"as secure as they could be made" is not good enough. Not nearly good enough.
"more secure than paper ballots" would be a start. *ONLY* a start, mind you, as it doesn't begin to justify the additional expense, but it'd be a start. I'm not advocating a Chicken Little approach by any means, but sticking your head in the sand and singing "it'll all be OK because the person presiding over this mess said so" stopped being a viable response about when the war in Iraq 'ended'.
We know software that's as bulletproof as our democracy deserves can be written - it runs on mainframes day in and day out for years and years. Then the only reasons why the election hardware/software is so buggy is incompetence or malice, and either way we shouldn't be using it.
There have been some analogies here trying to demonstrate how rediculous this is, but I've got a take I don't see posted already. Let's ignore for a second the technical details of associating to APs, broadcasting one's SSID, "inviting people in" by running a DHCP server, etc.
Wardriving is analagous to walking down the street ringing doorbells. Some people ignore you. Some people come out and say hi. Some invite you in for tea. There's nothing wrong with knocking, even though some knocks precede burglaries. You don't see the cops setting up special task forces to investigate phonecalls even though that's a great way to find out that somebody's home and you shouldn't try to break in, do you?
Maybe I'm missing something, but this whole thing seems rather silly.
Bashing would be Bill Maher's constant harping on Bush sitting around reading to kids while planes continue to collide with buildings. Yeah, in hindsight he kinda screwed up, but I'm sure it made sense at the time. It's not like he was going to do anything anyway. The president doesn't gather information, and I'm sure the information gathering went on just fine without him, and was prepared by the time he got somewhere and listened to it.
Bashing would be constantly badmouthing the man every time he takes a break because early on in his presidency, vacationing seemed to be all he got done.
Pointing out a pattern of deliberate, baldfaced lies told by the President in an effort to push his country into a war with an uninvolved sovereign state is not bashing. It's impeachable, and the only reason Bush is still in office is because the Republicans are in charge right now.
I'm not entirely sure what "inflammatory terms" you refer to. "Lied" perhaps? I wouldn't call that "inflammatory" - I'd call it "the uncolored truth". Disputed would be if we found a chemical factory that may have been producing chemical weapons, or a nuclear program that may have been generating power or may have been generating weapons-grade plutonium. Lied is when the country goes to war on the pretense that we're fighting terror and putting down an imminent threat, only to discover that neither is remotely true.
I saw the headline, and do you know what my first reaction was? It wasn't "grrr. Stupid software patents". That came later. My very FIRST reaction was to look for the foot. Because obviously Kodak pursuing software patent claims is absurd. No foot, so I read the article.
I'm not a patent lawyer, and I have better things to do with my time than try to decipher the deliberately-obfuscated language of a patent the article doesn't bother to mention. However, I do know a little bit about computers, and that patent better be a damn sight more specific than "ask for help".
Because I'll bet system calls predate whatever patent Kodak's waving around.
I'm still looking for that foot, only now I want one to kick Kodak in the head.
You, my friend, have a decidedly unsupportable view of anatomy. I suggest a trip to your local bookstore for a textbook on human A&P followed by a trip to your local college bar for the lab portion of the class.
That's interesting that an Apple-centric crowd would be so unimpressed. I've long faulted Apple for poor (-ly suited to me, if not outright wrong) design choices in the past, and think the new iMac looks quite nice.
I was initially skeptical of the cable layout as well, but upon further consideration think it is actually quite reasonable. For one thing, it's harder to access the back of the base than it is the side of the monitor. If you're never adding or removing devices, it matters very little where the cords plug in, but with this layout it's simple to reach around the corner and plug something in temporarily, and not much more difficult to thread a cable through the guide. For another thing, the cables are more-or-less aligned along the horizontal axis of the machine, so tilting the monitor won't pull on your cables.
You're correct that the design is only elegant until you start throwing peripherals at it, and will lose a lot of its simplicity and coolness with a half-dozen USB devices sticking out of it. However, if the machine's as nice as it looks in a fairly bare setup, and still manages to be at least functional with lots of stuff attached, that's a pretty successful design.
I don't think Firewire800 is necessary, but I am surprised Apple didn't include gigE. I suspect it's primarily to differentiate their product lines, but given the cost difference (a few dollars), it's still surprising they didn't throw it in. Another thing that worries me is the hard drive. Apple claim 25dB(A) v. 28dB(A) for the older iMac design. However, the older imacs had a disturbing tendency to develop rather whiny hard drives after a while, completely shooting their low noise floor and doing it with a high-pitched drone which is way more offensive than fan noise. If the new imacs can maintain their low noise floor in actual use, I'll be quite pleased.
Naturally a final opinion will have to wait until I've commandeered one at an apple store for a while, but if they're physically stable, they look like great replacements for our aging iMac/600s.
It's not double the hardware. That's benefit 1. Also, it's massively more closely coupled than a DP system.
AMD's dual-core chips have two separate L1 caches, two separate L2 caches, etc. However, they share the HT hardware and memory controller, etc.
The caches are ~50% of die area, the cores maybe 30% and the other 20% is memory controller, HT controller(s), and other miscellaneous hardware. So, a dual-core processor performs better than a DP system and uses 180% of the die area of a UP system rather than 200%. The savings is slight on the CPU, but it also saves a CPU socket, motherboard traces, power circuitry, and on and on and on.
In fact, the only disadvantage is that you now have two cores to feed with 1 memory controller rather than 2 cores with 2 memory controllers, and I'd be willing to bet that AMD's memory controller has some headroom.
So, while a dual-core CPU will probably cost about the same as 2 separate cores (more expensive die offset by lower packaging and testing costs), the systems they go into can be a lot cheaper for the same performance. Also, this lets you pack more performance into a given area, and do it cheaply too, which is something AMD have always been good at.
Actually, even without a NUMA-aware OS, the worst-case dual (and almost quad) memory latency is less than a Xeon's.
What really sets the Opteron apart in MP scenarios is the bandwidth. Each chip gets 6.4G/sec to memory: add more chips, get more bandwidth. The Xeon on the other hand has to share its 6.4G/sec with all the chips in the system, which severely limits its scaling. A quad Opteron has over 25G/sec of aggregate memory bandwidth, while a quad Xeon is stuck with its 6.4G shared 4 ways. That's half the bandwidth of a 400MHz P4 - no wonder the quad Xeons are often barely faster than the duals.
Add to this that cache snoops and other bus traffic all have to share the same FSB on the Xeon whereas on the Opteron local memory accesses don't touch the HT links at all. For a standard 2P system, this frees up 3.2G/sec of HT link bandwidth, and a NUMA-aware OS only increases the efficiency of the system.
Despite Intel's recent marketing push, they really don't have the best CPU, and don't have the best system either. There are still considerable advantages to choosing a Xeon system but these days they have little to do with the chip or the board and a lot to do with Intel backing. That's an advantage that will quickly evaporate as industry gets comfortable with non-Intel parts.
WHAT end user usability?! You're absolutely right that the average user glazes over when you mention HTML, CSS, the DOM, PNG, GIF, LZW and all the rest. You're absolutely right that when a web page renders wrong or fails to work, the user knows not whom to blame nor what the cause of his or her problem. But this assertion that things just work is a complete fiction. We already know that Microsoft cannot be trusted to create, maintain, and support standards (they were given that opportunity with.DOC and failed abysmally). Your conclusion that somehow web standards compliance is not a usability issue is unfathomable to me. What could possibly be a more basic usability requirement for a web browser than that it properly display content? That is the sole function of a web browser, and any failure in that area must be regarded as a usability disaster. High-level integration with mail, a contact manager, calendar application, OS-level components for the display of rich media and all the rest are bells and whistles.
These bells and whistles are a major and growing use of the internet and I will agree with you 100% that a huge fraction of the current 'net-using population would abandon the web if these functions ceased to work. However, media distribution does not require the internet. Rich content can be delivered without HTTP or even TCP/IP, without CSS or PNG or XML. So to abandon the standards that make the internet work in favor of tighter OS-level integration of features only peripherally related to the core internet technologies represents, to my mind, a usability failure of the highest order and a gross misapprehension of the purpose and use of a web browser.
The only way your "just works" ideal will ever just work is if everyone involved writes to a common set of standards. These standards, while technical and dry and completely beyond the scope of interest of the average web user are none the less critical to delivering on the promise of the world wide web. The Microsoft person who commented that CSS- and other standards-compliance was a non-issue from the end-user's perspective only demonstrates his or her complete misunderstanding of the issue. In every other facet of modern life, from the tiniest screw to the largest ship, from the humblest nail to the world's biggest slab of glass, standards are what permit us to get work done. They are what ensure that the light bulb you buy fits into the socket at home; they are why your appliances all work when you plug them in; they are why your front porch is level and why your stop lights all are hung in the same order for the color-blind. Basic adherence to established industry standards is the single most important usability trait that can ever exist for any product designed to work with others.
To fail to recognize this on a personal level is unfortunate; on a corporate level, reprehensible.
Ok, I'll be stupid and play ball with your lame car analogy.
If you take your car to some lamer's bodyshop and he makes it slower and breaks the airbags and pours glue on your back seat, it's your fault for letting that idiot work on it. If you then take that car to a licensed GM shop, in fact the very dealer from whom you bought the car originally, and the car burns to the ground because the mechanic, who was smoking, gets caught on the glue while crawling in through the trunk and loses the cigarette in your upholstery while struggling to get free, I'd say the dealer owes you a new car.
The more I gain experience with foreign library systems, the more I respect the South Central Library System, which I grew up using and had rather taken for granted. Within about 3 days, for free, I can get any book in over 50 public libraries covering the entire southern half of the state of Wisconsin shipped to my local branch.
It's bad because libraries are no longer a big archive of collected books (costs too much to track all those dusty titles)
LINKCat, the library catalog system that SCLS uses, keeps track of all those dusty titles virtually for free, and gets them in the hands of the public with a minimum of effort on the part of all involved. Notwithstanding this technology, the library employees I have dealt with at member libraries have been helpful, courteous, and efficient. I have requested titles held in the basement archives a mere 10 minutes before library closing. About 8 minutes later someone returned from the basement with my book, apologizing for her tardiness, explaining that the lights had been turned off already, and she had to hunt through the stacks with a flashlight to get me what I wanted.
Though this level of service seems not to be universally available, public libraries certainly *can* maintain large inventories and be an incredible community resource without exceeding budgetary constraints - I've seen it happen.
That would be $500 extra revenue for Intel. How come they don't do it?
Because they're making and selling as many $1000 chips as the market will support. Now, they can either sell the $1000 chips for less money and sell more of them, or they can sell a slower chip for $500 and keep the $1000 top-end CPU.
As it happens, the math works out in Intel's favor selling a 3.4GHz chip for your eldest son and a 3.2GHz chip for your right arm and a 3.0Ghz chip for a pretty penny. In the begining this is great. Then for a while the 3.4GHz chips get too easy to make and so they sell some of them as 3.2GHz chips and maybe even some as 3.0GHz chips. But until they can make enough 3.6GHz chips to satisfy current demand for 3.4GHz chips, they can't introduce a new speed grade. When the 3.6GHz parts come out, demand increases for the now-cheaper 3.4Ghz parts, and the now-cheaper 3.2GHz parts and the now-low-end 3.0GHz parts. And the cycle repeats.
Intel and AMD don't sell CPUs to consumers. They don't respond to market pressures except at predetermined times, so when demand for high-end parts is less than supply, they sell the high-end parts for less money, and when demand exceeds supply there's a shortage. These are not spot prices as would be paid by a consumer, these are contract prices as would be paid by someone ordering 20,000 chips a month for the next 3 months: there is no other way to respond to surplus or shortage within the current system. Intel would much rather sell a potentially-high-end P4 as a mid-range P4 and make $100 than force the customer to source mid-range parts from AMD.
Best of luck to all involved, Scaled Composites and others. I would love to see the Information Age give way to the Space Age and humanity crawl from the cradle of Earth.
Photoshop is indeed a powerful program for which there is no viable replacement under linux. One can only hope that one day Adobe sees fit to release a linux version.
There is however a very reliable Office replacement under linux. OpenOffice has, for me at least, been more reliable than Microsoft Office. OO has kept up with MSO's changing file formats better than MSO itself has, and has its own native file format that is on average about 3x as space-efficient as Word2k's*. While MSO has a smiling puppy and innumerable braindead wizards, OO is at least on par with MSO in terms of day-to-day usability and functionality, even in mixed environments.
*The same plain text file is about 3x as large in.doc format. A Word document opened in OO and saved in.sxw format is about 1/3 the size, without losing data. A.rtf opened in MSO and saved as.doc is about 3x the size of the same.rtf opened in OO and saved as.sxw. Obviously these values are document-dependent, but I have found that 3x difference to be a good rule of thumb and surprisingly stable. The examples above are not by any means the only comparisons I have done, but are indicative of the methods I've used in making my decision to save documents in OO's native format by default.
Damn right. The only reason I stopped using WP5.1 was that under the NT-based Windowses the virtual DOS machine sucks up 100% of the CPU while not doing anything. So I use OO (Lord does Word suck ass), but to this day I miss decent alignment. Tables are *NOT* a layout device, damnit, no matter how many generations of braindead webpages used 'em that way. Centered title on line 1, left-aligned byline and right-aligned date on line two. And I had a ton of macros to do what I wanted too.
Coolest WP5.1 hack: a macro that would take raw text and stick it into properly-titled and -paginated and -rotated text boxes so you could print it and fold it into a mini book (16 pages per letter-sized sheet). It took about 15 minutes on a 386 to do, but it worked every time.
"Seagate will also offer the new 400GB capacity in its award-winning desktop Seagate External Hard Drive, which is perfect for using less desktop space and travels well with notebook PCs while still offering a 100GB capacity."
Seagate makes great stuff. It's too bad their marketing department is so clueless. Getting two products confused isn't a great way to convey professionalism, but these things happen. On the other hand, you don't need to know anything about either product to know that a sentence claiming something offers both 100GB and 400GB capacity just isn't right.
NCQ will be nice. In other products, it's provided a serious boost to performance in multiuser configurations, and remains one of the reasons why SCSI drives always beat IDE drives in server performance, even when the IDE drives are mechanically superior. This new generation of SATA drives, coupled with maturing SATA RAID cards and enclosures, will put huge pressure on SCSI for use in large disk arrays.
RDRAM tech may have been better (in theory), but the implementations available certainly weren't.
i820, anyone?
The only volume chipset I recall that was faster with RDRAM was the dual-channel i840 (I think that's the right number). It was only a smidge faster, and only for a short while before DDR boards caught back up. And it cost an arm and a leg and at least your neighbor's first-born.
Better, aye, but at too high a cost. Intel had contractual obligations to push RDRAM, but everyone else in the market saw an immature, litigious company asking a lot of money for marginally better tech which may or may not have panned out in the market. That's a lot of risk to assume for precious little gain. It's no wonder the memory makers didn't jump on the bandwagon wholeheartedly.
You're pretty optimistic on your power estimtes there.
The Prescott core at 3.4GHz consumes 103W typical, 127W maximum (www.sandpile.org).
Nvidia's latest GPU consumes 120W; ATi's consumes about 70. Nvidia's on a power splurge, but ATi's latest and greatest card is about twice as fast and actually consumes *LESS* power than the 9800XT.
CPUs are a whole lot better positioned to remove that immense heat load, particularly in Intel's forthcoming BTX form factor. Graphics cards are growing to the point that 2-slot-thick cooling is becoming the norm on high-end cards.
I'm not sure this is actually such an issue though. Longhorn has already slipped a lot. It will undoubtedly slip a lot more, and will be intentionally delayed until the hardware to support it is reasonably-priced (after an upgrade cycle to keep their dear friend Intel happy). So the question in my mind is less one of heat as opposed to one of when exactly this sort of hardware will reach the appropriate price point. If these hardware requirements are at all realistic, Microsoft is betting a lot on future hardware advancement at a time when increases in CPU power have practically reached a standstill.
Seriously though, it's been nice for the flash market, which is where the manufacturers are shifting capacity. Prices there have dropped nicely. If both markets continue to do well, more capacity will come online, and prices will drop again across the board until manufacturers start ramping up DDR2 capacity at the expense of DDR1 (as has happened to PC133).
Normal fluctuations in the RAM market - nothing to see here.
I live in Wisconsin, where it's legal to remember conversations you've had, regardless of whether you get a machine's help, even if you can't remember to remind everyone that you'll be remembering. Got all that? Now, what if I IM a friend in NH? She can't record the conversation without asking my permission first, but I can cheerfully log everything? Is that what they're saying? What if I then give her a copy? Sure, it's not (AFAIK) illegal to *accept* a recording of a conversation, but at the same time she'd be party to an act that's illegal in her state - how's that for a rediculous confluence of events?
I'm all for clarifying how existing laws apply to the internet, but not if the result will be something I'd look for in a Python sketch.
At least give Microsoft credit for realizing what sort of hardware they're dealing with.
Hah! Since when have Microsoft ever done anything but make hardware as slow as they can get away with?
No, they have a solid grasp of the market they're dealing with. That being emerging markets where Microsoft has no sizeable installed base with which to compete with Linux. You did notice this doesn't apply in the US or any of the major European countries, right?
This program exists for the same reason that Microsoft practically gives away their software to college students: so people in target markets will be familiar with their product. That familiarity is absolutely crucial to Microsoft: as Linux continues to be more and more compelling from a technical perspective, the only advantage Microsoft has is its familiarity and continuity with the old standard.
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"as secure as they could be made" is not good enough. Not nearly good enough.
"more secure than paper ballots" would be a start. *ONLY* a start, mind you, as it doesn't begin to justify the additional expense, but it'd be a start. I'm not advocating a Chicken Little approach by any means, but sticking your head in the sand and singing "it'll all be OK because the person presiding over this mess said so" stopped being a viable response about when the war in Iraq 'ended'.
We know software that's as bulletproof as our democracy deserves can be written - it runs on mainframes day in and day out for years and years. Then the only reasons why the election hardware/software is so buggy is incompetence or malice, and either way we shouldn't be using it.
There have been some analogies here trying to demonstrate how rediculous this is, but I've got a take I don't see posted already. Let's ignore for a second the technical details of associating to APs, broadcasting one's SSID, "inviting people in" by running a DHCP server, etc.
Wardriving is analagous to walking down the street ringing doorbells. Some people ignore you. Some people come out and say hi. Some invite you in for tea. There's nothing wrong with knocking, even though some knocks precede burglaries. You don't see the cops setting up special task forces to investigate phonecalls even though that's a great way to find out that somebody's home and you shouldn't try to break in, do you?
Maybe I'm missing something, but this whole thing seems rather silly.
Sorry. That doesn't fly.
Bashing would be Bill Maher's constant harping on Bush sitting around reading to kids while planes continue to collide with buildings. Yeah, in hindsight he kinda screwed up, but I'm sure it made sense at the time. It's not like he was going to do anything anyway. The president doesn't gather information, and I'm sure the information gathering went on just fine without him, and was prepared by the time he got somewhere and listened to it.
Bashing would be constantly badmouthing the man every time he takes a break because early on in his presidency, vacationing seemed to be all he got done.
Pointing out a pattern of deliberate, baldfaced lies told by the President in an effort to push his country into a war with an uninvolved sovereign state is not bashing. It's impeachable, and the only reason Bush is still in office is because the Republicans are in charge right now.
I'm not entirely sure what "inflammatory terms" you refer to. "Lied" perhaps? I wouldn't call that "inflammatory" - I'd call it "the uncolored truth". Disputed would be if we found a chemical factory that may have been producing chemical weapons, or a nuclear program that may have been generating power or may have been generating weapons-grade plutonium. Lied is when the country goes to war on the pretense that we're fighting terror and putting down an imminent threat, only to discover that neither is remotely true.
I saw the headline, and do you know what my first reaction was? It wasn't "grrr. Stupid software patents". That came later. My very FIRST reaction was to look for the foot. Because obviously Kodak pursuing software patent claims is absurd. No foot, so I read the article.
I'm not a patent lawyer, and I have better things to do with my time than try to decipher the deliberately-obfuscated language of a patent the article doesn't bother to mention. However, I do know a little bit about computers, and that patent better be a damn sight more specific than "ask for help".
Because I'll bet system calls predate whatever patent Kodak's waving around.
I'm still looking for that foot, only now I want one to kick Kodak in the head.
You, my friend, have a decidedly unsupportable view of anatomy. I suggest a trip to your local bookstore for a textbook on human A&P followed by a trip to your local college bar for the lab portion of the class.
That's interesting that an Apple-centric crowd would be so unimpressed. I've long faulted Apple for poor (-ly suited to me, if not outright wrong) design choices in the past, and think the new iMac looks quite nice.
I was initially skeptical of the cable layout as well, but upon further consideration think it is actually quite reasonable. For one thing, it's harder to access the back of the base than it is the side of the monitor. If you're never adding or removing devices, it matters very little where the cords plug in, but with this layout it's simple to reach around the corner and plug something in temporarily, and not much more difficult to thread a cable through the guide. For another thing, the cables are more-or-less aligned along the horizontal axis of the machine, so tilting the monitor won't pull on your cables.
You're correct that the design is only elegant until you start throwing peripherals at it, and will lose a lot of its simplicity and coolness with a half-dozen USB devices sticking out of it. However, if the machine's as nice as it looks in a fairly bare setup, and still manages to be at least functional with lots of stuff attached, that's a pretty successful design.
I don't think Firewire800 is necessary, but I am surprised Apple didn't include gigE. I suspect it's primarily to differentiate their product lines, but given the cost difference (a few dollars), it's still surprising they didn't throw it in. Another thing that worries me is the hard drive. Apple claim 25dB(A) v. 28dB(A) for the older iMac design. However, the older imacs had a disturbing tendency to develop rather whiny hard drives after a while, completely shooting their low noise floor and doing it with a high-pitched drone which is way more offensive than fan noise. If the new imacs can maintain their low noise floor in actual use, I'll be quite pleased.
Naturally a final opinion will have to wait until I've commandeered one at an apple store for a while, but if they're physically stable, they look like great replacements for our aging iMac/600s.
It's not double the hardware. That's benefit 1. Also, it's massively more closely coupled than a DP system.
AMD's dual-core chips have two separate L1 caches, two separate L2 caches, etc. However, they share the HT hardware and memory controller, etc.
The caches are ~50% of die area, the cores maybe 30% and the other 20% is memory controller, HT controller(s), and other miscellaneous hardware. So, a dual-core processor performs better than a DP system and uses 180% of the die area of a UP system rather than 200%. The savings is slight on the CPU, but it also saves a CPU socket, motherboard traces, power circuitry, and on and on and on.
In fact, the only disadvantage is that you now have two cores to feed with 1 memory controller rather than 2 cores with 2 memory controllers, and I'd be willing to bet that AMD's memory controller has some headroom.
So, while a dual-core CPU will probably cost about the same as 2 separate cores (more expensive die offset by lower packaging and testing costs), the systems they go into can be a lot cheaper for the same performance. Also, this lets you pack more performance into a given area, and do it cheaply too, which is something AMD have always been good at.
Actually, even without a NUMA-aware OS, the worst-case dual (and almost quad) memory latency is less than a Xeon's.
What really sets the Opteron apart in MP scenarios is the bandwidth. Each chip gets 6.4G/sec to memory: add more chips, get more bandwidth. The Xeon on the other hand has to share its 6.4G/sec with all the chips in the system, which severely limits its scaling. A quad Opteron has over 25G/sec of aggregate memory bandwidth, while a quad Xeon is stuck with its 6.4G shared 4 ways. That's half the bandwidth of a 400MHz P4 - no wonder the quad Xeons are often barely faster than the duals.
Add to this that cache snoops and other bus traffic all have to share the same FSB on the Xeon whereas on the Opteron local memory accesses don't touch the HT links at all. For a standard 2P system, this frees up 3.2G/sec of HT link bandwidth, and a NUMA-aware OS only increases the efficiency of the system.
Despite Intel's recent marketing push, they really don't have the best CPU, and don't have the best system either. There are still considerable advantages to choosing a Xeon system but these days they have little to do with the chip or the board and a lot to do with Intel backing. That's an advantage that will quickly evaporate as industry gets comfortable with non-Intel parts.
WHAT end user usability?! You're absolutely right that the average user glazes over when you mention HTML, CSS, the DOM, PNG, GIF, LZW and all the rest. You're absolutely right that when a web page renders wrong or fails to work, the user knows not whom to blame nor what the cause of his or her problem. But this assertion that things just work is a complete fiction. We already know that Microsoft cannot be trusted to create, maintain, and support standards (they were given that opportunity with .DOC and failed abysmally). Your conclusion that somehow web standards compliance is not a usability issue is unfathomable to me. What could possibly be a more basic usability requirement for a web browser than that it properly display content? That is the sole function of a web browser, and any failure in that area must be regarded as a usability disaster. High-level integration with mail, a contact manager, calendar application, OS-level components for the display of rich media and all the rest are bells and whistles.
These bells and whistles are a major and growing use of the internet and I will agree with you 100% that a huge fraction of the current 'net-using population would abandon the web if these functions ceased to work. However, media distribution does not require the internet. Rich content can be delivered without HTTP or even TCP/IP, without CSS or PNG or XML. So to abandon the standards that make the internet work in favor of tighter OS-level integration of features only peripherally related to the core internet technologies represents, to my mind, a usability failure of the highest order and a gross misapprehension of the purpose and use of a web browser.
The only way your "just works" ideal will ever just work is if everyone involved writes to a common set of standards. These standards, while technical and dry and completely beyond the scope of interest of the average web user are none the less critical to delivering on the promise of the world wide web. The Microsoft person who commented that CSS- and other standards-compliance was a non-issue from the end-user's perspective only demonstrates his or her complete misunderstanding of the issue. In every other facet of modern life, from the tiniest screw to the largest ship, from the humblest nail to the world's biggest slab of glass, standards are what permit us to get work done. They are what ensure that the light bulb you buy fits into the socket at home; they are why your appliances all work when you plug them in; they are why your front porch is level and why your stop lights all are hung in the same order for the color-blind. Basic adherence to established industry standards is the single most important usability trait that can ever exist for any product designed to work with others.
To fail to recognize this on a personal level is unfortunate; on a corporate level, reprehensible.
Ok, I'll be stupid and play ball with your lame car analogy.
If you take your car to some lamer's bodyshop and he makes it slower and breaks the airbags and pours glue on your back seat, it's your fault for letting that idiot work on it. If you then take that car to a licensed GM shop, in fact the very dealer from whom you bought the car originally, and the car burns to the ground because the mechanic, who was smoking, gets caught on the glue while crawling in through the trunk and loses the cigarette in your upholstery while struggling to get free, I'd say the dealer owes you a new car.
LINKCat, the library catalog system that SCLS uses, keeps track of all those dusty titles virtually for free, and gets them in the hands of the public with a minimum of effort on the part of all involved. Notwithstanding this technology, the library employees I have dealt with at member libraries have been helpful, courteous, and efficient. I have requested titles held in the basement archives a mere 10 minutes before library closing. About 8 minutes later someone returned from the basement with my book, apologizing for her tardiness, explaining that the lights had been turned off already, and she had to hunt through the stacks with a flashlight to get me what I wanted.
Though this level of service seems not to be universally available, public libraries certainly *can* maintain large inventories and be an incredible community resource without exceeding budgetary constraints - I've seen it happen.
Because they're making and selling as many $1000 chips as the market will support. Now, they can either sell the $1000 chips for less money and sell more of them, or they can sell a slower chip for $500 and keep the $1000 top-end CPU.
As it happens, the math works out in Intel's favor selling a 3.4GHz chip for your eldest son and a 3.2GHz chip for your right arm and a 3.0Ghz chip for a pretty penny. In the begining this is great. Then for a while the 3.4GHz chips get too easy to make and so they sell some of them as 3.2GHz chips and maybe even some as 3.0GHz chips. But until they can make enough 3.6GHz chips to satisfy current demand for 3.4GHz chips, they can't introduce a new speed grade. When the 3.6GHz parts come out, demand increases for the now-cheaper 3.4Ghz parts, and the now-cheaper 3.2GHz parts and the now-low-end 3.0GHz parts. And the cycle repeats.
Intel and AMD don't sell CPUs to consumers. They don't respond to market pressures except at predetermined times, so when demand for high-end parts is less than supply, they sell the high-end parts for less money, and when demand exceeds supply there's a shortage. These are not spot prices as would be paid by a consumer, these are contract prices as would be paid by someone ordering 20,000 chips a month for the next 3 months: there is no other way to respond to surplus or shortage within the current system. Intel would much rather sell a potentially-high-end P4 as a mid-range P4 and make $100 than force the customer to source mid-range parts from AMD.
Best of luck to all involved, Scaled Composites and others. I would love to see the Information Age give way to the Space Age and humanity crawl from the cradle of Earth.
Photoshop is indeed a powerful program for which there is no viable replacement under linux. One can only hope that one day Adobe sees fit to release a linux version.
.doc format. A Word document opened in OO and saved in .sxw format is about 1/3 the size, without losing data. A .rtf opened in MSO and saved as .doc is about 3x the size of the same .rtf opened in OO and saved as .sxw. Obviously these values are document-dependent, but I have found that 3x difference to be a good rule of thumb and surprisingly stable. The examples above are not by any means the only comparisons I have done, but are indicative of the methods I've used in making my decision to save documents in OO's native format by default.
There is however a very reliable Office replacement under linux. OpenOffice has, for me at least, been more reliable than Microsoft Office. OO has kept up with MSO's changing file formats better than MSO itself has, and has its own native file format that is on average about 3x as space-efficient as Word2k's*. While MSO has a smiling puppy and innumerable braindead wizards, OO is at least on par with MSO in terms of day-to-day usability and functionality, even in mixed environments.
*The same plain text file is about 3x as large in
Damn right. The only reason I stopped using WP5.1 was that under the NT-based Windowses the virtual DOS machine sucks up 100% of the CPU while not doing anything. So I use OO (Lord does Word suck ass), but to this day I miss decent alignment. Tables are *NOT* a layout device, damnit, no matter how many generations of braindead webpages used 'em that way. Centered title on line 1, left-aligned byline and right-aligned date on line two. And I had a ton of macros to do what I wanted too.
Coolest WP5.1 hack: a macro that would take raw text and stick it into properly-titled and -paginated and -rotated text boxes so you could print it and fold it into a mini book (16 pages per letter-sized sheet). It took about 15 minutes on a 386 to do, but it worked every time.
"Seagate will also offer the new 400GB capacity in its award-winning desktop Seagate External Hard Drive, which is perfect for using less desktop space and travels well with notebook PCs while still offering a 100GB capacity."
Seagate makes great stuff. It's too bad their marketing department is so clueless. Getting two products confused isn't a great way to convey professionalism, but these things happen. On the other hand, you don't need to know anything about either product to know that a sentence claiming something offers both 100GB and 400GB capacity just isn't right.
NCQ will be nice. In other products, it's provided a serious boost to performance in multiuser configurations, and remains one of the reasons why SCSI drives always beat IDE drives in server performance, even when the IDE drives are mechanically superior. This new generation of SATA drives, coupled with maturing SATA RAID cards and enclosures, will put huge pressure on SCSI for use in large disk arrays.
RDRAM tech may have been better (in theory), but the implementations available certainly weren't.
i820, anyone?
The only volume chipset I recall that was faster with RDRAM was the dual-channel i840 (I think that's the right number). It was only a smidge faster, and only for a short while before DDR boards caught back up. And it cost an arm and a leg and at least your neighbor's first-born.
Better, aye, but at too high a cost. Intel had contractual obligations to push RDRAM, but everyone else in the market saw an immature, litigious company asking a lot of money for marginally better tech which may or may not have panned out in the market. That's a lot of risk to assume for precious little gain. It's no wonder the memory makers didn't jump on the bandwagon wholeheartedly.
I saw that (sans Q3) on a Bebox more years ago than I can count.
As a demo, I find "we can play 6 videos at once" decidedly unimpressive.
Particularly since it's a hideously cooked demo.
You're pretty optimistic on your power estimtes there.
The Prescott core at 3.4GHz consumes 103W typical, 127W maximum (www.sandpile.org).
Nvidia's latest GPU consumes 120W; ATi's consumes about 70. Nvidia's on a power splurge, but ATi's latest and greatest card is about twice as fast and actually consumes *LESS* power than the 9800XT.
CPUs are a whole lot better positioned to remove that immense heat load, particularly in Intel's forthcoming BTX form factor. Graphics cards are growing to the point that 2-slot-thick cooling is becoming the norm on high-end cards.
I'm not sure this is actually such an issue though. Longhorn has already slipped a lot. It will undoubtedly slip a lot more, and will be intentionally delayed until the hardware to support it is reasonably-priced (after an upgrade cycle to keep their dear friend Intel happy). So the question in my mind is less one of heat as opposed to one of when exactly this sort of hardware will reach the appropriate price point. If these hardware requirements are at all realistic, Microsoft is betting a lot on future hardware advancement at a time when increases in CPU power have practically reached a standstill.
Well, here in the USA, we do use very heavy passengers:)
3, actually. Only I have no idea which neighbor it is.
Clearly, I should share Britney songs with 100,000 of my closest friends through a net link paid for by one of my closest neighbors.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Seriously though, it's been nice for the flash market, which is where the manufacturers are shifting capacity. Prices there have dropped nicely. If both markets continue to do well, more capacity will come online, and prices will drop again across the board until manufacturers start ramping up DDR2 capacity at the expense of DDR1 (as has happened to PC133).
Normal fluctuations in the RAM market - nothing to see here.
Schizophrenic?
I live in Wisconsin, where it's legal to remember conversations you've had, regardless of whether you get a machine's help, even if you can't remember to remind everyone that you'll be remembering. Got all that? Now, what if I IM a friend in NH? She can't record the conversation without asking my permission first, but I can cheerfully log everything? Is that what they're saying? What if I then give her a copy? Sure, it's not (AFAIK) illegal to *accept* a recording of a conversation, but at the same time she'd be party to an act that's illegal in her state - how's that for a rediculous confluence of events?
I'm all for clarifying how existing laws apply to the internet, but not if the result will be something I'd look for in a Python sketch.
Hah! Since when have Microsoft ever done anything but make hardware as slow as they can get away with?
No, they have a solid grasp of the market they're dealing with. That being emerging markets where Microsoft has no sizeable installed base with which to compete with Linux. You did notice this doesn't apply in the US or any of the major European countries, right?
This program exists for the same reason that Microsoft practically gives away their software to college students: so people in target markets will be familiar with their product. That familiarity is absolutely crucial to Microsoft: as Linux continues to be more and more compelling from a technical perspective, the only advantage Microsoft has is its familiarity and continuity with the old standard.