All bio-locks I'm aware of (See the Assa Abloy group of lock and door hardware companies for reference) use battery backup units built into the wall, door or door frame.
... except that since I often use cases (like the S50 by Elan Vital at http://www.elanvital.com.tw/) with hot-removable fans for the drive bays (or SCA bays for SCSI drives with built-in hot-changeable fans), the only heat sinks needing touching are the power supply and CPU.
Linux is at the point of being so generic that you may as well have a POSIX-OS certification instead. If perhaps Sun, SGI, HP, SCO, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, MS, etc. all got together to make a 'computer professional' series of exams for the sake of saying "this person understands how (networking/operating systems/development) works", that'd be interesting.
It was _obviously_ sold at a loss, in hard drive, CPU and video chip prices alone. If it wasn't at a loss to them, it was at a potential loss to those suppliers.
Those parts will get cheaper and make the Xbox production similarly cheaper of course, but all consoles are initially sold at a loss to get them out there so game companies license the development kits because of all the users.
I find it more interesting to consider the money MS spent on making what's happening not possible (at least, they seem to have not wanted it to be possible -- probably for two or three years at least). I wonder what the R&D costs were for making the Xbox unhackable vs. the time and ressources put into hacking it? I have a feeling the hacking community is still ahead... very ahead, if they get to use their $300 Xboxes as $900 PCs.
Contracting for a smaller job first and seeing how they do would probably be a good start.
Asking them for references of other currently-employed programmers they've worked with (as opposed to just employers) would be another thought.
See the comp.lang.c forum's logs / faq for information on the problems in trying to figure out how to interview / hire a programmer in the first place. Good stuff I'd never thought of until I was reading it...
LaCie has 800MB firewire available according to this page. That said, firewire is already supported by all major OS's. Go ahead, buy a firewire drive and plug it into your XP box.
I am aware of the fact that USB 2.0 is so bad at its bandwidth allocation; I was being as generous as possible while still favouring FireWire (gotta try and look unbiased).
That said, I'd like to disagree with your drivers picture -- the drivers for FireWire hard drives are already here; they're already stable. They'd just get used INSTEAD of the current IDE drivers (or even as well as).
The only change necessary would be the BIOS recognition of the IEEE1394 interface and its ability to boot the devices. I would guess that IEEE1394 chip makers would be more than willing to write boot bioses for their chips just as secondary ATA cards or SCSI cards currently work until the BIOSes understood them.
As far as "pushing" the ceiling on IEEE1394, its already under execution -- they were too slow to get started and probably don't have the funding, but like I said, SATA's money could have gone there instead. Hostlessness is probably too big of a deal to Intel though.
If I only had Bluetooth, USB and Firewire interfaces for peripherals, I'd be happy. Oh yeah, and its not Utopia -- we could all be there _right now_.
USB2.0 + Firewire cards: http://www.usb-2-0.com/usb-2-0-firewire.ht ml
The MSI 845PE Max2 FIR motherboard has Intel RC8254OEM 10/100/1000 bit LAN, Promise PDC20276 RAID controller for dual ATA-133, C-Media CMI8738 6-channel audio, VIA IEEE1394 FireWire controller & Bluetooth support all built in.
For the Athlon lover, see the Abit AT7 MAX with 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 additional USB 1.1 ports via PCI backplane, connector, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 additional USB 2.0 ports via PCI backplane connector, 2 IEEE 1394 Firewire ports, Audio jacks with S/PDIF-Out, 1 10/100MB LAN connector, but only 3 PCI slots.
My point may have been unclear -- you wouldn't do it any differently than you do now -- the class you derive from might be called ListViewX which knows how to communicate with either the QT ListView or the Gtk+ ListView or the MFC ListView. That was more my point. Its a nearly impossible dream, but a worthy one.
Since I don't have any moderator points, I'm going to reply instead (woah) and thank you for the extra info. I saw your comment at the top of the list before even reading the article and its helpful.
I'm going to go check if Tom's Hardware has their processor roadmap updated yet...
Maybe he should be the target of a future Slashdot interview?
I too have considered hiring people over the Internet to telecommute but I would want some form of personal assurance that they'd get the work done to the best of their abilities and not break any laws in the process.
And yes, in hiring programmers, I'm concerned that someone who is never physically met or supervised might not be on the up-and-up, although I'm pretty convinced that over 80% would be.
USB 2.0 is slightly faster than firewire (480Mb instead of 400Mb) but firewire has 800, 1600 and 3200Mb speeds in the pipe, as I understand it, for 2003. Even 400Mb/s is only 50MB/s and not the 133+ that serial ATA calls for. However, Firewire is peer-to-peer and therefore won't (ever?) get support from Intel because Intel likes technologies that are tied to CPUs (go figure). USB is host-based; you must have a computer to run it and so is Serial-ATA. With Firewire (also known as i.Link to Sony), you can connect an i.Link video camera to an IEEE 1394 hard drive and record to it; its really that simple.
If half the money that went into serial ATA went to realizing that IEEE 1394 could be improved to higher speeds, leaving consumers with one generic high-speed interconnect, we'd all be happier I think.
I'm surprised that an XML interface language hasn't developped yet. By interface, I mean callbacks and GUI notifications (although not necessarily just for GUIs). I see no reason why a visual inteface using Gtk+ or Qt couldn't be communicating with the App its tied to via socket calls (much like the X protocol and actual graphic displays). This way, the backend app communicates that the window named "setup_part2" is to be created, gets callbacks in that 'namespace' for window initialization being complete, sends button awareness messages, etc.
It seems complex, until its hidden in the libraries and one can ignore one's GUI code in one's app code completely.
It shows that they're a responsible company; a lot of investors are probably looking for that about now after all the tech crashes. Just being a high-performer shouldn't be the goal anymore.
If you followed the Mozilla project in its infancy on the newsgroups, that's what actually happened; many of the developers looked at the code and cried. Much of it sucked -- bad. Entire sections were "taken back to formula" including the rendering engine.
Mike: Hey Bob, you guys putting DRM in the new chip? Bob: No Mike, that would cost us $4.2 billion! Mike: Well see, we've got this interesting $3.5 billion advertising package about to go out that's being paid for by the MPAA and $1.7 billion from Microsoft for some cobranding of the CPUs... but only if you do the DRM thing (whatever that is). Bob: Umm, DRM sucks... Mike: Does your job suck? Bob: Yup, but I'm gonna go put DRM in our chips!
If the DRM capabilities were merged with the n/s bridge chips to real-time qualify all signals on the mb between hardware devices and system memory as well as provide memory isolation features between the CPU and RAM to prevent swapping DRM-protected data without DRM-protecting the drive space and so on and so forth, then there's still one requirement: that the chip require all software to have a form of DRM signature before being loaded and executed. If this is enforced, then Linux goes out the door... would anyone let that happen? Dunno...
I'm only responding to your subject; not your posting:
Not everything has to be free. However, the original point of Copyright, as I understand it was to allow owners of Copyrights to temporarily hold exclusive rights on the distribution of their creations for the sake of profit, then allow it to fall into the public domain _for the greater good_.
It is better for everyone if all media is free.
However, media isn't produced (in our very money-centric society) for free, so giving those who create media money to create it gives us more media. Those media should eventually be free, however. Not free at a cost to the creator (that is, it should not be the onus of the creator to give the product away), but free in that all people with access to that media can reproduce it and redistribute it freely (and I would of course argue, with credit given to the author(s)).
That is how a society becomes educated; I have a significant problem with RMS sometimes, but search for his essay on the future of people going to university and not being allowed to share books.
Also, consider reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free online book; also available in dead tree version) for some of that author's thoughts on a future where money is replaced by respect.
Please also consider volunteering at the local office for your constituency or call your politicians and ask if they need any volunteer work done in computers, etc. to show that you're a concerned, involved citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
All bio-locks I'm aware of (See the Assa Abloy group of lock and door hardware companies for reference) use battery backup units built into the wall, door or door frame.
... except that since I often use cases (like the S50 by Elan Vital at http://www.elanvital.com.tw/) with hot-removable fans for the drive bays (or SCA bays for SCSI drives with built-in hot-changeable fans), the only heat sinks needing touching are the power supply and CPU.
How about, you run a bunch of servers and are sick of taking them down to change fans.
Let me push the almost-never-talked-about Enlightenment as well. Love it :)
Linux is at the point of being so generic that you may as well have a POSIX-OS certification instead. If perhaps Sun, SGI, HP, SCO, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, MS, etc. all got together to make a 'computer professional' series of exams for the sake of saying "this person understands how (networking/operating systems/development) works", that'd be interesting.
...
But it won't happen any time soon
It was _obviously_ sold at a loss, in hard drive, CPU and video chip prices alone. If it wasn't at a loss to them, it was at a potential loss to those suppliers.
Those parts will get cheaper and make the Xbox production similarly cheaper of course, but all consoles are initially sold at a loss to get them out there so game companies license the development kits because of all the users.
I find it more interesting to consider the money MS spent on making what's happening not possible (at least, they seem to have not wanted it to be possible -- probably for two or three years at least). I wonder what the R&D costs were for making the Xbox unhackable vs. the time and ressources put into hacking it? I have a feeling the hacking community is still ahead ... very ahead, if they get to use their $300 Xboxes as $900 PCs.
Its a PC.
With Linux on it, its a PC.
With Linux on it, its a PC with USB ports and a hard drive and DVD player.
Contracting for a smaller job first and seeing how they do would probably be a good start.
...
Asking them for references of other currently-employed programmers they've worked with (as opposed to just employers) would be another thought.
See the comp.lang.c forum's logs / faq for information on the problems in trying to figure out how to interview / hire a programmer in the first place. Good stuff I'd never thought of until I was reading it
LaCie has 800MB firewire available according to this page. That said, firewire is already supported by all major OS's. Go ahead, buy a firewire drive and plug it into your XP box.
Check out a thread where this was discussed previously as well. Improving firewire is under way.
I am aware of the fact that USB 2.0 is so bad at its bandwidth allocation; I was being as generous as possible while still favouring FireWire (gotta try and look unbiased).
t ml
That said, I'd like to disagree with your drivers picture -- the drivers for FireWire hard drives are already here; they're already stable. They'd just get used INSTEAD of the current IDE drivers (or even as well as).
The only change necessary would be the BIOS recognition of the IEEE1394 interface and its ability to boot the devices. I would guess that IEEE1394 chip makers would be more than willing to write boot bioses for their chips just as secondary ATA cards or SCSI cards currently work until the BIOSes understood them.
As far as "pushing" the ceiling on IEEE1394, its already under execution -- they were too slow to get started and probably don't have the funding, but like I said, SATA's money could have gone there instead. Hostlessness is probably too big of a deal to Intel though.
If I only had Bluetooth, USB and Firewire interfaces for peripherals, I'd be happy. Oh yeah, and its not Utopia -- we could all be there _right now_.
USB2.0 + Firewire cards:
http://www.usb-2-0.com/usb-2-0-firewire.h
The MSI 845PE Max2 FIR motherboard has Intel RC8254OEM 10/100/1000 bit LAN, Promise PDC20276 RAID controller for dual ATA-133, C-Media CMI8738 6-channel audio, VIA IEEE1394 FireWire controller & Bluetooth support all built in.
For the Athlon lover, see the Abit AT7 MAX with 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 additional USB 1.1 ports via PCI backplane, connector, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 additional USB 2.0 ports via PCI backplane connector, 2 IEEE 1394 Firewire ports, Audio jacks with S/PDIF-Out, 1 10/100MB LAN connector, but only 3 PCI slots.
My point may have been unclear -- you wouldn't do it any differently than you do now -- the class you derive from might be called ListViewX which knows how to communicate with either the QT ListView or the Gtk+ ListView or the MFC ListView. That was more my point. Its a nearly impossible dream, but a worthy one.
Since I don't have any moderator points, I'm going to reply instead (woah) and thank you for the extra info. I saw your comment at the top of the list before even reading the article and its helpful.
I'm going to go check if Tom's Hardware has their processor roadmap updated yet...
Maybe he should be the target of a future Slashdot interview?
I too have considered hiring people over the Internet to telecommute but I would want some form of personal assurance that they'd get the work done to the best of their abilities and not break any laws in the process.
And yes, in hiring programmers, I'm concerned that someone who is never physically met or supervised might not be on the up-and-up, although I'm pretty convinced that over 80% would be.
USB 2.0 is slightly faster than firewire (480Mb instead of 400Mb) but firewire has 800, 1600 and 3200Mb speeds in the pipe, as I understand it, for 2003. Even 400Mb/s is only 50MB/s and not the 133+ that serial ATA calls for. However, Firewire is peer-to-peer and therefore won't (ever?) get support from Intel because Intel likes technologies that are tied to CPUs (go figure). USB is host-based; you must have a computer to run it and so is Serial-ATA. With Firewire (also known as i.Link to Sony), you can connect an i.Link video camera to an IEEE 1394 hard drive and record to it; its really that simple.
If half the money that went into serial ATA went to realizing that IEEE 1394 could be improved to higher speeds, leaving consumers with one generic high-speed interconnect, we'd all be happier I think.
I'm surprised that an XML interface language hasn't developped yet. By interface, I mean callbacks and GUI notifications (although not necessarily just for GUIs). I see no reason why a visual inteface using Gtk+ or Qt couldn't be communicating with the App its tied to via socket calls (much like the X protocol and actual graphic displays). This way, the backend app communicates that the window named "setup_part2" is to be created, gets callbacks in that 'namespace' for window initialization being complete, sends button awareness messages, etc.
It seems complex, until its hidden in the libraries and one can ignore one's GUI code in one's app code completely.
It shows that they're a responsible company; a lot of investors are probably looking for that about now after all the tech crashes. Just being a high-performer shouldn't be the goal anymore.
Actually, all the APC batteries I've received in the last two years are sealed lead-acid batteries made by Panasonic.
If you followed the Mozilla project in its infancy on the newsgroups, that's what actually happened; many of the developers looked at the code and cried. Much of it sucked -- bad. Entire sections were "taken back to formula" including the rendering engine.
It does _not_ help you get more security on your home PC. Operating systems that understand isolation provide 100% more security than DRM chips.
Mike: Hey Bob, you guys putting DRM in the new chip? ... but only if you do the DRM thing (whatever that is). ...
Bob: No Mike, that would cost us $4.2 billion!
Mike: Well see, we've got this interesting $3.5 billion advertising package about to go out that's being paid for by the MPAA and $1.7 billion from Microsoft for some cobranding of the CPUs
Bob: Umm, DRM sucks
Mike: Does your job suck?
Bob: Yup, but I'm gonna go put DRM in our chips!
If the DRM capabilities were merged with the n/s bridge chips to real-time qualify all signals on the mb between hardware devices and system memory as well as provide memory isolation features between the CPU and RAM to prevent swapping DRM-protected data without DRM-protecting the drive space and so on and so forth, then there's still one requirement: that the chip require all software to have a form of DRM signature before being loaded and executed. If this is enforced, then Linux goes out the door ... would anyone let that happen? Dunno ...
Not everything has to be free. However, the original point of Copyright, as I understand it was to allow owners of Copyrights to temporarily hold exclusive rights on the distribution of their creations for the sake of profit, then allow it to fall into the public domain _for the greater good_.
It is better for everyone if all media is free.
However, media isn't produced (in our very money-centric society) for free, so giving those who create media money to create it gives us more media. Those media should eventually be free, however. Not free at a cost to the creator (that is, it should not be the onus of the creator to give the product away), but free in that all people with access to that media can reproduce it and redistribute it freely (and I would of course argue, with credit given to the author(s)).
That is how a society becomes educated; I have a significant problem with RMS sometimes, but search for his essay on the future of people going to university and not being allowed to share books.
Also, consider reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free online book; also available in dead tree version) for some of that author's thoughts on a future where money is replaced by respect.
Links:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
GNU Philosophy
Please also consider volunteering at the local office for your constituency or call your politicians and ask if they need any volunteer work done in computers, etc. to show that you're a concerned, involved citizen.