If you're working with a certain number of ecc bits per data bit, then the number of corrections you can perform increases with an increased data block size. Oversimplifying, just for explanation here:
Let's suppose you can fix one error per 512 byte block or 6 errors per 4096 byte block. Intuitively that might seem like a step back because 6/8 is smaller than 1, but that is not so. If you have 512-byte blocks and get two errors in a 512-byte sequence then that block is corrupt. However if instead you're using 4096 byte blocks then a 512-byte sequence within that block can have two errors since we can tolerate up to 6 errors in the whole block.
Or put another way, consider a 4 k sequence of data, represented by a sequence of digits dependent on the number of errors in each 512 bytes. 00000000 means no errors, 03010000 means 3 errors in the second block and 1 in the fourth block (ie a total of 4 errors in the whole 4096 bytes). With a scheme that can fix only one error per 512 bytes, the block with 3 errors cannot be corrected (because 3 > 1), but in the system which fixes up to 6 errors per 4096, the errors can be fixed because 4 6. This means that the ECC is far more reliable.
Over 20 years ago I worked in a building that had IR motion sensors to control lights. It is a huge building and the IR would light up sections as you walked through them. Worked well.
It also worked as a security lighting system, turning on the lights one the few occasions the place was "visited".
The RTA approach is potentially useful for some very low volume data flows (system monitoring etc), but it is not the way you'd design any performance critical stuff (which many true embedded systems need). Most Linux embedded systems are portable devices that run on batteries, so efficiency is important. Efficient execution translates to longer battery life.
Many embedded systems need very high levels of responsiveness (sub-millisecond) which RTA is unlikely to provide. I've worked on Linux embedded systems that could reliably crank events within 50 microseconds, but that required the use of custom drivers.This responsiveness is why RTOSs and "no OS" solutions will dominate embedded space for a long time yet.
These days it is important to be saying trendy things. Wall St is a cat-walk of fashionable corporate behavior and you have to be doing some of the right stuff, be that offshoring, diversifying, core competetncy etc. These fashions will sometimes change 180 degrees within a year (eg. diversification to focussing on core products). These days you also must be doing something Open.
So what does "Open" mean? Different things in different contexts.
And while I'm typing... why does RMS think he has the right to define what "Free" means? I can fully understand why the Oracle guy would later use the term "costless". After an RMS rant, the term "Free" would be very confusing; any competent speaker would do the same. GPL sofware is hardly "free" by some dictionary definitions: "not controlled by the will of others". A bit ironic that the "Free Software Foundation" (who supposedly push freedom) feel they have the right to dictate which of the many definitions of "free" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/free may be used in a software context. Isn't imposing your will on others anti-freedom?
GPL clearly does impose a will on others in that it is highly selective about what software it associates with. You're free to associate with me so long as you're GPL/straight/Catholic.
And before I am branded as an anti-OSS guy, I've written, and continue to write, heaps too - much of that released under GPL.
Sure, you can defeat fingerprint scanners but that requires quite a bit of effort on the criminal's part. You can defeat most car alarms and locks too.
The point is that a hot ipod will only get 10% of the retial value from the fence. How much effort will the criminal go to to get $25?
Well duh! Taking a different route gives redundancy in the case of natural disaster/ deliberate attack clobbering one line. That's pretty common practice for laying cables, power lines, microwave links etc. It has been done for years.
This makes it sound like Google actually did this work themselves with mental images of Googlites flying kites and riding hot air balloons. That is patently untrue. Most of the images in Google earth have come from other sources (government agencies, scanned aerial photos, etc).
Anyone who has thought about this for more than half a second, or has looked at anything more than just their backyard would realise that it is cobbled together from various sources.
I wrote grandparent mainly to point out the inconsistencies in MS FUD. I use both OO and Office (older version) and find I can move between them pretty easily, so most of the retraining argument is FUD. A change to ribbons is a big change though.
I must admit that I get pretty cranky when software UI gets changed for little more than eye candy reasons and I get even more cranky when the UI is trying to guess what I want and gets it wrong. To most people, myself included, software is a tool. I'm the master, not the tool. Many UI "innovations" (particularly context sensitive stuff like clippy and ribbons) make for an annoying experience rather than an easy flow.
Rather than change the main menu to be context sensitive, it would likely be far better to keep the main menu structure solid so you always have consistency, then add the context sensitive stuff to right-click or something.
This does not stack up. On the one hand MS is trying to convert people to a sexier UI (change is good) while on the other hand they are FUDding people that they should not switch to Open Office etc, partially for retraining reasons (change is bad). People must be stupid.
Fuck what the software design looks like. The actual function is far more important. One part of that function is consistency across versions.
and I bet I'm not the only one. I made some very tiny contributions to OLPC and I feel violated that what I thought was an OSS project has been compromised to run Windows. People who made larger contributions than I have a much larger reason to be annoyed.
It isn't just the extra RAM and hard disk, it is things like using x86 too. An ARM CPU, for instance, would have been both cheaper and lower power.
I expect there are many people who have contributed in some way to OLPC because they see this as an OSS project with a good cause.
Now that it is also going to be a vector for the Windows cancer will surely leave many people feeling violated. I know I do, and my contribution was tiny compatred with others.
I really believe that OLPC could be way better if it did not have to support Windows. For example, using an ARM instead of an x86 would have reduced cost and power consuumption.
Without money flowing in to OSS, fewer people will be able to do useful work.
Sure there is a perception of OSS being written by the selfless hackers giving all their spare time. In reality though, people need to eat, pay the rent and buy computers etc. When organisations fund OSS development they help make it real. OSS businesses have found various ways to make money and do so in various ways.
The media is very well controlled to feed the citzens what they need to know to make the right choices. WMD etc, faked footage in Iraq etc, Jessica Lynch etc, now this. Are you really suprised?
I once lived in a country with a very muzzled press, but everybody knew this and was suitably skeptical.
In the USA people live under the illusion of a free and open press which means that they believe the news media. How easily they are fooled!
Darl's business strategy was very successful for some, if not for SCO:
Pump and dump: The "we're going to screw over IBM" hype lured in the vultures and pumped up SCO stocks. Those that then dumped stocks probably got 10x the true value for their stocks.
Milking the cow: Darl's brother Kevin is part of the SCO legal team. Keeping SCO and the conflict alive and spending big on lawyers fees got a lot of money into Darl's brother's pockets. Families help eachother out.
Unfortunately SCO was once a great software company that got trashed by poor management and greed.
Slashdot Mirror
...if you have Windows loaded.
Let's suppose you can fix one error per 512 byte block or 6 errors per 4096 byte block. Intuitively that might seem like a step back because 6/8 is smaller than 1, but that is not so. If you have 512-byte blocks and get two errors in a 512-byte sequence then that block is corrupt. However if instead you're using 4096 byte blocks then a 512-byte sequence within that block can have two errors since we can tolerate up to 6 errors in the whole block.
Or put another way, consider a 4 k sequence of data, represented by a sequence of digits dependent on the number of errors in each 512 bytes. 00000000 means no errors, 03010000 means 3 errors in the second block and 1 in the fourth block (ie a total of 4 errors in the whole 4096 bytes). With a scheme that can fix only one error per 512 bytes, the block with 3 errors cannot be corrected (because 3 > 1), but in the system which fixes up to 6 errors per 4096, the errors can be fixed because 4 6. This means that the ECC is far more reliable.
This will push up the size/weight/cost of cards somewhat ...and don't use your card to scratch the ice off your car.
It also worked as a security lighting system, turning on the lights one the few occasions the place was "visited".
He'd written 253 drivers when the article was started and wrote the other 99 drivers while the article was being written.
Many embedded systems need very high levels of responsiveness (sub-millisecond) which RTA is unlikely to provide. I've worked on Linux embedded systems that could reliably crank events within 50 microseconds, but that required the use of custom drivers.This responsiveness is why RTOSs and "no OS" solutions will dominate embedded space for a long time yet.
So what does "Open" mean? Different things in different contexts.
And while I'm typing... why does RMS think he has the right to define what "Free" means? I can fully understand why the Oracle guy would later use the term "costless". After an RMS rant, the term "Free" would be very confusing; any competent speaker would do the same. GPL sofware is hardly "free" by some dictionary definitions: "not controlled by the will of others". A bit ironic that the "Free Software Foundation" (who supposedly push freedom) feel they have the right to dictate which of the many definitions of "free" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/free may be used in a software context. Isn't imposing your will on others anti-freedom?
GPL clearly does impose a will on others in that it is highly selective about what software it associates with. You're free to associate with me so long as you're GPL/straight/Catholic.
And before I am branded as an anti-OSS guy, I've written, and continue to write, heaps too - much of that released under GPL.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.st m
The point is that a hot ipod will only get 10% of the retial value from the fence. How much effort will the criminal go to to get $25?
Well duh! Taking a different route gives redundancy in the case of natural disaster/ deliberate attack clobbering one line. That's pretty common practice for laying cables, power lines, microwave links etc. It has been done for years.
This makes it sound like Google actually did this work themselves with mental images of Googlites flying kites and riding hot air balloons. That is patently untrue. Most of the images in Google earth have come from other sources (government agencies, scanned aerial photos, etc).
Anyone who has thought about this for more than half a second, or has looked at anything more than just their backyard would realise that it is cobbled together from various sources.
I must admit that I get pretty cranky when software UI gets changed for little more than eye candy reasons and I get even more cranky when the UI is trying to guess what I want and gets it wrong. To most people, myself included, software is a tool. I'm the master, not the tool. Many UI "innovations" (particularly context sensitive stuff like clippy and ribbons) make for an annoying experience rather than an easy flow.
Rather than change the main menu to be context sensitive, it would likely be far better to keep the main menu structure solid so you always have consistency, then add the context sensitive stuff to right-click or something.
Fuck what the software design looks like. The actual function is far more important. One part of that function is consistency across versions.
It isn't just the extra RAM and hard disk, it is things like using x86 too. An ARM CPU, for instance, would have been both cheaper and lower power.
Now that it is also going to be a vector for the Windows cancer will surely leave many people feeling violated. I know I do, and my contribution was tiny compatred with others.
I really believe that OLPC could be way better if it did not have to support Windows. For example, using an ARM instead of an x86 would have reduced cost and power consuumption.
Without money flowing in to OSS, fewer people will be able to do useful work.
Sure there is a perception of OSS being written by the selfless hackers giving all their spare time. In reality though, people need to eat, pay the rent and buy computers etc. When organisations fund OSS development they help make it real. OSS businesses have found various ways to make money and do so in various ways.
The play is really just for infotainment. The purpose is not technical accuracy and probably only wants to use sound bites that people have heard of.
I find the XP level of eye candy pointless and destracting. More sugar coated pixels in Vista are unlikely to be a Good Thing.
For more info: http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?cat
I once lived in a country with a very muzzled press, but everybody knew this and was suitably skeptical.
In the USA people live under the illusion of a free and open press which means that they believe the news media. How easily they are fooled!
Pump and dump: The "we're going to screw over IBM" hype lured in the vultures and pumped up SCO stocks. Those that then dumped stocks probably got 10x the true value for their stocks.
Milking the cow: Darl's brother Kevin is part of the SCO legal team. Keeping SCO and the conflict alive and spending big on lawyers fees got a lot of money into Darl's brother's pockets. Families help eachother out.
Unfortunately SCO was once a great software company that got trashed by poor management and greed.
This device used the rock and scroll interface to flick between menu items, pan, zoom etc.
Please ignore all that folks. Don't worry, in the future we'll have a bunch of new toys for you...
Suggestion to the brass: before you play with the high tech stuff, get the low tech stuff right first.
I bet this is caused by cellphones, or perhaps by in-hive wifi for the bees to watch drone-on-drone porn.