I know TiVo is more expandable with the HD space and all, but is it better than Ultimate TV?
I only have a TiVo, and I'm not positive I'm talking about TiVo vs. UTV here, or mixing some of these up with TiVo vs. ReplayTV. Sorry.
UTV only works with DirecTV. TiVo comes in a DirecTV flavor (that can now record off of two channels like UTV), and a "Stand Alone" flavor that works with DISH, cable, or an antenna (and mixed, like antenna plus cable or antenna plus DISH -- very important if you get normal networks via antenna).
DirecTiVo has two "live buffers", UTV only lets you do PIP.
TiVo does a way way way better job tracking schedule changes, and letting you decide which shows to get when there is a schedule change. (TiVo basically tracks the show name, or other search, and lets you assign a priority, UTV looks for a show that is on at "about eight" with the name you gave it)
TiVo can be asked for it's current TODO list of stuff to record, to make sure it is going to do what you want.
UTV has a 30 second skip button, TiVo has a 60x FF with self correction. They both take about as long to use, but many people like the 30 second skip
TiVo has TiVomatics (during a commercial if the right crap is put into the VBL an icon pops up, pressing select will ask if you want to record "Show X", which is normally the show being advertised (or sponsored by Lexus), you can schedule it as normal, or cancel...or you can not press select and never see the screen -- it works even during FF), UTV doesn't.
TiVo can be asked why it didn't record something you thought it should
Unless you disable it, TiVo can record stuff it thinks you might like onto otherwise unused space (really unused, a show you recorded three months ago, and said "save for at least three days" is more important then a show TiVo thinks you might like because you liked other shows with the same actors, writer, and director).
TiVo lets you opt-out of their "information gathering", and tells you what they gather if you decline to opt-out. MS does not.
TiVo demands you use a phone to dial in and get program info (well DirecTiVo gets that off the air now, if you aren't recording something at 2am). UTV lets you use any ISP you like.
UTV's interface is slicker
TiVo has operating funds for a year or two (plus whatever Sony pays them), but is not currently self sustaining. MS can buy everyone on earth a UTV before going bankrupt:-)
I like TiVo, I hate MS...
Anyone had/used both and can give us an honest opinion?
Yes, he posts on a lame non-slash web BBS type thing once in a while. I think he is DrStrange. He has three TiVos, a Replay, and a UTV. He does balanced reviews (tells you what each unit is best for, not just what TiVo does well). I looked for the exact post, but couldn't find it. If I had I would have skipped doing my own list.
The new G2 version has just come out, but the differences are not very stunning (4Mpix instead of 3.3).
FYI, the G2 also (apparently) works better with Canon's E-TTL speedlights, esp in M mode. If you don't plan on using those the G1 is a great bargain (at least until Nikon'ss CP5000 comes out).
But not many people print 8x10s. 4x5 or 5x6 is as big as the average person goes.
Yes, but see my reply to the other message almost like yours. Also for no apparent reason large digital prints seem to cost less then large wet prints, er film prints. Like $10+ for a 8x10 or 8x12 from film, vs. $3 at ofoto.com, shutterfly.com, or any of a dozen (down from 100 last year) other places. Oh wait, that's the reason ".com":-)
The lower cost may give some incentive to having larger prints made.
Even if not, it is pretty nice for ray tracings (my former hobby), ofoto even does 16x20 prints now...
Ya know, there's a -lot- of us out here that use relatively cheap cameras for 4x6 pictures taken at birthday parties.. Not everyone out there is looking for 8x10 prints.
I don't disagree that most pictures are only printed at 4x6, or even that most pictures not only don't deserve to be 8x10, but many don't even deserve to be printed:-)
However if you get a really nice shot, whether it is via luck, or skill, it is nice to be able to have a reasonable size print.
Oh, and if you own a film camera and never got anything you want bigger then 4x6, don't assume it will be so with digital. I had a few film cameras over the years. I tended to shoot a roll or two on vacations and family gatherings and the like, never get anything astoundingly good, and put the camera away for months. Sometimes long enough to lose it (thus the "few" in "few film cameras"). Then I got a digital camera (because the new economy was still working for me, and I had $600 for a toy-of-no-clear-value).
Digital cameras are cool for learning. I don't have to pay for my bad pictures snap snap snap, I can see almost right away if the shot was good snap snap snap, I can show them to people 3 seconds after I take them snap snap snap. I took about 30 to 50 pictures a day for the first few months after I got the thing. Really. That is in a single week I took more pictures then I use to in a year. And I got kinda good at it. In fact lots of people who take that many pictures tend to get good at it.
Now I have a new hobby, a new reason to spend money, and if computer jobs get scarce enough a new skill:-) (actually most photographers are quite poor, so I think I'll try to avoid that!)
Hmmm, where was I going with all this? Oh yeah, go out and buy a digital camera, but don't expect to stay pleased by 4x6 prints after you get good. I had to buy a film camera a scant six months after the digital! (no, you can't have my digital, it is still my pocket camera, the film one is too bulky to fit in my pocket!)
My guess is the first person to put out information on how to hack one of these is going to get slapped with a lawsuit
Perhaps to make it harder to crack whenever you fail to give the camera the right handshake it dumps the charge it normally uses to fire the flash (speedlight) into the I/O port frying everything on the other side...
I don't think I could find a use for anything greater. 2megapixels is 1200x1600, which is full screen at the resolution I run at
In a word: printing
2Megapixels from most digital cameras (say the Canon PowerShot 100) will not make a good 8x10 print. The Nikon D1 is a pretty big exception, it's 2.7Mpixels can make decent 8x10 prints, you have probably seen some on the cover of Newsweek or Time. However it has exceptionally noise free images (as does the EOS-D30, Nikon D1x, and Nikon D1h, and some of the other $2000+ digital cameras).
Another good reason to have excess pixels is for cropping. Most good photos have their subject off center, like about 1/3rd over and up or down. Most cameras either only have a central focus point, or have the best focus point at the center, so cropping is useful. It is also useful if your viewfinder doesn't show a 100% view...
Wander over to DP review (digital photography, not double penetration) and see how disappointed people are that the new Canon EOS-1D has only 4.1Mpixels!
Seriously, I'd love to rent a high-end digital camera, cause I can't justify wasting more than $300 on buying something I don't use that often
These are not high end, 0.3Mpixels is not enough to make a good 4x6 print (2.1Mpixels is more then enough).
Places like Penn camera do rent high end digital cameras (Nikon D1, D1h, D1x, Canon EOS-D30, and I would assume the EOS-1D in a few months), but they run more like $100 to $300 a day (oddly enough a weekend is one "day").
I think you are going to be better off "renting" one of the disposable film cameras. The quality from them is pretty bad (far worse then a good $100 film P&S like the Stylus, or T4), but a lot better then 0.3Mpixels!
Award the amount frauded plus quadruple damages to the victims... Just a suggestion. I don't know what the current limits are, but I doubt the current law allows for that much
I haven't heard of more the 3x damages, but that doesn't mean 4x doesn't exist. The problem is organized fraud like this makes more money then most people can repay. For example if you steal $200,000, how much are you going to spend? How much of it is on durable goods like cars, and how much on fleeting things like dining out, or hookers? Ok, now you get arrested for fraud. What do you do with the rest of the money? Ah, hire a lawyer, wonderful. Do you get the best you can afford? Ok, that takes care of the rest of the money.
So now you lose the case (if you win, nobody get anything back anyway). You have spent all your money. Your broke. You are also in jail. There are very few jobs in jail, I don't think any pay above minimum wage, in fact I think they may all pay below it. So how long does it take to repay $200,000 plus three or four times that for damages at basically no pay?
Assuming you ever get out of jail (rather then being murdered there), what do you do with your life? Any money you get legally will be garnished, part of it given to your victims. That doesn't really encourage you to seek a high paying legal job...assuming you were talented enough to get one anyway (would you bother to steal $200k if you could earn it? Most people wouldn't).
Do you take crappy legal jobs? Or do you try to get the only well paying jobs that let you keep the money? That would be the illegal ones.
I'm not saying large fines cause more crime, but it does seem logical that assessing fines larger the someone's net worth may not deter crime as well as assessing fines at or slightly below their net worth. They definitely don't cause rapid repayment...
Re:Why did they spin *THIS* part off?
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Palm OS Spinoff
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Why does Palm think they're about to, in any way, create a new hardware device that they think will surpass these existing innovative devices?
Well to be honest the m500s as much as you seem to dislike it really is a close run with Handspring's product.
I had one of the first Visors (pre-order, wait list, blah-blah). None of the springboards was every well priced. I waited for over a year for a GPS and finally gave up. The MP3 springboards cost more then stand alone players (almost twice what I payed for the Rio). The 6-in-1 was more then two years late last I looked. The only thing I ever got was the backup module, which isn't that much more useful then frequent hot syncing.
Still I think the slot is cool, so when I went busted the Visor Handspring's new products were high on my list. I eventually decided I liked the Visor Edge. The m505 was a little smaller, barely heaveyer, and had a vibrating alarm, oh and a tiny slot for extra memory (the Edge requires a large plastic holder). The thing that finally convinced me to get the Edge is the metal cover (vs. the 505's psudo leather). Since I broke the Visor by breaking it through the plastic cover, I liked the idea of something a bit more sturdy.
Of corse if I had been looking for color Handspring had nothing. The m515, or whatever Palm's color m500 is pretty much has the market. It is the smallest little color PalmOS box.
That doesn't mean palm makes the best hardware all across the line, but they don't do so bad.
Re:Unfortunate for us Palm users
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Palm OS Spinoff
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Having the OS and hardware made by the same company is IMHO part of what has kept the Palm stable enough to be useable
Yeah, because my Handspring was made by Palm...just like the Sony is, and the TRGPro, and the Handera...
There are about half a dozen PalmOS hardware companies out there, only one also makes hardware.
As Apple has shown, there are definite advantages to having the hardware and software guys on the same team.
Yes, there are. Palm gave them up about three years ago.
Palm OS devices are stuck at 8 or 16MB's of total capacity
No, I believe they are stuck to 16M per chip select with four chip selects. One CS is used for the ROM, one for main memory, and Handspring uses two for the Springboard. It might be 32M per CS though, and this is a DragonBall limitation, not an OS limit, nor an instruction code limit, if they switched to a different 68000 derivative they could address 4G (or more, painfully). In fact since PalmOS machines are one of the lead uses of DragonBalls (the Blackberry oddly enough being another big user), having a respin with more addressing lines might not be too hard (depending on packaging), if Mot can be convinced Palm won't jump to the ARM before it buys enough of them. After all the instruction set uses a full 32 bits per address, so going from 24 bits to 25 (or 25 to 26) won't be a huge R&D challenge!
The real reason you don't see a ton of RAM on the PalmOS machines is they don't have enough CPU to do the "Find" if you put too much crap on them. It is a fine balance, one that was made well four or so years ago, but does not serve them well anymore.
The Palm OS is an old, creaky 16-bit rag that maxxed-out its potential back in '98.
No, it is an old, creaky 32-bit rag that maxxed-out its potential back in before it was released. Or at least it is a mostly 32-bit OS.
Along with a modern OS comes support for faster, better hardware (both Symbian EPOC and Pocket PC run on ARM-derived RISC processors), and more storage space (like IBM microdrives).
Moving to the ARM does seem to be Palm's published future direction, including an emulator for the old 68000 code (so you can beam 68k apps from an old Palm to a new one), and much talk of fat binaries that can run on both at full speed. I had half expected it to go to the PowerPC because they seem to be running along making all of Apple's old Mac mistakes...
(P.S. I'm pretty sure the PalmOS powered TRG Pro can run the IBM MicroDrive)
Again, this is the Palm OS's fault, not Handspring's
You can blame Handspring, after all it was Jef Hawking that ruthlessly trimmed everything from the original Pilot 500 (5000?) to get it to work decently with the almost no resources it had. The same guy that left Palm to found Handspring. Of corse I think if he hadn't crippled the Palm platform long term in order to make the short term work the Pilot would be yet another failed PDA (and there may have been no true success) rather then the rapidly fading leading PDA.
I'd like to see how Intercal is actually used for anything or if it keeps up with other emerging languages. When new (and useful) languages hit the scene, it probably has to drop some features because they're used in that language.
They don't bother, but the language isn't static. There is a multi-threading extension for example. Typical of Intercal it is unlike all other threading packages I know of. It doesn't share data, only the code, all messages must be passed by altering the code (disabling and enabling blocks). Trintercal is base-3, there is also a base-N variant (the base-3 one shares some ops with the Klingon programming language...)
Linux has lots of little locks (in 2.4) which seem pretty well placed. It scales very well to 4 CPUs, and after that, its mainly scheduler issues that hold it back.
Intresting, it seems like getting the scheduler right would be a lot simpler then getting all the little locks in the right place to both protect resources, and to not build up too much contention.
I'm not saying you are wrong, indeed you know far more about how Linux is built then I do, it just seems like a bottleneck that should be pretty easy to fix!
Matt's claim that SMPng is about a year behind Linux is optimistic, to put it mildly.
Could be, software schedules frequently are. Or it could be baised off where they are now, or how fast they got there compaired to how long Linux took. Who knows.
Personally I think the new slower 5.0 schedule is more realistic, and I'm glad for it, even if it means I get checkpoints (and background fsck) much later then I had hoped.
Merged From Current. Most new features (esp big ones) go into the "current" version of BSD. Most users use the "stable" version because current isn't exactly stable... If current is a long time off from going throught a code freeze and becoming stable, then some of the new features that don't depend on new other parts get Merged From Current into the stable version that most people use.
Giants?
The older SMP kernel had a "giant" lock on basically all of the OS. In theory more then one CPU could be int he kernel, in practice one would have a lock on Giant, and the rest would block waiting to get the lock (or would be running free in user code). The stable SMP code has a few other locks, and you can do a little in the kernel without hitting Giant. The SMP code in "current" pretty much (or totally) does away with the Giant lock.
Lotsa little locks is more like how Solaris works. I'm not sure if Linux has lots of little locks, or a hand full of mid-level ones (lots of little ones works better if they are all in the right place, a few mid-level ones works much better then the one giant lock, or lots of little ones in the wrong places).
And yes, it would have been nice to explain all the terms at the start of the article (even SMP which isn't BSD specific). I'll live though.
The linux kernel is specific to Linux. If you make linux specific kernel calls then your program will only run under Linux. If you're writing a kernel module, then go for it. Otherwise forget it. It will only make you look stupid.
Yeah, on the other hand sometimes they are useful enough to be worth it. If sendfile gives your application a 10% boost, and you need that 10% boost, well, go for it. #ifdef it, but use it. Hell, use it and #ifdef it if you just want to play with it.
I won't shrink back from using kqueue on FreeBSD, why should a Linux user hold back? (and kqueue is harder to #ifdef!) I won't go off and use it if it won't save me a lot, because it is painful to #ifdef around, but it is faster then poll...
If you always avoid something only on one Unix the state of the art never advances. Remember the socket calls were once on only one Unix (4BSD). SLIP was once only available for VAX BSD. Now sometimes that doesn't work out, after all that nasty SysV shm crap left SysV to infest the rest of the world.
This sounds like sane reasoning but conraditory to quite a few "service and support" business models (e.g Red Hat). It will be interesting to see who's right.
That sort of assumes you try to sell the support to the hackers. I expect you end up selling more support contracts to the "normal" folks. For example back before Ret Hat bought Cygnus they sold more gcc support contracts to embedded developers then to people wanting to run gcc on a Unix system to produce Unix executables.
(This is not to say embedded folks aren't hackers, but many more of them are hardware hackers, and software dabblers, and many many many of them a worker grunts and not hackers at all, which was surprising when I was in the field, but never the less true at the time)
So I think service and support business models have a market, that market just isn't me (and is less likely to be folks who read Slashdot, and more likely to be folks who stop reading about computers when they have free time...)
How hard would it be to just maintain the current tree and work only on the really important server features, bug fixes, and essential drivers?
Pretty trivial, since over 99% of the people working on FreeBSD were not WRS employees, and thus are still working wherever they were working last week.
The hardest part would be getting them to stop work on 5.0, halting work on less important features, and giving up on making the nonessential drivers work.:-)
I suggest the FreeBSD community forks FreeBSD, GPLs it (possibly with a modified GPL to support the advertising clause, where necessary)
That would be a lot harder. Legally it is easy, however many of the current developers would not be interested since they like the existing license for business reasons, or moral reasons, or just plain stuburness. Loss of those people would hurt a lot.
P.S. the advertising clause has been gone for quite a while.
(the obvious one) - Linux is a kernel, not a distribution. There is only one of it, and all distros use it
Except they may choose different official kernel versions, and different unofficial patches. They also might choose to have proprietary binary modules (I don't believe that is the least bit common).
That said the Linux kernels tend to be more similar then the *BSD kernels. That is both a good and bad thing.
Most distros actually use the same software, and what you don't get automatically you can get for free. In fact, the chief thing that distinguishes different Linux distros from just different default configurations and setup programs are the multiple package management systems, but there are only two of those (DEB and RPM - yes, I know and love Slackware tgz, but it's a nice and dead simple to install on ANY system), and most software gets packaged for both
I would have to say the Redhat userland and the Debian userland are no more similar then the NetBSD and FreeBSD userlands. Somewhat farther apart even.
I'm not a big Linux user (one Linux box at home, two BSDs), so I don't know if any are as far apart as OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I don't find it hard to believe that there are at least two that far apart.
Again, this is both good and bad (in this case, more good then bad though).
and unlike those dedicated amigans you dont need any exotic hardward to run it
No, but unlike the "dead" systems FreeBSD (and *BSD, and Linux) needs a certain amount of continued development just to keep it running.
Why? Well the hardware keeps changing. Even if you don't care to support the cutting edge the trailing edge moves. ISA cards are nearly gone, so if you refused to support PCI you would be about dead now. AT keyboards are being phased out, so if you can't support USB keyboards you are going to have to soon. Intel recently announced that they want to get rid of floppies (following Apple's lead!), so if you can't boot of CD-ROM of ethernet to do the first install, well you have some work to do.
Of corse FreeBSD can do all that, and there is no reason to believe that FreeBSD isn't going to keep up, but it is a good thing to remember that some effort is needed to keep even with a living hardware platform.
FYI, I think NetBSD was the first to get a USB stack (before Linux), and was one of the first free OS (or the first) to run on x86-64 (under simulation). They have even less manpower then FreeBSD. Of corse their main goal is being "the most portable", so they have frameworks for new busses, and a strong desire to test them out.
P.S. why pick on the amegians? There is still BSD 2.11, a full Unix for PDP-11 systems. That's right, 16 bit Unix shambles on, overlays and all.
A parolee does not have the full rights of a citizen of the USA. For example they do not have the right of free association -- i.e. they can be sent to jail for hanging out with the wrong people.
So curtailing their right to free speech (or free writing, or privacy) is not the same as infringing on the rights of someone who has been convicted of no crime.
(now it might suck for a ton of folks who are falsely convicted, or are convicted of unjust laws, but that is another matter...)
the market would take care of Microsoft, just like it had with IBM (the previous 800-lb gorilla of the computing world)
The market may or may not take care of MS, but it didn't take care of IBM without the governments help......sort of.
IBM was so wary of antitrust suits they hamstrung themselves. They would have acted very differently if there was no antitrust threat. MS seems to be doing the exact reverse, they seem to be ignoring the whole antitrust thing, and hoping it will go away.
I don't understand that, with Tivo, when you fast forward you just go thru the commercials, as soon as you see the show, you hit play, it jumps back a few seconds and BAM, you don't miss any of the show. I think that's far better then 30sec skip, because with that you could accidently skip into the show..
They are around the same. The people that have both TiVo and replay tend to like the 30sec skip a little better, but not all of them do. After you skip the right number of times you normally have to back up a little bit, so it is about as much fiddling with buttons as TiVo, and just slightly less time.
The upside is on the TiVo if you see a commercial you think is interesting you can watch it (at 60x FF the commercial is half a second to a second long, so don't blink!)
Replay's skips are more useful to move around in a TV show, like if you watched about half of it, and then your wife watched the rest, you have to FF for 30 seconds on the TiVo, the reply you can hit a few buttons. Apparently TiVo's 2.5 software will let you skip to the 15min tick marks, so that is less of an issue.
FYI, there is a backdoor code on TiVo's with pre-2.0.1 software, and I've been told 2.5 software to change the "skip to end" button into a 30 second skip.
The only compelling Replay feature (to me) is moving shows from unit to unit. Everything else you can either do (frequently with hacking!) to a TiVo, or just isn't that interesting to me. To be honest you can even currently move shows from one TiVo to another after you hack it, but I'm not expecting that to last:-(
However other people have other priorities, and may be better suited with a Replay. One thing's for sure though, if you watch TV, you really ought to own one of these things. Like now. I'm sorry I waited so long to buy mine (even with the price drop, and larger drives)!
Slashdot Mirror
I only have a TiVo, and I'm not positive I'm talking about TiVo vs. UTV here, or mixing some of these up with TiVo vs. ReplayTV. Sorry.
Yes, he posts on a lame non-slash web BBS type thing once in a while. I think he is DrStrange. He has three TiVos, a Replay, and a UTV. He does balanced reviews (tells you what each unit is best for, not just what TiVo does well). I looked for the exact post, but couldn't find it. If I had I would have skipped doing my own list.
FYI, the G2 also (apparently) works better with Canon's E-TTL speedlights, esp in M mode. If you don't plan on using those the G1 is a great bargain (at least until Nikon'ss CP5000 comes out).
Yes, but see my reply to the other message almost like yours. Also for no apparent reason large digital prints seem to cost less then large wet prints, er film prints. Like $10+ for a 8x10 or 8x12 from film, vs. $3 at ofoto.com, shutterfly.com, or any of a dozen (down from 100 last year) other places. Oh wait, that's the reason ".com" :-)
The lower cost may give some incentive to having larger prints made.
Even if not, it is pretty nice for ray tracings (my former hobby), ofoto even does 16x20 prints now...
I don't disagree that most pictures are only printed at 4x6, or even that most pictures not only don't deserve to be 8x10, but many don't even deserve to be printed :-)
However if you get a really nice shot, whether it is via luck, or skill, it is nice to be able to have a reasonable size print.
Oh, and if you own a film camera and never got anything you want bigger then 4x6, don't assume it will be so with digital. I had a few film cameras over the years. I tended to shoot a roll or two on vacations and family gatherings and the like, never get anything astoundingly good, and put the camera away for months. Sometimes long enough to lose it (thus the "few" in "few film cameras"). Then I got a digital camera (because the new economy was still working for me, and I had $600 for a toy-of-no-clear-value).
Digital cameras are cool for learning. I don't have to pay for my bad pictures snap snap snap, I can see almost right away if the shot was good snap snap snap, I can show them to people 3 seconds after I take them snap snap snap. I took about 30 to 50 pictures a day for the first few months after I got the thing. Really. That is in a single week I took more pictures then I use to in a year. And I got kinda good at it. In fact lots of people who take that many pictures tend to get good at it.
Now I have a new hobby, a new reason to spend money, and if computer jobs get scarce enough a new skill :-) (actually most photographers are quite poor, so I think I'll try to avoid that!)
Hmmm, where was I going with all this? Oh yeah, go out and buy a digital camera, but don't expect to stay pleased by 4x6 prints after you get good. I had to buy a film camera a scant six months after the digital! (no, you can't have my digital, it is still my pocket camera, the film one is too bulky to fit in my pocket!)
Perhaps to make it harder to crack whenever you fail to give the camera the right handshake it dumps the charge it normally uses to fire the flash (speedlight) into the I/O port frying everything on the other side...
Bzzzzzt!
In a word: printing
2Megapixels from most digital cameras (say the Canon PowerShot 100) will not make a good 8x10 print. The Nikon D1 is a pretty big exception, it's 2.7Mpixels can make decent 8x10 prints, you have probably seen some on the cover of Newsweek or Time. However it has exceptionally noise free images (as does the EOS-D30, Nikon D1x, and Nikon D1h, and some of the other $2000+ digital cameras).
Another good reason to have excess pixels is for cropping. Most good photos have their subject off center, like about 1/3rd over and up or down. Most cameras either only have a central focus point, or have the best focus point at the center, so cropping is useful. It is also useful if your viewfinder doesn't show a 100% view...
Wander over to DP review (digital photography, not double penetration) and see how disappointed people are that the new Canon EOS-1D has only 4.1Mpixels!
These are not high end, 0.3Mpixels is not enough to make a good 4x6 print (2.1Mpixels is more then enough).
Places like Penn camera do rent high end digital cameras (Nikon D1, D1h, D1x, Canon EOS-D30, and I would assume the EOS-1D in a few months), but they run more like $100 to $300 a day (oddly enough a weekend is one "day").
I think you are going to be better off "renting" one of the disposable film cameras. The quality from them is pretty bad (far worse then a good $100 film P&S like the Stylus, or T4), but a lot better then 0.3Mpixels!
What about ceramic magnets? Many hard drives use them. I have some up on my fridge, they stick great :-)
I haven't heard of more the 3x damages, but that doesn't mean 4x doesn't exist. The problem is organized fraud like this makes more money then most people can repay. For example if you steal $200,000, how much are you going to spend? How much of it is on durable goods like cars, and how much on fleeting things like dining out, or hookers? Ok, now you get arrested for fraud. What do you do with the rest of the money? Ah, hire a lawyer, wonderful. Do you get the best you can afford? Ok, that takes care of the rest of the money.
So now you lose the case (if you win, nobody get anything back anyway). You have spent all your money. Your broke. You are also in jail. There are very few jobs in jail, I don't think any pay above minimum wage, in fact I think they may all pay below it. So how long does it take to repay $200,000 plus three or four times that for damages at basically no pay?
Assuming you ever get out of jail (rather then being murdered there), what do you do with your life? Any money you get legally will be garnished, part of it given to your victims. That doesn't really encourage you to seek a high paying legal job...assuming you were talented enough to get one anyway (would you bother to steal $200k if you could earn it? Most people wouldn't).
Do you take crappy legal jobs? Or do you try to get the only well paying jobs that let you keep the money? That would be the illegal ones.
I'm not saying large fines cause more crime, but it does seem logical that assessing fines larger the someone's net worth may not deter crime as well as assessing fines at or slightly below their net worth. They definitely don't cause rapid repayment...
Well to be honest the m500s as much as you seem to dislike it really is a close run with Handspring's product.
I had one of the first Visors (pre-order, wait list, blah-blah). None of the springboards was every well priced. I waited for over a year for a GPS and finally gave up. The MP3 springboards cost more then stand alone players (almost twice what I payed for the Rio). The 6-in-1 was more then two years late last I looked. The only thing I ever got was the backup module, which isn't that much more useful then frequent hot syncing.
Still I think the slot is cool, so when I went busted the Visor Handspring's new products were high on my list. I eventually decided I liked the Visor Edge. The m505 was a little smaller, barely heaveyer, and had a vibrating alarm, oh and a tiny slot for extra memory (the Edge requires a large plastic holder). The thing that finally convinced me to get the Edge is the metal cover (vs. the 505's psudo leather). Since I broke the Visor by breaking it through the plastic cover, I liked the idea of something a bit more sturdy.
Of corse if I had been looking for color Handspring had nothing. The m515, or whatever Palm's color m500 is pretty much has the market. It is the smallest little color PalmOS box.
That doesn't mean palm makes the best hardware all across the line, but they don't do so bad.
Yeah, because my Handspring was made by Palm...just like the Sony is, and the TRGPro, and the Handera...
There are about half a dozen PalmOS hardware companies out there, only one also makes hardware.
Yes, there are. Palm gave them up about three years ago.
No, I believe they are stuck to 16M per chip select with four chip selects. One CS is used for the ROM, one for main memory, and Handspring uses two for the Springboard. It might be 32M per CS though, and this is a DragonBall limitation, not an OS limit, nor an instruction code limit, if they switched to a different 68000 derivative they could address 4G (or more, painfully). In fact since PalmOS machines are one of the lead uses of DragonBalls (the Blackberry oddly enough being another big user), having a respin with more addressing lines might not be too hard (depending on packaging), if Mot can be convinced Palm won't jump to the ARM before it buys enough of them. After all the instruction set uses a full 32 bits per address, so going from 24 bits to 25 (or 25 to 26) won't be a huge R&D challenge!
The real reason you don't see a ton of RAM on the PalmOS machines is they don't have enough CPU to do the "Find" if you put too much crap on them. It is a fine balance, one that was made well four or so years ago, but does not serve them well anymore.
No, it is an old, creaky 32-bit rag that maxxed-out its potential back in before it was released. Or at least it is a mostly 32-bit OS.
Moving to the ARM does seem to be Palm's published future direction, including an emulator for the old 68000 code (so you can beam 68k apps from an old Palm to a new one), and much talk of fat binaries that can run on both at full speed. I had half expected it to go to the PowerPC because they seem to be running along making all of Apple's old Mac mistakes...
(P.S. I'm pretty sure the PalmOS powered TRG Pro can run the IBM MicroDrive)
You can blame Handspring, after all it was Jef Hawking that ruthlessly trimmed everything from the original Pilot 500 (5000?) to get it to work decently with the almost no resources it had. The same guy that left Palm to found Handspring. Of corse I think if he hadn't crippled the Palm platform long term in order to make the short term work the Pilot would be yet another failed PDA (and there may have been no true success) rather then the rapidly fading leading PDA.
They don't bother, but the language isn't static. There is a multi-threading extension for example. Typical of Intercal it is unlike all other threading packages I know of. It doesn't share data, only the code, all messages must be passed by altering the code (disabling and enabling blocks). Trintercal is base-3, there is also a base-N variant (the base-3 one shares some ops with the Klingon programming language...)
Intresting, it seems like getting the scheduler right would be a lot simpler then getting all the little locks in the right place to both protect resources, and to not build up too much contention.
I'm not saying you are wrong, indeed you know far more about how Linux is built then I do, it just seems like a bottleneck that should be pretty easy to fix!
Could be, software schedules frequently are. Or it could be baised off where they are now, or how fast they got there compaired to how long Linux took. Who knows.
Personally I think the new slower 5.0 schedule is more realistic, and I'm glad for it, even if it means I get checkpoints (and background fsck) much later then I had hoped.
Nope, I'm not really much for IRC. What is #kotari anyway?
Merged From Current. Most new features (esp big ones) go into the "current" version of BSD. Most users use the "stable" version because current isn't exactly stable... If current is a long time off from going throught a code freeze and becoming stable, then some of the new features that don't depend on new other parts get Merged From Current into the stable version that most people use.
The older SMP kernel had a "giant" lock on basically all of the OS. In theory more then one CPU could be int he kernel, in practice one would have a lock on Giant, and the rest would block waiting to get the lock (or would be running free in user code). The stable SMP code has a few other locks, and you can do a little in the kernel without hitting Giant. The SMP code in "current" pretty much (or totally) does away with the Giant lock.
Lotsa little locks is more like how Solaris works. I'm not sure if Linux has lots of little locks, or a hand full of mid-level ones (lots of little ones works better if they are all in the right place, a few mid-level ones works much better then the one giant lock, or lots of little ones in the wrong places).
And yes, it would have been nice to explain all the terms at the start of the article (even SMP which isn't BSD specific). I'll live though.
Yeah, on the other hand sometimes they are useful enough to be worth it. If sendfile gives your application a 10% boost, and you need that 10% boost, well, go for it. #ifdef it, but use it. Hell, use it and #ifdef it if you just want to play with it.
I won't shrink back from using kqueue on FreeBSD, why should a Linux user hold back? (and kqueue is harder to #ifdef!) I won't go off and use it if it won't save me a lot, because it is painful to #ifdef around, but it is faster then poll...
If you always avoid something only on one Unix the state of the art never advances. Remember the socket calls were once on only one Unix (4BSD). SLIP was once only available for VAX BSD. Now sometimes that doesn't work out, after all that nasty SysV shm crap left SysV to infest the rest of the world.
That sort of assumes you try to sell the support to the hackers. I expect you end up selling more support contracts to the "normal" folks. For example back before Ret Hat bought Cygnus they sold more gcc support contracts to embedded developers then to people wanting to run gcc on a Unix system to produce Unix executables.
(This is not to say embedded folks aren't hackers, but many more of them are hardware hackers, and software dabblers, and many many many of them a worker grunts and not hackers at all, which was surprising when I was in the field, but never the less true at the time)
So I think service and support business models have a market, that market just isn't me (and is less likely to be folks who read Slashdot, and more likely to be folks who stop reading about computers when they have free time...)
Please reread what I wrote, not the IA-64, the x86-64. That would be the AMD thing, not the Intel thing.
Pretty trivial, since over 99% of the people working on FreeBSD were not WRS employees, and thus are still working wherever they were working last week.
The hardest part would be getting them to stop work on 5.0, halting work on less important features, and giving up on making the nonessential drivers work. :-)
That would be a lot harder. Legally it is easy, however many of the current developers would not be interested since they like the existing license for business reasons, or moral reasons, or just plain stuburness. Loss of those people would hurt a lot.
P.S. the advertising clause has been gone for quite a while.
Except they may choose different official kernel versions, and different unofficial patches. They also might choose to have proprietary binary modules (I don't believe that is the least bit common).
That said the Linux kernels tend to be more similar then the *BSD kernels. That is both a good and bad thing.
I would have to say the Redhat userland and the Debian userland are no more similar then the NetBSD and FreeBSD userlands. Somewhat farther apart even.
I'm not a big Linux user (one Linux box at home, two BSDs), so I don't know if any are as far apart as OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I don't find it hard to believe that there are at least two that far apart.
Again, this is both good and bad (in this case, more good then bad though).
No, but unlike the "dead" systems FreeBSD (and *BSD, and Linux) needs a certain amount of continued development just to keep it running.
Why? Well the hardware keeps changing. Even if you don't care to support the cutting edge the trailing edge moves. ISA cards are nearly gone, so if you refused to support PCI you would be about dead now. AT keyboards are being phased out, so if you can't support USB keyboards you are going to have to soon. Intel recently announced that they want to get rid of floppies (following Apple's lead!), so if you can't boot of CD-ROM of ethernet to do the first install, well you have some work to do.
Of corse FreeBSD can do all that, and there is no reason to believe that FreeBSD isn't going to keep up, but it is a good thing to remember that some effort is needed to keep even with a living hardware platform.
FYI, I think NetBSD was the first to get a USB stack (before Linux), and was one of the first free OS (or the first) to run on x86-64 (under simulation). They have even less manpower then FreeBSD. Of corse their main goal is being "the most portable", so they have frameworks for new busses, and a strong desire to test them out.
P.S. why pick on the amegians? There is still BSD 2.11, a full Unix for PDP-11 systems. That's right, 16 bit Unix shambles on, overlays and all.
A parolee does not have the full rights of a citizen of the USA. For example they do not have the right of free association -- i.e. they can be sent to jail for hanging out with the wrong people.
So curtailing their right to free speech (or free writing, or privacy) is not the same as infringing on the rights of someone who has been convicted of no crime.
(now it might suck for a ton of folks who are falsely convicted, or are convicted of unjust laws, but that is another matter...)
The market may or may not take care of MS, but it didn't take care of IBM without the governments help... ...sort of.
IBM was so wary of antitrust suits they hamstrung themselves. They would have acted very differently if there was no antitrust threat. MS seems to be doing the exact reverse, they seem to be ignoring the whole antitrust thing, and hoping it will go away.
They are around the same. The people that have both TiVo and replay tend to like the 30sec skip a little better, but not all of them do. After you skip the right number of times you normally have to back up a little bit, so it is about as much fiddling with buttons as TiVo, and just slightly less time.
The upside is on the TiVo if you see a commercial you think is interesting you can watch it (at 60x FF the commercial is half a second to a second long, so don't blink!)
Replay's skips are more useful to move around in a TV show, like if you watched about half of it, and then your wife watched the rest, you have to FF for 30 seconds on the TiVo, the reply you can hit a few buttons. Apparently TiVo's 2.5 software will let you skip to the 15min tick marks, so that is less of an issue.
FYI, there is a backdoor code on TiVo's with pre-2.0.1 software, and I've been told 2.5 software to change the "skip to end" button into a 30 second skip.
The only compelling Replay feature (to me) is moving shows from unit to unit. Everything else you can either do (frequently with hacking!) to a TiVo, or just isn't that interesting to me. To be honest you can even currently move shows from one TiVo to another after you hack it, but I'm not expecting that to last :-(
However other people have other priorities, and may be better suited with a Replay. One thing's for sure though, if you watch TV, you really ought to own one of these things. Like now. I'm sorry I waited so long to buy mine (even with the price drop, and larger drives)!