I have a Handspring Treo 300 with Sprint PCS Vision service. When I connect to my laptop with the USB cable I consistently get 140kbps. I'm not sure why AT&T is spreading lies about the service, but I have no problem opening up Shoutcast and listening to 128kbps MP3 radio streams over my cellphone. It works great and never stutters unless I try to browse the web at the same time.
The latency, however, is pretty bad. It's about 500 ms. latency, but you can't get everything perfect. I'm just amazed that I can be on the freeway travelling 70 mph and get faster than ISDN speeds to my laptop.
There's no point in consolidating if you're not reducing the number of boxes. Also, how do you add CPUs and memory beyond the capacity of a single box?
Sun virtualization is rather bizarre from an economic point of view: first you pay a premium to get all your hardware in one huge "Enterprise Server", and then you virtualize it out again.
Yeah, you're right, it doesn't make sense at first, but a lot of companies want to do "server consolidation" projects where they can stick all of their smaller boxes on one big box where they share resources like power and can reallocate CPUs and memory to meet short term demand for different projects.
okay, I think you are trolling, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
What stability/reliability? worst data disaster we ever had was due to Sun techs on Solaris 8 on E4500's running Veritas clustering.
Excuse me? Who's trolling? You wouldn't be basing your opinion of the reliability of a systems manufacturer on one isolated incident that resulted in data loss due to the use of a 3rd party software product now, would you?:-)
Ok, here are a few "advanced features" that actually work and are used in the real world:
* Multiple hardware domains on a single physical system (let's see Linux do that). * ECC across all data paths (show me an Intel manufacturer that does this). * Sun Fire plane interconnect that allows up to 106 CPUs to work without bottlenecks and gives you a total of about 40 GBytes a second system throughput. * Real error reporting, actually calling out correctable memory errors in syslog and telling you exactly which DIMM on which system board you need to replace. * Openfirmware allowing low-level hardware troubleshooting and diagnosis without the need for an OS.
These are just a few of the advanced reliability features that Sun offers on their hardware that you can't get on an Intel box. Note that I didn't list hot-swapping CPUs on an E4500. Sure, they support what's called DR, or dynamic reconfiguration, but in actual practice nobody uses it. And to my knowledge, even on the largest box a CPU failure while executing kernel code will cause a kernel panic. I don't know of any Unix system that has figured out a workaround for that problem.
BTW - since you are knowledgable. Can you get the full Solaris C compiler for free or do you have to stick with gcc? On the Sun pages it appeared like you had to pay $1000 for the compiler.
Unfortunately you do have to pay for the compiler. I admit it pretty much sucks because I am more old-school and have this mistaken impression that any real Unix should come with a compiler. But, I think you might be better off with GCC anyway. I hear it generates better code than the Sun compiler does now, but I could be mistaken.
Quit jumping on people just because they mention nVidia or fail to laud ATi in a post when that isn't even the topic.
I'm not an ATI zealot. My current card is a 9800 pro in my workstation, and my laptop has a 9600, but my last desktop card before that was an Nvidia GF4Ti4200. I just buy whatever card is best for the money. Right now ATI are on the top of the heap.
But if you are going to buy a notebook, I just wanted to steer you away from the myth that the 5200go is a good GPU. It's actually a really shitty GPU (440mx) rebundled with a new name on it, as near as I can tell.
Let's hope so. If we are really lucky, most of them will never make it into Linux because they are useless bloat for almost all users.
I know, it's bad form to reply twice, but I wanted to point something else out. Several years ago, people probably said the same thing about new features Sun added like NFS and NIS. Now they are considered standard parts of Unix. Sun has a long heritage of making kick-ass software that works so well that it becomes a standard (well, maybe NIS isn't the best example, it kinda sucks, but you get what I mean).
I don't know about you, but I like having features like virtualization part of the base OS. That means it's supported and not tricky to install and use, and I can have multiple Solaris instances on a single box and never have to worry about one of those instances taking another one down. I know Linux has similar functionality, but it's a separate program and probably not supported by Redhat or any of the main Linux vendors.
I can't see them putting 'slugs' into the O/S to prevent it working on non-Sun-assembled boxes, that's more of an IBM style trick
Well, I could maybe see them changing this policy simply because a 4-way or 8-way Opteron clone system with 32GB of memory or so could take a serious chunk out of their midrange workgroup market. I could see them offering single processor usage for free, and possibly crippling the multi-proc kernel so it only runs on Sun hardware.
Look. I just got a Sun Blade 150. I guarantee Gnome is not in there nor is there an option to use it. I searched the help files and there is nothing about Gnome. This is a brand new system.
Ok, I'm going to walk you through this since you're obviously new to Solaris. Open up your Solaris 8 media kit (you know, the big box you got with Solaris 8). Hopefully you purchased a media kit along with your system or you might be screwed. Find a plastic binder called "Bonus Software". In there there is a CD called "Exploring the Gnome Desktop". Pop that in your CD-ROM and install it. Gnome is now installed and you can choose it from the login screen. There's another CD in that same Bonus Software pack called "Software Companion" that has tons of Open Source software, including KDE. If you install that you'll have GCC and a bunch of other great GNU and open source stuff. I highly recommend you do that.
I hope Solaris 10 is free. The last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free.
Solaris 10 will be free in the same way that Solaris 8 and 9 are. If you bought a system from Sun, you already purchased a Right-to-Use license (it's bundled into the cost of the hardware). All you have to pay for is a media kit. When you said "last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free." I think you're talking about paying $70 for a media kit. This seems like a lot but look at how big those boxes of media are. It probably costs close to that amount to manufacture all of the CDs and manuals in there.
I wonder what they will charge for the upgrade. Sun wisely made the Solaris 8 -> Solaris 9 move free for developers and home users. (They have home users?)
Your comment shows a huge lack of knowledge about Sun and Solaris licensing. If you purchase a system from Sun you have a right-to-use license for any version of Solaris you want to put on it. If you bought your system from some other vendor (aka Intel), then you have a right-to-use license for only 1 CPU. Any more than that you must purchase licenses. Sun doesn't charge for upgrades, other than the media price itself. When Solaris 10 is released, go ahead and put it on your Ultra 5 or Sun Blade 150, or whatever you have. No worries there.
Also, unless you are just trolling, you should be aware that Sun has shipped the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment with Solaris 8 for the last year or so. KDE also comes on the Open Source software CD included with Solaris 8.
No wonder they are losing billions.
Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions. While this is still a bad thing, they do have ~$5 billion in the bank and won't be going away any time soon.
Go back to your bridge and quit spreading FUD, troll.
Wait until you see what is coming down the pipe from Sun. The new Athlon 64 workstations and servers will breathe new life into Solaris. For the first time you will be able to run a fully 64-bit kernel with all of the stability and reliability of Solaris, along with all of the advanced features of Solaris. Features like this won't even make their way into Linux for another 5 years or so.
Solaris 10 will be the first release of Solaris that supports native 64-bit mode on the new AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.
Not to mention the ability to address terabytes of memory without using PAE hacks.
The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?
A little OT, but I once got into trouble with my girlfriend because she sent me out to the store to run some errands. When I came home she was sitting on the couch wearing nothing but a black lace teddy, watching TV. I looked at her and smiled. Then, like the attention deficit disorder that I am, hearing the Simpson's theme song come from the TV, I said "ooh! the Simpson's is on!" and promptly plopped down on the couch next to her to watch some TV. Well, she about had it. She was completely offended that I didn't focus all of my attention on her and told all of her girlfriends that I was a shitty boyfriend.
Perhaps I was, but I learned from that experience. If your girlfriend or significant other ever puts on a teddy or some other type of lingerie for you, that means she wants to be the center of your attention for the next couple of hours. It's equivelant to the police busting down your door and saying "put down the mouse/keyboard/remote and come out with your hands up!". You better do what they say.
The UI is slick and the quickest and most responsive I've seen on an mp3 player (including ipod).
One thing I noticed about my iPod: When I originally got it, if I navigated to a Genre or something that had a lot of subfolders for the first time, it could take seconds just to load the list of folders. During that time it would freeze and be totally unresponsive. This really only started happening when I loaded it up (26 out of 27GB) of music on the thing. I was using EphPod with Windows.
When I switched to iTunes for Windows and resynced my entire music library, everything on the iPod was way more responsive, and pretty much any list loaded instantly. No more annoying lag navigating through the menus.
I believe this is due to the fact that EphPod and other "iTunes replacement products" that you might use on Windows or Linux don't write the iPod music database in the optimal format. They probably don't organize the XML in the proper way because the format was reverse engineered without access to Apple's internal documentation.
So if your iPod's menus are anything other than "instant", definitely switch to iTunes, it will make a world of difference.
... a GeForce FX Go5200 64MB (less ram but more features than my desktop)...
So tell me how this system isn't designed for games...
Well, for starters, that shitty GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card really sucks for games. All of the benchmarks say that it performs about equal to a GeForce MX 440, which was lousy at best. So go with the Dell and see how good it is at gaming. If you really want a laptop for gaming at least get an ATI 9600 which should play most current games, but not Doom 3 or Halflife 2 or anything around the corner.
Yes, but you do realize you're getting a system that runs real sparc based Solaris (not Solaris for Intel), has just as much horsepower as a SunFire V120 1U server, and has ECC memory and data paths.
I won't hold it against you. Most people that compare Sparc systems to Intel systems don't realize how much having ECC across all data paths can affect the price of a system. Basically, every bus that was 64-bits wide has to be 80-bits wide to get your error correction bits in there.
As an exercise for the EE majors, calculate the extra cost in R&D time + manufacturing for this high level of reliability.
... Steve Jobs is choking and fuming because he wasn't able to fit G5s in PowerBooks and sell the "first 64-bit laptops". Somewhere in Cupertino Steve Jobs is cackling with glee because he is smart enough to realize that most people won't pay $3800 for a 10 pound leaf blower that only gets 2 hours of battery life. Really, what is the market for these things? Are they only selling them to foolish gamers that want to lug them to a LAN party and plug them in to a wall outlet?
Apple doesn't release half-assed products just because they can. Believe me, they could have stuffed a G5 into a laptop this summer if they wanted to, and it would have about the same weight, dimensions, and battery life that one of these suckers does. But would anyone buy it?
Me, I'll stick with my sleek 15" Powerbook that gets 4 hours of actual battery life, is only 1" thick, and has the same graphics chipset (ATI Radeon 9600) allowing me to play almost all of the same games (UT2003 anyone? Halo on Dec. 11th anyone?) I'd much rather show up at a LAN party with it and not have to visit the chiropractor the next day because I threw my back out trying to lift that behemoth off the table.
De-authorizing your computer will do nothing except render it unable to play your iTMS purchased music until you re-authorize it. The files won't be erased or damaged in any way. You will be able to play them on any computer once you authorize it with iTMS. The authorization procedure downloads your private keys from the iTMS and allows the computer you just authorized to play any files that were encrypted with these private keys. This feature is simply there in case you decide to sell your computer and don't want it counting as one of your three authorized machines.
Also, iTunes doesn't encrypt any music that you bought on CD and ripped with it. They may have some limited DRM, but it's nowhere near as draconian as Microsoft's own DRM.
For free distribution, I assume, or lossless conversion to MP3 (as opposed to burning and re-ripping it).
This is the thing that most people don't understand. If all you're trying to do is convert your AAC files to MP3, you will always have a loss. Any program that transcodes from AAC to MP3 has to convert to raw WAV data first, then re-encode. There's no way around that. So anyone that claims this crack is just a way to get their files converted to MP3 without a loss is full of it. They would get exactly the same quality of music by burning the AAC files to a CD and re-ripping them as MP3s.
The only valid use for this crack is using a different player like Foobar2000 to play your AAC files.
I am a huge fan of IBM's chips, especially in Apple computers (I am a proud owner of a 12" Powerbook).
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but your 12" PowerBook uses a Motorola processor, not an IBM one. I own a 15" PowerBook though and I love it.
That having been said, the IBM PPC 970 or G5 is breathing new life into the PowerMac line and Apple is doing really well because of it. I can't wait until they get it stuffed into a PowerBook.
I think if you read between the lines about all of the things going on that day, it becomes more and more clear what actually happened. This is my theory, take it with however many grains of salt you wish:
1. The MSBlaster worm was widespread on that day, and was wreaking havoc on both the Internet and on corporate LANs when employees brought infected machines in to work and plugged them in behind the firewall.
2. These Unix systems are old, and are probably running on 10 mbps unswitched segments of the corporate LAN.
3. It doesn't take a lot of excess RPC traffic to completely overload the 10mbps segment. Even though the computers were not directly exploited by the MSBlaster worm, the traffic caused by all of the infected machines was enough to fully clog their 10mbps segment and effectively created a DOS attack which prevented them from monitoring the equipment out in the field which would have notified them of a failure.
4. When IT staff noticed the machines weren't responding on the network, they did the only thing they knew how to do, rebooted the servers (it says this much in the report).
5. The servers came back up just fine, but seeing as how this is probably the system administration group troubleshooting at this point and not the network administration group, they probably had no clue that their network was still overloaded, so the problem still existed.
6. Everything crashed and massive blackouts and chaos ensued.
I think it is foolish to think that MSBlaster had nothing whatsoever to do with this outage. Sure you can look through the syslog on the SCADA servers and there's probably nothing in there that would indicate a problem. That's because they were completely cut off from the rest of the network. But if they had something like MRTG that was able to monitor the bandwidth utilization on their LAN segment (highly unlikely on old equipment like this, especially 10mbps unswitched), they would have noticed near 100% utilization of the segment and collisions galore.
This is just my theory, but I'm sticking to it unless they prove otherwise.
"With the Solaris OS running on the AMD Opteron processor, our customers and partners can take advantage of unique features such as containers delivering virtualization and high levels of security..."
I would also like to add that you'll see the first Opteron workstations and servers about the same time that Solaris 10 technology preview is available. Sun has chosen to implement IA-64 into the kernel in the Solaris 10 release, which also adds some great new functionality such as true virtualization and containers that are even more powerful than chroot jails. Think of the ability to partition a single box into as many different virtual machines as you want, each completely isolated from each other and each having their own unique root account. The benefits for server consolidation projects and virtual hosting applications are obvious.
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I have a Handspring Treo 300 with Sprint PCS Vision service. When I connect to my laptop with the USB cable I consistently get 140kbps. I'm not sure why AT&T is spreading lies about the service, but I have no problem opening up Shoutcast and listening to 128kbps MP3 radio streams over my cellphone. It works great and never stutters unless I try to browse the web at the same time.
The latency, however, is pretty bad. It's about 500 ms. latency, but you can't get everything perfect. I'm just amazed that I can be on the freeway travelling 70 mph and get faster than ISDN speeds to my laptop.
There's no point in consolidating if you're not reducing the number of boxes. Also, how do you add CPUs and memory beyond the capacity of a single box?
Sun virtualization is rather bizarre from an economic point of view: first you pay a premium to get all your hardware in one huge "Enterprise Server", and then you virtualize it out again.
Yeah, you're right, it doesn't make sense at first, but a lot of companies want to do "server consolidation" projects where they can stick all of their smaller boxes on one big box where they share resources like power and can reallocate CPUs and memory to meet short term demand for different projects.
okay, I think you are trolling, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
:-)
What stability/reliability? worst data disaster we ever had was due to Sun techs on Solaris 8 on E4500's running Veritas clustering.
Excuse me? Who's trolling? You wouldn't be basing your opinion of the reliability of a systems manufacturer on one isolated incident that resulted in data loss due to the use of a 3rd party software product now, would you?
Ok, here are a few "advanced features" that actually work and are used in the real world:
* Multiple hardware domains on a single physical system (let's see Linux do that).
* ECC across all data paths (show me an Intel manufacturer that does this).
* Sun Fire plane interconnect that allows up to 106 CPUs to work without bottlenecks and gives you a total of about 40 GBytes a second system throughput.
* Real error reporting, actually calling out correctable memory errors in syslog and telling you exactly which DIMM on which system board you need to replace.
* Openfirmware allowing low-level hardware troubleshooting and diagnosis without the need for an OS.
These are just a few of the advanced reliability features that Sun offers on their hardware that you can't get on an Intel box. Note that I didn't list hot-swapping CPUs on an E4500. Sure, they support what's called DR, or dynamic reconfiguration, but in actual practice nobody uses it. And to my knowledge, even on the largest box a CPU failure while executing kernel code will cause a kernel panic. I don't know of any Unix system that has figured out a workaround for that problem.
BTW - since you are knowledgable. Can you get the full Solaris C compiler for free or do you have to stick with gcc? On the Sun pages it appeared like you had to pay $1000 for the compiler.
Unfortunately you do have to pay for the compiler. I admit it pretty much sucks because I am more old-school and have this mistaken impression that any real Unix should come with a compiler. But, I think you might be better off with GCC anyway. I hear it generates better code than the Sun compiler does now, but I could be mistaken.
Quit jumping on people just because they mention nVidia or fail to laud ATi in a post when that isn't even the topic.
I'm not an ATI zealot. My current card is a 9800 pro in my workstation, and my laptop has a 9600, but my last desktop card before that was an Nvidia GF4Ti4200. I just buy whatever card is best for the money. Right now ATI are on the top of the heap.
But if you are going to buy a notebook, I just wanted to steer you away from the myth that the 5200go is a good GPU. It's actually a really shitty GPU (440mx) rebundled with a new name on it, as near as I can tell.
Let's hope so. If we are really lucky, most of them will never make it into Linux because they are useless bloat for almost all users.
I know, it's bad form to reply twice, but I wanted to point something else out. Several years ago, people probably said the same thing about new features Sun added like NFS and NIS. Now they are considered standard parts of Unix. Sun has a long heritage of making kick-ass software that works so well that it becomes a standard (well, maybe NIS isn't the best example, it kinda sucks, but you get what I mean).
I don't know about you, but I like having features like virtualization part of the base OS. That means it's supported and not tricky to install and use, and I can have multiple Solaris instances on a single box and never have to worry about one of those instances taking another one down. I know Linux has similar functionality, but it's a separate program and probably not supported by Redhat or any of the main Linux vendors.
I can't see them putting 'slugs' into the O/S to prevent it working on non-Sun-assembled boxes, that's more of an IBM style trick
Well, I could maybe see them changing this policy simply because a 4-way or 8-way Opteron clone system with 32GB of memory or so could take a serious chunk out of their midrange workgroup market. I could see them offering single processor usage for free, and possibly crippling the multi-proc kernel so it only runs on Sun hardware.
Look. I just got a Sun Blade 150. I guarantee Gnome is not in there nor is there an option to use it. I searched the help files and there is nothing about Gnome. This is a brand new system.
Ok, I'm going to walk you through this since you're obviously new to Solaris. Open up your Solaris 8 media kit (you know, the big box you got with Solaris 8). Hopefully you purchased a media kit along with your system or you might be screwed. Find a plastic binder called "Bonus Software". In there there is a CD called "Exploring the Gnome Desktop". Pop that in your CD-ROM and install it. Gnome is now installed and you can choose it from the login screen. There's another CD in that same Bonus Software pack called "Software Companion" that has tons of Open Source software, including KDE. If you install that you'll have GCC and a bunch of other great GNU and open source stuff. I highly recommend you do that.
I hope Solaris 10 is free. The last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free.
Solaris 10 will be free in the same way that Solaris 8 and 9 are. If you bought a system from Sun, you already purchased a Right-to-Use license (it's bundled into the cost of the hardware). All you have to pay for is a media kit. When you said "last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free." I think you're talking about paying $70 for a media kit. This seems like a lot but look at how big those boxes of media are. It probably costs close to that amount to manufacture all of the CDs and manuals in there.
Ooops! Sorry, I meant X86-64.
I wonder what they will charge for the upgrade. Sun wisely made the Solaris 8 -> Solaris 9 move free for developers and home users. (They have home users?)
Your comment shows a huge lack of knowledge about Sun and Solaris licensing. If you purchase a system from Sun you have a right-to-use license for any version of Solaris you want to put on it. If you bought your system from some other vendor (aka Intel), then you have a right-to-use license for only 1 CPU. Any more than that you must purchase licenses. Sun doesn't charge for upgrades, other than the media price itself. When Solaris 10 is released, go ahead and put it on your Ultra 5 or Sun Blade 150, or whatever you have. No worries there.
Also, unless you are just trolling, you should be aware that Sun has shipped the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment with Solaris 8 for the last year or so. KDE also comes on the Open Source software CD included with Solaris 8.
No wonder they are losing billions.
Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions. While this is still a bad thing, they do have ~$5 billion in the bank and won't be going away any time soon.
Go back to your bridge and quit spreading FUD, troll.
Wait until you see what is coming down the pipe from Sun. The new Athlon 64 workstations and servers will breathe new life into Solaris. For the first time you will be able to run a fully 64-bit kernel with all of the stability and reliability of Solaris, along with all of the advanced features of Solaris. Features like this won't even make their way into Linux for another 5 years or so.
Solaris 10 will be the first release of Solaris that supports native 64-bit mode on the new AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.
Not to mention the ability to address terabytes of memory without using PAE hacks.
The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?
A little OT, but I once got into trouble with my girlfriend because she sent me out to the store to run some errands. When I came home she was sitting on the couch wearing nothing but a black lace teddy, watching TV. I looked at her and smiled. Then, like the attention deficit disorder that I am, hearing the Simpson's theme song come from the TV, I said "ooh! the Simpson's is on!" and promptly plopped down on the couch next to her to watch some TV. Well, she about had it. She was completely offended that I didn't focus all of my attention on her and told all of her girlfriends that I was a shitty boyfriend.
Perhaps I was, but I learned from that experience. If your girlfriend or significant other ever puts on a teddy or some other type of lingerie for you, that means she wants to be the center of your attention for the next couple of hours. It's equivelant to the police busting down your door and saying "put down the mouse/keyboard/remote and come out with your hands up!". You better do what they say.
The UI is slick and the quickest and most responsive I've seen on an mp3 player (including ipod).
One thing I noticed about my iPod: When I originally got it, if I navigated to a Genre or something that had a lot of subfolders for the first time, it could take seconds just to load the list of folders. During that time it would freeze and be totally unresponsive. This really only started happening when I loaded it up (26 out of 27GB) of music on the thing. I was using EphPod with Windows.
When I switched to iTunes for Windows and resynced my entire music library, everything on the iPod was way more responsive, and pretty much any list loaded instantly. No more annoying lag navigating through the menus.
I believe this is due to the fact that EphPod and other "iTunes replacement products" that you might use on Windows or Linux don't write the iPod music database in the optimal format. They probably don't organize the XML in the proper way because the format was reverse engineered without access to Apple's internal documentation.
So if your iPod's menus are anything other than "instant", definitely switch to iTunes, it will make a world of difference.
... a GeForce FX Go5200 64MB (less ram but more features than my desktop) ...
...
So tell me how this system isn't designed for games
Well, for starters, that shitty GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card really sucks for games. All of the benchmarks say that it performs about equal to a GeForce MX 440, which was lousy at best. So go with the Dell and see how good it is at gaming. If you really want a laptop for gaming at least get an ATI 9600 which should play most current games, but not Doom 3 or Halflife 2 or anything around the corner.
Yes, but you do realize you're getting a system that runs real sparc based Solaris (not Solaris for Intel), has just as much horsepower as a SunFire V120 1U server, and has ECC memory and data paths.
I won't hold it against you. Most people that compare Sparc systems to Intel systems don't realize how much having ECC across all data paths can affect the price of a system. Basically, every bus that was 64-bits wide has to be 80-bits wide to get your error correction bits in there.
As an exercise for the EE majors, calculate the extra cost in R&D time + manufacturing for this high level of reliability.
... Steve Jobs is choking and fuming because he wasn't able to fit G5s in PowerBooks and sell the "first 64-bit laptops".
Somewhere in Cupertino Steve Jobs is cackling with glee because he is smart enough to realize that most people won't pay $3800 for a 10 pound leaf blower that only gets 2 hours of battery life. Really, what is the market for these things? Are they only selling them to foolish gamers that want to lug them to a LAN party and plug them in to a wall outlet?
Apple doesn't release half-assed products just because they can. Believe me, they could have stuffed a G5 into a laptop this summer if they wanted to, and it would have about the same weight, dimensions, and battery life that one of these suckers does. But would anyone buy it?
Me, I'll stick with my sleek 15" Powerbook that gets 4 hours of actual battery life, is only 1" thick, and has the same graphics chipset (ATI Radeon 9600) allowing me to play almost all of the same games (UT2003 anyone? Halo on Dec. 11th anyone?) I'd much rather show up at a LAN party with it and not have to visit the chiropractor the next day because I threw my back out trying to lift that behemoth off the table.
De-authorizing your computer will do nothing except render it unable to play your iTMS purchased music until you re-authorize it. The files won't be erased or damaged in any way. You will be able to play them on any computer once you authorize it with iTMS. The authorization procedure downloads your private keys from the iTMS and allows the computer you just authorized to play any files that were encrypted with these private keys. This feature is simply there in case you decide to sell your computer and don't want it counting as one of your three authorized machines.
Also, iTunes doesn't encrypt any music that you bought on CD and ripped with it. They may have some limited DRM, but it's nowhere near as draconian as Microsoft's own DRM.
For free distribution, I assume, or lossless conversion to MP3 (as opposed to burning and re-ripping it).
This is the thing that most people don't understand. If all you're trying to do is convert your AAC files to MP3, you will always have a loss. Any program that transcodes from AAC to MP3 has to convert to raw WAV data first, then re-encode. There's no way around that. So anyone that claims this crack is just a way to get their files converted to MP3 without a loss is full of it. They would get exactly the same quality of music by burning the AAC files to a CD and re-ripping them as MP3s.
The only valid use for this crack is using a different player like Foobar2000 to play your AAC files.
Isn't the first rule, don't talk? This coder is going to get whacked!
How many mafioso types do you think actually read Wired magazine?
I am a huge fan of IBM's chips, especially in Apple computers (I am a proud owner of a 12" Powerbook).
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but your 12" PowerBook uses a Motorola processor, not an IBM one. I own a 15" PowerBook though and I love it.
That having been said, the IBM PPC 970 or G5 is breathing new life into the PowerMac line and Apple is doing really well because of it. I can't wait until they get it stuffed into a PowerBook.
I think if you read between the lines about all of the things going on that day, it becomes more and more clear what actually happened. This is my theory, take it with however many grains of salt you wish:
1. The MSBlaster worm was widespread on that day, and was wreaking havoc on both the Internet and on corporate LANs when employees brought infected machines in to work and plugged them in behind the firewall.
2. These Unix systems are old, and are probably running on 10 mbps unswitched segments of the corporate LAN.
3. It doesn't take a lot of excess RPC traffic to completely overload the 10mbps segment. Even though the computers were not directly exploited by the MSBlaster worm, the traffic caused by all of the infected machines was enough to fully clog their 10mbps segment and effectively created a DOS attack which prevented them from monitoring the equipment out in the field which would have notified them of a failure.
4. When IT staff noticed the machines weren't responding on the network, they did the only thing they knew how to do, rebooted the servers (it says this much in the report).
5. The servers came back up just fine, but seeing as how this is probably the system administration group troubleshooting at this point and not the network administration group, they probably had no clue that their network was still overloaded, so the problem still existed.
6. Everything crashed and massive blackouts and chaos ensued.
I think it is foolish to think that MSBlaster had nothing whatsoever to do with this outage. Sure you can look through the syslog on the SCADA servers and there's probably nothing in there that would indicate a problem. That's because they were completely cut off from the rest of the network. But if they had something like MRTG that was able to monitor the bandwidth utilization on their LAN segment (highly unlikely on old equipment like this, especially 10mbps unswitched), they would have noticed near 100% utilization of the segment and collisions galore.
This is just my theory, but I'm sticking to it unless they prove otherwise.
You can still download the application from Cricket Media at the following link: Netflix Fanatic
Someone with lots of bandwidth should mirror this before it's gone.
"With the Solaris OS running on the AMD Opteron processor, our customers and partners can take advantage of unique features such as containers delivering virtualization and high levels of security..."
I would also like to add that you'll see the first Opteron workstations and servers about the same time that Solaris 10 technology preview is available. Sun has chosen to implement IA-64 into the kernel in the Solaris 10 release, which also adds some great new functionality such as true virtualization and containers that are even more powerful than chroot jails. Think of the ability to partition a single box into as many different virtual machines as you want, each completely isolated from each other and each having their own unique root account. The benefits for server consolidation projects and virtual hosting applications are obvious.