The hard part was continuing backwards compatibility for the XBox Live service. It would've been maybe couple hundred man hours of devel/test costs a year just to make sure XBox1 was still working as they continue to roll out enhanced Xbox360 software.
That said, they're definitely a bunch of penny pinching scrooges. I've been businesses make similar heavyhanded "profit saving" measures w/r/t what they will and will not support, and lets just say the customers ended up not being very understanding or pleased finding their "working fine" setup kicked to the curb and them being saddled with a compromised "upgraded" hardware unit of dubious parity.
I had a BP6 with dual 450's running 575. Not nearly the same % increase, but the 450's were barely more expensive than the 300's by the time I mustered up the cash for the mobo and first cpu.
is your svn hosted on a 386? is it in someone's closet, on a dsl line? why is your source repository humiliatingly unbearably slow, and why does it take minutes for an svn update to even start? is the abominable performance a hardware, or software issue?
Because we have VASMIR coming. Combine that with a nice nuclear reactor and we are looking at some good speeds.
The 2.3kW of this sterling engine doesnt speak to that promise. The 40kW they hope to have a ground system producing doesnt instill much confidenc either. ISS produces around 130kW, via a colossal truss-work of solar panels. These are all far short of the 400kW power needed for the target baseline VASIMR engine, and well short of the multi MW power levels VASIMR really is designed for.
Nuclear power generates heat. Heat differential is then used to drive turbines. In space, you may be able to make heat, but what is there for the other end of this power generation equation; where does the cool body of mass come from, the essential other integral to power generation?
VASIMR itself, at high ISP's, is generating 10 megakelvin plasma. That itself has cooling challenges.
Right now, I dont see how these ideas are practical.
I wonder what the improvement of NX v. XCB is. XCB, I believe, does away with the sychronous request/reply nature of X and allows for async event handling. Pure conjecture, but that might provide a comparable advantage to the round-trip reductions provided by NX.
I used NX server for a hot six weeks as a persistent desktop I could remotely attach to; its main duty was holding open a session of XMMS.
But the NX server was a perpetual pain. Configuring it was hellish, and sometimes it would crash. Lack of a rootless mode and the undocumented/proprietary nature were the final nails: I gave up the experiment.
This was a long long time ago.
Re:I stopped reading the summary
on
Best eSATA JBOD?
·
· Score: 1
adding more disks is not the solution. the solution is more active and correcting consistency checking. the reason raid 5 and raid 1 rebuilds fail is because data is replicated, but errors are only discovered when something fails, when the shits already hit the fan. zfs, hammer, btrfs, they're all running headlong towards consitency checking because that is not good enough and not pre-emptive enough.
Worth nothing PERHAPS, but does this transformation make it now without value?
Moralizing aside, I disagree about worth nothing: there are plenty of album sales that happen only because of music discovered via piracy. Plenty of artists are jumping on the bandwagon and finding that it takes making valueable art free (without worth) to make good money... Trent Reznor, TMBG, and every band under the sun with a MySpace page.
You seem to have built up this notion that you deserve to get free access to any content that you wish, simply because you wish to.
I'm sympathetic, but thats stretching it friend. Dont push your luck.
Sure, I agree content producers have the right to try and get payed. But VCR's have given us the legal power to view content under our own terms for ages. You cant turn that off and say, content producers, you have the right to produce content that can be viewed only under your own terms. You cant say "you can only view this standing on your head" and expect people to, like cattle to your call, all dutifully turn and stand on their heads for you. If content producers want payment, they need to find a way to get payed that doesnt involve dictating how users view the media, in part because users wont consume burdensome content, and in part because you cant build a system strong enough to enforce usage rights. Users dont expect free content, but they have ready access to colossal amounts of it, and they'd prefer consuming poor media on their terms above good media on someone elses terms. Its up the content producers to figure out how to monetize good content, but you're incorrectly assuming that the content producer gets to dictate the entire experience and gets to package content, just as TV packed ads bypassed by VCR.
People have already voted with their feet & said that they have the right to access the content you send us in whatever form we want. If your business model revolves around force feeding us bullshit we dont want to see, you've been outvoted. It sucks that it hurts small indie sites, but its more important that we have 2.0 Voltaire: "I may not agree with how you view your content, but I will defend to the death your right to view as you choose." And that, brother, is liberty.
The browsers you named have even smaller market share than Firefox...
Yes but they're technologically better i.e. not cobbled together XPCOM & XUL running in a single thread. They also have more cohesive direction and leadership. I'd cite Chrome's Extensions as a perfect example of everything Jetpack ought to have been, for one example of where that direction shows.
Users dont care about the technological background of what they use is irrelevant, but my hope is that as embedded takes off, we'll see the better designed solutions are more adaptable to stranger & more limited environments. This will grow the user base of the margin browsers without users knowing or having choice: pre and iphone are forerunning examples.
Also, better design, such as Chrome Extensions, will hopefully lead to a better ecosystem surrounding the product. Thats really the key. Firefox has a colossal lead in building an ecosystem, as for ten years its been the only one building an ecosystem at all, but developers are finnicky people, and its ultimately them and their preference of technologies that dictates where cool shit gets built. If Chrome or Safari or Opera comes up with a more compelling more empowering developer experience, it can shift the balance of where new edgy innovative shit gets made.
Whether or not that cool edgy innovative shit is compelling enough to herd the rest of the cats following is TBD. Its up to the competing browsers to potentiate the space to make that move compelling.
Ok, assuming that most major web surfers are at least somewhat computer literate and have at least heard of Firefox why wouldn't they switch? Other then web developers needing to have a copy of IE to test code why would anyone use IE when Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc are all technologically superior and have more plugins?
Users need compelling reason to switch. Technological superiority doesnt sell itself, there needs to be a reason to move, a reason to download something else and to relearn a new interface and to shuffle bookmarks and customizations into a new system.
Systems like Extensions and Jetpack exist as precursors to incentives: they themselves offer nothing of value to end users, and only serve as progenitors for incentives to be created.
These incentives are still highly detached: a user isnt saying, I'm switching to Firefox so I can use Vimperator, they're saying, I'm switching to firefox so I can go find and install the Vimperator plugin. And typically its not one particular plugin, its the accrued group of plugins each user build that makes them dedicated to Firefox, there are very few killer features. To answer your question, the immediate value proposition of switching to Firefox is minimal: it and IE are both web browsers, and they generally render most sites with parity.
Jetpack and its father-in-kind Chrome Extensions in particular are trying to close the loop some, and at least increase accessibility of enhancements.
The guy forgot just one important thing: Most people don't use Firefox.
Jetpack is just a weekend knock off of the much better done Chrome Extensions, true story. Compare their couple month old API v. Jetpack's API and its blatantly obvious where Jetpack came from.
I'm hoping Safari and Opera adopt the Chrome Extensions model.
I just want to make one more complaint against usb power: its often horribly regulated. I have a USB soundcard that essentially requires a USB hub between it and whatever its plugged into in order to not sound like garbage.
4.5 watts is enough for a low speed 2.5" hard drive. it might run some of the new "green" 3.5's or a high speed 2.5" 7200 rpm, but you're pushing the limit. and you've just tapped the entire power budget for your USB, no room for any other peripherals.
The spec does not support 1 amp. If you want to talk about manufacturers going off on their own to extend the spec in a proprietary fashion, I think you lose the usefulness of the standard USB interconnect. A good example is the Macbook Air cdrom, which works with nothing except the usb on the Macbook Air.
USB is 5v. USB2.0 maxes out at "5" units of 100mA, with USB3.0 providing a staggering "6" units of 150mA. Thats.5A and.9A. That gives you 2.5 watts and 4.5 watts. There are proposed additions to let USB source up to 1.8A if the port is not sending data, and up to 1.5A in low speed mode.
Looking at the numbers, the whole notion that USB could ever become the dominant standard for power seems laughable to me. USB may be a convenient means of providing a trickle charge, but with batteries getting considerably higher C rates we need 10x beefier power supplies than what USB will ever be capable of.
Power Over Ethernet+ (PoE+) is targetting 24w: thats no quickcharge, but unlike USB its least enough to run a small computer.
This is really endemic of the difficulty virtual worlds are going to have gaining recognition. To an outsider, its a case of "so what," but to the virtual world people inhabit and dedicate themselves to, its as if the colonial English empire suffered a Babylonian confusion of language and was no longer able to talk or work together. All powers great and small are rushing to fill the power vaccuum left in their wake, to claim the profitable and rich bounds of space this alliance once defended.
The case is more complex than that; EVE, unlike every other program out there, is a contested world with rich rewards for those holding space. By disbanding the alliance, these people no longer hold space. The space and its wealth of resources are up for grabs and there are suddenly dozens of major parties joining the frey to claim it. Alliances who ship off to the freshly claimable Delve seeking riches fortune and fame are subject to attacks at their homelands.
EVE had been at a status quo for nearly 3 years: there was an established Northern Coallition, the southern RedSwarm Faction, and BoB. Each group has made attacks, but none have succeeded in storming the others home or ruining the other. Disbanding BoB has destabilized a perfect balance, and instilled a sense of adventure in a lot of people who'd found the universe growing boring and stale.
In closing, I can only lament how unfortunate it is that this titanic event will go unnoticed and unappreciated for so long. If this were an article about someone beating the newest boss in WoW I'd throw up my hands in disgust, but theres something fundamentally different about the limited and player driven world of EVE: the events in it are shared between all the players of EVE, and this great confusion has thrown a very interesting twist into what had become a rather stalemated game. I hope more games follow EVEs pattern of making rich and authentic universes where actions have consequences and great powers and alliances rise and fall, but I think it will be a long long time before these worlds come to domainate & the populous feels their tremors as readily as they feel the throws of power in the real world.
I cant stand it because its too attention grabbing; it overwhelms the tab-bar. I'd installed this userscript on a handful of my most used systems to revert the last blue/grey favicon to the older blue/white icon, but now that they've made it even more ugly, I've been compulsively installing the old favicon on every single system I touch.
On a decent number of systems I've been using a UserScript (aka greasemonkey script) that gives me the original white/blue G, but with this new even more hideous favicon I now compulsively install the script on every computer I touch: the new one is such an offensive eye-sore in the tab-bar.
Given that ExpressCard already has both PCIe and USB connectors, and that the spec you linked states,
Both the SuperSpeed USB and the PCIe specifications, therefore, are derived from the basic OSI layered architecture. Both protocols look very similar in terms of layer architecture, and their physical layers share many common functions, as well as similar concepts for other layers.
it'll be interesting to see if the confluence comes to a head and the two specs gain some kind of genuine interoperability. Afaik the current ExpressCard implementation works by having two sets of connectors; if USB 3.0 really is PCIe dervied, it would be great to collapse it to using the same PCIe interfaces.
The other two outstanding questions I have are: 1) how much the new architecture will alleviate latency? 2) is the time quantization better than the old 1ms standard?
Both of these prevent USB from being usable in real time contexts, contrary to evidence of the massive number of craptacular web cams sold.
The current obsession with consoles is monetization. Unless your game is purely multiplayer focused (where you have broad capabilities to prevent piracy) people will pirate your game. Secondly, if you do make it onto one of the commercial venues, you get exposure to a sizable audience. The console market has a higher barrier to entry, but if you can cross that threshold you're rewarded with a large & paying market (which doesnt presume success; you still have to make a compelling game). Having to pass acceptance committees of XBLA or PS3 or Wii does not infringe on this notion of "sovereignty" over ones game you seem to engender to indie developers... at least I presume as much. I rather doubt these acceptance committees put games through a full battery of gameplay critiques; my expectation is they check for game stability, whether the game is entirely crap, a reasonable test of playability, and last for some level of appropriateness. I'd be interested to hear some negative stories of people trying to get games put on these online services, as it seems like most of the big gaming companies are working hard to attract small developers.
Slashdot Mirror
The hard part was continuing backwards compatibility for the XBox Live service. It would've been maybe couple hundred man hours of devel/test costs a year just to make sure XBox1 was still working as they continue to roll out enhanced Xbox360 software.
That said, they're definitely a bunch of penny pinching scrooges. I've been businesses make similar heavyhanded "profit saving" measures w/r/t what they will and will not support, and lets just say the customers ended up not being very understanding or pleased finding their "working fine" setup kicked to the curb and them being saddled with a compromised "upgraded" hardware unit of dubious parity.
I had a BP6 with dual 450's running 575. Not nearly the same % increase, but the 450's were barely more expensive than the 300's by the time I mustered up the cash for the mobo and first cpu.
is your svn hosted on a 386? is it in someone's closet, on a dsl line? why is your source repository humiliatingly unbearably slow, and why does it take minutes for an svn update to even start? is the abominable performance a hardware, or software issue?
Because we have VASMIR coming. Combine that with a nice nuclear reactor and we are looking at some good speeds.
The 2.3kW of this sterling engine doesnt speak to that promise. The 40kW they hope to have a ground system producing doesnt instill much confidenc either. ISS produces around 130kW, via a colossal truss-work of solar panels. These are all far short of the 400kW power needed for the target baseline VASIMR engine, and well short of the multi MW power levels VASIMR really is designed for.
Nuclear power generates heat. Heat differential is then used to drive turbines. In space, you may be able to make heat, but what is there for the other end of this power generation equation; where does the cool body of mass come from, the essential other integral to power generation?
VASIMR itself, at high ISP's, is generating 10 megakelvin plasma. That itself has cooling challenges.
Right now, I dont see how these ideas are practical.
I wonder what the improvement of NX v. XCB is. XCB, I believe, does away with the sychronous request/reply nature of X and allows for async event handling. Pure conjecture, but that might provide a comparable advantage to the round-trip reductions provided by NX.
I used NX server for a hot six weeks as a persistent desktop I could remotely attach to; its main duty was holding open a session of XMMS. But the NX server was a perpetual pain. Configuring it was hellish, and sometimes it would crash. Lack of a rootless mode and the undocumented/proprietary nature were the final nails: I gave up the experiment. This was a long long time ago.
adding more disks is not the solution. the solution is more active and correcting consistency checking. the reason raid 5 and raid 1 rebuilds fail is because data is replicated, but errors are only discovered when something fails, when the shits already hit the fan. zfs, hammer, btrfs, they're all running headlong towards consitency checking because that is not good enough and not pre-emptive enough.
maybe now the cock-arsed moderators at wikipedia will stop deleting the 4.2.2.2 article.
Worth nothing PERHAPS, but does this transformation make it now without value?
Moralizing aside, I disagree about worth nothing: there are plenty of album sales that happen only because of music discovered via piracy. Plenty of artists are jumping on the bandwagon and finding that it takes making valueable art free (without worth) to make good money... Trent Reznor, TMBG, and every band under the sun with a MySpace page.
You seem to have built up this notion that you deserve to get free access to any content that you wish, simply because you wish to.
I'm sympathetic, but thats stretching it friend. Dont push your luck.
Sure, I agree content producers have the right to try and get payed. But VCR's have given us the legal power to view content under our own terms for ages. You cant turn that off and say, content producers, you have the right to produce content that can be viewed only under your own terms. You cant say "you can only view this standing on your head" and expect people to, like cattle to your call, all dutifully turn and stand on their heads for you. If content producers want payment, they need to find a way to get payed that doesnt involve dictating how users view the media, in part because users wont consume burdensome content, and in part because you cant build a system strong enough to enforce usage rights. Users dont expect free content, but they have ready access to colossal amounts of it, and they'd prefer consuming poor media on their terms above good media on someone elses terms. Its up the content producers to figure out how to monetize good content, but you're incorrectly assuming that the content producer gets to dictate the entire experience and gets to package content, just as TV packed ads bypassed by VCR.
People have already voted with their feet & said that they have the right to access the content you send us in whatever form we want. If your business model revolves around force feeding us bullshit we dont want to see, you've been outvoted. It sucks that it hurts small indie sites, but its more important that we have 2.0 Voltaire: "I may not agree with how you view your content, but I will defend to the death your right to view as you choose." And that, brother, is liberty.
The browsers you named have even smaller market share than Firefox...
Yes but they're technologically better i.e. not cobbled together XPCOM & XUL running in a single thread. They also have more cohesive direction and leadership. I'd cite Chrome's Extensions as a perfect example of everything Jetpack ought to have been, for one example of where that direction shows.
Users dont care about the technological background of what they use is irrelevant, but my hope is that as embedded takes off, we'll see the better designed solutions are more adaptable to stranger & more limited environments. This will grow the user base of the margin browsers without users knowing or having choice: pre and iphone are forerunning examples.
Also, better design, such as Chrome Extensions, will hopefully lead to a better ecosystem surrounding the product. Thats really the key. Firefox has a colossal lead in building an ecosystem, as for ten years its been the only one building an ecosystem at all, but developers are finnicky people, and its ultimately them and their preference of technologies that dictates where cool shit gets built. If Chrome or Safari or Opera comes up with a more compelling more empowering developer experience, it can shift the balance of where new edgy innovative shit gets made. Whether or not that cool edgy innovative shit is compelling enough to herd the rest of the cats following is TBD. Its up to the competing browsers to potentiate the space to make that move compelling.
Ok, assuming that most major web surfers are at least somewhat computer literate and have at least heard of Firefox why wouldn't they switch? Other then web developers needing to have a copy of IE to test code why would anyone use IE when Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc are all technologically superior and have more plugins?
Users need compelling reason to switch. Technological superiority doesnt sell itself, there needs to be a reason to move, a reason to download something else and to relearn a new interface and to shuffle bookmarks and customizations into a new system.
Systems like Extensions and Jetpack exist as precursors to incentives: they themselves offer nothing of value to end users, and only serve as progenitors for incentives to be created.
These incentives are still highly detached: a user isnt saying, I'm switching to Firefox so I can use Vimperator, they're saying, I'm switching to firefox so I can go find and install the Vimperator plugin. And typically its not one particular plugin, its the accrued group of plugins each user build that makes them dedicated to Firefox, there are very few killer features. To answer your question, the immediate value proposition of switching to Firefox is minimal: it and IE are both web browsers, and they generally render most sites with parity.
Jetpack and its father-in-kind Chrome Extensions in particular are trying to close the loop some, and at least increase accessibility of enhancements.
The guy forgot just one important thing: Most people don't use Firefox.
Jetpack is just a weekend knock off of the much better done Chrome Extensions, true story. Compare their couple month old API v. Jetpack's API and its blatantly obvious where Jetpack came from.
I'm hoping Safari and Opera adopt the Chrome Extensions model.
oreilly radar recently covered the topic, as did Richard Jones, a last.fm person. Some decent reading in both
Life unfortunately has all the directedness and continuity of Flux.
I just want to make one more complaint against usb power: its often horribly regulated. I have a USB soundcard that essentially requires a USB hub between it and whatever its plugged into in order to not sound like garbage.
4.5 watts is enough for a low speed 2.5" hard drive. it might run some of the new "green" 3.5's or a high speed 2.5" 7200 rpm, but you're pushing the limit. and you've just tapped the entire power budget for your USB, no room for any other peripherals.
The spec does not support 1 amp. If you want to talk about manufacturers going off on their own to extend the spec in a proprietary fashion, I think you lose the usefulness of the standard USB interconnect. A good example is the Macbook Air cdrom, which works with nothing except the usb on the Macbook Air.
USB is 5v. USB2.0 maxes out at "5" units of 100mA, with USB3.0 providing a staggering "6" units of 150mA. Thats .5A and .9A. That gives you 2.5 watts and 4.5 watts. There are proposed additions to let USB source up to 1.8A if the port is not sending data, and up to 1.5A in low speed mode.
Looking at the numbers, the whole notion that USB could ever become the dominant standard for power seems laughable to me. USB may be a convenient means of providing a trickle charge, but with batteries getting considerably higher C rates we need 10x beefier power supplies than what USB will ever be capable of.
Power Over Ethernet+ (PoE+) is targetting 24w: thats no quickcharge, but unlike USB its least enough to run a small computer.
This is really endemic of the difficulty virtual worlds are going to have gaining recognition. To an outsider, its a case of "so what," but to the virtual world people inhabit and dedicate themselves to, its as if the colonial English empire suffered a Babylonian confusion of language and was no longer able to talk or work together. All powers great and small are rushing to fill the power vaccuum left in their wake, to claim the profitable and rich bounds of space this alliance once defended.
The case is more complex than that; EVE, unlike every other program out there, is a contested world with rich rewards for those holding space. By disbanding the alliance, these people no longer hold space. The space and its wealth of resources are up for grabs and there are suddenly dozens of major parties joining the frey to claim it. Alliances who ship off to the freshly claimable Delve seeking riches fortune and fame are subject to attacks at their homelands.
EVE had been at a status quo for nearly 3 years: there was an established Northern Coallition, the southern RedSwarm Faction, and BoB. Each group has made attacks, but none have succeeded in storming the others home or ruining the other. Disbanding BoB has destabilized a perfect balance, and instilled a sense of adventure in a lot of people who'd found the universe growing boring and stale.
In closing, I can only lament how unfortunate it is that this titanic event will go unnoticed and unappreciated for so long. If this were an article about someone beating the newest boss in WoW I'd throw up my hands in disgust, but theres something fundamentally different about the limited and player driven world of EVE: the events in it are shared between all the players of EVE, and this great confusion has thrown a very interesting twist into what had become a rather stalemated game. I hope more games follow EVEs pattern of making rich and authentic universes where actions have consequences and great powers and alliances rise and fall, but I think it will be a long long time before these worlds come to domainate & the populous feels their tremors as readily as they feel the throws of power in the real world.
I cant stand it because its too attention grabbing; it overwhelms the tab-bar. I'd installed this userscript on a handful of my most used systems to revert the last blue/grey favicon to the older blue/white icon, but now that they've made it even more ugly, I've been compulsively installing the old favicon on every single system I touch.
On a decent number of systems I've been using a UserScript (aka greasemonkey script) that gives me the original white/blue G, but with this new even more hideous favicon I now compulsively install the script on every computer I touch: the new one is such an offensive eye-sore in the tab-bar.
Fantastic link, thanks.
Given that ExpressCard already has both PCIe and USB connectors, and that the spec you linked states,
Both the SuperSpeed USB and the PCIe specifications, therefore, are derived from the basic
OSI layered architecture. Both protocols look very similar in terms of layer architecture, and their physical layers share many common functions,
as well as similar concepts for other layers.
it'll be interesting to see if the confluence comes to a head and the two specs gain some kind of genuine interoperability. Afaik the current ExpressCard implementation works by having two sets of connectors; if USB 3.0 really is PCIe dervied, it would be great to collapse it to using the same PCIe interfaces.
The other two outstanding questions I have are:
1) how much the new architecture will alleviate latency?
2) is the time quantization better than the old 1ms standard?
Both of these prevent USB from being usable in real time contexts, contrary to evidence of the massive number of craptacular web cams sold.
The current obsession with consoles is monetization. Unless your game is purely multiplayer focused (where you have broad capabilities to prevent piracy) people will pirate your game. Secondly, if you do make it onto one of the commercial venues, you get exposure to a sizable audience. The console market has a higher barrier to entry, but if you can cross that threshold you're rewarded with a large & paying market (which doesnt presume success; you still have to make a compelling game). Having to pass acceptance committees of XBLA or PS3 or Wii does not infringe on this notion of "sovereignty" over ones game you seem to engender to indie developers... at least I presume as much. I rather doubt these acceptance committees put games through a full battery of gameplay critiques; my expectation is they check for game stability, whether the game is entirely crap, a reasonable test of playability, and last for some level of appropriateness. I'd be interested to hear some negative stories of people trying to get games put on these online services, as it seems like most of the big gaming companies are working hard to attract small developers.