I just learned the reason for the current 'reusable' design of the shuttle. Apparently, there was a much better design on the table at the time...but that one was simpler, and meant that 5.000 jobs wouldn't be created in Texas...so they went with the current design, which even at the time wasn't considered the best option.
I really hate it when politics interferes with science; a scientist can learn about politics, but a politician just doesn't have the smarts for science.
"Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too."
And where do you get this 'wisdom' from? Sad to say, your statement is just not true; NASA has plans to start designing a new reusable orbiter (basically a frankenrocket cobbled together from an unholy mating between the US' rocket designs and the shuttle), but no more thna that.
Had you been up on your news, you'd know that. Projects like the shuttle are just too expensive and large scale to keep secret.
Imagine the poor European/Games/ Developer Conference in/2012/: they couldn't mention that they where having a/games/ conference, and couldn't mention that they had/sponsors/. And if they have the gall to hold their/sponsored//games/ conference in the/summer/...
If this bill doesn't fuck with free speech, I really don't know what would. Just goes to show what a despot gets up to if he isn't punished for misleading the public the first (and second, and third...) time 'round.
"If there were a market for upgradeable consoles, it would have surely materialized by now."
It has...they're called PC's. MS' plan for the xbox360 has changed their console from a console which 'just works' and is 'just put in the disk and play' to 'will only work if you have the hd-dvd package, with the keyboard peripheral and an xbox360 rev 2.1'. As I said: a PC.
What's happened is you mistook GP post and have made his point for him.
I think 3. is one option which is going to come pretty soon now. A mobo+cpu is where the heat is coming from; a case design where the mobo is completely divorced from the rest of the components, propbably with the cpu/north/southbridge touching the case and the case being the heat-spreader is the way forwards.
The problem of course is the fact that differenbt mobo's place the cpu/bridges in different places. Enter CTX (instead of A/BTX)?
-do any 3d work -do any video editing -do any CAD/CAM -play games -do any simulation -have to use Windows in a noise free environment (audio studio, scientific environment)
So of course you're happy with your iMac DV. Good on you to pick the right computer for your needs.
Now bugger off out of a thread meant for those of us who do do this stuff.
I think an even more important point is: where did you grow up? Was yours a geek family, with tech spinning up all around? Or did you grow up in a log cabin?
Nature and natural are defined by context, I'd wager.
First off, QM isn't the easiest subject; even experts say that if you say you understand QM (as oposed to just apply it) you're lying.
So first off you need an understanding of QM (it's statistical information, so screw the Kopenhagen interpretation:P). Then you need to understand the concept of information, in the context of QM. After that you need to know what's meant by/positive/, in the context of information and in the context of how a Quantum Mechanic would apply that. And then you'd need to read the papers and grok what negative quantum information means.
Shit, I'm getting to my third year of applied physics, and I'm just grokking the basics of QM, let alone the concept of 'information' (let alone positive or negative) in QM:)
And it's exactly that kind of thinking which makes it OK to ignore Geneva. Which should tell you that somehow the logic is flawed.
"No nation at war with us is going to ignore our satelites giving us up-to-the-minute battlefield data when it has the option to do something about them instead."
Problem with that is that it's only superpowers like Chine who have the capability to do such a thing. And if you enter into a war with China, you have much MUCH bigger problems than losing a satelite; you've just entered WWIII.
So instead of spending money on a provocation which will self-fulfill into China also being/forced/ to create space weaponry, spend that money on keeping good relations with such countries that can concievably interfere with your satelites. And before you spout any shit about 'those who wish to live in peace must prepare for war'...remember that the societies which have spouted and lived by that dictum aren't there anymore, without exception. That fact should tell you all you need to know.
"Space weapons won't initiate any Cold War-esque weapons race"
Where the hell do you get this from? The US developing space arms will FORCE Russia and/especially/ China to do the same. They have no plans to do so now, but as soon as the US launches, you can bet your ass that China will have something up there too, tout-suite.
"Space weaponry if anything will reduce war to a battle of communications and intelligence"
What, like nukes where supposed to? MAD and all that utter money/effort wasting shite? Again, where the hell do you come up with this? And this one you contradict yourself, with:
"Is war inevitable, space weapons or not? 3,000 years of history says it is"
History also tells us that the last century, mankind has been limiting the effect of war through such treaties as those made in Geneva. Had the US not contravened those, and in the process telling every [expletive deleted] one that the moratorium/tabboo is done away with, the world might have shown signs of slowly weaning itself off those destructive tendencies, or at least channeling them into less harmfull things like football holiganary.
So it could have gone with space...but no, the US just has to be the one to create the problem...under the [expletive deleted] kindergarten excuse of 'if we don't do it first, someone else will'.
And then again, if they have no reason to, no a-priori case which has been made by another nation, maybe they won't.
Both outcomes being equaly likely, why not go for the one with the positive outcome (no weapons in space) rather than the negative one? Why give others a/reason/?
Plus, worst case scenario is that China does develop space arms. If the US is afraid of them using them, you've already got much larger problems than merely losing GPS.
Why is it that 'warriors' just can't get their head around that? Explains why nuclear proliferation is inevitable, though...even though it's meaningless. Nukes are gonna get built because the same tech drives nuclear energy production. But using nukes is an entirely different kettle of fish...as long as they're anathema (ie tabboo). And especially if one has armed forces enough to conventially bomb a country into the middle ages (like Iraq; no running water or electricity).
So apply the same facts as they've played out in the nuke-race to space weapons and you'll see that developing them is a waste of money better spent on building better relations with other countries, or even doing something about the poverty, innumeracy, illiteracy and corruption in your own country.
Personally, I really don't think that the brain is calculating anything at all. I think it's one of the most common wrong beliefs held.
When you try to catch (and throw) a ball for the first time, you usually don't. After repeated tries, your (at that point usualy childrens) brain stores a pattern of experiences about that particular ball and the amount of effort required to throw that ball a certain distance and for the time that ball takes to get to you. Any further throwing/catching of that particular ball is a comparison to all the previous experiences you've had throwing/catching that ball (did't expend enough muscle-effort this time to close the gap, must throw harder next time).
This would also explain what happens when you get a different ball. If the brain where truly calculating trajectories, you'd throw the new ball (with it's different weight and drag profile) perfectly, first try. But that's not what happens: you have to adapt to that new ball; you're brain has to store a new set of experiences with that ball to get a correct throw, based off correlations of experiences of throwing different size/weight balls. No calculation occurs as such...comparison and extrapolation based on those tell you to throw the ball a bit harder, 'cause in a similar situation with a ball which was half as light, you threw/this/ distance...
Now I'm not a neurologist, but I wish I where so that I could validate this view of how the brain works. I'm sure there are some nicely testable experiment one can dream up to distinguisch actual calculation from memory-recall-and-extrapolation. Experienced based instead of mathematical based catching...
Any phd's which test this based on this post, gimme credit:)
You're pretty coherent, offer a somewhat witty/smart comment, in a condescending, disparaging way.
You complain about this not catching heavy thrown balls. You bitch about "I think its applications will be rather more in the picking up of (reasonably slow) moving objects realm than any useful rôle in catching.".
Are you a geek at all? WTF are you doing here on this site? A normal nerd/geek/person who is interested in tech will immediatelt grasp that this tech is a demo of tech which will, at one point, be able to catch pretty much anything thrown at it. THATS HOW TECH WORKS: ITTERATIVE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN! Geeks get that intuitively.
You, on the other hand, are bitching about this tech sucking, and then move towards a tangent on how this tech should be used to do something which is a) a solved problem (picking stuff up is done by robots all the time and has been for decades) and b) a hugely dumbed down version of the problem these guys where tackeling, and something which this robot could already do.
You trash the tech, aren't constructive, don't look on the bright side but on the negative (but strangely on a negative which has nothing to do with the subject at hand, really) and talk like a jock (which in itself is no problem, but if you're on this site, you must be a jock who understands and likes tech). You're a person in geeks clothing...and you got moderated +5 for being the antithesis of what hacking (in the oldschool, MIT sense of the word) and grokking are all about.
Where are the people who actually like technology? Where have the real hackers gone? Someone tell me, 'cause I think quite a few have left/., and I wanna know where they went.
's why the ancient greeks, egyptians and chinese never had an industrial revolution. All the knowledge was there, but due to the cheap slavery available, there was never any need for it to be put together in a way that spawned the industrial age.
MS Trackball Explorer. Better than the latest Logitech wireless trackball, 'cause whilst that one does have more buttons (==better), it still uses the old wireless tech which makes for crap tracking. I returned mine for the wired MS trackball. It's strange though, as MS is a software co., but their hardware outclasses their software by far.
Any other great trackballs out there? I'm looking for great, not just good: great tracking, lotsa buttons, great ergonomics...and not at the price of a spaceball4000:)
I've already got a h2g2: basically my palmpilot loaded with stuff coupled with my cellphone. Hell, actually my cellphone is more of a h2g2 all by itself, seeing as I do google searches on it.
The three body problem tells us that it won't even be highly accurate. It's to do with the fact that small changes in initial values can change the outcome significantly. Google for chaos theory, strange attractors and mandelbrot (and by now I'd also highly recomend a google for the three body problem) for more on that.
And by 'not highly accurate' I don't just mean 'not perfect', but absolutely wrong. It's one of the reasons why real weather prediction is pretty damn much impossible past the next hour; the rest is extrapolation which starts to fail pretty quickly.
"if you knew the mass of all of the objects in the Solar System and where they were to incredible precision, you might be able to come up with a mathmatical model that would be highly accurate in regards to leap seconds."
Nope: quantum mechanics (well, Heisenberg) and the three-body problem state that the deterministic universe is a thing of the past. Has been since the 1930's or so.
" it's not as if, were this released a couple of years later it would do well... it wouldn't"
This is not true. The Apple Newton and the Palmpilot proves this; the Newton was ahead of it's time, and whilst the palmpilot was released later, it was only just as good (and in some cases worse), but was a commercial success.
Wow...what a way to RFTA (realy fuck the analogy). Of course we want PCIe and we don't need ISA anymore. Of course new tech requires a new bus. But that's missing the point entirely. Frankly, I'm really surprised I have to explain this, and had half expected you to slam Warlock on this. Oh well.
The point, which you yourself have so very clearly elucidated, is this: the hardware/software industry can very easily force a standard, and in doing so replace the old hardware, in echange for new features.
By your lack of understanding, I see I'll have to paint the picture explicitly with the following hypothetical. Imagine the newest mobo's and cpu's have mandatory standardised DRM. All new mobo's and cpu's include this (at least all AMD and Intel cpu's, and thus their corresponding cpu's). The old cpu's (and thus mobo's) production is ceased. As soon as that stock is sold, there are no more high end cpu's without DRM. If you want a cpu in a couple of years time, you are now therefore forced to get a DRM'd cpu, or get a cpu which is years old. This is how pci replaced isa and how pci-e is replacing pci/agp; only now it's EFI/TC/DRM'd cpu's. And you have no choice, except by forfeiting the latest tech. So "you'll be wanting that 6800 in ISA next" turns into 'you'll be wanting that 5 core, 10 ghz, EFI/TC/DRM'd cpu in non-drm'd socket 478 next?'.
"Imagine having to edit BIOS options on a cluster of 300 PCs"
Uhm...couldn't you just create a custom bios by hacking in your desired options in the standard bios, then flash all the machines with floppy's/cd's/usbsticks? That would be a hell of a lot faster than doing it all manually....but of course, not as fast as doing it over the ethernet.
Jesus...are you guys all this naive? Look at the first-poster's post and see the last item. The reason the mayor manufacturors want EFI over anything else is of course Trusted Computing. Anyone who thinks otherwise (especially considering OF has 11 years of getting the bugs out) is hopelessly naive.
And it's sad, not just because with DRM/TC that 'great firewall of China' can be implemented anywhere quite trivially and in a targetted way, or just because the little group with it's (admittedly better) OF doesn't have jack shit influence-wise, or just because if it did join EFI (even if EFI let it) it would be drowned out, but most of all because the first couple of posts at/. come out with some bogus 'well, maybe it's because of a NIH-mentality!'. Yeah; right.
I'm sorry this post is so vitriolic, but the fact is that here it is: DRM made for mass consumption. Only the geeks will know not to buy it, but it won't matter, because soon you won't be able to buy anything without a TC-EFI 'bios'. Or at least something up-to-date. For proof, just try and get a decent PCI(non-e) graphics card, and just look at what's happening to AGP. And for the people who say 'it'll be hacked'....yeah, it will, but it won't do us much good; look at all the guys with chipped xbox's who don't do it for the pirated games, but for the otherwise never playable Japanese imports. Yeah, they can crack it, but they can't play 'Live'.
So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.
And for those who hope for capitalism and market forces to right this: forget it. PC-electronics is only feasable due to high mass-market penentration: geeks alone are too small a market for manufacturors to cost-effectively make EFI-less products when that's the standard. And even if they do manage (at largely inflated prices, too high for the average geek), you won't be able to use it on the EFI'd internet2.0.
Slashdot Mirror
I just learned the reason for the current 'reusable' design of the shuttle. Apparently, there was a much better design on the table at the time...but that one was simpler, and meant that 5.000 jobs wouldn't be created in Texas...so they went with the current design, which even at the time wasn't considered the best option.
I really hate it when politics interferes with science; a scientist can learn about politics, but a politician just doesn't have the smarts for science.
"Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too."
And where do you get this 'wisdom' from? Sad to say, your statement is just not true; NASA has plans to start designing a new reusable orbiter (basically a frankenrocket cobbled together from an unholy mating between the US' rocket designs and the shuttle), but no more thna that.
Had you been up on your news, you'd know that. Projects like the shuttle are just too expensive and large scale to keep secret.
Imagine the poor European /Games/ Developer Conference in /2012/: they couldn't mention that they where having a /games/ conference, and couldn't mention that they had /sponsors/. And if they have the gall to hold their /sponsored/ /games/ conference in the /summer/...
If this bill doesn't fuck with free speech, I really don't know what would. Just goes to show what a despot gets up to if he isn't punished for misleading the public the first (and second, and third...) time 'round.
I really think you've somehow missed GP point:
"If there were a market for upgradeable consoles, it would have surely materialized by now."
It has...they're called PC's. MS' plan for the xbox360 has changed their console from a console which 'just works' and is 'just put in the disk and play' to 'will only work if you have the hd-dvd package, with the keyboard peripheral and an xbox360 rev 2.1'. As I said: a PC.
What's happened is you mistook GP post and have made his point for him.
Both; the one doesn't preclude the other.
IOW they're a persecuted minority consisting of evil trolls.
I think 3. is one option which is going to come pretty soon now. A mobo+cpu is where the heat is coming from; a case design where the mobo is completely divorced from the rest of the components, propbably with the cpu/north/southbridge touching the case and the case being the heat-spreader is the way forwards.
The problem of course is the fact that differenbt mobo's place the cpu/bridges in different places. Enter CTX (instead of A/BTX)?
You don't:
-do any 3d work
-do any video editing
-do any CAD/CAM
-play games
-do any simulation
-have to use Windows in a noise free environment (audio studio, scientific environment)
So of course you're happy with your iMac DV. Good on you to pick the right computer for your needs.
Now bugger off out of a thread meant for those of us who do do this stuff.
I think an even more important point is: where did you grow up? Was yours a geek family, with tech spinning up all around? Or did you grow up in a log cabin?
Nature and natural are defined by context, I'd wager.
First off, QM isn't the easiest subject; even experts say that if you say you understand QM (as oposed to just apply it) you're lying.
:P). Then you need to understand the concept of information, in the context of QM. After that you need to know what's meant by /positive/, in the context of information and in the context of how a Quantum Mechanic would apply that. And then you'd need to read the papers and grok what negative quantum information means.
:)
So first off you need an understanding of QM (it's statistical information, so screw the Kopenhagen interpretation
Shit, I'm getting to my third year of applied physics, and I'm just grokking the basics of QM, let alone the concept of 'information' (let alone positive or negative) in QM
"Some rules matter. This one doesn't."
/forced/ to create space weaponry, spend that money on keeping good relations with such countries that can concievably interfere with your satelites. And before you spout any shit about 'those who wish to live in peace must prepare for war'...remember that the societies which have spouted and lived by that dictum aren't there anymore, without exception. That fact should tell you all you need to know.
And it's exactly that kind of thinking which makes it OK to ignore Geneva. Which should tell you that somehow the logic is flawed.
"No nation at war with us is going to ignore our satelites giving us up-to-the-minute battlefield data when it has the option to do something about them instead."
Problem with that is that it's only superpowers like Chine who have the capability to do such a thing. And if you enter into a war with China, you have much MUCH bigger problems than losing a satelite; you've just entered WWIII.
So instead of spending money on a provocation which will self-fulfill into China also being
Man, did the nuclear arms race teach you
/especially/ China to do the same. They have no plans to do so now, but as soon as the US launches, you can bet your ass that China will have something up there too, tout-suite.
NOTHING?
"Space weapons won't initiate any Cold War-esque weapons race"
Where the hell do you get this from? The US developing space arms will FORCE Russia and
"Space weaponry if anything will reduce war to a battle of communications and intelligence"
What, like nukes where supposed to? MAD and all that utter money/effort wasting shite? Again, where the hell do you come up with this? And this one you contradict yourself, with:
"Is war inevitable, space weapons or not? 3,000 years of history says it is"
History also tells us that the last century, mankind has been limiting the effect of war through such treaties as those made in Geneva. Had the US not contravened those, and in the process telling every [expletive deleted] one that the moratorium/tabboo is done away with, the world might have shown signs of slowly weaning itself off those destructive tendencies, or at least channeling them into less harmfull things like football holiganary.
So it could have gone with space...but no, the US just has to be the one to create the problem...under the [expletive deleted] kindergarten excuse of 'if we don't do it first, someone else will'.
Grow the [expletive deleted] up.
Now that gives new meaning to the phrase 'fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity'...but now in space!
And then again, if they have no reason to, no a-priori case which has been made by another nation, maybe they won't.
/reason/?
Both outcomes being equaly likely, why not go for the one with the positive outcome (no weapons in space) rather than the negative one? Why give others a
Plus, worst case scenario is that China does develop space arms. If the US is afraid of them using them, you've already got much larger problems than merely losing GPS.
Why is it that 'warriors' just can't get their head around that? Explains why nuclear proliferation is inevitable, though...even though it's meaningless. Nukes are gonna get built because the same tech drives nuclear energy production. But using nukes is an entirely different kettle of fish...as long as they're anathema (ie tabboo). And especially if one has armed forces enough to conventially bomb a country into the middle ages (like Iraq; no running water or electricity).
So apply the same facts as they've played out in the nuke-race to space weapons and you'll see that developing them is a waste of money better spent on building better relations with other countries, or even doing something about the poverty, innumeracy, illiteracy and corruption in your own country.
Personally, I really don't think that the brain is calculating anything at all. I think it's one of the most common wrong beliefs held.
/this/ distance...
:)
When you try to catch (and throw) a ball for the first time, you usually don't. After repeated tries, your (at that point usualy childrens) brain stores a pattern of experiences about that particular ball and the amount of effort required to throw that ball a certain distance and for the time that ball takes to get to you. Any further throwing/catching of that particular ball is a comparison to all the previous experiences you've had throwing/catching that ball (did't expend enough muscle-effort this time to close the gap, must throw harder next time).
This would also explain what happens when you get a different ball. If the brain where truly calculating trajectories, you'd throw the new ball (with it's different weight and drag profile) perfectly, first try. But that's not what happens: you have to adapt to that new ball; you're brain has to store a new set of experiences with that ball to get a correct throw, based off correlations of experiences of throwing different size/weight balls. No calculation occurs as such...comparison and extrapolation based on those tell you to throw the ball a bit harder, 'cause in a similar situation with a ball which was half as light, you threw
Now I'm not a neurologist, but I wish I where so that I could validate this view of how the brain works. I'm sure there are some nicely testable experiment one can dream up to distinguisch actual calculation from memory-recall-and-extrapolation. Experienced based instead of mathematical based catching...
Any phd's which test this based on this post, gimme credit
Man, I REALLY hate insidious comments like this.
/., and I wanna know where they went.
You're pretty coherent, offer a somewhat witty/smart comment, in a condescending, disparaging way.
You complain about this not catching heavy thrown balls. You bitch about "I think its applications will be rather more in the picking up of (reasonably slow) moving objects realm than any useful rôle in catching.".
Are you a geek at all? WTF are you doing here on this site?
A normal nerd/geek/person who is interested in tech will immediatelt grasp that this tech is a demo of tech which will, at one point, be able to catch pretty much anything thrown at it. THATS HOW TECH WORKS: ITTERATIVE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN! Geeks get that intuitively.
You, on the other hand, are bitching about this tech sucking, and then move towards a tangent on how this tech should be used to do something which is a) a solved problem (picking stuff up is done by robots all the time and has been for decades) and b) a hugely dumbed down version of the problem these guys where tackeling, and something which this robot could already do.
You trash the tech, aren't constructive, don't look on the bright side but on the negative (but strangely on a negative which has nothing to do with the subject at hand, really) and talk like a jock (which in itself is no problem, but if you're on this site, you must be a jock who understands and likes tech).
You're a person in geeks clothing...and you got moderated +5 for being the antithesis of what hacking (in the oldschool, MIT sense of the word) and grokking are all about.
Where are the people who actually like technology? Where have the real hackers gone? Someone tell me, 'cause I think quite a few have left
's why the ancient greeks, egyptians and chinese never had an industrial revolution. All the knowledge was there, but due to the cheap slavery available, there was never any need for it to be put together in a way that spawned the industrial age.
/is/ the mother of invention.
Neccessity
MS Trackball Explorer. Better than the latest Logitech wireless trackball, 'cause whilst that one does have more buttons (==better), it still uses the old wireless tech which makes for crap tracking. I returned mine for the wired MS trackball.
:)
It's strange though, as MS is a software co., but their hardware outclasses their software by far.
Any other great trackballs out there? I'm looking for great, not just good: great tracking, lotsa buttons, great ergonomics...and not at the price of a spaceball4000
I've already got a h2g2: basically my palmpilot loaded with stuff coupled with my cellphone. Hell, actually my cellphone is more of a h2g2 all by itself, seeing as I do google searches on it.
The three body problem tells us that it won't even be highly accurate. It's to do with the fact that small changes in initial values can change the outcome significantly. Google for chaos theory, strange attractors and mandelbrot (and by now I'd also highly recomend a google for the three body problem) for more on that.
And by 'not highly accurate' I don't just mean 'not perfect', but absolutely wrong. It's one of the reasons why real weather prediction is pretty damn much impossible past the next hour; the rest is extrapolation which starts to fail pretty quickly.
"if you knew the mass of all of the objects in the Solar System and where they were to incredible precision, you might be able to come up with a mathmatical model that would be highly accurate in regards to leap seconds."
Nope: quantum mechanics (well, Heisenberg) and the three-body problem state that the deterministic universe is a thing of the past. Has been since the 1930's or so.
" it's not as if, were this released a couple of years later it would do well... it wouldn't"
This is not true. The Apple Newton and the Palmpilot proves this; the Newton was ahead of it's time, and whilst the palmpilot was released later, it was only just as good (and in some cases worse), but was a commercial success.
Wow...what a way to RFTA (realy fuck the analogy). Of course we want PCIe and we don't need ISA anymore. Of course new tech requires a new bus. But that's missing the point entirely. Frankly, I'm really surprised I have to explain this, and had half expected you to slam Warlock on this. Oh well.
The point, which you yourself have so very clearly elucidated, is this: the hardware/software industry can very easily force a standard, and in doing so replace the old hardware, in echange for new features.
By your lack of understanding, I see I'll have to paint the picture explicitly with the following hypothetical. Imagine the newest mobo's and cpu's have mandatory standardised DRM. All new mobo's and cpu's include this (at least all AMD and Intel cpu's, and thus their corresponding cpu's). The old cpu's (and thus mobo's) production is ceased. As soon as that stock is sold, there are no more high end cpu's without DRM. If you want a cpu in a couple of years time, you are now therefore forced to get a DRM'd cpu, or get a cpu which is years old. This is how pci replaced isa and how pci-e is replacing pci/agp; only now it's EFI/TC/DRM'd cpu's. And you have no choice, except by forfeiting the latest tech. So "you'll be wanting that 6800 in ISA next" turns into 'you'll be wanting that 5 core, 10 ghz, EFI/TC/DRM'd cpu in non-drm'd socket 478 next?'.
Gettit now?
Oh? Where can I find a PCI(non-e) 6800/x800 gfx card? What? There isn't a current model PCI implementation available, only cards which are years old?
Hmmmm. Makes you think, doesn't it.
"Imagine having to edit BIOS options on a cluster of 300 PCs"
Uhm...couldn't you just create a custom bios by hacking in your desired options in the standard bios, then flash all the machines with floppy's/cd's/usbsticks? That would be a hell of a lot faster than doing it all manually....but of course, not as fast as doing it over the ethernet.
"Not Invented Here"-mentality?
/. come out with some bogus 'well, maybe it's because of a NIH-mentality!'. Yeah; right.
Jesus...are you guys all this naive? Look at the first-poster's post and see the last item. The reason the mayor manufacturors want EFI over anything else is of course Trusted Computing. Anyone who thinks otherwise (especially considering OF has 11 years of getting the bugs out) is hopelessly naive.
And it's sad, not just because with DRM/TC that 'great firewall of China' can be implemented anywhere quite trivially and in a targetted way, or just because the little group with it's (admittedly better) OF doesn't have jack shit influence-wise, or just because if it did join EFI (even if EFI let it) it would be drowned out, but most of all because the first couple of posts at
I'm sorry this post is so vitriolic, but the fact is that here it is: DRM made for mass consumption. Only the geeks will know not to buy it, but it won't matter, because soon you won't be able to buy anything without a TC-EFI 'bios'. Or at least something up-to-date. For proof, just try and get a decent PCI(non-e) graphics card, and just look at what's happening to AGP.
And for the people who say 'it'll be hacked'....yeah, it will, but it won't do us much good; look at all the guys with chipped xbox's who don't do it for the pirated games, but for the otherwise never playable Japanese imports. Yeah, they can crack it, but they can't play 'Live'.
So I'm a bit bitter about this: if we can't get enough people to talk with their wallets, we will soon truly have two internets: one for the masses, all EFI'd and bright-shiny-new, and one for the geeks who run ten year old hardware, because that's the last pieces which rolled off without EFI.
And for those who hope for capitalism and market forces to right this: forget it. PC-electronics is only feasable due to high mass-market penentration: geeks alone are too small a market for manufacturors to cost-effectively make EFI-less products when that's the standard. And even if they do manage (at largely inflated prices, too high for the average geek), you won't be able to use it on the EFI'd internet2.0.