The newer Toyota Prius cars also have LED headlights. I prefer my older Prius with HIDs which also are used for the high beams. I've not had a problem with people flashing their highs at me and the self-leveling works. Also, they're not located high like they are on trucks and SUVs. The LED headlights are not as bright (but brighter than halogen) and only work for low-beams.
I think a lot of the problem is after market HIDs and poorly maintained vehicles, especially the bluish HIDs. When mine went out I bought replacement bulbs and saw that there's a wide range of color temperatures available (up to around 10K which isn't legal). The lower color temperature bulbs are brighter and cause less glare issues IMO but are not as "cool" looking.
Actually CDMA works better in densely populated areas as well. It is able to handle a larger call volume in the same amount of spectrum compared to GSM. Why do you think AT&T customers have so many problems in places like New York and San Francisco? CDMA allows multiple devices to transmit at the same time on the same frequency and is much better at adjusting the power levels compared to GSM.
That's like when AT&T bought out my cable internet provider and the service took a major nosedive. Dialup was a LOT faster than the cable modem, thanks to AT&T's incompetence. They throttled upstream bandwidth to 128Kbps, but aggregated EVERYBODY together through the same 128Kbps pipe. Ping showed 40-60% packet loss on average.
When Comcast bought out the cable system it was a major improvement for everything. I get almost daily junk mail from AT&T for their U-Verse service... I won't trust AT&T with any kind of service.
It's still overly complicated. I recently spent a lot of time working on EHCI drivers for an embedded platform. xHCI which is used for USB 3.0 is an improvement. Most USB implementations use EHCI and OHCI/UHCI. To the host it looks like two separate PCI devices with completely different drivers that must hand-off to one another. OHCI or UHCI is used for USB 1.X and EHCI for 2.0. xHCI also replaces EHCI and OHCI.
At least for EHCI the descriptors are overly complex and 64-bit addressing support is a bit of a hacked on extension.
That's my feeling as well. I am a long time KDE user (since 1999!) and it took a long time before I was able to make the switch from KDE 3.5 to 4.x. In many ways 4.7 is as good or better than 3.5.x but there are still some things like konsole I like better in 3.5.x. I also wish kscope were updated or that its functionality be merged into kdevelop. It's an invaluable tool for digging through large code bases like the Linux kernel.
I might add that I'm using OpenSUSE which has one of the best KDE implementations I've seen. I don't like Fedora though recent versions of Kubuntu are nice.
Every time I play with Gnome on Ubuntu I quickly find myself frustrated by the lack of options and little features I make extensive use of missing. I don't want a simple user interface. I want one that allows me to efficiently do what I need to do.
Back when Google first came out it gained popularity due to the quality of its results compared with Alta Vista and others. The others couldn't hold a candle to Google with their page rank algorithm.
The other thing that made Google so popular was that the other search engines were completely cluttered with animated ads all over the place whereas Google just had a simple clean interface.
That certainly does not seem to be the case. I found a large group of my friends are already on and a number of others were interested in joining, though we tend to be more technical than average.
I'll believe it when I see it. If anything, the processor cores will be very simple. The biggest bottlenecks will be memory bandwidth and synchronization between the cores. It sounds like what they are doing may be more akin to what GPUs are doing today, though they say nothing about floating point support or even if it's 8, 16, 32 or 64-bits per core.
The company I work for, Cavium Networks, has a 32 core 64-bit MIPS processor (and yes, it runs Linux).
I agree with this. OO does have a place in system level programming. Years ago I worked on a complex networking driver for OS/2 (about 100,000 lines of C++) to handle ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). The company I worked for also had a driver for Windows NT that was written in C. The C driver, by comparison, was 360,000 lines of code and tended to have a lot more bugs and was much more difficult to maintain.
The C++ driver was considerably smaller and faster and contained more functionality than the equivalent C driver. Performance was also excellent due to the way the data path was implemented.
I think C++ definitely has its uses and can be great for things like protocol stacks or where a lot of complexity takes place. It can be a lot trickier to work with C++, though, which I think is probably the main reason. C is a much simpler language than C++ and it's a lot easier to understand what's going on at the machine level without a lot of experience.
I think there's definitely room for C++ within Linux, though. I think it might be easier to restrict it to loadable modules and I recall that somebody once implemented a C++ framework for modules.
I remember AT&T broadband... Comcast was a MAJOR improvement compared to AT&T who was totally incompetent. From that experience alone I will never deal with AT&T.
I upgraded a couple of machines from 11.3 to 11.4 and everything went very smoothly and just worked. I've found OpenSUSE to be fairly stable and I like the fact that out of the box it has full LVM and RAID support and easily recognized my LVM setup from before.
The installation went quickly and seemed faster than 11.3 when I installed off of a DVD. It feels faster than 11.3 as well.
Even brand new high-capacity NAND flash chips often have bad sectors in them. I'm working with them in embedded systems, but it seems that most customers don't bother booting over NAND because of the reliability problems and just use NOR flash (which typically has 100K to 1M write cycles.
I could see using a SSD to hold the operating system and applications, but certainly not/tmp, swap or data that's going to be updated frequently. I've had fairly good luck with mechanical drives, often running for many years 24/7, even Maxtor.
For all of my important data I use a RAID controller and back up periodically.
I use CFLs like crazy and even a couple LED bulbs, but there are cases where I stick with incandescents. I have some flood lights that are cycled on and off quite frequently which causes the CFL ones to die quickly and the LED ones are still too costly for the amount of light I need or they're unsuitable for outdoors.
I also have used incandescents as a heat source for animals and I don't think their use in some appliances is going to disappear anytime soon (i.e. oven lights, dryer lights, refrigerator lights, etc.)
Actually ours is in the mainline gcc, so there's no special fork unless you want the bleeding edge support, which always takes a little while to get checked in to the main branch.
The company I work for makes 64-bit MIPS processors with up to 16 cores (soon 32 cores). They're optimized for I/O, networking, storage and security and lack floating point though. The nice thing with MIPS is that it's easy to extend the instruction set without breaking anything. We've added a number of instructions and have extended gcc/binutils to take advantage of it. And yes, they all run Linux.
Being a traditional RISC type platform makes it not too difficult for the compiler to optimize code for.
Sadly this is true as most of the main-stream media in this country has been taken over by those with a corporate agenda (or by individuals with a political agenda, i.e. Rupert Murdoch). What's disappearing in this country is objective journalism. We don't really have a news media that is independently funded like the BBC, which is funded by British taxpayers but is mostly independent of the government. I think the closest we have is PBS with shows like Frontline which sadly gets labeled as "liberal media" because some of the stories they run are counter to the corporate or right-wing agenda.
I would not compare it with what's going on in Venezuela or Russia since that is far more controlled than the media is here. There are still independent media over here, it is just that they are often drowned out by the large media companies.
I never have a problem finding information in PDFs, nor do I always have to pan and zoom. I'm always dealing with datasheets for various chips and whatnot. These are ALWAYS in PDF format without exception from every vendor I've seen. They usually contain scalable vector drawings where they can't really do that in HTML because a certain company's web browser didn't support SVG until very recently. These PDFs also usually have have the table of contents as well to help navigation.
In my case I usually use Okular to read them.
Also, I don't have to be online to read them. Often these are saved locally. At times it can also be nice to print them out so I don't have to have it open on my screen to reference while working on code.
HTML manuals suck for a number of things. They don't print very well and are limited to a certain set of fonts. While there's SVG, it's not widely used at this time in the web browser because some browsers only recently started to support it (i.e. I.E.).
I happen to know Julia Wolf personally and I know she's not seeking publicity. In talks I've had with her in the past, she has described how open PDF is to attack and how bad Adobe's reader is at security. She designs and writes these attacks as part of her job in order to detect and block them. She's one of the white hats. I'm sure that the issues she's discussed were probably discussed previously with Adobe and a handful of other security researchers, hence "previously hardly known". The article is poorly written IMO.
Trying to say that she's a publicity-seeking person would be highly inaccurate. She does give talks at various security conferences around the world since that is her expertise and she knows what she's talking about.
The problem is that Adobe made PDF so flexible with so many features that it's impossible to block all the various exploits, not to mention that Adobe themselves don't have a very good track record with security, i.e. look at Flash. The fact that PDF can incorporate Javascript, Flash, multimedia and even execute arbitrary external programs makes it a nightmare to secure.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone that you can't have a democracy when the media is controlled by the person in power. It's also quite well documented on how the media in the countries I've listed has been taken over by the government or their freedom otherwise suppressed.
This is from just a quick Google search. The concept of freedom of the press and democracy goes back to the founding of the United States where the press is often referred to as the 4th branch of government or the 4th pillar of democracy. One needs a free press in order to expose corruption and provide an informed electorate which is vital for a healthy democracy.
It's well known among journalists in Russia that reporting on certain things is a good way to end up dead. In Venezuela almost all (if not all by now) of the major TV stations have been taken over by the government and spew pro Chavez propaganda without providing an outlet for the opposition.
Part of a vibrant democracy is having an independent media that is free to report on what the government is doing without government interference. When you have media that can't say bad things about the people in power or can't report accurately on challengers then you don't really have a democracy if you think about it. I no longer consider countries like Russia or Venezuela democracies since their media is tightly controlled by the leaders in power. They're democracies in name only.
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Maybe not for long though.. Disclaimer: I work for Cavium, a competitor to NetLogic.
The newer Toyota Prius cars also have LED headlights. I prefer my older Prius with HIDs which also are used for the high beams. I've not had a problem with people flashing their highs at me and the self-leveling works. Also, they're not located high like they are on trucks and SUVs. The LED headlights are not as bright (but brighter than halogen) and only work for low-beams.
I think a lot of the problem is after market HIDs and poorly maintained vehicles, especially the bluish HIDs. When mine went out I bought replacement bulbs and saw that there's a wide range of color temperatures available (up to around 10K which isn't legal). The lower color temperature bulbs are brighter and cause less glare issues IMO but are not as "cool" looking.
Actually CDMA works better in densely populated areas as well. It is able to handle a larger call volume in the same amount of spectrum compared to GSM. Why do you think AT&T customers have so many problems in places like New York and San Francisco? CDMA allows multiple devices to transmit at the same time on the same frequency and is much better at adjusting the power levels compared to GSM.
That's like when AT&T bought out my cable internet provider and the service took a major nosedive. Dialup was a LOT faster than the cable modem, thanks to AT&T's incompetence. They throttled upstream bandwidth to 128Kbps, but aggregated EVERYBODY together through the same 128Kbps pipe. Ping showed 40-60% packet loss on average.
When Comcast bought out the cable system it was a major improvement for everything. I get almost daily junk mail from AT&T for their U-Verse service... I won't trust AT&T with any kind of service.
I was the same way. It took until KDE 4.5 before I switched. There's still a few things I miss from 3.5.10 but it is much improved.
It's still overly complicated. I recently spent a lot of time working on EHCI drivers for an embedded platform. xHCI which is used for USB 3.0 is an improvement. Most USB implementations use EHCI and OHCI/UHCI. To the host it looks like two separate PCI devices with completely different drivers that must hand-off to one another. OHCI or UHCI is used for USB 1.X and EHCI for 2.0. xHCI also replaces EHCI and OHCI.
At least for EHCI the descriptors are overly complex and 64-bit addressing support is a bit of a hacked on extension.
That's my feeling as well. I am a long time KDE user (since 1999!) and it took a long time before I was able to make the switch from KDE 3.5 to 4.x. In many ways 4.7 is as good or better than 3.5.x but there are still some things like konsole I like better in 3.5.x. I also wish kscope were updated or that its functionality be merged into kdevelop. It's an invaluable tool for digging through large code bases like the Linux kernel.
I might add that I'm using OpenSUSE which has one of the best KDE implementations I've seen. I don't like Fedora though recent versions of Kubuntu are nice.
Every time I play with Gnome on Ubuntu I quickly find myself frustrated by the lack of options and little features I make extensive use of missing. I don't want a simple user interface. I want one that allows me to efficiently do what I need to do.
Back when Google first came out it gained popularity due to the quality of its results compared with Alta Vista and others. The others couldn't hold a candle to Google with their page rank algorithm.
The other thing that made Google so popular was that the other search engines were completely cluttered with animated ads all over the place whereas Google just had a simple clean interface.
That certainly does not seem to be the case. I found a large group of my friends are already on and a number of others were interested in joining, though we tend to be more technical than average.
I'll believe it when I see it. If anything, the processor cores will be very simple. The biggest bottlenecks will be memory bandwidth and synchronization between the cores. It sounds like what they are doing may be more akin to what GPUs are doing today, though they say nothing about floating point support or even if it's 8, 16, 32 or 64-bits per core.
The company I work for, Cavium Networks, has a 32 core 64-bit MIPS processor (and yes, it runs Linux).
-Aaron
I agree with this. OO does have a place in system level programming. Years ago I worked on a complex networking driver for OS/2 (about 100,000 lines of C++) to handle ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). The company I worked for also had a driver for Windows NT that was written in C. The C driver, by comparison, was 360,000 lines of code and tended to have a lot more bugs and was much more difficult to maintain.
The C++ driver was considerably smaller and faster and contained more functionality than the equivalent C driver. Performance was also excellent due to the way the data path was implemented.
I think C++ definitely has its uses and can be great for things like protocol stacks or where a lot of complexity takes place. It can be a lot trickier to work with C++, though, which I think is probably the main reason. C is a much simpler language than C++ and it's a lot easier to understand what's going on at the machine level without a lot of experience.
I think there's definitely room for C++ within Linux, though. I think it might be easier to restrict it to loadable modules and I recall that somebody once implemented a C++ framework for modules.
I remember AT&T broadband... Comcast was a MAJOR improvement compared to AT&T who was totally incompetent. From that experience alone I will never deal with AT&T.
I upgraded a couple of machines from 11.3 to 11.4 and everything went very smoothly and just worked. I've found OpenSUSE to be fairly stable and I like the fact that out of the box it has full LVM and RAID support and easily recognized my LVM setup from before.
The installation went quickly and seemed faster than 11.3 when I installed off of a DVD. It feels faster than 11.3 as well.
-Aaron
Even brand new high-capacity NAND flash chips often have bad sectors in them. I'm working with them in embedded systems, but it seems that most customers don't bother booting over NAND because of the reliability problems and just use NOR flash (which typically has 100K to 1M write cycles.
I could see using a SSD to hold the operating system and applications, but certainly not /tmp, swap or data that's going to be updated frequently. I've had fairly good luck with mechanical drives, often running for many years 24/7, even Maxtor.
For all of my important data I use a RAID controller and back up periodically.
I use CFLs like crazy and even a couple LED bulbs, but there are cases where I stick with incandescents. I have some flood lights that are cycled on and off quite frequently which causes the CFL ones to die quickly and the LED ones are still too costly for the amount of light I need or they're unsuitable for outdoors.
I also have used incandescents as a heat source for animals and I don't think their use in some appliances is going to disappear anytime soon (i.e. oven lights, dryer lights, refrigerator lights, etc.)
Actually ours is in the mainline gcc, so there's no special fork unless you want the bleeding edge support, which always takes a little while to get checked in to the main branch.
The company I work for makes 64-bit MIPS processors with up to 16 cores (soon 32 cores). They're optimized for I/O, networking, storage and security and lack floating point though. The nice thing with MIPS is that it's easy to extend the instruction set without breaking anything. We've added a number of instructions and have extended gcc/binutils to take advantage of it. And yes, they all run Linux.
Being a traditional RISC type platform makes it not too difficult for the compiler to optimize code for.
Comcast will gladly do this. I have a business account and with just a single phone call they set up the reverse DNS mapping.
I've never had a problem and haven't had to touch the BIOS for eSATA. I just plug the drive in and it works. Then again, I'm running Linux.
-Aaron
Sadly this is true as most of the main-stream media in this country has been taken over by those with a corporate agenda (or by individuals with a political agenda, i.e. Rupert Murdoch). What's disappearing in this country is objective journalism. We don't really have a news media that is independently funded like the BBC, which is funded by British taxpayers but is mostly independent of the government. I think the closest we have is PBS with shows like Frontline which sadly gets labeled as "liberal media" because some of the stories they run are counter to the corporate or right-wing agenda.
I would not compare it with what's going on in Venezuela or Russia since that is far more controlled than the media is here. There are still independent media over here, it is just that they are often drowned out by the large media companies.
I never have a problem finding information in PDFs, nor do I always have to pan and zoom. I'm always dealing with datasheets for various chips and whatnot. These are ALWAYS in PDF format without exception from every vendor I've seen. They usually contain scalable vector drawings where they can't really do that in HTML because a certain company's web browser didn't support SVG until very recently. These PDFs also usually have have the table of contents as well to help navigation.
In my case I usually use Okular to read them.
Also, I don't have to be online to read them. Often these are saved locally. At times it can also be nice to print them out so I don't have to have it open on my screen to reference while working on code.
HTML manuals suck for a number of things. They don't print very well and are limited to a certain set of fonts. While there's SVG, it's not widely used at this time in the web browser because some browsers only recently started to support it (i.e. I.E.).
I happen to know Julia Wolf personally and I know she's not seeking publicity. In talks I've had with her in the past, she has described how open PDF is to attack and how bad Adobe's reader is at security. She designs and writes these attacks as part of her job in order to detect and block them. She's one of the white hats. I'm sure that the issues she's discussed were probably discussed previously with Adobe and a handful of other security researchers, hence "previously hardly known". The article is poorly written IMO.
Trying to say that she's a publicity-seeking person would be highly inaccurate. She does give talks at various security conferences around the world since that is her expertise and she knows what she's talking about.
The problem is that Adobe made PDF so flexible with so many features that it's impossible to block all the various exploits, not to mention that Adobe themselves don't have a very good track record with security, i.e. look at Flash. The fact that PDF can incorporate Javascript, Flash, multimedia and even execute arbitrary external programs makes it a nightmare to secure.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone that you can't have a democracy when the media is controlled by the person in power. It's also quite well documented on how the media in the countries I've listed has been taken over by the government or their freedom otherwise suppressed.
This is from just a quick Google search. The concept of freedom of the press and democracy goes back to the founding of the United States where the press is often referred to as the 4th branch of government or the 4th pillar of democracy. One needs a free press in order to expose corruption and provide an informed electorate which is vital for a healthy democracy.
It's well known among journalists in Russia that reporting on certain things is a good way to end up dead. In Venezuela almost all (if not all by now) of the major TV stations have been taken over by the government and spew pro Chavez propaganda without providing an outlet for the opposition.
http://www.un.org/democracyfund/XNewsSGFreePress.htm
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/21452
http://www.america.gov/st/democracyhr-english/2008/June/20080630215145eaifas0.6333842.html
http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/news/press-freedom-pillar-democracy-mzilikazi-wa-afrika
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51587-2005Feb24.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7321168.stm
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100430/158814432.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,443543,00.html
http://www.advancingafreesociety.org/2010/12/14/russian-style/
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/fd/droi20071001_russia_004/droi20071001_russia_004en.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_Russia
Part of a vibrant democracy is having an independent media that is free to report on what the government is doing without government interference. When you have media that can't say bad things about the people in power or can't report accurately on challengers then you don't really have a democracy if you think about it. I no longer consider countries like Russia or Venezuela democracies since their media is tightly controlled by the leaders in power. They're democracies in name only.