A couple of questions on how this might relate to the first release of MS Office to officially support Intel Macs:
1) It is my understanding that the Mac BU is an officially separate entity. Does that really mean that there is no chance that Microsoft would "borrow" people on the Mac team to help push Vista or Office for Windows 2007 out the door?
2) Recently, the Windows and Mac releases of Office have been staggered so that they are released on alternating years (or 1 - 1.5 years). The Mac BU is quoted as saying that they "typically deliver new versions every two to three years" but that "[m]oving to universal binaries will naturally impact our schedule". (Isn't that wonderfully non-committal.) The last version effectively shipped in June of 2004.
Alternating releases between platforms has its advantages for MS: you don't have to hold up one release to coincide with the other and you have more time to ensure that the new version for one platform is compatible with the latest version for the other platform. Does the delay on the Windows front mean that we are likely to see the 2 versions come out more concurrently? Might MS delay the Mac version as the result of the delay in the Windows version?
I have 2 friends/relatives that I have chatted with in the last month about making their first Apple hardware purchase (switchers if you will). I told both of them to wait until after the WWDC, hoping for the latest updates.
What the hell do I tell them now?
One is looking at a laptop, probably an iBook. The G4 is way behind the curve, and what can you say when there is a hardware update around the corner that might double the observed speed of the machine? The other is looking at a desktop, probably an iMac. The current G5 actually stacks up okay right now, but does the purchase make sense?
Mac buyers are shown to wait longer before upgrading their machines. What is the scene going to look like in 4 years? I'd still be using my older PC hardware if the hardware itself hadn't died. There are supposed to be fat binaries from developers using Xcode, and Rosetta for running old PPC binaries on an x86 machine. But there will inevitably be x86 only binaries for some app that you love; will there be a way to run it on the old PPC hardware? And even if there is, why do I want to burden an already slow machine with runtime translation?
What about peripherals? Will there be a fat binary driver for your current printer in 3 years? Will the printer you buy in 3 years come with a fat binary driver?
Perspective matters, but taking it to 100% is unrealistic.
I know about customizing Slashdot sections, but I do actually care about Apple news. My point was that this isn't news at all, it is a rumor, and an inconsequential one at that. The slashdot editors should serve as a little bit of a filter, otherwise Apple slashdot will just turn into a dumb RSS feed of Mac Rumors.
I feel like I am stating the obvious here, but it needs to be said:
This does not belong on/..
If you want to read an Apple rumors site then I suggest you read AppleInsider itself, it happens to be a pretty good one. If that has too much detail for your taste and you want someone to summarize the high points for you then read Mac Rumors. Having this post on apple.slashdot sort of makes it into a poor imitation of Mac Rumors.
Noone should be surprised that after releasing a major new version of the OS Apple would be developing an update that "address[es] 'over three dozen componets, with an emphasis on improving general stability and reliability'. The only useful information summarized for us is that "[t]he patch is listed for a mid to late May release." And that is just a rumor of a projection that could easily change.
Slashdot should be a place where you come and catch links to interesting articles that you would not have found on your own and that reach a certain level of newsworthiness. Like an informative review of a new Apple OS release or an educational story of reverse engineering Mac OS X.
I predict that in the next 6 months someone will provide a crack of Janus that allows you to steal the subscription music and let you keep it after you cancel your subscription. With a 14-day free trial of Napster that means you could steal all the music you want to fill up your MP3 player for free.
If the crack would allow you to convert the locked WMA files into unlocked MP3 files then you could even load them onto your iPod and not expect future firmware upgrades to make the songs stop playing. When the record companies see this they are sure to pull their music from a Janus service.
Hymn may let you "steal" purchased music from iTunes Music Store, but someone has to at least buy the music. The music is only stolen in this case when you share the files with your friends, but this just isn't the same threat to the record companies as a Janus crack.
A Janus crack would allow you to steal exactly the music you want (not limited by what your friends have), without having to hassle with the P2P services. You can do it by yourself in a couple of hours and how would anyone be able to identify you as having abused the service?
I recently moved from the US to Italy with a brand new HP printer. The printer was able to run off of the European voltage, so I bought a new cord with the European plug type and it works with no problems. From reading the article it sounds like my US printer will have no issues running with the European cartridges, so for the moment I am okay.
But what happens if I do exactly the opposite? I plan on moving back to the US at some point. Does this mean I shouldn't buy a new HP printer (say a nice photo one) before I move? And how am I supposed to know this if I don't read Slashdot? What I'm doing is legal: taking personal items with me when I move.
For most people in my situation I assume they won't be able to do much about it. They will only find out after they have moved their printer out of the country where it works (thereby ruling out giving it to a friend before they move) and will then be unable to buy cartridges that work with the printer. Obviously you can't return the printer to the stort you bought it from in another country months ago. Is HP going to make European printer cartridges easier to buy in the US? Or are you forced to buy the more expensive European cartridges and someone (probably by paying even more money) import them into the US.
The world is becoming more and more global and large companies want to punish me for being an international consumer.
I have been pretty happy with Umbrellabank.com
Early on they had a javascript issues with pre 1.0 Mozilla; I emailed them and they fixed it in a reasonable time. I haven't had any problems for a long time (although they do not officially claim to support mozilla).
You purpose all of these difficult measures in compromising it: brute force, sniffing, spying. If you were capable of doing it once, why can't you do it again? And if you are truly l33t you would have a backdoor, so that changing my password wouldn't lock you out.
Now go back to what the original poster was talking about. Frequent password changes make users choose simple passwords and/or write them down. I have seen this in practice too many times to count. So now you don't need to brute force my password, just look for a sticky note or run a dictionary attack. This gets worse as I visit 10 sites a day that want a password from me; how can I remember them all?
I'm skeptical of your assertion. When SUN bought StarOffice it was in the era of the dot com craze where it seemed logical to lose money a product for other purposes.
I think I remeber reading a Scott McNealy quotation from many years ago that SUN was a software company that sold hardware. Well, times have changed.
Why should SUN give StarOffice away now? SUN wants to make money and they still generally make money selling UNIX hardware (they do a lot of unrelated software things now too; but none of them really connect to StarOffice either). Initially the goal with StarOffice was to allow a mix of Solaris and Windows machines in a workplace, or at best to prevent Solaris houses to need Windows boxes at all. How do you get people to adopt it? Give it away! We'll make money on the SparcStation that now can sit on the secratary's desk.
But something different started happening. Linux starting eroding the Solaris market share, in part helped by a free StarOffice. Plus with Lin4Win and similar tools people saw advantages to having PCs with Linux & Windows.
So now that StarOffice was failing to bring people to the Solaris world and thus making money for SUN, the best way to get money back on their investment was to charge for StarOffice. If SUN could get away with it I bet they would charge more for the Linux version thant the Windows version.
I still see StarOffice as positive for the general public; anything to decrease Microsoft's power. Plus StarOffice 6.0 is such a better product than 5.2.
The AMDs consume heat? Whoa! No more worries of a heat sink and noisy fan. I guess by reducing the amount of heat they consume you don't have to worry about your laptop freezing your lap. Intel only manages to produce heat. Wonder how much power the chips consume?
Usually when the hardcore Slashdot crowd starts whining about having their "fair-use" rights violated I am likely to roll my eyes. Who says that when you bought a CD that gave you the right to have my.mp3.com stream that music to you no matter where you are? (Neglecting how cool the service is and how stupid the labels are for not trying to work within the system.)
But in this case the labels really are going to far. At work I use a Sun Ultra 10 on my desk and usually have my headphones on most of the day listening to a CD that I have brought in. Unfortunately many of the "enhanced CDs" that I own confuse Solaris to the point that I can't play them. Now how many labels test their CDs to ensure that they work on a SUN workstation? And how much work does SUN put in trying to understand every different CD type? (remember this is a workstation that has a CD-ROM drive that has no builtin connection to the sound card; I literally have a patch cable running from the front of the machine to the back to accomplish this) When I was using Solaris 2.6 it would reject almost all of my enhanced CDs, but when I was upgraded to Solaris 7 (2.7) I was happy to see that some of them, like the latest Fiona Apple disk were now recognized. I still have some discs that the machine can't understand though, like a CD I bought from mp3.com that is supposed to be "playable on any CD player and any computer".
When I buy a CD I would expect that I should be able to take the CD with me to any CD player and have it work. I'm not trying to do anything "special" like copy it, or rip it, or stream it to myself. But the fact that I can't play it in my machine at work means that I am now forced do start thinking about ripping those songs to MP3s (I never got into MP3s until "Smashing Pumpkins" released "Machina II" exclusively as MP3s).
As the article hints at, I fully expect the (h/cr)ackers to figure out how to get around the system; probably even making a special point of going after the protected discs and posting them on Napster because it is an extra challenge and feat to boast about. Those "rebel" Linux guys will write some app to read the discs. But me, a non-Windows, non-Mac user who is just trying to execercise my fair-use on a "fringe OS" gets caught in the middle. (I am really curious to know how the new DVD/CD players that will be able to read CD-R and MP3 data discs are going to respond...)
I know several people including myself who have
gone with SprintPCS only to be disappointed. SprintPCS has pretty good prices and doesn't lock you into a contract, but I would recommend Verizon wireless (which costs a bit more and locks you into a contract).
I live in Boston near the Porter Square T stop. Amazingly enough the T stop is a pretty bad coverage hole. I have had my calls dropped driving along Rt. 95 & 93. Where I work 30 minutes North of Boston the coverage goes in and out. I have had people call me at 11AM and leave a message while I am at work; but I never get notified that I have voicemail until I drive 20 minutes South towards Boston. Often I'll only get the message right as I place a call (often to the friend asking why they never called). I have friends who live outside Boston, in New York City, and Los Angeles who have similar coverage complaints.
Starting with the Pentium Pro Intel introduced
a Write Combined (WC) memory type for fast transfer of data. Intel discusses this and its application to graphics devices here:
This is related to how the processor works internally. By marking regions of memory as WC the processor can issue writes to that region faster. There are controls for setting what regions of memory are WC, referred to as MTRRs (Memory Type Range Register).
What a user has to understand in referencing these regions of memory is that order is not guaranteed. So if my application writes to memory locations 1, 2 and then 3, if this is WC memory then there is no guarantee what order they will happen in. If I am just writing directly to the frame buffer (turning pixels on and off) then I don't care about the order, the faster the better, as long as they all happen. But what if I was trying to write commands to the device? If I don't mark the memory as WC then the writes may not happen as fast as if I do. And how do I know when all the writes have been performed? (I don't even know how many there are.) To solve this problem you use a DMA as Intel suggested above. Oh, and don't forget to patent it.
There is also just some relation to the burst architecture of PCI/AGP. If I write ten consecutive addresses as one burst then it happens faster than if I write ten individual addresses. The patent that offends me the most is the Register array for utilizing burst mode transfer on local bus. It basically says that if I used to write to one address repeatedly to give the graphics chip a bunch of commands; instead I should write to a range of addresses and the device should treat them as if I wrote them to the same address repeatedly (i.e. execute all the commands in order). This way the writes appear as a burst write and get transferred faster.
I'm still holding out for the Voodoo5, because as far as I can tell it is the only PCI card to give good 3d performance. Are there any other feasible options?
I seem to remember talking to a friend about Real would charge you per the number of simultaneous streams you could broadcast with their server. Can anyone give info on what Real & MS charge for their servers? This may just be a case of MS giving a server away to a University, whereas the University would have to pay for Real. Which would you use in this case?
Mistakes happen and sometimes things just go wrong. Slashdot is news with a slant (or at least a more obvious slant than other media).
If this was really just MS being stupid, then I wonder if any Linux, Mac, or SUN supporting company would be willing to step forward and create a "rematch done right".
I wonder if Kasparov had some of non-compete clause in his contract with MS; that would be amusing.
I am disappointed with those that are disappointed. There has been a lot of criticism of the SCSL here, and rightly so. However, I wish more people would vocalize their support for actions like these.
Okay, so the SCSL isn't nearly as open as a lot of us would like. But before you complain endlessly stop and think. Last year did you have access to the source for Solaris or StarOffice? Will you next year? This is a step forward right?
Just as ESR reluctantly congratulated Microsoft for their stance on instant messaging we should be praising SUN for taking these steps and encouraging other companies to do the same. If SUN saw the advantage to using the SCSL, maybe if we rationally and respectfully submit our case for going full open source they will see the logic of that soon. But if everyone criticizes SUN for being just another corporation that does not understand open source we are discouraging other companies from even going this far.
Can we really say that SUN has made things worse with this move?
This doesn't appear to be to avoid load, so is this just a way to count where people are coming from? If so, do you think there is any way we can find out what portion of their hits come from slashdot?
Of course if enough people follow the stripped link I give, we will end up slashdotting their data to hell; lol
Is there any danger that Linux is going to be talked to death?
The danger is that the press is going to run out of reasons to talk about Linux and then stop talking about it.
Linux has been getting a lot of good press recently, but we are clearly seeing signs of the coverage just rehashing old news. You have to acknowledge that one of the reasons the mainstream press are talking about Linux so much is that they ran out of Microsoft news to report. Windows '95 was huge, '98 was a bit of a yawn, and everyone has already previewed 2000 to death. This is a PR war and if we run out of Linux news then Linux will become JAOS (just another OS).
Linux has some promising tidbits brewing:
Corel Linux and the maturation of Wine
The growing gaming support and 3d acceleration
Mozilla
Visibility for clustering
Linux on Merced (regardless of the actual value of Merced, it is something the press loves to talk about)
KDE and GNOME coming of age.
Microsoft will make a huge push once Windows 2000 ships and the Linux community needs corporate partners like RedHat, Corel, and VA Linux to respond in kind with a bit of media hype.
I can't believe that no other geek has talked about the binary encoding scheme that the barcodes use for numbers...
There was a link in the article to a page describing how to read the barcodes, but it just gives a table showing the binary codes and their decimal value without explaining it. I couldn't resist trying to understand it, and I have composed the following rules:
From left to right the first 4 bits have values of:
1247
Each code most have 2 and only 2 of the bits set. The fifth bit is used to ensure that this is always true.
The value 11(decimal) represents the digit 0(decimal).
Once I started I couldn't stop, so check out this page for a good reference on barcodes.
Odd thing is that when you get a look at all the different barcode formats, they chose about the easiest one to be read by humans because:
When dealing with only the digits 0-9, spaces don't mean anything, you only have to focus on the bars. However the spaces are useful to help you spot character boundaries. This means you don't have to keep as good a track of where you are when reading across.
There are only 2 line widths rather than the 4 used in some other systems.
The encoding for one digit always looks the same, no matter where it appears in a number and what digits surround it.
The 3c574-TX used to be bursty for me on my stock Mandrake 6.0 system. However an upgrade to pcmcia-cs-3.0.13 and I haven't seen any troubles since. My current kernel is 2.2.10
The reason I got a 3com card in the first place was because the PCMCIA pages mentioned that 3Com was one of the vendors that assisted "in the development of the Linux PCMCIA driver package by contributing hardware and/or technical documentation". They didn't know it at the time, but that won them a customer.
I just saw this post and realized that what we need now is moderation of the articles themselves!!! Let us rate the articles to reflect how we feel about them. I'm not necessarily saying that we should filter the alticles themselves; I just want a score next to the article so I know not to miss a "5er".
I got rotated into moderation recently and am seeing how it really does work. With only 5 points it really makes sense to boost good posts rather than flaming them. I also like the 3 day term; I already ready/. too much and as much as I'd like to contribute I initially groaned at the idea of spending time reading un-moderated posts. I never used to read comments because they were useless before moderation; afterwards it has so much value.
Amusing that those most interested in moderation will post to this topic, meaning that they can't moderate it; lol
Slashdot Mirror
1) It is my understanding that the Mac BU is an officially separate entity. Does that really mean that there is no chance that Microsoft would "borrow" people on the Mac team to help push Vista or Office for Windows 2007 out the door?
2) Recently, the Windows and Mac releases of Office have been staggered so that they are released on alternating years (or 1 - 1.5 years). The Mac BU is quoted as saying that they "typically deliver new versions every two to three years" but that "[m]oving to universal binaries will naturally impact our schedule". (Isn't that wonderfully non-committal.) The last version effectively shipped in June of 2004.
Alternating releases between platforms has its advantages for MS: you don't have to hold up one release to coincide with the other and you have more time to ensure that the new version for one platform is compatible with the latest version for the other platform. Does the delay on the Windows front mean that we are likely to see the 2 versions come out more concurrently? Might MS delay the Mac version as the result of the delay in the Windows version?
What the hell do I tell them now?
One is looking at a laptop, probably an iBook. The G4 is way behind the curve, and what can you say when there is a hardware update around the corner that might double the observed speed of the machine? The other is looking at a desktop, probably an iMac. The current G5 actually stacks up okay right now, but does the purchase make sense?
Mac buyers are shown to wait longer before upgrading their machines. What is the scene going to look like in 4 years? I'd still be using my older PC hardware if the hardware itself hadn't died. There are supposed to be fat binaries from developers using Xcode, and Rosetta for running old PPC binaries on an x86 machine. But there will inevitably be x86 only binaries for some app that you love; will there be a way to run it on the old PPC hardware? And even if there is, why do I want to burden an already slow machine with runtime translation?
What about peripherals? Will there be a fat binary driver for your current printer in 3 years? Will the printer you buy in 3 years come with a fat binary driver?
I know about customizing Slashdot sections, but I do actually care about Apple news. My point was that this isn't news at all, it is a rumor, and an inconsequential one at that. The slashdot editors should serve as a little bit of a filter, otherwise Apple slashdot will just turn into a dumb RSS feed of Mac Rumors.
If you want to read an Apple rumors site then I suggest you read AppleInsider itself, it happens to be a pretty good one. If that has too much detail for your taste and you want someone to summarize the high points for you then read Mac Rumors. Having this post on apple.slashdot sort of makes it into a poor imitation of Mac Rumors.
Noone should be surprised that after releasing a major new version of the OS Apple would be developing an update that "address[es] 'over three dozen componets, with an emphasis on improving general stability and reliability'. The only useful information summarized for us is that "[t]he patch is listed for a mid to late May release." And that is just a rumor of a projection that could easily change.
Slashdot should be a place where you come and catch links to interesting articles that you would not have found on your own and that reach a certain level of newsworthiness. Like an informative review of a new Apple OS release or an educational story of reverse engineering Mac OS X.
--
I must be old around here...
I predict that in the next 6 months someone will provide a crack of Janus that allows you to steal the subscription music and let you keep it after you cancel your subscription. With a 14-day free trial of Napster that means you could steal all the music you want to fill up your MP3 player for free.
If the crack would allow you to convert the locked WMA files into unlocked MP3 files then you could even load them onto your iPod and not expect future firmware upgrades to make the songs stop playing. When the record companies see this they are sure to pull their music from a Janus service.
Hymn may let you "steal" purchased music from iTunes Music Store, but someone has to at least buy the music. The music is only stolen in this case when you share the files with your friends, but this just isn't the same threat to the record companies as a Janus crack.
A Janus crack would allow you to steal exactly the music you want (not limited by what your friends have), without having to hassle with the P2P services. You can do it by yourself in a couple of hours and how would anyone be able to identify you as having abused the service?
I recently moved from the US to Italy with a brand new HP printer. The printer was able to run off of the European voltage, so I bought a new cord with the European plug type and it works with no problems. From reading the article it sounds like my US printer will have no issues running with the European cartridges, so for the moment I am okay.
But what happens if I do exactly the opposite? I plan on moving back to the US at some point. Does this mean I shouldn't buy a new HP printer (say a nice photo one) before I move? And how am I supposed to know this if I don't read Slashdot? What I'm doing is legal: taking personal items with me when I move.
For most people in my situation I assume they won't be able to do much about it. They will only find out after they have moved their printer out of the country where it works (thereby ruling out giving it to a friend before they move) and will then be unable to buy cartridges that work with the printer. Obviously you can't return the printer to the stort you bought it from in another country months ago. Is HP going to make European printer cartridges easier to buy in the US? Or are you forced to buy the more expensive European cartridges and someone (probably by paying even more money) import them into the US.
The world is becoming more and more global and large companies want to punish me for being an international consumer.
The end of the blurb got my hopes up; I really need someone to fix the "content spam" on the internet these days.
So much spam=cr*p and not enough content!!!
All it needs to make it complete is an auto-sensing backlight to aid use in a dark room (something like the backlight on the new Powerbooks)...
I have been pretty happy with Umbrellabank.com
Early on they had a javascript issues with pre 1.0 Mozilla; I emailed them and they fixed it in a reasonable time. I haven't had any problems for a long time (although they do not officially claim to support mozilla).
You purpose all of these difficult measures in compromising it: brute force, sniffing, spying. If you were capable of doing it once, why can't you do it again? And if you are truly l33t you would have a backdoor, so that changing my password wouldn't lock you out.
Now go back to what the original poster was talking about. Frequent password changes make users choose simple passwords and/or write them down. I have seen this in practice too many times to count. So now you don't need to brute force my password, just look for a sticky note or run a dictionary attack. This gets worse as I visit 10 sites a day that want a password from me; how can I remember them all?
I think I remeber reading a Scott McNealy quotation from many years ago that SUN was a software company that sold hardware. Well, times have changed.
Why should SUN give StarOffice away now? SUN wants to make money and they still generally make money selling UNIX hardware (they do a lot of unrelated software things now too; but none of them really connect to StarOffice either). Initially the goal with StarOffice was to allow a mix of Solaris and Windows machines in a workplace, or at best to prevent Solaris houses to need Windows boxes at all. How do you get people to adopt it? Give it away! We'll make money on the SparcStation that now can sit on the secratary's desk.
But something different started happening. Linux starting eroding the Solaris market share, in part helped by a free StarOffice. Plus with Lin4Win and similar tools people saw advantages to having PCs with Linux & Windows.
So now that StarOffice was failing to bring people to the Solaris world and thus making money for SUN, the best way to get money back on their investment was to charge for StarOffice. If SUN could get away with it I bet they would charge more for the Linux version thant the Windows version.
I still see StarOffice as positive for the general public; anything to decrease Microsoft's power. Plus StarOffice 6.0 is such a better product than 5.2.
The AMDs consume heat? Whoa! No more worries of a heat sink and noisy fan. I guess by reducing the amount of heat they consume you don't have to worry about your laptop freezing your lap.
Intel only manages to produce heat. Wonder how much power the chips consume?
Does anyone know the status of the 64-bit gcc for Sparc Solaris?
Usually when the hardcore Slashdot crowd starts whining about having their "fair-use" rights violated I am likely to roll my eyes. Who says that when you bought a CD that gave you the right to have my.mp3.com stream that music to you no matter where you are? (Neglecting how cool the service is and how stupid the labels are for not trying to work within the system.)
But in this case the labels really are going to far. At work I use a Sun Ultra 10 on my desk and usually have my headphones on most of the day listening to a CD that I have brought in. Unfortunately many of the "enhanced CDs" that I own confuse Solaris to the point that I can't play them. Now how many labels test their CDs to ensure that they work on a SUN workstation? And how much work does SUN put in trying to understand every different CD type? (remember this is a workstation that has a CD-ROM drive that has no builtin connection to the sound card; I literally have a patch cable running from the front of the machine to the back to accomplish this) When I was using Solaris 2.6 it would reject almost all of my enhanced CDs, but when I was upgraded to Solaris 7 (2.7) I was happy to see that some of them, like the latest Fiona Apple disk were now recognized. I still have some discs that the machine can't understand though, like a CD I bought from mp3.com that is supposed to be "playable on any CD player and any computer".
When I buy a CD I would expect that I should be able to take the CD with me to any CD player and have it work. I'm not trying to do anything "special" like copy it, or rip it, or stream it to myself. But the fact that I can't play it in my machine at work means that I am now forced do start thinking about ripping those songs to MP3s (I never got into MP3s until "Smashing Pumpkins" released "Machina II" exclusively as MP3s).
As the article hints at, I fully expect the (h/cr)ackers to figure out how to get around the system; probably even making a special point of going after the protected discs and posting them on Napster because it is an extra challenge and feat to boast about. Those "rebel" Linux guys will write some app to read the discs. But me, a non-Windows, non-Mac user who is just trying to execercise my fair-use on a "fringe OS" gets caught in the middle. (I am really curious to know how the new DVD/CD players that will be able to read CD-R and MP3 data discs are going to respond...)
I know several people including myself who have gone with SprintPCS only to be disappointed. SprintPCS has pretty good prices and doesn't lock you into a contract, but I would recommend Verizon wireless (which costs a bit more and locks you into a contract).
I live in Boston near the Porter Square T stop. Amazingly enough the T stop is a pretty bad coverage hole. I have had my calls dropped driving along Rt. 95 & 93. Where I work 30 minutes North of Boston the coverage goes in and out. I have had people call me at 11AM and leave a message while I am at work; but I never get notified that I have voicemail until I drive 20 minutes South towards Boston. Often I'll only get the message right as I place a call (often to the friend asking why they never called).
I have friends who live outside Boston, in New York City, and Los Angeles who have similar coverage complaints.
- Write Combining Memory Implementation Guidelines.
This is related to how the processor works internally. By marking regions of memory as WC the processor can issue writes to that region faster. There are controls for setting what regions of memory are WC, referred to as MTRRs (Memory Type Range Register).What a user has to understand in referencing these regions of memory is that order is not guaranteed. So if my application writes to memory locations 1, 2 and then 3, if this is WC memory then there is no guarantee what order they will happen in. If I am just writing directly to the frame buffer (turning pixels on and off) then I don't care about the order, the faster the better, as long as they all happen. But what if I was trying to write commands to the device? If I don't mark the memory as WC then the writes may not happen as fast as if I do. And how do I know when all the writes have been performed? (I don't even know how many there are.) To solve this problem you use a DMA as Intel suggested above. Oh, and don't forget to patent it.
There is also just some relation to the burst architecture of PCI/AGP. If I write ten consecutive addresses as one burst then it happens faster than if I write ten individual addresses. The patent that offends me the most is the Register array for utilizing burst mode transfer on local bus. It basically says that if I used to write to one address repeatedly to give the graphics chip a bunch of commands; instead I should write to a range of addresses and the device should treat them as if I wrote them to the same address repeatedly (i.e. execute all the commands in order). This way the writes appear as a burst write and get transferred faster.
I'm still holding out for the Voodoo5, because as far as I can tell it is the only PCI card to give good 3d performance.
Are there any other feasible options?
I seem to remember talking to a friend about Real would charge you per the number of simultaneous streams you could broadcast with their server. Can anyone give info on what Real & MS charge for their servers?
This may just be a case of MS giving a server away to a University, whereas the University would have to pay for Real. Which would you use in this case?
If this was really just MS being stupid, then I wonder if any Linux, Mac, or SUN supporting company would be willing to step forward and create a "rematch done right".
I wonder if Kasparov had some of non-compete clause in his contract with MS; that would be amusing.
Okay, so the SCSL isn't nearly as open as a lot of us would like. But before you complain endlessly stop and think. Last year did you have access to the source for Solaris or StarOffice? Will you next year? This is a step forward right?
Just as ESR reluctantly congratulated Microsoft for their stance on instant messaging we should be praising SUN for taking these steps and encouraging other companies to do the same. If SUN saw the advantage to using the SCSL, maybe if we rationally and respectfully submit our case for going full open source they will see the logic of that soon. But if everyone criticizes SUN for being just another corporation that does not understand open source we are discouraging other companies from even going this far.
Can we really say that SUN has made things worse with this move?
- http://www.wired.com/news/news/slashdot/technolog
y /story/22015.html
Why is "slashdot" in the link? The same story also appears at- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/story/22015.
h tml
This doesn't appear to be to avoid load, so is this just a way to count where people are coming from? If so, do you think there is any way we can find out what portion of their hits come from slashdot?Of course if enough people follow the stripped link I give, we will end up slashdotting their data to hell; lol
- Is there any danger that Linux is going to be talked to death?
The danger is that the press is going to run out of reasons to talk about Linux and then stop talking about it.Linux has been getting a lot of good press recently, but we are clearly seeing signs of the coverage just rehashing old news. You have to acknowledge that one of the reasons the mainstream press are talking about Linux so much is that they ran out of Microsoft news to report. Windows '95 was huge, '98 was a bit of a yawn, and everyone has already previewed 2000 to death. This is a PR war and if we run out of Linux news then Linux will become JAOS (just another OS).
Linux has some promising tidbits brewing:
- Corel Linux and the maturation of Wine
- The growing gaming support and 3d acceleration
- Mozilla
- Visibility for clustering
- Linux on Merced (regardless of the actual value of Merced, it is something the press loves to talk about)
- KDE and GNOME coming of age.
Microsoft will make a huge push once Windows 2000 ships and the Linux community needs corporate partners like RedHat, Corel, and VA Linux to respond in kind with a bit of media hype.There was a link in the article to a page describing how to read the barcodes, but it just gives a table showing the binary codes and their decimal value without explaining it. I couldn't resist trying to understand it, and I have composed the following rules:
- From left to right the first 4 bits have values of:
- 1247
- Each code most have 2 and only 2 of the bits set. The fifth bit is used to ensure that this is always true.
- The value 11(decimal) represents the digit 0(decimal).
So:110-001
201-001
311-000
400-101
510-100
601-100
700-011
810-010
901-010
000-110
Once I started I couldn't stop, so check out this page for a good reference on barcodes.
Odd thing is that when you get a look at all the different barcode formats, they chose about the easiest one to be read by humans because:
The reason I got a 3com card in the first place was because the PCMCIA pages mentioned that 3Com was one of the vendors that assisted "in the development of the Linux PCMCIA driver package by contributing hardware and/or technical documentation". They didn't know it at the time, but that won them a customer.
I got rotated into moderation recently and am seeing how it really does work. With only 5 points it really makes sense to boost good posts rather than flaming them. I also like the 3 day term; I already ready /. too much and as much as I'd like to contribute I initially groaned at the idea of spending time reading un-moderated posts. I never used to read comments because they were useless before moderation; afterwards it has so much value.
Amusing that those most interested in moderation will post to this topic, meaning that they can't moderate it; lol