If you wanted them to fix your programming/software/data/configuration issue on a machine they own and manage, then to me, that implies that they have to be able to look at the data itself on at least an as-needed basis. Hopefully they are discrete about it and comply with appropriate privacy requirements (e.g. never disclose what they see to anyone else besides other staff that are also working on your problems).
What if you owned the machine(s) and they were physically located in your own office space in a building you own... and you hired a programmer or system administrator or consultant to look at your programming problem? Would you expect them to NOT look at the data? You see, I think that this is an implied situation.
When I long ago worked for an ISP (director of operations with 3 net/sysadmins reporting to me), our policy is we did not look at customer data directly unless it was for problem resolution, and then only look where problem analysis suggested the problem might be, or that information about the problem might be. For example, I did look at a couple customer mailboxes to resolve problems with why their mail agent wasn't loading the mail. Turns out there were non-compliant headers and a less than robust agent. I did not feel a need to ask to look once the evidence suggested the problem was in the content of the messages. I did ask the customer for permission to manually edit his mailbox to remove the defective mail so he could continue to use hos non-robust mail agent. And I will never divulge what I saw in that email short of a valid and verified court order to do so.
But Comcast I Comcast actually Comcast want Comcast their Comcast search Comcast bot Comcast to Comcast find Comcast my Comcast post. I Comcast want Comcast them Comcast to Comcast actually Comcast know Comcast how Comcast bad Comcast their Comcast service Comcast is. But Comcast I Comcast doubt Comcast it Comcast will Comcast do Comcast any Comcast good. They Comcast never Comcast fix Comcast it.
"Do not assume malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
When it comes to companies dealing with Microsoft, I leave malice open as a real possibility. It's certainly either that or incompetent engineering. Either of these alone is sufficient reason to avoid all Foxconn boards in the future (at least until something changes).
BTW, it does seem that some people at these manufacturers assume that "supporting OS XYZ" implies getting a certification from "OS vendor XYZ", after (often costly) rounds of certification testing. What they don't seem to know is that for Linux, they can do this in their own labs at a much lower cost. They simply need to boot up various bootable DVDs (Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, for example), install to a hard drive, carry out various tests like making sure all the on-board devices work, checking power on/off/suspend, etc. Then if something does not work and if they think the fault is with Linux itself, they can report the problem to Linux developers. Alternatively, they can provide an engineering sample board to willing Linux developers to test with. Same for BSD. Or they can choose to go to a company like Red Hat for help. My point is, this is NOT going to cost them anywhere near what it costs to deal with Microsoft. And they would get free advertising from the Linux community by doing the right thing.
So shall we now speculate on whether their actions are due to malice or incompetence?
Seagate does not support Linux, either. I discovered this when I tried to make a Seagate external USB portable hard drive work. When this drive spins down to save energy, it does NOT obey standard USB commands to reactivate. It should just reactiveate when the next command is given, and perform that command slightly delayed when the drive is up to speed (a few seconds at most). The Maxtor and Western Digital drives do this just fine. An older Seagate drive also does this just fine. It is the newer (as of 2007) drives that fail. Seagate technical support simply says "We do not support Linux". Sounds like another Microsoft payoff, and another needed Justice Department investigation, to me.
ACPI is such an absurd feature for a computer. It is quite frequently THE source of many problems. And clearly from this case it makes it easy for a manufacturer to abuse. And they are not the first. I found a machine (or rather the sysadmin at my previous job got me a machine) from HP that would not boot up Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu due to ACPI crap.
A great many of the features ACPI provides would not even be needed if there was no tendency on manufacturers to keep changing things (e.g. making a moving target for developers of any OS). A standardized computer design would need very little configuration information passed to the OS. And what it would need could be passed to the OS by the actual devices themselves which would be at specific locations the OS can always find (a finite set of device addresses with registers in each device that reveals what device it is).
A whole re-design of the PC to clean up the mess is needed. Nothing can be added on top to fix it. It needs a "start over". But this thread is not the place for me to describe what really needs to be done to make a robust computer system that lets any OS work on any makers machine (but of course, Microsoft would not want that).
LCD is already polarized. Hold a linear polarizing filter in front of an LCD screen and turn it and you can see. So it's just a matter of subdividing each pixel (that is already divided into 3 color subpixels) yet again, and designing the polarizing filter so half of each pixel has one polarization angle, and half at 90 degrees to that. I recommend 2 diagonal polarizations at 90 degrees. The new difficulty is that you can't just use a single flat polarization filter like you can with a plain LCD. But once this is solved, the 3D glasses are trivial.
The next problem is doubling the bandwidth of the HDMI link. 1920 x 1080 x 3 is easily done in HDMI. But twice that is a bit beyond its range. And unlike DVI, HDMI does not have a dual-link feature. One option is to increase the clock rate on it to use the same cable. Another option is an extended HDMI. Or just use a dual-link DVI-I cable and run the audio (digitally) over the analog video wires (the ones around the funny large pin on one side). The final option is to have 2 HDMI cables.
And of course they'll need to double the bandwidth of TV transmissions. That can be done easily enough with over-the-air 8VSB in the USA with a reduced frame rate of 24 Hz at the 720 line resolution. Cable has twice the capacity, so it should be possible to do 3D sports (that needs a faster frame rate) at 60 Hz and 720 lines. Satellite service can probably find a similar arrangement for double bandwidth TV.
This will start to push the limits of even Blu-Ray. But there is new technology on the way in optical media, and solid state flash storage looks like its converging to a usable price/capacity point in a decade or so.
The fun begins when we roll out "super wide stereoscopic cinema" with 5120 x 2160 (64:27) at 120 Hz in 3D. That is sure to be encumbered all to hell with DRM. Try running that uncompressed through your HDMI.
Really? I run Firefox as a non-root user. It is installed on the/usr filesystem. Are you saying Firefox has figured out how to get around the permissions issue? Oh, and BTW, my/usr is mounted read-only.
Who in their right mind have a computer online with Windows 95/98 or ME on it?
Someone whose business applications only run on Windows 95/98 or ME, and either there is no upgraded version of it (maybe the vendor went out of business) or the upgrade doesn't convert the old data, or doesn't have a feature being used, or otherwise isn't workable.
One way to make memory contents much more difficult to recover is this. The CPU(s) will have a key stored internal to the CPU chip, in SRAM (memory held in state by power, a technology that does not lend itself to the high density that DRAM does). Initially the CPU runs in "clear mode" and establishes the key. Then it proceeds to encrypt memory, except for the page the encrypt program runs in. Then it enters "crypt mode", which includes a jump to a new address outside of the clear page. In "crypt mode" all memory fetches are decrypted in hardware, and all memory writes are encrypted. The one page that was not encrypted is now reclaimed, wiped, and made available for other uses.
Simple XOR encryption will not work. Much of memory is written with zeros or predictable data. That would make recovering this key trivial. What is needed is a type of encryption that makes the key recovery impossible or at least very difficult. One possible approach is to combine the key and address and produce a checksum that is used to do the actual memory contents encryption or decryption. The problem with all this is that it would slow down memory a great deal. But maybe by doing this only on select portions of memory, it becomes a practical tradeoff.
But maybe it is enough to just have a page of SRAM inside the CPU chip itself, where the normal data keys can be kept by the kernel, which will have to be sure to clean up after any cryptographic operations in regular DRAM.
Multi-core chips will be constrained by, among other things, the memory bandwidth going off-chip. Maybe they need larger caches. Maybe they just need to put all the RAM on the chip itself instead of so many other cores. How about 4GB of RAM at 1st level cache speed.
Ultimately, we'll end up with PCs made from SoCs, and direct SATA, USB, Firewire, and DVI interfaces coming out instead of a RAM access bus. By the time they are ready to make 256 core CPUs, software still won't be ready to work well on that. So in the interim, they might as well just do tighter integration (that can also run faster there, too). No more north bridge or south bridge. Just a few capacitors, resistors, and maybe a buffer amp or two, around the big CPU.
About the only thing that won't be practical to put in the CPU for a long time is the power supply. They could even put the disk drive in there (flash SSD).
It could have originated with a equatorial orbit. But over millions of years, the ecliptic gravitational tug would have pulled it into more of an ecliptic orbit.
Normally, when a product is sold in a state with a sales tax, the business doing the selling collects the tax and submits it to the state. Is the BSA actually doing that with the money they collect for pirated copies of commercial software? Inquiring minds want to know.
This is software design issue, too. A good software package using config files would have the ability to parse and understand separate files for a default configuration and a locally customized configuration. When such software is distributed, whether in source form that you compile and install, or a binary package you simply install, it will install a default config file that never needs to be updated by the admin/user. To customize such software, a local config file will be written and placed in a different location that the software looks for. The local config will override the default config, when the local is present. The installation of the software will never touch the local config file.
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If you wanted them to fix your programming/software/data/configuration issue on a machine they own and manage, then to me, that implies that they have to be able to look at the data itself on at least an as-needed basis. Hopefully they are discrete about it and comply with appropriate privacy requirements (e.g. never disclose what they see to anyone else besides other staff that are also working on your problems).
What if you owned the machine(s) and they were physically located in your own office space in a building you own ... and you hired a programmer or system administrator or consultant to look at your programming problem? Would you expect them to NOT look at the data? You see, I think that this is an implied situation.
When I long ago worked for an ISP (director of operations with 3 net/sysadmins reporting to me), our policy is we did not look at customer data directly unless it was for problem resolution, and then only look where problem analysis suggested the problem might be, or that information about the problem might be. For example, I did look at a couple customer mailboxes to resolve problems with why their mail agent wasn't loading the mail. Turns out there were non-compliant headers and a less than robust agent. I did not feel a need to ask to look once the evidence suggested the problem was in the content of the messages. I did ask the customer for permission to manually edit his mailbox to remove the defective mail so he could continue to use hos non-robust mail agent. And I will never divulge what I saw in that email short of a valid and verified court order to do so.
Punishment enough would be for the FCC to require Comcast to double the capacity of their network every 18 months.
But Comcast I Comcast actually Comcast want Comcast their Comcast search Comcast bot Comcast to Comcast find Comcast my Comcast post. I Comcast want Comcast them Comcast to Comcast actually Comcast know Comcast how Comcast bad Comcast their Comcast service Comcast is. But Comcast I Comcast doubt Comcast it Comcast will Comcast do Comcast any Comcast good. They Comcast never Comcast fix Comcast it.
... I write a blog about it?
"Do not assume malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
When it comes to companies dealing with Microsoft, I leave malice open as a real possibility. It's certainly either that or incompetent engineering. Either of these alone is sufficient reason to avoid all Foxconn boards in the future (at least until something changes).
BTW, it does seem that some people at these manufacturers assume that "supporting OS XYZ" implies getting a certification from "OS vendor XYZ", after (often costly) rounds of certification testing. What they don't seem to know is that for Linux, they can do this in their own labs at a much lower cost. They simply need to boot up various bootable DVDs (Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, for example), install to a hard drive, carry out various tests like making sure all the on-board devices work, checking power on/off/suspend, etc. Then if something does not work and if they think the fault is with Linux itself, they can report the problem to Linux developers. Alternatively, they can provide an engineering sample board to willing Linux developers to test with. Same for BSD. Or they can choose to go to a company like Red Hat for help. My point is, this is NOT going to cost them anywhere near what it costs to deal with Microsoft. And they would get free advertising from the Linux community by doing the right thing.
So shall we now speculate on whether their actions are due to malice or incompetence?
Seagate does not support Linux, either. I discovered this when I tried to make a Seagate external USB portable hard drive work. When this drive spins down to save energy, it does NOT obey standard USB commands to reactivate. It should just reactiveate when the next command is given, and perform that command slightly delayed when the drive is up to speed (a few seconds at most). The Maxtor and Western Digital drives do this just fine. An older Seagate drive also does this just fine. It is the newer (as of 2007) drives that fail. Seagate technical support simply says "We do not support Linux". Sounds like another Microsoft payoff, and another needed Justice Department investigation, to me.
ACPI is such an absurd feature for a computer. It is quite frequently THE source of many problems. And clearly from this case it makes it easy for a manufacturer to abuse. And they are not the first. I found a machine (or rather the sysadmin at my previous job got me a machine) from HP that would not boot up Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu due to ACPI crap.
A great many of the features ACPI provides would not even be needed if there was no tendency on manufacturers to keep changing things (e.g. making a moving target for developers of any OS). A standardized computer design would need very little configuration information passed to the OS. And what it would need could be passed to the OS by the actual devices themselves which would be at specific locations the OS can always find (a finite set of device addresses with registers in each device that reveals what device it is).
A whole re-design of the PC to clean up the mess is needed. Nothing can be added on top to fix it. It needs a "start over". But this thread is not the place for me to describe what really needs to be done to make a robust computer system that lets any OS work on any makers machine (but of course, Microsoft would not want that).
You left out a step: India
I think the issue is that the government was afraid that some colleges would not do this, for example for reasons of cost.
But what about all those people that prefer online learning so they don't have to put clothes on?
And it discriminates against a minority group: people with dial-up.
Obviously, they accidentally let someone in here that didn't know.
Both.
So lets see if they can export my leet water closet sanitation technician job to India. Those guys don't have the cool degrees for this that I do. :-)
We tracked down who it was that stole your identity. Guess what, they have the same name you do.
She needs to have her own computer with her, with its own security so it can't even be operated by someone who might take it.
LCD is already polarized. Hold a linear polarizing filter in front of an LCD screen and turn it and you can see. So it's just a matter of subdividing each pixel (that is already divided into 3 color subpixels) yet again, and designing the polarizing filter so half of each pixel has one polarization angle, and half at 90 degrees to that. I recommend 2 diagonal polarizations at 90 degrees. The new difficulty is that you can't just use a single flat polarization filter like you can with a plain LCD. But once this is solved, the 3D glasses are trivial.
The next problem is doubling the bandwidth of the HDMI link. 1920 x 1080 x 3 is easily done in HDMI. But twice that is a bit beyond its range. And unlike DVI, HDMI does not have a dual-link feature. One option is to increase the clock rate on it to use the same cable. Another option is an extended HDMI. Or just use a dual-link DVI-I cable and run the audio (digitally) over the analog video wires (the ones around the funny large pin on one side). The final option is to have 2 HDMI cables.
And of course they'll need to double the bandwidth of TV transmissions. That can be done easily enough with over-the-air 8VSB in the USA with a reduced frame rate of 24 Hz at the 720 line resolution. Cable has twice the capacity, so it should be possible to do 3D sports (that needs a faster frame rate) at 60 Hz and 720 lines. Satellite service can probably find a similar arrangement for double bandwidth TV.
This will start to push the limits of even Blu-Ray. But there is new technology on the way in optical media, and solid state flash storage looks like its converging to a usable price/capacity point in a decade or so.
The fun begins when we roll out "super wide stereoscopic cinema" with 5120 x 2160 (64:27) at 120 Hz in 3D. That is sure to be encumbered all to hell with DRM. Try running that uncompressed through your HDMI.
Firefox already automatically updates.
Really? I run Firefox as a non-root user. It is installed on the /usr filesystem. Are you saying Firefox has figured out how to get around the permissions issue? Oh, and BTW, my /usr is mounted read-only.
Who in their right mind have a computer online with Windows 95/98 or ME on it?
Someone whose business applications only run on Windows 95/98 or ME, and either there is no upgraded version of it (maybe the vendor went out of business) or the upgrade doesn't convert the old data, or doesn't have a feature being used, or otherwise isn't workable.
One way to make memory contents much more difficult to recover is this. The CPU(s) will have a key stored internal to the CPU chip, in SRAM (memory held in state by power, a technology that does not lend itself to the high density that DRAM does). Initially the CPU runs in "clear mode" and establishes the key. Then it proceeds to encrypt memory, except for the page the encrypt program runs in. Then it enters "crypt mode", which includes a jump to a new address outside of the clear page. In "crypt mode" all memory fetches are decrypted in hardware, and all memory writes are encrypted. The one page that was not encrypted is now reclaimed, wiped, and made available for other uses.
Simple XOR encryption will not work. Much of memory is written with zeros or predictable data. That would make recovering this key trivial. What is needed is a type of encryption that makes the key recovery impossible or at least very difficult. One possible approach is to combine the key and address and produce a checksum that is used to do the actual memory contents encryption or decryption. The problem with all this is that it would slow down memory a great deal. But maybe by doing this only on select portions of memory, it becomes a practical tradeoff.
But maybe it is enough to just have a page of SRAM inside the CPU chip itself, where the normal data keys can be kept by the kernel, which will have to be sure to clean up after any cryptographic operations in regular DRAM.
Multi-core chips will be constrained by, among other things, the memory bandwidth going off-chip. Maybe they need larger caches. Maybe they just need to put all the RAM on the chip itself instead of so many other cores. How about 4GB of RAM at 1st level cache speed.
Ultimately, we'll end up with PCs made from SoCs, and direct SATA, USB, Firewire, and DVI interfaces coming out instead of a RAM access bus. By the time they are ready to make 256 core CPUs, software still won't be ready to work well on that. So in the interim, they might as well just do tighter integration (that can also run faster there, too). No more north bridge or south bridge. Just a few capacitors, resistors, and maybe a buffer amp or two, around the big CPU.
About the only thing that won't be practical to put in the CPU for a long time is the power supply. They could even put the disk drive in there (flash SSD).
It could have originated with a equatorial orbit. But over millions of years, the ecliptic gravitational tug would have pulled it into more of an ecliptic orbit.
Normally, when a product is sold in a state with a sales tax, the business doing the selling collects the tax and submits it to the state. Is the BSA actually doing that with the money they collect for pirated copies of commercial software? Inquiring minds want to know.
This is software design issue, too. A good software package using config files would have the ability to parse and understand separate files for a default configuration and a locally customized configuration. When such software is distributed, whether in source form that you compile and install, or a binary package you simply install, it will install a default config file that never needs to be updated by the admin/user. To customize such software, a local config file will be written and placed in a different location that the software looks for. The local config will override the default config, when the local is present. The installation of the software will never touch the local config file.
I suspect the scenario between your step 1 and step 2 went something like this: