I'm as big a fan of VLC as the next guy -- it's great when I just want to play back some specific bit of media -- but if you want to be able to embed media in anything, you're gonna need a system-level framework, QuickTime or otherwise, and it makes sense to use something that people already have installed.
For example, I've written a small app that plays media files and reads a second "bookmark" file to provide jump-to points and notes for anything QuickTime plays (and I know some formats support this natively, but not all do). I could have written the same app using ffmpeg as the basis for a media player, but then I'd either have to A) distribute my own copy of all the ffmpeg libraries as part of the program or B) require everyone to install ffmpeg before using my program. How is that any different/better/etc. than QuickTime?
Moreover, while the MS/Real/Apple fight for file extensions on Windows is annoying (though not entirely limited to QuickTime), having the libraries around on your system doesn't hurt anything, and lets you use QuickTime files and use QuickTime-linked programs if you so desire. It's not like having QuickTime installed (or even in use) requires that you run 4 different daemons 24/7.
I won't say you're wrong about the missed-the-boat notion, but I think you might be misunderstanding the role of this product. At the very least we don't see it doing the same things.
For one thing, it's composite and s-video only. I know some people are whining that the AppleTV doesn't support those formats, but those of use with newer, high-def equipment are sick of componsite video signals.
For another, it only decodes MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video. It plays DivX, but only by using your host system to decode them -- it doesn't have the on-board power to decode anything in software, and doesn't have DivX hardware.
And as far as "works with MythTV" I assume you mean "can be re-flashed and the hardware used to run mvpmc", since the factory software only support Windows as a host system and doesn't know anything about MythTV. mvpmc is a great bit of software -- I've used their code to provide non-Java interfaces for my ReplayTV -- but it's hardly a feature of the MediaMVP itself.
The Windows Media Center Extender is a much better comparison to the AppleTV -- supports wired and/or wireless in the same box, requires a host system for content origination but can play with or without live streaming, outputs to HD, has enough processor to decode in software (i.e. without being limited to an MPEG hardware decoder).
As someone who's had both commerical and home-built media systems, I've been waiting for more people to get into the market that AppleTV plays in. Like I said, the Windows Media Center Extender is a comparable product, but it wants Windows Media Center, which I don't (and likely won't) have. SlingBox claims they'll put out something in the near future, but they haven't announced a release date or specs yet, just some hype to counter the AppleTV. There are a couple of other players like Pixel Magic Systems, but so far there aren't in clear leaders.
I'm not sure yet that I want an AppleTV, but I'm glad to see another big-name player through its hat in the ring, with the hope that either AppleTV will become the product I want, or will help define the high-def computer-based-but-not-computer-in-living-room media playback market and eventually will help bring about some more refined, mature products in that market.
And you couldn't have cats in your house if your neighborhood association said you couldn't. But the finer points of contract law hardly seem relevant to a discussion about public services.
But I most certainly could put a tent in the street if I had a contract with the city to do so. Every room and board contract I've ever seen for a state school (granted, that's only from 4 schools in the midwest) includes Internet access as part of the "public service" that I'm buying.
Again, that's all unrelated to the original point about how *living* at the school and *paying* for Internet access as part of your room and board contract seems like a perfectly valid way to grant students residential Internet access without impeding the education mission or funding of the school. Or the point I raised about how allowing alternate access methods, that would not use the school's Internet connection, would also be an acceptable solution if the schools allowed it (but they don't due to their private telcom systems). And I haven't even brought philisophical points about how personal growth has traditionally been considered an important part of higher education, and restricting students access to the world in comparsion to their non-dorm-dwelling peers might be detremental to the educational experience as whole. But it doesn't really matter, since you seem unwilling to discuss the point you made in the first place.
Seriously, if you're going to make inflammatory remarks you should at least be prepared to discuss them. I think you're just opposed to publically funded higher education -- which is a viewpoint I don't entirely disagree with -- or maybe that you're just angry about your student loans or something -- but you made an argument about how students don't deserve residental Internet access because the school is state subsidized and now you're refusing to discuss that point. This whole dorm vs. apartment vs. house thing only got started because I answered your rhetorical question in the same rhetorical manner -- it's wholly unrelated to the discussion, and you're using it to ignore everything else I've said.
Show me an apartment where you can remodel your room and I'll show you a dorm that lets you make the same kind of changes -- move the furniture, non-destructively hang things, store your own things, and maybe paint. I don't see how the pragmatic limitations of multi-tenant buildings are related to this argument at all.
I'm actually not attending a school where my education is being subsidized by someone else. Even when I was, my room and board wasn't, or they had the most inefficient housing system in the history of man, because rent on my apartment, including utilities and Internet, was less than the "room" portion of my room and board when I moved out.
Moreover, you can't expect someone to give up every aspect of their life except education and sleep just because they are getting a bit of subsidy from the government. It's not like college is a 2-week camp -- it's 3+ years of your life. Are you seriously suggesting that living in the dorms means you can't send email or make phone calls from your home for several years? It's not prison, and the people attending aren't getting a free ride on "your" tax dollars; they're paying to be there, and they'll be paying taxes too.
Finally, you're missing the intent of government subsidies in the first place. Their intent is to benefit the public at large, even those who do not receive them directly. State subsidized education is no different; the theory is that providing affordable education to the public, and providing institutions for publicly available academic research, provides a benefit to society in general, not just the people attending. The same is true of welfare, libraries, roads, and public sanitation. Whether you think those things are good ideas or not, they are funded with the intent of providing a benefit to the entire community, not just the specific users, and it's ridiculous to ask people to give up things that the rest of society takes for granted.
If you want to end subsidies, or replace them with loans that make people personally accountable for the services they use, I might even agree with you, but it's outright silly to suggest that use of public services requires you to give up your entire life outside those specific services.
You find me a state school where I can buy DSL or similar non-state Internet access in my dorm room and I'll back you 100%. Heck, in places with digital phone service you can't even get dial-up in the dorms, because the phone system doesn't support data calls.
Students using the Internet at 2 AM at a university aren't (generally) just studying there, they are *living* there, and they're paying room and board above and beyond their tuition. That room and board includes Internet access, and often on significantly different terms that Internet access outside the dorms.
No, killer bees aren't bad -- they were created by selective breeding, not direct genetic manipulation, which means they are "natural" and therefore not dangerous unlike these terrible GM mosquitos and GM corn abominations.
Accused of potentially depleting upper-atmosphere ozone. Found to deplete ozone is a bit strong.
I'm not a big fan of the Montreal Protocol myself. I'm not saying we should pump out CFCs for fun, and you have valid points about their dangers as fire supressants, but the evidence to ban HCFCs was even flimsier than the evidence to ban CFCs, and neither of them have been proven, even 15 years later, to cause any significant amount of the upper-atmosphere ozone depletion of which they were accused. Moreover, the ban on HCFCs has demonstrably lead to increased energy use, and therefore increased greenhouse gas production, because the replacement refrigerants are less efficient.
One could argue that the inconclusive (not bad mind you, just incomplete) science and subsequent political maneuvering that lead to the Montreal Protocol contributed to the need for the Kyoto Protocol. But that kind of thinking just starts flamewars.
Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.
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I wasn't aware of that -- it's an interesting idea. It's not really desktop-oriented in the current setup, but desktop use wouldn't be out of the question if you had the Ethernet controllers built-in to the disks rather than into some multi-disk enclosure.
I'd hate to connect anything other than disks via ATAoE though -- I don't have nearly enough mouse buttons to justify block-sized transfers. But a mouse that supported seek operations could be cool...
Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.
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It's not a bad idea, save the configuration part. How does the drive get an IP address? How does it resolve conflicts for addresses with other devices on the bus? How does your motherboard find the attached devices? If you're running iSCSI it's not just an Ethernet connector, it's a full-on TCP network. There are solutions to these problems, but they go beyond "add an Ethernet interface" -- you'd need DHCP and SLP or the likes at the very least just to get everything talking, and all embedded both on the disk and in the pre-boot environment.
You could drop iSCSI and just use layer-2 Ethernet to transfer blocks, but then you'd have to define a comm protocol for disks on layer-2 Ethernet. Not that it couldn't be done, but I'm not aware of one in common use today (at least not on commodity Ethernet hardware). I think this sort of solution is more feasible, as it's closer to the standard motherboard bus technologies, but there would have to be some motivation to develop the comm protocol and write drivers for it for both the OS and the pre-boot environment.
What's wrong with IEEE 1394 as a generic system interconnect? It has global addressing, it's hostless, it's hot-swappable, supports a large number (compared to the needs of the average desktop for example) of systems per bus, it works over reasonably long cable runs (very long if you use Cat-5 or optical connections) -- it's a lot like Ethernet in all those respects. And it's already got wide support for block access, DV streams, TCP/IP and a variety of other transports. Why do you want to invent a new block access protocol for Ethernet?
That there's no evidence that GM is dangerous. There's no evidence that it's not either. My entire point is there's not much evidence, so there's no reason to believe that GM is any more dangerous than other things with a similar lack of evidence -- i.e. every new food we invent/grow/etc.
Like I keep saying, I think we should test new foods, of all types, GM or not. I just think it's silly that we're afraid of the voodoo magic of direct genetic manipulation, but foods we create through indirect genetic manipulation or even by pure chemistry are thought to be "safer" for some reason. There's no evidence to support that feeling whatever, and ten thousand years with only a few problems, while it might make people feel good, is not particularly good evidence that selective breeding is safe, only that we have been (mostly) lucky that the bad things weren't so bad as to wipe us out.
What does "cooking corn in alkali solution" have to do with "indirect genetic manipulation" (aka selective breeding) ?
Corn itself in all modern forms (and by "modern" I mean the last ~3000 years) is the result of selective breeding. It came from plants that wouldn't have passed as primary grains, and wouldn't have caused the problems saw with corn. If you're going to argue with me about indirect genetic manipulation you might at least learn something about the plant your claiming isn't.
And we've got, what, a whopping twenty years worth of experience (as opposed to several orders of magnitude more years for the indirect variant)?
Like I told the last 4 trolls, I'm not opposed to testing new foods, nor am I claming anything we can grow will be safe for us or the environment. I just don't see why we distinguish between direct genetic modification and any other method that produces new foods, because most of the other methods, despite being older, have not been proven safe by any scientifically valid method.
First, indirect genetic manipulation has wiped out lots of people. Ask anyone who switched to corn as a primary grain but didn't adopt nixtamalization. Oh wait, you can't, they all died.
Second, direct genetic manipulation hasn't wiped out lots of people or "entire groups of species" at any time in the past, so there's no evidence that it's even as dangerous than indirect manipulation.
Finally, it's hypocritical to argue that a lack of evidence about the safety of direct genetic manipulation is cause for fear, while a lack of evidence about the safety of indirect genetic manipulation is a cause for calm. Even ignoring the problems that indirect genetic manipulation has caused, the fact that there haven't been a lot of problems isn't really evidence that the method is safe, just that the particular things we've done with the method are safe.
Like I said, I'm not opposed to testing, but I've yet to heard one argument in support of differential testing that isn't based entirely on a fear of new things.
I won't disagree per say, but what makes you believe that new foods created by direct genetic manipulation are any more or less dangerous than new foods created by indirect genetic manipulation? Being "natural" doesn't make something safe. If you're going to require extensive testing and quarantine for directly manipulated foods why not require the same for new foods created through selective breeding?
There have been cases of selective breeding gone wrong, in both plants and animals -- I'm not sure any of those cases lead to toxicity in human foodstuffs (though I'm not sure they didn't either) but they have lead to inferior breeds of plants and animals. Take almost any breed of show dog, or hybrid African bees, or several varieties of plants we previously grew intentionally that are now considered non-native weeds.
I'm not saying we shouldn't test new foods, I just don't see why the method of creation is a significant influence in the diligence we should have in testing.
There are plenty of uses for SMS that don't prevent you from having a dinner conversation. And there are plenty of places where WiFi isn't available or isn't free that make wide-area wireless Internet access useful. It's a little hypocritical to whine about how you'll be ignored by the new plans while you ignore or dismiss users that might actual benefit from those plans.
Diesel isn't right for everyone. But it is right for a lot of applications where we currently use gasoline, particularly in the US, due primarily to poorly targeted emissions standards, institutional inertia, and public perception. None of those are technical problems, and they're only engineering problems if you're trying to selling something and the business requirements conflict with the technical ones.
You can't tell me that a gasoline engine is the best way to drive a low-voltage (i.e. low-speed) generator in a system with a sufficient power buffer to allow load adjustments to happen over a period of up to several minutes. I've actually worked on systems that did fuel->electric->rotary motion in a non-propulsion setting with much tighter load-match timing requirements than your average hybrid car, (moreover it was a system that was previously fuel->rotary motion just like hybrid cars) and I really can't fathom why you'd chose a gasoline engine for such an application. That's the kind of silliness that leads to diesel fanboys -- it's a counter to the silliness that puts gasoline into applications where diesel *is* the right choice.
Duplicate MAC address seems seriously lazy to me. Even if the spec didn't say that manufacturers were supposed to provide globally unique IDs, the YY:YY:YY part of XX:XX:XX:YY:YY:YY is still 2^24 = 16,777,216 addresses -- you wouldn't think it would be that hard to find unused address. And according to coffer.com 3com has a whole slew of vendor codes, so they shouldn't even have to roll around at 16.7 million: http://www.coffer.com/mac_find/?string=3com.
You're right that MACs don't pass layer-3 routers, but they *are* unique (48-bit address space, bigger than IPv4). Otherwise you'd have to be careful which NICs you put on the same segment.
99.9% of the time people who are depressed have only one person to blame -- themselves. They could simply work every day at making changes to their lifestyle, relationships, and brain chemistry to be happy. It's not any less true than your fat line, but it's not an opinion most people would be proud to express.
I'm not saying fat people shouldn't work to improve their situation, but failing to sympathize *at all* because it "their own fault" is a little extreme, particularly if they are working to improve their body.
Moreover if someone is born fat to fat parents, and has been raised overfed and under-active since birth, is is really their fault that they aren't suddenly thin at 18? How early are people supposed to notice their parent's bad habits and break them, and how long do we give them to overcome 18 years of bad training and habits?
The why become very important when it comes to "fixing" whatever the problem may be.
If your house is on fire because your fuel oil tank is leaking and shorting out an electric line, water is probably a very bad solution, at least until you've turned off the power and done something to contain the oil.
Now if only they used it. I've got an analog radio clock that doesn't even display the date, but for some reason they decided to read the date bits and do some calendar calculations (or hard code the next X years of DST dates) to calculate DST rather than reading the flag.
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.
FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).
His statements aren't clear, but he isn't wrong. He's saying "don't use UTC for future dates [unless you really don't care what time it is locally]". If you schedule something to happen at midnight local time, convert to UTC and store the timestamp, and then before that time arrives someone changes the notion of local time, your UTC timestamp will no longer represent midnight local time. Depending on what you're doing that may be a problem -- maybe you picked a specific local time because of business requirements related to the local time.
The SATA interface most certainly has commands to handle this new technology -- you can send arbitrary commands over SATA, just like you can over SCSI. It's a generic data interface not a block-layer device controller.
You'd just assign the controller another LUN and document the commands it accepts. You could then make the flash disk part of the address space of the primary disk or you could assign each their own LUN for use as two separate disks, with the third "control" LUN accepting commands to copy between the first two out-of-band. You could even setup a system where "dumb" controllers could use LUN 0 and treat the disk as a normal hard drive, with either automatic or no use of the flash portion, and expose the same physical disks separately on other LUNs for advanced use by "smart" controllers. Take a look at any tape library or even an iPod for a similar example.
Did Regan stop Canada and the UK from converting to metric too? Last time I checked there's still common use of imperial units in both places. Canada has at least embraced the change governmentally, so you could argue that they've done all they can, but those MPH speed limits in the UK don't seem terribly metric to me, and they aren't the only example.
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What makes you think those are different?
I'm as big a fan of VLC as the next guy -- it's great when I just want to play back some specific bit of media -- but if you want to be able to embed media in anything, you're gonna need a system-level framework, QuickTime or otherwise, and it makes sense to use something that people already have installed.
For example, I've written a small app that plays media files and reads a second "bookmark" file to provide jump-to points and notes for anything QuickTime plays (and I know some formats support this natively, but not all do). I could have written the same app using ffmpeg as the basis for a media player, but then I'd either have to A) distribute my own copy of all the ffmpeg libraries as part of the program or B) require everyone to install ffmpeg before using my program. How is that any different/better/etc. than QuickTime?
Moreover, while the MS/Real/Apple fight for file extensions on Windows is annoying (though not entirely limited to QuickTime), having the libraries around on your system doesn't hurt anything, and lets you use QuickTime files and use QuickTime-linked programs if you so desire. It's not like having QuickTime installed (or even in use) requires that you run 4 different daemons 24/7.
I won't say you're wrong about the missed-the-boat notion, but I think you might be misunderstanding the role of this product. At the very least we don't see it doing the same things.
a mvp.html
From my persepctive, there are other similar solutions, but the Hauppauge MediaMVP is not one of them for a number of reasons. Just read the product page: http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_medi
For one thing, it's composite and s-video only. I know some people are whining that the AppleTV doesn't support those formats, but those of use with newer, high-def equipment are sick of componsite video signals.
For another, it only decodes MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video. It plays DivX, but only by using your host system to decode them -- it doesn't have the on-board power to decode anything in software, and doesn't have DivX hardware.
And as far as "works with MythTV" I assume you mean "can be re-flashed and the hardware used to run mvpmc", since the factory software only support Windows as a host system and doesn't know anything about MythTV. mvpmc is a great bit of software -- I've used their code to provide non-Java interfaces for my ReplayTV -- but it's hardly a feature of the MediaMVP itself.
The Windows Media Center Extender is a much better comparison to the AppleTV -- supports wired and/or wireless in the same box, requires a host system for content origination but can play with or without live streaming, outputs to HD, has enough processor to decode in software (i.e. without being limited to an MPEG hardware decoder).
As someone who's had both commerical and home-built media systems, I've been waiting for more people to get into the market that AppleTV plays in. Like I said, the Windows Media Center Extender is a comparable product, but it wants Windows Media Center, which I don't (and likely won't) have. SlingBox claims they'll put out something in the near future, but they haven't announced a release date or specs yet, just some hype to counter the AppleTV. There are a couple of other players like Pixel Magic Systems, but so far there aren't in clear leaders.
I'm not sure yet that I want an AppleTV, but I'm glad to see another big-name player through its hat in the ring, with the hope that either AppleTV will become the product I want, or will help define the high-def computer-based-but-not-computer-in-living-room media playback market and eventually will help bring about some more refined, mature products in that market.
And you couldn't have cats in your house if your neighborhood association said you couldn't. But the finer points of contract law hardly seem relevant to a discussion about public services.
But I most certainly could put a tent in the street if I had a contract with the city to do so. Every room and board contract I've ever seen for a state school (granted, that's only from 4 schools in the midwest) includes Internet access as part of the "public service" that I'm buying.
Again, that's all unrelated to the original point about how *living* at the school and *paying* for Internet access as part of your room and board contract seems like a perfectly valid way to grant students residential Internet access without impeding the education mission or funding of the school. Or the point I raised about how allowing alternate access methods, that would not use the school's Internet connection, would also be an acceptable solution if the schools allowed it (but they don't due to their private telcom systems). And I haven't even brought philisophical points about how personal growth has traditionally been considered an important part of higher education, and restricting students access to the world in comparsion to their non-dorm-dwelling peers might be detremental to the educational experience as whole. But it doesn't really matter, since you seem unwilling to discuss the point you made in the first place.
Seriously, if you're going to make inflammatory remarks you should at least be prepared to discuss them. I think you're just opposed to publically funded higher education -- which is a viewpoint I don't entirely disagree with -- or maybe that you're just angry about your student loans or something -- but you made an argument about how students don't deserve residental Internet access because the school is state subsidized and now you're refusing to discuss that point. This whole dorm vs. apartment vs. house thing only got started because I answered your rhetorical question in the same rhetorical manner -- it's wholly unrelated to the discussion, and you're using it to ignore everything else I've said.
Show me an apartment where you can remodel your room and I'll show you a dorm that lets you make the same kind of changes -- move the furniture, non-destructively hang things, store your own things, and maybe paint. I don't see how the pragmatic limitations of multi-tenant buildings are related to this argument at all.
I'm actually not attending a school where my education is being subsidized by someone else. Even when I was, my room and board wasn't, or they had the most inefficient housing system in the history of man, because rent on my apartment, including utilities and Internet, was less than the "room" portion of my room and board when I moved out.
Moreover, you can't expect someone to give up every aspect of their life except education and sleep just because they are getting a bit of subsidy from the government. It's not like college is a 2-week camp -- it's 3+ years of your life. Are you seriously suggesting that living in the dorms means you can't send email or make phone calls from your home for several years? It's not prison, and the people attending aren't getting a free ride on "your" tax dollars; they're paying to be there, and they'll be paying taxes too.
Finally, you're missing the intent of government subsidies in the first place. Their intent is to benefit the public at large, even those who do not receive them directly. State subsidized education is no different; the theory is that providing affordable education to the public, and providing institutions for publicly available academic research, provides a benefit to society in general, not just the people attending. The same is true of welfare, libraries, roads, and public sanitation. Whether you think those things are good ideas or not, they are funded with the intent of providing a benefit to the entire community, not just the specific users, and it's ridiculous to ask people to give up things that the rest of society takes for granted.
If you want to end subsidies, or replace them with loans that make people personally accountable for the services they use, I might even agree with you, but it's outright silly to suggest that use of public services requires you to give up your entire life outside those specific services.
You find me a state school where I can buy DSL or similar non-state Internet access in my dorm room and I'll back you 100%. Heck, in places with digital phone service you can't even get dial-up in the dorms, because the phone system doesn't support data calls.
Students using the Internet at 2 AM at a university aren't (generally) just studying there, they are *living* there, and they're paying room and board above and beyond their tuition. That room and board includes Internet access, and often on significantly different terms that Internet access outside the dorms.
No, killer bees aren't bad -- they were created by selective breeding, not direct genetic manipulation, which means they are "natural" and therefore not dangerous unlike these terrible GM mosquitos and GM corn abominations.
Accused of potentially depleting upper-atmosphere ozone. Found to deplete ozone is a bit strong.
I'm not a big fan of the Montreal Protocol myself. I'm not saying we should pump out CFCs for fun, and you have valid points about their dangers as fire supressants, but the evidence to ban HCFCs was even flimsier than the evidence to ban CFCs, and neither of them have been proven, even 15 years later, to cause any significant amount of the upper-atmosphere ozone depletion of which they were accused. Moreover, the ban on HCFCs has demonstrably lead to increased energy use, and therefore increased greenhouse gas production, because the replacement refrigerants are less efficient.
One could argue that the inconclusive (not bad mind you, just incomplete) science and subsequent political maneuvering that lead to the Montreal Protocol contributed to the need for the Kyoto Protocol. But that kind of thinking just starts flamewars.
I wasn't aware of that -- it's an interesting idea. It's not really desktop-oriented in the current setup, but desktop use wouldn't be out of the question if you had the Ethernet controllers built-in to the disks rather than into some multi-disk enclosure.
I'd hate to connect anything other than disks via ATAoE though -- I don't have nearly enough mouse buttons to justify block-sized transfers. But a mouse that supported seek operations could be cool...
It's not a bad idea, save the configuration part. How does the drive get an IP address? How does it resolve conflicts for addresses with other devices on the bus? How does your motherboard find the attached devices? If you're running iSCSI it's not just an Ethernet connector, it's a full-on TCP network. There are solutions to these problems, but they go beyond "add an Ethernet interface" -- you'd need DHCP and SLP or the likes at the very least just to get everything talking, and all embedded both on the disk and in the pre-boot environment.
You could drop iSCSI and just use layer-2 Ethernet to transfer blocks, but then you'd have to define a comm protocol for disks on layer-2 Ethernet. Not that it couldn't be done, but I'm not aware of one in common use today (at least not on commodity Ethernet hardware). I think this sort of solution is more feasible, as it's closer to the standard motherboard bus technologies, but there would have to be some motivation to develop the comm protocol and write drivers for it for both the OS and the pre-boot environment.
What's wrong with IEEE 1394 as a generic system interconnect? It has global addressing, it's hostless, it's hot-swappable, supports a large number (compared to the needs of the average desktop for example) of systems per bus, it works over reasonably long cable runs (very long if you use Cat-5 or optical connections) -- it's a lot like Ethernet in all those respects. And it's already got wide support for block access, DV streams, TCP/IP and a variety of other transports. Why do you want to invent a new block access protocol for Ethernet?
That there's no evidence that GM is dangerous. There's no evidence that it's not either. My entire point is there's not much evidence, so there's no reason to believe that GM is any more dangerous than other things with a similar lack of evidence -- i.e. every new food we invent/grow/etc.
Like I keep saying, I think we should test new foods, of all types, GM or not. I just think it's silly that we're afraid of the voodoo magic of direct genetic manipulation, but foods we create through indirect genetic manipulation or even by pure chemistry are thought to be "safer" for some reason. There's no evidence to support that feeling whatever, and ten thousand years with only a few problems, while it might make people feel good, is not particularly good evidence that selective breeding is safe, only that we have been (mostly) lucky that the bad things weren't so bad as to wipe us out.
What does "cooking corn in alkali solution" have to do with "indirect genetic manipulation" (aka selective breeding) ?
Corn itself in all modern forms (and by "modern" I mean the last ~3000 years) is the result of selective breeding. It came from plants that wouldn't have passed as primary grains, and wouldn't have caused the problems saw with corn. If you're going to argue with me about indirect genetic manipulation you might at least learn something about the plant your claiming isn't.
And we've got, what, a whopping twenty years worth of experience (as opposed to several orders of magnitude more years for the indirect variant)?
Like I told the last 4 trolls, I'm not opposed to testing new foods, nor am I claming anything we can grow will be safe for us or the environment. I just don't see why we distinguish between direct genetic modification and any other method that produces new foods, because most of the other methods, despite being older, have not been proven safe by any scientifically valid method.
First, indirect genetic manipulation has wiped out lots of people. Ask anyone who switched to corn as a primary grain but didn't adopt nixtamalization. Oh wait, you can't, they all died.
Second, direct genetic manipulation hasn't wiped out lots of people or "entire groups of species" at any time in the past, so there's no evidence that it's even as dangerous than indirect manipulation.
Finally, it's hypocritical to argue that a lack of evidence about the safety of direct genetic manipulation is cause for fear, while a lack of evidence about the safety of indirect genetic manipulation is a cause for calm. Even ignoring the problems that indirect genetic manipulation has caused, the fact that there haven't been a lot of problems isn't really evidence that the method is safe, just that the particular things we've done with the method are safe.
Like I said, I'm not opposed to testing, but I've yet to heard one argument in support of differential testing that isn't based entirely on a fear of new things.
I won't disagree per say, but what makes you believe that new foods created by direct genetic manipulation are any more or less dangerous than new foods created by indirect genetic manipulation? Being "natural" doesn't make something safe. If you're going to require extensive testing and quarantine for directly manipulated foods why not require the same for new foods created through selective breeding?
There have been cases of selective breeding gone wrong, in both plants and animals -- I'm not sure any of those cases lead to toxicity in human foodstuffs (though I'm not sure they didn't either) but they have lead to inferior breeds of plants and animals. Take almost any breed of show dog, or hybrid African bees, or several varieties of plants we previously grew intentionally that are now considered non-native weeds.
I'm not saying we shouldn't test new foods, I just don't see why the method of creation is a significant influence in the diligence we should have in testing.
You have a valid point about not everyone wanting unlimited access. You don't need to be so annoyingly arrogant to make it -- you come off like Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television.
There are plenty of uses for SMS that don't prevent you from having a dinner conversation. And there are plenty of places where WiFi isn't available or isn't free that make wide-area wireless Internet access useful. It's a little hypocritical to whine about how you'll be ignored by the new plans while you ignore or dismiss users that might actual benefit from those plans.
Diesel isn't right for everyone. But it is right for a lot of applications where we currently use gasoline, particularly in the US, due primarily to poorly targeted emissions standards, institutional inertia, and public perception. None of those are technical problems, and they're only engineering problems if you're trying to selling something and the business requirements conflict with the technical ones.
You can't tell me that a gasoline engine is the best way to drive a low-voltage (i.e. low-speed) generator in a system with a sufficient power buffer to allow load adjustments to happen over a period of up to several minutes. I've actually worked on systems that did fuel->electric->rotary motion in a non-propulsion setting with much tighter load-match timing requirements than your average hybrid car, (moreover it was a system that was previously fuel->rotary motion just like hybrid cars) and I really can't fathom why you'd chose a gasoline engine for such an application. That's the kind of silliness that leads to diesel fanboys -- it's a counter to the silliness that puts gasoline into applications where diesel *is* the right choice.
Duplicate MAC address seems seriously lazy to me. Even if the spec didn't say that manufacturers were supposed to provide globally unique IDs, the YY:YY:YY part of XX:XX:XX:YY:YY:YY is still 2^24 = 16,777,216 addresses -- you wouldn't think it would be that hard to find unused address. And according to coffer.com 3com has a whole slew of vendor codes, so they shouldn't even have to roll around at 16.7 million: http://www.coffer.com/mac_find/?string=3com.
You're right that MACs don't pass layer-3 routers, but they *are* unique (48-bit address space, bigger than IPv4). Otherwise you'd have to be careful which NICs you put on the same segment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
99.9% of the time people who are depressed have only one person to blame -- themselves. They could simply work every day at making changes to their lifestyle, relationships, and brain chemistry to be happy. It's not any less true than your fat line, but it's not an opinion most people would be proud to express.
I'm not saying fat people shouldn't work to improve their situation, but failing to sympathize *at all* because it "their own fault" is a little extreme, particularly if they are working to improve their body.
Moreover if someone is born fat to fat parents, and has been raised overfed and under-active since birth, is is really their fault that they aren't suddenly thin at 18? How early are people supposed to notice their parent's bad habits and break them, and how long do we give them to overcome 18 years of bad training and habits?
The why become very important when it comes to "fixing" whatever the problem may be.
If your house is on fire because your fuel oil tank is leaking and shorting out an electric line, water is probably a very bad solution, at least until you've turned off the power and done something to contain the oil.
Now if only they used it. I've got an analog radio clock that doesn't even display the date, but for some reason they decided to read the date bits and do some calendar calculations (or hard code the next X years of DST dates) to calculate DST rather than reading the flag.
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.
FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).
His statements aren't clear, but he isn't wrong. He's saying "don't use UTC for future dates [unless you really don't care what time it is locally]". If you schedule something to happen at midnight local time, convert to UTC and store the timestamp, and then before that time arrives someone changes the notion of local time, your UTC timestamp will no longer represent midnight local time. Depending on what you're doing that may be a problem -- maybe you picked a specific local time because of business requirements related to the local time.
As opposed to cancer?
Or the current radition and chemical treatments?
The SATA interface most certainly has commands to handle this new technology -- you can send arbitrary commands over SATA, just like you can over SCSI. It's a generic data interface not a block-layer device controller.
You'd just assign the controller another LUN and document the commands it accepts. You could then make the flash disk part of the address space of the primary disk or you could assign each their own LUN for use as two separate disks, with the third "control" LUN accepting commands to copy between the first two out-of-band. You could even setup a system where "dumb" controllers could use LUN 0 and treat the disk as a normal hard drive, with either automatic or no use of the flash portion, and expose the same physical disks separately on other LUNs for advanced use by "smart" controllers. Take a look at any tape library or even an iPod for a similar example.
Did Regan stop Canada and the UK from converting to metric too? Last time I checked there's still common use of imperial units in both places. Canada has at least embraced the change governmentally, so you could argue that they've done all they can, but those MPH speed limits in the UK don't seem terribly metric to me, and they aren't the only example.