this is from old-school thinking where they feel compelled to encode control information into data streams.
ATA uses separate registers for control. Data transfer takes place as a separate operation of successive reads of the data register (PIO mode), or as its own DMA transfer.
Rather than using a 32-bit "structure" they should have spent the extra few dollars and used a 32-bit data bus and a synchronized 8-bit control bus.
Sure, that would have made a lot of sense when ATA was standardized in the days before PCI and other 32 bit busses were common. Even today, that'd be a really dumb move, to dedicate a bus to sending the commands and reading status which is such a tiny fraction of all the data transfer. Even with a (senseless) dedicated 8 bit control bus, you'd still need four 8 bit writes to send the sector number to the drive, which is more or less what happens today. In the ATA standard 4 of those bits are for something other than the sector address (LBA mode). Even if your proposed scheme used 32 bits, that's still a "barrier" of 2 terabytes. ATA-6 defines a 48 bit LBA extension, which amounts to just writing a few more bytes over the bus. 2^48 sectors of 512 bytes each is a LOT.
Wide SCSI is only 16 bits wide, by the way. Future disk standards will be serial access, using LVDS signals (1 bit wide) Welcome to the modern world, where transistors are free and wires are what costs money!
Then we'd have been able to easily have 32-bit addressing and would probably be able to hang 63 devices off the bus.
The two device limit is due to electrical signaling requirements. There's two more bits in the "head" register that could have easily been assigned to allow 8 devices to be addressed instead of 2 (and if one of the six unused bytes on the second chip selected had been used, 256 devices could have been addressed). The IDE bus is not terminated. The electrical design allows for only two devices to reliably communicate with one host. The protocol only provides one bit in one register to select between them... but the real limitation is physical, not logical.
This could be done pretty easily if the PC world would just LET GO. Stop clinging to compatiblity with things that you'll never use again anyways!
Sure, go write up your business plan that involves hundreds of millions of PC owners (and operating system vendors) all converting to a new motherboard, new drives, and new software.
Of course, it IS happening with serial ATA, but everyone involved has very realistic goals that make good business and technological sense. The main thing that's driving it is the difficulty of providing 5 volt tollerance and TTL logic levels in modern chips, where the transistor gate-to-substrate and drain-to-substrate breakdown voltages are getting lower and lower as the gate width shrinks (making many more, much faster transistors available). The large number of signals required (over 50 for two controllers) also makes poor usage of a LVDS capable process (UDMA133 is only 66.5 MHz signals on each pin, when LVDS can support gigabit speeds). Silicon gets cheaper and cheaper (per transitor), but the physical packaging technology doesn't move that way, so pins are at a premium. In the not-too-distant future, drives will use a tiny connector (4 pins as I recall), and the same basic protocol as used today.... more or less in exactly the opposite direction as your rant suggesting a 32+8 bit bus and a completely new protocol that throws backwards compatibility to the wind.
For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?
The limit is due to having only 28 bits in the IDE registers to selecting the address. There are four 8-bit registers, and the "head" register uses 1 bit for master/slave selection, one bit to select CHS/LBA addressing, and two bits are "reserved" (originally used to select sector sizes, but in modern times sectors are always 512 bytes).
ATA-6 kludges this 28 bit LBA limit to 48 bits by specifying that the host is to write 20 bits twice!
But for the forseeable future, 32 bit computers will only really use 32 of those 48 bits, which turns out to be only 2 terabytes. If the operating system uses a signed integer (common practice, including the linux kernel until only recently), you only end up with 31 bits of sector addressing, or just one terabyte.
Of course, there are probably even more limits lurking. Doesn't linux ext2/ext3 use 32 bit numbers? FAT32 uses 28 bits for cluster numbers, but clusters can be as much as 32k in the standard (apparantly larger in some systems, though Microsoft doesn't document that in the FAT32 specification).
I was wondering if any homophobic types would post an infamatory reply.
So are you a giver or a taker? Speak up you homo!
Awfully inquisitive about activities within the privacy of my own home, aren't you? Such rude and indignant questioning! Maybe it was meant as a (distastful) jest?
It's pretty easy to see at our website that Robin and I live together, as Sean Adams (of the cool Slim Devices MP3 Player) pointed out. She's not a lesbian, and I'm not gay, and what we do in the privacy of our own home is, well, private. We're not actually married yet.
I know some gay men, some lesbians, and some folks who are bi, and they're mostly pretty nice people. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay. I unfortunately have met a bunch of folks who are homophobes, and in every case they were assholes. I do think there's something fundamentally wrong about being so concerned about the consentual sexual activities of other people, conducted in the privacy of their own homes.
How often do you ask people you believe to be straight about the intimate details of their sexual activity? And in such a rude and indignant manner?? Do you ask men questions like "did you bang your wife last night?" or women questions like "do you suck and swallow?"
What's really interesting is the moderation totals, which probably aren't viewable for most people. Here's what it says right now:
It's kind of ironic that the whole point of a SSL cert is to establish your site's true identity to the browser (where most users are not even aware of the certificate, the one true way that can tell who is going to receive their confidential information).
And here we have a certificate authority (CA) who's masquerading as a competitor, in order to slam "subscribers" and certify their identity to end users.
... unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON)
Later on the same google result is this
paper which at first appears to be based on some honest research which claims 5% and goes on to say "On the basis of the Bagley et al.(1994) sample data, it is now known that the recent studies producing 1%(90) to 3% estimates for gay males, or for males who are homosexually active, are seriously flawed." Turns out this one is
hosted by the
Queer Resources Directory, but the author appears to be dedicated to helping troubled homosexual teens (more google searching)
So I guess I learned something new today. The gay population numbers are in a lot more dispute than WorldCom's traffic growth due to the tension between homosexual communities and homophobic right-wing groups, the 10% number I've always heard before does appear to be a bit high. Hmm.
Personally, I'm het, but I'd much rather be around people who are homosexual than people who are homophobic. Fortunately, repressed homophobics are a lot easier to spot.
Very off-topic, someone please mod me down, if for nothing else other than wasting time on this instead of what I should be working on....
Just a simple box that I can plug my OWN hard drives into?
Have you see my little open-source mp3 player circuit board project?? Yes, a shameless plug, but on-topic. I have the Neo guys also sell a box that you can plug your own drive into... or at least they did some time ago.
All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.
Saddly, there's nothing simple about pretty plastic boxes and li-ion batteries. Injection molding involved tooling costs in the range of $20k to $60k. Li-ion batteries are complex and take special circuits. They're only sold to a small number of companies who make custom battery packs (because the packs include critical safety circuits). High tooling setup fees also apply to Li-ion battery packs.
Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.
Yep, did that. It's all GPL'd too, available from a CVS server, or on this firmware download page.
And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair.
That would be fair, if you and millions of others were serious buyers.
But the do-it-yourself market is a niche, and the economy of scale associated with mass production just isn't possible. Still, I've tried to keep the costs low (and also keep it buildable for hobbists with hand soldering). By the time you add the LCD, it's at about twice the "fair" $100 mark. If you go price the parts alone (not even soldered together) at small quantity, you'll find you're well over $100. If you're Creative Labs or Apple building millions in China, you can make it that cheap, but a niche market as small volumes, it just isn't possible.
Anyway, later this year I'm planning to make a car stereo cd changer protocol emulator board, so this thing can emulate a cd changer (but with lots of discs with lots of files... depends on the limitations of each deck and its protocol).
... effect on the rest of the markets however is due to Bush. People have no faith in the markets because of a lack of leadership.
A pattern of fraud in financial reporting was what I had though was causing investors to be nervous.
I'm glad you set the record straight. If Bush were a better leader, somehow investors would have just shrugged off these startling exposures of fraud as isolated incidents, all brought to light with unfortunate timing. I'm sure it'll all magically get better when democrats are in power in a couple years....
it is the growth of the Internet and the advent of massive computing systems built from loose affiliations of services, machines, communications networks and application software that have helped create the potential for increased vulnerabilities.
Shoddy code running unnecessarily with full admin privs probably had nothing to do with it!
Switching to PNG does at first sound like an obvious solution, but it isn't. PNG and JPG are made for different purposes.
From the patent summary, it seems to cover the "invention" of removing redundant data and a bunch of other vauge compression concepts. It does NOT specifically mention color-space separation followed by spectral transformation that can be quantied with minimal loss of perceived quality (the real magic of JPEG).
IANAL, but it sure looks like this thing could apply equally well to just about any image compression since it's so vauge.
... advertisers feel that people don't give commercials the "respect and attention" that they think they deserve... I wonder why? Oh yeah, that's right. People don't like advertising.
But they do, at least as far as I can tell as a non tv watcher listening to the occasional conversations at work. Sometimes they'll talk about what happened in some show, but quite often conversation is about the funnier ads. It's amazing how long those impressions can last.
For example, I missed the guy who's not a doctor, but plays one on TV (and then apparantly goes on to prescribe whatever medication is being pitched).
I also missed the old woman who fell over and couldn't get up.
Now I did catch the superbowl a few years ago when some friends were having a superbowl watching party... and guess what everyone was really interested in watching? A lot were for dot-coms back then.
There are so many more, but not having seen them I really don't pay much attention to the conversations.
Geocities? I thought you could... Remember when there used to be web pages there? Look at them now It was either ads, or all those "personal" home pages of Fluffy The Cat On Him Grand Adventure To The Park On The Day We Bought The Digital Camera.
All the pages that anyone put some real work eventually got moved to servers under a registered domain name, or they just disappeared after neglect.
You just can't save as a gif without extra software (That you are only supposed to use where the patent isn't enforcable).
FWIW, the gimp that came with redhat 7.2 saves GIF just fine. Perhaps they're voilating the patent, but I believe the Unisys LZW patent runs out sometime next year (2003) anyway.
Fry's (Some regional electronics firm...) selling Linux pre-installed computers is just not as "World-changing" as Wal-Mart (A well known INTERNATIONAL corporation that most everyone on the planet HAS heard of.)
We're talking about Walmart quietly adding PCs on their website with little promotion (other than geek news coverage) vs Fry's (a large regional store) displaying linux-based PCs in Fry's stores and boldly promoting it in their advertising. A friend of mine went there twice in the last couple weeks and bought two of them right off the shelf in the store. Saw a big ad, no mail order, no needing to know about about an obscure page on a website, didn't already need to have a PC, etc.
Sure, Walmart may be able to reach everyone, if they try... and maybe they will someday.
But in the here and now, and lot more people are getting exposed to a bargain linux-based PC due to (regional) Frys than (international) Walmart. Just because you're bitter that Fry's isn't in your area doesn't mean that they aren't managing to expose a lot of people to the concept of a $300 PC with linux.
Sure, you may like Walmart better (I do too... Fry's really does terrible customer service), and it is true that Walmart could expose a lot more people to linux-based computers, but the fact is that their linux-based PCs are on their website, only available to people who already have a PC and are willing to mail order. Fry's has these $300 machines in their stores, and they're devoting major advertising to let people know about it.
Alright, if you're going to invoke the car analogy, here's a few things to consider from the linux side....
You can tweak the car if you like, but few people do. Still, you have the Freedom to do with as you please. You do not enter a "no modification, no reverse engineering" contract when you buy or drive it. It is not illegal to look under the hood.
You can repair your car if you want.
If you choose to repair it, you can get informaion about how it works.
You can obtain spare parts from third parties.
You can get someone else to service it, besides the original manufacturer. They can use original manufacturer or third party parts. There is competition in the market.
You can sell your car to someone else.
You can continue driving the car for as long as you like and nobody can coerce you into signing sequence of 2 year leases.
And the real failure of the car analogy, for Windows, MacOS, and Linux....
ALL NEW CARS COME WITH A WARRANTY. The manufacture will fix defects at their cost, and if there's a significant systematic problem, they usually issue a recall.
... would actually go towards funding programmers to work on more free software? Probably none.
Face it, adware companies are sleeziest, slimiest, most unscrupulous charlatans the world has ever been widely exposed to. The internet has given these deceivers the "power" to reach millions.
Slashdot has run dozens of stories, or well, at least linked to dozens of stories about these crooks.
This
one from last week was one of the best examples of
what types of people are behind adware and spyware, but there have been
many,
many,
many
others recently, and they go back for years.
Even if an adware "sponsorship" were run by a more "honest" company, it's hard to imagine they could resist the pressure to spend the funds on their own well-intentioned efforts. But given the sorry state of adware and spyware on windoze-based shareware and the dismal glimpses into the operations behind these adware services, it's hard to believe these would be any well-meaning intentions at all when it comes to actually handling the money.
According to Microsoft, the success of the entire industry depends on an "Ecosystem" where initial long-range developments are placed in the public domain and can later be exploited royalty-free once Micr... er, the "IP Community" sees a short-term profit opportunity.
Of course, we've had the odd complaint, but they're very few (hasn't cost us a sale yet).
That you are aware of....
I shop on-line frequently. For a specialty item, I'll complain (or more likely just call the merchant on the phone if the site isn't working).
For "normal" things, if a site doesn't work for me in Mozilla (linux), usually I'll just go back to my google search and try a different merchant whose site does work. Sites that don't work with Mozilla are pretty rare, and for "normal" things like consumer electronics and computer parts, I rarely give a damn about any particular merchant.... I've already decided what I want and I'll just go find some other place that has it in stock and ready to ship.
And as a personal rant, I would never rely on the self-righteous opinion of most people using Linux and Mozilla. You want your software, services, and bandwidth and don't care who pays for it as long it isn't you.
Wow, because I'm using linux and mozilla, I therefore have
a self-righteous (and thus unreliable) opinion, and I'm
a freeloader who wants everything for free despite who else ends up paying??
Ok, I know it's a troll, but perhaps this AC really is some merchant with a real website? If that's the case, I have some news for you:
I am a paying customer. I regularly shop online. I buy all sorts of things, but electronic items are among the higher dollar items. I pay $79/month for DSL, and I pay for a dedicated server at Verio for my website. I pay to rent movies (considering going to netflix.com). I own my home (pay monthly mortgage), and I own my car. I pay my bills, and I make enough money to eat out, go to movies, and shop both in brick-n-morter stores and online. I am an electrical engineer (approx 11 years professional experience). I'm also NOT an Anonymous Coward. I use Redhat Linux (and mozilla) for a variety of reasons, partly because the documentation is so much better than windows (if you really need to know something instead of point-n-click hand holding), and partly because I've used Unix since the late 80s and Linux-based systems "feel" more natural to me than windows. I do shop on-line. If a merchant's site doesn't work AND the same item is available elsewhere, I simply shop elsewhere. I usually find merchants using search, so if one doesn't work, there's a long list of competitors who are ready to fill in for them. There's very few things important enough to go to the trouble of rebooting, and shopping certainly isn't. I'm the paying customer, why should I have to change what I'm doing just to spend my own money??
Perhaps I'm the only linux user who ever buys anything? I somehow doubt that. More likely is that zealots complain loudly, while paying customers silently move on to another site that works properly and ultimately accomplish their goal... to purchase their intended item. Why bother complaining to a merchant who probably doesn't give a damn and has a bad attitude? A guy like this AC probably wouldn't believe you were ready to buy, even if you did waste your time to let him know. Of course, I don't know how many serious shoppers use linux (except for me), I don't know how many move on with their shopping goal without complaining (except for me), and I don't even know if this AC is for real or just a smarter-than-average troll.
But I do know that linux users are a small percentage AND merchant sites that don't work with linux are also a small percentage. AC, if you're reading this, I've got some news for you. One of those percentages is slowly but steadily increasing, and the other is doing roughly the opposite. Guess which one you are?? And before you smuggly conclude that your site's incompatibility with linux has never cost you a sale, ask yourself why a serious buyer would bother complaining to someone who didn't invest the time/money to make a compatible site instead of just returning to google (just a couple simple clicks of the back button) and locating another merchant with a better website? That's what I do on those rare occasions when a site doesn't work.
You still get 100+ per day. You just don't see them in your mailbox. But the bandwidth and storage space have already been eaten, and that's really what's evil about spam.
Storage space is cheap, and bandwidth isn't that expensive either, but the time spent sifting through them to "just hit delete" is precious. Not only does it take time, but it immediately turns "let's check the inbox and answer some people's questions" into "first identify all the spams, viruses and other junk and delete". Even it that's just a couple messages, it put me into a different mood.
Many people email me asking technical questions. With the wonders spamassassin, I can finally get a whim of "let's answer some people's questions" without ruining my mood with "what bunch of scumbags littered my inbox". Even though it only takes less than a minute to delete a dozen junk messages (I get about 10-12 per day, not 100), it often times would completely change my mood. I'd put a lot less effort into helping people who aren't direct customers of the site. I generally like helping most people (except perhaps students trying to cheat) and spamassassin lets me remain focused and keep a positive energy without spoiling it by having to manually clean up a mess of spam.
My point is that the human factor, the small but non-zero time spent to "just hit delete", is much more expensive than storage space and bandwidth.
The resulting change in ones mood (having just dealt with rip-offs from the scummiest charlatans on the Earth) is intangible, and perhaps the most expensive aspect of spam. Maybe some people can "just hit delete" without effecting their mood at all, but I can not and I don't know many people who can. Some people get frustrated, some get mad, others see it as a sad comentary on the state of the world. However any particular individual reacts to briefly seeing beastiality porno ads, penis/breast enlargement, diet fads, fradulent credit techniquest, get rich quick schemes... it's just not a positive influence. It provokes negative feelings, discust, anger, irratation, or perhaps minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Any what do people do immediately after their mood has been somewhat altered towards the negative.... they read emails, write responses, and sometimes compose new messages. There is probably no way anyone can measure this intangible change in how people interpret what they read and what/how they compose what they write.
But I can say for certain that having to clean up a bunch of spam put me in a slightly bad mood that makes me tend to be less helpful to people who are emailing me asking for help with their electronics problems. Luckily for them, spamassassin (with the RBL and Razor checks enabled and a threshold of 7.5) catches nearly all spams and has not yet in about 5 months filtered a single legitimate message.
I believe the world would indeed be a better place without millions of people suffering the minor irratation of spam, and then immediately thereafter corresponding with others.
Imagine there's an interesting but lengthy story of a fraudlent business and the charlatans who founded it. You go to the site and read only the first paragraph. Then you whip up a quick comment, and slashdot's moderation system offers you a bit of "karma" for pressing the "Submit" button as soon as possible.
Poor analogy. Nobody's addicted to receiving spam.
Look at the "illicit drug situation". Certain drugs are illegal. DO people still use them? Yes. Have the numbers went down since the enacted idiotic penalties? No.
The 1992 telecommunications act almost completely wiped
out junk faxes, and the few folks who left doing it illegally are getting found and fined by the FCC.
It also greatly cleaned up telemarketing calls. Callers are required to truthfully required to identify themselves within 30 seconds.
It estabilished a strong legal requirement for "do not call lists".
The "war on drugs" may not have had much impact on illegal drug usage, but previous federal laws regulating telecommunications have been very effective.
Everybody hates spam.... Thing is, why EXACTLY is he rich?
Before 1992, a lot of folks made money sending out lots and lots of unsolicited fax advertising.
That didn't make it right, but it did create an annoyance, disrupt legitimate business fax machines (which ran out of paper), and ultimate lawmakers responded and made it illegal.
Soon, lawmakers will probably respond to scumbags like Ronnie Scelson, probably not be outlawing email advertising, but it's almost certain that forged headers, fraudlent ads, and not actually honoring removal requests will be illegal shortly. We can only hope that abusing open relays will also go on the list of banned activities....
Slashdot Mirror
this is from old-school thinking where they feel compelled to encode control information into data streams.
ATA uses separate registers for control. Data transfer takes place as a separate operation of successive reads of the data register (PIO mode), or as its own DMA transfer.
Rather than using a 32-bit "structure" they should have spent the extra few dollars and used a 32-bit data bus and a synchronized 8-bit control bus.
Sure, that would have made a lot of sense when ATA was standardized in the days before PCI and other 32 bit busses were common. Even today, that'd be a really dumb move, to dedicate a bus to sending the commands and reading status which is such a tiny fraction of all the data transfer. Even with a (senseless) dedicated 8 bit control bus, you'd still need four 8 bit writes to send the sector number to the drive, which is more or less what happens today. In the ATA standard 4 of those bits are for something other than the sector address (LBA mode). Even if your proposed scheme used 32 bits, that's still a "barrier" of 2 terabytes. ATA-6 defines a 48 bit LBA extension, which amounts to just writing a few more bytes over the bus. 2^48 sectors of 512 bytes each is a LOT.
Wide SCSI is only 16 bits wide, by the way. Future disk standards will be serial access, using LVDS signals (1 bit wide) Welcome to the modern world, where transistors are free and wires are what costs money!
Then we'd have been able to easily have 32-bit addressing and would probably be able to hang 63 devices off the bus.
The two device limit is due to electrical signaling requirements. There's two more bits in the "head" register that could have easily been assigned to allow 8 devices to be addressed instead of 2 (and if one of the six unused bytes on the second chip selected had been used, 256 devices could have been addressed). The IDE bus is not terminated. The electrical design allows for only two devices to reliably communicate with one host. The protocol only provides one bit in one register to select between them... but the real limitation is physical, not logical.
This could be done pretty easily if the PC world would just LET GO. Stop clinging to compatiblity with things that you'll never use again anyways!
Sure, go write up your business plan that involves hundreds of millions of PC owners (and operating system vendors) all converting to a new motherboard, new drives, and new software.
Of course, it IS happening with serial ATA, but everyone involved has very realistic goals that make good business and technological sense. The main thing that's driving it is the difficulty of providing 5 volt tollerance and TTL logic levels in modern chips, where the transistor gate-to-substrate and drain-to-substrate breakdown voltages are getting lower and lower as the gate width shrinks (making many more, much faster transistors available). The large number of signals required (over 50 for two controllers) also makes poor usage of a LVDS capable process (UDMA133 is only 66.5 MHz signals on each pin, when LVDS can support gigabit speeds). Silicon gets cheaper and cheaper (per transitor), but the physical packaging technology doesn't move that way, so pins are at a premium. In the not-too-distant future, drives will use a tiny connector (4 pins as I recall), and the same basic protocol as used today.... more or less in exactly the opposite direction as your rant suggesting a 32+8 bit bus and a completely new protocol that throws backwards compatibility to the wind.
The limit is due to having only 28 bits in the IDE registers to selecting the address. There are four 8-bit registers, and the "head" register uses 1 bit for master/slave selection, one bit to select CHS/LBA addressing, and two bits are "reserved" (originally used to select sector sizes, but in modern times sectors are always 512 bytes).
ATA-6 kludges this 28 bit LBA limit to 48 bits by specifying that the host is to write 20 bits twice!
But for the forseeable future, 32 bit computers will only really use 32 of those 48 bits, which turns out to be only 2 terabytes. If the operating system uses a signed integer (common practice, including the linux kernel until only recently), you only end up with 31 bits of sector addressing, or just one terabyte.
Of course, there are probably even more limits lurking. Doesn't linux ext2/ext3 use 32 bit numbers? FAT32 uses 28 bits for cluster numbers, but clusters can be as much as 32k in the standard (apparantly larger in some systems, though Microsoft doesn't document that in the FAT32 specification).
Have you tried hdparm?
I have. Always spins right back up within several seconds.
So are you a giver or a taker? Speak up you homo!
Awfully inquisitive about activities within the privacy of my own home, aren't you? Such rude and indignant questioning! Maybe it was meant as a (distastful) jest?
It's pretty easy to see at our website that Robin and I live together, as Sean Adams (of the cool Slim Devices MP3 Player) pointed out. She's not a lesbian, and I'm not gay, and what we do in the privacy of our own home is, well, private. We're not actually married yet.
I know some gay men, some lesbians, and some folks who are bi, and they're mostly pretty nice people. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay. I unfortunately have met a bunch of folks who are homophobes, and in every case they were assholes. I do think there's something fundamentally wrong about being so concerned about the consentual sexual activities of other people, conducted in the privacy of their own homes.
How often do you ask people you believe to be straight about the intimate details of their sexual activity? And in such a rude and indignant manner?? Do you ask men questions like "did you bang your wife last night?" or women questions like "do you suck and swallow?"
What's really interesting is the moderation totals, which probably aren't viewable for most people. Here's what it says right now:
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=3, Interesting=4, Informative=2, Overrated=2, Total=11.
Definately the most moderated comment I've ever posted... and honestly the only part I agree with is the -3 for Offtopic.
And here we have a certificate authority (CA) who's masquerading as a competitor, in order to slam "subscribers" and certify their identity to end users.
OK, but would you hide billions in expenses (commit fraud) along the way ??
I've heard the 10% number over the years and believed it, so out of curiousity I did a little little google search, and whattaya know, the #1 result was this 10% myth page from the Family Research Institute.
Also featured today on the Family Research Institute home page:
You can also check out their " educational pamphlets", such as " Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do" ... utter homophobia (and a lot of hetrosexual couples have oral sex, anal sex, kinky S&M play, but the text is pure FUD, mostly Fear) I wonder if their pamphlets are made by the
Chick Tract guys.
Later on the same google result is this paper which at first appears to be based on some honest research which claims 5% and goes on to say "On the basis of the Bagley et al.(1994) sample data, it is now known that the recent studies producing 1%(90) to 3% estimates for gay males, or for males who are homosexually active, are seriously flawed." Turns out this one is hosted by the Queer Resources Directory, but the author appears to be dedicated to helping troubled homosexual teens (more google searching)
So I guess I learned something new today. The gay population numbers are in a lot more dispute than WorldCom's traffic growth due to the tension between homosexual communities and homophobic right-wing groups, the 10% number I've always heard before does appear to be a bit high. Hmm. Personally, I'm het, but I'd much rather be around people who are homosexual than people who are homophobic. Fortunately, repressed homophobics are a lot easier to spot.
Very off-topic, someone please mod me down, if for nothing else other than wasting time on this instead of what I should be working on....
Defeat copy protection, and you're a pirate.
Defeat region locking, and you're a screwed-over consumer who's just trying to play the DVDs you legally purchased.
Have you see my little open-source mp3 player circuit board project?? Yes, a shameless plug, but on-topic. I have the Neo guys also sell a box that you can plug your own drive into... or at least they did some time ago.
All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.
Saddly, there's nothing simple about pretty plastic boxes and li-ion batteries. Injection molding involved tooling costs in the range of $20k to $60k. Li-ion batteries are complex and take special circuits. They're only sold to a small number of companies who make custom battery packs (because the packs include critical safety circuits). High tooling setup fees also apply to Li-ion battery packs.
Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.
Yep, did that. It's all GPL'd too, available from a CVS server, or on this firmware download page.
And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair.
That would be fair, if you and millions of others were serious buyers.
But the do-it-yourself market is a niche, and the economy of scale associated with mass production just isn't possible. Still, I've tried to keep the costs low (and also keep it buildable for hobbists with hand soldering). By the time you add the LCD, it's at about twice the "fair" $100 mark. If you go price the parts alone (not even soldered together) at small quantity, you'll find you're well over $100. If you're Creative Labs or Apple building millions in China, you can make it that cheap, but a niche market as small volumes, it just isn't possible.
Anyway, later this year I'm planning to make a car stereo cd changer protocol emulator board, so this thing can emulate a cd changer (but with lots of discs with lots of files... depends on the limitations of each deck and its protocol).
A pattern of fraud in financial reporting was what I had though was causing investors to be nervous.
I'm glad you set the record straight. If Bush were a better leader, somehow investors would have just shrugged off these startling exposures of fraud as isolated incidents, all brought to light with unfortunate timing. I'm sure it'll all magically get better when democrats are in power in a couple years....
Shoddy code running unnecessarily with full admin privs probably had nothing to do with it!
From the patent summary, it seems to cover the "invention" of removing redundant data and a bunch of other vauge compression concepts. It does NOT specifically mention color-space separation followed by spectral transformation that can be quantied with minimal loss of perceived quality (the real magic of JPEG).
IANAL, but it sure looks like this thing could apply equally well to just about any image compression since it's so vauge.
But they do, at least as far as I can tell as a non tv watcher listening to the occasional conversations at work. Sometimes they'll talk about what happened in some show, but quite often conversation is about the funnier ads. It's amazing how long those impressions can last.
For example, I missed the guy who's not a doctor, but plays one on TV (and then apparantly goes on to prescribe whatever medication is being pitched).
I also missed the old woman who fell over and couldn't get up.
Now I did catch the superbowl a few years ago when some friends were having a superbowl watching party... and guess what everyone was really interested in watching? A lot were for dot-coms back then.
There are so many more, but not having seen them I really don't pay much attention to the conversations.
It was either ads, or all those "personal" home pages of Fluffy The Cat On Him Grand Adventure To The Park On The Day We Bought The Digital Camera.
All the pages that anyone put some real work eventually got moved to servers under a registered domain name, or they just disappeared after neglect.
FWIW, the gimp that came with redhat 7.2 saves GIF just fine. Perhaps they're voilating the patent, but I believe the Unisys LZW patent runs out sometime next year (2003) anyway.
We're talking about Walmart quietly adding PCs on their website with little promotion (other than geek news coverage) vs Fry's (a large regional store) displaying linux-based PCs in Fry's stores and boldly promoting it in their advertising. A friend of mine went there twice in the last couple weeks and bought two of them right off the shelf in the store. Saw a big ad, no mail order, no needing to know about about an obscure page on a website, didn't already need to have a PC, etc.
Sure, Walmart may be able to reach everyone, if they try... and maybe they will someday.
But in the here and now, and lot more people are getting exposed to a bargain linux-based PC due to (regional) Frys than (international) Walmart. Just because you're bitter that Fry's isn't in your area doesn't mean that they aren't managing to expose a lot of people to the concept of a $300 PC with linux.
Sure, you may like Walmart better (I do too... Fry's really does terrible customer service), and it is true that Walmart could expose a lot more people to linux-based computers, but the fact is that their linux-based PCs are on their website, only available to people who already have a PC and are willing to mail order. Fry's has these $300 machines in their stores, and they're devoting major advertising to let people know about it.
You can tweak the car if you like, but few people do. Still, you have the Freedom to do with as you please. You do not enter a "no modification, no reverse engineering" contract when you buy or drive it. It is not illegal to look under the hood.
You can repair your car if you want.
If you choose to repair it, you can get informaion about how it works.
You can obtain spare parts from third parties.
You can get someone else to service it, besides the original manufacturer. They can use original manufacturer or third party parts. There is competition in the market.
You can sell your car to someone else.
You can continue driving the car for as long as you like and nobody can coerce you into signing sequence of 2 year leases.
And the real failure of the car analogy, for Windows, MacOS, and Linux....
ALL NEW CARS COME WITH A WARRANTY. The manufacture will fix defects at their cost, and if there's a significant systematic problem, they usually issue a recall.
Face it, adware companies are sleeziest, slimiest, most unscrupulous charlatans the world has ever been widely exposed to. The internet has given these deceivers the "power" to reach millions.
Slashdot has run dozens of stories, or well, at least linked to dozens of stories about these crooks. This one from last week was one of the best examples of what types of people are behind adware and spyware, but there have been many, many, many others recently, and they go back for years.
Even if an adware "sponsorship" were run by a more "honest" company, it's hard to imagine they could resist the pressure to spend the funds on their own well-intentioned efforts. But given the sorry state of adware and spyware on windoze-based shareware and the dismal glimpses into the operations behind these adware services, it's hard to believe these would be any well-meaning intentions at all when it comes to actually handling the money.
According to Microsoft, the success of the entire industry depends on an "Ecosystem" where initial long-range developments are placed in the public domain and can later be exploited royalty-free once Micr... er, the "IP Community" sees a short-term profit opportunity.
Is this published somewhere?
That you are aware of....
I shop on-line frequently. For a specialty item, I'll complain (or more likely just call the merchant on the phone if the site isn't working).
For "normal" things, if a site doesn't work for me in Mozilla (linux), usually I'll just go back to my google search and try a different merchant whose site does work. Sites that don't work with Mozilla are pretty rare, and for "normal" things like consumer electronics and computer parts, I rarely give a damn about any particular merchant.... I've already decided what I want and I'll just go find some other place that has it in stock and ready to ship.
And as a personal rant, I would never rely on the self-righteous opinion of most people using Linux and Mozilla. You want your software, services, and bandwidth and don't care who pays for it as long it isn't you.
Wow, because I'm using linux and mozilla, I therefore have a self-righteous (and thus unreliable) opinion, and I'm a freeloader who wants everything for free despite who else ends up paying??
Ok, I know it's a troll, but perhaps this AC really is some merchant with a real website? If that's the case, I have some news for you:
I am a paying customer. I regularly shop online. I buy all sorts of things, but electronic items are among the higher dollar items. I pay $79/month for DSL, and I pay for a dedicated server at Verio for my website. I pay to rent movies (considering going to netflix.com). I own my home (pay monthly mortgage), and I own my car. I pay my bills, and I make enough money to eat out, go to movies, and shop both in brick-n-morter stores and online. I am an electrical engineer (approx 11 years professional experience). I'm also NOT an Anonymous Coward. I use Redhat Linux (and mozilla) for a variety of reasons, partly because the documentation is so much better than windows (if you really need to know something instead of point-n-click hand holding), and partly because I've used Unix since the late 80s and Linux-based systems "feel" more natural to me than windows. I do shop on-line. If a merchant's site doesn't work AND the same item is available elsewhere, I simply shop elsewhere. I usually find merchants using search, so if one doesn't work, there's a long list of competitors who are ready to fill in for them. There's very few things important enough to go to the trouble of rebooting, and shopping certainly isn't. I'm the paying customer, why should I have to change what I'm doing just to spend my own money??
Perhaps I'm the only linux user who ever buys anything? I somehow doubt that. More likely is that zealots complain loudly, while paying customers silently move on to another site that works properly and ultimately accomplish their goal... to purchase their intended item. Why bother complaining to a merchant who probably doesn't give a damn and has a bad attitude? A guy like this AC probably wouldn't believe you were ready to buy, even if you did waste your time to let him know. Of course, I don't know how many serious shoppers use linux (except for me), I don't know how many move on with their shopping goal without complaining (except for me), and I don't even know if this AC is for real or just a smarter-than-average troll.
But I do know that linux users are a small percentage AND merchant sites that don't work with linux are also a small percentage. AC, if you're reading this, I've got some news for you. One of those percentages is slowly but steadily increasing, and the other is doing roughly the opposite. Guess which one you are?? And before you smuggly conclude that your site's incompatibility with linux has never cost you a sale, ask yourself why a serious buyer would bother complaining to someone who didn't invest the time/money to make a compatible site instead of just returning to google (just a couple simple clicks of the back button) and locating another merchant with a better website? That's what I do on those rare occasions when a site doesn't work.
Storage space is cheap, and bandwidth isn't that expensive either, but the time spent sifting through them to "just hit delete" is precious. Not only does it take time, but it immediately turns "let's check the inbox and answer some people's questions" into "first identify all the spams, viruses and other junk and delete". Even it that's just a couple messages, it put me into a different mood.
Many people email me asking technical questions. With the wonders spamassassin, I can finally get a whim of "let's answer some people's questions" without ruining my mood with "what bunch of scumbags littered my inbox". Even though it only takes less than a minute to delete a dozen junk messages (I get about 10-12 per day, not 100), it often times would completely change my mood. I'd put a lot less effort into helping people who aren't direct customers of the site. I generally like helping most people (except perhaps students trying to cheat) and spamassassin lets me remain focused and keep a positive energy without spoiling it by having to manually clean up a mess of spam.
My point is that the human factor, the small but non-zero time spent to "just hit delete", is much more expensive than storage space and bandwidth.
The resulting change in ones mood (having just dealt with rip-offs from the scummiest charlatans on the Earth) is intangible, and perhaps the most expensive aspect of spam. Maybe some people can "just hit delete" without effecting their mood at all, but I can not and I don't know many people who can. Some people get frustrated, some get mad, others see it as a sad comentary on the state of the world. However any particular individual reacts to briefly seeing beastiality porno ads, penis/breast enlargement, diet fads, fradulent credit techniquest, get rich quick schemes... it's just not a positive influence. It provokes negative feelings, discust, anger, irratation, or perhaps minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Any what do people do immediately after their mood has been somewhat altered towards the negative.... they read emails, write responses, and sometimes compose new messages. There is probably no way anyone can measure this intangible change in how people interpret what they read and what/how they compose what they write.
But I can say for certain that having to clean up a bunch of spam put me in a slightly bad mood that makes me tend to be less helpful to people who are emailing me asking for help with their electronics problems. Luckily for them, spamassassin (with the RBL and Razor checks enabled and a threshold of 7.5) catches nearly all spams and has not yet in about 5 months filtered a single legitimate message.
I believe the world would indeed be a better place without millions of people suffering the minor irratation of spam, and then immediately thereafter corresponding with others.
Would you press that button ?????
Look at the "illicit drug situation". Certain drugs are illegal. DO people still use them? Yes. Have the numbers went down since the enacted idiotic penalties? No.
The 1992 telecommunications act almost completely wiped out junk faxes, and the few folks who left doing it illegally are getting found and fined by the FCC.
It also greatly cleaned up telemarketing calls. Callers are required to truthfully required to identify themselves within 30 seconds. It estabilished a strong legal requirement for "do not call lists".
The "war on drugs" may not have had much impact on illegal drug usage, but previous federal laws regulating telecommunications have been very effective.
Before 1992, a lot of folks made money sending out lots and lots of unsolicited fax advertising.
That didn't make it right, but it did create an annoyance, disrupt legitimate business fax machines (which ran out of paper), and ultimate lawmakers responded and made it illegal.
Soon, lawmakers will probably respond to scumbags like Ronnie Scelson, probably not be outlawing email advertising, but it's almost certain that forged headers, fraudlent ads, and not actually honoring removal requests will be illegal shortly. We can only hope that abusing open relays will also go on the list of banned activities....