Re:I've had IP TV for almost a year now...
on
A Look at IPTV
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· Score: 1
Interesting, you have 50 000 IPTV subscribers in Manitoba, and the service has been around since 2003. I think you may have some people who are a wee pissed off at Shaw, because in Saskatchewan, we've you around 30 000 subs, and it's been around since 2002.
You toss control back to whatever would otherwise load when it fails.
Back to whatever would otherwise load? That would be nothing (Well, not nothing, but it's impossible to determine what that something would be). The BIOS loads the first 512 bytes of the disk (the MBR) into ram at location 07c0:0000, that MBR then loads the 512 bytes at the start of the partition marked "active" in the MBR at address 07c0:0000. Now, keep in mind that there are 512 bytes in the MBR for data, and code, also remember that the MBR just loaded the partition bootloader over itself in RAM, it's not there any more at all. Next, the partition bootloader (grub in this case) has 512 bytes at location 0x7c0:0000 to load the rest of itself into memory, including error conditions. Now, the read fails, and you get code like this:
if(read failed)
print ("read error")
goto fail...
fail:
clear interrupts
halt cpu
because there isn't any other option. You can't just jump back to code that was overwritten when you came into ram. There is no option but to crash in this case. It's like if your interrupt handling code page faults. Your OS WILL crash.
Let's say, for want of an argument, that you buy a PC that can't boot off firewire/network/wireless/whatever. You have EFI. You can write your own EFI module to do the booting for you instead of disassembling the BIOS, patching it with your code, then praying that it works in the end.
Sasktel is a crown corporation, and own the lines in Saskatchewan.
Who else would? They built the infrastructure, they should own it. Seems simple, no?
It was only recently that other providers were permitted to sell long distance there
Well, considering that other providers selling long distance means buying it from SaskTel at cost, selling it at a profit, and not having to build any infrastructure themselves, do you think this is fair? Add to that the fact that the CRTC made SaskTel RAISE their rates to make their competitors look good.
and Saskatchewanians can't get a VoIP phone number with their local area code because Sasktel charges Vonage too much for a block of numbers.
That has to do with the way the infrastructure works in Saskatchewan. We (Saskatchewan) were the first to get rid of party lines, and every town has its own "NXX" (prefix - NXX-XXXX), SaskTel is running out of numbers in the 306 area code, so there really aren't any to provide. Case in point: Navigata, a SaskTel subsidiary can't get 306 numbers, either.
but how come in every other Canadian province you can get a local area code for your VoIP phone
Pretty much because every other Canadian province has more than one area code.
If I worked there, you can be damn sure that I'd deny 90% of the tech-related patents that came across my desk, fully justifying each decision, and wholly expecting to be disciplined or fired for not being a rubber-stamp. Then I'd sure as hell make a big stink about it. Why isn't this happening?
Sad as it is, most people value employment over principles.
On OSX, it is safe to have administrator privileges: to do anything that could mess with the system, I still have to type my password.
True true. On a Windows machine being in the Administrators group is just like being Administrator itself. With Mac OS X, just like most UNIX systems with which I am familiar, an administrator is just a member of their equivalent of the wheel group.
Did you ever think that it was because there is no currently supported version of WINDOWS for the PowerPC or MIPS or ARM or Sparc... or ANYTHING that is not X86?
Of course that's the reason. Too bad the Linux/UNIX people don't command enough of the market to make IBM reconsider, as there is a fully supported version of Linux for PPC. There is also AIX, (Net|Open|Free)BSD (FreeBSD's PowerPC port is still in development) and quite a few I haven't mentioned.
Shame. I want a newer PowerPC laptop. Hopefully somebody comes up with one. I can already get a SPARC laptop, and I'm considering one. I like OpenFirmware, and I like the nice ISA of the PowerPC.
Hardware-wise, the chipset supports these. So, nothing has been left-behind. In fact, Apple is subsidizing the remaining DOS users that need these features.
I did not know that. I don't generally follow chipset features, I figured those were still seperate. The BIOS, however, is definitaly not a part of the chipset, as they tend to be made by Phoenix. Apparently not having one is enough to keep Windows XP from booting. Shame.
Did it occur to you that they may have ditched some of the cruft in the x86 architecture? For instance, the BIOS? Or maybe you don't have to ask the keyboard controller to enable gate A20 on these new machines? Or maybe there's no Intel 8259 interrupt controller emulation, and you need ACPI support?
Leaving out these things isn't building in incompatibility. It's getting rid of cruft that should have been removed with the introduction of Windows 2000.
XP cannot unless it has the BIOS emulation layer in place. XP x64 Edition can, but the Core Duo processor doesn't do the 64 bit thing yet. I'm waiting for the EM64T version before I get one (well, that and I have a fairly new PowerBook G4 which is still useful)
More important to me are the lack of a full-size 5-pin DIN keyboard port, a DB-9 serial port, and 5 1/4" floppy drive.
I know you jest, but OF is not exactly obsolete technology. It's one of the things that seperates Old world from New world Macintoshes. It's a very neat firmware, having a bootloader written in Forth, having the firmware knowing how to load ELF executables.. all sorts of neat things it can do. I particularly like Firewire target disk mode.
I'm sure all these things can be done with EFI, too, though, as it's an extendible firmware too.
OpenFirmware is just a firmware spec, not an implementation. There is no reason why somebody couldn't make OF for ia32 processors. It seems to me that EFI and OF are very similar in practise.
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Interesting, you have 50 000 IPTV subscribers in Manitoba, and the service has been around since 2003. I think you may have some people who are a wee pissed off at Shaw, because in Saskatchewan, we've you around 30 000 subs, and it's been around since 2002.
Well, in the case of Canadian telcos, the price is fixed by the CRTC. If anybody wants to change their rates, they have to apply to the CRTC.
Here's a little secret: Windows was able to load before I installed GRUB. Take that hint, and answer your question.
I was able to close my window on my car before I installed this new power window system that completely replaces the old one.
Now does it make sense? You can't just replace something then expect the old one to be a fail-over.
You toss control back to whatever would otherwise load when it fails.
...
Back to whatever would otherwise load? That would be nothing (Well, not nothing, but it's impossible to determine what that something would be). The BIOS loads the first 512 bytes of the disk (the MBR) into ram at location 07c0:0000, that MBR then loads the 512 bytes at the start of the partition marked "active" in the MBR at address 07c0:0000. Now, keep in mind that there are 512 bytes in the MBR for data, and code, also remember that the MBR just loaded the partition bootloader over itself in RAM, it's not there any more at all. Next, the partition bootloader (grub in this case) has 512 bytes at location 0x7c0:0000 to load the rest of itself into memory, including error conditions. Now, the read fails, and you get code like this:
if(read failed)
print ("read error")
goto fail
fail:
clear interrupts
halt cpu
because there isn't any other option. You can't just jump back to code that was overwritten when you came into ram. There is no option but to crash in this case. It's like if your interrupt handling code page faults. Your OS WILL crash.
Let's say, for want of an argument, that you buy a PC that can't boot off firewire/network/wireless/whatever. You have EFI. You can write your own EFI module to do the booting for you instead of disassembling the BIOS, patching it with your code, then praying that it works in the end.
Can you come up with some real world examples of the usefulness of the OF console on a Mac?
BSDs use it to do console I/O. At least they did the last time I booted NetBSD.
Sasktel is a crown corporation, and own the lines in Saskatchewan.
Who else would? They built the infrastructure, they should own it. Seems simple, no?
It was only recently that other providers were permitted to sell long distance there
Well, considering that other providers selling long distance means buying it from SaskTel at cost, selling it at a profit, and not having to build any infrastructure themselves, do you think this is fair? Add to that the fact that the CRTC made SaskTel RAISE their rates to make their competitors look good.
and Saskatchewanians can't get a VoIP phone number with their local area code because Sasktel charges Vonage too much for a block of numbers.
That has to do with the way the infrastructure works in Saskatchewan. We (Saskatchewan) were the first to get rid of party lines, and every town has its own "NXX" (prefix - NXX-XXXX), SaskTel is running out of numbers in the 306 area code, so there really aren't any to provide. Case in point: Navigata, a SaskTel subsidiary can't get 306 numbers, either.
but how come in every other Canadian province you can get a local area code for your VoIP phone
Pretty much because every other Canadian province has more than one area code.
Says who?
... and let me tell you, the stories about him are greatly exaggerated!
Well, it's pretty crappy whiskey, so he obviously didn't drink it.
He was talking about NetBSD's pkgsrc packaging system, similar to portage and FreeBSD's ports.
If I worked there, you can be damn sure that I'd deny 90% of the tech-related patents that came across my desk, fully justifying each decision, and wholly expecting to be disciplined or fired for not being a rubber-stamp. Then I'd sure as hell make a big stink about it. Why isn't this happening?
Sad as it is, most people value employment over principles.
High bandwidth sure, but what about latency?!? Even dial-up is faster!
On OSX, it is safe to have administrator privileges: to do anything that could mess with the system, I still have to type my password.
True true. On a Windows machine being in the Administrators group is just like being Administrator itself. With Mac OS X, just like most UNIX systems with which I am familiar, an administrator is just a member of their equivalent of the wheel group.
Most people here don't know what z/OS is, and all others are toy operating systems.
Did you ever think that it was because there is no currently supported version of WINDOWS for the PowerPC or MIPS or ARM or Sparc... or ANYTHING that is not X86?
Of course that's the reason. Too bad the Linux/UNIX people don't command enough of the market to make IBM reconsider, as there is a fully supported version of Linux for PPC. There is also AIX, (Net|Open|Free)BSD (FreeBSD's PowerPC port is still in development) and quite a few I haven't mentioned.
Shame. I want a newer PowerPC laptop. Hopefully somebody comes up with one. I can already get a SPARC laptop, and I'm considering one. I like OpenFirmware, and I like the nice ISA of the PowerPC.
Hardware-wise, the chipset supports these. So, nothing has been left-behind. In fact, Apple is subsidizing the remaining DOS users that need these features.
I did not know that. I don't generally follow chipset features, I figured those were still seperate. The BIOS, however, is definitaly not a part of the chipset, as they tend to be made by Phoenix. Apparently not having one is enough to keep Windows XP from booting. Shame.
Did it occur to you that they may have ditched some of the cruft in the x86 architecture? For instance, the BIOS? Or maybe you don't have to ask the keyboard controller to enable gate A20 on these new machines? Or maybe there's no Intel 8259 interrupt controller emulation, and you need ACPI support?
Leaving out these things isn't building in incompatibility. It's getting rid of cruft that should have been removed with the introduction of Windows 2000.
Can it be used to make the Intel portion of Universal binaries along with something else to make the PowerPC code?
XP cannot unless it has the BIOS emulation layer in place. XP x64 Edition can, but the Core Duo processor doesn't do the 64 bit thing yet. I'm waiting for the EM64T version before I get one (well, that and I have a fairly new PowerBook G4 which is still useful)
More important to me are the lack of a full-size 5-pin DIN keyboard port, a DB-9 serial port, and 5 1/4" floppy drive.
I know you jest, but OF is not exactly obsolete technology. It's one of the things that seperates Old world from New world Macintoshes. It's a very neat firmware, having a bootloader written in Forth, having the firmware knowing how to load ELF executables.. all sorts of neat things it can do. I particularly like Firewire target disk mode.
I'm sure all these things can be done with EFI, too, though, as it's an extendible firmware too.
OpenFirmware is just a firmware spec, not an implementation. There is no reason why somebody couldn't make OF for ia32 processors. It seems to me that EFI and OF are very similar in practise.
How is it a shit processor? Please explain, I'd like to know.
As it exists now, with my PowerBook G4, I can boot Mac OS X and Linux from a firewire disk, so this isn't too far fetched.
+ Mac OS X
To be fair, Apple didn't buy NeXT. Apple paid NeXT to take over!