At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB
Worse yet, a couple paragraphs later he points out that some service is apparently leaking memory non-stop... so who knows how long it had been running by the time he got around to checking memory usage?
The whole article was pretty lame. He could saved everybody some time by just saying, "Build 4053 is basically the same as the PDC build 4051. Thanks." Or perhaps by not bothering with the article at all.
Let's assume it costs Xerox more to design and manufacture the nice printer. Somehow they have to recoup thier costs so they gouge you on the cartridge.
I've never understood this kind of thinking (which only seems to happen in the printer market). What's so strange about expecting them to just charge more for the printer in the first place???
Ah, the good old computer/car analogy: "This Ferrari 575 Maranello cost us $120,000 to build and would normally have a retail price of $275,000, but since the Ford Taurus only costs $18,000, we're just going to make up the difference [waves hands] some day by selling you really expensive custom tires."
Actually, the analogy works on another level. At that point, somebody who really could afford the Ferrari would just treat them as disposable -- which is exactly what I do with my crappy cheap inkjet printers. They rarely seem to survive more than one or two cartridge-swap cycles -- usually a cheap nylon gear strips somewhere inside.
That would be interesting if it was true -- but it isn't. RLE is not a good compression choice unless you're using highly artificial images with large sections of uniform color (usually at 8 bits), but it certainly isn't dependent upon or only effective with "consecutive gray pixels".
For example, this GIF image (artibrarily chosen from a Google search) contains a bunch of colors and almost no gray. When saved as an uncompressed BMP, the file is 76K. When RLE is turned on, the image is only 14K.
RLE isn't going to do you much good with a "real" image -- a photo, or anti-aliased rendering, or something along those lines -- but that's a failing of RLE itself (or more accurately, a failing of the person who chooses to apply RLE to that kind of image).
Bulk mailing is almost free, which is why most people get huge quantities of junk mail. The scenario is very close to what you ask us to consider. We don't rent mailboxes, but we do subsidize the majority of bulk mail costs through our private mail postage. Why do you think the price of stamps continues to increase?
If bulk mail had to be shipped around the country and delivered to people's doorstep through a system purely paid for by bulk mail fees, the system would collapse. (Not that you'd hear any complaints from me.)
Opt-out works in postal mail only because of the threat of federal law and the fact that the post office really might (probably, eventually) come after you if enough people lodge complaints. Direct-mail advertisers couldn't care less if they accidentally spam out to "hostile prospects" -- it doesn't really cost anything extra in the big picture. And of course, it requires a great deal more effort to opt-out of a physical bulk mail campaign (do you send a letter? make a call? where do you find the correct contact information?) so the actual opt-out rates are pretty low.
I'm personally more annoyed by physical junk mail than I've ever been by spam. I receive a lot of spam each day, but it's almost all filtered automatically. That's difficult to do with a physical mailbox...
It's funny that this came up. A friend of mine, who happens to also be a client (I built his machines and network on the side), just called me with a problem that turned out to be a dead network card. In an attempt to fix it himself before calling me (he's a good-enough friend that I help him for free), he jacked the RAM up from 128MB to 512MB.
It would appear your first assumption is very true.:)
something as simple as CF form factor memory, with the pin out changed, or a different operational voltage
That still isn't embrace and extend. That's just a purely custom solution which happens to have started life as a standard piece of equipment. Nothing about that would be a "threat" to anyone with an interest in the related standard -- which is the point of the "extend" part.
Java is the popular example for embrace and extend. In that case, the Microsoft JVM was capable of running standard Java bytecode: embrace. However, MS added non-standard features, allegedly to "lock in" developers to their VJ product: extend. If it worked the way you describe it, the MS JVM wouldn't run standard JVM bytecode at all.
I'm also not saying it's necessarily impossible to imagine an embrace-and-extend angle to this -- although nothing comes to mind, and it would be difficult to imagine a justification since standards worth controlling are few & far between in the console world -- I'm just saying I don't see any evidence of embrace and extend in anything you've brought up so far.
If you feel belittled by that, sorry, but I still think you don't get it.
I can second that. I read about Spambayes here on slashdot only a few months ago. I had some problems with it identifying legit messages as spam at first, but once it was trained and I tweaked a few other settings, it's pretty reliable. I dip into the spam folder about once a week, and right now it's error rate is about one falsely identified e-mail every two weeks or so, something in the neighborhood of 200 correctly tagged pieces of spam in that same timeframe, and around 100 correctly tagged pieces of "good" mail.
I wish it had an option to let messages through from anybody in my address book. That would literally eliminate all of the false tagging as spam that I see right now. That's minor, though -- at the rate it has been improving, I figure within a couple months the false hits should drop off to almost nothing.
You can transfer everything it has learned to another machine, so as an interesting experiment, once that happens I'm going to put it on my wife's machine and see how well my rules apply to her mail.
It's definitely worth checking out, and give it a few days to do some learning and notice how it steadily improves.
That's an old urban legend. Snopes dates it at 1998, but I received an account of some variation via e-mail quite a bit before then. (Even Snopes points out it was in a 1998 movie, so it had to be around before then, unless the movie was the originator.)
I ran a couple of Fidonet nodes over the years (even in that period when the Fidonet-to-Internet interface was new and cool) and I don't recall seeing any. It would have been fairly easy to identify the source of the spam, I think. I also think any spam mailing campaigns would have been noticed quickly (near the source) because any truly large volume of mail would have slowed things down in a huge and annoying way. (Remember that many of those hubs operated on long-distance dial-up connections, so people tended to monitor how much traffic they were relaying.) Compared to today's connectivity, the system back then was very small and limited.
There was a more entertaining rendition of this concept (if somewhat less intellectually stimulating) in a wryly satirical book called "Dad's Nuke" by Marc Laidlaw. Families gathered around the television each evening to watch the latest episodes of their neighbor's lives...
We know the motto, but it doesn't apply here, and you obviously don't understand it.
The idea is that you subvert an existing standard by adopting it (embrace) then add non-standard features/capabilities/whatever (extend). Once people come to rely upon these proprietary capabilities, anything truly compliant with the regular standard is either less attractive to a consumer, or not an option for those who are "locked in" by a reliance on those features.
Since there is no standard involved, there isn't anything to embrace, let alone extend.
As many others have already posted, the most likely reason for this is to prevent piracy in the form of DVDs copied to the HDD (either the stock one, or an expanded one). That would probably indicate there won't be an HDD aftermarket. Except to whatever degree putting Linux on the XBOX helped pirates figure out how to circumvent piracy protections, Linux on the XBOX really isn't doesn't pose any sort of threat -- certainly not one worth a major hardware overhaul.
But any anti-MS post is always good for a couple of positive mod points around here.
If America wasn't ass-backwards, I'd just SMS the stuff to my cell phone.
Give up your ass-backwards ways. I'm in Florida and I send text to my cell phone all day long. Some of my servers send activity reports every few hours. I also threw together a simple web page to help friends and family members send messages to my phone. Easy.
Speaking as a programmer whose first programming experience was Z80 assembly with 4K of RAM, I had to seriously revamp my thinking in recent years, but basically 32-bit processors work significantly better with 32-bit values. Also, except when memory is statically allocated and you've forced the compiler to pack memory allocated to your variables, that carefully considered allocation of a single byte is going to take up 32 bits of actual memory anyway, because once again, the CPU can access it that way significantly faster.
In a nutshell, if you use a byte, short, or int, you're slowing down the machine. The only good reason to optimize to that level is when you're expecting memory problems, and as your professor pointed out, that is rarely a consideration these days (especially when you add modern paging techniques to the vast amounts of available physical memory).
The more interesting question is the chicken-and-egg angle on runtime bloat -- did RAM increase because users needed it to run steadily ballooning applications, or did applications get bloated because cheap-as-dirt RAM meant end user machines had memory to spare? (I suppose both are probably true... which would be a bizarre conclusion if we were actually talking about chickens and eggs...)
Slow movement means less inertia to shed in the form of heat through the braking system. Your speed while not using the brakes is irrelevant. It's your speed when you do use the brakes that generates heat. You can use them all day long if you're not moving.
what more do you really need on a standard "family" car?
Plugs, oil filter, air filter, battery, PCV valve, fuel filter, plug wires. And if the hood is sealed, you're not going to have access to a wide range of fairly important fluids, either -- oil, brake fluid, auto trans fluid, coolant.
I believe this is really just a ploy to promote the concept of "throw-away cars". You can get away with not touching those things for three years in most cases, but only if you don't plan to keep the car for much more than those three years... and the next buyer, who'd better be the type who performs regular maintenance -- he is screwed.
While that's usually true, it isn't ALWAYS true. I high school I had a friend who filled her unleaded-only Rabbit with diesel. When she told me about this shortly after the damage was undone, I said it was impossible because the nozzle wouldn't fit, so we took the Rabbit up to a gas station and sure enough, it fit. To this day, twenty years later, she is still annoyed that it didn't just run right in spite of her mistake.
Actually, if you're in slow-moving traffic, your brakes may not heat up much at all. Most regular brake fluid (e.g. not hi-temp racing fluid) has a wet-boiling temperature in the neighborhood of 300 degrees F -- not much higher than the boiling point of water. Also, even if the temp does peak above 212 F, brakes actually cool down fairly fast, especially at such low temperatures. In regular around-town driving, you may not boil enough water to create any noticable effect.
Where he'll get into trouble is when he needs brakes the most -- a panic stop, or slowing down coming off that highway off-ramp, for example. Temperatures will elevate for an extended period of time, the water will boil, the pedal goes to the floor, and the local mortician scores another $10K for services rendered.
Longer term, that much water in the lines will cause severe corrosion of the brake lines and possibly inside the caliper.
Suggestions for your Season Pass list? "Scrubs". "Red Dwarf". "South Park". the revamped "Headbangers Ball", maybe, though maybe not. Oh, and those Discovery, History, and TLC channel shows you like, if you must.
An excellent example of why TiVo is great. You never have to watch the crap other people like.:)
The concern is that hardware players will eventually be changed to refuse to play media without DRM tagging (which assclowns like Fraunhofer can force upon them because they own the MP3 format).
I suppose the another possible concern is that the DRM will involve some kind of encryption which would prevent (thanks to the DMCA) anything but a legally licensed player (in code or in hardware) from reading the audio stream, making it effectively illegal to remove the DRM changes. Of course, at that point it would be an MP3 in name only -- not that most of your Man On The Street types would care, or probably even know.
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At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB
Worse yet, a couple paragraphs later he points out that some service is apparently leaking memory non-stop... so who knows how long it had been running by the time he got around to checking memory usage?
The whole article was pretty lame. He could saved everybody some time by just saying, "Build 4053 is basically the same as the PDC build 4051. Thanks." Or perhaps by not bothering with the article at all.
Let's assume it costs Xerox more to design and manufacture the nice printer. Somehow they have to recoup thier costs so they gouge you on the cartridge.
I've never understood this kind of thinking (which only seems to happen in the printer market). What's so strange about expecting them to just charge more for the printer in the first place???
Ah, the good old computer/car analogy: "This Ferrari 575 Maranello cost us $120,000 to build and would normally have a retail price of $275,000, but since the Ford Taurus only costs $18,000, we're just going to make up the difference [waves hands] some day by selling you really expensive custom tires."
Actually, the analogy works on another level. At that point, somebody who really could afford the Ferrari would just treat them as disposable -- which is exactly what I do with my crappy cheap inkjet printers. They rarely seem to survive more than one or two cartridge-swap cycles -- usually a cheap nylon gear strips somewhere inside.
consistently presented as factual down through the ages
Sorta like that flat-earth thing?
If they keep saying it, it MUST be true. (Amen.)
That would be interesting if it was true -- but it isn't. RLE is not a good compression choice unless you're using highly artificial images with large sections of uniform color (usually at 8 bits), but it certainly isn't dependent upon or only effective with "consecutive gray pixels".
For example, this GIF image (artibrarily chosen from a Google search) contains a bunch of colors and almost no gray. When saved as an uncompressed BMP, the file is 76K. When RLE is turned on, the image is only 14K.
RLE isn't going to do you much good with a "real" image -- a photo, or anti-aliased rendering, or something along those lines -- but that's a failing of RLE itself (or more accurately, a failing of the person who chooses to apply RLE to that kind of image).
Bulk mailing is almost free, which is why most people get huge quantities of junk mail. The scenario is very close to what you ask us to consider. We don't rent mailboxes, but we do subsidize the majority of bulk mail costs through our private mail postage. Why do you think the price of stamps continues to increase?
If bulk mail had to be shipped around the country and delivered to people's doorstep through a system purely paid for by bulk mail fees, the system would collapse. (Not that you'd hear any complaints from me.)
Opt-out works in postal mail only because of the threat of federal law and the fact that the post office really might (probably, eventually) come after you if enough people lodge complaints. Direct-mail advertisers couldn't care less if they accidentally spam out to "hostile prospects" -- it doesn't really cost anything extra in the big picture. And of course, it requires a great deal more effort to opt-out of a physical bulk mail campaign (do you send a letter? make a call? where do you find the correct contact information?) so the actual opt-out rates are pretty low.
I'm personally more annoyed by physical junk mail than I've ever been by spam. I receive a lot of spam each day, but it's almost all filtered automatically. That's difficult to do with a physical mailbox...
Anybody feel like helping him with the definition of "troll"? :)
It's funny that this came up. A friend of mine, who happens to also be a client (I built his machines and network on the side), just called me with a problem that turned out to be a dead network card. In an attempt to fix it himself before calling me (he's a good-enough friend that I help him for free), he jacked the RAM up from 128MB to 512MB.
:)
It would appear your first assumption is very true.
something as simple as CF form factor memory, with the pin out changed, or a different operational voltage
That still isn't embrace and extend. That's just a purely custom solution which happens to have started life as a standard piece of equipment. Nothing about that would be a "threat" to anyone with an interest in the related standard -- which is the point of the "extend" part.
Java is the popular example for embrace and extend. In that case, the Microsoft JVM was capable of running standard Java bytecode: embrace. However, MS added non-standard features, allegedly to "lock in" developers to their VJ product: extend. If it worked the way you describe it, the MS JVM wouldn't run standard JVM bytecode at all.
I'm also not saying it's necessarily impossible to imagine an embrace-and-extend angle to this -- although nothing comes to mind, and it would be difficult to imagine a justification since standards worth controlling are few & far between in the console world -- I'm just saying I don't see any evidence of embrace and extend in anything you've brought up so far.
If you feel belittled by that, sorry, but I still think you don't get it.
I suppose you're right at some pedantic level, but the quantity of heat in that case is so infinitesimal as to be irrelevant to the discussion.
I can second that. I read about Spambayes here on slashdot only a few months ago. I had some problems with it identifying legit messages as spam at first, but once it was trained and I tweaked a few other settings, it's pretty reliable. I dip into the spam folder about once a week, and right now it's error rate is about one falsely identified e-mail every two weeks or so, something in the neighborhood of 200 correctly tagged pieces of spam in that same timeframe, and around 100 correctly tagged pieces of "good" mail.
I wish it had an option to let messages through from anybody in my address book. That would literally eliminate all of the false tagging as spam that I see right now. That's minor, though -- at the rate it has been improving, I figure within a couple months the false hits should drop off to almost nothing.
You can transfer everything it has learned to another machine, so as an interesting experiment, once that happens I'm going to put it on my wife's machine and see how well my rules apply to her mail.
It's definitely worth checking out, and give it a few days to do some learning and notice how it steadily improves.
That's an old urban legend. Snopes dates it at 1998, but I received an account of some variation via e-mail quite a bit before then. (Even Snopes points out it was in a 1998 movie, so it had to be around before then, unless the movie was the originator.)
I ran a couple of Fidonet nodes over the years (even in that period when the Fidonet-to-Internet interface was new and cool) and I don't recall seeing any. It would have been fairly easy to identify the source of the spam, I think. I also think any spam mailing campaigns would have been noticed quickly (near the source) because any truly large volume of mail would have slowed things down in a huge and annoying way. (Remember that many of those hubs operated on long-distance dial-up connections, so people tended to monitor how much traffic they were relaying.) Compared to today's connectivity, the system back then was very small and limited.
There was a more entertaining rendition of this concept (if somewhat less intellectually stimulating) in a wryly satirical book called "Dad's Nuke" by Marc Laidlaw. Families gathered around the television each evening to watch the latest episodes of their neighbor's lives...
You missed a big physics fact.
:)
That should be the name of a new -1 moderation.
You know the old moto: "embrace and extend".
We know the motto, but it doesn't apply here, and you obviously don't understand it.
The idea is that you subvert an existing standard by adopting it (embrace) then add non-standard features/capabilities/whatever (extend). Once people come to rely upon these proprietary capabilities, anything truly compliant with the regular standard is either less attractive to a consumer, or not an option for those who are "locked in" by a reliance on those features.
Since there is no standard involved, there isn't anything to embrace, let alone extend.
As many others have already posted, the most likely reason for this is to prevent piracy in the form of DVDs copied to the HDD (either the stock one, or an expanded one). That would probably indicate there won't be an HDD aftermarket. Except to whatever degree putting Linux on the XBOX helped pirates figure out how to circumvent piracy protections, Linux on the XBOX really isn't doesn't pose any sort of threat -- certainly not one worth a major hardware overhaul.
But any anti-MS post is always good for a couple of positive mod points around here.
If America wasn't ass-backwards, I'd just SMS the stuff to my cell phone.
Give up your ass-backwards ways. I'm in Florida and I send text to my cell phone all day long. Some of my servers send activity reports every few hours. I also threw together a simple web page to help friends and family members send messages to my phone. Easy.
Speaking as a programmer whose first programming experience was Z80 assembly with 4K of RAM, I had to seriously revamp my thinking in recent years, but basically 32-bit processors work significantly better with 32-bit values. Also, except when memory is statically allocated and you've forced the compiler to pack memory allocated to your variables, that carefully considered allocation of a single byte is going to take up 32 bits of actual memory anyway, because once again, the CPU can access it that way significantly faster.
In a nutshell, if you use a byte, short, or int, you're slowing down the machine. The only good reason to optimize to that level is when you're expecting memory problems, and as your professor pointed out, that is rarely a consideration these days (especially when you add modern paging techniques to the vast amounts of available physical memory).
The more interesting question is the chicken-and-egg angle on runtime bloat -- did RAM increase because users needed it to run steadily ballooning applications, or did applications get bloated because cheap-as-dirt RAM meant end user machines had memory to spare? (I suppose both are probably true... which would be a bizarre conclusion if we were actually talking about chickens and eggs...)
You're in the finance business, but you don't know how to spell "lien"?
Slow movement means less inertia to shed in the form of heat through the braking system. Your speed while not using the brakes is irrelevant. It's your speed when you do use the brakes that generates heat. You can use them all day long if you're not moving.
what more do you really need on a standard "family" car?
Plugs, oil filter, air filter, battery, PCV valve, fuel filter, plug wires. And if the hood is sealed, you're not going to have access to a wide range of fairly important fluids, either -- oil, brake fluid, auto trans fluid, coolant.
I believe this is really just a ploy to promote the concept of "throw-away cars". You can get away with not touching those things for three years in most cases, but only if you don't plan to keep the car for much more than those three years... and the next buyer, who'd better be the type who performs regular maintenance -- he is screwed.
While that's usually true, it isn't ALWAYS true. I high school I had a friend who filled her unleaded-only Rabbit with diesel. When she told me about this shortly after the damage was undone, I said it was impossible because the nozzle wouldn't fit, so we took the Rabbit up to a gas station and sure enough, it fit. To this day, twenty years later, she is still annoyed that it didn't just run right in spite of her mistake.
Where he'll get into trouble is when he needs brakes the most -- a panic stop, or slowing down coming off that highway off-ramp, for example. Temperatures will elevate for an extended period of time, the water will boil, the pedal goes to the floor, and the local mortician scores another $10K for services rendered.
Longer term, that much water in the lines will cause severe corrosion of the brake lines and possibly inside the caliper.
(Personally, I think the whole thing is a troll.)
An excellent example of why TiVo is great. You never have to watch the crap other people like.
You've obviously never actually been to a jobsite.
I suppose the another possible concern is that the DRM will involve some kind of encryption which would prevent (thanks to the DMCA) anything but a legally licensed player (in code or in hardware) from reading the audio stream, making it effectively illegal to remove the DRM changes. Of course, at that point it would be an MP3 in name only -- not that most of your Man On The Street types would care, or probably even know.