What, you don't deal with classpaths, libs/JARs, and other associated bits? You've never installed an app that changed the classpath, pointing to new (and subtly incompatible) versions of a JAR, thus breaking things in an odd and impossible to diagnose way? Never had someone or something drop new files into Tomcat's shared lib directory that overrode you? Have you never had to dig through 14 layers of config files (vomited all over the filesystem in some sort of byzantine maze) to find out why something won't compile or run?
If you haven't then I suggest you climb down from your ivory tower and check out the real world sometime...
The energy required to move the oceans is drawn from the moon's orbit. We more commonly refer to this as "The Tides". Every year the moon moves a little bit further from the earth by a few cm, thus providing the necessary energy.
I wonder, if we turned all the energy available to mankind toward the task, would we be able to move that much water and land on a daily basis? I would guess not, and by extension I would guess that sourcing all of man's energy needs from a gravitational source would not have a noticeable impact on the orbit of the sun/earth/moon system or the rotation of any of those bodies.
The source code of most Open Source software is never examined by anyone other than the original authors of the source code.
Granted, this is decidedly untrue for certain projects (like the Linux kernel) and even entire Operating Systems (OpenBSD). But most projects are not as popular as these and receive relatively little attention, let alone anyone combing through the source code.
So what? There are two major things you need to understand about money systems, then it all makes sense.
1. Commodity-backed currency is not inflation or deflation proof! Instead of being impacted by elected or appointed government officials (who must adhere to various standards of transparency around the world), the value of the currency is impacted by the availability of the commodity compared to the real growth of the economy. If you strike a new major source of Gold your economy experiences massive inflation and a huge shock (see: Spain, 1600s). If you fail to discover new sources of gold, you experience deflation as the same ol' amount of gold must now account for your increased population, productivity, and/or GDP.
2. The Federal Reserve does not adjust the money supply purely by open market operations or reserve requirements; what you were taught in high-school economics is wrong. The Feds have a target overnight lending rate, which is how they control inflation. Banks have set reserve requirements that they MUST meet or they cease operating.
If a bank is below its reserve requirement, the overnight rate will tend toward infinity; if the choice is paying 45% interest or shutting down operations, the bank will pay 45%. The problem is if the Fed buys or sells bonds, or adjusts reserve requirements, that changes the total amount of reserves in the system, which affects the Banks, which in turn requires an off-setting operation by the Fed to push the overnight rate back where the Fed wants it to be.
The real way money is injected or removed from the economy in a fiat money system is through government debt... after all, the only reason you and I need that fiat money is to pay the government's taxes, otherwise we could just use our own money or some other country's money.
Whenever the government takes in more money than it spends (surplus), this tends toward deflation. The Treasury pays off its loans from the Fed, resulting in money evaporating from the Reserve Banking system entirely! All those people calling for the government to balance its budget have no idea what they are talking about - if the government did that over the long term it would cause major shocks to our financial system.
When the government spends more than it takes in, the Fed issues new currency (injecting cash into the Reserve system) by buying bonds from the Treasury. If you understand the debt this way, you realize that over half of the "National Debt" is nothing more than accounting entries at the Federal Reserve and don't represent money owed to anyone... nor even money that must ever be paid back!
True, the value comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the inflation "tax". All spending by the government above receipts is captured in the form of inflation, which itself (in small doses) encourages people to put their money to work, lest it sit and have a portion of its value evaporate every year.
They don't have to answer to anyone because they have boatloads of cash.
Duke3D All the Duke Expansion packs Duke mobile variants (free money - the content already exists!) Max Payne and Max Payne 2 Prey
Other game studios wish they were in that position. I might add that Half Life 2 took forever to come out (so did Team Fortress 2), but it was worth the wait.
[quote]In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.[/quote]
Which is simultaneously a great strength and great weakness. Why will people end up using the Microsoft stack to host Linux VMs? Because everything has a windows driver.
That is one of Microsoft's greatest strengths. Part of this is due to critical mass, but Microsoft also gave away their DDK back when companies like IBM charged money to get OS/2 DDKs (not to mention the big iron machines).
That's not exactly true... a few humans used the AI machines to enslave the human race, then modified themselves to such an extent that they were barely human. After a few thousand years they got bored and ended up giving the AI too much control, which it promptly used to usurp its former masters and thus the age of machine enslavement.
Conversely, it was the giving of too much power to a human that led directly to the downfall of the machines.
And in fact the discovery of Gold in the New World caused deflation in the Spanish economy. I don't know why people buy into the myth that a "gold standard" prevents deflation/inflation. Research it if you don't believe me; economics as a science wasn't well understood at the time and the Spanish ended up with huge problems because of the drastic increase in gold availability (which was promptly transported outside the country to other nations for trade, causing further economic shocks).
If you don't mine enough gold to keep up with your economic output you get deflation; there is only so much gold to go around, but every year new people enter the workforce and create new goods, meaning the same amount of gold (money) must pay for ever more goods.
If you hit a huge cache of gold or silver (such as the California gold rush or the Nevada Comstock Lode) then suddenly you get inflation because the world supply of these precious metals jumps suddenly (i.e. the US could afford to buy exports, another country's currency, or churn out a lot more of its own.)
All a goods-backed currency does is place the control of the money supply in the random availability of the good in question, rather than in the hands of government or bankers. The money supply still exists and its contraction or expansion still has a huge effect on the economy; you just have less control over the process.
That isn't good enough either; What guarantee do you have that some new version of Office or OpenOffice won't change something in the way it renders documents, calculates formulas, etc that results in an incompatibility or rendering something incorrectly? Do you really think OpenOffice is going to handle your documents exactly the same way in 10 years after however-many people have touched the code? What about 20 years? 30 years? I didn't think so. The problem gets infinitely worse when you are talking about Macros... if there are object model changes (or just subtle changes in existing behavior) across versions that fancy document that does all those fancy things may be completely broken... or worse, it may just be wrong in some subtle ways.
The only way to be more certain you can reproduce the work exactly as intended is to render it into a format that has its rendering more tightly specified: PDF. Even that suffers from some of the same issues.
The only true way is to use Virtual Machines to run older software on older Operating Systems so you can edit and/or render (print, convert to PDF, etc) older documents. This also applies to media, especially media that has DRM (though I avoid DRM like the plague if at all possible). Virtual Machines and emulation will continue to be ported or re-created on newer platforms; it is unlikely that the ability to virtually run or emulate x86 code won't be available in 100 years. The critical mass is high enough and the problem well-understood enough that any future computing platforms are highly likely to support such a thing.
At least then you only have to worry about keeping your VM software up to date and/or translating the VM's virtual hard disk formats, rather than keeping after tons of individual software versions and/or conversion tools.
Actually it does have similar mechanisms, in a way. Every process has a security token that determines what the process can and can't do. The main problem is that Windows doesn't really expose a good way to alter these permissions when the program is launched - it picks up whatever rights and permissions the user has. Runas is a good way around this, but there is no fundamental reason Windows couldn't let you right-click an exe, go to a permissions tab, and uncheck various permissions... like communicating over the network.
Delegation is the key; with ACLs you can delegate rights to any combination of users and groups and have those rights be inherited, either by files, subfolders, or both.
For example you could give CHANGE_PERMISSIONS to CREATOR_OWNER on \Users, to be inherited by subfolders and files only (not Users itself). Then a user can grant other people access to his or her files without having to be root (administrator).
In Windows, it isn't just the filesystem that supports ACLs; processes, kernel objects, etc all support them too. In fact inside the NT kernel everything is a file just like on Unix; ever see a file path given ala "\\?\blahblahblah"? That's an NT Executive path from the root. All volumes, processes, sockets, objects, the registry, etc are mounted here. There's a handy trick where you can delete a file using its kernel path even when Windows says the file is in use, because the kernel isn't what enforces the sharing semantics.
What are you talking about? Prey and Max Payne are both 3D Realms properties; combined with the boat-loads of cash they made on Duke3D and all its various ports and expansion packs (such as to the various GameBoy incarnations), they've been consistently profitable since before Duke3D was released.
I might add that I live in the Dallas area and everyone I know in the games industry here that has played the game says it is far and way the most fun game they've ever played and if it were immediately released they would buy it without question. George Brussard is just a perfectionist and given the mountains of cash 3D Realms has accumulated, he can afford to be one.
All that bitching about Half-Life 2 taking so long to come out, including a huge delay from the release date? Yeah, doesn't seem all that important now. Why? It was a good engine and a good game.
Hell, look at how long Team Fortress 2 was supposedly under development - when Counter-Strike was just a dream people were talking about TF2.
Vista is really annoying because it has several important, useful, and/or cool features that really make it a better OS, for example:
1. IO Scheduling - the scheduler now tracks IO requests and priorities, not just CPU time. This is probably my #1 complaint with almost any OS: Any app can bring the system to a crawl by issuing constant disk IO, regardless of how much CPU time it is using. Use up a lot of memory to cause swapping and you can effectively DoS just about any system even with no admin rights whatsoever. But since Vista considers IO in its scheduling a low-priority process can't flood the disk with requests. No technical reason this can't be back-ported to XP.
2. Hot-patching - long overdue, but at least it is being delivered. Other than swapping out the kernel there is no excuse for rebooting to install or update any subsystem. There is no technical reason why this can't be supported by XP.
3. User-mode driver framework - Even if we can't have microkernels, at least we can start moving more stuff into user mode. The audio subsystem is one of these. Frankly, except for some very minor pieces, not only should most drivers live in user mode I think most drivers should use a form of managed code as well (perhaps with some deterministic GC or other memory management mechanism). Switching ring levels isn't the massively huge hit it was on older x86 processors. Again, no reason this can't be supported by XP.
4. DirectX scheduler and video virtualization - long overdue; let the OS virtualize the 3d hardware and dish time out to any app that needs to do some rendering. We've all been over the DirectX 10 scandal before and are well aware that it could be back-ported to XP.
5. Explorer improvements - more multi-threaded (less blocking) and (FINALLY) it doesn't b0rk an entire file copy job just because one file failed... now you can retry or skip the offending item. Welcome to 1993, apparently.
6. Pending IO cancellation - the IO subsystem finally understands how to cancel pending IOs. Ever had a zombie process that wouldn't go away, even though you did an End Process or kill on it? It probably had an incomplete network or disk IO request out there, but under XP and earlier Windows can't cleanup the process until all the IOs are finished. In Vista the IO subsystem understands how to cancel the IO, or if it can't be cancelled will automatically take care of cleaning it up when it returns... no need for the process to stick around waiting on a request to complete that it doesn't give a shit about. Again, this should have been part of an XP service pack.
7. Async SMB/Net - All the SMB/Net calls and apps support async IO now, so you can finally CTRL+C a 'net view \\machine' command and have it terminate immediately, instead of having to wait 60 seconds for that CTRL+C to register while the network operation is blocking. This one I can't even understand... Windows has supported non-blocking IO since the original NT. IO Completion Ports (essentially callbacks when an IO operation is complete) are fast and used throughout Windows for all sorts of things. Except in this one area.
8. Kernel transactions - now the Registry and supported filesystems (NTFS), along with any subsystem or kernel object that cares to implement support for it, can participate in transactions. This one makes installations far easier and simpler - just run all your registry and file updates inside a transaction and commit when done. Also makes hot-patching support easier, since running processes keep their open handles to the previous version of the file prior to the transaction. All filesystem should have supported transactions in like 1995; no idea why it has taken this long.
9. Shadow Copies exposed - this one is really dumb; XP already supports shadow copies, it just doesn't expose them to you. Again, something we should have seen on clients several years ago when disk space started getting really cheap. Empty sectors on a disk are like empty blocks of memory: a complete waste. Just as ever
Actually the issue is that an over-compressed signal cut for vinyl will cause the needle to jump out of the groove, so either you compress and turn the overall volume way down or you leave the peaks and can't compress as much. That's the physical restraint imposed on you by the medium.
If you are referring to the RIAA standard EQing applied to vinyl, then that is far, far less of an issue than the situation with CDs; the RIAA standards are published and fixed and everyone who cuts vinyl has to adhere to them, because modern players (or receivers with Phono inputs) are designed to apply the reverse EQing to restore the original audio.
If CDs had a standard for compression and came with compression adjustments built-in then it would be similar... an individual user could adjust the compression settings for their taste and listening environment (no compression at home, medium compression in the car, and so on). Actually if CDs just came with the info embedded similar to CD-Text it would be enough. I could slap my expander inbetween the CD player and the receiver and reverse some of the damage.
"Forking" (launching) a process is much more expensive on Windows than it is on Linux. Windows NT is architected after VMS (in part because of Dave Cutler). Processes are expensive on windows. This is true because Windows and the Win32 require threads and assume they exist; if you want to spin-off a lightweight operation you kick up a new thread. Although most Unix systems have OS threads these days that wasn't always the case - processes were the word of the day for a long time and still are in some ways.
Although patents may fulfill this function, their original intent was to get rid of the whole trade guild / trade secret situation, where only one company or a small group of people had some particular bit of knowledge or new invention and they refused to share it with the rest of society, as well as to provide incentives to inventors to create new inventions because those inventors know their risk and hard work won't be immediately ripped off.
In exchange for sharing that knowledge with the world you get a monopoly on using it for a certain period of time. Once that period of time is up, everyone else is free to adopt your new invention.
This was supposed to be the same trade-off with copyright: in exchange for a limited-time monopoly, society gets to put your works in the public domain. Imagine the loss to western culture if Shakespeare was still under the copyright control of some "Shakespeare Foundation".
Both of these ideas are also based on the foundation that "nothing happens in a vacuum". Without a functioning society and markets and without the influence of previous generations it simply wouldn't be possible to create much of value. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all, and it is only fair that we give something back to the society that has given us the tools and the opportunity to succeed.
Well, that was before you could patent "business methods" and before copyright lasted longer than any human being will ever live (your children and grandchildren will all be dead before anything created today leaves copyright protection). At least with shitty software patents you only have to wait 20 years before the issue becomes moot.
Not only can you use ZFS extended attributes for this but NTFS also supports true alternate data streams and has since its inception; this is how NT fileservers supported Mac clients natively (Services for Mac). You could copy a file to the NT share and back without losing any of the resource fork data.
I'm sure there are other filesystems that have done the same thing in the past as well.
This is slightly misleading, in that the law only says the vehicles manufactured for special markets must be limited to those special markets (for what byzantine reason I have no idea).
There is nothing preventing the car makers from releasing the same vehicles into all the other markets; they don't because the cars cost a little bit more ($150-$400 according to the article), but still get the same MPG even if the tailpipe emissions are almost nil. They don't believe consumers will pay the premium so they don't bother.
In other words, the manufacturers are free to produce the same exact car but instead of stamping "CALIFORNIA ONLY" on it and being unable to sell it outside that designated market, they can just sell it everywhere with no problem.
You can press F8 to select disable driver signing verification (or you can modify BCD's startup switches for Vista to enable that option all the time). Also, if you can attach a kernel debugger it turns off verification automatically.
In either case, once you have code in kernel mode all that remains is to suss out where the DRM system detects debug mode (to disable high-def playback) and override that protection. Essentially your kernel-mode code patches the kernel to erase its tracks.
I suspect this route would prove much easier than trying to exploit driver weaknesses; alternately just run Vista in a VM and do whatever you like. If they add VM detection code just patch it in memory to bypass the detection.
Perhaps the bigger issue here is that HTML/CSS hasn't kept up with the times (read the story about HTML 5 and the fact that almost no new tags have been introduced in years).
We shouldn't need Java/scripts to get menus - they should be supported directly in HTML via use of a element. In fact, the web would be far easier to browse with all this "active" crap turned off if HTML directly supported the most common uses of script with specific tags: menus, rollovers, tooltips, browser version checking, etc. (As an added bonus these things would also become easier to translate for mobile or accessible/handicapped browsing as well).
CDMA has a SIM-like standard, it's called R-UIM. In fact it is backwards-compatible with SIM/GSM and if your provider has roaming contracts with GSM networks you can make calls on both CDMA and GSM networks with it. The fact is the CDMA providers in the US simply don't give a shit and won't adopt the technology.
TimeWarner pulled the same jackass stunt on me; within a month or two of taking over the Dallas-area systems from Comcast they cut off half of my HD channels. Supposedly someone was "supposed to call" and tell me this was going to happen (yeah, right). They refuse to let me have those channels unless I switch from my $60/month "grandfathered" package to a $120/month TimeWarner package.
I have FIOS and love the internet access however I am forced to buy Business service to get static IP addresses; for some reason, Verizon didn't anticipate businesses would want TV service or residential customers with home offices would want static IP addresses. This means I cannot get the TV service and keep my static IPs; I'd rather have the internet service.
Does anyone know of *any* large company that doesn't suck? I've never found one.
The reliability fallacy has already been proven false and you can read about that in other posts, but I wanted to chime in regarding NCQ support on SATA:
If your controller and drives both support it SATA-II drives can do NCQ (Native Command Queuing), which buffers and reorders outstanding disk commands to maximize speed and minimize power/heat/wear. This is similar to TCQ that SCSI drives have been doing for ages.
So no, SATA drives don't react worse to server loads than SCSI drives.
IIRC, China was on its way to moving to an alphabet system (certain characters can be used for their alphabetic sounds in various circumstances) and so was Japan (look at Katakana/Hirigana).
It is likely that the introduction of the printing press (and later mass media like TV/radio and computers) have "arrested" this natural evolution. It may also be possible that the development of a national identity and cohesive society tends to put the brakes on some developments as well - if a single unified language is mandated by culture or a central authority then local variations are much less important.
Romanji (and to a certain extent English itself) is definitely influencing the Japanese; the younger generations even moreso. Japan may end up using an alphabet for day to day needs almost exclusively within the next 100 years. The situation in China is much less clear but it will probably happen eventually.
If we look into the past, nearly all societies with ideographic/logographic writing systems eventually moved to an alphabetic system. Hell, even Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs were partially syllabic much like Katakana. Much as previous posters have pointed out, changing to an alphabetic system from Chinese-characters has allowed Korea to dramatically raise literacy rates. There is only so much time for schooling and memorization, and only so much effort to expend on literacy. If a simpler writing system is more accessible then that is a net gain, even if there are a few things that logographic writing systems do better than alphabetic ones.
The NT kernel has a root namespace for everything in the system (from local filesystems to network drives to sockets to synchronization objects like mutexes), and in fact treats everything as a file (just like Unix) underneath.
Using the Native (NT Executive) API you can read or set the ACL on any object in the namespace, assuming you have the appropriate user rights and you own the object (or the ACL allows you to modify the permissions). NT kernel objects can also be case-sensitive (though that can confuse some Win32 programs). Often, you can delete, move, etc files that are locked by the Win32 subsystem, which can be useful in certain situations (though in Vista they made the IO system capable of cancelling outstanding IOs on its own so the zombie process bug that ends up locking files doesn't happen anymore. Its unfortunate Vista is so DRM-laden, or I'd try upgrading.)
The APIs are NtQuerySecurityObject and NtSetSecurityObject and I believe the devices are in \Device\Tcp, \Device\Ip, \Device\RawIp, \Device\Udp, etc. Check out http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ for more details on what is in the native API (ntdll). This API provides everything necessary to implement a full POSIX layer, which is exactly what Services for Unix does, installing itself as a new runtime subsystem right next to the Win32 subsystem. (With Server 2003 R2 SP2 they shipped it as an available component as part of the install; I've even got setuid support and GCC installed as part of the package.)
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What, you don't deal with classpaths, libs/JARs, and other associated bits? You've never installed an app that changed the classpath, pointing to new (and subtly incompatible) versions of a JAR, thus breaking things in an odd and impossible to diagnose way? Never had someone or something drop new files into Tomcat's shared lib directory that overrode you? Have you never had to dig through 14 layers of config files (vomited all over the filesystem in some sort of byzantine maze) to find out why something won't compile or run?
If you haven't then I suggest you climb down from your ivory tower and check out the real world sometime...
The energy required to move the oceans is drawn from the moon's orbit. We more commonly refer to this as "The Tides". Every year the moon moves a little bit further from the earth by a few cm, thus providing the necessary energy.
I wonder, if we turned all the energy available to mankind toward the task, would we be able to move that much water and land on a daily basis? I would guess not, and by extension I would guess that sourcing all of man's energy needs from a gravitational source would not have a noticeable impact on the orbit of the sun/earth/moon system or the rotation of any of those bodies.
The source code of most Open Source software is never examined by anyone other than the original authors of the source code.
Granted, this is decidedly untrue for certain projects (like the Linux kernel) and even entire Operating Systems (OpenBSD). But most projects are not as popular as these and receive relatively little attention, let alone anyone combing through the source code.
So what? There are two major things you need to understand about money systems, then it all makes sense.
1. Commodity-backed currency is not inflation or deflation proof! Instead of being impacted by elected or appointed government officials (who must adhere to various standards of transparency around the world), the value of the currency is impacted by the availability of the commodity compared to the real growth of the economy. If you strike a new major source of Gold your economy experiences massive inflation and a huge shock (see: Spain, 1600s). If you fail to discover new sources of gold, you experience deflation as the same ol' amount of gold must now account for your increased population, productivity, and/or GDP.
2. The Federal Reserve does not adjust the money supply purely by open market operations or reserve requirements; what you were taught in high-school economics is wrong. The Feds have a target overnight lending rate, which is how they control inflation. Banks have set reserve requirements that they MUST meet or they cease operating.
If a bank is below its reserve requirement, the overnight rate will tend toward infinity; if the choice is paying 45% interest or shutting down operations, the bank will pay 45%. The problem is if the Fed buys or sells bonds, or adjusts reserve requirements, that changes the total amount of reserves in the system, which affects the Banks, which in turn requires an off-setting operation by the Fed to push the overnight rate back where the Fed wants it to be.
The real way money is injected or removed from the economy in a fiat money system is through government debt... after all, the only reason you and I need that fiat money is to pay the government's taxes, otherwise we could just use our own money or some other country's money.
Whenever the government takes in more money than it spends (surplus), this tends toward deflation. The Treasury pays off its loans from the Fed, resulting in money evaporating from the Reserve Banking system entirely! All those people calling for the government to balance its budget have no idea what they are talking about - if the government did that over the long term it would cause major shocks to our financial system.
When the government spends more than it takes in, the Fed issues new currency (injecting cash into the Reserve system) by buying bonds from the Treasury. If you understand the debt this way, you realize that over half of the "National Debt" is nothing more than accounting entries at the Federal Reserve and don't represent money owed to anyone... nor even money that must ever be paid back!
True, the value comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the inflation "tax". All spending by the government above receipts is captured in the form of inflation, which itself (in small doses) encourages people to put their money to work, lest it sit and have a portion of its value evaporate every year.
They don't have to answer to anyone because they have boatloads of cash.
Duke3D
All the Duke Expansion packs
Duke mobile variants (free money - the content already exists!)
Max Payne and Max Payne 2
Prey
Other game studios wish they were in that position. I might add that Half Life 2 took forever to come out (so did Team Fortress 2), but it was worth the wait.
[quote]In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.[/quote]
Which is simultaneously a great strength and great weakness. Why will people end up using the Microsoft stack to host Linux VMs? Because everything has a windows driver.
That is one of Microsoft's greatest strengths. Part of this is due to critical mass, but Microsoft also gave away their DDK back when companies like IBM charged money to get OS/2 DDKs (not to mention the big iron machines).
That's not exactly true... a few humans used the AI machines to enslave the human race, then modified themselves to such an extent that they were barely human. After a few thousand years they got bored and ended up giving the AI too much control, which it promptly used to usurp its former masters and thus the age of machine enslavement.
Conversely, it was the giving of too much power to a human that led directly to the downfall of the machines.
And in fact the discovery of Gold in the New World caused deflation in the Spanish economy. I don't know why people buy into the myth that a "gold standard" prevents deflation/inflation. Research it if you don't believe me; economics as a science wasn't well understood at the time and the Spanish ended up with huge problems because of the drastic increase in gold availability (which was promptly transported outside the country to other nations for trade, causing further economic shocks).
If you don't mine enough gold to keep up with your economic output you get deflation; there is only so much gold to go around, but every year new people enter the workforce and create new goods, meaning the same amount of gold (money) must pay for ever more goods.
If you hit a huge cache of gold or silver (such as the California gold rush or the Nevada Comstock Lode) then suddenly you get inflation because the world supply of these precious metals jumps suddenly (i.e. the US could afford to buy exports, another country's currency, or churn out a lot more of its own.)
All a goods-backed currency does is place the control of the money supply in the random availability of the good in question, rather than in the hands of government or bankers. The money supply still exists and its contraction or expansion still has a huge effect on the economy; you just have less control over the process.
That isn't good enough either; What guarantee do you have that some new version of Office or OpenOffice won't change something in the way it renders documents, calculates formulas, etc that results in an incompatibility or rendering something incorrectly? Do you really think OpenOffice is going to handle your documents exactly the same way in 10 years after however-many people have touched the code? What about 20 years? 30 years? I didn't think so. The problem gets infinitely worse when you are talking about Macros... if there are object model changes (or just subtle changes in existing behavior) across versions that fancy document that does all those fancy things may be completely broken... or worse, it may just be wrong in some subtle ways.
The only way to be more certain you can reproduce the work exactly as intended is to render it into a format that has its rendering more tightly specified: PDF. Even that suffers from some of the same issues.
The only true way is to use Virtual Machines to run older software on older Operating Systems so you can edit and/or render (print, convert to PDF, etc) older documents. This also applies to media, especially media that has DRM (though I avoid DRM like the plague if at all possible). Virtual Machines and emulation will continue to be ported or re-created on newer platforms; it is unlikely that the ability to virtually run or emulate x86 code won't be available in 100 years. The critical mass is high enough and the problem well-understood enough that any future computing platforms are highly likely to support such a thing.
At least then you only have to worry about keeping your VM software up to date and/or translating the VM's virtual hard disk formats, rather than keeping after tons of individual software versions and/or conversion tools.
Actually it does have similar mechanisms, in a way. Every process has a security token that determines what the process can and can't do. The main problem is that Windows doesn't really expose a good way to alter these permissions when the program is launched - it picks up whatever rights and permissions the user has. Runas is a good way around this, but there is no fundamental reason Windows couldn't let you right-click an exe, go to a permissions tab, and uncheck various permissions... like communicating over the network.
Delegation is the key; with ACLs you can delegate rights to any combination of users and groups and have those rights be inherited, either by files, subfolders, or both.
For example you could give CHANGE_PERMISSIONS to CREATOR_OWNER on \Users, to be inherited by subfolders and files only (not Users itself). Then a user can grant other people access to his or her files without having to be root (administrator).
In Windows, it isn't just the filesystem that supports ACLs; processes, kernel objects, etc all support them too. In fact inside the NT kernel everything is a file just like on Unix; ever see a file path given ala "\\?\blahblahblah"? That's an NT Executive path from the root. All volumes, processes, sockets, objects, the registry, etc are mounted here. There's a handy trick where you can delete a file using its kernel path even when Windows says the file is in use, because the kernel isn't what enforces the sharing semantics.
What are you talking about? Prey and Max Payne are both 3D Realms properties; combined with the boat-loads of cash they made on Duke3D and all its various ports and expansion packs (such as to the various GameBoy incarnations), they've been consistently profitable since before Duke3D was released.
I might add that I live in the Dallas area and everyone I know in the games industry here that has played the game says it is far and way the most fun game they've ever played and if it were immediately released they would buy it without question. George Brussard is just a perfectionist and given the mountains of cash 3D Realms has accumulated, he can afford to be one.
All that bitching about Half-Life 2 taking so long to come out, including a huge delay from the release date? Yeah, doesn't seem all that important now. Why? It was a good engine and a good game.
Hell, look at how long Team Fortress 2 was supposedly under development - when Counter-Strike was just a dream people were talking about TF2.
Vista is really annoying because it has several important, useful, and/or cool features that really make it a better OS, for example:
1. IO Scheduling - the scheduler now tracks IO requests and priorities, not just CPU time. This is probably my #1 complaint with almost any OS: Any app can bring the system to a crawl by issuing constant disk IO, regardless of how much CPU time it is using. Use up a lot of memory to cause swapping and you can effectively DoS just about any system even with no admin rights whatsoever. But since Vista considers IO in its scheduling a low-priority process can't flood the disk with requests. No technical reason this can't be back-ported to XP.
2. Hot-patching - long overdue, but at least it is being delivered. Other than swapping out the kernel there is no excuse for rebooting to install or update any subsystem. There is no technical reason why this can't be supported by XP.
3. User-mode driver framework - Even if we can't have microkernels, at least we can start moving more stuff into user mode. The audio subsystem is one of these. Frankly, except for some very minor pieces, not only should most drivers live in user mode I think most drivers should use a form of managed code as well (perhaps with some deterministic GC or other memory management mechanism). Switching ring levels isn't the massively huge hit it was on older x86 processors. Again, no reason this can't be supported by XP.
4. DirectX scheduler and video virtualization - long overdue; let the OS virtualize the 3d hardware and dish time out to any app that needs to do some rendering. We've all been over the DirectX 10 scandal before and are well aware that it could be back-ported to XP.
5. Explorer improvements - more multi-threaded (less blocking) and (FINALLY) it doesn't b0rk an entire file copy job just because one file failed... now you can retry or skip the offending item. Welcome to 1993, apparently.
6. Pending IO cancellation - the IO subsystem finally understands how to cancel pending IOs. Ever had a zombie process that wouldn't go away, even though you did an End Process or kill on it? It probably had an incomplete network or disk IO request out there, but under XP and earlier Windows can't cleanup the process until all the IOs are finished. In Vista the IO subsystem understands how to cancel the IO, or if it can't be cancelled will automatically take care of cleaning it up when it returns... no need for the process to stick around waiting on a request to complete that it doesn't give a shit about. Again, this should have been part of an XP service pack.
7. Async SMB/Net - All the SMB/Net calls and apps support async IO now, so you can finally CTRL+C a 'net view \\machine' command and have it terminate immediately, instead of having to wait 60 seconds for that CTRL+C to register while the network operation is blocking. This one I can't even understand... Windows has supported non-blocking IO since the original NT. IO Completion Ports (essentially callbacks when an IO operation is complete) are fast and used throughout Windows for all sorts of things. Except in this one area.
8. Kernel transactions - now the Registry and supported filesystems (NTFS), along with any subsystem or kernel object that cares to implement support for it, can participate in transactions. This one makes installations far easier and simpler - just run all your registry and file updates inside a transaction and commit when done. Also makes hot-patching support easier, since running processes keep their open handles to the previous version of the file prior to the transaction. All filesystem should have supported transactions in like 1995; no idea why it has taken this long.
9. Shadow Copies exposed - this one is really dumb; XP already supports shadow copies, it just doesn't expose them to you. Again, something we should have seen on clients several years ago when disk space started getting really cheap. Empty sectors on a disk are like empty blocks of memory: a complete waste. Just as ever
Actually the issue is that an over-compressed signal cut for vinyl will cause the needle to jump out of the groove, so either you compress and turn the overall volume way down or you leave the peaks and can't compress as much. That's the physical restraint imposed on you by the medium.
If you are referring to the RIAA standard EQing applied to vinyl, then that is far, far less of an issue than the situation with CDs; the RIAA standards are published and fixed and everyone who cuts vinyl has to adhere to them, because modern players (or receivers with Phono inputs) are designed to apply the reverse EQing to restore the original audio.
If CDs had a standard for compression and came with compression adjustments built-in then it would be similar... an individual user could adjust the compression settings for their taste and listening environment (no compression at home, medium compression in the car, and so on). Actually if CDs just came with the info embedded similar to CD-Text it would be enough. I could slap my expander inbetween the CD player and the receiver and reverse some of the damage.
Although patents may fulfill this function, their original intent was to get rid of the whole trade guild / trade secret situation, where only one company or a small group of people had some particular bit of knowledge or new invention and they refused to share it with the rest of society, as well as to provide incentives to inventors to create new inventions because those inventors know their risk and hard work won't be immediately ripped off.
In exchange for sharing that knowledge with the world you get a monopoly on using it for a certain period of time. Once that period of time is up, everyone else is free to adopt your new invention.
This was supposed to be the same trade-off with copyright: in exchange for a limited-time monopoly, society gets to put your works in the public domain. Imagine the loss to western culture if Shakespeare was still under the copyright control of some "Shakespeare Foundation".
Both of these ideas are also based on the foundation that "nothing happens in a vacuum". Without a functioning society and markets and without the influence of previous generations it simply wouldn't be possible to create much of value. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all, and it is only fair that we give something back to the society that has given us the tools and the opportunity to succeed.
Well, that was before you could patent "business methods" and before copyright lasted longer than any human being will ever live (your children and grandchildren will all be dead before anything created today leaves copyright protection). At least with shitty software patents you only have to wait 20 years before the issue becomes moot.
Not only can you use ZFS extended attributes for this but NTFS also supports true alternate data streams and has since its inception; this is how NT fileservers supported Mac clients natively (Services for Mac). You could copy a file to the NT share and back without losing any of the resource fork data.
I'm sure there are other filesystems that have done the same thing in the past as well.
This is slightly misleading, in that the law only says the vehicles manufactured for special markets must be limited to those special markets (for what byzantine reason I have no idea).
There is nothing preventing the car makers from releasing the same vehicles into all the other markets; they don't because the cars cost a little bit more ($150-$400 according to the article), but still get the same MPG even if the tailpipe emissions are almost nil. They don't believe consumers will pay the premium so they don't bother.
In other words, the manufacturers are free to produce the same exact car but instead of stamping "CALIFORNIA ONLY" on it and being unable to sell it outside that designated market, they can just sell it everywhere with no problem.
You can press F8 to select disable driver signing verification (or you can modify BCD's startup switches for Vista to enable that option all the time). Also, if you can attach a kernel debugger it turns off verification automatically.
In either case, once you have code in kernel mode all that remains is to suss out where the DRM system detects debug mode (to disable high-def playback) and override that protection. Essentially your kernel-mode code patches the kernel to erase its tracks.
I suspect this route would prove much easier than trying to exploit driver weaknesses; alternately just run Vista in a VM and do whatever you like. If they add VM detection code just patch it in memory to bypass the detection.
Perhaps the bigger issue here is that HTML/CSS hasn't kept up with the times (read the story about HTML 5 and the fact that almost no new tags have been introduced in years).
We shouldn't need Java/scripts to get menus - they should be supported directly in HTML via use of a element. In fact, the web would be far easier to browse with all this "active" crap turned off if HTML directly supported the most common uses of script with specific tags: menus, rollovers, tooltips, browser version checking, etc. (As an added bonus these things would also become easier to translate for mobile or accessible/handicapped browsing as well).
CDMA has a SIM-like standard, it's called R-UIM. In fact it is backwards-compatible with SIM/GSM and if your provider has roaming contracts with GSM networks you can make calls on both CDMA and GSM networks with it. The fact is the CDMA providers in the US simply don't give a shit and won't adopt the technology.
TimeWarner pulled the same jackass stunt on me; within a month or two of taking over the Dallas-area systems from Comcast they cut off half of my HD channels. Supposedly someone was "supposed to call" and tell me this was going to happen (yeah, right). They refuse to let me have those channels unless I switch from my $60/month "grandfathered" package to a $120/month TimeWarner package.
I have FIOS and love the internet access however I am forced to buy Business service to get static IP addresses; for some reason, Verizon didn't anticipate businesses would want TV service or residential customers with home offices would want static IP addresses. This means I cannot get the TV service and keep my static IPs; I'd rather have the internet service.
Does anyone know of *any* large company that doesn't suck? I've never found one.
The reliability fallacy has already been proven false and you can read about that in other posts, but I wanted to chime in regarding NCQ support on SATA:
If your controller and drives both support it SATA-II drives can do NCQ (Native Command Queuing), which buffers and reorders outstanding disk commands to maximize speed and minimize power/heat/wear. This is similar to TCQ that SCSI drives have been doing for ages.
So no, SATA drives don't react worse to server loads than SCSI drives.
IIRC, China was on its way to moving to an alphabet system (certain characters can be used for their alphabetic sounds in various circumstances) and so was Japan (look at Katakana/Hirigana).
It is likely that the introduction of the printing press (and later mass media like TV/radio and computers) have "arrested" this natural evolution. It may also be possible that the development of a national identity and cohesive society tends to put the brakes on some developments as well - if a single unified language is mandated by culture or a central authority then local variations are much less important.
Romanji (and to a certain extent English itself) is definitely influencing the Japanese; the younger generations even moreso. Japan may end up using an alphabet for day to day needs almost exclusively within the next 100 years. The situation in China is much less clear but it will probably happen eventually.
If we look into the past, nearly all societies with ideographic/logographic writing systems eventually moved to an alphabetic system. Hell, even Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs were partially syllabic much like Katakana. Much as previous posters have pointed out, changing to an alphabetic system from Chinese-characters has allowed Korea to dramatically raise literacy rates. There is only so much time for schooling and memorization, and only so much effort to expend on literacy. If a simpler writing system is more accessible then that is a net gain, even if there are a few things that logographic writing systems do better than alphabetic ones.
The NT kernel has a root namespace for everything in the system (from local filesystems to network drives to sockets to synchronization objects like mutexes), and in fact treats everything as a file (just like Unix) underneath.
Using the Native (NT Executive) API you can read or set the ACL on any object in the namespace, assuming you have the appropriate user rights and you own the object (or the ACL allows you to modify the permissions). NT kernel objects can also be case-sensitive (though that can confuse some Win32 programs). Often, you can delete, move, etc files that are locked by the Win32 subsystem, which can be useful in certain situations (though in Vista they made the IO system capable of cancelling outstanding IOs on its own so the zombie process bug that ends up locking files doesn't happen anymore. Its unfortunate Vista is so DRM-laden, or I'd try upgrading.)
The APIs are NtQuerySecurityObject and NtSetSecurityObject and I believe the devices are in \Device\Tcp, \Device\Ip, \Device\RawIp, \Device\Udp, etc. Check out http://undocumented.ntinternals.net/ for more details on what is in the native API (ntdll). This API provides everything necessary to implement a full POSIX layer, which is exactly what Services for Unix does, installing itself as a new runtime subsystem right next to the Win32 subsystem. (With Server 2003 R2 SP2 they shipped it as an available component as part of the install; I've even got setuid support and GCC installed as part of the package.)