To quote the first paragraph of the introduction of the pdf: "The x86-64 architecture supports legacy 16-bit and 32-bit applications and operating systems without modification."
There are 3 operating modes in the chip - a pure legacy mode (supporting realmode, v86, and protected mode) which will run if you're on a 16 or 32bit OS; and two modes - true 64 and 16-32 compatibility (both supporting only protected mode, woohoo!) - that can be accessed if running an OS with their 64-bit extensions, and it oughta be trivial for the OS's program loaded to know if the app it's trying to run is 32-bit or 64-bit so it will just have to know how to launch a program in either the 64-bit mode or the 32-bit compatibility mode.
So with the software incompatibility nightmare out of the way, people can upgrade their hardware and sit around running their 'legacy OS' while waiting for a new OS that supports the wonderful 64-bit extensions. And who will be there first? I think we all know that answer and it's probably not even going to be Sun.
The only thing that really sucks about this is that the byte order is still backwards Intel legacy crap. If only they could get around it through emulation.
The big question is whether Microsoft will write two 64-bit OS's. If Win2k doesn't run in 64-bit mode on this thing it's going to be dead in the water --- I was going to say all the Linux boxes in the world changing to this chip wouldn't save it... but it probably would;-). Of course, all it should take is a new OS loader which throws it into 64-bit mode and a few changes in the kernel so it can start up all the apps in 32-bit compatibility mode. So that'll take MS, what, maybe 2 years:-)
ACK!!!! Why go through this hell? I said it before, but this one's been modded so high that my previous statement has been eclipsed.
Just download all the files in the 'xpi' dir on the netscape site, download the installer into the same dir, and run it! Works on Windows and Linux. The installer will see the xpi's and won't download them.
If you don't want to use the installer to download everything, just do it yourself - grab everything in the xpi directory and copy the installer to your local xpi directory and run it. No more autodownloading...
Er... not support - but add on their per client license which at the minimums for Oracle 8i Enterprise (that's buying 1 named user license for every UPU, which for Intel is 1x the MHz x the number of CPUs).... so it would be about 2k+ for a 450 Mhz, single processor Intel box. Of course it's much cheaper to buy a 2 year license (35% of the cost), or to buy Standard Edition if you don't need the added functionality of Enterprise.
They changed the licensing structure: http://oraclestore.oracle.com -- you can now get Oracle 8i Enterprise edition licensed for multiple servers for $750 - add on support and you're probably in the 2k range.
No need to even think about this one - on HP/UX at least Oracle can handle db's in the TERABYTE range. Oracle is usually configured to use raw partitions, so you just add more table space by creating more partitions until your disk is gone... and then you add more disk!
"So call me silly, but it bothers me to think that a government agent won't be stationed inside of my residence... but *will* be stationed on my front porch where he can casually examine the contents of my mailbox, the books I'm carrying to and from the public library (which traditionally zealously protects patrons' reading material), etc."
It may not be totally obvious how this system works, but after reading most all of the articles that have been written up on it I've determined the following:
The FBI first has to get a court order, then they have to bring the box to the ISP's premisis and hook it up on the network segment that the ISP's mail server runs on.
It's just a damned network sniffer set to filter TCP packets on the SMTP port. When it sniffs a connection on port 25 - it reads the message header, and THEN if it contains an address that they are looking for it saves the header - YES they actually claim it only looks at the header. But even if it did store the entire message, the purpose of the tool is to 'get to the meat', meaning that they aren't looking at YOUR mail unless YOU are the person they're investigating.
On top of all that, they still can't read encrypted mail - all they can do is read the header (to, from, possibly subject depending on your crypto package) and try to decrypt the body by whatever method they can...
So in conclusion -- when you want to talk to your terrorist friends and you don't want the FBI watching - either use your ISP's mail server and encrypt your message using an absurd keylength -- or better yet DON'T use their mail server at all. Just set up your own mail server... or even better - set up a VPN.
Why is everyone so paranoid about this? The technology that allows this to happen has been around practically since the dawn if TCP/IP. Why do you think they invented SSL??
"Before Carnivore can be used in a case, the FBI must go through several high-level judiciary approvals..." Meaning, they can't deploy it without a court order. That would be 100% illegal - in which case the evidence collected would be thrown out of court. So what's the point?
Most of that really isn't fiction. There ARE cameras everywhere (stores, highways, traffic lights, office buildings). A few million illegal wiretaps later... and then you have a vast network which can be used to watch everything you do in just about every public place (in the US at least).
It's not paranoia to believe that nearly everything done in that movie is possible with todays technology.
He's not referring to DHCP (in fact way up he tells you to use it!) - he's talking about automatically handing out new hostnames (and any other info that is particular to that box) to machines as they are brought up - if you can do it automatically then you don't have to interact with the box after it's up which means (assuming you have a reliable installation routine) you can pop a floppy in, wait for it to boot to the point where you don't need it and WALK AWAY.
The less interaction and 'exceptions to the rule' you can have with 2500 workstations the better.
You would never do an install 2500 times... more likely either to Ghost the disk to a CD or a network location, and have a first boot script that prompts to enter machine specific info. Or just a bootable floppy disk which would do a scripted install straight off network source files.
Direct X is a service that the OS provides to the applications which run on it. It may come bundled with every game in the world - but it's so tightly integrated with the OS that they can't even get to parity on versioning from 9x to NT. It doesn't make any sense, IMHO, to split it off to the Apps division.
Agreed about diskdruid. The GUI partitioning tool in the later Mandrake installs is quite nice and is completely usable once you get the hang of it. It does at least the 95% of what fdisk can do -- who really needs to do low level editing of a partition table??
And really, when I want a new version of a tool I either download it from the MandrakeCooker (which yes is potentially untested) or I download it myself and compile it. And Mandrake's release schedule has been soooo agressive lately that I rarely need to do that!
I go back to my point about why would you want to switch distros just to get a point release of a couple dozen apps? You could just as easilly download the latest release of those apps and install them -- or wait a month or so for the next release of the distro that you're using.
Mandrakes big benefit (besides the peice of cake install) is that all of the binaries for Intel CPU's are compiled with optimizations and pentium level instructions -- RedHat is still sending out binaries for compiled for i386...
I can't imagion why anyone would switch back and forth between RedHat and Mandrake.
USWest (now QWest) offered self installation over 2 years ago. You just plug the stuff in on your end, nothing special. You get NO benefit other than the saved installation cost.
Nobody's asking anyone to sell their beliefs for $3000. The issue is that most of the licenses are already very close to GPL or are GPL without the additional clause regarding Qt. It's not going to change the 'freeness' of the software - everything is already 'open-sourced' to use a more generic term.
Besides, it's just a donation to KDE *if* they can organize the license changes with all of their developers - it's not a bribe.
The company behind this - steelbridge - is making a distributed search engine similar to the one mentioned in a previous post.
To quote one of their pages:: "The project is deeply cool: a "Gnutella for search" that uses distributed, autonomous, collaborating search agents to keep its users abreast of relevant new Internet documents as they appear, allowing them to modify their queries by training their agents." (their site)
Gnutella-type technology is taking over the world - woohoo!
of course, spending $50/month on the service (unlimited data from Bell Atlantic or Verizon these days) just to listen to new mp3s every day is rather cost prohibitive.
It would probably be easier to have a box at home cache your mp3 streams and then dock the device at night.
Somebody remind me of this again when CDPD drops to $5/month for unlimited data.:-)
With enough storage space you could use CDPD (protocol used by most cellular based data streams) to receive and cache mp3 files to a device.
assuming you could actually get the full 19.2 which you can't in the real world - that's around 5 hours per day of 96kbps mp3s streamed to your mp3phone/palm7/whatever - you'd only need 160 megs of nonvolitile storage to cache them all.
intermingle the stream with news headline feeds and you have a reasonably useful portable information device (even if it is slow)
The point was not that they innovated and added wonderful new features to the protocol - the point is that they promised to be 100%compatible and they aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote the first paragraph of the introduction of the pdf: "The x86-64 architecture supports legacy 16-bit and 32-bit applications and operating systems without modification."
;-). Of course, all it should take is a new OS loader which throws it into 64-bit mode and a few changes in the kernel so it can start up all the apps in 32-bit compatibility mode. So that'll take MS, what, maybe 2 years :-)
There are 3 operating modes in the chip - a pure legacy mode (supporting realmode, v86, and protected mode) which will run if you're on a 16 or 32bit OS; and two modes - true 64 and 16-32 compatibility (both supporting only protected mode, woohoo!) - that can be accessed if running an OS with their 64-bit extensions, and it oughta be trivial for the OS's program loaded to know if the app it's trying to run is 32-bit or 64-bit so it will just have to know how to launch a program in either the 64-bit mode or the 32-bit compatibility mode.
So with the software incompatibility nightmare out of the way, people can upgrade their hardware and sit around running their 'legacy OS' while waiting for a new OS that supports the wonderful 64-bit extensions. And who will be there first? I think we all know that answer and it's probably not even going to be Sun.
The only thing that really sucks about this is that the byte order is still backwards Intel legacy crap. If only they could get around it through emulation.
The big question is whether Microsoft will write two 64-bit OS's. If Win2k doesn't run in 64-bit mode on this thing it's going to be dead in the water --- I was going to say all the Linux boxes in the world changing to this chip wouldn't save it... but it probably would
ACK!!!! Why go through this hell? I said it before, but this one's been modded so high that my previous statement has been eclipsed.
Just download all the files in the 'xpi' dir on the netscape site, download the installer into the same dir, and run it! Works on Windows and Linux. The installer will see the xpi's and won't download them.
If you don't want to use the installer to download everything, just do it yourself - grab everything in the xpi directory and copy the installer to your local xpi directory and run it. No more autodownloading...
right, and 17 * 100 = 1700 + 750 for the software = $2450 (using that 500 MHz CPU).
Er... not support - but add on their per client license which at the minimums for Oracle 8i Enterprise (that's buying 1 named user license for every UPU, which for Intel is 1x the MHz x the number of CPUs).... so it would be about 2k+ for a 450 Mhz, single processor Intel box. Of course it's much cheaper to buy a 2 year license (35% of the cost), or to buy Standard Edition if you don't need the added functionality of Enterprise.
They changed the licensing structure: http://oraclestore.oracle.com -- you can now get Oracle 8i Enterprise edition licensed for multiple servers for $750 - add on support and you're probably in the 2k range.
mysql is not a real database.... it's a filesystem on drugs. don't get me wrong, I use it! It has it's place and a 30 gig database is NOT it.
No need to even think about this one - on HP/UX at least Oracle can handle db's in the TERABYTE range. Oracle is usually configured to use raw partitions, so you just add more table space by creating more partitions until your disk is gone... and then you add more disk!
It may not be totally obvious how this system works, but after reading most all of the articles that have been written up on it I've determined the following:
So in conclusion -- when you want to talk to your terrorist friends and you don't want the FBI watching - either use your ISP's mail server and encrypt your message using an absurd keylength -- or better yet DON'T use their mail server at all. Just set up your own mail server... or even better - set up a VPN.
Why is everyone so paranoid about this? The technology that allows this to happen has been around practically since the dawn if TCP/IP. Why do you think they invented SSL??
Just my 2 cents.
"Before Carnivore can be used in a case, the FBI must go through several high-level judiciary approvals..." Meaning, they can't deploy it without a court order. That would be 100% illegal - in which case the evidence collected would be thrown out of court. So what's the point?
Most of that really isn't fiction. There ARE cameras everywhere (stores, highways, traffic lights, office buildings). A few million illegal wiretaps later... and then you have a vast network which can be used to watch everything you do in just about every public place (in the US at least).
It's not paranoia to believe that nearly everything done in that movie is possible with todays technology.
He's not referring to DHCP (in fact way up he tells you to use it!) - he's talking about automatically handing out new hostnames (and any other info that is particular to that box) to machines as they are brought up - if you can do it automatically then you don't have to interact with the box after it's up which means (assuming you have a reliable installation routine) you can pop a floppy in, wait for it to boot to the point where you don't need it and WALK AWAY.
The less interaction and 'exceptions to the rule' you can have with 2500 workstations the better.
You would never do an install 2500 times... more likely either to Ghost the disk to a CD or a network location, and have a first boot script that prompts to enter machine specific info. Or just a bootable floppy disk which would do a scripted install straight off network source files.
Direct X is a service that the OS provides to the applications which run on it. It may come bundled with every game in the world - but it's so tightly integrated with the OS that they can't even get to parity on versioning from 9x to NT. It doesn't make any sense, IMHO, to split it off to the Apps division.
Agreed about diskdruid. The GUI partitioning tool in the later Mandrake installs is quite nice and is completely usable once you get the hang of it. It does at least the 95% of what fdisk can do -- who really needs to do low level editing of a partition table??
And really, when I want a new version of a tool I either download it from the MandrakeCooker (which yes is potentially untested) or I download it myself and compile it. And Mandrake's release schedule has been soooo agressive lately that I rarely need to do that!
I go back to my point about why would you want to switch distros just to get a point release of a couple dozen apps? You could just as easilly download the latest release of those apps and install them -- or wait a month or so for the next release of the distro that you're using.
Mandrakes big benefit (besides the peice of cake install) is that all of the binaries for Intel CPU's are compiled with optimizations and pentium level instructions -- RedHat is still sending out binaries for compiled for i386...
I can't imagion why anyone would switch back and forth between RedHat and Mandrake.
USWest (now QWest) offered self installation over 2 years ago. You just plug the stuff in on your end, nothing special. You get NO benefit other than the saved installation cost.
Not true - you can do packet writing to CD-R's. not sure under linux (never tried), but windows works.
Nobody's asking anyone to sell their beliefs for $3000. The issue is that most of the licenses are already very close to GPL or are GPL without the additional clause regarding Qt. It's not going to change the 'freeness' of the software - everything is already 'open-sourced' to use a more generic term.
Besides, it's just a donation to KDE *if* they can organize the license changes with all of their developers - it's not a bribe.
Get a clue.
DIVX != DivX
DIVX is DVD with extra encryption, same tech, same MPEG2 video and audio.
DivX is a new piece of software that was hacked from Microsoft's MPEG-4 Codec to make the bitstream even smaller.
The company behind this - steelbridge - is making a distributed search engine similar to the one mentioned in a previous post.
:: "The project is deeply cool: a "Gnutella for search" that uses distributed, autonomous, collaborating search agents to keep its users abreast of relevant new Internet documents as they appear, allowing them to modify their queries by training their agents." (their site)
To quote one of their pages
Gnutella-type technology is taking over the world - woohoo!
of course, spending $50/month on the service (unlimited data from Bell Atlantic or Verizon these days) just to listen to new mp3s every day is rather cost prohibitive.
:-)
It would probably be easier to have a box at home cache your mp3 streams and then dock the device at night.
Somebody remind me of this again when CDPD drops to $5/month for unlimited data.
With enough storage space you could use CDPD (protocol used by most cellular based data streams) to receive and cache mp3 files to a device.
assuming you could actually get the full 19.2 which you can't in the real world - that's around 5 hours per day of 96kbps mp3s streamed to your mp3phone/palm7/whatever - you'd only need 160 megs of nonvolitile storage to cache them all.
intermingle the stream with news headline feeds and you have a reasonably useful portable information device (even if it is slow)
The point was not that they innovated and added wonderful new features to the protocol - the point is that they promised to be 100%compatible and they aren't.
This article was published on M$NBC - are they really going to say anything bad about themselves????