> Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop > experience on a device too small for it to be effective.
Microsoft's current mistake is assuming that people want a smartphone experience on a desktop PC with a 24" 1920x1080 display. Unless I'm doing a large spreadsheet or watching streaming video, I usually do not want apps to be fullscreen. And no, I do not intend to risk RSI by sticking my arm out 2 feet and dragging my fingers all over the 24" screen.
I'm running linux with multiple workspaces. In my "Forums" workspace, I have 2 Firefox windows side-by-side. At 960x1080 they look a lot more natural than fullscreen browser windows. I have a workspace for a programming project. When in use, it has... * an xterm window open with vim editing the source code * a small window to execute the code * a file viewer window to allow me to look at the input and output files
Fullscreen may have been appropriate in the days of 640x480 VGA displays, but it's not appropriate on a 1920x1080 display.
ACTA started out as a legitimate anti-counterfeit-goods agreement, that the MAFIAA hijacked. The stink of the MAFIAA corruption was enough to get ACTA rejected in its entirety. If Big Pharma can do without ACTA, that's one less lobby group pushing for its re-incarnation.
> Yes, and threatening to remove your pages from the search > engine completely is what is called "leveraging of monopolist position".
Errr. uhmmm, no. Some politicians in France threatened to pass laws which would require Google to pay for a previously free activity, indexing websites of French newspapers. Google said "fine, we'll stop indexing. We'll use other free sites.". The best analogy is if Slashdot was paywalled after 15 years of being free. If you said that you'd stop using Slashdot, rather than pay, is that illegal on your part?
> Though some have questioned Calacanis's story, Facebook's own FAQ > confirms that anyone can be added to a group without his or her consent: > "Can I prevent people from adding me to a new group?" is answered by > "The functionality of approving a group membership is not available."
It's one thing to join a private gay web forum, but with "Facebook" and "private" do not belong in the same sentence. I'm retired, so my right-of-centre views (Canadian "right wing" === USA "mushy middle") won't be able to hurt any potential career. But for anybody who needs a job to pay bills and put food on the table, Facebook is a timebomb waiting to go off.
> So a new bureaucracy to create standards of questionable usefulness, and then to enforce their compliance.
If you like the TSA, you'll love the ITSA (IT Safety Administration). You'll have a minimum-wage "security officer" sticking their hand up your ass before you sit down in front of your computer.
> In 2004, Reed, a former Air Force secretary of the Reagan administration, wrote that > they had added a Trojan horse to equipment that the Soviet Union obtained from a > company in Canada. When the components were deployed on a Trans-Siberian gas > pipeline, the Trojan horse led to a huge explosion, according to Reed. As Reed explained, > "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed > to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond > those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental > non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
> The explosion was so large that the White House received warning from U.S. > early-warning satellites of a bizarre event in a remote area of the Soviet Union. NORAD > had initially feared that the event was a missile launch from an area previously not > known to host missile launching facilities.
> As the explosion occurred in a remote area, no casualties are known to have resulted.
> There is more likelihood of a million monkeys randomly typing for a million years to > create one of Shakespeare's plays than for creating a truly secure OS in the manner > described. And even coming close could not be done before whatever product is > completely, totally irrelevant from obsolescence.
The first question in many security cases is "WTF was the idea behind connecting it to the internet?" Many SCADA systems are controlled by Windows computers which are often net connected. Disconnect the system from the net (wired and wireless), and turn off autorun/autoplay on the machines, disable USB port access for all but authorized personnel. It may not be perfect, but it'll be a lot better than today.
> I verified that my mobile number is set to be visible to myself only. I then used > a fake facebook account that I keep around, and searched for my phone number.
So you set up a Facebook account as Jane Doe with phone number 123-456-789-0000. However, several of your real-life friends have you under that number in their cellphone contacts as John Smith. Those friends have Facebook accounts, and their mobile phone contacts get scraped. Now Facebook knows you're lying, and they can connect that account with your real name.
I read about people who get freaked out, because minutes after joining Facebook, they get a long list of "people you may know" that they do actually know.
> She claims that in Autumn 2006 everyone at the company was so convinced that > Facebook was something that everyone should have that when the product team > created an experimental feature called dark profiles in 2006, nobody even flinched.
> People can be tagged in Facebook photos even if they do not have a profile, and the idea > was to create a 'dark' version which could apparently be activated if they finally signed up.
> An iPod Touch is cheaper than any Desktop PC I have ever seen, and you it has HDMI out, and is > plenty fast enough and has plenty of RAM for the kind of stuff everyday people do with their desktop.
> It can show facebook and play music and stream 1080p video and play games (if someone > ever makes a bluetooth controller for it). What more does a typical person need?
Howsabout a decent *PHYSICAL KEYBOARD*? Tablets are OK for playing back movies/music, and reading Fecesbook. But when you want to type something longer than a tweet or a Fecesbook status message, it gets really painful really fast on a touchscreen device.
There's an old, politically incorrect, cartoon with a husband freaking out in a car while his wife is driving the wrong way into oncoming , and saying, "I'm not going the wrong way... THEY are going the wrong way". Lennart Poettering wrote systemd, which is broken on machines with a separate/usr (without initramfs). Like the wife in the cartoon, his reaction is "My software isn't broken... the machines my software won't run on are broken. Repartition and reformat your machine.".
If that had remained strictly a Redhat-ism, nobody else would've complained. However, udev has been hijacked into the systemd tarball https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ Because of the shared code with systemd, udev shares systemd's brokenness on machines with separate/usr, even if you're not running systemd itself. That's the vast majority of linux systems.
As the infomercials say... "But wait, there's more". Lennart Poettering has made no secret of his desire to do away with standalone udev. See http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html Basically, if you want to use udev (required by the vast majority of linux machines) you'll one day need to switch to systemd.
> I'm just waiting for netbooks to die. I've used netbooks on and off for 20 years. > They just wern't called that until recently, but last year's laptop was a netbook.
There is a legitimate market for netbooks. Not everybody needs one as a desktop replacement or as a gaming machine; then again, not everybody needs a Mercedes. I went on a trip recently, and brought along a 3-year-old 11" netbook http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2347366,00.asp I used it for two things... 1) cursory check of my email every day 2) offloading pics from my camera's card onto disc (250 gig drive), and a backup copy onto a 16 gig USB key.
A lightweight $300 netbook is perfectly sufficient for my needs in this situation. It's maxed out at 2 gigs ram, and is 32-bit-only. The Vista Home that came with it absolutely crawled. I run optimized Gentoo linux with ICEWM (no KDE or GNOME), and it's half-decent. A reverse-engineered opensource Poulsbo video driver for linux has been available in the main kernel since January, 2012, so I can get the full 1366x768 resolution. It'll keep up with Youtube 720p videos in "large-player" mode, but stutters in fullscreen. As for 1080... fuggedaboutit.
For regular computing, I have a desktop machine with a 24 inch monitor.
2) Setting security standards... if a law was passed that only "secure systems" were allowed online, I could see Microsoft using bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H "campaign contributions" to ensure that only the latest patched version of Windows and Windows Office were allowed online.
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.
> Which says "Privacy extensions do little to protect the user from tracking if only one or > two hosts are using a given network prefix, and the activity tracker is privy to this > information. In this scenario, the network prefix is the unique identifier for tracking."
No different than right now. That depends on whether or not the ISP hands you a dynamic IP address or a static IP address. Static IP addresses will allow/encourage people to set up servers. Most ISPs do not like that. So I expect dynamic IP addresses to remain the norm. In my case, I have a seperate electricity meter for my condo. This is a financial incentive to turn off my PC and ADSL-router-modem off when not in use, I get a different IPV4 address every day.
What reason do you have for believing that ISP's will start handing out static IPV6 prefixes?
I'm running linux on a a Dell Inspiron the shipped June 19, 2008. Core2 Duo, 2.4ghz cpus, with MemTotal showing as 2,853,208 kB (approx 3 gigs). The only upgrade I got for it afterwards was a cheap Nvidia video card, because the onboard Intel GPU had problems keeping up with NHL Gamecenter Live. The machine does everything I need.
> As an end user you shouldn't have to care, but when the upstream guys haven't done > their work and you can't access newpopularsoscialsite.com, which is IPv6 only, then you > start getting annoyed and start trawling the net to see why things are broken.
If it's IPV6-only, it'll be newUNpopularsoscialsite.com. This is a classic chicken+egg problem. ISPs which go IPV6-only first will go broke. Commercial sites which go IPV6-only first will go broke. Sadly, I think it'll take a multi-lateral government-mandated "flag day" to force the switchover. At which point, all the "New World Order" conspiracy nuts will start preaching their theories.
Sorry about the weird quoting style. Slashdot's "lame filter" blocks the use of ">" at the beginning of every quoted line.
BEGIN QUOTE here is the list you've been waiting for; what NAT444 breaks:
FTP download
Large files END QUOTE
Really? Are you saying that at some specified file size, the FTP protocol toggles to a different state/version? Please explain.
BEGIN QUOTE
BitTorrent and Limewire
Seeding (upload) END QUOTE
I'm sure the MAFIAA will be happy
BEGIN QUOTE
On-line gaming
Xbox
PlayStation
Etc.
Video streaming
Hulu
Netflix
Slingcatcher
Etc. END QUOTE
What sort of braindead "design" requires a public IP address on *CLIENT* software??? BTW, some time ago, I had a situation at home where I had to put a NATing router behind a NATing router (long story). ssh and ftp and streaming audio/video on the web worked just fine, thank you. Ditto for annoying schlockwave trash ads.
> All custom applications with the IP embedded > Lack of ALGs
See above comment re:braindead "design".
Look, there are valid reasons for switching to IPV6 rather than NAT444. Braindead applications which needlessly break under NAT444 is not one of them.
Arguably provoked by the British. They had a lot of press-ganged sailors deserting in the early 1800's. So they started boarding US ships and kidnapping alleged deserters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment#Conflict_with_the_United_States The US reaction was to eventually declare war.
> There is one reason the system does NOT scale. Canada uses a parliamentary system, > Votes only have to be totalled in each riding (district) to see who wins that district, > and then the party taking the largest number of seats forms a government.
You seem to misunderstand the US system. No scaling beyond the state level is required...
* the US House of Representatives is composed of representatives, each of whom is elected in a congressional district. This is identical in priciple to the House of Commons in Canada.
* US senators are elected on a state-by-state basis
> Who owns a system that still cannot run 64bit software?
Me. Me. Me. I made the mistake of buying an early netbook with a Z520 dual core Atom cpu. The Poulsbo GPU didn't help either... bleagh. For a couple of years, it was almost a doorstop under linux, running painfully slow VESA 1024x768. Earlier this year, an open-source Poulsbo driver for linux was reverse-engineered. See http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/linux-gma500-poulsbo-driver-moved-out-of-staging In addition to the kernel setting, I had to install xf86-video-fbdev as the X11 video driver.
1) It woiks!!! The netbook is now displaying 1366x768.
2) No xorg.conf required. And udev is not sniffing anything out, because the machine is running on mdev.
3) Performance is decent for an early Atom. I used Youtube for quick-n-dirty torture testing...
- 480p Youtube videos are OK, even at fullscreen
- 720p Youtube videos are OK on the standard player and large player,
but stutter slightly at fullscreen
- 1080p - fuggedaboutit
4) Getting brightness control, etc, to work is still hit-and-miss.
5) Hibernate (suspend-to-disk) does not work. Reading comments at the blog, that appears to be a known problem with the GPU and the kernel driver.
Slashdot Mirror
Control W closes the current window, so you don't have to guess the correct tab.
> Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop
> experience on a device too small for it to be effective.
Microsoft's current mistake is assuming that people want a smartphone experience on a desktop PC with a 24" 1920x1080 display. Unless I'm doing a large spreadsheet or watching streaming video, I usually do not want apps to be fullscreen. And no, I do not intend to risk RSI by sticking my arm out 2 feet and dragging my fingers all over the 24" screen.
I'm running linux with multiple workspaces. In my "Forums" workspace, I have 2 Firefox windows side-by-side. At 960x1080 they look a lot more natural than fullscreen browser windows. I have a workspace for a programming project. When in use, it has...
* an xterm window open with vim editing the source code
* a small window to execute the code
* a file viewer window to allow me to look at the input and output files
Fullscreen may have been appropriate in the days of 640x480 VGA displays, but it's not appropriate on a 1920x1080 display.
ACTA started out as a legitimate anti-counterfeit-goods agreement, that the MAFIAA hijacked. The stink of the MAFIAA corruption was enough to get ACTA rejected in its entirety. If Big Pharma can do without ACTA, that's one less lobby group pushing for its re-incarnation.
> Yes, and threatening to remove your pages from the search
> engine completely is what is called "leveraging of monopolist position".
Errr. uhmmm, no. Some politicians in France threatened to pass laws which would require Google to pay for a previously free activity, indexing websites of French newspapers. Google said "fine, we'll stop indexing. We'll use other free sites.". The best analogy is if Slashdot was paywalled after 15 years of being free. If you said that you'd stop using Slashdot, rather than pay, is that illegal on your part?
> Still time to rename their next release to Roaring Ringwraith, though.
Yeah, but, what is the name of the release *AFTER* "Zippy Zebra"? Does Ubuntu shut down after that?
> I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent.
Mark Zuckerberg was added to NAMBLA without his consent. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/10/07/mark-zuckerberg-joins-the-north-american-man-boy-love-association-and-other-adventures-in-facebook-groups/
> Though some have questioned Calacanis's story, Facebook's own FAQ
> confirms that anyone can be added to a group without his or her consent:
> "Can I prevent people from adding me to a new group?" is answered by
> "The functionality of approving a group membership is not available."
It's one thing to join a private gay web forum, but with "Facebook" and "private" do not belong in the same sentence. I'm retired, so my right-of-centre views (Canadian "right wing" === USA "mushy middle") won't be able to hurt any potential career. But for anybody who needs a job to pay bills and put food on the table, Facebook is a timebomb waiting to go off.
> So a new bureaucracy to create standards of questionable usefulness, and then to enforce their compliance.
If you like the TSA, you'll love the ITSA (IT Safety Administration). You'll have a minimum-wage "security officer" sticking their hand up your ass before you sit down in front of your computer.
The US has been doing this since 1982. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
> In 2004, Reed, a former Air Force secretary of the Reagan administration, wrote that
> they had added a Trojan horse to equipment that the Soviet Union obtained from a
> company in Canada. When the components were deployed on a Trans-Siberian gas
> pipeline, the Trojan horse led to a huge explosion, according to Reed. As Reed explained,
> "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed
> to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond
> those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental
> non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
> The explosion was so large that the White House received warning from U.S.
> early-warning satellites of a bizarre event in a remote area of the Soviet Union. NORAD
> had initially feared that the event was a missile launch from an area previously not
> known to host missile launching facilities.
> As the explosion occurred in a remote area, no casualties are known to have resulted.
> There is more likelihood of a million monkeys randomly typing for a million years to
> create one of Shakespeare's plays than for creating a truly secure OS in the manner
> described. And even coming close could not be done before whatever product is
> completely, totally irrelevant from obsolescence.
The first question in many security cases is "WTF was the idea behind connecting it to the internet?" Many SCADA systems are controlled by Windows computers which are often net connected. Disconnect the system from the net (wired and wireless), and turn off autorun/autoplay on the machines, disable USB port access for all but authorized personnel. It may not be perfect, but it'll be a lot better than today.
> I verified that my mobile number is set to be visible to myself only. I then used
> a fake facebook account that I keep around, and searched for my phone number.
So you set up a Facebook account as Jane Doe with phone number 123-456-789-0000. However, several of your real-life friends have you under that number in their cellphone contacts as John Smith. Those friends have Facebook accounts, and their mobile phone contacts get scraped. Now Facebook knows you're lying, and they can connect that account with your real name.
I read about people who get freaked out, because minutes after joining Facebook, they get a long list of "people you may know" that they do actually know.
I don't do Fecesbook, but I probably have a profile anyways, according to a former Facebook employee... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2165543/Facebooks-Dark-Profiles-twisted-genius-Mark-Zuckerbergs-quest-total-domination.html
> She claims that in Autumn 2006 everyone at the company was so convinced that
> Facebook was something that everyone should have that when the product team
> created an experimental feature called dark profiles in 2006, nobody even flinched.
> People can be tagged in Facebook photos even if they do not have a profile, and the idea
> was to create a 'dark' version which could apparently be activated if they finally signed up.
|| Facebook (Forcebook, Farcebook, Facebroke, Facebork)
| Faceboot, Faecesbook,...
I get my daily giggles from "Lamebook" http://www.lamebook.com/ and Failbook http://www.failbook.com/
> An iPod Touch is cheaper than any Desktop PC I have ever seen, and you it has HDMI out, and is
> plenty fast enough and has plenty of RAM for the kind of stuff everyday people do with their desktop.
> It can show facebook and play music and stream 1080p video and play games (if someone
> ever makes a bluetooth controller for it). What more does a typical person need?
Howsabout a decent *PHYSICAL KEYBOARD*? Tablets are OK for playing back movies/music, and reading Fecesbook. But when you want to type something longer than a tweet or a Fecesbook status message, it gets really painful really fast on a touchscreen device.
There's an old, politically incorrect, cartoon with a husband freaking out in a car while his wife is driving the wrong way into oncoming , and saying, "I'm not going the wrong way... THEY are going the wrong way". Lennart Poettering wrote systemd, which is broken on machines with a separate /usr (without initramfs). Like the wife in the cartoon, his reaction is "My software isn't broken... the machines my software won't run on are broken. Repartition and reformat your machine.".
If that had remained strictly a Redhat-ism, nobody else would've complained. However, udev has been hijacked into the systemd tarball https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ Because of the shared code with systemd, udev shares systemd's brokenness on machines with separate /usr, even if you're not running systemd itself. That's the vast majority of linux systems.
As the infomercials say... "But wait, there's more". Lennart Poettering has made no secret of his desire to do away with standalone udev. See
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html Basically, if you want to use udev (required by the vast majority of linux machines) you'll one day need to switch to systemd.
There are scattered efforts to run systems on mdev, bypassing udev altogether.
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss#readme
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB
Opinion?
They use ancient technology, based on dead trees. I believe it's called "phone books", especially the "white pages" variant.
> I'm just waiting for netbooks to die. I've used netbooks on and off for 20 years.
> They just wern't called that until recently, but last year's laptop was a netbook.
There is a legitimate market for netbooks. Not everybody needs one as a desktop replacement or as a gaming machine; then again, not everybody needs a Mercedes. I went on a trip recently, and brought along a 3-year-old 11" netbook http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2347366,00.asp I used it for two things...
1) cursory check of my email every day
2) offloading pics from my camera's card onto disc (250 gig drive), and a backup copy onto a 16 gig USB key.
A lightweight $300 netbook is perfectly sufficient for my needs in this situation. It's maxed out at 2 gigs ram, and is 32-bit-only. The Vista Home that came with it absolutely crawled. I run optimized Gentoo linux with ICEWM (no KDE or GNOME), and it's half-decent. A reverse-engineered opensource Poulsbo video driver for linux has been available in the main kernel since January, 2012, so I can get the full 1366x768 resolution. It'll keep up with Youtube 720p videos in "large-player" mode, but stutters in fullscreen. As for 1080... fuggedaboutit.
For regular computing, I have a desktop machine with a 24 inch monitor.
1) One of the links in the summary http://blogs.cio.com/security/17430/air-force-chief-ex-fbi-agent-cybersecurity-policy-cant-wait has a quote...
> He thinks companies that find proprietary data on an external server should be
> legally able to take actionâ"to delete or encrypt the data. A company could
> then report the crime to the authorities so the government could search for the hacker.
Remember how a NASA video was mis-identified as property of Scripps Local News http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/06/1613211/nasas-own-video-of-curiosity-landing-crashes-into-a-dmca-takedown
Remember how some birds tweeting were mis-identified as "Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property" http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/2141246/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copyrighted-music
Now imagine if those same companies were authorized to DDOS your ISP or some other stupid stuff
2) Setting security standards... if a law was passed that only "secure systems" were allowed online, I could see Microsoft using bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H "campaign contributions" to ensure that only the latest patched version of Windows and Windows Office were allowed online.
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.
> Tablets and cell phones are for consumption and it's going to take
> a hell of an engineering feat to make it more practical otherwise.
Add a bluetooth keyboard+mouse to a tablet, and you've re-invented the notebook.
> Which says "Privacy extensions do little to protect the user from tracking if only one or
> two hosts are using a given network prefix, and the activity tracker is privy to this
> information. In this scenario, the network prefix is the unique identifier for tracking."
No different than right now. That depends on whether or not the ISP hands you a dynamic IP address or a static IP address. Static IP addresses will allow/encourage people to set up servers. Most ISPs do not like that. So I expect dynamic IP addresses to remain the norm. In my case, I have a seperate electricity meter for my condo. This is a financial incentive to turn off my PC and ADSL-router-modem off when not in use, I get a different IPV4 address every day.
What reason do you have for believing that ISP's will start handing out static IPV6 prefixes?
I'm running linux on a a Dell Inspiron the shipped June 19, 2008. Core2 Duo, 2.4ghz cpus, with MemTotal showing as 2,853,208 kB (approx 3 gigs). The only upgrade I got for it afterwards was a cheap Nvidia video card, because the onboard Intel GPU had problems keeping up with NHL Gamecenter Live. The machine does everything I need.
> As an end user you shouldn't have to care, but when the upstream guys haven't done
> their work and you can't access newpopularsoscialsite.com, which is IPv6 only, then you
> start getting annoyed and start trawling the net to see why things are broken.
If it's IPV6-only, it'll be newUNpopularsoscialsite.com. This is a classic chicken+egg problem. ISPs which go IPV6-only first will go broke. Commercial sites which go IPV6-only first will go broke. Sadly, I think it'll take a multi-lateral government-mandated "flag day" to force the switchover. At which point, all the "New World Order" conspiracy nuts will start preaching their theories.
Sorry about the weird quoting style. Slashdot's "lame filter" blocks the use of ">" at the beginning of every quoted line.
BEGIN QUOTE
here is the list you've been waiting for; what NAT444 breaks:
FTP download
Large files
END QUOTE
Really? Are you saying that at some specified file size, the FTP protocol toggles to a different state/version? Please explain.
BEGIN QUOTE
BitTorrent and Limewire
Seeding (upload)
END QUOTE
I'm sure the MAFIAA will be happy
BEGIN QUOTE
On-line gaming
Xbox
PlayStation
Etc.
Video streaming
Hulu
Netflix
Slingcatcher
Etc.
END QUOTE
What sort of braindead "design" requires a public IP address on *CLIENT* software??? BTW, some time ago, I had a situation at home where I had to put a NATing router behind a NATing router (long story). ssh and ftp and streaming audio/video on the web worked just fine, thank you. Ditto for annoying schlockwave trash ads.
> All custom applications with the IP embedded
> Lack of ALGs
See above comment re:braindead "design".
Look, there are valid reasons for switching to IPV6 rather than NAT444. Braindead applications which needlessly break under NAT444 is not one of them.
The Transformer is essentially a modular laptop plus...
1) It has a touch screen
2) The keyboard is detachable
But it is a modular laptop.
> War of 1812 , Mexican American War, You started
Arguably provoked by the British. They had a lot of press-ganged sailors deserting in the early 1800's. So they started boarding US ships and kidnapping alleged deserters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment#Conflict_with_the_United_States The US reaction was to eventually declare war.
> There is one reason the system does NOT scale. Canada uses a parliamentary system,
> Votes only have to be totalled in each riding (district) to see who wins that district,
> and then the party taking the largest number of seats forms a government.
You seem to misunderstand the US system. No scaling beyond the state level is required...
* the US House of Representatives is composed of representatives, each of whom is elected in a congressional district. This is identical in priciple to the House of Commons in Canada.
* US senators are elected on a state-by-state basis
* the president and vice-president are actually elected by the Electoral College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) The voting members of the Electoral College are elected on a state-by-state basis
> Who owns a system that still cannot run 64bit software?
Me. Me. Me. I made the mistake of buying an early netbook with a Z520 dual core Atom cpu. The Poulsbo GPU didn't help either... bleagh. For a couple of years, it was almost a doorstop under linux, running painfully slow VESA 1024x768. Earlier this year, an open-source Poulsbo driver for linux was reverse-engineered. See http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/linux-gma500-poulsbo-driver-moved-out-of-staging In addition to the kernel setting, I had to install xf86-video-fbdev as the X11 video driver.
1) It woiks!!! The netbook is now displaying 1366x768.
2) No xorg.conf required. And udev is not sniffing anything out, because the machine is running on mdev.
3) Performance is decent for an early Atom. I used Youtube for quick-n-dirty torture testing...
- 480p Youtube videos are OK, even at fullscreen
- 720p Youtube videos are OK on the standard player and large player,
but stutter slightly at fullscreen
- 1080p - fuggedaboutit
4) Getting brightness control, etc, to work is still hit-and-miss.
5) Hibernate (suspend-to-disk) does not work. Reading comments at the blog, that appears to be a known problem with the GPU and the kernel driver.