But the thing that sticks out the most is - why the hell is it such a crisis that IP addresses are doled out where they are needed, instead of what I am sure you would consider "fairly" to everyone? Is there now a social justice aspect to the IPv4 "crisis?"
Thanks for making it obvious you have no idea what you're talking about.
I have no problem with the disproportionate amount of/8's ARIN has assigned to it However, having such a large pool means that:
Many of the organizations that want an IPv4 address block (of whatever size) probably already have one. Indeed, due to pre-CIDR allocation rules, many of them have way more than they actually need to use,
There are more opportunities for addresses to be shuffled about. ARIN has assigned/controls over 1.3 billion addresses, for a population of roughly 530 million people. You have a lot more flexibility when you have nearly 2.5 addresses for every man, woman, and child in your registry area.
As such, you can't point to the pool with the largest number of addresses, and then imply(as the/. article does) that there is no address shortage issues. APNIC and RIPE NCC are already exhausted. The fact that North America has a historical address advantage means that effects in North America will be delayed -- not that they simply won't happen.
With that out of the way, if you know anything about routing, you would know that there is a technical crisis in doling out addresses wherever they are needed. Anytime you break up a contiguous address space, you'll generally need two (or more) additional routing table entries to handle the situation. In pre-CIDR days, the situation was fairly simple (although I'm simplify it a bit to make it easier to communicate): a router only had to look up where to forward a packet based on the value of the first octet, which would only have 255 possibilities (actually less, due to reserved address spaces, such as the unused Class E space). The packet would follow the route until it reached the router in charge of the value of the first octet, which would route based on the second octet, also with a maximum of 255 values. Each hop would hit a router with a table with a maximum of 255 entries, until you got to the destination host.
Post CIDR, the address space could be broken up at pretty much arbitrary locations, so knowing the next hope required ever expanding tables. As soon as you geographically break up, say, 213, into geographically separate ranges (say, for simplicity, a series of/16s), what used to be one routing entry is now 256 routing entries. Break up some of those/16s into/24s, and each of those/16s that are broken up become 256 other router entries.
This is how we've got to the point where there are roughly half a million forwarding entries. Maintaining all of these entries in a constantly changing network, storing them, and searching them is getting to be extraordinarily computationally expensive. If you continue to break them up such that no two contiguous addresses are on the same physical network, you could wind up with roughly 3.7 BILLION routing entries.
IPv4 wasn't designed to be broken up this way. In the early days of CIDR, it was expected that such routing difficulties were far in the future, and that we would have moved to a newer, better protocol by then. Turns out the problems aren't as far into the future as they may have expected, and we've done pretty much squat at doing anything about it, other than throwing more compute power at packet routing.
So yeah -- you can't just throw addresses where they're needed anymore. Every/8 block from the IANA has been assigned to RIRs, and any transfer of a block smaller than a/8 is going to add yet more entries to the global routing table. Just try to think of how a network is supposed to route 213.0.113.1 to th
For anybody paying any attention over the past few years, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
The IANA ran out of IPv4 address space available for doling out to the Regional Internet Registries (of which there are six) three years ago. APNIC (Asia Pacific) and RIPE NCC (Europe) went below a single/8 three and two years ago respectively. The IPv4 address exhaustion has already begun.
ARIN (North America), however, has 82/8s. If you consider that there are only 221/8s in total (the IANA keeps 35 for reserved use), this means that ARIN has 37% of all usable Internet addresses assigned to it, for roughly 8% of the worlds population. More than a third of all possible addresses for less than a tenth of the worlds population.
Even still, ARIN now only has about 1.3/8s free. Projections have them running out next year. They've always been estimated to be one of the last RIRs to run out (with AfriNIC being last, as they still have just over 3 of their nearly 13/8s free) due in part to the huge number of/8s already in use in North America (way out of proportion to the population of the continent).
I feel really ashamed every time this topic comes up on/. at the complete and rampant ignorance of the issues surrounding IPv4 and IPv6. We will run out of IPv4 address space, but address space is hardly the only problem with IPv4. The bigger problem is ROUTABILITY -- the IPv4 routing tables have become seriously unweildly, they are getting progressively worse (in part due to InterRIR transfers of address blocks now that Europe and Asia have run out of addresses), and they continue to need more and more compute power thrown at the problem just to keep up. The number of BGP forwarding entries has doubled from roughly 250k to nearly 500k in just the last six years. The algorithms used for determining routes in IPv4 are complex. The computability is difficult, and it's slowing down the Internet today.
IPv6 solves a lot of the routing problems inherent in IPv4, making routability a lot easier to compute. IPv6 packets have a simpler header, routers don't need to provide fragmentation services, and there is no header checksum. IPv6 also avoids the routing anomalies present in IPv4 due to things such as the switch to CIDR. We know a heck of a lot more about packet routing now than we did in the 60s when IPv4 was first defined, and these improvements are available in IPv6.
This is why I cringe whenever I see a post in an IPv6 address exhaustion related/. story complaining about a lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6, or anytime anyone says that NAT is good enough for everybody. As the address space fragments even further, and historic/8s and/16s are broken up into ever smaller units which are then distributed to diverse geographies, the routing table in IPv4 is going to continue to blow up, becoming ever uglier -- it simply wasn't designed to scale in the manner in which we're using it. IPv6 brings sanity to global routing again, in a way that no backward-compatible solution could achieve.
The IANA is out of addresses. RIPE and APNIC are virtually out of addresses (with only enough reserved to aid in IPv4 - IPv6 tunnelling and translation services). ARIN is down to less than 1.5/8s, and survives purely on the fact that it has a disproportionate number of/8s compared to the population it serves. And worst of all, IPv4 routing is an absolute mess that requires a ton of processing power and compute time to maintain. Remember these things before you post something silly about being pro-NAT, pro-some-untested-IPv4-address-extension-proposal, complaining about backward compatibility, or how people have been predicting IPv4 exhaustion for the last 25 years (just because you see the train coming towards you way off in the distance does
That's probably one of the reasons they closed in Canada. Radio Shack used to be the place to go when you needed some components (which they stopped selling). the 200-1 electronic kits, the Armatron, I miss those kind of things...
Nope -- technically, they have never really closed in Canada, but it's a strange story.
RadioShack was operated in Canada by a company called InterTAN. They weren't owned by the US RadioShack at all -- the stores were licensed under an agreement. In 2004, Circuit City in the US bought InterTAN, and one week later RadioShack sued in the US (claiming breech of agreement) to have the licensing agreement cancelled. All Canadian RadioShack stores were then rebranded as "The Source By Circuit City" (which IMO was always a terrible name).
But wait -- there's more. In 2006 RadioShack US then opened 9 stores in the Toronto area running under the "Radio Shack" name. After only a few months in business, they closed all of them down "to focus on core US business".
In January 2009, Circuit City in the US went out of business; however, as "The Source By Circuit City" in Canada wasn't doing too badly, instead of being shut down with the US stores the entire thing was sold to Bell Canada, who renamed the stores "The Source", and who continues to operate them to this day.
As such, many/most of the pre-2006 RadioShack stores haven't actually closed -- they were simply renamed, first to "The Source By Circuit City", ad then just "The Source", which still operates today. InterTAN didn't go out of business -- it's just been swallowed up.
Of course, the product selection has changed over the years -- you're probably not going there anymore to get your zener diodes. They still have some parts, but it's not like back in the heyday.
It was the last of the plastic MacBooks, self identifies as "Early 2008". The CPU is a Core Duo and is 64-bit capable but Apple did not write 64-bit drivers (or something like that) for this system. It is not compatible with the 64-bit versions of Mac OS X. That makes it a non-64 bit machine regardless of what the CPU is capable of.
Your system runs a Core 2 Duo, and is indeed 64-bit capable.
Here's the rub, however -- your machine only has a 32-bit EFI, which means it can only boot in 32-bit mode. In OS X, this means it can only boot the 32-bit kernel and associated kernel modules. The 32-bit kernel can still run 64-bit applications -- but you'll still have the various limitations of a 32-bit kernel (although as the OS X 32-bit kernel implements PAE, you can still bust the 4GB addressing limitations you see in 32-bit versions of Windows client OS's).
The most recent OS X releases ship with only a 64-bit kernel; systems running with a 32-bit EFI are thus left out of the cold.
As such, it's not that your CPU can't handle 64-bit computation, or that Apple didn't write suitable drivers for your system. It's a boot issue due to the 32-bit EFI. So now you know.
If you did, you'd understand why people thought Windows 3.1 was... GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT.
I remember some of Microsofts advertising around the release of Windows 3.1, heavily advertising the fact that there were no more "Unexpected Application Errors", and thus Windows 3.1 was so much more stable than Windows 3.0.
Of course, the truth of the matter really was they just renamed the error condition to "General Protection Fault", and it was no more stable than 3.0.
Windows 3.1 was the last version of Windows I ever ran on personal hardware (and I steer clear from Windows at work as much as possible).
That's okay. Personally, I don't believe in Republicans. Indeed, I'm pretty confident at this stage in my life that "Republicans" and "Americans" were things my Dad invented for bedtime stories when I was young to scare the crap out of me and keep me on the straight and narrow.
Like me. I live alone, and so I don't cook very often. Mostly I get home from work, heat something up quickly and that is dinner.
Get yourself a pressure canner and a bunch of 1L jars. Take a weekend to learn how to use it properly. Then, go out and buy yourself a bunch of whole chickens, some potatoes, stewing beef, chicken and beef broth (or just make your own), carrots, celery, and onions. Ensure you have some salt and pepper and some common spices. Roast a few whole chickens, remove the meat, and stick them in jars (one each), top with water and a bit of salt, and put in the pressure canner for 90 mins (you can save the bones for broth). Put some raw beef cubes in the bottom of some other jars, with cubed potatoes, and chopped celery, carrot, and onions, until nearly full, and top with beef broth. Put in the pressure canner for 90 mins. Do the same with raw chicken instead of beef. The raw meat will cook completely within the jar during the pressure canning process, and comes out seriously tender and juicy.
A typical home pressure canner can do 7L of food at once. That can mean seven chickens, seven jars of stew, or seven jars of soup at your disposal, which only need heating, and which only have the ingredients you put in them.
The possibilities are huge, and not only do you get to select the ingredients, but the end result is completely shelf-stable (so long as you follow the directions correctly and verify the seals on your jars are solid). It's usually recommended you eat anything you can this way within a year, but I've heard of people who have ate canned items 5 - 10 years old that tasted just fine (you may lose some of the nutritional factors this way, mind you).
It's really pretty easy, and the US government Dept of Agriculture, as well as some other canning companies and organizations publish tested recipes online. So long as you take care of them the jars themselves last nearly forever, and only need their snap lids replaced, so you can reuse them to your hearts content.
I took up canning roughly a year ago for my family, and we currently have over 40L of food put away, including whole chickens (deboned), crab meat (I live by the ocean, and own some crab traps), vegetables, pasta sauce with meat, jams, jellies, whole fruits, soups, and stews. I'm planning on doing some chilli in the near future. It's so easy for even one of us to have a tasty, nutritious meal -- and considering I can raw pack the stews especially means I can easily make seven meals in about two hours time that are shelf-stable and which take just minutes to heat in the microwave.
I wish I had known what I know now about pressure canning when I was single. You can often buy food cheaper in bulk -- perhaps in quantities more than you'd typically be able to eat in a single week. You can control the sizes (as jars are available in a variety of sizes). Shelf-stability. Quick reheating. Nothing in the jar you don't put in there yourself. And if you plan ahead just a little bit, you can put up a lot of future meals in just a few hours.
I thought there was already a known connection between the gut bacteria and autism.
The best anyone can really say at this point is that gut bacteria might play a role in some peoples autistic symptoms, but certainly not all. It's not a panacea by a long shot. Some autistic children do see some improvement through the use of specialized diets. Others see no change at all. I'm the father of an autistic child who falls into the latter category -- on a typical diet she shows no propensity to constipation, diarrhoea, or other obvious digestive issues, and on a gluten and dairy free diet, she isn't any different than on a typical diet.
Chances are there are multiple routes to the same sort of neural-developmental issues that cause autism in individuals. This research is promising for those whose autism does have a digestive basis, but that doesn't mean that all autism comes from the same source, or that no further research is needed into other possible causes.
While EGA was available in '85, I wouldn't call it common. Both home PCs and business PCs of the time still typically had either monochrome graphics or CGA.
Of course, if you really want to discuss a blast from the past, you could get 640x480x256 on a PC XT back in 1984 using the (little known) IBM Professional Graphics Controller.
I had an ATI graphics card way back in the day that could provide EGA graphics on a CGA display (with a lot of interlacing, mind you). Those were the days.
Amazon Prime only has seasons 1 through 3. Season four just completed yesterday in the UK, and probably won't be available on Amazon for some months yet.
Yaz
For those with bad eyes, is the new OS easier to read, harder, or about the same?
The place where I've seen MAJOR improvement in this area with iOS7 has been when running iPhone apps on an iPad (in my case, an iPad 2 -- the oldest iPad supported by iOS7).
In iOS6 and prior, when running an iPhone app you had a choice between running it at its native resolution (and it would always choose the older 480x320 used by all iPhones up to (but not including) the iPhone 4) as a tiny window in the centre of the screen, or running it at "2x", doing a straight pixel doubling of everything. Fonts in particular became pretty ugly scaled this way -- they became obviously pixellated.
In iOS7 however, all iPhone apps are auto-scaled. It appears it now prefers graphics for the iPhone 4/4s screen resolution (940x640). Most importantly,
the fonts are simply sized to the correct 2x size without pixel doubling -- so the render to the correct size at native resolution. This makes iPhone apps on the iPad vastly easier to read.
I can be a bit jarring mind you when you couple the new, crisp text with a graphic containing text designed for the pre- iPhone 4 screen resolution. The graphic gets scaled, so any graphical text looks pixellated still, however UI fonts in the same display will be crisp and clean.
I don't run a lot of iPhone apps on my iPad -- most are either dual iPhone/iPad apps in the first place, or have iPad equivalents available in the app store. There are a few that I need to run however (my banking and insurance apps don't have iPad equivalents, for example), and the text quality improvement in them is tremendous. It was pretty much worth the iOS7 upgrade alone for those apps.
None of which is helpful on an iPhone of course, and not having an iPhone (or bad eyes for that matter) I can't comment on how easy to read the text is on those devices. They certain do appear to have taken some time to improve things on the iPad however, and there I've ben really happy with the new and improved font rendering support.
Who the hell uses it? I know legacy apps but it makes more sense to me to keep old OS/2 in VMWare workstation or ESXi server and virtualize it to have it run older programs. No one cares what features it will include because it is obsolete and users would leave if they could.
The last time I tested it, VMware has a really hard time virtualizing the latest OS/2 releases. I was able to get it to work with some degree of stability only if I ensured I never went past OS/2 WARP v4 FixPak 11. Anything beyond that and the VM simply wouldn't boot.
My understanding is the problem is that OS/2 was pretty much the only OS out there to make use of the full range of the Intel IA-32 architecture, in particular Ring 2 access, which isn't used in Windows or most *NIX derivatives.
But unless Apple opens up the internals of how it processes and stores the data, I don't think it will have any generic utility.
According to the 5s release presentation, Apple claims that the fingerprint hash is stored in secure memory inside the CPU, in such a way that it isn't available for read outside the CPU itself. Applications have no access to it -- all you can do is a) write to it, and b) presumably run a CPU instruction to compare against it (whether this is tied directly to the scanner or not I have no idea). The claim as I understand it is that the data can never be read by anything anywhere other than the internal comparison circuits.
I suppose the truth of this will be tested in the coming months by every hacker who would like to take Apple down a peg or two.
I admit that it will make the job of the common thief hard, that's why I said that it's a good idea. Just don't trust unencrypted sensitive data on your phone.
All data on every iPhone since the 3GS has been fully encrypted, so long as you have a passcode/passphrase setup.
In the iPhone 5s presentation, it was mentioned that one of the main drivers for the fingerprint scanning technology is because in their research, a large percentage of users never bother to setup a passcode/passphrase, making all of the hardware encryption in the iPhone completely useless.
However, I feel a company the size and stature of Google should've pushed ARM based devices into the market - now Microsoft, Apple and now Google are all pushing Intel gear.
It isn't really Google that is determining what processor is going into the Chromebooks. That's up to the manufacturers. Samsung's Series 3 Chromebook is running the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which uses the ARMv7 instruction set. It's been the best selling Laptop on Amazon for the entirety of 2013.
As such, there are a lot of ARM-based Chromebooks out there. My wife has one; she loves it.
Which gets to the crux of my thesis -- if you need to put into place and maintain the staff, volunteers, and technology to make this work, why even bother in the first place?
Besides which, we all know that often "moderation" winds up simply becoming a way to demote ideas you don't agree with, and promoting those you do.
I prefer my news sites provide really good journalism in the first place (I should note that being in Canada, our journalistic standards haven't tanked as they have in the US. Our notion of "journalism" doesn't equate to "talking blowhards giving their opinion over and over and over again"). I can make up my own mind about what is being discussed in the article, and don't need a mob of people frothing at the mouth over ideology at the bottom. If I want more discussion, that's what Twitter, Facebook (to a lesser extent), and any number of blogs and forums (like/.) are for.
They like comments because they can sometimes get more information about the story of someone who may be more involved in it.
It opens the possibility to learn of new stories or ideas to further create journalism.
But how often does this actually happen? And does it happen more than if they simply provide a form to privately e-mail them with your comments on a story?
99.99% of the time the comments against such stories provide nothing towards the story (and I'm willing to bet that percentage is a low estimate). I'm not sure having such commenting systems (and the back-end manual moderation systems that are often in place to support them) is of any real economic benefit to such news sites. Sure, specialized sites like/. which have community moderation systems are a different entity -- but sites like the ones I've linked to above could save a lot of money and effort by simply removing their commenting systems, and virtually nothing would be lost in the process.
(Yeah, I'll admit I often read the comments against such stories -- followed by admonishing myself for doing so when I see what's actually being posted).
I have wondered over the last few years why more big-name general news sites around the world don't just shut down their comment systems. The comments attached to virtually any major TV news network site or newspaper site tend to be filled with content that does little if anything to actually further any sort of discussion or dissemination of knowledge about the topic at hand.
I have noticed recently some of the sites I follow daily have started to only selectively permit commenting on stories. Stories which are likely to bring out the trolls and bigots seem to have commenting disabled more and more. However, I'm not sure why these news sites don't just bite the bullet and dismantle the comments attached to stories. Nobody seems to ever benefit from them.
(Obviously, something like/. which is centred around discussion and commenting is a somewhat different beast. I am specifically talking about general news outlets like CBC News, The Toronto Star, or CNN.com, and others like them./. naturally also has the benefit of community-driven moderation to limit trolling, flamebait, and spam).
Slashdot Mirror
But the thing that sticks out the most is - why the hell is it such a crisis that IP addresses are doled out where they are needed, instead of what I am sure you would consider "fairly" to everyone? Is there now a social justice aspect to the IPv4 "crisis?"
Thanks for making it obvious you have no idea what you're talking about.
I have no problem with the disproportionate amount of /8's ARIN has assigned to it However, having such a large pool means that:
As such, you can't point to the pool with the largest number of addresses, and then imply(as the /. article does) that there is no address shortage issues. APNIC and RIPE NCC are already exhausted. The fact that North America has a historical address advantage means that effects in North America will be delayed -- not that they simply won't happen.
With that out of the way, if you know anything about routing, you would know that there is a technical crisis in doling out addresses wherever they are needed. Anytime you break up a contiguous address space, you'll generally need two (or more) additional routing table entries to handle the situation. In pre-CIDR days, the situation was fairly simple (although I'm simplify it a bit to make it easier to communicate): a router only had to look up where to forward a packet based on the value of the first octet, which would only have 255 possibilities (actually less, due to reserved address spaces, such as the unused Class E space). The packet would follow the route until it reached the router in charge of the value of the first octet, which would route based on the second octet, also with a maximum of 255 values. Each hop would hit a router with a table with a maximum of 255 entries, until you got to the destination host.
Post CIDR, the address space could be broken up at pretty much arbitrary locations, so knowing the next hope required ever expanding tables. As soon as you geographically break up, say, 213, into geographically separate ranges (say, for simplicity, a series of /16s), what used to be one routing entry is now 256 routing entries. Break up some of those /16s into /24s, and each of those /16s that are broken up become 256 other router entries.
This is how we've got to the point where there are roughly half a million forwarding entries. Maintaining all of these entries in a constantly changing network, storing them, and searching them is getting to be extraordinarily computationally expensive. If you continue to break them up such that no two contiguous addresses are on the same physical network, you could wind up with roughly 3.7 BILLION routing entries.
IPv4 wasn't designed to be broken up this way. In the early days of CIDR, it was expected that such routing difficulties were far in the future, and that we would have moved to a newer, better protocol by then. Turns out the problems aren't as far into the future as they may have expected, and we've done pretty much squat at doing anything about it, other than throwing more compute power at packet routing.
So yeah -- you can't just throw addresses where they're needed anymore. Every /8 block from the IANA has been assigned to RIRs, and any transfer of a block smaller than a /8 is going to add yet more entries to the global routing table. Just try to think of how a network is supposed to route 213.0.113.1 to th
For anybody paying any attention over the past few years, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
The IANA ran out of IPv4 address space available for doling out to the Regional Internet Registries (of which there are six) three years ago. APNIC (Asia Pacific) and RIPE NCC (Europe) went below a single /8 three and two years ago respectively. The IPv4 address exhaustion has already begun.
ARIN (North America), however, has 82 /8s. If you consider that there are only 221 /8s in total (the IANA keeps 35 for reserved use), this means that ARIN has 37% of all usable Internet addresses assigned to it, for roughly 8% of the worlds population. More than a third of all possible addresses for less than a tenth of the worlds population.
Even still, ARIN now only has about 1.3 /8s free. Projections have them running out next year. They've always been estimated to be one of the last RIRs to run out (with AfriNIC being last, as they still have just over 3 of their nearly 13 /8s free) due in part to the huge number of /8s already in use in North America (way out of proportion to the population of the continent).
I feel really ashamed every time this topic comes up on /. at the complete and rampant ignorance of the issues surrounding IPv4 and IPv6. We will run out of IPv4 address space, but address space is hardly the only problem with IPv4. The bigger problem is ROUTABILITY -- the IPv4 routing tables have become seriously unweildly, they are getting progressively worse (in part due to InterRIR transfers of address blocks now that Europe and Asia have run out of addresses), and they continue to need more and more compute power thrown at the problem just to keep up. The number of BGP forwarding entries has doubled from roughly 250k to nearly 500k in just the last six years. The algorithms used for determining routes in IPv4 are complex. The computability is difficult, and it's slowing down the Internet today.
IPv6 solves a lot of the routing problems inherent in IPv4, making routability a lot easier to compute. IPv6 packets have a simpler header, routers don't need to provide fragmentation services, and there is no header checksum. IPv6 also avoids the routing anomalies present in IPv4 due to things such as the switch to CIDR. We know a heck of a lot more about packet routing now than we did in the 60s when IPv4 was first defined, and these improvements are available in IPv6.
This is why I cringe whenever I see a post in an IPv6 address exhaustion related /. story complaining about a lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6, or anytime anyone says that NAT is good enough for everybody. As the address space fragments even further, and historic /8s and /16s are broken up into ever smaller units which are then distributed to diverse geographies, the routing table in IPv4 is going to continue to blow up, becoming ever uglier -- it simply wasn't designed to scale in the manner in which we're using it. IPv6 brings sanity to global routing again, in a way that no backward-compatible solution could achieve.
The IANA is out of addresses. RIPE and APNIC are virtually out of addresses (with only enough reserved to aid in IPv4 - IPv6 tunnelling and translation services). ARIN is down to less than 1.5 /8s, and survives purely on the fact that it has a disproportionate number of /8s compared to the population it serves. And worst of all, IPv4 routing is an absolute mess that requires a ton of processing power and compute time to maintain. Remember these things before you post something silly about being pro-NAT, pro-some-untested-IPv4-address-extension-proposal, complaining about backward compatibility, or how people have been predicting IPv4 exhaustion for the last 25 years (just because you see the train coming towards you way off in the distance does
That's probably one of the reasons they closed in Canada. Radio Shack used to be the place to go when you needed some components (which they stopped selling). the 200-1 electronic kits, the Armatron, I miss those kind of things...
Nope -- technically, they have never really closed in Canada, but it's a strange story.
RadioShack was operated in Canada by a company called InterTAN. They weren't owned by the US RadioShack at all -- the stores were licensed under an agreement. In 2004, Circuit City in the US bought InterTAN, and one week later RadioShack sued in the US (claiming breech of agreement) to have the licensing agreement cancelled. All Canadian RadioShack stores were then rebranded as "The Source By Circuit City" (which IMO was always a terrible name).
But wait -- there's more. In 2006 RadioShack US then opened 9 stores in the Toronto area running under the "Radio Shack" name. After only a few months in business, they closed all of them down "to focus on core US business".
In January 2009, Circuit City in the US went out of business; however, as "The Source By Circuit City" in Canada wasn't doing too badly, instead of being shut down with the US stores the entire thing was sold to Bell Canada, who renamed the stores "The Source", and who continues to operate them to this day.
As such, many/most of the pre-2006 RadioShack stores haven't actually closed -- they were simply renamed, first to "The Source By Circuit City", ad then just "The Source", which still operates today. InterTAN didn't go out of business -- it's just been swallowed up.
Of course, the product selection has changed over the years -- you're probably not going there anymore to get your zener diodes. They still have some parts, but it's not like back in the heyday.
(Refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack#Operations_in_Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(retailer))
Yaz
Does that mean only hatchbacks will be permitted in the EU going forward?
(Note to eds: bad titles are bad, and will be mocked.)
Yaz
It was the last of the plastic MacBooks, self identifies as "Early 2008". The CPU is a Core Duo and is 64-bit capable but Apple did not write 64-bit drivers (or something like that) for this system. It is not compatible with the 64-bit versions of Mac OS X. That makes it a non-64 bit machine regardless of what the CPU is capable of.
Your system runs a Core 2 Duo, and is indeed 64-bit capable.
Here's the rub, however -- your machine only has a 32-bit EFI, which means it can only boot in 32-bit mode. In OS X, this means it can only boot the 32-bit kernel and associated kernel modules. The 32-bit kernel can still run 64-bit applications -- but you'll still have the various limitations of a 32-bit kernel (although as the OS X 32-bit kernel implements PAE, you can still bust the 4GB addressing limitations you see in 32-bit versions of Windows client OS's).
The most recent OS X releases ship with only a 64-bit kernel; systems running with a 32-bit EFI are thus left out of the cold.
As such, it's not that your CPU can't handle 64-bit computation, or that Apple didn't write suitable drivers for your system. It's a boot issue due to the 32-bit EFI. So now you know.
Yaz
Did you ever use Windows 3.0?
If you did, you'd understand why people thought Windows 3.1 was... GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT.
I remember some of Microsofts advertising around the release of Windows 3.1, heavily advertising the fact that there were no more "Unexpected Application Errors", and thus Windows 3.1 was so much more stable than Windows 3.0.
Of course, the truth of the matter really was they just renamed the error condition to "General Protection Fault", and it was no more stable than 3.0.
Windows 3.1 was the last version of Windows I ever ran on personal hardware (and I steer clear from Windows at work as much as possible).
Yaz
That's okay. Personally, I don't believe in Republicans. Indeed, I'm pretty confident at this stage in my life that "Republicans" and "Americans" were things my Dad invented for bedtime stories when I was young to scare the crap out of me and keep me on the straight and narrow.
Yaz
Like me. I live alone, and so I don't cook very often. Mostly I get home from work, heat something up quickly and that is dinner.
Get yourself a pressure canner and a bunch of 1L jars. Take a weekend to learn how to use it properly. Then, go out and buy yourself a bunch of whole chickens, some potatoes, stewing beef, chicken and beef broth (or just make your own), carrots, celery, and onions. Ensure you have some salt and pepper and some common spices. Roast a few whole chickens, remove the meat, and stick them in jars (one each), top with water and a bit of salt, and put in the pressure canner for 90 mins (you can save the bones for broth). Put some raw beef cubes in the bottom of some other jars, with cubed potatoes, and chopped celery, carrot, and onions, until nearly full, and top with beef broth. Put in the pressure canner for 90 mins. Do the same with raw chicken instead of beef. The raw meat will cook completely within the jar during the pressure canning process, and comes out seriously tender and juicy.
A typical home pressure canner can do 7L of food at once. That can mean seven chickens, seven jars of stew, or seven jars of soup at your disposal, which only need heating, and which only have the ingredients you put in them.
The possibilities are huge, and not only do you get to select the ingredients, but the end result is completely shelf-stable (so long as you follow the directions correctly and verify the seals on your jars are solid). It's usually recommended you eat anything you can this way within a year, but I've heard of people who have ate canned items 5 - 10 years old that tasted just fine (you may lose some of the nutritional factors this way, mind you).
It's really pretty easy, and the US government Dept of Agriculture, as well as some other canning companies and organizations publish tested recipes online. So long as you take care of them the jars themselves last nearly forever, and only need their snap lids replaced, so you can reuse them to your hearts content.
I took up canning roughly a year ago for my family, and we currently have over 40L of food put away, including whole chickens (deboned), crab meat (I live by the ocean, and own some crab traps), vegetables, pasta sauce with meat, jams, jellies, whole fruits, soups, and stews. I'm planning on doing some chilli in the near future. It's so easy for even one of us to have a tasty, nutritious meal -- and considering I can raw pack the stews especially means I can easily make seven meals in about two hours time that are shelf-stable and which take just minutes to heat in the microwave.
I wish I had known what I know now about pressure canning when I was single. You can often buy food cheaper in bulk -- perhaps in quantities more than you'd typically be able to eat in a single week. You can control the sizes (as jars are available in a variety of sizes). Shelf-stability. Quick reheating. Nothing in the jar you don't put in there yourself. And if you plan ahead just a little bit, you can put up a lot of future meals in just a few hours.
Yaz
I thought there was already a known connection between the gut bacteria and autism.
The best anyone can really say at this point is that gut bacteria might play a role in some peoples autistic symptoms, but certainly not all. It's not a panacea by a long shot. Some autistic children do see some improvement through the use of specialized diets. Others see no change at all. I'm the father of an autistic child who falls into the latter category -- on a typical diet she shows no propensity to constipation, diarrhoea, or other obvious digestive issues, and on a gluten and dairy free diet, she isn't any different than on a typical diet.
Chances are there are multiple routes to the same sort of neural-developmental issues that cause autism in individuals. This research is promising for those whose autism does have a digestive basis, but that doesn't mean that all autism comes from the same source, or that no further research is needed into other possible causes.
Yaz
While EGA was available in '85, I wouldn't call it common. Both home PCs and business PCs of the time still typically had either monochrome graphics or CGA.
Of course, if you really want to discuss a blast from the past, you could get 640x480x256 on a PC XT back in 1984 using the (little known) IBM Professional Graphics Controller.
I had an ATI graphics card way back in the day that could provide EGA graphics on a CGA display (with a lot of interlacing, mind you). Those were the days.
Yaz
...someone starts a bounty on the site for "Kuwabatake Sanjuro"?
Yaz
jpeg is a lossy compression even at 100%
Technically incorrect, as the JPEG standard has defined a lossless encoding mode since 1993.
However, I suppose it is practically correct, as I know of no camera which implements lossless JPEG compression.
Yaz
Amazon Prime only has seasons 1 through 3. Season four just completed yesterday in the UK, and probably won't be available on Amazon for some months yet. Yaz
Better to focus on math, which is the hard part of programming.
Perhaps in mathematical topics such as mathematical logic, recursive definitions, automata theory, graph theory, algorithms, Turing machines, computability theory, or complexity theory?
Yaz
For those with bad eyes, is the new OS easier to read, harder, or about the same?
The place where I've seen MAJOR improvement in this area with iOS7 has been when running iPhone apps on an iPad (in my case, an iPad 2 -- the oldest iPad supported by iOS7).
In iOS6 and prior, when running an iPhone app you had a choice between running it at its native resolution (and it would always choose the older 480x320 used by all iPhones up to (but not including) the iPhone 4) as a tiny window in the centre of the screen, or running it at "2x", doing a straight pixel doubling of everything. Fonts in particular became pretty ugly scaled this way -- they became obviously pixellated.
In iOS7 however, all iPhone apps are auto-scaled. It appears it now prefers graphics for the iPhone 4/4s screen resolution (940x640). Most importantly, the fonts are simply sized to the correct 2x size without pixel doubling -- so the render to the correct size at native resolution. This makes iPhone apps on the iPad vastly easier to read.
I can be a bit jarring mind you when you couple the new, crisp text with a graphic containing text designed for the pre- iPhone 4 screen resolution. The graphic gets scaled, so any graphical text looks pixellated still, however UI fonts in the same display will be crisp and clean.
I don't run a lot of iPhone apps on my iPad -- most are either dual iPhone/iPad apps in the first place, or have iPad equivalents available in the app store. There are a few that I need to run however (my banking and insurance apps don't have iPad equivalents, for example), and the text quality improvement in them is tremendous. It was pretty much worth the iOS7 upgrade alone for those apps.
None of which is helpful on an iPhone of course, and not having an iPhone (or bad eyes for that matter) I can't comment on how easy to read the text is on those devices. They certain do appear to have taken some time to improve things on the iPad however, and there I've ben really happy with the new and improved font rendering support.
Yaz
Much earlier is a roughly 1800 year old book called "The Bible". Only contains one zombie though. Yaz
It is still updated?!
Who the hell uses it? I know legacy apps but it makes more sense to me to keep old OS/2 in VMWare workstation or ESXi server and virtualize it to have it run older programs. No one cares what features it will include because it is obsolete and users would leave if they could.
The last time I tested it, VMware has a really hard time virtualizing the latest OS/2 releases. I was able to get it to work with some degree of stability only if I ensured I never went past OS/2 WARP v4 FixPak 11. Anything beyond that and the VM simply wouldn't boot.
My understanding is the problem is that OS/2 was pretty much the only OS out there to make use of the full range of the Intel IA-32 architecture, in particular Ring 2 access, which isn't used in Windows or most *NIX derivatives.
Wikipedia has some background on this issue.
Yaz
But unless Apple opens up the internals of how it processes and stores the data, I don't think it will have any generic utility.
According to the 5s release presentation, Apple claims that the fingerprint hash is stored in secure memory inside the CPU, in such a way that it isn't available for read outside the CPU itself. Applications have no access to it -- all you can do is a) write to it, and b) presumably run a CPU instruction to compare against it (whether this is tied directly to the scanner or not I have no idea). The claim as I understand it is that the data can never be read by anything anywhere other than the internal comparison circuits.
I suppose the truth of this will be tested in the coming months by every hacker who would like to take Apple down a peg or two.
Yaz
I admit that it will make the job of the common thief hard, that's why I said that it's a good idea. Just don't trust unencrypted sensitive data on your phone.
All data on every iPhone since the 3GS has been fully encrypted, so long as you have a passcode/passphrase setup.
In the iPhone 5s presentation, it was mentioned that one of the main drivers for the fingerprint scanning technology is because in their research, a large percentage of users never bother to setup a passcode/passphrase, making all of the hardware encryption in the iPhone completely useless.
Yaz
However, I feel a company the size and stature of Google should've pushed ARM based devices into the market - now Microsoft, Apple and now Google are all pushing Intel gear.
It isn't really Google that is determining what processor is going into the Chromebooks. That's up to the manufacturers. Samsung's Series 3 Chromebook is running the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which uses the ARMv7 instruction set. It's been the best selling Laptop on Amazon for the entirety of 2013.
As such, there are a lot of ARM-based Chromebooks out there. My wife has one; she loves it.
Yaz
So they need a better moderation system.
Which gets to the crux of my thesis -- if you need to put into place and maintain the staff, volunteers, and technology to make this work, why even bother in the first place?
Besides which, we all know that often "moderation" winds up simply becoming a way to demote ideas you don't agree with, and promoting those you do.
I prefer my news sites provide really good journalism in the first place (I should note that being in Canada, our journalistic standards haven't tanked as they have in the US. Our notion of "journalism" doesn't equate to "talking blowhards giving their opinion over and over and over again"). I can make up my own mind about what is being discussed in the article, and don't need a mob of people frothing at the mouth over ideology at the bottom. If I want more discussion, that's what Twitter, Facebook (to a lesser extent), and any number of blogs and forums (like /.) are for.
Yaz
They like comments because they can sometimes get more information about the story of someone who may be more involved in it.
It opens the possibility to learn of new stories or ideas to further create journalism.
But how often does this actually happen? And does it happen more than if they simply provide a form to privately e-mail them with your comments on a story?
99.99% of the time the comments against such stories provide nothing towards the story (and I'm willing to bet that percentage is a low estimate). I'm not sure having such commenting systems (and the back-end manual moderation systems that are often in place to support them) is of any real economic benefit to such news sites. Sure, specialized sites like /. which have community moderation systems are a different entity -- but sites like the ones I've linked to above could save a lot of money and effort by simply removing their commenting systems, and virtually nothing would be lost in the process.
(Yeah, I'll admit I often read the comments against such stories -- followed by admonishing myself for doing so when I see what's actually being posted).
Yaz
I have wondered over the last few years why more big-name general news sites around the world don't just shut down their comment systems. The comments attached to virtually any major TV news network site or newspaper site tend to be filled with content that does little if anything to actually further any sort of discussion or dissemination of knowledge about the topic at hand.
I have noticed recently some of the sites I follow daily have started to only selectively permit commenting on stories. Stories which are likely to bring out the trolls and bigots seem to have commenting disabled more and more. However, I'm not sure why these news sites don't just bite the bullet and dismantle the comments attached to stories. Nobody seems to ever benefit from them.
(Obviously, something like /. which is centred around discussion and commenting is a somewhat different beast. I am specifically talking about general news outlets like CBC News, The Toronto Star, or CNN.com, and others like them. /. naturally also has the benefit of community-driven moderation to limit trolling, flamebait, and spam).
Yaz
That's taught the band to play, doofus.
Yaz
It's used as a warning to others, so far Canada hasn't tried to invade us. That means it's working!
Been there. Did that.
Surrender of Detroit
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