Problem with aluminum is that in wiring, it can causes problems....such as fires. That's why we use copper in homes nowadays, and aluminum is no longer around.
The problem is the corrosion that results when you try to connect aluminum and copper wiring. The connection (if not treated with those special compounds) gets highly resistive and heats up, starting fires.
What reason would these few people have to make one for an OS with around 2% market share? Why would they spend the amount of time to find a vulnerability and create a method of transportation?
Seems to me that any cracker who found such a vulnerability would get lots of cred in the black-hat community: "He's the dude that wrote that virus for OS X. And they said it couldn't be done." Or something like that.
Even though the Mac marketshare may be mindshare is much greater.
Maybe Steve Jobs has less enemies than Bill Gates.
"Part of the reason I'm not rushing out to buy Mac antivirus software is that I'm not convinced it's worth the money. I'd assert it's guarding against sources of infections that so far haven't proven out. When there is an actual Mac OS X virus/worm/malware/etc, we'll be able to understand that real, no-sh*t vulnerability and I'll be happy to buy a product that is proven effective against it."
Some time last year, Macworld magazine ran a big Security issue. One article pointed out something we all know: "there are no known Mac viruses."
Yet the magazine still gave four (out of five) "mice" to two $70 antivirus programs.
So I wrote a letter to the editor, saying basically, "So, you tell us that there are no Mac viruses, yet you give antivirus software glowing reviews. What do I really get for my $70 if I buy one of these programs?" The editor wrote back asking me to approve an edited version of my letter, which did NOT include my question (which was the point of my letter). I wrote back and told them--run the question or don't run the letter. So it ran as I required, but the question was never answered.
Seems to me we already have a "real ID" in the form of a passport. They're issued by the State Department or the equivalent from a foreign nation. It oughta be good enough for regular ID use, as one presumes that if you apply for a passport, the State Department will do some minimal checking to ensure that you are you. And the infrastructure to issue passports already exists. No other gov't agency required.
I realize that passports cost more than a driver's license and I don't see any reason why the cost of a passport can't be reduced. The point is that if the Feds require everyone to have valid identification papers, then the passport is the answer.
And let's not forget an important point: the 9/11 terrorists were travelling with valid visas issued by the State Department under their own real names. They were renting apartments and cars, attending school, working regular jobs (and paying taxes!), all in their own real names. I'm not exactly sure how this "Real ID" law will make any difference in the So-Called Global War On Terror. But then again, nothing the Bush Administration has done in the name of terror has been a rousing success.
Wait a minute... maybe ID means "Intelligent Design," not "identification." Hmmmm....
"....as proven by the fact that AOL is having difficulty signing up subscribers to run what is basically a portal with Net access (or in some flavors, a portal where you supply your own Net access). If.Mac was free, they could generate revenue from page clicks, advertising, etc. just like Google does."
Oh, great... more fucking advertising.
-a
Re:The moon, tis a harsh mistress
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Humans. Robots are a lot of money for little return. For example, a human on Mars could do in minutes what takes the Rovers months to accomplish. Humans are extremely adaptable to changing situations, and can actually cover ground extremely well on foot. In addition, they're excellent at building and operating a wide variety of tools."
The one problem with your thinking is that the cost of life-support systems (including ensuring the vehicles don't accelerate too fast) is the most expensive part of manned space travel. OK, so we get to the moon. Where do we find food and water for the humans? Oh, we need to bring it from earth. At great cost. Robots don't need to eat, although Bender needs alcohol.
"Having sold Toyota's, and having family members that sell Ford's, from what I understand, Ford couldn't make their technology work in time to make it too market,"
"So will we ever get computers where the processor, RAM, and flash memory storage are all on the same chip?"
No, for a couple of reasons. One is that flash and CPUs are built on very different IC processes and integrating the two is difficult. (This is why FPGAs with built-in configuration flash are always one or two generations behind their counterparts that use an external configuration EEPROM.)
A second reason is that once you integrate all this stuff, you lose the ability to add more memory. Don't like 512 MB? Tough, that's all that the chip supports.
"On top of that, Flash has a limited number of erase/write cycles. Virtual memory and/or swap partitions (not to mention constant writing and rewriting of data during normal use) will very quickly kill your expensive NAND Flash drive.... In saying that, there are companies that do make Flash based solid state disks that solve most of these problems. I'd say that even the finite write/erase life is made less of an issue by large ammounts of caching and something akin to RAID 6."
At my last job, I designed a NAND flash drive that mounts in a PMC site, so I know a little bit about this. Nope, no large amounts of caching or RAID was used to mitigate the wearout problem, although we considered putting some SRAM on it to use as a cache to speed up access.
Flash file systems use wear-leveling algorithms to help mitigate the finite lifetime of the flash. Basically, you never keep writing to the same location over and over again. Rather, you always write to new locations. This is especially useful when you read, update and write the same file over and over again, for example if you were using the "disk" for a swap file. The good news is that the low-level file system takes care of these details, so application programmers don't need to worry about it. With a large "disk" the file system can really spread the love and increase the disk lifetime.
Using a flash disk for a swap file might be painfully slow, but "painfully slow" is application dependent.
The other thing to note is that your flash file system needs to take care of bad blocks. When the chips are tested at the factory, any bad blocks are noted in the memory "spare area." The file system needs to read this bad-block info when the "disk" is initialized and it has to keep track of (and not use) the bad blocks. Now, when doing writes or erases, the file system needs to verify that the operation was successful, and if a bit in a page doesn't verify, it has to mark the entire block as bad. You lose 16 k bits if one bit fails.
Flash is the thing to use when your applicaton can't tolerate the power consumption of a spinning drive, or if the environment precludes the use of a mechanical drive. You pay for this in terms of much smaller storage capacity.
"Apple just wants to sell you music, they just sell music,they dont want to sell the info becase that is bad press and they would loose (SIC!!!) all market share and credibility company-wide pretty much instantly.
Apple has WAY too much to loose (SIC!!!) here."
PLEASE learn how to fucking spell the word "lose," you loser.
Q: I want to make an urgent purchase of your apple laptop for my nephew's Mac project. I'm unable to bid due to the urgency and my short access to internet.Let me know its current condition and your last desired price as I hope to send money order via MoneyGram since I do not have access to paypal.I'll be offering a sum of 2450 usd including shipping via express post to Ibadan, Nigeria and let me know if this is ok by you. Kindly provide me your full address details and the name that will be on the payment form of your money order. I'm awaiting your response as speedy as possible Thanks and God bless! Vivian Jan-11-06
"A camera snuck inside a threatre where the audio is taken from the Hearing Aid port on certain chairs is called a TeleSync and somebody sneaking a camera in there with a microphone is called something similar, although the exact name escapes me at the moment."
"His last few films have been very much geared toward propping up the ideals of the state. --Painting the law to look like an immovable edifice we must all simply accept regardless of how fair or unfair the law really is. And that any defiance which happens, must do so within the boundaries set out by the law itself. --All the while, sending the message that deviating from those boundaries will inevitably lead to punishment, and that happiness and reward can only come when one gives up independence and chooses to align themselves with the state."
Clearly, you haven't seen the movie. First of all, Avram and his team "don't exist," clearly outside the law. (At one point, he even asks Ephraim, "Did we do anything illegal?" and Ephraim hems and haws.)
The points of the film are simple: One is, "We kill one, six more take their place." And another is Avram realizes that he is turning into a terrorist. And a third is that he realizes that he is used by the Israeli government to do their dirty work.
I think by Apples strategy is to keep a constant revolving door so to speak with their new products. I understand the company is going through changes, however if you do not standardize your computer lines you do nothing but become another "Dell". Macbook and iMacs were announced...a bit lopsided upgrade if you ask me and obvious others on/.. The iBook needs the most revision out of any of them. New hardware released every 3-5 months pisses your comsumer base off. Please Apple, standardize your computing line like it once was so those of us who *JUST* bought computers from you dont feel like asshats when a new release is announced.
Dell changes their product line and product configuration on a daily basis! Trying to configure a Dell is a nightmare. Which overall product line? Which model within a product line? What configuration makes the most sense? What options are they giving away today that they won't give away tomorrow? It's all waaaay too complicated. At least when Apple updates their products, you (usually) know it.
I think that the MacBook systems look very tempting, but in my own case, I have a large investment in the very technologies that are being dropped, namely:
-1) Firewire 800 drives; I carry one or two of the 1 TeraByte drives with me, and would now have to retool to USB 2.0.... ouch!!
This is no different from when Apple dropped SCSI. Lots of people had expensive SCSI RAID systems they could no longer just plug into their Macs (even the low-end Macs had SCSI). Of course, you can still buy SCSI interface cards for the G5 PowerMacs, and I'd presume that someone will come out with a FW800 card for the ExpressCard slot.
Of course, I'm annoyed that the latest iPods don't have FireWire support, and my eMac only has USB 1.1 ports. I don't want to wait overnight for a 60 GB iPod to sync!
-2) My main audio interface is a PC-card solution. I am not even aware of a manufacturer that makes an 'Express Card' professional multichannel audio interface.
It's a brand-new interface option, and I suspect that most audio interface vendors are still trying to get their FireWire and USB 2.0 High Speed devices to work.
I'm sure Apple did a bit of market research and figured that a small minority of users need PC Card slots, as things like BlueTooth, 802.11g wireless, etc are built into the laptop.
-3) Traveling a lot, I need the Lindt in-flight power adaptor for my Powerbook. This new solution means having to purchase a new type if and when it becomes available
If the voltages are the same, perhaps you can build an adapter cable?
Office will be soon available with Universal Binaries. What about Adobe- and Macromedia-products? Isn't the target consumer group of Apple Designers, Artists and ppl like that? These are the Pros who are buying professional products like Powerbooks. Why should I buy this new Powerbook when it doesn't support pro-applications right now?
Why do you ask Adobe when they plan to ship Universal Binaries? Why do you think they'd tell Apple?
The whole operating system is an emulator. For the expected arrival dates of Universal versions of third-party applications, Apple says sorry, check with the manufacturer-it's up to them.
Why would Apple know an independent software vendor's release schedule?
Yeah, I do... a whole bunch. I recall buying my first CD player in 1985 as a sophomore in college. I bought a boatload of CDs, too, which I still have and they all still work. it helps if you take care of them. I don't keep them in a case attached to my car's sunvisor.
"My 5-year-old DVDs play just fine still, but if this is true, then the MPAA ought to be forced to allow legal copies so we may preserve films we legally purchased from them by copying them to new media every 4 years. I don't recall any warnings on any of the DVDs I purchased about shelf life--neither from the MPAA, the distributor, or the manufacturer of DVD recorders."
Are you talking about pre-recorded DVDs or DVDs you burned at home?
If the former, then RTFA. It doesn't refer to machine-stamped DVDs.
I can't speak from personal experience, but Computer Shopper UK gives the 60GB fifth-generation iPod a so-so review. You'll have to search their site for it, as I can't give you a deep link. Their main beef: "we noticed distorted bass when using many of the presets. This was most noticeable on dance and hip-hop tracks with a prominent drumbeat and happened irrespective of listening volume.... [W]e expect exceptional sound quality from a £300 MP3 player, and in this respect the iPod disappoints."
Having had to do live sound for DJ/hip-hop/laptop-types, I've noticed that the source material is usually a problem. These guys fiddle-fart around in their bedrooms with monitor speakers that are incapable of reproducing the tones created by their software synths. They can't hear the low end so they boost it. They use sawtooth and square wave signals for the LF stuff, which are of course full of harmonics, which sounds like... distortion.
Or they "master" the material with ProTools (or a cheap alternative) so as to get the mix as loud as possible, distortion be damned.
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The problem is the corrosion that results when you try to connect aluminum and copper wiring. The connection (if not treated with those special compounds) gets highly resistive and heats up, starting fires.
Seems to me that any cracker who found such a vulnerability would get lots of cred in the black-hat community: "He's the dude that wrote that virus for OS X. And they said it couldn't be done." Or something like that.
Even though the Mac marketshare may be mindshare is much greater.
Maybe Steve Jobs has less enemies than Bill Gates.
Some time last year, Macworld magazine ran a big Security issue. One article pointed out something we all know: "there are no known Mac viruses."
Yet the magazine still gave four (out of five) "mice" to two $70 antivirus programs.
So I wrote a letter to the editor, saying basically, "So, you tell us that there are no Mac viruses, yet you give antivirus software glowing reviews. What do I really get for my $70 if I buy one of these programs?" The editor wrote back asking me to approve an edited version of my letter, which did NOT include my question (which was the point of my letter). I wrote back and told them--run the question or don't run the letter. So it ran as I required, but the question was never answered.
-a
You're an idiot. What, a windows virus will damage an Intel-based OS X install? Jeez. Get a clue.
I realize that passports cost more than a driver's license and I don't see any reason why the cost of a passport can't be reduced. The point is that if the Feds require everyone to have valid identification papers, then the passport is the answer.
And let's not forget an important point: the 9/11 terrorists were travelling with valid visas issued by the State Department under their own real names. They were renting apartments and cars, attending school, working regular jobs (and paying taxes!), all in their own real names. I'm not exactly sure how this "Real ID" law will make any difference in the So-Called Global War On Terror. But then again, nothing the Bush Administration has done in the name of terror has been a rousing success.
Wait a minute ... maybe ID means "Intelligent Design," not "identification." Hmmmm ....
My AZ DL expires in 2031!
Oh, great ... more fucking advertising.
-a
The one problem with your thinking is that the cost of life-support systems (including ensuring the vehicles don't accelerate too fast) is the most expensive part of manned space travel. OK, so we get to the moon. Where do we find food and water for the humans? Oh, we need to bring it from earth. At great cost. Robots don't need to eat, although Bender needs alcohol.
You sold Toyota's what?
Your family members sold Ford's what?
No, for a couple of reasons. One is that flash and CPUs are built on very different IC processes and integrating the two is difficult. (This is why FPGAs with built-in configuration flash are always one or two generations behind their counterparts that use an external configuration EEPROM.)
A second reason is that once you integrate all this stuff, you lose the ability to add more memory. Don't like 512 MB? Tough, that's all that the chip supports.
"On top of that, Flash has a limited number of erase/write cycles. Virtual memory and/or swap partitions (not to mention constant writing and rewriting of data during normal use) will very quickly kill your expensive NAND Flash drive. ... In saying that, there are companies that do make Flash based solid state disks that solve most of these problems. I'd say that even the finite write/erase life is made less of an issue by large ammounts of caching and something akin to RAID 6."
At my last job, I designed a NAND flash drive that mounts in a PMC site, so I know a little bit about this. Nope, no large amounts of caching or RAID was used to mitigate the wearout problem, although we considered putting some SRAM on it to use as a cache to speed up access.
Flash file systems use wear-leveling algorithms to help mitigate the finite lifetime of the flash. Basically, you never keep writing to the same location over and over again. Rather, you always write to new locations. This is especially useful when you read, update and write the same file over and over again, for example if you were using the "disk" for a swap file. The good news is that the low-level file system takes care of these details, so application programmers don't need to worry about it. With a large "disk" the file system can really spread the love and increase the disk lifetime.
Using a flash disk for a swap file might be painfully slow, but "painfully slow" is application dependent.
The other thing to note is that your flash file system needs to take care of bad blocks. When the chips are tested at the factory, any bad blocks are noted in the memory "spare area." The file system needs to read this bad-block info when the "disk" is initialized and it has to keep track of (and not use) the bad blocks. Now, when doing writes or erases, the file system needs to verify that the operation was successful, and if a bit in a page doesn't verify, it has to mark the entire block as bad. You lose 16 k bits if one bit fails.
Flash is the thing to use when your applicaton can't tolerate the power consumption of a spinning drive, or if the environment precludes the use of a mechanical drive. You pay for this in terms of much smaller storage capacity.
-a
Apple has WAY too much to loose (SIC!!!) here."
PLEASE learn how to fucking spell the word "lose," you loser.
Top-posting is evil and stupid. Only terrorists top-post.
Q: I want to make an urgent purchase of your apple laptop for my nephew's Mac project. I'm unable to bid due to the urgency and my short access to internet.Let me know its current condition and your last desired price as I hope to send money order via MoneyGram since I do not have access to paypal.I'll be offering a sum of 2450 usd including shipping via express post to Ibadan, Nigeria and let me know if this is ok by you. Kindly provide me your full address details and the name that will be on the payment form of your money order. I'm awaiting your response as speedy as possible Thanks and God bless! Vivian Jan-11-06
A: Let me check with the US State Department.
they're offered for sale, but there are no bidders ...
It's called a bootleg.
Clearly, you haven't seen the movie. First of all, Avram and his team "don't exist," clearly outside the law. (At one point, he even asks Ephraim, "Did we do anything illegal?" and Ephraim hems and haws.)
The points of the film are simple: One is, "We kill one, six more take their place." And another is Avram realizes that he is turning into a terrorist. And a third is that he realizes that he is used by the Israeli government to do their dirty work.
Dell changes their product line and product configuration on a daily basis! Trying to configure a Dell is a nightmare. Which overall product line? Which model within a product line? What configuration makes the most sense? What options are they giving away today that they won't give away tomorrow? It's all waaaay too complicated. At least when Apple updates their products, you (usually) know it.
-1) Firewire 800 drives; I carry one or two of the 1 TeraByte drives with me, and would now have to retool to USB 2.0.... ouch!!
This is no different from when Apple dropped SCSI. Lots of people had expensive SCSI RAID systems they could no longer just plug into their Macs (even the low-end Macs had SCSI). Of course, you can still buy SCSI interface cards for the G5 PowerMacs, and I'd presume that someone will come out with a FW800 card for the ExpressCard slot.
Of course, I'm annoyed that the latest iPods don't have FireWire support, and my eMac only has USB 1.1 ports. I don't want to wait overnight for a 60 GB iPod to sync!
-2) My main audio interface is a PC-card solution. I am not even aware of a manufacturer that makes an 'Express Card' professional multichannel audio interface.
It's a brand-new interface option, and I suspect that most audio interface vendors are still trying to get their FireWire and USB 2.0 High Speed devices to work.
I'm sure Apple did a bit of market research and figured that a small minority of users need PC Card slots, as things like BlueTooth, 802.11g wireless, etc are built into the laptop.
-3) Traveling a lot, I need the Lindt in-flight power adaptor for my Powerbook. This new solution means having to purchase a new type if and when it becomes available
If the voltages are the same, perhaps you can build an adapter cable?
-a
Why do you ask Adobe when they plan to ship Universal Binaries? Why do you think they'd tell Apple?
Why would Apple know an independent software vendor's release schedule?
-a
if they'd dropped the G5 iMac to $899 I would have bought one ...
Yeah, I do ... a whole bunch. I recall buying my first CD player in 1985 as a sophomore in college. I bought a boatload of CDs, too, which I still have and they all still work. it helps if you take care of them. I don't keep them in a case attached to my car's sunvisor.
-a
Are you talking about pre-recorded DVDs or DVDs you burned at home?
If the former, then RTFA. It doesn't refer to machine-stamped DVDs.
Having had to do live sound for DJ/hip-hop/laptop-types, I've noticed that the source material is usually a problem. These guys fiddle-fart around in their bedrooms with monitor speakers that are incapable of reproducing the tones created by their software synths. They can't hear the low end so they boost it. They use sawtooth and square wave signals for the LF stuff, which are of course full of harmonics, which sounds like ... distortion.
Or they "master" the material with ProTools (or a cheap alternative) so as to get the mix as loud as possible, distortion be damned.
-a