I'm replying to my own post to comment on a few things that others have said in their replies.
With regards to all software being copyrighted: I did forget about public domain works. For example, some software created by or for the US Government is automatically part of the public domain. And, of course, anything old enough that the copyright has expired becomes part of the public domain. There isn't any software that old, though.
It should be noted that, as I understand it, one cannot "place" something in the public domain. Any remarks to that affect have no legal standing. Or so I'm told. Like most here, IANAL.
To those who wrote about copying vs distributing vs selling vs using vs installing and so on: You are arguing semantics. I've got better things to do with my time.
Finally, to those who dispute the legal standing of Microsoft's licensing tactics: The courts do not agree with you. Go ahead and violate the major points in Microsoft's (or some other large software company's) licenses. If it goes to court, you'll go to jail (or suffer other legal penalties). That may not be fair or just or right, but it is the way things are right now. Bitching about it on Slashdot won't change that.
"How then can they sue people for pirating software, if it's only the unlicensed USE of that software that is illegal?"
Unlicensed distribution is illegal, too.
Any software is a copyrighted work. As such, you need the permission of the copyright holder before you can distribute (make copies) of it. Software pirates lack such permission, and thus are liable for copyright infringement -- a serious crime today, thanks to the large corporations which own so many valuable copyrights.
Microsoft does not sell copies of their software. They sell licenses. They retain full ownership of the copyrighted work. They sell you a license to use said copyrighted work. You only own the license (which can be terminated), not the software itself.
You can obtain a media kit for just about any Microsoft product by calling your local Microsoft Product Fulfillment sales office. Most of the kits cost $24.95. That includes things like Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server, etc. Any software media you get this way will be marked "Unlicensed Software -- Illegal Without Separate License From Microsoft".
The general idea here is that software -- all software -- is licensed independently of the media it comes on. For example, if you lose or damage your Windows install CD, you can order a replacement for a small fee. The license that you purchased originally is still valid, and is what counts.
These CDs are also used with the various volume licensing programs (Open, Select, and so on) that Microsoft offers. Basically, you order licenses for your organization separately, and then order however many media kits you want or need. You can find more information on these programs at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/.
Now, as far as these discs go: Without a separate license agreement, they are not legal to use. It sure sounds to me that no such license agreement was distributed. I would be very careful about using such media unless I received an agreement.
The fact that some marketing dweeb at Microsoft handled them out is not enough. The fact that the same dweeb said it was okay is not enough, either. A dweeb is not a legal license agreement. Those facts would give you plausible denial in court, and likely decide the case in your favor, but it would have to go to court.
Finally, I doubt Microsoft has any nefarious intentions here. I suspect that Microsoft is just like any other large company, and that as such, they employ people (like this marketing dweeb) who don't understand that software licensing is a legal contract. I'm sure it never occurred to him that he was doing something wrong. Most people don't think before they pirate software. Heck, far too many people don't think, period.
The fact that Microsoft's own people have this problem is certainly ironic, and highlights just how crazy the world of software licensing is.
Zealots, please note: Free/Open Source Software is still licensed. You need to very carefully understand your rights and obligations under a software license, be it a Microsoft EULA, the BSD license, or the GPL. Failure to do so may open you up to legal problems, regardless. (Go ahead and incorporate some GPL code into a closed product, and see how the FSF reacts.)
I don't mean to offend, but you obviously don't know what you are talking about.
The space shuttle is an amazing technology, but all the shuttles are going to fly until they can't.
Of course. Why would they stop using them if they were still good? The orbiters were designed to be able to launched at least 100 times. The Columbia, while over twenty years old, was still well within its operational lifetime. There are commercial jetliners twice as old as Columbia still in active service today.
Furthermore, it isn't like this was some beat-up automobile that someone was still trying to coax a few more miles out of. Each orbiter is subject to a complete inspection after every launch. Systems which can no longer do their job are upgraded or replaced. NASA's shuttle fleet is probably the best maintained equipment in human history.
"...why does it have to re-enter so fast..."
Because it is in orbit. An orbit is achieved by traveling fast enough that your rate of fall toward the center of gravity (Earth, in this case) is canceled out. I believe the orbiter travels at a relative ground speed of something like 17,000 miles per hour.
In order to decelerate from that great velocity, they use the atmospheric breaking. Just as the breaks in your car use friction to slow the car, the orbiter uses atmospheric friction to slow the orbiter.
It is an inherently dangerous situation (second only to launch in risk), but an unavoidable one.
...It should be able to fly itself anywhere after re-entry...
How?
It's a reasonable question. There is a good reason every spacecraft ever flown by man has used an unpowered re-entry: Fuel. You would need a lot of fuel to control that kind of velocity. That means added weight, and weight is everything when it comes to launching a vehicle from a gravity well. Every pound of weight on the space shuttle costs approximately five thousand dollars to launch.
A powered landing would not only be impractically expensive, it would likely be technologically impossible. It makes no sense.
...crew ejection...
Again: How? Velocities of thousands of miles per hour. Altitudes of hundreds of thousands of miles. Temperatures of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't like they can just jump out. To survive, you would basically need to build another spacecraft. See above about weight.
...tiles falling off...
The heat shield is one of the weaker points in the design of most spacecraft. Keep in mind that building a realistic heat shield pushes our materials technology to the edge. While you might think that building a single surface with no seams would be better, but that is not so. It would in fact be considerably harder and more expensive to build. It would also be much harder to maintain. The shuttle's tiles can be easily replaced when they inevitably degrade. Not so with a single surface.
...lift off and land in poor weather...
On one hand, you're suggesting infeasible or impossible improvements. Now you suggest they subject it to unnecessary risk? Why?
...more monitoring to know if something can go wrong...
The space shuttle is already one of the most heavily monitored devices ever built by man. Huge amounts of data are constantly transmitted, recorded, and analyized by computers and people, both onboard the spacecraft and on the ground. What do you suggest they do differently?
"...do Shuttles carry flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders..."
The shuttle, like most NASA spacecraft, is continuously monitored by ground stations. Crew conversations, control inputs, flight data, systems telemetry, everything is recorded in incredible detail. NASA has already started the process of reviewing these records for possible clues.
There is nothing like the so-called "black boxes" (they're actually bright orange) carried by commercial aircraft. For most any kind of failure, the ground telemetry is sufficient, and for the few cases where it is not, it is very unlikely that any kind of recorder could be recovered.
If an accident occurs during spaceflight, you have a practically infinite search area. Simply getting a spacecraft out to any given point stretches the limits of our current technology. The odds of finding the right point are literally astronomical.
During re-entry, the spacecraft is traveling at thousands of miles per hour, hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Between re-entry stress and the impact force, simply building a recorder that could survive would be decidedly non-trivial. Even assuming you did build it, it would likely be very heavy (shielding). Increased weight means a hugely increased cost -- it costs approximately five thousand dollars per pound to launch something using the NASA shuttle. And the search area for the recorder would immense -- something falling from that height, at that speed, could land practically anywhere.
I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, but the technical challanges and engineering costs are huge, and the improvement over the ground telemetry systems would be marginal.
"I like the Opera web browser a lot, but it is closed source... [and] costs money..."
The poster raises the popular specter of "closed source". Yet he goes on to complain about the cost of the software.
All software costs money to develop. The only way Free Software can sustain itself is through community contributions: People (and companies) fund the development -- either directly with code, or indirectly with cash. Free Software is about Freedom, not cost.
I wonder how much money this person has donated to the Phoenix project?
I wonder, if Opera gave away their browser, would this person still be unhappy?
I wonder if the poster is interested in Freedom, or simply a Free Lunch?
"...is poking around inside your machine when it's still turned on a good idea?"
Hot-swap is like nuclear power: It can be used for good or evil.;-) (With apologies to Scott Adams.)
Seriously, hot-swap is probably not something you want to give to the average luser. I tell some of people to shutdown their computers before swapping anything (USB, PCMCIA, etc.) just because it is easier for them to understand.
In a server situation, though, hot-swap is often a requirement. Redundant disks really want to go along with hot-swap. Even the ability to expand storage while online is useful. High-end servers these days have hot-swap PCI; hot-swap disks are expected as a matter of course.
"Apple, when designing the Firewire physical port looked into what it would take to build a rugged, tough, port that would accept the rigors of being connected and unconnected repeatedly."
Which makes sense. ATA (in any form), however, is not intended to be connected and unconnected repeatedly. Anyone who has ever bent the pins on a drive, or pulled the IDC right off the ribbon, can tell you it has been this way from day one. ATA is supposed to live inside the computer and be touched only rarely.
That being said, from what I've read, the new Serial ATA cables are likely to stand up to abuse better than the ribbons we have now. The connectors are smaller (= less friction = less mechanical stress), and there are no pins -- only edge contacts. But it still is not designed for abuse. Don't do that, then.
"...the fscking cable kept coming undone... written off as 'a prototype problem'..."
Dude, have you ever seen prototype hardware before? That sort of thing is normal. I've seen prototype systems with so many ECO wires that the cover wouldn't close. I've seen boards with parts missing. You cannot base anything on the quality of this sort of stuff. It is the hardware equivalent of a "beta" or "development" release.
As for coverage, Tom devoted a whole page to it -- what more do you want?
"When you bunch the individual wires up like that, you destroy the shielding."
Good round IDE cables have shielding around individual wires, and between rows, to keep things working. Like most things with the IBM-PC, there is considerable variation in quality (and price). People need to realize that getting an I/O cable for a buck might not be a good thing...
"does anyone know exactly what to call things like the promise and Highpoint "Raid" controllers that rely on BIOS hooks and software drivers to do the RAID dirty work?"
"Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?"
People often complain that SCSI costs 3X more than ATA, when the HDA (Hard Disk Assembly) is often the same in both. "Why does SCSI cost so much more?" they ask.
That is the wrong question. They should instead ask, "Why does ATA cost so much less?"
The minimum quality level you see with ATA is significantly lower than for SCSI. You can find some really crappy ATA parts out there, and you can find vendors to sell them, and people to buy them. The least-effort engineering that ATA gets is why you can buy a 100 GB hard disk for a buck or whatever. They simply do not put a lot of engineering into a product that cheap.
Now, compare that to the market SCSI gets used in. You are not going to build a $10,000 workstation or server and then put a crap hard disk in it. About the only place SCSI gets used is in that kind of high-end equipment, so the demand is for well-engineered SCSI products. Anyone pushing the kind of crap that ATA is would be laughed at.
"Now if only they would do the same with their drivers!"
I known someone who once worked for MetroLink. He was part of the team that was writing the NVidia device driver for Metro-X. They were a source licensee, under NDA, yadda yadda, so they had access to the NVidia driver source.
He said that the NVidia driver source is highly coupled with the chip design. Apparently, the NVidia driver people have intimate knowledge of the hardware design, and take advantage of it. This lets the driver exploit as much of the hardware's potential as possible. However, it also means that the driver has specific knowledge of the hardware design.
Given that NVidia's sole business is chip design, you can bet that they will never release source for that driver. It contains too much of their business. (No, it is not a chip schematic, but that isn't the point. It contains enough to make their lawyers unhappy.)
For better or worse, that is the way it is with NVidia. If you do not like it, do not buy their cards.
One of the major reasons streaming media is used today is not for live productions, but rather, as a misguided and ill-conceived form of copy-protection and content-control. If Real goes open, and that creates a perception that Real is easier to copy, will the media cartel (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) drop Real entirely, in favor of Windows Media or some other more suitably evil technology?
In other words, could this make the Open Source streaming media situation worse, at least in the short-term?
"I think it won't work out, because there's too much legacy stuff that there will always be confusion at this point about what "mega" and "kilo" mean with computers."
Not to mention the fact that computers are incapable of "thinking" in anything but a power of two. You will not find a discrete quantity of 10 (or a power thereof) bytes anywhere in a computer system. This makes the SI units useless for computers. While re-defining them for use in computers was and still is an abuse, the lack of applicability of the conventional SI units makes it largely a non-issue. The only people who care are are HDD manufacturers who rate drives in "millions of bytes" so they can swindle stupid customers.
"What's the point of a sig about your email address when you don't even display one?"
When I wrote that signature, Slashdot had the concept of a "display email address", which was always shown. I had a spam-guard in that field.
Then I did not visit slashdot for about a year. Things have changed.
Anyway, since you pointed that out (thank you, BTW), I have updated my signature to include the spam-guarded address that was previously displayed automatically. (No, I do not trust the spam-guards built-in to Slashdot.)
Information is still sketchy, but this appears to be a design issue (i.e., different components interacting badly due to assumptions) rather than a bug. It could even happen on non-Athlon systems, if the processor in use happens to tickle the same conditions.
"this is something....that mac users dont have to worry about.:)"
While I suspect you are correct, there is/was discussion on LKML about whether or not other architectures would be vulnerable to this issue. The PPC was specifically mentioned.
Yesterday, information became widely available that described possible stability issues (system crashes, hangs, etc.) when using an AGP video card under Linux in conjunction with an AMD Athlon processor. It was generally called a "bug" in the Athlon CPU.
There is apparently some kind of bad interaction between the AGP GART ("Graphics Address Remapping Table", I think?), speculative memory operations performed by the Athlon processor, the memory mappings used by the kernel, and cache coherency. The details are beyond me, but the practical upshot appears to be that the wrong data ends up being written back to main memory at some point.
I recommend reading the above LKML thread if you suspect you are affected by this issue. Information is still being uncovered, and it is not immediately clear how this occurs, what causes it, who is affected by it, and how to work around it.
In particular, there is some uncertainty as to whether the "mem=nopentium" option actually prevents the problem, or merely makes it less likely to occur.
and turn off 4MB pages (which may or may not prevent the problem from manifesting -- the situation is unclear at this time). You can do this at the boot prompt like this
LILO boot: linux mem=nopentium
or by placing the configuration directive
append="mem=nopentium"
in your/etc/lilo.conf configuration file.
See the manual page for lilo.conf for the details.
"I remember where I was when Challenger exploded. I was in bed, sleeping."
I'm dating myself here, but I was still in public grade school at the time. I remember being herded into another class room, where my whole grade (it was a small town) was assembled to watch the event on TV. After all, this was New Hampshire, and it was our very own Christa McAuliffe that was going up! Some people at the school had actually met her. We were pretty excited.
Until 73 seconds after liftoff.
I still remember, quite vividly, the picture on the TV as the Challenger disappeared in a giant ball of smoke and steam. I remember watching what was left of the solid rock boosters twist and veer away wildly. And I knew, almost instinctively, that those seven people were dead. There was no way someone could survive a ship disintegrating like that.
I can still hears the words of the news announcer in my ears: "At this time, we do not know what has happened, but obviously the Challenger has suffered a major malfunction."
A major malfunction.
And seven people dead.
All because some manager somewhere didn't want to disappoint everyone by holding the launch. People have asked me how I can use the term "manager" as a curse word. This is why.
Slashdot Mirror
"Nostalgically twm would be more cool. fvwm, fvwm2, fvwm95, icewm, sawfish are the 'other' window managers."
Actually, I think twm would be an 'other' as well. I believe the original window manager was xwm.
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/others.html
I'm replying to my own post to comment on a few things that others have said in their replies.
With regards to all software being copyrighted: I did forget about public domain works. For example, some software created by or for the US Government is automatically part of the public domain. And, of course, anything old enough that the copyright has expired becomes part of the public domain. There isn't any software that old, though.
It should be noted that, as I understand it, one cannot "place" something in the public domain. Any remarks to that affect have no legal standing. Or so I'm told. Like most here, IANAL.
To those who wrote about copying vs distributing vs selling vs using vs installing and so on: You are arguing semantics. I've got better things to do with my time.
Finally, to those who dispute the legal standing of Microsoft's licensing tactics: The courts do not agree with you. Go ahead and violate the major points in Microsoft's (or some other large software company's) licenses. If it goes to court, you'll go to jail (or suffer other legal penalties). That may not be fair or just or right, but it is the way things are right now. Bitching about it on Slashdot won't change that.
"How then can they sue people for pirating software, if it's only the unlicensed USE of that software that is illegal?"
Unlicensed distribution is illegal, too.
Any software is a copyrighted work. As such, you need the permission of the copyright holder before you can distribute (make copies) of it. Software pirates lack such permission, and thus are liable for copyright infringement -- a serious crime today, thanks to the large corporations which own so many valuable copyrights.
Microsoft does not sell copies of their software. They sell licenses. They retain full ownership of the copyrighted work. They sell you a license to use said copyrighted work. You only own the license (which can be terminated), not the software itself.
"Did anyone here ... actually read the f*ckin article?"
Come on. This is Slashdot. Do you really need to ask that question?
You can obtain a media kit for just about any Microsoft product by calling your local Microsoft Product Fulfillment sales office. Most of the kits cost $24.95. That includes things like Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server, etc. Any software media you get this way will be marked "Unlicensed Software -- Illegal Without Separate License From Microsoft".
The general idea here is that software -- all software -- is licensed independently of the media it comes on. For example, if you lose or damage your Windows install CD, you can order a replacement for a small fee. The license that you purchased originally is still valid, and is what counts.
These CDs are also used with the various volume licensing programs (Open, Select, and so on) that Microsoft offers. Basically, you order licenses for your organization separately, and then order however many media kits you want or need. You can find more information on these programs at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/.
Now, as far as these discs go: Without a separate license agreement, they are not legal to use. It sure sounds to me that no such license agreement was distributed. I would be very careful about using such media unless I received an agreement.
The fact that some marketing dweeb at Microsoft handled them out is not enough. The fact that the same dweeb said it was okay is not enough, either. A dweeb is not a legal license agreement. Those facts would give you plausible denial in court, and likely decide the case in your favor, but it would have to go to court.
Finally, I doubt Microsoft has any nefarious intentions here. I suspect that Microsoft is just like any other large company, and that as such, they employ people (like this marketing dweeb) who don't understand that software licensing is a legal contract. I'm sure it never occurred to him that he was doing something wrong. Most people don't think before they pirate software. Heck, far too many people don't think, period.
The fact that Microsoft's own people have this problem is certainly ironic, and highlights just how crazy the world of software licensing is.
Zealots, please note: Free/Open Source Software is still licensed. You need to very carefully understand your rights and obligations under a software license, be it a Microsoft EULA, the BSD license, or the GPL. Failure to do so may open you up to legal problems, regardless. (Go ahead and incorporate some GPL code into a closed product, and see how the FSF reacts.)
I don't mean to offend, but you obviously don't know what you are talking about.
The space shuttle is an amazing technology, but all the shuttles are going to fly until they can't.
Of course. Why would they stop using them if they were still good? The orbiters were designed to be able to launched at least 100 times. The Columbia, while over twenty years old, was still well within its operational lifetime. There are commercial jetliners twice as old as Columbia still in active service today.
Furthermore, it isn't like this was some beat-up automobile that someone was still trying to coax a few more miles out of. Each orbiter is subject to a complete inspection after every launch. Systems which can no longer do their job are upgraded or replaced. NASA's shuttle fleet is probably the best maintained equipment in human history.
"...why does it have to re-enter so fast..."
Because it is in orbit. An orbit is achieved by traveling fast enough that your rate of fall toward the center of gravity (Earth, in this case) is canceled out. I believe the orbiter travels at a relative ground speed of something like 17,000 miles per hour.
In order to decelerate from that great velocity, they use the atmospheric breaking. Just as the breaks in your car use friction to slow the car, the orbiter uses atmospheric friction to slow the orbiter.
It is an inherently dangerous situation (second only to launch in risk), but an unavoidable one.
How?
It's a reasonable question. There is a good reason every spacecraft ever flown by man has used an unpowered re-entry: Fuel. You would need a lot of fuel to control that kind of velocity. That means added weight, and weight is everything when it comes to launching a vehicle from a gravity well. Every pound of weight on the space shuttle costs approximately five thousand dollars to launch.
A powered landing would not only be impractically expensive, it would likely be technologically impossible. It makes no sense.
Again: How? Velocities of thousands of miles per hour. Altitudes of hundreds of thousands of miles. Temperatures of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't like they can just jump out. To survive, you would basically need to build another spacecraft. See above about weight.
The heat shield is one of the weaker points in the design of most spacecraft. Keep in mind that building a realistic heat shield pushes our materials technology to the edge. While you might think that building a single surface with no seams would be better, but that is not so. It would in fact be considerably harder and more expensive to build. It would also be much harder to maintain. The shuttle's tiles can be easily replaced when they inevitably degrade. Not so with a single surface.
On one hand, you're suggesting infeasible or impossible improvements. Now you suggest they subject it to unnecessary risk? Why?
The space shuttle is already one of the most heavily monitored devices ever built by man. Huge amounts of data are constantly transmitted, recorded, and analyized by computers and people, both onboard the spacecraft and on the ground. What do you suggest they do differently?
"...do Shuttles carry flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders..."
The shuttle, like most NASA spacecraft, is continuously monitored by ground stations. Crew conversations, control inputs, flight data, systems telemetry, everything is recorded in incredible detail. NASA has already started the process of reviewing these records for possible clues.
There is nothing like the so-called "black boxes" (they're actually bright orange) carried by commercial aircraft. For most any kind of failure, the ground telemetry is sufficient, and for the few cases where it is not, it is very unlikely that any kind of recorder could be recovered.
If an accident occurs during spaceflight, you have a practically infinite search area. Simply getting a spacecraft out to any given point stretches the limits of our current technology. The odds of finding the right point are literally astronomical.
During re-entry, the spacecraft is traveling at thousands of miles per hour, hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Between re-entry stress and the impact force, simply building a recorder that could survive would be decidedly non-trivial. Even assuming you did build it, it would likely be very heavy (shielding). Increased weight means a hugely increased cost -- it costs approximately five thousand dollars per pound to launch something using the NASA shuttle. And the search area for the recorder would immense -- something falling from that height, at that speed, could land practically anywhere.
I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, but the technical challanges and engineering costs are huge, and the improvement over the ground telemetry systems would be marginal.
"I like the Opera web browser a lot, but it is closed source ... [and] costs money ..."
The poster raises the popular specter of "closed source". Yet he goes on to complain about the cost of the software.
All software costs money to develop. The only way Free Software can sustain itself is through community contributions: People (and companies) fund the development -- either directly with code, or indirectly with cash. Free Software is about Freedom, not cost.
I wonder how much money this person has donated to the Phoenix project?
I wonder, if Opera gave away their browser, would this person still be unhappy?
I wonder if the poster is interested in Freedom, or simply a Free Lunch?
"...is poking around inside your machine when it's still turned on a good idea?"
;-) (With apologies to Scott Adams.)
Hot-swap is like nuclear power: It can be used for good or evil.
Seriously, hot-swap is probably not something you want to give to the average luser. I tell some of people to shutdown their computers before swapping anything (USB, PCMCIA, etc.) just because it is easier for them to understand.
In a server situation, though, hot-swap is often a requirement. Redundant disks really want to go along with hot-swap. Even the ability to expand storage while online is useful. High-end servers these days have hot-swap PCI; hot-swap disks are expected as a matter of course.
"The real knuckle busters are really tight power connectors on drives. You know, the kind that you need a crowbar to remove."
Worse still is when you end up removing the power socket from the hard disk PCB instead....
"Apple, when designing the Firewire physical port looked into what it would take to build a rugged, tough, port that would accept the rigors of being connected and unconnected repeatedly."
Which makes sense. ATA (in any form), however, is not intended to be connected and unconnected repeatedly. Anyone who has ever bent the pins on a drive, or pulled the IDC right off the ribbon, can tell you it has been this way from day one. ATA is supposed to live inside the computer and be touched only rarely.
That being said, from what I've read, the new Serial ATA cables are likely to stand up to abuse better than the ribbons we have now. The connectors are smaller (= less friction = less mechanical stress), and there are no pins -- only edge contacts. But it still is not designed for abuse. Don't do that, then.
"...the fscking cable kept coming undone... written off as 'a prototype problem'..."
Dude, have you ever seen prototype hardware before? That sort of thing is normal. I've seen prototype systems with so many ECO wires that the cover wouldn't close. I've seen boards with parts missing. You cannot base anything on the quality of this sort of stuff. It is the hardware equivalent of a "beta" or "development" release.
As for coverage, Tom devoted a whole page to it -- what more do you want?
"When you bunch the individual wires up like that, you destroy the shielding."
Good round IDE cables have shielding around individual wires, and between rows, to keep things working. Like most things with the IBM-PC, there is considerable variation in quality (and price). People need to realize that getting an I/O cable for a buck might not be a good thing...
"The reason this is useful is that you have a larger bus bandwidth, not that it benefits any one particular device."
Too bad Serial ATA is a point-to-point bus. One device per host interface.
"does anyone know exactly what to call things like the promise and Highpoint "Raid" controllers that rely on BIOS hooks and software drivers to do the RAID dirty work?"
Junk?
"Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?"
People often complain that SCSI costs 3X more than ATA, when the HDA (Hard Disk Assembly) is often the same in both. "Why does SCSI cost so much more?" they ask.
That is the wrong question. They should instead ask, "Why does ATA cost so much less?"
The minimum quality level you see with ATA is significantly lower than for SCSI. You can find some really crappy ATA parts out there, and you can find vendors to sell them, and people to buy them. The least-effort engineering that ATA gets is why you can buy a 100 GB hard disk for a buck or whatever. They simply do not put a lot of engineering into a product that cheap.
Now, compare that to the market SCSI gets used in. You are not going to build a $10,000 workstation or server and then put a crap hard disk in it. About the only place SCSI gets used is in that kind of high-end equipment, so the demand is for well-engineered SCSI products. Anyone pushing the kind of crap that ATA is would be laughed at.
So, in the end, you get what you pay for.
"Now if only they would do the same with their drivers!"
I known someone who once worked for MetroLink. He was part of the team that was writing the NVidia device driver for Metro-X. They were a source licensee, under NDA, yadda yadda, so they had access to the NVidia driver source.
He said that the NVidia driver source is highly coupled with the chip design. Apparently, the NVidia driver people have intimate knowledge of the hardware design, and take advantage of it. This lets the driver exploit as much of the hardware's potential as possible. However, it also means that the driver has specific knowledge of the hardware design.
Given that NVidia's sole business is chip design, you can bet that they will never release source for that driver. It contains too much of their business. (No, it is not a chip schematic, but that isn't the point. It contains enough to make their lawyers unhappy.)
For better or worse, that is the way it is with NVidia. If you do not like it, do not buy their cards.
One of the major reasons streaming media is used today is not for live productions, but rather, as a misguided and ill-conceived form of copy-protection and content-control. If Real goes open, and that creates a perception that Real is easier to copy, will the media cartel (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) drop Real entirely, in favor of Windows Media or some other more suitably evil technology?
In other words, could this make the Open Source streaming media situation worse, at least in the short-term?
"I think it won't work out, because there's too much legacy stuff that there will always be confusion at this point about what "mega" and "kilo" mean with computers."
Not to mention the fact that computers are incapable of "thinking" in anything but a power of two. You will not find a discrete quantity of 10 (or a power thereof) bytes anywhere in a computer system. This makes the SI units useless for computers. While re-defining them for use in computers was and still is an abuse, the lack of applicability of the conventional SI units makes it largely a non-issue. The only people who care are are HDD manufacturers who rate drives in "millions of bytes" so they can swindle stupid customers.
"What's the point of a sig about your email address when you don't even display one?"
When I wrote that signature, Slashdot had the concept of a "display email address", which was always shown. I had a spam-guard in that field.
Then I did not visit slashdot for about a year. Things have changed.
Anyway, since you pointed that out (thank you, BTW), I have updated my signature to include the spam-guarded address that was previously displayed automatically. (No, I do not trust the spam-guards built-in to Slashdot.)
Information is still sketchy, but this appears to be a design issue (i.e., different components interacting badly due to assumptions) rather than a bug. It could even happen on non-Athlon systems, if the processor in use happens to tickle the same conditions.
"this is something....that mac users dont have to worry about. :)"
While I suspect you are correct, there is/was discussion on LKML about whether or not other architectures would be vulnerable to this issue. The PPC was specifically mentioned.
Yesterday, information became widely available that described possible stability issues (system crashes, hangs, etc.) when using an AGP video card under Linux in conjunction with an AMD Athlon processor. It was generally called a "bug" in the Athlon CPU.
2 6960/.
More information is now available at http://www.gentoo.org, including an analysis of AMD's response. AMD's official response was posted to LKML, and is available at http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/76
There is apparently some kind of bad interaction between the AGP GART ("Graphics Address Remapping Table", I think?), speculative memory operations performed by the Athlon processor, the memory mappings used by the kernel, and cache coherency. The details are beyond me, but the practical upshot appears to be that the wrong data ends up being written back to main memory at some point.
I recommend reading the above LKML thread if you suspect you are affected by this issue. Information is still being uncovered, and it is not immediately clear how this occurs, what causes it, who is affected by it, and how to work around it.
In particular, there is some uncertainty as to whether the "mem=nopentium" option actually prevents the problem, or merely makes it less likely to occur.
The kernel will look for the parameter
/etc/lilo.conf configuration file.
mem=nopentium
and turn off 4MB pages (which may or may not prevent the problem from manifesting -- the situation is unclear at this time). You can do this at the boot prompt like this
LILO boot: linux mem=nopentium
or by placing the configuration directive
append="mem=nopentium"
in your
See the manual page for lilo.conf for the details.
"I remember where I was when Challenger exploded. I was in bed, sleeping."
I'm dating myself here, but I was still in public grade school at the time. I remember being herded into another class room, where my whole grade (it was a small town) was assembled to watch the event on TV. After all, this was New Hampshire, and it was our very own Christa McAuliffe that was going up! Some people at the school had actually met her. We were pretty excited.
Until 73 seconds after liftoff.
I still remember, quite vividly, the picture on the TV as the Challenger disappeared in a giant ball of smoke and steam. I remember watching what was left of the solid rock boosters twist and veer away wildly. And I knew, almost instinctively, that those seven people were dead. There was no way someone could survive a ship disintegrating like that.
I can still hears the words of the news announcer in my ears: "At this time, we do not know what has happened, but obviously the Challenger has suffered a major malfunction."
A major malfunction.
And seven people dead.
All because some manager somewhere didn't want to disappoint everyone by holding the launch. People have asked me how I can use the term "manager" as a curse word. This is why.
"We have to make a management decision."
-- Jerry Mason, General Manager, Morton Thiokol, January 27, 1986.
Sometimes, management stupidity has consequences far beyond simply annoyances.