the sudden cratering of ResierFS demonstrates the huge Bus Factor of Open source software. Takeout one guy and major part of an operating system can suddenly become unsupported. This is a non-trivial thing. If you are a big bussiness do you want to commit your operations center to some Database or some communication protocol (say Samba) and filesystem (say ReiserFS) to open source solutions if suddenly overnight and with no warning it could become unsupported?
If linus got hit by a Bus tommorrow, Linux would no doubt survive but there would be a giant glitch in the force and depending on how things got restored Linux might very well start to lose it's focus.
It's a big opportunity for the Microsofts, IBMs, Oracles, SAPs and Novell's to point out that for bussiness operations continuity you should only buy software, open source or private, backed by a commercial vendor.
To try to extend your explanation a bit. And this may be incorrect info. But my appreciation is that if one has the volume ID one can now read in the bit image of the disk. As you say, transferring these bits to anew disk may not result in a playable disk if the volume ID cannot be physically written to it. However, just being able to read in the bits now allows one to search those bits for the Media key. Eventually it will be figured out where the media key is stored. at that point any software player that can access the bits can grab the keys. Of course I suppose the media key is encrypted with a player specific key that can be revoked. However if the player specific key for the Xbox is known it's unlikely they would actually dare revoke it.
So what it comes down to is a hardware hack, not generally available to the public, to access the Volume ID. One player key that is so widespread they can't dare revoke it. then the rest is just patience and software. Since individuals won't have access to the hardware, this won't be like DeCSS where anyone can use it. It will be pro-pirates that have this. People may be able to download cracked movies via piratebay and such but they won't be able to crack or backup their own movies.
Way back when I used to read and study kilobaud and it's big brother Dr. Dobbs. You could really learn a lot from those. Lot's of tutorials and interesting projects. Not unlike say Popular Mechanics used to be long ago. or How scinetific american used to have the amateur sceintist and the Martin Gardeners educational columns.
The current crop of mags is for imbeciles mostly. Occasionally they alert you to something you did not know. And perhaps the occasional feature by feature comparison of two (expensive) softwares is marginally useful.
Other than that. good question. Who does read these things? I get them mailed to me for free. Not sure why they do, but I suppose it's to keep up their circulation numbers.
how? if the URL is going to the bank then my browser is "on" the bank's site. How is their latent access to the cookies, and form fields, being retained by the intial site.
You appear to be clueless. When a bulb break you do not inhale all of the mercury. In fact you probably inhale parts per thousand of it. Meanwhile, you may easily consume 60 fish meals every year or so and 100% of that mercury is entering your body. While lungs and digestive system bay have different uptake modalities for mercury the exposure from tuna would appear to be thousands of time higher when looked at from a chronic exposure level.
You'd think some bank could turn this into a marketing ploy. put up a banner saying "please excuse the sluggishness and old fashion style of our web site, unlike our comeptitors we use a transactional accounting system and everything you see on your screen is generated right on our servers. It's safer even if it isn't sexy. But you don't really want your bank to be sexy do you?".
Now could someone please explain to me what cross site scripting is and why it is so hard to stamp it out.
If you want a serious answer it's because there shoul dbe no dangerous keys on the keyboard. Period. making something a delete key is pretty dangerous. Your cat could delete your file system.
Bill will love the market share. But he may not like the rampant virus incubator that is created. 30 million unpatched copies of Windows are going to be 15 million more bots. Windows might get a black eye.
Your right. it's not the feature count that matters. It's little things like does it have Bash (or for me Perl) that are disprortionately large factors. On the other hand, I'd be kidding my self if I thought there were a lot of perl and bash users out there. it's spit in the ocean of devil spawned end users.
Linux shoul dnot try to play microsoft's game of putting up feature charts and trying to claim them all. What matters to the user is how good a tool it ends up being and that things like consistency of use, intuitiveness and in fact hiding stuff from the user that they don't need to know about.
Windows does a better job than Linux at seemlessness. That is you can configure a lot more things in the gui, and expect them to actually work, before you have to open the hood an dive into the scarey bits. On the other hand things like KDE and GNome, do expose a lot more raw power in a very accessible gui way than windows. For a certain class of user, windows just dumbs things down too much.
For me the sweet spot between power and seemlessness and data hiding is Mac OSX. My mom, who really can't operate a 3 button mouse, is able to use it. Yet Me a power user loves it too. I have hundreds of linux machines yet my desktop machine is nearly always mac osx.
I'd be surprised if the OEM cost for the new vista was the same as for XP. I bet there's a premium. Which means that even if all the sales were OEM and the OEMs were selling the same number of computers they would see a big bounce. Now one also figures in the release of the pent-up demand for a new computer--people hung onto the things a tad longer because they knew vista was coming. Indeed MS encouraged this because of they kept postponing it's release, and because the uncertainty that any newly purchased computer would actually run the fothcoming vista release.
all desktop computers are cheap compared to the cost of the staff needed to maintain a healthy highly secure network. Mac's require a LOT(!) less tech support to maintain that condition in my experience.
Being over 40 and not a gamer, I have zero interest in mastering one of those fancy pants controllers like the Xbox has. But I'd like to play games with my kids. It's no fun for you kid to race cArs with you if your continually driving it to the wall on level one, which is my forte. having tried it once I can see that while I'm still disoriented a bit, the wii controller gets you to a high and competitive level fast. I'd consider getting one so we could both enjoy it.
If the secretary of state's statewide public-facing website fakes it, everyone in the world will know it within minutes, because the press will see the difference and start to say so.
Not in practice, elections are messy and a complete self consistent accounting is not easy to access, as I pointed out in my post.
How is this ripe for exploitation? I pointed out a few ways above. If you need another then getting the results early and having the ability to delay posting them enlarges the opportunity for dirty tricks. For example here's a sort of maxwell's deamon way to rig an eleciton completely legally. If you look at the early returns you will see lots of mistakes. Some will go in your favor some will go against you. If you selectively inquire with precinct judges only on the cases where the votes go against you, you can make gains. Indeed both parties routinely do this after the elections so that's not even science fiction. But now suppose your party, and only your party, is magically granted the power to do this on election night itself. Getting totals "fixed" is a lot easier when things are in flux. a simple phone call can say "Hey that can't be right, better check those numbers again" will get you an updated total. After the election is done getting changes is much harder. Hence eraly knowledge helps. Running the reporting site would be a windfall.
Ultimately this is all besides the point. The real question is was there a good reason to choose Smarttech to host the returns? One that outweighed the hideous public trust issue?
I've done stat analysis too. I concur with you that accusations based on statistical about what happened in florida don't seem to be strongly supported. That is to say the statistics are not conclusive. But I've also follwed the ohio reports pretty closely too. Some of the reports are incorrect. But some can't be so easily debunked. The strongest cases indicate that shoddy voting equipment created long lines that detered voters in selected precincts. It's also now certain that the recounts were rigged (they precounted then selected the precincts without problems for the official counts. And there are precints where the votes and voters don't add up. You always expect some of that so one can never really put a finger on if there was too much or too little. All very statistically nebulous. and hence an opportunity to tilt things and hide in the noise.
This is why getting the results early and having the ability to delay posting them enlarges the opportunity for dirty tricks. For example here's a sort of maxwell's deamon way to rig an eleciton completely legally. If you look at the early returns you will see lots of mistakes. Some will go in your favor some will go against you. If you selectively inquire with precinct judges only on the cases where the votes go against you, you can make gains. Indeed both parties routinely do this after the elections so that's not even science fiction. But now suppose your party, and only your party, is magically granted the power to do this on election night itself. Getting totals "fixed" is a lot easier when things are in flux. a simple phone call can say "Hey that can't be right, read those numbers again" will get you an updated total. After the election is done getting changes is much harder. Hence eraly knowledge helps. Running the reporting site would be a windfall.
While it hardly is a smoking gun, it does create situation so ripe for exploitation that it's proper to second guess the logic of the SOS's decision. There are other checks on the vote totals, but there's still problems if someone can adjust the reporting. Perhaps this is obvious but if you are planning any monkey business running the reporting site gives you the opportunity to see the data before anyone else knows and to delay posting it. Buys time and tells you exactly the minimum number of votes that have to be intercepted up-stream. (It's kinda like the plot of the movie the Sting, where horse racing results were delayed). Even if one is not planning to try to manipulate the precinct totals there's other values. For example, Early and large misreports in the florida election had Gore planning a concession prematurely (he eventually did concede of course). And perceived swings in east coast voting may possibly affect west coast voting turn-out.
Finally, there's other potential problems. As I said there are other checks on the votes, but it seems they really are not in use. Ohio was such a mess that it still is hard to match up precinct totals with final totals. Some of this is due to artifacts in the way they attribute absentee votes to precincts as virtual voters causing more apparent votes than voters signing in. In other cases the discrepancies in the poll books go the other way. And in some cases precincts post "corrected" total late. Now you might think a person could get all the data and sort it all out. But the fact is that in practice this is not really possible. There just never seems to be one set of books. If you go to many web sites to day, New Mexico, for example, you can do the addition yourself and find that the sum of the precinct totals on the SOS's website is not the sum of the election, and some counties had more votes than voters while others had undervotes in the tens of percent. In fact there are even errors that simply are accepted because the canvassing board accepted them.
Ordinary citizens usually don't have standing to contest elections. And it can literally be expensive for candidates to do so. Generally they don't get back any bonds they put up unless the election actually changes outcome. And with electronic voting they become more reluctant to do so since theirs nothing to recount (and so the totals won't change).
Thus in a close election changing the vote totals at the "top" is not even a completely crazy notion since it's in practice hard to verify.
For these reasons it's imperative that the vote counting system not have egreious opportunities to inflame partisan suspicions. It does not matter so much what was done, if anything, but if it expanded the opportunity for this to be done. Perceptions matter a lot.
In this case some reports say the crew that set up this site was the same one now being accused of the phone jamming dirty tricks against the DNC. So it's not really so far fetched to be suspicious.
I always thought the page1 address mode was brilliant. While there's other ways now to achieve a context switch back then this was a great idea. For example, if each subprocess was allocated say 16 "registers" in the form of 16 page 1 memory locations, to switch between subprocesses you just changed the index offset in the Y register. So yeah it was like having 256 registers but not having to hard code which process gets allocated which set. It also was like having persistence in the registers in that if you wanted one process could asyncronously change another registers (with great power comes great responsibility). The way the 6502 worked this did not really cost a lot in CPU operations so not having the registers on board was not so bad. And having 256 of them versus a measly 8 allowed a lot more use of these.
I've never seen a computer that used I/O mapped screen memory on a Z80. Memory mapping was natural for the Z80 too. Nearly all of the video cards were not memory mapped. I know, I used to run a store that sold these. Perhaps you were not fully familiar with all the Z-80 sellers. Northstar, Cormenco... . Techincally Northstar used memory mapping but they did it like an I/o port. namely there was one memory location you read and wrote to. it was not screen mapped. Essentially everything that was s-100 bus worked this way. The same was true for most early CGA using the IBM bus.
DRAM refresh was also not a problem for the Z80 - the Z80 actually had built in DRAM refresh circuitry - this is one reason it was so popular, because you didn't need a big pile of glue logic to do DRAM refresh because the Z80 provided a/RFSH pin which did this for you. No wait states were caused by the refresh. Essentially none of the early implementaitons were able to use this. Again I point you to northstar, cromenco, etc... I'm not sure it was even possible on the s-100 bus but I don't know.
Also, static RAM uses considerably less power than dynamic RAM. DRAM was cheaper, that's all.
Not back then it did not. Dynamic ram used an order of magnitude less power per byte. This may have changed now.
Anyhow my main point was about the megahertz myth not these details. 6502s were much less of a kludge than the z80 which was an augmented 8080 instruction set.
The 1 Mhz 6502 was significantly faster and had a more advanced instruction set than the 3.5Mhz Z-80.
The Z-80 was essentially an 8080 with twice as many registers but no significant changes to the instruction set. the Z-80's. (well DMA but it was hard to use). I/O was a separate operation than memory access. And most instructions took 4 clock cycles but some took more and a few took 3.
The 6502 had a much leaner but more powerful instruction set with some very sophisticated computed branch offset instructions. It had fewer registered but mapped all of the first 256 bytes to behave like registers. (At that time It did not pay a significant speed penalty for accessing main memory over register memory.) All I/O was memory mapped. This allowed a simpler bus structure.
it ran at 1Mhz but most instructions were 1 cycle so it was faster than the Z-80.
These design features allowed for the two greatest innovations in modern computing history. Dynamic memory and Graphical displays
1) Dynamic memory. Prior to the pet and apple, nearly all computers used Static memory which was not dense and used lots of power. Many bankrupt companies had tries to use Dynamic memory with the 8080. They all failed because no one successfully mastered the problem of robustly refreshing the memory without severely compromising the machine. The problem was that irregulat 3,4,5,6 cycle instructions set length. one could not predict easily when and how much of the time the memory bus would be in use by the CPU. As a result the refresh controller had to just opportunstically try to refresh the memory. This resulted in complex logic that sometimes failed to get through the whole row-address space in the required time. As a result, the only viable approach was to insert wait states into the process to give the refresh a guarenteed access. This slowed the CPU and also had complex logic. It even messed up timing loops like those used in I/O for baud rates and such.
The 6502 had a regular heart beat. The second half of the cycle was gaurenteed not to access memory. So the refersh sould be poot on the back side of the cycle. no special logic was needed. No wait states.
Of course eventually refresh controllers got better and that did allow the intels to work with dynamic memory. But the 6502 got their first.
2) Graphics. Most graphics on the 8080/z-80 used I/O ports. Think CGI graphics. There were of course exceptions. But the reason for the lack of memory mapping was How was the video card supposed to access the main memory. It would have had to use wait states. lots of them. and would have halved the CPU rate.
Memory mapped graphics were of course natural for 6502. Wozniak went one better. He used that backside clock cycle to access the memory for the video output. Now wait you say, how can he use the backside clock cycle to video access if it's already in use for the refresh? That's the genius part. He used the video access as the refresh. The video was just incrementing over the entire row-addrress space in a very regular cycle. Refresh was assured and no circuits was needed.
the Dynamic ram and overall lower chip counts, simpler bus logic, video, refresh all meant smaller power supplies too. the expansion cards required less logic to decode the complex bus signals so the expansion cards on the apple were literally 1/4 the size of the ones on the s-100 bus that was standard in the 8080 world.
I wish they would say if the user that safari was running under was admin or regular. If it was admin then this is even less of a hack than it already is. Also I wonder if they disabled the safari feature to automatically "open safe files after downloading". That option puts a lot of trust in other programs not to have holes. indeed it's not really safe at all. Only stupid people or people that don't do stupid things leave it on.
Slashdot Mirror
the sudden cratering of ResierFS demonstrates the huge Bus Factor of Open source software. Takeout one guy and major part of an operating system can suddenly become unsupported. This is a non-trivial thing. If you are a big bussiness do you want to commit your operations center to some Database or some communication protocol (say Samba) and filesystem (say ReiserFS) to open source solutions if suddenly overnight and with no warning it could become unsupported?
If linus got hit by a Bus tommorrow, Linux would no doubt survive but there would be a giant glitch in the force and depending on how things got restored Linux might very well start to lose it's focus.
It's a big opportunity for the Microsofts, IBMs, Oracles, SAPs and Novell's to point out that for bussiness operations continuity you should only buy software, open source or private, backed by a commercial vendor.
To try to extend your explanation a bit. And this may be incorrect info. But my appreciation is that if one has the volume ID one can now read in the bit image of the disk. As you say, transferring these bits to anew disk may not result in a playable disk if the volume ID cannot be physically written to it. However, just being able to read in the bits now allows one to search those bits for the Media key. Eventually it will be figured out where the media key is stored. at that point any software player that can access the bits can grab the keys. Of course I suppose the media key is encrypted with a player specific key that can be revoked. However if the player specific key for the Xbox is known it's unlikely they would actually dare revoke it.
So what it comes down to is a hardware hack, not generally available to the public, to access the Volume ID. One player key that is so widespread they can't dare revoke it. then the rest is just patience and software. Since individuals won't have access to the hardware, this won't be like DeCSS where anyone can use it. It will be pro-pirates that have this. People may be able to download cracked movies via piratebay and such but they won't be able to crack or backup their own movies.
Did I get this right?
You're reading it with the wrong accent
"fifty Beeeeeeellion dollars"
How about "monochrome" instead of silverlight. (ie. whitelight versus single frequency). Of course those opposed to it might call it silverblight.
Other possibilities:
flash-light
sliver-lux
silver-tux
silvix
sliver
Gold-light
Way back when I used to read and study kilobaud and it's big brother Dr. Dobbs. You could really learn a lot from those. Lot's of tutorials and interesting projects. Not unlike say Popular Mechanics used to be long ago. or How scinetific american used to have the amateur sceintist and the Martin Gardeners educational columns.
The current crop of mags is for imbeciles mostly. Occasionally they alert you to something you did not know. And perhaps the occasional feature by feature comparison of two (expensive) softwares is marginally useful.
Other than that. good question. Who does read these things? I get them mailed to me for free. Not sure why they do, but I suppose it's to keep up their circulation numbers.
Balance deprivation does not kill you, it's the sudden restoration of terra firma that does.
how? if the URL is going to the bank then my browser is "on" the bank's site. How is their latent access to the cookies, and form fields, being retained by the intial site.
You appear to be clueless. When a bulb break you do not inhale all of the mercury. In fact you probably inhale parts per thousand of it. Meanwhile, you may easily consume 60 fish meals every year or so and 100% of that mercury is entering your body. While lungs and digestive system bay have different uptake modalities for mercury the exposure from tuna would appear to be thousands of time higher when looked at from a chronic exposure level.
Of course more seriously, presumably the firehose voting can be rigged too.
You'd think some bank could turn this into a marketing ploy. put up a banner saying "please excuse the sluggishness and old fashion style of our web site, unlike our comeptitors we use a transactional accounting system and everything you see on your screen is generated right on our servers. It's safer even if it isn't sexy. But you don't really want your bank to be sexy do you?".
Now could someone please explain to me what cross site scripting is and why it is so hard to stamp it out.
If you want a serious answer it's because there shoul dbe no dangerous keys on the keyboard. Period. making something a delete key is pretty dangerous. Your cat could delete your file system.
The dollar has slipped about 15%. It would make sense to denominate this in Euros.
Bill will love the market share. But he may not like the rampant virus incubator that is created. 30 million unpatched copies of Windows are going to be 15 million more bots. Windows might get a black eye.
Your right. it's not the feature count that matters. It's little things like does it have Bash (or for me Perl) that are disprortionately large factors. On the other hand, I'd be kidding my self if I thought there were a lot of perl and bash users out there. it's spit in the ocean of devil spawned end users.
Linux shoul dnot try to play microsoft's game of putting up feature charts and trying to claim them all. What matters to the user is how good a tool it ends up being and that things like consistency of use, intuitiveness and in fact hiding stuff from the user that they don't need to know about.
Windows does a better job than Linux at seemlessness. That is you can configure a lot more things in the gui, and expect them to actually work, before you have to open the hood an dive into the scarey bits. On the other hand things like KDE and GNome, do expose a lot more raw power in a very accessible gui way than windows. For a certain class of user, windows just dumbs things down too much.
For me the sweet spot between power and seemlessness and data hiding is Mac OSX. My mom, who really can't operate a 3 button mouse, is able to use it. Yet Me a power user loves it too. I have hundreds of linux machines yet my desktop machine is nearly always mac osx.
I'd be surprised if the OEM cost for the new vista was the same as for XP. I bet there's a premium. Which means that even if all the sales were OEM and the OEMs were selling the same number of computers they would see a big bounce. Now one also figures in the release of the pent-up demand for a new computer--people hung onto the things a tad longer because they knew vista was coming. Indeed MS encouraged this because of they kept postponing it's release, and because the uncertainty that any newly purchased computer would actually run the fothcoming vista release.
Thus a 30% bump in revenue seems kinda low to me.
all desktop computers are cheap compared to the cost of the staff needed to maintain a healthy highly secure network. Mac's require a LOT(!) less tech support to maintain that condition in my experience.
Being over 40 and not a gamer, I have zero interest in mastering one of those fancy pants controllers like the Xbox has. But I'd like to play games with my kids. It's no fun for you kid to race cArs with you if your continually driving it to the wall on level one, which is my forte. having tried it once I can see that while I'm still disoriented a bit, the wii controller gets you to a high and competitive level fast. I'd consider getting one so we could both enjoy it.
If the secretary of state's statewide public-facing website fakes it, everyone in the world will know it within minutes, because the press will see the difference and start to say so.
Not in practice, elections are messy and a complete self consistent accounting is not easy to access, as I pointed out in my post. How is this ripe for exploitation? I pointed out a few ways above. If you need another then getting the results early and having the ability to delay posting them enlarges the opportunity for dirty tricks. For example here's a sort of maxwell's deamon way to rig an eleciton completely legally. If you look at the early returns you will see lots of mistakes. Some will go in your favor some will go against you. If you selectively inquire with precinct judges only on the cases where the votes go against you, you can make gains. Indeed both parties routinely do this after the elections so that's not even science fiction. But now suppose your party, and only your party, is magically granted the power to do this on election night itself. Getting totals "fixed" is a lot easier when things are in flux. a simple phone call can say "Hey that can't be right, better check those numbers again" will get you an updated total. After the election is done getting changes is much harder. Hence eraly knowledge helps. Running the reporting site would be a windfall.
Ultimately this is all besides the point. The real question is was there a good reason to choose Smarttech to host the returns? One that outweighed the hideous public trust issue?
I've done stat analysis too. I concur with you that accusations based on statistical about what happened in florida don't seem to be strongly supported. That is to say the statistics are not conclusive. But I've also follwed the ohio reports pretty closely too. Some of the reports are incorrect. But some can't be so easily debunked. The strongest cases indicate that shoddy voting equipment created long lines that detered voters in selected precincts. It's also now certain that the recounts were rigged (they precounted then selected the precincts without problems for the official counts. And there are precints where the votes and voters don't add up. You always expect some of that so one can never really put a finger on if there was too much or too little. All very statistically nebulous. and hence an opportunity to tilt things and hide in the noise.
This is why getting the results early and having the ability to delay posting them enlarges the opportunity for dirty tricks. For example here's a sort of maxwell's deamon way to rig an eleciton completely legally. If you look at the early returns you will see lots of mistakes. Some will go in your favor some will go against you. If you selectively inquire with precinct judges only on the cases where the votes go against you, you can make gains. Indeed both parties routinely do this after the elections so that's not even science fiction. But now suppose your party, and only your party, is magically granted the power to do this on election night itself. Getting totals "fixed" is a lot easier when things are in flux. a simple phone call can say "Hey that can't be right, read those numbers again" will get you an updated total. After the election is done getting changes is much harder. Hence eraly knowledge helps. Running the reporting site would be a windfall.
While it hardly is a smoking gun, it does create situation so ripe for exploitation that it's proper to second guess the logic of the SOS's decision. There are other checks on the vote totals, but there's still problems if someone can adjust the reporting. Perhaps this is obvious but if you are planning any monkey business running the reporting site gives you the opportunity to see the data before anyone else knows and to delay posting it. Buys time and tells you exactly the minimum number of votes that have to be intercepted up-stream. (It's kinda like the plot of the movie the Sting, where horse racing results were delayed). Even if one is not planning to try to manipulate the precinct totals there's other values. For example, Early and large misreports in the florida election had Gore planning a concession prematurely (he eventually did concede of course). And perceived swings in east coast voting may possibly affect west coast voting turn-out.
Finally, there's other potential problems. As I said there are other checks on the votes, but it seems they really are not in use. Ohio was such a mess that it still is hard to match up precinct totals with final totals. Some of this is due to artifacts in the way they attribute absentee votes to precincts as virtual voters causing more apparent votes than voters signing in. In other cases the discrepancies in the poll books go the other way. And in some cases precincts post "corrected" total late. Now you might think a person could get all the data and sort it all out. But the fact is that in practice this is not really possible. There just never seems to be one set of books. If you go to many web sites to day, New Mexico, for example, you can do the addition yourself and find that the sum of the precinct totals on the SOS's website is not the sum of the election, and some counties had more votes than voters while others had undervotes in the tens of percent. In fact there are even errors that simply are accepted because the canvassing board accepted them.
Ordinary citizens usually don't have standing to contest elections. And it can literally be expensive for candidates to do so. Generally they don't get back any bonds they put up unless the election actually changes outcome. And with electronic voting they become more reluctant to do so since theirs nothing to recount (and so the totals won't change).
Thus in a close election changing the vote totals at the "top" is not even a completely crazy notion since it's in practice hard to verify.
For these reasons it's imperative that the vote counting system not have egreious opportunities to inflame partisan suspicions. It does not matter so much what was done, if anything, but if it expanded the opportunity for this to be done. Perceptions matter a lot.
In this case some reports say the crew that set up this site was the same one now being accused of the phone jamming dirty tricks against the DNC. So it's not really so far fetched to be suspicious.
I always thought the page1 address mode was brilliant. While there's other ways now to achieve a context switch back then this was a great idea. For example, if each subprocess was allocated say 16 "registers" in the form of 16 page 1 memory locations, to switch between subprocesses you just changed the index offset in the Y register. So yeah it was like having 256 registers but not having to hard code which process gets allocated which set. It also was like having persistence in the registers in that if you wanted one process could asyncronously change another registers (with great power comes great responsibility). The way the 6502 worked this did not really cost a lot in CPU operations so not having the registers on board was not so bad. And having 256 of them versus a measly 8 allowed a lot more use of these.
Not back then it did not. Dynamic ram used an order of magnitude less power per byte. This may have changed now.
Anyhow my main point was about the megahertz myth not these details. 6502s were much less of a kludge than the z80 which was an augmented 8080 instruction set.
The 1 Mhz 6502 was significantly faster and had a more advanced instruction set than the 3.5Mhz Z-80.
The Z-80 was essentially an 8080 with twice as many registers but no significant changes to the instruction set. the Z-80's. (well DMA but it was hard to use). I/O was a separate operation than memory access. And most instructions took 4 clock cycles but some took more and a few took 3.
The 6502 had a much leaner but more powerful instruction set with some very sophisticated computed branch offset instructions. It had fewer registered but mapped all of the first 256 bytes to behave like registers. (At that time It did not pay a significant speed penalty for accessing main memory over register memory.) All I/O was memory mapped. This allowed a simpler bus structure.
it ran at 1Mhz but most instructions were 1 cycle so it was faster than the Z-80.
These design features allowed for the two greatest innovations in modern computing history. Dynamic memory and Graphical displays
1) Dynamic memory.
Prior to the pet and apple, nearly all computers used Static memory which was not dense and used lots of power. Many bankrupt companies had tries to use Dynamic memory with the 8080. They all failed because no one successfully mastered the problem of robustly refreshing the memory without severely compromising the machine. The problem was that irregulat 3,4,5,6 cycle instructions set length. one could not predict easily when and how much of the time the memory bus would be in use by the CPU. As a result the refresh controller had to just opportunstically try to refresh the memory. This resulted in complex logic that sometimes failed to get through the whole row-address space in the required time. As a result, the only viable approach was to insert wait states into the process to give the refresh a guarenteed access. This slowed the CPU and also had complex logic. It even messed up timing loops like those used in I/O for baud rates and such.
The 6502 had a regular heart beat. The second half of the cycle was gaurenteed not to access memory. So the refersh sould be poot on the back side of the cycle. no special logic was needed. No wait states.
Of course eventually refresh controllers got better and that did allow the intels to work with dynamic memory. But the 6502 got their first.
2) Graphics.
Most graphics on the 8080/z-80 used I/O ports. Think CGI graphics. There were of course exceptions. But the reason for the lack of memory mapping was How was the video card supposed to access the main memory. It would have had to use wait states. lots of them. and would have halved the CPU rate.
Memory mapped graphics were of course natural for 6502. Wozniak went one better. He used that backside clock cycle to access the memory for the video output. Now wait you say, how can he use the backside clock cycle to video access if it's already in use for the refresh? That's the genius part. He used the video access as the refresh. The video was just incrementing over the entire row-addrress space in a very regular cycle. Refresh was assured and no circuits was needed.
the Dynamic ram and overall lower chip counts, simpler bus logic, video, refresh all meant smaller power supplies too. the expansion cards required less logic to decode the complex bus signals so the expansion cards on the apple were literally 1/4 the size of the ones on the s-100 bus that was standard in the 8080 world.
I wish they would say if the user that safari was running under was admin or regular. If it was admin then this is even less of a hack than it already is. Also I wonder if they disabled the safari feature to automatically "open safe files after downloading". That option puts a lot of trust in other programs not to have holes. indeed it's not really safe at all. Only stupid people or people that don't do stupid things leave it on.
Bottom line no remote hacks.
Well the voting machine companies would like to know how to do that too.