and it/displayed the HTML/. Damn. Why do browsers do that?
Because the web server is misconfigured and it told the browser that the data it sent was plain text. The http protocol has a "Content-type" field that is transmitted with every response, to tell the client what type of data it is sending. So sites incorrectly send "text/plain" when they should have sent "text/html".
The problem exists largely because Microsoft decided to second guess the content type information from web servers, and treat anything that looks like it might be html as if it were html.... so often the administrators of these misconfigured web servers never know anything is wrong because it appears to work properly in IE.
However, sometimes IE doesn't guess correctly because the first part of the data doesn't look enough like html. Worse yet, sometimes "text/plain" really is correct and IE mistakes it for html. Other wierd cases exist too, and they make website development a pain. The http protocol was well designed to communicate the data type, but in these modern times, this well thought out feature isn't reliable because IE second guesses it (even when it's correct) and usually hides the true problem (when it's configured incorrectly), causing a misconfigured server to appear to usually (but not always) work properly.
Assuming all the rejected mail is spam (and I really wouldn't know if it's not:)
Therein lies the problem. The blacklists are horrible regarding false positives.
SORBS, recommended in the parent post, is particularly bad. I currently have 1201 message in my inbox and stored mail folders. 200 were flagged by spamassassin with a hit from SORBS.
Spamcop is much better. Only 14 are flagged by spamcop. Still, that's a lot worse that using spamassassin, which is still very effective against spam with a high threshold that virtually eliminates the possbilitiy of flash positives.
While we're using stats to "prove" assertions, here's some hard data from my spamassassin filtered inbox:
grep RCVD_IN_SORBS * | wc 200 817 13465
grep ^X-Spam-Status: * | wc 1201 6029 86914
If I had followed your advice and used all those RBLs, including SORBS, to immediately reject 86% of incoming connections, then 200 of the 1201 legit messages currently in my inbox (none are spam) and various archived mail folders would not be there. That's over 16% false positive rate!
Perhaps not all of those 86% rejected connections were really spam, but rather legitimate mail that bounced. You'll never know, since you dropped the connection before getting the message.
Maybe you don't care about false positives. But I do. That's why I use a cpu-intensive filter, rather than RBLs that are notorious for high rates of false positives.
Maybe you're an admin at a cash-strapped ISP with high mail loads and old servers that can barely handle them. But in my world, CPU cycles are cheap... and hassles of false positives, expecially from prospective customers, are expensive.
Answer questions, comments, feedback from customers
Publish any public writing and accept comments from your readers
Participate in public forums (like this one) and provide a reliable way for anyone interested to contact you
Sure, the disposable address idea works great if you only use email for personal conversation exclusively with a small group of people you already know, and as a consumer.
But if you want to publish anything, participate publically, or respond to current and prospective customers... you just gotta make your email address available.
If you follow the link and read the list of new features or just to a search for "native" (yeah, RTFA... I must be new here):
Native System Theme Integration (Native Widget Rendering)
To enhance integration of OpenOffice.org with the underlying operating system, all user interface elements (such as buttons and scrollbars) will have the same look as those used in most other "native" applications for that platform. OpenOffice.org will react on-the-fly to changes of the desktop theme, so that when the user changes the desktop colors or theme, OpenOffice.org will adjust its own appearance to match.
Native system theme integration will be available for Gnome (version 2.4 or higher), Microsoft Windows (including XP and future versions), and KDE (version 3.2 and higher) desktop environments. On Windows XP the "Windows XP Style" must be chosen under Settings->Control Panel->Display->Appearance to achieve the correct look.
Theme integration will be the default for desktop environments that support it (listed above). Systems that do not support it (e.g., Windows 98/ME/2000, CDE) will see no visual change in OpenOffice.org. On supported systems OpenOffice.org will always adopt the theme of the system and cannot choose not to do so.
What if a general purpose data compression algorithm was developed, which was lossless and would not cause compatilibity problems, but still allowed for 300:1 compression ratios? A UK-base company First 4 Compression (F4c) claims to have pulled this off with their "eXtended Compression Product" (XCP) system; "The archive will present itself as a ZIP file to PCs, a Stuff-it archive on Mac computers, a MP3 to mp3 players, and uncompressed data on legacy systems. This multifunctional archive format offers full compatability and therefore greater flexibility, without lowering compression ratio" and "By using a range of methodologies, including the construction of multiple archive layers, limiting the data accessibility to the provided extractor, and encapsulating ascii format content, XCP successfully compresses all data to 1/300th of its original size".
Now, the purpose of setting up a http server is to distribute some kind of information to the world at large.
This is the most common purpose, but certainly not the only one.
It's also quite common to use a http server to distribute information only to customers who have paid. For example, most online porn is distributed this way.
One would expect a minimum of "due diligence", such as maybe using a locked-down ftp server with access to only authorized users, if their information was not to be made public and available to world+dog..
If you read the documents and manage to view them in a light most favorable to SCO (and neglect all the other crap they've done), they appear to claim:
Their server was supposed to be locked down, but had a "bug"
IBM knew of the "bug"...
... and knowingly and deliberately exploited the "bug" to obtain access to files....
... that IBM knew SCO only intended to be access by SCO's customers.
Yeah, it's quite a stretch IF this "bug" is a case of their server being configured to allow anonymous FTP access and the files being in a "pub" directory.
Soon, we'll see IBM's response. If history repeats itself, IBM will make SCO looks like fools yet again.
What's wrong with just giving them one part at a time?
In the long run, Microsoft will change APIs and other stuff inside Windows to intentionally sagotage open source apps that are cutting into their revenue.
There's also the debatable possibility that people may not ever have an incentive to make the full switch... but that's pretty questionable. There's very little question that running on top of Microsoft's platform gives them the ability to play dirty tricks.
They've done it before against competitors. One old by famous example was Digital's superior DR-DOS was detected by Win31 betas and a scary error message was printed, causing all reviews to recommend buying the inferior MS-DOS to ensure compatibility with the upcoming Windows 3.1.
Believe it or not, we're supposed to give Microsoft some credit for their recent good efforts. We're supposed to accept that someday in the future, they will ship secure, high quality software.
That may yet happen, and indeed XP SP2 was a good step, but a soild Microsoft system is still vapor.
Faced with superior products already existing on the market, Microsoft has consistently promised and promised and promised vapor... in the hopes of persuading everyone to keep on using their shoddy wares in hope that they'll someday, at an unknown time in the future, provide improvements. After all, they're "serious" and making a good effort.
We're also supposed to believe that Microsoft's process is somehow superious, despite flawed results, because of a 3 year roadmap. It's all part of the vaporware marketing tactic... don't buy something better NOW, instead wait for us. Never mind their poor track record of slipping their own dates and dropping those ambitious planned features.
those people are not going to simply cast aside their players and huge DVD collections for the new shiny thing that will force them to buy all their movies yet
Blue laser HD players will almost certainly support playing standard DVD discs designed for red lasers... much like most of today's DVD players and DVD drives support playing CDs designed to be read with an infrared laser.
Nobody's going to have to throw out their existing DVD collections.
As for those old DVD players that were only $50 to $80 retail....
Didn't stand a chance against applications and operating systems first written to obtain and entrench an air-tight monopoly hold over the entire software industry, rather than a common sense design. You know, like not worrying about quality when there's an opportunity to tie products together and leverage an existing monopoly to destroy the market for a competitors product, leaving only yours.
Simple stuff like...
Tying the gui, browser, media player into the operating system and forcing exclusionary contracts on all PC vendors. Get rid of Ditial(DR-DOS), Netscape and Real Networks, and you get rid of 90% of the threat to your monopoly profits.
This would be a plug for MSFT stock. If only Linus had used ruthless, underhanded tactics...
This all depends on being able to force the array to allow access to the device, so that you can mount the filesystem (in read-only mode) and sift through the remains.
3ware's 3DM utility allows this with the older 7000 series boards. Presumably it also does with their newer ones, since this capability has been present for many years.
On the screen where you instruct it to rebuild the array, there is a button that forces it to ignore errors and rebuild anyway.
I personally experienced this with a card that went bad and was getting lots of checksum errors reading and writing. 3ware's tech support folks replaced the 3 year old card without any hassle.
I can also tell you from personal experience that once the arry goes into degraded mode, you can still access it even though the controller is experiencing errors reading from the remaining drives. Sometimes it will retry many times and eventually you get an I/O error reported by the OS. But 3ware does NOT suddenly give up when the array is degraded and one or more of the remaining drives aren't reading properly. You get the best effort it can make, but when it can't read a file because of errors, you get an OS-level I/O error, not sudden and complete inability to access all data.
Everything I have written here IS from personal experience, with the older 7000 series cards. I have not used the newer 8000 series (which appears to be the 7000 with SATA), nor the newest 9000 series, but there is no reason to suspect they have gone from a very sane and workable system to something so brittle that it suddenly stops allowing any access to any drive upon the first sector error when the array is degraded.
Consider--your ATA RAID controller dies three years down the road. What if the manufacturer no longer makes it?
This happened to me. The card was sorta still working... could read, with lots of errors usually recoverable, but writing was flakey.
Luckily, even after about 3 years, 3ware (now AAMC) was willing to send me a free replacement card. They answered the phone quickly (no long wait on hold), they guy I talked with knew the products well, and he had me email some log files. He looked at them for about a minute, asked some questions about the cables I was using, and then gave me an RMA number.
The new card came, and my heart sank when I saw it was a newer model. But I plugged the old drives in, and it automatically recognized their format and everything worked as it should.
This might not work on those cheapo cards like Promise that really are just multiple IDE controllers and a bios that does all the raid in software. Yeah, I know they're cheaper, but the 3ware cards really are very good and worth the money if you can afford them.
That [embedded] market is actually bigger than the desktop space
The "embedded" market is indeed huge. But the vast majority is inexpensive 8 bit (and even 4 bit) microcontrollers that typically have 32k or less Flash/EPROM/mask-ROM and 1k or less RAM, and chips as small as 1k of code and 64 bytes of RAM are very popular, due to their small size, low power and most importantly, their low cost.
Recently, 32 bit ARM7 chips have started to appear on the market at prices competitive to the upper end of the 8 bit controllers. Slashdot even carried an article about Atmel's much-hyped new ARM7 chips coming out soon. But they have flash sizes ranging from 32k to 256k, and RAM ranging from 8k to 64k. These 32 bit chips can't run linux. Most will run either a custom app, or a tiny RTOS like
http://www.freertos.org/">FreeRTOS or
http://www.ucos-ii.com/">uC/OS.
Ask yourself why you'd choose linux for some application where you are selling the hardware with the firmware embedded. Because it's cool? Because you want to include megabytes of additional memory, extra board space, and a more expensive chip with external bus pins rather than cram it all into the 128k of on-chip memory in a less expensive processor without an external bus? Because you'd rather distrubute your source code to customers and competitors alike, rather than go with a bsd-style license or one-time license payment. Because you'd rather go to market with a higher cost of goods sold than your competitors?
Sure, there are some very high complexity products that need the features of a system like Linux or WinCE. But the vast majority of embedded apps don't need that complexity, and the extra cost just isn't commercially competitive.
Why can't open source hardware scare competitors of it's field?
Because there are no hardware companies in a monopoly position able block entry to the market and able to command 80% profit margin (make it for $1, sell for $5).
"horribly limited" = file size limit not an issue on small media. FAT12/16 main directory size limit usually not an issue either, for most small media applications still using FAT.
"slow" = cluster chain traversal for random seeking in files is what's slow about FAT. Not usually an issue for mp3 players, cameras that read or write files as a continuous stream.
"badly designed" = simplicity. Just what you need when it's gotta be implemented in a small microcontroller that's already tasked with doing lots of other stuff... all at minimum cost (memory) and minimum power (max battery life).
These sort of statements may seem true in the context of today's software market, but looking back to what really happened, it's just not the case.
FOSS is a response to the heavy handed tactics of Microsoft and to a lesser extent it is also related to a number of other near-monopolies that developed in the software industry.
You could say Free software started with Richard Stallman in about 1984 or 1985. It certainly wasn't a reaction of Microsoft back then! There's a famous story of Stallman requesting the source for a printer driver, so he could fix some annoying bugs.
You could argue that Linux was really the important enabler. Linux Torvalds did begin the project because he wanted to run unix on a (the top-of-the-line 386 PC), though he already used minix. It would be quite a stretch to say Microsoft played much of a role.
You could argue that the students and CS dept at Berkeley were really the true beginning of open source. NetBSD was in wide spread distribution and use at universities and companies. AT&T played a role there initially... but these times even predate MS-DOS.
Perhaps the most plausible explaination behind the modern state of FOSS is the widespread access to the internet. You could believe that FOSS existed long before (though "open source" wasn't a term unused until very late in the 90's when Raymond and many others decided to "sell" the idea to businesses and needed to downplay Stallman's agenda).
It certainly is true that the more developers and would-be developers are able to communicate, and the lower the distribution costs get (from 94 to 97, cdroms were typically used to distribute linux + gnu tools), the more FOSS grows.
But reaction to Microsoft? Perhaps it's a small part of some motivation behind FOSS. You could certainly argue that Mozilla would never have gone open source if Microsoft hadn't destroyed Netscape. But Konq development continued despite Mozilla becoming usable... to the point where some (eg, Apple) consider it superior.
Likewise, you could predict that Sun probably never would have purchased Star Office and released Open Office if it hadn't needed to put some long-term hurt on Microsoft. But even with Open Office released, others like Abiword, Gnumeric, Kword have continued and are really starting to mature nicely. Yes, a good office suite would have taken longer than without Sun's help, but the final outcome would still have been similar.
The point is that people have naturally collaborated together and released code for free for a long time. Key enablers are electronic communication and a small handful of extrordinary individuals who overcame the initial obstacles to get a solid start on projects that others eventually could join and contribute onto (eg, in the early days of linux, Torvalds got several people to join once virtual memory worked well enough to run gcc on a 386 with only 2 megs of ram).
Sure, Microsoft may have "helped" a bit, by driving some companies to make serious contributions when they otherwise would have probably just ignored FOSS. And they may have caused a good number of business customers to talk about switching for no reason other than cost savings. But so far, it's been a lot more talk than action.... and despite some rapid leaps forward from Netscape and Sun and others, reaction to Microsoft really doesn't deserve the credit for inspiring a movement that began long before the current dark times of Microsoft's monopoly.
Serial ATA uses 10 bits per byte, so the byte rate is 300 Mbytes/sec, not 375 MBytes/sec as you might expect if there were not 2 extra bits per byte. The 10 bit encoding provides clock recovery, byte and word framing, error detection, and some extra non-byte characters (usually called "comma" characters) that are used for syncing and packet framing.
So it'll actually take 0.0533 seconds, plus command overhead.
To make things even more confusing, the
Serial ATA II Specification actually is about adding a bunch of features, not the increase in speed from 1.5 to 3.0 Gb/s.
These features include as backplane support with higher voltages (FR4 fiberglass insulation of circuit boards is more lossy at GHz bitrates than plastic used in the cables), port multipliers (connecting several drives), port selector (redundant communication channels), native command queuing and other features mostly targeted at the high end server market.
The 3 Gb/s (gigabits/sec) speed was actually part of the
original 1.0a spec. The speeds 1.5 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 6.0 Gb/s are refered to as "Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3".
So it's natural to confuse "Gen 2" as mentioned in the 1.0a spec with the revision "II" spec which actually adds features and not increased speed.
Instead of getting rid of phishing scams, we should get rid of low-common sense/stupid people on the net. Then we wouldn't have this problem. Or many others.
Exactly. Most people are easily manipulated and just aren't reliable. Hell, they probably even believe what the see on TV. Imagine what could happen if these unwashed masses were allowed to make important decisions, like choosing whom to be elected to the presidency?
What we really need, at a critical time like the election, is a system where these stupid people don't really elect the president, but their ballots are filtered through a small, well controlled, verifable and controlled sample of smart people who actually will choose our new leader.
(for the humor impared, this was an attempt at satire...)
Saddly, it is an American tradition to not trust the population.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the web server is misconfigured and it told the browser that the data it sent was plain text. The http protocol has a "Content-type" field that is transmitted with every response, to tell the client what type of data it is sending. So sites incorrectly send "text/plain" when they should have sent "text/html".
The problem exists largely because Microsoft decided to second guess the content type information from web servers, and treat anything that looks like it might be html as if it were html.... so often the administrators of these misconfigured web servers never know anything is wrong because it appears to work properly in IE.
However, sometimes IE doesn't guess correctly because the first part of the data doesn't look enough like html. Worse yet, sometimes "text/plain" really is correct and IE mistakes it for html. Other wierd cases exist too, and they make website development a pain. The http protocol was well designed to communicate the data type, but in these modern times, this well thought out feature isn't reliable because IE second guesses it (even when it's correct) and usually hides the true problem (when it's configured incorrectly), causing a misconfigured server to appear to usually (but not always) work properly.
Therein lies the problem. The blacklists are horrible regarding false positives.
SORBS, recommended in the parent post, is particularly bad. I currently have 1201 message in my inbox and stored mail folders. 200 were flagged by spamassassin with a hit from SORBS.
Spamcop is much better. Only 14 are flagged by spamcop. Still, that's a lot worse that using spamassassin, which is still very effective against spam with a high threshold that virtually eliminates the possbilitiy of flash positives.
If I had followed your advice and used all those RBLs, including SORBS, to immediately reject 86% of incoming connections, then 200 of the 1201 legit messages currently in my inbox (none are spam) and various archived mail folders would not be there. That's over 16% false positive rate!
Perhaps not all of those 86% rejected connections were really spam, but rather legitimate mail that bounced. You'll never know, since you dropped the connection before getting the message.
Maybe you don't care about false positives. But I do. That's why I use a cpu-intensive filter, rather than RBLs that are notorious for high rates of false positives.
Maybe you're an admin at a cash-strapped ISP with high mail loads and old servers that can barely handle them. But in my world, CPU cycles are cheap... and hassles of false positives, expecially from prospective customers, are expensive.
and also not do the things you don't do:
Sure, the disposable address idea works great if you only use email for personal conversation exclusively with a small group of people you already know, and as a consumer.
But if you want to publish anything, participate publically, or respond to current and prospective customers... you just gotta make your email address available.
Yes
What if a general purpose data compression algorithm was developed, which was lossless and would not cause compatilibity problems, but still allowed for 300:1 compression ratios? A UK-base company First 4 Compression (F4c) claims to have pulled this off with their "eXtended Compression Product" (XCP) system; "The archive will present itself as a ZIP file to PCs, a Stuff-it archive on Mac computers, a MP3 to mp3 players, and uncompressed data on legacy systems. This multifunctional archive format offers full compatability and therefore greater flexibility, without lowering compression ratio" and "By using a range of methodologies, including the construction of multiple archive layers, limiting the data accessibility to the provided extractor, and encapsulating ascii format content, XCP successfully compresses all data to 1/300th of its original size".
This is the most common purpose, but certainly not the only one.
It's also quite common to use a http server to distribute information only to customers who have paid. For example, most online porn is distributed this way.
One would expect a minimum of "due diligence", such as maybe using a locked-down ftp server with access to only authorized users, if their information was not to be made public and available to world+dog..
If you read the documents and manage to view them in a light most favorable to SCO (and neglect all the other crap they've done), they appear to claim:
Yeah, it's quite a stretch IF this "bug" is a case of their server being configured to allow anonymous FTP access and the files being in a "pub" directory.
Soon, we'll see IBM's response. If history repeats itself, IBM will make SCO looks like fools yet again.
IBM has not yet said to the court how, exactly, they accessed the material on SCO's site.
In the long run, Microsoft will change APIs and other stuff inside Windows to intentionally sagotage open source apps that are cutting into their revenue.
There's also the debatable possibility that people may not ever have an incentive to make the full switch... but that's pretty questionable. There's very little question that running on top of Microsoft's platform gives them the ability to play dirty tricks.
They've done it before against competitors. One old by famous example was Digital's superior DR-DOS was detected by Win31 betas and a scary error message was printed, causing all reviews to recommend buying the inferior MS-DOS to ensure compatibility with the upcoming Windows 3.1.
Believe it or not, we're supposed to give Microsoft some credit for their recent good efforts. We're supposed to accept that someday in the future, they will ship secure, high quality software.
That may yet happen, and indeed XP SP2 was a good step, but a soild Microsoft system is still vapor.
Faced with superior products already existing on the market, Microsoft has consistently promised and promised and promised vapor... in the hopes of persuading everyone to keep on using their shoddy wares in hope that they'll someday, at an unknown time in the future, provide improvements. After all, they're "serious" and making a good effort.
We're also supposed to believe that Microsoft's process is somehow superious, despite flawed results, because of a 3 year roadmap. It's all part of the vaporware marketing tactic... don't buy something better NOW, instead wait for us. Never mind their poor track record of slipping their own dates and dropping those ambitious planned features.
Blue laser HD players will almost certainly support playing standard DVD discs designed for red lasers... much like most of today's DVD players and DVD drives support playing CDs designed to be read with an infrared laser.
Nobody's going to have to throw out their existing DVD collections.
As for those old DVD players that were only $50 to $80 retail....
Been tried, didn't work.
Didn't stand a chance against applications and operating systems first written to obtain and entrench an air-tight monopoly hold over the entire software industry, rather than a common sense design. You know, like not worrying about quality when there's an opportunity to tie products together and leverage an existing monopoly to destroy the market for a competitors product, leaving only yours.
Simple stuff like...
Tying the gui, browser, media player into the operating system and forcing exclusionary contracts on all PC vendors. Get rid of Ditial(DR-DOS), Netscape and Real Networks, and you get rid of 90% of the threat to your monopoly profits.
This would be a plug for MSFT stock. If only Linus had used ruthless, underhanded tactics...
3ware's 3DM utility allows this with the older 7000 series boards. Presumably it also does with their newer ones, since this capability has been present for many years.
On the screen where you instruct it to rebuild the array, there is a button that forces it to ignore errors and rebuild anyway.
I personally experienced this with a card that went bad and was getting lots of checksum errors reading and writing. 3ware's tech support folks replaced the 3 year old card without any hassle.
I can also tell you from personal experience that once the arry goes into degraded mode, you can still access it even though the controller is experiencing errors reading from the remaining drives. Sometimes it will retry many times and eventually you get an I/O error reported by the OS. But 3ware does NOT suddenly give up when the array is degraded and one or more of the remaining drives aren't reading properly. You get the best effort it can make, but when it can't read a file because of errors, you get an OS-level I/O error, not sudden and complete inability to access all data.
Everything I have written here IS from personal experience, with the older 7000 series cards. I have not used the newer 8000 series (which appears to be the 7000 with SATA), nor the newest 9000 series, but there is no reason to suspect they have gone from a very sane and workable system to something so brittle that it suddenly stops allowing any access to any drive upon the first sector error when the array is degraded.
This happened to me. The card was sorta still working... could read, with lots of errors usually recoverable, but writing was flakey.
Luckily, even after about 3 years, 3ware (now AAMC) was willing to send me a free replacement card. They answered the phone quickly (no long wait on hold), they guy I talked with knew the products well, and he had me email some log files. He looked at them for about a minute, asked some questions about the cables I was using, and then gave me an RMA number.
The new card came, and my heart sank when I saw it was a newer model. But I plugged the old drives in, and it automatically recognized their format and everything worked as it should.
This might not work on those cheapo cards like Promise that really are just multiple IDE controllers and a bios that does all the raid in software. Yeah, I know they're cheaper, but the 3ware cards really are very good and worth the money if you can afford them.
... if Julian Dibbell, author of this long winded article, is somehow realated to John Katz ?
The "embedded" market is indeed huge. But the vast majority is inexpensive 8 bit (and even 4 bit) microcontrollers that typically have 32k or less Flash/EPROM/mask-ROM and 1k or less RAM, and chips as small as 1k of code and 64 bytes of RAM are very popular, due to their small size, low power and most importantly, their low cost.
Recently, 32 bit ARM7 chips have started to appear on the market at prices competitive to the upper end of the 8 bit controllers. Slashdot even carried an article about Atmel's much-hyped new ARM7 chips coming out soon. But they have flash sizes ranging from 32k to 256k, and RAM ranging from 8k to 64k. These 32 bit chips can't run linux. Most will run either a custom app, or a tiny RTOS like http://www.freertos.org/">FreeRTOS or http://www.ucos-ii.com/">uC/OS.
Ask yourself why you'd choose linux for some application where you are selling the hardware with the firmware embedded. Because it's cool? Because you want to include megabytes of additional memory, extra board space, and a more expensive chip with external bus pins rather than cram it all into the 128k of on-chip memory in a less expensive processor without an external bus? Because you'd rather distrubute your source code to customers and competitors alike, rather than go with a bsd-style license or one-time license payment. Because you'd rather go to market with a higher cost of goods sold than your competitors?
Sure, there are some very high complexity products that need the features of a system like Linux or WinCE. But the vast majority of embedded apps don't need that complexity, and the extra cost just isn't commercially competitive.
Because there are no hardware companies in a monopoly position able block entry to the market and able to command 80% profit margin (make it for $1, sell for $5).
"horribly limited" = file size limit not an issue on small media. FAT12/16 main directory size limit usually not an issue either, for most small media applications still using FAT.
"slow" = cluster chain traversal for random seeking in files is what's slow about FAT. Not usually an issue for mp3 players, cameras that read or write files as a continuous stream.
"badly designed" = simplicity. Just what you need when it's gotta be implemented in a small microcontroller that's already tasked with doing lots of other stuff... all at minimum cost (memory) and minimum power (max battery life).
FOSS is a response to the heavy handed tactics of Microsoft and to a lesser extent it is also related to a number of other near-monopolies that developed in the software industry.
You could say Free software started with Richard Stallman in about 1984 or 1985. It certainly wasn't a reaction of Microsoft back then! There's a famous story of Stallman requesting the source for a printer driver, so he could fix some annoying bugs.
You could argue that Linux was really the important enabler. Linux Torvalds did begin the project because he wanted to run unix on a (the top-of-the-line 386 PC), though he already used minix. It would be quite a stretch to say Microsoft played much of a role.
You could argue that the students and CS dept at Berkeley were really the true beginning of open source. NetBSD was in wide spread distribution and use at universities and companies. AT&T played a role there initially... but these times even predate MS-DOS.
Perhaps the most plausible explaination behind the modern state of FOSS is the widespread access to the internet. You could believe that FOSS existed long before (though "open source" wasn't a term unused until very late in the 90's when Raymond and many others decided to "sell" the idea to businesses and needed to downplay Stallman's agenda).
It certainly is true that the more developers and would-be developers are able to communicate, and the lower the distribution costs get (from 94 to 97, cdroms were typically used to distribute linux + gnu tools), the more FOSS grows.
But reaction to Microsoft? Perhaps it's a small part of some motivation behind FOSS. You could certainly argue that Mozilla would never have gone open source if Microsoft hadn't destroyed Netscape. But Konq development continued despite Mozilla becoming usable... to the point where some (eg, Apple) consider it superior.
Likewise, you could predict that Sun probably never would have purchased Star Office and released Open Office if it hadn't needed to put some long-term hurt on Microsoft. But even with Open Office released, others like Abiword, Gnumeric, Kword have continued and are really starting to mature nicely. Yes, a good office suite would have taken longer than without Sun's help, but the final outcome would still have been similar.
The point is that people have naturally collaborated together and released code for free for a long time. Key enablers are electronic communication and a small handful of extrordinary individuals who overcame the initial obstacles to get a solid start on projects that others eventually could join and contribute onto (eg, in the early days of linux, Torvalds got several people to join once virtual memory worked well enough to run gcc on a 386 with only 2 megs of ram).
Sure, Microsoft may have "helped" a bit, by driving some companies to make serious contributions when they otherwise would have probably just ignored FOSS. And they may have caused a good number of business customers to talk about switching for no reason other than cost savings. But so far, it's been a lot more talk than action.... and despite some rapid leaps forward from Netscape and Sun and others, reaction to Microsoft really doesn't deserve the credit for inspiring a movement that began long before the current dark times of Microsoft's monopoly.
So it'll actually take 0.0533 seconds, plus command overhead.
These features include as backplane support with higher voltages (FR4 fiberglass insulation of circuit boards is more lossy at GHz bitrates than plastic used in the cables), port multipliers (connecting several drives), port selector (redundant communication channels), native command queuing and other features mostly targeted at the high end server market.
The 3 Gb/s (gigabits/sec) speed was actually part of the original 1.0a spec. The speeds 1.5 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 6.0 Gb/s are refered to as "Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3".
So it's natural to confuse "Gen 2" as mentioned in the 1.0a spec with the revision "II" spec which actually adds features and not increased speed.
Does this SP2 enhancement work on today's installed base of CPUs, or only the newest models with the NX extension?
Exactly. Most people are easily manipulated and just aren't reliable. Hell, they probably even believe what the see on TV. Imagine what could happen if these unwashed masses were allowed to make important decisions, like choosing whom to be elected to the presidency?
What we really need, at a critical time like the election, is a system where these stupid people don't really elect the president, but their ballots are filtered through a small, well controlled, verifable and controlled sample of smart people who actually will choose our new leader.
(for the humor impared, this was an attempt at satire...)
Saddly, it is an American tradition to not trust the population.