Ideally you'd want to strip off just the encryption, leaving the original data intact as wma or whatever
Speaking personally with my own tiny nit-pick, ideally you don't only want to strip off just the encryption, but to store the data in a standard format that is more portable than a Windows-specific format.
Personally, if I'm re-encoding lossy data, I prefer to encode it in a lossless format, so as to preserve the existing loss (as opposed to making it worse).
So, basically, you don't do anything with it except stare at a classic interface. Wait, what was the purpose again?
To run the ATMEL development suite primarily, which I can't run otherwise, to program an ATMEL AT90USB microcontroller. It runs an IDE, compilers/linkers, AT90 simulator environment, Subversion, and the FLiP microcontroller board programmer.
I've experimented with a number of other applications, including IE7, WMP, and several of the other built-in tools. I still don't like how they organize their OS, or the crappy UI, but system responsiveness has not been an issue.
I don't advocate anyone use this as their gaming or media environment -- hell, I don't avocate anyone use Vista for anything. But in response to the GP's claim that someone might want to evaluate Vista under a VM and get a poor opinion of its performance, Vista 64-bit actually stands up quite well under virtualization, at least on my system.
(I will note here that the 64-bit version of Vista appears to run slightly quicker than the 32-bit version on my MacBook, both under VMware Fusion, but I suppose YMMV).
Then somehow, magically, this has something to do with Music/Movie DRM? Are they talking about cracking the DRM on media files from within the VM (which would give you the normal file-size minus the DRM part)? Or are they talking about distributing the Vista-VM (which would apparently be really huge for unknown reasons)?
It sounds like there is a lot of confusion, and admittedly, I'm not going to read the article, because it seems to come from there.
Vista apparently requires an authenticated path from the digital media all the way through the audio and video output devices to play a DRM data file. The kernel and system drivers are configured so as to prevent hooks form intercepting the data once it has been decrypted, making it difficult to get around the DRM on a Vista-installed system, short of a brute-force key cracking (all of this is theoretical, of course -- knowing MS the system is probably filled with more holes than swiss cheese, but I'll ignore that for a moment).
In a VM environment, however, the OS doesn't have direct access to the hardware -- th software VM environment emulates all of the hardware including the display and audio hardware. If you run Vista inside a VM on an OS that doesn't restrict digital data capturing (like say Linux or Mac OS X), you can easily capture the data Vista is decoding within th host OS layer.
I'll give you an example. On my MacBook I'm running VMware Fusion beta 4.1, with a 64-bit Windows Vista Business Edition virtual machine (an an Ubuntu, Debian, and Solaris VMs -- I'm a bit of a VM junkie). Under Vista, I can play Microsoft DRM'ed audio files without an problems -- they go through MS's protected media player and the protected Vista kernel, through the properly signed audio driver, to VMware's virtualized audio device (I believe it emulates one of the Sound Blaster series cards), which simply outputs the audio through Mac OS X's audio subsystem.
OS X's audio subsystem can be easily hijacked using third-party tools, which simply grab the digital audio stream from the specified application, optionally cruns it through a user-specified codec, and writes it to disk. Presto -- I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Of course, if MS had any backbone they'd stand up for their end-users and say no to the media conglomerates, and remove DRM limitations from their products, but the likelihood of that happening appears to be virtually zilch. But that's no skin off my nose, and just gives Linux yet another way to gain a foothold into the enterprise.
Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell. People using virtual machines to 'test' Vista would end up with an even slower crummier machine and thus taint their perceptions for the negative. Nothing kills a product faster than the good old 'Word of Mouth' and there has been plenty badmouthing of Vista by all levels of tech support (not sales people though they gotta sell those Vista pieces of crap any way they can.
I have as much reason to hate MS's operating systems as the next guy. No, scratch that, I have vastly more reason to hate MS's OS's than the next guy, having watched them attempt to undermine and destroy OS/2 back in the early 90's, back before it become fashionable to hate MS OS's. I remember having to put up with the constantly shifting Win32s extensions for Windows 3.1, which were modified for the sole purpose of breaking OS/2 compatibility. Or their (then new) "per-processor license agreements". I haven't run a Windows machine as my desktop since 1992, having run OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS X (in that order) since that time.
As such, it really pains me greatly to say -- Vista under virtualization is surprisingly decent and well behaved. I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run. I've even experimented with it running digital video, and the performance has been very good.
Now of course, I can see why they'd be worried about their DRM stance. As the VMware audio and video go through a virtualized driver/device to the Mac's hardware, it would be easy to use readily available tools to hijack the stream (like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro.
Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet).
I remember scene in Bowling for Columbine when he stated people in Toronto don't lock their doors. This is an exaggeration to put it mildly.
It matches up with my experience, having grown up in the area surrounding TO during the 70's and 80s, and living in TO proper in the early part of this decade. During the day, so long as someone was home, the door was not only unlocked, but wide open, with just a screen door, and anyone could have (theoretically) walked in at any time. It was only locked if nobody was home, and at night when everyone was sleeping. It was the same for all our neighbours, and it was never a problem.
I imagine thee are areas like this in the US as well, but Toronto is the largest urban area in Canada, and as such I would imagine that for a US citizen living in a large urban area where everyone locks their doors (assuming for a moment that such a exists) might have an impact, which is probably what Mr. Moore was going for. Let's face it -- Americans don't generally line up at the cinema to see statistical comparisons between major North American cities of equivalent size and population density on rates of daytime family-members-present door locking (although for the purposes of this thread, I know I would be interested in such statistics).
Note that they're still not Core 2 Duos, which it would take to beat the X2 4000+
Agreed, however it does appear that Apple is first in moving their entire line to multi-core CPUs. The next step for them would appear to be the first to move their entire line to 64 bit CPUs as well -- the minis are the only thing holding them back from achieving this. Who knows -- maybe we'll see a refresh on Monday offering just that.
I suppose if I did digital video I might want firewire. But I don't. And frankly, I don't see any other good reason to use Firewire today.
A few things off the top of my head:
Digital video input. Most digital video cameras in the last 5 years or so have Firewire output on them.
System-to-system file transfer. At 400Mbps it's faster than WiFi, 100Mhz Ethernet, moving data through USB keys, or copying to an external drive and then back to the destination system as a two-step process.
I use both of these on my Macs, particularly the latter -- when I have multi-gigabyte file transfers, nothing beats doing it over Firewire (short of Gigabit ethernet, but I certainly don't have the necessary routing hardware for this at home -- do you?)
To say marijuana is illegal is like saying nature is illegal. Or, if you are a "god-fearing" person, it's like saying god made a mistake.
Sounds just a little more silly now, doesn't it.
Anthrax is also found in nature. Possessing and/or distributing it without a license is likewise illegal. Or are you arguing that Anthrax should be legal, just because it exists in nature?
(Your off-topic argument) [s]ounds just a little more silly now, doesn't it?
Nicely enough, a few Enlightenment thinkers came up with a legitimate issue of liberties which also served to justify amputating Christianity's political power. I eagerly await the day when Muslims do the same to their religion.
You haven't been paying attention to what has been going on in Turkey lately, have you?
Indeed, the day Turkish Muslims did what you're asking was originally back in 1924.
The problem here is that Muslims aren't just of the jihadist type you see on the news. Islam is practised world-wide, and not just in Palestine, Iran, and Iraq. At the same time, there is no Muslim equivalent of Catholicisms' Pope -- there is no one, central leader which dictates docterine.
Yes, radical Muslim fundamentalists are a problem -- but then again so are radical fundamentalists of every religion. While Muslim Turks are fighting en-masse to protect their countries secular system, there are Christian fundamentalists in the US trying to erode their own secular society.
Frankly, using SVN would be just too much effort for me: I may forget to commit the changes after a day of work; the files are binary.odt files; I need to teach my wife to use it.
Why not just extract your ODF file before committing? Other than graphic figures it's all text data inside a ZIP wrapper.
Why is your wife working on your thesis?
Why would you be any more likely to forget to run "svn commit" than you would be to tar your files up every day? And if you're likely to forget either, why not just do it as a cron job to run daily?
Meanwhile 4 Gigawatt nuclear reactors would cost ~4-8 Billion dollars and eliminate the need for nanticoke, complete with around a 30% increase in available power.
Ontario is a big place, however, with 1.5 times the surface area of the state of Texas. This is a very large area to serve, and much of it has a low population density. At these sorts of distances, there is a lot of potential for line-loss if you just build a few really massive plants and try to serve everyone from them. And let's face it -- you can't really put together a nuclear microgeneration station to service remote communities.
I've never said that this plan alone is the solution to all of Ontario's future power needs. Big plants certainly have their place, and nuclear is my personal choice for such plants. This is why the Standard Offer Program is only for microgeneration facilities that use renewable energy sources. I don't see any reason why spurring investment in such plants where they make sense is a bad thing.
Im pretty sure canada uses spot pricing for electricity, so the generators sell their electricity into the grid, at a spot price with available loads updated every 5 mins. Then power retails buy up the power etc think of it like a big stockmarket.
Not quite true. Power is a Provincial jurisdiction, so it varies from Province to Province. Ontario has a system like this, but the Standard Offer Program for Small Electricity Generators bypasses this system, as it appears that they buy the power from the microgenerator operators, and then sell it at the spot price.
That's how I understand this to work at least. Other Provincial Governments simply own all of the power generation and transmission (that least for whatever they generate themselves, and don't import from other jurisdictions).
Glad to hear that the Province of Ontario no longer has ANY taxation of its citizens! Wonderful news - I'll move there immediately!
Oh wait, they still have to tax the population to pay for things like health, education, roads, power subsidies?
Somewhere this solar power plant is getting its $0.42/kWh, and if it's coming from the government, it's coming from your taxes. Essentially your tax dollars are funding this private company - you're paying $0.42/kWh minimum, whether it shows on your power bill or not.
A few points:
As you said, taxation pays for health care in Ontario. Not all that far from the area in question is the Nanticoke Power Plant -- the largest coal fired power plant in North America. Pollution from fossil fuel fired power plants causes thousands of deaths in Canada per year, primarily of the elderly, who have to be hospitalized for lengthy periods of time due to respiratory problems. Pollution from fossil-fuel plants is already costing taxpayers. Reducing pollution will (in time) net a tax savings for taxpayers.
Most of the large scale power plants in Ontario are ageing, and will be in need of replacement in the next 20 years. The Government has stated its intentions to close Nanticoke by 2009. If new generation capacity is going to be built anyhow, who do you think is going to pay for it anyhow? That's right -- taxpayers.
Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections.
As seen in the blackout of August 2003 (and I was living in Ontario at the time, and remember it quite well), Ontario's electricity grid and system of lots of large, distant power plants makes failure really easy. One of the potential solutions to mitigate the effects from such things occurring again is to have a lot more regional microgeneration plants. Encouraging the creation of such facilities can lessen the effect on the economy and the lives of citizens if such an event happens again.
FWIW, I haven't lived in Ontario for a few years. I have family that still does, however. IMO, this seems like a pretty good investment on the part of the Province and on the part of taxpayers -- taxpayers get clean burning energy, pollution-related health care costs decrease, jobs are created, and with a bit of luck and ingenuity green power related industries move to Ontario due to its expended market. Sounds like a pretty good deal to the citizens of Ontario to me.
Investments cost money. Governments have been investing in fossil fuel based power plants for decades, through either direct ownership or subsidies. Hell, chances are very good that the power in whatever region you're living in is or has been subsidized by tax dollars. Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
like every greenie i've ever met, your lack of understanding of even basic economics is woeful. where the hell do you think the province gets it's money from dim wit??? CONSUMERS/TAX PAYERS.
and last i heard, the production of the solar panels is more toxic then just burning the same amount of coal. i hate this kind of feel good crap. do something REAL for the environment, not this fake shit.
I'm not a "greenie". I can, however, use proper capitalization, grammar, and spelling.
You have to realize that in Ontario many of the existing large-scale power stations are slated to be shutdown within the next 20 years anyhow. Where do you think the capital construction costs for new and/or retrofitted plants is going to come from? Those exact same taxpayers. Who pays for the environmental consequences? Those exact same taxpayers. Who pays for the extra healthcare costs associated with the pollution the existing coal fired plants spew into the atmosphere? Those exact same taxpayers.
The Province specifically capped this program to smaller installations. Capital infrastructure costs money, but once installed will provide benefits for many years to come (and should for significantly longer than then 20 year contract period). The taxpayers are going to wind up paying for this new infrastructure in one way or another -- an incentive like this to create new jobs, new power generation, with the side benefits of a cleaner environment and lessened health care costs (remember, health care in Canada is paid for by the Province), and it's an all-around winning scenario.
I think it is you that needs a lesson in economics. A few lessons in English and typing wouldn't hurt either while you're at it.
If I converted to this, it would ramp my annual bill from $480 to $3200.
No misunderstand the program. It isn't end-consumers who pay the $0.42/KWh, its the Province of Ontario, through the Ontario Power Authority. It simple gets pumped into the grid, and the consumers continue to pay the standard rate. The contract with the Province is good for 20 years.
The idea is to spur development of renewable energy sources, while fossil fuel based plants are taken offline. It's a pretty sweet deal for the microgenerators (the program is only open to projects that generate a maximum of 10MW at a voltage of 50kV or less).
Note that during peak periods, an extra 3.52/KWh is paid out, and the contract is indexed to inflation. And anyone in Ontario can apply to have their renewable resource microgenerator included in the program simply by filling out an online form.
IMO, this is an excellent program. Ontario has been rebuilding nuclear capacity, has a lot of hydroelectric generation, and has been taking fossil fuel based plants offline (slowly). My family has some holiday property in central Ontario that goes unused for much of the year, and I've long thought that we should invest in some solar panels and a small wind turbine hooked into the power grid to generate some revenue. A program like this could very well make it worth it in the long run. Every such project, no matter how small, is that much less reliance needed on a fossil fuel-based plant somewhere.
As someone who just today cancelled his Fido service after having ported his Fido number to a Vonage Virtual number (attached to my existing Vonage service), let's look at my typical Fido bill for that $25/month plan:
Basic Plan: $25
Voice Mail + Call Display: $8.00
911 Emergency Service: $0.50
System Access Fee: $6.95
GPRS (500kb/mo): $5.00
GST: $2.78
PST: $3.71
TOTAL: $51.94
So, just to get barely reasonable service, which doesn't work in either my home or my office building inside a major Canadian city, costs me more than $50/mo for that "$25/mo" plan. Even if I get rid of the GPRS service and the voice mail and call display, I'm still paying nearly $40/mo for a "$25/mo" plan.
The other poster is correct -- Canada is in the dark ages where cells service is concerned. I signed up for this plan two and a half years ago, and in all that time the infrastructure has been ageing, service hasn't improved, and the price has stayed constant (with the only "savings" being when the Federal Government dropped the GST by 1%!).
(Oh, Fido did get their network coverage "expanded" when Rogers bought them out, but now you have to sign up for YET ANOTHER $5/MO FEE to get "expanded network access").
And none of this includes all the "roaming charges" and relatively high long distance charges.
It doesn't help that the only two GSM providers in Canada are both owned by the same company. The other two main providers (Bell and Telus) are still using CDMA technology, so if you're a cell user in Canada who wants to keep their phone and switch providers, if you're using a GSM phone you're screwed, and if you're using a CDMA phone you have ONE choice. And most of the really interesting, innovative phones are simply unavailable. GPRS is the best network access you can get in most places in Canada -- 3G service is barely even on the roadmap, and is excessively expensive.
I want WiFi/VoIP phone service to eat the call companies breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Competition here is virtually non-existent, and none of the providers is doing much to lower service prices. That's certainly their prerogative , but this consumer has now voted with his dollars. Worse service for more money -- what's not to hate here?
Wonder what this'll do to Mac sales, as many people were waiting for a Leopard release before buying? Will people still wait 6 more months, or will they buy now?
As someone who is in this very situation, I'm probably going to wait until WWDC to see if they have any hardware announcements between now and then for the model I'm looking at (the top-end MacBook to replace my 12" PowerBook).
In essence, my plan isn't changing at all -- I just won't be getting a new OS with my new machine. As I'm keeping the 12" PowerBook (it's becoming my girlfriends machine), we'll just buy the Leopard Family Pack when Leopard is released and upgrade both systems at once.
That's not to say that I'm all that happy about todays news -- I'm not. But then again, I'm not going to die in the meantime either, and my PowerBook will keep functioning just fine.
Yaz.
Re:Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go
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100 Million iPods
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I have to say, I'm still using my 3G, 15GB iPod, and it's still going strong. Sure, the battery doesn't seem to last as long as it once did, but I can still get several hours of enjoyment out of it on a charge, and that suits my personal needs just fine.
Plus, it has the old firewire interface, so I can boot OS X from it as a sort of external maintenance partition.
Yaz.
Re:So what about Vonage Canada and Vonage UK?
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The End for Vonage?
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I wonder if Rogers and Shaw have anything like this......
Both do, but Shaw's offering really wouldn't sufficiently replace Vonage for me. They have no softphone option (which I frequently use at the office, and on the road via my laptop and Bluetooth headset), and no virtual phone numbers (as soon as my cell phone number port is finished, I'll have numbers in both Toronto and Victoria that ring to one phone line). Plus you don't have phone portability -- virtually anywhere in the world I plug in my Vonage router, I can make calls (short of those countries which block VoIP).
And as I don't make 500 minutes worth of calls per month, I'm paying $20 a month for my primary Vonage line[0]. All other options are more expensive out here in Victoria. I moved my parents in Toronto to Vonage last summer, as Vonage-to-Vonage calls are completely free.
I've been extremely happy with the service, and really while the Videotron, Rogers, and Shaw bundles are an improvement in many ways over Bell and Telus, they don't come close to the services Vonage Canada provides me (does Videotron support things like having your voicemail forwarded as digital audio to you're e-mail inbox? Or web-enabled voicemail listening and management? Or a series of toll-free numbers that people can use to call you without incurring long distance charges?)
None of this is meant to put down the service you're happy with -- it sounds like the price is fantastic -- it's just that I've come to rely on these extras, and replacing them is going to either be expensive or impossible. And even if one doesn't get good Vonage connectivity through their ISP (which is a problem for some people), having Vonage around as an option keeps the pressure up on all the other phone companies to provide more and better services, while keeping the price down.
Yaz.
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[0] I pay extra for the softphone option and the virtual number in Toronto, but as those services aren't available at any price on any of the competition, I've left those out of the cost. It's also pre-tax.
Re:So what about Vonage Canada and Vonage UK?
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I'm a Vonage Canada customer as well and I am just holding my breath hoping this gets sorted out. I have been a Vonage customer since it first broke into the Canadian market and I will sorely hate to lose the service. One of the best features is the virtual phone numbers (I have 2, one in Arizona and one elsewhere in Canada). There don't seem to be any VoIP competitors in Canada that offer the same features as Vonage so switching to something else is going to be very difficult.
I'm in a similar boat. To top things off, now that we have number portability for cell phones here in Canada, I just applied last week to have my cell number transferred to Vonage as my new main number, with my old Vonage number staying as a Virtual number (which is important to me, as when I moved to BC I kept my cell phone on my old Toronto number -- and besides which, I've been realizing more and more lately what a terrible rip-off cell service is here in Canada, and I can't wait to be totally rid of it (I pay $50 a month for what is supposed to be a $25 a month plan, and use it about 15 minutes per month because I can't get any signal in the two places I spend the most time -- the office and home)).
I'm not a high-volume phone user. I don't want to spend a ton of money for phone service (and right now between Vonage and Fido I'm paying nearly $90 a month). I'm going to halve my phone bill going the all-Vonage route and getting rid of my cell phone -- and I'll still have three phone lines (I'm a Vonage Softphone user) in two different area codes. I have no idea what I'm going to do if they go under -- I'm not going to be able to replace their services for a reasonable price if they do.
Yaz.
So what about Vonage Canada and Vonage UK?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a Canadian Vonage user, my interest in this case is going to be how it affects me -- but nobody seems to be talking about what might happen to the Canadian (or UK) subsidiaries should Vonage US go down.
It appears that Vonage Canada (and presumably UK) is a wholly-owned, seperate company, and isn't directly constrained by the patent suit (as Verizon has no Canadian presence or patents). However, it is my understanding that Vonage Canada relies pretty heavily on the Vonage US network for call routing (although it is also my understanding that it has been gaining a bit more independence in the past year).
So what happens if Vonage US goes into receivership? Presumably holdings like Vonage Canada and Vonage UK will go on sale. I suspect Vonage Canada's call quality might suffer if they don't put contingency plans in place now, but that if they can stave off the loss of customers due to the US network folding, it could potentially survive (in which case, the 4 Vonage lines I have in my home, and the Vonage lines family and friends have thanks to my recommendation could keep working). But then again, if Vonage Canada isn't all that profitable (I have no idea if they are or not), they could fold up as well.
For now I'm waiting it out, but if anyone has any better info on what could be expected for the Canadian and UK subsidiaries, I'd certainly be interested in learning more.
You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.
As someone who has recently written an RTOS for such a system (which does include some hand-coded assembly operations), let me add this: debugging. The bulk of our RTOS is written in C, but sometimes the compiler can do some strange things, and the only way to figure out why is to debug the code at the assembly level. Case in point, contrary to the development system documentation, at the end of every C function call the compiler threw in two stack pops instead of just one. Our hand-rolled assembly for context switching was pushing one less element onto the stack (the expected, documented number), resulting in an eventual stack underflow. We couldn't debug this at the C level -- we had to debug it at the assembly level to figure out what is going on (fortunately we have on hand a good simulator environment which includes assembly view of the code that runs through the simulated debugger).
For my part in the project, I didn't write any assembly. But I've had to debug the assembly instructions created by the C compiler on many, many occasions.
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Speaking personally with my own tiny nit-pick, ideally you don't only want to strip off just the encryption, but to store the data in a standard format that is more portable than a Windows-specific format.
Personally, if I'm re-encoding lossy data, I prefer to encode it in a lossless format, so as to preserve the existing loss (as opposed to making it worse).
Yaz.
To run the ATMEL development suite primarily, which I can't run otherwise, to program an ATMEL AT90USB microcontroller. It runs an IDE, compilers/linkers, AT90 simulator environment, Subversion, and the FLiP microcontroller board programmer.
I've experimented with a number of other applications, including IE7, WMP, and several of the other built-in tools. I still don't like how they organize their OS, or the crappy UI, but system responsiveness has not been an issue.
I don't advocate anyone use this as their gaming or media environment -- hell, I don't avocate anyone use Vista for anything. But in response to the GP's claim that someone might want to evaluate Vista under a VM and get a poor opinion of its performance, Vista 64-bit actually stands up quite well under virtualization, at least on my system.
(I will note here that the 64-bit version of Vista appears to run slightly quicker than the 32-bit version on my MacBook, both under VMware Fusion, but I suppose YMMV).
Any other questions?
Yaz
It sounds like there is a lot of confusion, and admittedly, I'm not going to read the article, because it seems to come from there.
Vista apparently requires an authenticated path from the digital media all the way through the audio and video output devices to play a DRM data file. The kernel and system drivers are configured so as to prevent hooks form intercepting the data once it has been decrypted, making it difficult to get around the DRM on a Vista-installed system, short of a brute-force key cracking (all of this is theoretical, of course -- knowing MS the system is probably filled with more holes than swiss cheese, but I'll ignore that for a moment).
In a VM environment, however, the OS doesn't have direct access to the hardware -- th software VM environment emulates all of the hardware including the display and audio hardware. If you run Vista inside a VM on an OS that doesn't restrict digital data capturing (like say Linux or Mac OS X), you can easily capture the data Vista is decoding within th host OS layer.
I'll give you an example. On my MacBook I'm running VMware Fusion beta 4.1, with a 64-bit Windows Vista Business Edition virtual machine (an an Ubuntu, Debian, and Solaris VMs -- I'm a bit of a VM junkie). Under Vista, I can play Microsoft DRM'ed audio files without an problems -- they go through MS's protected media player and the protected Vista kernel, through the properly signed audio driver, to VMware's virtualized audio device (I believe it emulates one of the Sound Blaster series cards), which simply outputs the audio through Mac OS X's audio subsystem.
OS X's audio subsystem can be easily hijacked using third-party tools, which simply grab the digital audio stream from the specified application, optionally cruns it through a user-specified codec, and writes it to disk. Presto -- I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Of course, if MS had any backbone they'd stand up for their end-users and say no to the media conglomerates, and remove DRM limitations from their products, but the likelihood of that happening appears to be virtually zilch. But that's no skin off my nose, and just gives Linux yet another way to gain a foothold into the enterprise.
Yaz.
I have as much reason to hate MS's operating systems as the next guy. No, scratch that, I have vastly more reason to hate MS's OS's than the next guy, having watched them attempt to undermine and destroy OS/2 back in the early 90's, back before it become fashionable to hate MS OS's. I remember having to put up with the constantly shifting Win32s extensions for Windows 3.1, which were modified for the sole purpose of breaking OS/2 compatibility. Or their (then new) "per-processor license agreements". I haven't run a Windows machine as my desktop since 1992, having run OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS X (in that order) since that time.
As such, it really pains me greatly to say -- Vista under virtualization is surprisingly decent and well behaved. I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run. I've even experimented with it running digital video, and the performance has been very good.
Now of course, I can see why they'd be worried about their DRM stance. As the VMware audio and video go through a virtualized driver/device to the Mac's hardware, it would be easy to use readily available tools to hijack the stream (like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro.
Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet).
Strange but true.
Yaz.
It matches up with my experience, having grown up in the area surrounding TO during the 70's and 80s, and living in TO proper in the early part of this decade. During the day, so long as someone was home, the door was not only unlocked, but wide open, with just a screen door, and anyone could have (theoretically) walked in at any time. It was only locked if nobody was home, and at night when everyone was sleeping. It was the same for all our neighbours, and it was never a problem.
I imagine thee are areas like this in the US as well, but Toronto is the largest urban area in Canada, and as such I would imagine that for a US citizen living in a large urban area where everyone locks their doors (assuming for a moment that such a exists) might have an impact, which is probably what Mr. Moore was going for. Let's face it -- Americans don't generally line up at the cinema to see statistical comparisons between major North American cities of equivalent size and population density on rates of daytime family-members-present door locking (although for the purposes of this thread, I know I would be interested in such statistics).
Yaz.
Agreed, however it does appear that Apple is first in moving their entire line to multi-core CPUs. The next step for them would appear to be the first to move their entire line to 64 bit CPUs as well -- the minis are the only thing holding them back from achieving this. Who knows -- maybe we'll see a refresh on Monday offering just that.
Yaz.
A few things off the top of my head:
I use both of these on my Macs, particularly the latter -- when I have multi-gigabyte file transfers, nothing beats doing it over Firewire (short of Gigabit ethernet, but I certainly don't have the necessary routing hardware for this at home -- do you?)
Yaz.
Apple hasn't sold a mini with a Core Solo in nearly a year. They're all Core Duos these days.
Please get with the times.
Yaz.
Anthrax is also found in nature. Possessing and/or distributing it without a license is likewise illegal. Or are you arguing that Anthrax should be legal, just because it exists in nature?
(Your off-topic argument) [s]ounds just a little more silly now, doesn't it?
Yaz.
You haven't been paying attention to what has been going on in Turkey lately, have you?
Indeed, the day Turkish Muslims did what you're asking was originally back in 1924.
The problem here is that Muslims aren't just of the jihadist type you see on the news. Islam is practised world-wide, and not just in Palestine, Iran, and Iraq. At the same time, there is no Muslim equivalent of Catholicisms' Pope -- there is no one, central leader which dictates docterine.
Yes, radical Muslim fundamentalists are a problem -- but then again so are radical fundamentalists of every religion. While Muslim Turks are fighting en-masse to protect their countries secular system, there are Christian fundamentalists in the US trying to erode their own secular society.
Yaz.
For the information of anyone interested in the free Bejeweled offer, apparently the offer is only good for Bejeweled Deluxe for Windows .
I was ready to jump on this offer, as my Mom adores Bejeweled. Mom, however, is a Mac user -- and it looks like Mac using Moms need to pay cash.
Mom is, of course, worth it -- but after this experience I'll probably buy her one of her other favourites (from another publisher) instead.
Yaz.
Yaz.
For the record, I am not against nuclear power. Ontario has nuclear power facilities, and are apparently setting up to bring 4 new reactors online by 2018 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlington_Nuclear_G enerating_Station).
Ontario is a big place, however, with 1.5 times the surface area of the state of Texas. This is a very large area to serve, and much of it has a low population density. At these sorts of distances, there is a lot of potential for line-loss if you just build a few really massive plants and try to serve everyone from them. And let's face it -- you can't really put together a nuclear microgeneration station to service remote communities.
I've never said that this plan alone is the solution to all of Ontario's future power needs. Big plants certainly have their place, and nuclear is my personal choice for such plants. This is why the Standard Offer Program is only for microgeneration facilities that use renewable energy sources. I don't see any reason why spurring investment in such plants where they make sense is a bad thing.
Yaz.
Not quite true. Power is a Provincial jurisdiction, so it varies from Province to Province. Ontario has a system like this, but the Standard Offer Program for Small Electricity Generators bypasses this system, as it appears that they buy the power from the microgenerator operators, and then sell it at the spot price.
That's how I understand this to work at least. Other Provincial Governments simply own all of the power generation and transmission (that least for whatever they generate themselves, and don't import from other jurisdictions).
Yaz.
A few points:
FWIW, I haven't lived in Ontario for a few years. I have family that still does, however. IMO, this seems like a pretty good investment on the part of the Province and on the part of taxpayers -- taxpayers get clean burning energy, pollution-related health care costs decrease, jobs are created, and with a bit of luck and ingenuity green power related industries move to Ontario due to its expended market. Sounds like a pretty good deal to the citizens of Ontario to me.
Investments cost money. Governments have been investing in fossil fuel based power plants for decades, through either direct ownership or subsidies. Hell, chances are very good that the power in whatever region you're living in is or has been subsidized by tax dollars. Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Yaz.
I'm not a "greenie". I can, however, use proper capitalization, grammar, and spelling.
You have to realize that in Ontario many of the existing large-scale power stations are slated to be shutdown within the next 20 years anyhow. Where do you think the capital construction costs for new and/or retrofitted plants is going to come from? Those exact same taxpayers. Who pays for the environmental consequences? Those exact same taxpayers. Who pays for the extra healthcare costs associated with the pollution the existing coal fired plants spew into the atmosphere? Those exact same taxpayers.
The Province specifically capped this program to smaller installations. Capital infrastructure costs money, but once installed will provide benefits for many years to come (and should for significantly longer than then 20 year contract period). The taxpayers are going to wind up paying for this new infrastructure in one way or another -- an incentive like this to create new jobs, new power generation, with the side benefits of a cleaner environment and lessened health care costs (remember, health care in Canada is paid for by the Province), and it's an all-around winning scenario.
I think it is you that needs a lesson in economics. A few lessons in English and typing wouldn't hurt either while you're at it.
Yaz.
Oops -- I forgot the URL to the programs website, for the interested:
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/sop/
Yaz.
No misunderstand the program. It isn't end-consumers who pay the $0.42/KWh, its the Province of Ontario, through the Ontario Power Authority. It simple gets pumped into the grid, and the consumers continue to pay the standard rate. The contract with the Province is good for 20 years.
The idea is to spur development of renewable energy sources, while fossil fuel based plants are taken offline. It's a pretty sweet deal for the microgenerators (the program is only open to projects that generate a maximum of 10MW at a voltage of 50kV or less).
Note that during peak periods, an extra 3.52/KWh is paid out, and the contract is indexed to inflation. And anyone in Ontario can apply to have their renewable resource microgenerator included in the program simply by filling out an online form.
IMO, this is an excellent program. Ontario has been rebuilding nuclear capacity, has a lot of hydroelectric generation, and has been taking fossil fuel based plants offline (slowly). My family has some holiday property in central Ontario that goes unused for much of the year, and I've long thought that we should invest in some solar panels and a small wind turbine hooked into the power grid to generate some revenue. A program like this could very well make it worth it in the long run. Every such project, no matter how small, is that much less reliance needed on a fossil fuel-based plant somewhere.
Yaz.
As someone who just today cancelled his Fido service after having ported his Fido number to a Vonage Virtual number (attached to my existing Vonage service), let's look at my typical Fido bill for that $25/month plan:
So, just to get barely reasonable service, which doesn't work in either my home or my office building inside a major Canadian city, costs me more than $50/mo for that "$25/mo" plan. Even if I get rid of the GPRS service and the voice mail and call display, I'm still paying nearly $40/mo for a "$25/mo" plan.
The other poster is correct -- Canada is in the dark ages where cells service is concerned. I signed up for this plan two and a half years ago, and in all that time the infrastructure has been ageing, service hasn't improved, and the price has stayed constant (with the only "savings" being when the Federal Government dropped the GST by 1%!).
(Oh, Fido did get their network coverage "expanded" when Rogers bought them out, but now you have to sign up for YET ANOTHER $5/MO FEE to get "expanded network access").
And none of this includes all the "roaming charges" and relatively high long distance charges.
It doesn't help that the only two GSM providers in Canada are both owned by the same company. The other two main providers (Bell and Telus) are still using CDMA technology, so if you're a cell user in Canada who wants to keep their phone and switch providers, if you're using a GSM phone you're screwed, and if you're using a CDMA phone you have ONE choice. And most of the really interesting, innovative phones are simply unavailable. GPRS is the best network access you can get in most places in Canada -- 3G service is barely even on the roadmap, and is excessively expensive.
I want WiFi/VoIP phone service to eat the call companies breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Competition here is virtually non-existent, and none of the providers is doing much to lower service prices. That's certainly their prerogative , but this consumer has now voted with his dollars. Worse service for more money -- what's not to hate here?
Yaz.
As someone who is in this very situation, I'm probably going to wait until WWDC to see if they have any hardware announcements between now and then for the model I'm looking at (the top-end MacBook to replace my 12" PowerBook).
In essence, my plan isn't changing at all -- I just won't be getting a new OS with my new machine. As I'm keeping the 12" PowerBook (it's becoming my girlfriends machine), we'll just buy the Leopard Family Pack when Leopard is released and upgrade both systems at once.
That's not to say that I'm all that happy about todays news -- I'm not. But then again, I'm not going to die in the meantime either, and my PowerBook will keep functioning just fine.
Yaz.
I have to say, I'm still using my 3G, 15GB iPod, and it's still going strong. Sure, the battery doesn't seem to last as long as it once did, but I can still get several hours of enjoyment out of it on a charge, and that suits my personal needs just fine.
Plus, it has the old firewire interface, so I can boot OS X from it as a sort of external maintenance partition.
Yaz.
Both do, but Shaw's offering really wouldn't sufficiently replace Vonage for me. They have no softphone option (which I frequently use at the office, and on the road via my laptop and Bluetooth headset), and no virtual phone numbers (as soon as my cell phone number port is finished, I'll have numbers in both Toronto and Victoria that ring to one phone line). Plus you don't have phone portability -- virtually anywhere in the world I plug in my Vonage router, I can make calls (short of those countries which block VoIP).
And as I don't make 500 minutes worth of calls per month, I'm paying $20 a month for my primary Vonage line[0]. All other options are more expensive out here in Victoria. I moved my parents in Toronto to Vonage last summer, as Vonage-to-Vonage calls are completely free.
I've been extremely happy with the service, and really while the Videotron, Rogers, and Shaw bundles are an improvement in many ways over Bell and Telus, they don't come close to the services Vonage Canada provides me (does Videotron support things like having your voicemail forwarded as digital audio to you're e-mail inbox? Or web-enabled voicemail listening and management? Or a series of toll-free numbers that people can use to call you without incurring long distance charges?)
None of this is meant to put down the service you're happy with -- it sounds like the price is fantastic -- it's just that I've come to rely on these extras, and replacing them is going to either be expensive or impossible. And even if one doesn't get good Vonage connectivity through their ISP (which is a problem for some people), having Vonage around as an option keeps the pressure up on all the other phone companies to provide more and better services, while keeping the price down.
Yaz.
----
[0] I pay extra for the softphone option and the virtual number in Toronto, but as those services aren't available at any price on any of the competition, I've left those out of the cost. It's also pre-tax.
I'm in a similar boat. To top things off, now that we have number portability for cell phones here in Canada, I just applied last week to have my cell number transferred to Vonage as my new main number, with my old Vonage number staying as a Virtual number (which is important to me, as when I moved to BC I kept my cell phone on my old Toronto number -- and besides which, I've been realizing more and more lately what a terrible rip-off cell service is here in Canada, and I can't wait to be totally rid of it (I pay $50 a month for what is supposed to be a $25 a month plan, and use it about 15 minutes per month because I can't get any signal in the two places I spend the most time -- the office and home)).
I'm not a high-volume phone user. I don't want to spend a ton of money for phone service (and right now between Vonage and Fido I'm paying nearly $90 a month). I'm going to halve my phone bill going the all-Vonage route and getting rid of my cell phone -- and I'll still have three phone lines (I'm a Vonage Softphone user) in two different area codes. I have no idea what I'm going to do if they go under -- I'm not going to be able to replace their services for a reasonable price if they do.
Yaz.
As a Canadian Vonage user, my interest in this case is going to be how it affects me -- but nobody seems to be talking about what might happen to the Canadian (or UK) subsidiaries should Vonage US go down.
It appears that Vonage Canada (and presumably UK) is a wholly-owned, seperate company, and isn't directly constrained by the patent suit (as Verizon has no Canadian presence or patents). However, it is my understanding that Vonage Canada relies pretty heavily on the Vonage US network for call routing (although it is also my understanding that it has been gaining a bit more independence in the past year).
So what happens if Vonage US goes into receivership? Presumably holdings like Vonage Canada and Vonage UK will go on sale. I suspect Vonage Canada's call quality might suffer if they don't put contingency plans in place now, but that if they can stave off the loss of customers due to the US network folding, it could potentially survive (in which case, the 4 Vonage lines I have in my home, and the Vonage lines family and friends have thanks to my recommendation could keep working). But then again, if Vonage Canada isn't all that profitable (I have no idea if they are or not), they could fold up as well.
For now I'm waiting it out, but if anyone has any better info on what could be expected for the Canadian and UK subsidiaries, I'd certainly be interested in learning more.
Yaz.
As someone who has recently written an RTOS for such a system (which does include some hand-coded assembly operations), let me add this: debugging. The bulk of our RTOS is written in C, but sometimes the compiler can do some strange things, and the only way to figure out why is to debug the code at the assembly level. Case in point, contrary to the development system documentation, at the end of every C function call the compiler threw in two stack pops instead of just one. Our hand-rolled assembly for context switching was pushing one less element onto the stack (the expected, documented number), resulting in an eventual stack underflow. We couldn't debug this at the C level -- we had to debug it at the assembly level to figure out what is going on (fortunately we have on hand a good simulator environment which includes assembly view of the code that runs through the simulated debugger).
For my part in the project, I didn't write any assembly. But I've had to debug the assembly instructions created by the C compiler on many, many occasions.
Yaz.