can take the code private and make money selling it.
There are several companies that have no problem making a wad of cash from GPL software without changing the license. At least one has two or three other groups giving away the same software for free, and yet is still doing just fine.
No leaks like that exist in firefox 7,
Yeah, they do.
Sitting with only 3 tabs open (iGoogle, The Daily WTF, and Techdirt), Firefox 7 keeps increasing memory usage to about 900MB. At that point my system becomes so slow (due to having only 3GB of total RAM) that editing this post causes the system to pause for about 5 seconds after every 10 or so characters typed. So, I restart Firefox and it's OK again for a day. But, if I leave it running overnight right after a restart with just those 3 tabs open, by the next morning it's at 700MB.
This only happens on my Windows XP machine at work...64-bit XP at home with the same tabs open grows to about 300MB then holds steady for weeks. So, it's not universal, but it still leaks in some cases. And, yes, I've reproduced this with no add-ons enabled.
Probably Not going to be coming to joystick ports anytime soon; but is considered a feature of interest for things like high speed NICs, GPUs, and other such devices
With the IOMMU virtualization in current Intel and AMD chips, any PCI device can be slaved to a VM. The trick is that things like joystick ports aren't usually their own device, but rather hang off of a PCI bridge that can't handle single-root virtualization, but is part of an aggregate root device that can. So, you wouldn't always be able to pick and choose just one device.
In Linux, use "lspci -vt" to see the device tree. Any device that is just one level off the root can generally be slaved to a to a VM. I use this feature for an eSATA card and video capture cards and it works fine.
A few months ago, we had to restore it. It took THREE DAYS. Why? Because MySQL's backup and restore workflow has basically gone nowhere in 5 years, and hasn't scaled well to accommodate gigabyte-sized partitioned databases.
Use InnoDB and set "innodb_file_per_table" to "ON", and you can back up and restore database files without using SQL INSERT commands.
It's still going to take a while with 100GB of data, but it's just hard drive (and maybe network) speed and no CPU.
Rsync is not a backup.
rsync creates a copy, and is thus a backup.
Add in domain knowledge (e.g., the database must be quiesced before the snapshot of the filesystem is taken, and you rsync from the snapshot) and with the "--backup" flag, you can even keep mutliple versions without duplication, which acts the same as a full/incremental tape rotation. This gives you an easy to maintain, reliable backup system. And, if you still need your crutch, you could back up the rsync copy to tape.
Periodic full-image backups are essential
That depends on the hosting company. If they let you load any OS, then maybe, but if they provide you with a clone of their standard image, then only the changes made by the customer need to be backed up...any "full-image" restore would start by restoring from the source image.
Why?
Simply because any technology used on a tablet is also available for a desktop PC, but without any of the restrictions. So, if tablets get "faster than a desktop", then desktop PCs can get even faster using that same technology, because battery life, heat, and size are all unimportant (within reason...nobody wants a room-sized compter today, but as long as you are in the normal ATX form factor ballpark, it would be fine).
For example, if next week Apple comes out with amazing new technology that allows the iPad 3 to have a quad-core processor that is faster than any desktop while still keeping a 10-hour battery life, then a month later some desktop will have an 8-core version of the same processor, and a month after that you'd have 16 cores.
4: Use an offsite provider. The usual stuff about losing access, security, and reliability of the offsite provider apply.
As people get more and more connected, the best way would be to pool with your friends and store offsite at their homes. A 2-4TB external drive is fairly cheap, and although some people might have more data, it should work to store the truly "cannot be reproduced" data (e.g., not ripped CDs, as you should still have the original).
CrashPlan is free for this kind of backup (as well as local backup), and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, which should cover most real-world users (although FreeBSD is specifically not supported).
I don't want it searching from the URL box any more than I want it searching from my login screen.
So, set "keyword.enabled" to false in about:config and Firefox will not search from the urlbar (that's what the code calls it, so that's what I call it...if they don't call it "awesome" in the code, then even the developers don't believe it is).
Although Firefox 3 didn't expose every option to allow full control of the urlbar, by 3.5 they were pretty much all there, and you can now set just about any combination of behavior you want. I do think more config options should be exposed in the "options" dialog, but even an addition of a help on the context menu forr about:config options would be enough for most power users (assuming that every configurable option is listed there, and it should be, even if it is set at the default).