It's about time we got a movie based on politics that really doesn't have a bias or an op-ed piece, and just around Election Day.
Hey, give 'em a break, they're just playing it clever.
Last time I checked some polls, Bush or Kerry managed to put only their nose in front of the other, and it isn't clear whose nose is first. With just a couple of weeks to go, you (as a movie maker) wouldn't want to be on the losing side, would you?
Although I do suspect a large majority of movie makers, actors and other artistic types to be in the winning camp (that is, Kerry's). Just my humble, totally unbiased opinion...
I don't think GM things are any more or LESS dangerous than nuclear research.
I'd say: more dangerous that nuclear research. See also above comment "Don't screw with things you don't understand".
Why? Because GM has much of the properties of biological weapons. The thing that sets these apart from other Weapons of Mass Destruction, is that an effect can keep on multiplying and spreading, until all possible destructive effect has occured. To start, a single organism is enough.
In a nuclear disaster (take Chernobyl for example), the effect can be horrible, and last generations. Same with a mass release of toxic chemicals. But no matter how bad, the damage is done, and that's it. No more.
Now take a gene that makes it into the wild. And suppose that gene would mutate some more, and make an ordinary plant, say grass, produce a toxic chemical. That plant could spread until every lawn and every park on the planet would poison you when you sit on it. Worst-case scenario? Sure, chances of that happening will be slim, but if it occurs, there'd be no way to stop it.
I'd still be okay with that, if those risks were known, and could be controlled. But they aren't. If a plant is GM, is it known exactly what the result of the modification is? No it isn't. Research is done, lots is known, but a single plant is still too complex to fully understand. Is it producing a chemical it wasn't producing before? Not sure, when 5000+ chemicals are produced in that plant anyway.
So can you prevent a gene from making it into the wild? No you can't, certainly not when you put GM crops in a field outside.
Can you be sure of the maximal effect it will have on the world's ecosystem? No you can't, because no-one can say for sure how it will spread in the wild, how it will further mutate, or how it will affect biodiversity.
I feel that GM should therefore be treated similar as biological weapons, until such effects are known. Whatever selection of species is already done for today's industrial agriculture, the selection is always between species with genetic differences that occur naturally, and that automatically limits the effect when these species/genes spread in the wild.
And then there is the argument that a poor farmer in Africa could benefit from a better growing crop that is pest-resistant. In theory yes, but that argument is flawed as well.
World markets may not allow fair trade for some agricultural products, but the size of this problem is also limited by what any farmer can do with his crop. Now throw in a better growing, pest-resistant plant, possibly with some patents surrounding the GM involved. What will happen? In rich countries, this plant will be grown everywhere, and this poor farmer in Africa won't have the money the buy the expensive seeds, or pay royalties of some sort. His (natural) product will look even worse compared to the GM 'enhanced' one. That only decreases his market share, compared to the rest of the world. Fair? No. Benefit? Only for those who were better off in the first place.
"After my last horrific experience with their 4 in 1 driver set, I vowed to never touch another board with a VIA chipset again"
Maybe you simply lack some positive experience with Via hardware? The most stable x86 system I ever had, a 486, was Via chipset based. What I currently have uses Via KM266 chipset, performs solid and very stable. With non-Via chipsets, it's been a mixed bag for me.
I really like them advancing the art for power-efficient CPU's. For many applications, the underlying hardware is increasingly irrelevant, and other factors like power consumption become important. In the old days, computer hardware just couldn't be fast enough. Nowadays PC's are way faster than needed for almost any application. Next on the list is price, and as a result, ordinary PC hardware has become dirt cheap. What's next? Ergonomics, reliability, durability. Read: low power, small, low noise. Via CPU's fit in there nicely.
I think a big problem for Via CPU's market share in desktop systems is not their technical merits, but their availability. If you want to buy AMD or Intel, any computershop has something on offer. But if you want to buy Via C3, matching motherboard (socket 370), or Mini-ITX board, your choices in supplier are extremely limited (at least where I live, the Netherlands). If Via wants to sell more of this stuff, they should focus on making sure that you can actually get it somewhere.
Slightly off-topic, but quoting from the summary: "In anticipation of a slow news day..."
Pardon me, but isn't news something that isn't known yet? How would you know what will happen today? Are you wearing some future-looking goggles? Or otherwise know something that the rest of the world doesn't? If not, what a silly statement to make...
---I haven't got a clue how this sig made it in here.
I don't see the point why they would release a player at all, if it doesn't support MP3 playback.
MP3 is defacto standard, and if I would buy a player, MP3, WAV, and OGG support is a must. Any other formats not so important. The market is pretty well covered with all sorts of players. Experience shows you can't count on firmware updates. If you want MP3 support, it has to be in there when you buy it. How many consumers would even consider a player that doesn't support THE audio format?
Turning it into a glass isn't so much to reduce radiation in any way, but to immobilise the radioactive material. It can remain highly radioactive.
This sort of thing is done already, and often glass is packed inside a metal layer/container. Take transport: if you got fluid components, dust, or pressurised gasses, and there's an accident, the stuff spills all over the place, and into air, ground water. If it's glass, it may go in pieces, but the pieces stay were they are, with the radioactive material trapped inside.
With the cost of IC's, sensors, microcontrollers, and PC's falling through the floor (..)
If you were 'hardware hacking' a century ago, you might have used wood, rope, nails, old buckets or glass items. These days, it's often electric/electronic stuff like sensors, stepper motors or ucontrollers. Either way, the hardware is always cheap, like ripped out of old equipment. Tradition wants it that way. If you use all new stuff, you're not hacking, but developing new hardware.
Actually, pushing big objects of course is relatively easy. A tiny push can change the path enough enough to miss the earth by a huge margin. And there's plenty of methods one could imagine to apply a 'tiny' push.
But for good effect, it needs to apply over extended period of time. So you need early warning. With the speeds of these objects, that means looking into deep space in all directions, so that you see the thing coming, months or years ahead. And there's the problem: roughly speaking, we are looking, but not too closely. And when something is spotted, the game plan isn't ready either.
I always wondered if tech like this could be used as a movie compression method. As in, not store rendered picture data, but store textures, maps of an environment, data about how characters move, what they say, that sort of thing. And then render the whole shebang on-the-fly when you view it.
That's mostly like the sort of tech used in today's 3D games. It would be real easy to make such a 'movie' interactive. Walk around in a scene, or choose a character to follow in the story, and tag along with another character when you view the movie next time.
The first time I ran it, I was very impressed with the intro of the game Half-Life. You sit in a rail vehicle, can't get out, so the story is very linear, but you can move, look around, all sorts of things happening around you. If you know the game, you'll know what I mean.
If you see that some skilled coders can cram incredible demo's, or even a FPS in a 100 KB., it's clear that the amount of data to process is do-able. It's really just computing power that's needed. Today's home PC's aren't yet powerful enough to pull this off, but we're getting there real quick.
The article was very good to suggest separating information security from IT, and integrating with physical security.
After all, IT is just a tool, a means to an end. If you have a super-secure server, but one could throw a brick through a window and walk away with the goodies, that server isn't really secure. If you have a fire in a datacenter, and your entire archive and customer files are lost, then your backup procedures were flawed, even if state-of-the-art tools were used.
If it's "GPL-style", it's not the GPL, and exact license terms may be different.
..that if they get a request for the source from those who they distribute to...they have to fork the changes over to that group or person. If not, they don't have to; not just anyone can demand the source -- the recipients have to.
In case of the GPL: I learned just today, that what you wrote, isn't true. Section 2b of the GPL states: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License". So basically, if you distribute the program (to buyers of a device with the binary inside) you have to make the source available (to anyone who asks). I'm not sure if "all third parties" means: "anybody" or "any user of the program", but it's clearly not limited to "buyers of that device". Ofcourse, this only applies if you are distributing the program. As long as it's just sitting on your desk, nobody can demand anything from you.
Theoretically, if the same device is leased they would not have to distribute the source also...though I'd like to hear a counter argument.
In my book, "distribution" means: passing copies around. In that context, what's the difference between selling or leasing a device?
Sounds like a good career move to me
on
Open Source Licensing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hacker turned lawyer, eh?
Well, with IT jobs cut or outsourced to India, and legal battles about 'intellectual property' (damn, that phrase annoys me more and more) on the rise, that sounds like a solid career move. If you're in it for the money, that is.
Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere.
Looks like a book that could be really useful if it were online, so that you could browse through it when you have license-related questions. Or is this only something for lawyers, and they prefer paper?
Aren't insects doing this (sort of) when flying? You just have to move your 'arms' real quick, and many insects also have a very good power vs. volume/weight ratio.
Hmmm. I'd say laws should: a) be enforced (otherwise there's no point in creating them), b) therefore be enforceable, and c) not conflict with more fundamental laws.
My guess is a law like the above a) won't be enforced, b) won't be enforceable if tried, and c) might conflict with fundamental privacy legislation.
That makes it a lousy law, and thus for purely technical reasons alone, shouldn't be in the books in the first place.
Ever heard of the Morris internet worm? Back in 1988, and didn't even use Windows systems.
There have been several Linux worms as well, like the Lion worm. BTW: very interesting story about the origins of that one! Some even stay only in memory after infection, so that you can remove them by a simple reboot (and get re-infected 2 minutes later). Not changing any system files makes them harder to detect.
Usually these don't have as big an impact as their Windows counterparts, I suspect this has a lot to do with the way the average *nix system is managed in comparison to the average Windoze box. Decent built-in security, and software distributed in source form, makes life a lot harder for worms, spyware and shit like that.
...and the likes that bother the end-user directly...
It doesn't really matter if it's a browser-only or other type of exploit. Malware like worms, virusses, spyware, whatever, eat CPU time, memory, can cause unexpected crashes, leak private information, loads of network traffic, or weird/annoying behaviour of your system. In short: they cost you (time and/or money). And what they do (infect other systems, send spam,...), causes cost on others as well.
Hope it don't go boom while they're recovering it...
I wouldn't know in detail how a hydrogen bomb is constructed, but roughly the process goes like:
Igniting conventional high-explosives (400 pounds here) compresses uranium enough to trigger a (relatively small, but what's small in this context) thermonuclear explosion. That thermonuclear explosion in turn causes 'heavy water' to go into a far more powerful (secondary) nuclear explosion.
It's not easy to cause this whole sequence. So don't worry, any such event won't happen by accident. Being underwater for a couple of decades, only helps to make it less likely.
You are quite right. Many stories involving MS quickly polarise into "MS bad", "MS shouldn't", "Open Source is better" battles. My initial comment was aimed at the "funny" mark, as in: "insert your anti-MS comments here".
In the real world, things never are black & white. One poster had a good remark about historical Unix (search for 'AT&T' in the comments). Likewise, I myself am in favour of Free/OS, but don't really think laws explicitly promoting Free/OSS are needed.
What IS needed, is that government should judge software on requirements, and benefit to the public. I have no problem with closed-source solutions, as long as they respect open standards and data formats. For databases containing sensitive data about citizens, government has the obligation to guard the integrity/security of that data, and that could require the ability to search for/plug security holes, if needed without the help of the vendor. Needing open source could follow fom that requirement. Also government should spend public money as effectively as possible. Avoiding licensing costs by going opensource could help that. But it is the requirement itself that should be guidance, not OS just for the sake of OS.
Similarly I don't like, but also don't have a problem with MS lobbying efforts. But it IS the responsibility of politicians to serve the public. If lack of informed data makes them susceptible to lobbying efforts, then maybe that same public should just do more to remind those politicians of their responsibility? As in: put your vote where your mouth is, and let politicians know how you feel.
Re: Yeah, companies would love it, but I would too
on
Would You Bid for a Job?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Take the scheme in the article to the extreme, and that would be like abandoning a legally required minimum wage. It would sound to most workers like "back to being slaves of corporations", but I would be all in favour of that. My reasoning goes roughly like this:
With a minimum wage, a company decides how many people they want to hire. More people apply for a job, so a number remain unemployed. Work that is considered too costly, is outsourced to low-wage countries. The people hired are pushed to maximise productivity (to compensate for the high wages), and of the money they earn, a large chunk is paid in taxes. A lot of that tax money is then used to support people that can't get a job, even if they'd like to work.
Abandon minimum wages, and what happens? Companies would decide how many people they want to hire, at what price. A sheme like the above might help determine it. You decide if you think it's worth it, and if not, you go work elsewhere. With any hourly wage possible, there's always a job opening somewhere, or of the type of work that you like to do. Instead of seeing your job go overseas, you can compete directly with Indian workers. But the kicker: because there's less people that really can't get a job, there's less money needed to support them. So, you can lower income taxes, and all the working folks get to keep a larger portion of what they earn. That also makes low-wage jobs more attractive.
I for one, would rather have a low-pay job, with low income taxes, and pay my own bills, then not have a job, and need support from high-pay workers through a high income tax system.
Why do motherboard manufacturers make a big deal out of multi-layer PCB's?
Roughly speaking, more PCB layers makes it easier to do a complex design, but harder (read: more costly) to do the manufacturing.
The mobo market is very competitive, so shaving a single $ of the price of manufacturing a board, is profit/market advantage for a mobo maker. So the mobo maker will try to keep the number of PCB layers to the absolute minimum needed for the design. AFAIK, many mobo's use 4 layers.
Slashdot Mirror
Presidential debate has begun!
Hey, give 'em a break, they're just playing it clever.
Last time I checked some polls, Bush or Kerry managed to put only their nose in front of the other, and it isn't clear whose nose is first. With just a couple of weeks to go, you (as a movie maker) wouldn't want to be on the losing side, would you?
Although I do suspect a large majority of movie makers, actors and other artistic types to be in the winning camp (that is, Kerry's). Just my humble, totally unbiased opinion...
I'd say: more dangerous that nuclear research. See also above comment "Don't screw with things you don't understand".
Why? Because GM has much of the properties of biological weapons. The thing that sets these apart from other Weapons of Mass Destruction, is that an effect can keep on multiplying and spreading, until all possible destructive effect has occured. To start, a single organism is enough.
In a nuclear disaster (take Chernobyl for example), the effect can be horrible, and last generations. Same with a mass release of toxic chemicals. But no matter how bad, the damage is done, and that's it. No more.
Now take a gene that makes it into the wild. And suppose that gene would mutate some more, and make an ordinary plant, say grass, produce a toxic chemical. That plant could spread until every lawn and every park on the planet would poison you when you sit on it. Worst-case scenario? Sure, chances of that happening will be slim, but if it occurs, there'd be no way to stop it.
I'd still be okay with that, if those risks were known, and could be controlled. But they aren't. If a plant is GM, is it known exactly what the result of the modification is? No it isn't. Research is done, lots is known, but a single plant is still too complex to fully understand. Is it producing a chemical it wasn't producing before? Not sure, when 5000+ chemicals are produced in that plant anyway.
So can you prevent a gene from making it into the wild? No you can't, certainly not when you put GM crops in a field outside.
Can you be sure of the maximal effect it will have on the world's ecosystem? No you can't, because no-one can say for sure how it will spread in the wild, how it will further mutate, or how it will affect biodiversity.
I feel that GM should therefore be treated similar as biological weapons, until such effects are known. Whatever selection of species is already done for today's industrial agriculture, the selection is always between species with genetic differences that occur naturally, and that automatically limits the effect when these species/genes spread in the wild.
And then there is the argument that a poor farmer in Africa could benefit from a better growing crop that is pest-resistant. In theory yes, but that argument is flawed as well.
World markets may not allow fair trade for some agricultural products, but the size of this problem is also limited by what any farmer can do with his crop. Now throw in a better growing, pest-resistant plant, possibly with some patents surrounding the GM involved. What will happen? In rich countries, this plant will be grown everywhere, and this poor farmer in Africa won't have the money the buy the expensive seeds, or pay royalties of some sort. His (natural) product will look even worse compared to the GM 'enhanced' one. That only decreases his market share, compared to the rest of the world. Fair? No. Benefit? Only for those who were better off in the first place.
Look elsewhere - no sig to be found here.
Maybe you simply lack some positive experience with Via hardware? The most stable x86 system I ever had, a 486, was Via chipset based. What I currently have uses Via KM266 chipset, performs solid and very stable. With non-Via chipsets, it's been a mixed bag for me.
I really like them advancing the art for power-efficient CPU's. For many applications, the underlying hardware is increasingly irrelevant, and other factors like power consumption become important. In the old days, computer hardware just couldn't be fast enough. Nowadays PC's are way faster than needed for almost any application. Next on the list is price, and as a result, ordinary PC hardware has become dirt cheap. What's next? Ergonomics, reliability, durability. Read: low power, small, low noise. Via CPU's fit in there nicely.
I think a big problem for Via CPU's market share in desktop systems is not their technical merits, but their availability. If you want to buy AMD or Intel, any computershop has something on offer. But if you want to buy Via C3, matching motherboard (socket 370), or Mini-ITX board, your choices in supplier are extremely limited (at least where I live, the Netherlands). If Via wants to sell more of this stuff, they should focus on making sure that you can actually get it somewhere.
Pardon me, but isn't news something that isn't known yet? How would you know what will happen today? Are you wearing some future-looking goggles? Or otherwise know something that the rest of the world doesn't? If not, what a silly statement to make...
---I haven't got a clue how this sig made it in here.
MP3 is defacto standard, and if I would buy a player, MP3, WAV, and OGG support is a must. Any other formats not so important. The market is pretty well covered with all sorts of players. Experience shows you can't count on firmware updates. If you want MP3 support, it has to be in there when you buy it. How many consumers would even consider a player that doesn't support THE audio format?
2500+ should be enough for everyone?
This sort of thing is done already, and often glass is packed inside a metal layer/container. Take transport: if you got fluid components, dust, or pressurised gasses, and there's an accident, the stuff spills all over the place, and into air, ground water. If it's glass, it may go in pieces, but the pieces stay were they are, with the radioactive material trapped inside.
If you were 'hardware hacking' a century ago, you might have used wood, rope, nails, old buckets or glass items. These days, it's often electric/electronic stuff like sensors, stepper motors or ucontrollers. Either way, the hardware is always cheap, like ripped out of old equipment. Tradition wants it that way. If you use all new stuff, you're not hacking, but developing new hardware.
But for good effect, it needs to apply over extended period of time. So you need early warning. With the speeds of these objects, that means looking into deep space in all directions, so that you see the thing coming, months or years ahead. And there's the problem: roughly speaking, we are looking, but not too closely. And when something is spotted, the game plan isn't ready either.
That's mostly like the sort of tech used in today's 3D games. It would be real easy to make such a 'movie' interactive. Walk around in a scene, or choose a character to follow in the story, and tag along with another character when you view the movie next time.
The first time I ran it, I was very impressed with the intro of the game Half-Life. You sit in a rail vehicle, can't get out, so the story is very linear, but you can move, look around, all sorts of things happening around you. If you know the game, you'll know what I mean.
If you see that some skilled coders can cram incredible demo's, or even a FPS in a 100 KB., it's clear that the amount of data to process is do-able. It's really just computing power that's needed. Today's home PC's aren't yet powerful enough to pull this off, but we're getting there real quick.
After all, IT is just a tool, a means to an end. If you have a super-secure server, but one could throw a brick through a window and walk away with the goodies, that server isn't really secure. If you have a fire in a datacenter, and your entire archive and customer files are lost, then your backup procedures were flawed, even if state-of-the-art tools were used.
If it's "GPL-style", it's not the GPL, and exact license terms may be different.
In case of the GPL: I learned just today, that what you wrote, isn't true. Section 2b of the GPL states: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License". So basically, if you distribute the program (to buyers of a device with the binary inside) you have to make the source available (to anyone who asks). I'm not sure if "all third parties" means: "anybody" or "any user of the program", but it's clearly not limited to "buyers of that device". Ofcourse, this only applies if you are distributing the program. As long as it's just sitting on your desk, nobody can demand anything from you.
Theoretically, if the same device is leased they would not have to distribute the source also...though I'd like to hear a counter argument.
In my book, "distribution" means: passing copies around. In that context, what's the difference between selling or leasing a device?
Did you take your Free Software licensing quiz today?
Well, with IT jobs cut or outsourced to India, and legal battles about 'intellectual property' (damn, that phrase annoys me more and more) on the rise, that sounds like a solid career move. If you're in it for the money, that is.
Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere.
Did you take your Free Software licensing quiz today?
Aren't insects doing this (sort of) when flying? You just have to move your 'arms' real quick, and many insects also have a very good power vs. volume/weight ratio.
Hmmm. I'd say laws should: a) be enforced (otherwise there's no point in creating them), b) therefore be enforceable, and c) not conflict with more fundamental laws.
My guess is a law like the above a) won't be enforced, b) won't be enforceable if tried, and c) might conflict with fundamental privacy legislation.
That makes it a lousy law, and thus for purely technical reasons alone, shouldn't be in the books in the first place.
There have been several Linux worms as well, like the Lion worm. BTW: very interesting story about the origins of that one! Some even stay only in memory after infection, so that you can remove them by a simple reboot (and get re-infected 2 minutes later). Not changing any system files makes them harder to detect.
Usually these don't have as big an impact as their Windows counterparts, I suspect this has a lot to do with the way the average *nix system is managed in comparison to the average Windoze box. Decent built-in security, and software distributed in source form, makes life a lot harder for worms, spyware and shit like that.
It doesn't really matter if it's a browser-only or other type of exploit. Malware like worms, virusses, spyware, whatever, eat CPU time, memory, can cause unexpected crashes, leak private information, loads of network traffic, or weird/annoying behaviour of your system. In short: they cost you (time and/or money). And what they do (infect other systems, send spam, ...), causes cost on others as well.
I wouldn't know in detail how a hydrogen bomb is constructed, but roughly the process goes like:
Igniting conventional high-explosives (400 pounds here) compresses uranium enough to trigger a (relatively small, but what's small in this context) thermonuclear explosion. That thermonuclear explosion in turn causes 'heavy water' to go into a far more powerful (secondary) nuclear explosion.
It's not easy to cause this whole sequence. So don't worry, any such event won't happen by accident. Being underwater for a couple of decades, only helps to make it less likely.
In the real world, things never are black & white. One poster had a good remark about historical Unix (search for 'AT&T' in the comments). Likewise, I myself am in favour of Free/OS, but don't really think laws explicitly promoting Free/OSS are needed.
What IS needed, is that government should judge software on requirements, and benefit to the public. I have no problem with closed-source solutions, as long as they respect open standards and data formats. For databases containing sensitive data about citizens, government has the obligation to guard the integrity/security of that data, and that could require the ability to search for/plug security holes, if needed without the help of the vendor. Needing open source could follow fom that requirement. Also government should spend public money as effectively as possible. Avoiding licensing costs by going opensource could help that. But it is the requirement itself that should be guidance, not OS just for the sake of OS.
Similarly I don't like, but also don't have a problem with MS lobbying efforts. But it IS the responsibility of politicians to serve the public. If lack of informed data makes them susceptible to lobbying efforts, then maybe that same public should just do more to remind those politicians of their responsibility? As in: put your vote where your mouth is, and let politicians know how you feel.
Our daily fix of MS bashing has arrived...
With a minimum wage, a company decides how many people they want to hire. More people apply for a job, so a number remain unemployed. Work that is considered too costly, is outsourced to low-wage countries. The people hired are pushed to maximise productivity (to compensate for the high wages), and of the money they earn, a large chunk is paid in taxes. A lot of that tax money is then used to support people that can't get a job, even if they'd like to work.
Abandon minimum wages, and what happens? Companies would decide how many people they want to hire, at what price. A sheme like the above might help determine it. You decide if you think it's worth it, and if not, you go work elsewhere. With any hourly wage possible, there's always a job opening somewhere, or of the type of work that you like to do. Instead of seeing your job go overseas, you can compete directly with Indian workers. But the kicker: because there's less people that really can't get a job, there's less money needed to support them. So, you can lower income taxes, and all the working folks get to keep a larger portion of what they earn. That also makes low-wage jobs more attractive.
I for one, would rather have a low-pay job, with low income taxes, and pay my own bills, then not have a job, and need support from high-pay workers through a high income tax system.
Yes, yes, people are starting to notice...
Methinks somebody is doing a thorough code review (..)
Naahhh, it must be a global conspiracy! We just didn't find out yet who is The Evil One behind all this...
Roughly speaking, more PCB layers makes it easier to do a complex design, but harder (read: more costly) to do the manufacturing.
The mobo market is very competitive, so shaving a single $ of the price of manufacturing a board, is profit/market advantage for a mobo maker. So the mobo maker will try to keep the number of PCB layers to the absolute minimum needed for the design. AFAIK, many mobo's use 4 layers.