Standard firewire disk? What format is the disk in, tho? Does the firmware on the device require the disk formatted in something unique to MacOS? Does it require the files to be in some specific Mac format or some other "added" files in order for the device's UI to properly work?
I guess time will tell when people finally get ahold of one, but I would almost guess that its not just a pile of MP3s on a disk..
It read to me like the opposite situation, but the same kind of outcome. HP says one thing, but does another.
In this case, it's that they're saying semi-officially that "...PA-RISC is here for the forseeable future, so relax already..".
In the past when they bought Apollo they officially said "Domain/OS is here to stay, we won't be cramming HP/UX down your throat" and then Domain/OS goes away.
It's very clear to me that marketing people are trying to have it both ways. One camp wants to ditch PA-RISC and do Itanium everywhere, another camp that has happy PA-RISC customers wants to make like Itanium ain't happening. Corporate america, fscking the customer. Go figure.
More feature-filled than the Apex units? While their onscreen features aren't much to write home about, it's hard to say no to flashable ROMs, CD-R/RW, MP3 and Video CD compatibility.
A better menuing system and some MP3 feature enhancements would be cool, but what features am I missing?
The result is that I am always suprised how bad Windows actually is.
Isn't that the truth? Given the amazing amount of resources at their disposal, it's often surprising how bad Windows can be and how many obvious problems they just didn't fix or even address.
This strikes me most often when I find myself running RegEdit to add some key to the registry to fix some Windows annoyance in a way that *should* be modifyable through a GUI utility -- if the annoyance existed at all. I'm amazed first that I have to use RegEdit, I'm amazed second that I have to *add* a key instead of modifying an existing one (what's up with code that looks for variables that aren't there?), and third that the annoying behavior exists in the first place.
Maybe they put so much into marketing/psychological warfare that they don't really have the resources I thought they did for making sure their programs work right.
I had one demo'd here at work. It was being resold by WrightLine, the rack enclosure people, but was available seperately from the manufacturer.
It was tres expensive, though -- like thousands of dollars, *but* with the client you could connect to any machine that was connected to it over a network and get hardware-level control over the machine -- BIOS screen, dos prompts, totally seperate from the OS running on the machine.
The magic was their ability to do real-time video compression of the hardwired systems displays. The client app that could connect to the switch could also resample a hi-res screen to fit a lower res screen, as well as send special keystrokes so that you could use cheapie switches daisychained off of the expensive one.
It had limitations, though -- the client software was licensed (cheap money grab attempt), and it was a bandwidth pig. The guy that demo'd it didn't think it would be practical to control a system via dual-channel ISDN and barely practical over broadband connection. And it was REALLY expensive, I seem to remember a price in the thousands for the 8 port box, cables and a 4 client license of the remote-use software.
What surprises me is how dumb the video is in even non-networked high end KVMs. Why isn't there an option to do picture-in-picture? Or tiling all connected systems on one screen? With a good hi-res display and resampling, you should be able to monitor (maybe not use 6pt windows, tho) multiple systems at one time. There's loads of video tricks that get used in even the low-end TV world that really ought to be in the KVM world.
There is very little value in owning a car if it's breaking down all the time and ready for replacement.
This is where you argument falls apart. Most cars these days are good for 100,000 miles, easily. Many well-made cars (Hondas, Toyotas in particular) are, if maintained properly, good for 200,000 miles. Combining the mileage that my wife *and* I drive into one car and you get something on the order of 20,000 miles per year. A car than can reliably be driven for 200,000 miles will last 10 years. If the note was for four years, that's six years of driving without a car payment. If you're smart and make a phantom car payment to yourself, that next car costs only the sticker price because you can pay for it in cash, no interest payments or other finance hassles.
The difference between buying software and vehicles is that vehicles take decades to become incompatible. It's not uncommon for busses and heavy duty diesel trucks to be driven millions of miles and tens of years before they're retired.
Software, however, is often nearly obsolete the day its first available. Using software is like swallowing string, you really can't stop upgrading. I think renting makes good sense, provided the terms are OK. I think rented software ought to be cheaper than existing software licenses, and ought to always include whatever version I want and patches, fixes and upgrades.
The downside is that with Microsoft, rentals will be more expnesive, have higher costs and and poor availability of choices.
I have the three-CD Apex unit and it does a good job of playing MP3s, with the following gripes:
8.3 on-screen naming only, which makes the whole navigation/menu nearly useless and kind of fubars track ordering.
No shuffle mode.
No programmability (eg, play this directory only, etc)
Mine seems prone to skipping the first second or so of songs once a while. Sometimes hitting the back button and starting over plays it, sometimes it doesn't.
I'm mostly happy with it, when we have parties or other gatherings its nice to make a master mix CD that involves no changing of CDs, although setting the playlist order would be a welcome addition.
How about going one further, and saying they're an example of not just unity of style and theme, but they're unifications of functionality -- drag and drop, built-in configurability (no hacking text files to alter an applicationmenu).
It's kind of like an IDE versus vi/make/gcc/gdb, except that you're only giving up a certain amount of system resources and gaining features and integration.
There's probably a way to make it boot off of a bios-update disk or a specially prepared boot floppy that will cause the saved settings to get wiped and put it into "new computer" mode again.
I had a DEC PC that had a bios recovery mode that would reflash the bios from floppy without a flash program or a bootable floppy. The catch was you had to make a recovery floppy before you foobar'd the machine. I presume it was just a raw dump to disk media of the old bios.
Whatever ROM the machine had was capable of doing disk reads and flash writes.
I'm sure there's a way to make this one go into "recovery" mode which would at least make it a working laptop.
Here's my guess about how it works and some questions:
The BIOS probably interacts with this and tells you to put your finger on it before it will complete booting. There's probably a finger-less way to update the bios which puts the laptop back into "new" mode, forgetting its fingerprint settings. This seems like the most likely way to override this security as a method of getting a working laptop.
Presumably this wouldn't allow decryption of files encrypted to use fingerprint as an access method to some other encryption keys, but it would make the laptop a functional computer again.
Regardless of the fingerprint system, it still seems possible to part the laptop out as individual components (of limited usability since its a laptop) as well as replace the motherboard or flash RAM if its socketed.
This computer is kind of confusing because its trying to solve two problems: laptop security (keep the laptop from functionality if stolen) as well as data security (protect the data even if the computer is made workable).
The latter is hard, but the former is very desirable to me as a corporate IT guy. I'd love a hardware-key system that would render the laptop useless if stolen. Fingerprint is a PITA since they're kind of tied to humans, but access cards would be great since presumably there could be many cards capable of accessing or modifying the laptops (ie, master key).
It still might not prevent disassembly or other hardware attacks, but my guess is that most laptops that are stolen are stolen to be resold as complete units, not sent to back-alley chopshops to be sold as parts..
The reason they're playing Tetris on their phones is that they're on the SUBway and can't get service. Which, unless 3G is magic, will apply to it, too, rendering TV-watching, movie-watching, etc all pointless until you're above ground.
I think the idea that might work would be a well-planned thin-client linux desktop and a single 5-user citrix metaframe Win2k box for those things which Absolutely Cannot Be Done on Linux No Matter How Hard We Try.
The other thing will be iron-fisted leadership to keep the "don wannas" from killing morale, since those are the people that make it bad. Most people can live with KOffice or whatever, and most things could be done on a linux desktop. There will be a few, however, that can't, but the don wannas will use that to kill the transition.
What manufacturers, though? I have no hard numbers, but I'd bet that almost no CD drives are made here and precious few at this point in time are even *designed* here. The fact that many say "HP" or "Compaq" or whatever on the outside means squat -- they're all likely designed and built overseas.
Let's assume that a firmware change *is* made that overcomes these copy protection schemes but it isn't advertised, except by geeks that figure out that drives coming out of the Jinjang Drive Factory in China all work. What are they going to do?
The other question is, is this "copy protection" even covered by DMCA? It may be argued that these discs are just flawed at the factory, and not copy protected.
Since overriding DVD region coding and copy protection *is* a violation of DMCA and DVD contracts, given the number of DVD players that are made overseas with *deliberate* region coding and macrovision disabling abilities and those that are sold with firmware that has been fixed to eliminate region coding, I would think that CD players that overcame the CD copy protection wouldn't face much opposition since flawing the CD isn't quite the same as the deliberate encryption and encoding scheme on DVDs.
It stands to reason that the biggest enemy of these non-standard CDs has to be the consumer electronics industry. They've seen a huge sales of burners, players, software, blanks, labels and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the make-your-own-CD revolution.
Limiting or preventing ripping of CDs seems like a real threat to not just Johnny Digital's passtime but of those in the electronics industry whose livlihood relies on consumers legitimately being able to rip CDs.
How soon until they fire back with firmware upgrades or other hardware hacks that overcome the copy protection gimmicks? And how will the music industry respond when this stuff is sold with the claim "Now compatible with new CDS!"?
I hate "fun" work environments, because they're usually not very fun and are focused on pretty lame people pursuing lame activities.
Nerf toys, "group happy hour", "group lunches", yuck. I have plenty of friends that match my interests and values outside of work. The LAST thing I want at work is having to try to fit in with the "fun group". Sounds like high school to me.
I get my "fun" at work by being challenged by the work, not enthralled with the people.
That being said, I have had fun with the people I worked with at every job, but it happened in an organic way, not because work was a "fun place".
Re:what is it good for?
on
2.2 GHz Xeon
·
· Score: 2
Maybe we should just head back down the bus board route. Instead of having a (relatively) big motherboard with main memory and CPU and (relatively) small I/O cards (disk, scsi, network, etc), maybe we should have (relatively) simpler "processor boards" which host their own RAM and connect to a common bus. Modular connector(s) on each processor board could have adapters for various tasks -- networking, disk, video and so on.
This way each processor board could be tasked to handle whatever it was connected to. Adding CPUs to a system for actual processing would mean adding a processor board. Adding functionality to a processor board would mean adding the appropriate connector for whatever you wanted it to do.
This way we're not building as much specialized hardware to do a specific task. The bus could really be a half-smart switch instead to eliminate contention between processor boards. With general purpose processors running on the processor boards, specific OS functionality could easily be offloaded to individual processor boards, eliminating the need for the processor boards that actually host the OS to spend as much time manipulating dumb hardware.
But the default for root seems to be csh, which is a hard link to tcsh, so the whole/bin/sh issue is kind of moot relative to the FreeBSD system itself.
If you have a dependency on/bin/sh (scripts, etc), maybe bash would work in its place. If not, burying your head in the sand seems like a worthwhile alternative.
Heh, with the advent of OS X.1's built-in SMB support, maybe they think SMB and NFS are enough for the whole universe.
AppleShare (you misspelled it "AppleTalk") support would be nice, but I get the feeling that the market is just too small and OS X.1's support of SMB natively will make it kind of kind of moot, even among Mac users.
Is it a laser or is an LED? I have an IntelliMouse optical that's at least a year old and it looks like an LED on the inside to me. If its an LED, shouldn't it last "forever" (forever in computer years, 5 years in people time).
Pressboard? I assume you mean MDF and while it's usually really flat, it is not anything like hardwood in strength or durability. It falls apart if it gets wet. The same thing holds true for hardboard.
IKEA furniture sucks because IKEA uses the lowest-budget (hardboard, cardboard, and particle board if you're lucky) materials for the most important structural elements. I'll admit I like the designs and the styling, but my experience with IKEA furniture was bad because the materials were so poor.
A cheaper, better alternative (if "looks" aren't important) is either plywood sheets or door blanks set on filing cabinets. Buy veneered plywood (oak or cherry) and it'll look as good as anything IKEA ever sold.
For a sleek modern look, buy some old steel filing cabinets from a used office supply place and strip the paint off of them until they're a nice brushed steel.
Re:Have you ever been to these protests? They're s
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
Hey, show up on time. Kind of hard to get a group organized if everyone plans on showing up whenever it's convenient.
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Standard firewire disk? What format is the disk in, tho? Does the firmware on the device require the disk formatted in something unique to MacOS? Does it require the files to be in some specific Mac format or some other "added" files in order for the device's UI to properly work?
I guess time will tell when people finally get ahold of one, but I would almost guess that its not just a pile of MP3s on a disk..
They did. The lesson was to give it away until the competitors selling theirs went away. When they go away, charge as much as you like.
It read to me like the opposite situation, but the same kind of outcome. HP says one thing, but does another.
In this case, it's that they're saying semi-officially that "...PA-RISC is here for the forseeable future, so relax already..".
In the past when they bought Apollo they officially said "Domain/OS is here to stay, we won't be cramming HP/UX down your throat" and then Domain/OS goes away.
It's very clear to me that marketing people are trying to have it both ways. One camp wants to ditch PA-RISC and do Itanium everywhere, another camp that has happy PA-RISC customers wants to make like Itanium ain't happening. Corporate america, fscking the customer. Go figure.
More feature-filled than the Apex units? While their onscreen features aren't much to write home about, it's hard to say no to flashable ROMs, CD-R/RW, MP3 and Video CD compatibility.
A better menuing system and some MP3 feature enhancements would be cool, but what features am I missing?
The result is that I am always suprised how bad Windows actually is.
Isn't that the truth? Given the amazing amount of resources at their disposal, it's often surprising how bad Windows can be and how many obvious problems they just didn't fix or even address.
This strikes me most often when I find myself running RegEdit to add some key to the registry to fix some Windows annoyance in a way that *should* be modifyable through a GUI utility -- if the annoyance existed at all. I'm amazed first that I have to use RegEdit, I'm amazed second that I have to *add* a key instead of modifying an existing one (what's up with code that looks for variables that aren't there?), and third that the annoying behavior exists in the first place.
Maybe they put so much into marketing/psychological warfare that they don't really have the resources I thought they did for making sure their programs work right.
I had one demo'd here at work. It was being resold by WrightLine, the rack enclosure people, but was available seperately from the manufacturer.
It was tres expensive, though -- like thousands of dollars, *but* with the client you could connect to any machine that was connected to it over a network and get hardware-level control over the machine -- BIOS screen, dos prompts, totally seperate from the OS running on the machine.
The magic was their ability to do real-time video compression of the hardwired systems displays. The client app that could connect to the switch could also resample a hi-res screen to fit a lower res screen, as well as send special keystrokes so that you could use cheapie switches daisychained off of the expensive one.
It had limitations, though -- the client software was licensed (cheap money grab attempt), and it was a bandwidth pig. The guy that demo'd it didn't think it would be practical to control a system via dual-channel ISDN and barely practical over broadband connection. And it was REALLY expensive, I seem to remember a price in the thousands for the 8 port box, cables and a 4 client license of the remote-use software.
What surprises me is how dumb the video is in even non-networked high end KVMs. Why isn't there an option to do picture-in-picture? Or tiling all connected systems on one screen? With a good hi-res display and resampling, you should be able to monitor (maybe not use 6pt windows, tho) multiple systems at one time. There's loads of video tricks that get used in even the low-end TV world that really ought to be in the KVM world.
There is very little value in owning a car if it's breaking down all the time and ready for replacement.
This is where you argument falls apart. Most cars these days are good for 100,000 miles, easily. Many well-made cars (Hondas, Toyotas in particular) are, if maintained properly, good for 200,000 miles. Combining the mileage that my wife *and* I drive into one car and you get something on the order of 20,000 miles per year. A car than can reliably be driven for 200,000 miles will last 10 years. If the note was for four years, that's six years of driving without a car payment. If you're smart and make a phantom car payment to yourself, that next car costs only the sticker price because you can pay for it in cash, no interest payments or other finance hassles.
The difference between buying software and vehicles is that vehicles take decades to become incompatible. It's not uncommon for busses and heavy duty diesel trucks to be driven millions of miles and tens of years before they're retired.
Software, however, is often nearly obsolete the day its first available. Using software is like swallowing string, you really can't stop upgrading. I think renting makes good sense, provided the terms are OK. I think rented software ought to be cheaper than existing software licenses, and ought to always include whatever version I want and patches, fixes and upgrades. The downside is that with Microsoft, rentals will be more expnesive, have higher costs and and poor availability of choices.
This is a good point -- instant cameras are inherently valuable for situations where you need a photograph *now*, not later.
Digital cameras can almost do this, but it's pretty expensive (~$500 for a printer/camera combo, plus consumables) and simple, immediate and easy.
I'm mostly happy with it, when we have parties or other gatherings its nice to make a master mix CD that involves no changing of CDs, although setting the playlist order would be a welcome addition.
How about going one further, and saying they're an example of not just unity of style and theme, but they're unifications of functionality -- drag and drop, built-in configurability (no hacking text files to alter an applicationmenu).
It's kind of like an IDE versus vi/make/gcc/gdb, except that you're only giving up a certain amount of system resources and gaining features and integration.
There's probably a way to make it boot off of a bios-update disk or a specially prepared boot floppy that will cause the saved settings to get wiped and put it into "new computer" mode again.
I had a DEC PC that had a bios recovery mode that would reflash the bios from floppy without a flash program or a bootable floppy. The catch was you had to make a recovery floppy before you foobar'd the machine. I presume it was just a raw dump to disk media of the old bios.
Whatever ROM the machine had was capable of doing disk reads and flash writes.
I'm sure there's a way to make this one go into "recovery" mode which would at least make it a working laptop.
Here's my guess about how it works and some questions:
The BIOS probably interacts with this and tells you to put your finger on it before it will complete booting. There's probably a finger-less way to update the bios which puts the laptop back into "new" mode, forgetting its fingerprint settings. This seems like the most likely way to override this security as a method of getting a working laptop.
Presumably this wouldn't allow decryption of files encrypted to use fingerprint as an access method to some other encryption keys, but it would make the laptop a functional computer again.
Regardless of the fingerprint system, it still seems possible to part the laptop out as individual components (of limited usability since its a laptop) as well as replace the motherboard or flash RAM if its socketed.
This computer is kind of confusing because its trying to solve two problems: laptop security (keep the laptop from functionality if stolen) as well as data security (protect the data even if the computer is made workable).
The latter is hard, but the former is very desirable to me as a corporate IT guy. I'd love a hardware-key system that would render the laptop useless if stolen. Fingerprint is a PITA since they're kind of tied to humans, but access cards would be great since presumably there could be many cards capable of accessing or modifying the laptops (ie, master key).
It still might not prevent disassembly or other hardware attacks, but my guess is that most laptops that are stolen are stolen to be resold as complete units, not sent to back-alley chopshops to be sold as parts..
The reason they're playing Tetris on their phones is that they're on the SUBway and can't get service. Which, unless 3G is magic, will apply to it, too, rendering TV-watching, movie-watching, etc all pointless until you're above ground.
I think the idea that might work would be a well-planned thin-client linux desktop and a single 5-user citrix metaframe Win2k box for those things which Absolutely Cannot Be Done on Linux No Matter How Hard We Try.
The other thing will be iron-fisted leadership to keep the "don wannas" from killing morale, since those are the people that make it bad. Most people can live with KOffice or whatever, and most things could be done on a linux desktop. There will be a few, however, that can't, but the don wannas will use that to kill the transition.
What manufacturers, though? I have no hard numbers, but I'd bet that almost no CD drives are made here and precious few at this point in time are even *designed* here. The fact that many say "HP" or "Compaq" or whatever on the outside means squat -- they're all likely designed and built overseas.
Let's assume that a firmware change *is* made that overcomes these copy protection schemes but it isn't advertised, except by geeks that figure out that drives coming out of the Jinjang Drive Factory in China all work. What are they going to do?
The other question is, is this "copy protection" even covered by DMCA? It may be argued that these discs are just flawed at the factory, and not copy protected.
Since overriding DVD region coding and copy protection *is* a violation of DMCA and DVD contracts, given the number of DVD players that are made overseas with *deliberate* region coding and macrovision disabling abilities and those that are sold with firmware that has been fixed to eliminate region coding, I would think that CD players that overcame the CD copy protection wouldn't face much opposition since flawing the CD isn't quite the same as the deliberate encryption and encoding scheme on DVDs.
It stands to reason that the biggest enemy of these non-standard CDs has to be the consumer electronics industry. They've seen a huge sales of burners, players, software, blanks, labels and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the make-your-own-CD revolution.
Limiting or preventing ripping of CDs seems like a real threat to not just Johnny Digital's passtime but of those in the electronics industry whose livlihood relies on consumers legitimately being able to rip CDs.
How soon until they fire back with firmware upgrades or other hardware hacks that overcome the copy protection gimmicks? And how will the music industry respond when this stuff is sold with the claim "Now compatible with new CDS!"?
I hate "fun" work environments, because they're usually not very fun and are focused on pretty lame people pursuing lame activities.
Nerf toys, "group happy hour", "group lunches", yuck. I have plenty of friends that match my interests and values outside of work. The LAST thing I want at work is having to try to fit in with the "fun group". Sounds like high school to me.
I get my "fun" at work by being challenged by the work, not enthralled with the people.
That being said, I have had fun with the people I worked with at every job, but it happened in an organic way, not because work was a "fun place".
Maybe we should just head back down the bus board route. Instead of having a (relatively) big motherboard with main memory and CPU and (relatively) small I/O cards (disk, scsi, network, etc), maybe we should have (relatively) simpler "processor boards" which host their own RAM and connect to a common bus. Modular connector(s) on each processor board could have adapters for various tasks -- networking, disk, video and so on.
This way each processor board could be tasked to handle whatever it was connected to. Adding CPUs to a system for actual processing would mean adding a processor board. Adding functionality to a processor board would mean adding the appropriate connector for whatever you wanted it to do.
This way we're not building as much specialized hardware to do a specific task. The bus could really be a half-smart switch instead to eliminate contention between processor boards. With general purpose processors running on the processor boards, specific OS functionality could easily be offloaded to individual processor boards, eliminating the need for the processor boards that actually host the OS to spend as much time manipulating dumb hardware.
But the default for root seems to be csh, which is a hard link to tcsh, so the whole /bin/sh issue is kind of moot relative to the FreeBSD system itself.
/bin/sh (scripts, etc), maybe bash would work in its place. If not, burying your head in the sand seems like a worthwhile alternative.
If you have a dependency on
Heh, with the advent of OS X.1's built-in SMB support, maybe they think SMB and NFS are enough for the whole universe.
AppleShare (you misspelled it "AppleTalk") support would be nice, but I get the feeling that the market is just too small and OS X.1's support of SMB natively will make it kind of kind of moot, even among Mac users.
Is it a laser or is an LED? I have an IntelliMouse optical that's at least a year old and it looks like an LED on the inside to me. If its an LED, shouldn't it last "forever" (forever in computer years, 5 years in people time).
But wasn't the media for the original DIVX like bargain-basement priced, like $8.95 or something, and it included your first "rental"?
I think it wasn't a terrible idea, but I only rent movies I don't buy them.
Pressboard? I assume you mean MDF and while it's usually really flat, it is not anything like hardwood in strength or durability. It falls apart if it gets wet. The same thing holds true for hardboard.
IKEA furniture sucks because IKEA uses the lowest-budget (hardboard, cardboard, and particle board if you're lucky) materials for the most important structural elements. I'll admit I like the designs and the styling, but my experience with IKEA furniture was bad because the materials were so poor.
A cheaper, better alternative (if "looks" aren't important) is either plywood sheets or door blanks set on filing cabinets. Buy veneered plywood (oak or cherry) and it'll look as good as anything IKEA ever sold.
For a sleek modern look, buy some old steel filing cabinets from a used office supply place and strip the paint off of them until they're a nice brushed steel.
Hey, show up on time. Kind of hard to get a group organized if everyone plans on showing up whenever it's convenient.