You need not hope. if the linux driver is buggy/bloated/disgraceful, we have the source now, so we can fix it. If one could only say the same for Win32...
that I saw on TechTV yesterday. Although manufacturers can build content protection of public television streams into their devices, Dvorak and others made reference to a Supreme Court case a few years old that gives consumers an absolute right to record these public streams. Dvorak et al seemed baffled that the FCC had let HDTV copy pretection pass, since this ruling effectively nullifies it.
What does this mean to us geeks? It means that although manufacturers can make copy-protected TV's, they don't have to. Companies (e.g., Apex Digital, makers of the best $170 DVD player ever made) can simply choose to make TV's and VCR's etc that ignore this copy-protection scheme, just and Hedrick has gotten T.13 to do with CPRM.
Ah yes but the second study due out on the eleventh involved soemthing like 2611 paitents many of whom had brain cancer, yet no correlation with cell use (IIRC)
How the hell did this get a 2? did you log in under your meoderator name and mod yourself up??
In terms of radiation effect in man, the background radiation that we are all exposed to constantly is on the order of 5 X 10^-3 to 2 X 10^-2 Sv (sieverts) per year. OSHA requires that people working with radiation not be exposed to a level of more than 5 X 10^-2 Sv/year. Your average X-ray is on the order of 4 X 10^-4 Sv, equivalent to about 25 days of background, with a range of 10^-4 (fingers) to 10^-1 (heads).
So 100 X-rays per year is between 0.5 to 2 sieverts a year, plus background. Keep in mind that a single exposure of 6 Sv is the mean lethal dose, meaning that half of all people exposed to this level will die within a month.
As I was driving home from work today, there was a piece on NPR about the (lack of any ) link between cell phones and cancer. The MD interviewed stated there was no link between cell phones, the amount of time one used one (mins/day), an increase in temporal lobe cancer (thats the part of the brain where the cell phone goes, or even a correlation between the side of the head a user held the phone to and an increased risk. Research is out in this months JAMA, with the results of a different study (same result, no correlation) due out in the New England JM on January 11th.
However, he did say that no long term (over ten years) are as yet available.
I say we lock Rasterman, Mandrake, Linus, Alan, Jens Axboe, Ted T'so, Hemos, and CmdrTaco in a room, giving them breaks only for Number 1's and 2's and twinkies. Then I might get 2.4 and e0.17 before years end, and maybe there wouldnt be so much double posting here on/.:)
> Most genes code for biochemistry, not for structures that you'd notice by eye.
Exactly my point. There is no structural difference between Na+ channels in humans and Na+ channels in other animals - so it's safe to say that the same DNA exists in all animals to code for this channel.
But who gives a crap about a *normal* Na+ channel?
The promise of genomics is the elimination of things like Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Anemia. These disorders are pretty specific to humans, so it makes no sense to go mucking about in some other animal's genome to cure them.
Back to my programming analogy: all these genes that are common to many animals, well we need to learn about these, but I don't see much useful coming from it. These genes are sort of like a C reference manual - tons of information, no utility. But genes that code for CF or SCA or cancer - these are more like the Linux Source code - written in C, but much more practical, and much more useful.
Albert Einstein once said that nature is as complex as it needs to be, and no more. True, only something like 3% of our genome determines phenotypical stuff (height, hair color), but I think that as the genome mystery is unraveled, we will begin to see that our genome isn't just an important 3% bundled in 97% of crap. If it were, I think nature would have naturally selected out those humans with an inefficient DNA long ago. I think the 97% that is considered unimportant now will likely be found to be vital to protein expression, apoptosis, and things we haven't even thought of yet.
> The cells in your heart, hand, brain, muscle and liver are completely different in their functionality, despite being created from the same DNA.
Well, not exactly. They are from the same genome. The reason theyre different is that they come from different segments of that genome - different proteins are expressed by different cells (it's called differentiation).
To begin, when the new kernel is loaded, the uptime goes back down to zero. Secondly, this software was written by Erik Hendriks, who works for Scyld Corporation, not Redhat.
Go play on your Windows box. Yes, I know you're running Windows, because if you were running Linux, you would have downloaded monte, installed it, run it, and seen that your uptime got reset.
If the puffer fish contained all the human genes, then by and large, the puffer fish would seem awfully human. But it doesn't. Its even got extra stuff, like gills and chemicals that are cardiotoxic (if I recall correctly, the chemical in puffer fish that kills humans is tetrodotoxin, which poisons Na+ channels and thus stops the depolarization and beating of the heart).
I think a more likely reason that "by and large, when we've looked for human genes in the puffer, we've found them" is that we currently know about only a few of the important genes in the genome - we've just scratched the surface. Perhaps now we should try to find genes in the human genome that are NOT in the puffer, and then see what THEY do. I think genes that are common among all animals are probably of the least interest - they are sort of like the "int main()" of the human genome, in that every program (here, a biological program) must have them.
Linus and Cox supply you with a completely free operating system. Linux is better than M$ because it is released when the code is mature, not when it is marketable. The best part about Linux is that if you don't think development is moving fast enough, all you have to do is stop trolling on/., pop up an Xterm, cd to/usr/src/linux, and speed up the development process yourself.
OK. Western Digital sells a 30GB Firewire hard drive on the market now. Send a reply with instructions on how I'm going to use this under linux, after I've bought it and got it working under linux, I will shut up and concede to you.
Mozilla sucks all ass. Yes, OpenOffice and StarOffice are VERY good and VERY reliable alternatives. Yes, 3d chipset support is great under X (not just linux), but there was an article on slashdot not yesterday that highlighted the dismal level of linux gaming.
If you can tell me the "emulation tricks" to watch divx and asf movies under linux, I will consider you a God. XMPS and Xtheater, however, do not count as they can be considered alpha at best (the goal is to watch movies full screen over TV out).
The point I'm making here is that M$ can throw a ton of money at things. They also have industry contacts that no one in the Linux Community has (see above about my Neomagic TV out chipset). So if all these little cool features are ever going to get implemented in a timely fashion (eg, USB for linux is just getting stable), a big company is going to have to do it.
Personally, I would be thrilled if Redhat or another vendor was able to support all chipsets, code media players, etc. But Redhat seem too busy shipping CVS compilers and replacing inetd.conf with xinetd to do anything that would actually "bring Linux to the Desktop."
Call this flamebait if you want, but if you do, you are hiding from the truth. Truth is, people want to watch DVD's and divx on their desktops. This time of year, they want to be able to double-click on that elf-bowling2.exe file in their email and play it. And you can't do that with linux right now. For a while, people trashed the linux install process; now it is impeccable (Redhat and SuSE I have installed; much better than windows in my opinion).
95% of the time I use a computer, I am using it for "workstation" purposes: webserver admin, compiling code, creating and manipulating graphics. As a workstation, Linux (and the *BSD's) kick M$'s ass.
But now its time to actually think about Desktop things. KDE and Gnome need to work together. Tons of multimedia apps need to be written. Browsers need much improvement. And if a non-M$ company does it, I will be thrilled. If M$ does it, I wont be thrilled, but I know for sure that for that 5% of the time, I will be using it.
LOL - I agree with you about the OSS thing, having read people's post on the thread, I agree that M$ will probably (er, undoubtedly) release as little source as they need to so that they can "embrace, extend, and then extinguish" any Linux competition.
I laugh because I downloaded Xtheater (and all its dependencies) last night; I appreciate that someone is working on a movie player, and I am sure that it will get better, but right now it quite frankly SUCKS. It won't play any of the movies I have (Unbreakable, Charlie's angels, etc). My only option to see these movies right now is to boot my laptop's Win partition (the only remaining Win partition I have, out of a router, three workstations, and an 8-node cluster). I kept the partition on my laptop simply because I need to have TV out, and its the only TV out card I have; furthermore, X does not support TV out on the neomagic chipset within it.
This leads me back to saying that if M$ does get into the Linux market, it won't suck completely, that is, _if_ I can get TV out, a decent media player (btw, right now I mostly play mpegs, I simply do a "mtvp -z mpegfile.mpeg"), and a browser with decent JS support - all the trimmings.
Let's say that 5 years down the line, there exists an "M$ Linux." Finally, someone will be able to throw a ton of money at Linux. It will still be open-source, so we will still be able to fix all the bugs that M$ will no doubt generate in their "we release on a marketing schedule not a quality schedule" craze.
On the good side, you and I will have a browser that doesn't suck, an Office Suite compatible with the rest of the world, movies players that support ASF, Divx;-), etc., and with any luck, decent game support under linux.
FreeBSD, Redhat (I guess), SuSE, etc will still be available to all of us 133t h4x0rs (I hope you see the sarcasm in this). But now they would (in theory) have much better support for new and upcoming technologies (eg, USB, Firewire, Divx, etc).
With the upfront statement that all this will suck if M$ close-sources everything and just makes some sort of "Reverse-Wine," I actually look forward to M$ jumping into this. No, I would never run an M$ version of anything, but it would be nice if SuSE and FreeBSD (and others) had some M$ source code on which to implement DVD, USB, ASF, and all the other trimmings.
Improvement is to be expected, and that's fine. From what I could tell, xinetd is a script that gets executed. That's fine. But what is not fine is that I can't edit inetd.conf and restart inetd in order to secure a box from telnet and ftp, which is what I can do on any other linux (and UNIX) flavor. It is a relatively simple matter to keep the inetd.conf functionality, improve it with xinetd, but allow xinetd to parse/handle inetd.conf. But they didn't do that. Thus, Redhat is no longer side-ways compatible with other linux/unix flavors. And people who have to admin multiple distro/*nix flavors HATE that. Furthermore, old users of Redhat used to be able to use inetd.conf to lock down boxes. Now they can't. So it's not backwards compatible, either.
The GCC steering committee has stated in a formal disapproval of the Redhat compiler situation that not only is their compiler a pre-beta, it's not even a CVS snapshot (they don't even recognize it as _existing_). It is also not supported by the GCC team. Also, anything compiled with gcc-2.96 (which does not exist!) will not be portable to any other system.
Not backwards compatible, not sideways compatible, not forwards compatible. but who cares? These GUI config thingies are so great!
Huh? I may be completely stoned or something, but I thought the SUN produced ultraviolet. So at night, there's not much of it around. That's why night vision goggles use infrared, at the other end of the visible spectrum, which is produced when things give off heat. Since UV heats during the day, and they cool at different rates at night, you can see the infrared given off, particularly the edges between different-cooling objects. I must really suck at electromagnetics or something.
By the way, if I had mod points, I would mod you way down. The sexist comment about women driving is probably the main reason chicks don't frequent/.
"It would have been great if GCC 3.0 had been a released compiler and had all the quality, performance, functionality, and features that our various constituents required."
Am I the only who who sees Bill Gates saying this when I read it? Functionality is my #1 Bill word - he says it ALL the time. I'm surprised that there's no quote about Redhat needing "the freedom to innovate." (which reminds me....every time you hear M$ say innovate, just replace it with dominate)
"2.95 is the least stable release that we (the fsf gcc team) have shipped in a long time. It does ok on x86, but is pathetic on the other platforms that Red Hat cares about -- especially Alpha."
Yeah, we did it because we care about other platforms....thats why we dropped the SPARC port.
Don't get me wrong: I think somebody, and it would be great if it were Redhat, has to dumb-down Redhat if it is ever going to compete with Windows. But changing standard things is _NOT_ the way to do it. Shipping compilers that the GCC steering comittee doesn't even recognize as _existing_ is not the way to do it.
Screwing with industry-standard configuration files is also _not_ the way to do it: I had the distinct displeasure of having to admin one of my professor's boxes the other day (He put Redhat 7 on it, to learn how to use it). I went to disable ftp and telnet by outcommenting/etc/inetd.conf. Guess what? There is no inetd.conf!
Redhat: Please leave the standard config files in place! Stop molesting/etc!
Am I the only onw whose mind is boggled that A)Tom's Hardware, an alledgedly reputable hardware reviewer, chose to use FlaskMPEG (a buggy 0.5.9.4 BETA Piracy tool) to assess a processor? or that B)Slashdot didn't pick up on this?
I'm happy using either Intel or AMD procs, but let's face it people, this is a downright shitty and amateur way to review anything. It's not too much different than testing new procs by the amount of time it takes them to load WINE. I don't give a shit how many frames per second it can encode or play. Can it turn a gigaflop? How fast can it run computer simulations? How fast can it compile the latest linux kernel? This is the kinda shit I'm gonna be doing; this is also software that isn't BETA.
The use of a Beta piracy tool in a product test has brought Tom's reputability into SERIOUS question.
Nah....I'm more like Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor - I want more power! When you start spending all day compiling source code or running massively parallel simulation code, you'll understand why.
Actually no. See, if this were true, then *ALL* Sony laptops would run Firewire under linux, but not all do. This is because not all are OHCI, and all iLink/S400 (or 200 for that matter) are built from proprietary Sony chipsets, some of which are close enough to Firewire to work, and some of which aren't. However, your point about both 4 and 6 pin being part of Firewire, is true.
I've been learning a ton of stuff from the responses to this post, so I thought I'd share. For all of you out there who are thinking about buying a VAIO but are hesitant because of the Firewire (iLink) issue, you need to know that the only difference between plain-vanilla firewire and Sony's "iLink" is that the iLink does not provide power to FireWire Devices. The port on my laptop, a PCGF540, is an S400. It's the smaller type of Firewire port, and it only has 4 pins as opposed to the normal 6 (you guessed it - the missing pins are positive voltage and ground).
In the latest 2.4 kernels, the Sony CXD-3222 chipset, which is what I've got, works like a charm. Not sure about FreeBSD tho. Anyways, if you're shopping for one, boot it up in Windoze, go to Control Panel --> System --> Device Manager --> 1394 Bus Controller. If you Sony CXD3222 OCHI, it will work:)
The you can use FIPS to get rid of the Win partition.
Windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Windows will now reboot in order for this change to take effect
Slashdot Mirror
You need not hope. if the linux driver is buggy/bloated/disgraceful, we have the source now, so we can fix it. If one could only say the same for Win32...
It was a winmodem when it only worked with Windows. Now, its either a winmodem, or a linmodem, depending on which OS youre running it with.
What does this mean to us geeks? It means that although manufacturers can make copy-protected TV's, they don't have to. Companies (e.g., Apex Digital, makers of the best $170 DVD player ever made) can simply choose to make TV's and VCR's etc that ignore this copy-protection scheme, just and Hedrick has gotten T.13 to do with CPRM.
cd /usr/src/sys; make world
Ah yes but the second study due out on the eleventh involved soemthing like 2611 paitents many of whom had brain cancer, yet no correlation with cell use (IIRC)
How the hell did this get a 2? did you log in under your meoderator name and mod yourself up?? In terms of radiation effect in man, the background radiation that we are all exposed to constantly is on the order of 5 X 10^-3 to 2 X 10^-2 Sv (sieverts) per year. OSHA requires that people working with radiation not be exposed to a level of more than 5 X 10^-2 Sv/year. Your average X-ray is on the order of 4 X 10^-4 Sv, equivalent to about 25 days of background, with a range of 10^-4 (fingers) to 10^-1 (heads). So 100 X-rays per year is between 0.5 to 2 sieverts a year, plus background. Keep in mind that a single exposure of 6 Sv is the mean lethal dose, meaning that half of all people exposed to this level will die within a month.
As I was driving home from work today, there was a piece on NPR about the (lack of any ) link between cell phones and cancer. The MD interviewed stated there was no link between cell phones, the amount of time one used one (mins/day), an increase in temporal lobe cancer (thats the part of the brain where the cell phone goes, or even a correlation between the side of the head a user held the phone to and an increased risk. Research is out in this months JAMA, with the results of a different study (same result, no correlation) due out in the New England JM on January 11th. However, he did say that no long term (over ten years) are as yet available.
I say we lock Rasterman, Mandrake, Linus, Alan, Jens Axboe, Ted T'so, Hemos, and CmdrTaco in a room, giving them breaks only for Number 1's and 2's and twinkies. Then I might get 2.4 and e0.17 before years end, and maybe there wouldnt be so much double posting here on /. :)
But who gives a crap about a *normal* Na+ channel? The promise of genomics is the elimination of things like Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Anemia. These disorders are pretty specific to humans, so it makes no sense to go mucking about in some other animal's genome to cure them.
Back to my programming analogy: all these genes that are common to many animals, well we need to learn about these, but I don't see much useful coming from it. These genes are sort of like a C reference manual - tons of information, no utility. But genes that code for CF or SCA or cancer - these are more like the Linux Source code - written in C, but much more practical, and much more useful.
Albert Einstein once said that nature is as complex as it needs to be, and no more. True, only something like 3% of our genome determines phenotypical stuff (height, hair color), but I think that as the genome mystery is unraveled, we will begin to see that our genome isn't just an important 3% bundled in 97% of crap. If it were, I think nature would have naturally selected out those humans with an inefficient DNA long ago. I think the 97% that is considered unimportant now will likely be found to be vital to protein expression, apoptosis, and things we haven't even thought of yet.
> The cells in your heart, hand, brain, muscle and liver are completely different in their functionality, despite being created from the same DNA. Well, not exactly. They are from the same genome. The reason theyre different is that they come from different segments of that genome - different proteins are expressed by different cells (it's called differentiation).
To begin, when the new kernel is loaded, the uptime goes back down to zero. Secondly, this software was written by Erik Hendriks, who works for Scyld Corporation, not Redhat.
Go play on your Windows box. Yes, I know you're running Windows, because if you were running Linux, you would have downloaded monte, installed it, run it, and seen that your uptime got reset.
And GPL in this case stands for God's People License???
I think a more likely reason that "by and large, when we've looked for human genes in the puffer, we've found them" is that we currently know about only a few of the important genes in the genome - we've just scratched the surface. Perhaps now we should try to find genes in the human genome that are NOT in the puffer, and then see what THEY do. I think genes that are common among all animals are probably of the least interest - they are sort of like the "int main()" of the human genome, in that every program (here, a biological program) must have them.
Linus and Cox supply you with a completely free operating system. Linux is better than M$ because it is released when the code is mature, not when it is marketable. The best part about Linux is that if you don't think development is moving fast enough, all you have to do is stop trolling on /., pop up an Xterm, cd to /usr/src/linux, and speed up the development process yourself.
Mozilla sucks all ass. Yes, OpenOffice and StarOffice are VERY good and VERY reliable alternatives. Yes, 3d chipset support is great under X (not just linux), but there was an article on slashdot not yesterday that highlighted the dismal level of linux gaming.
If you can tell me the "emulation tricks" to watch divx and asf movies under linux, I will consider you a God. XMPS and Xtheater, however, do not count as they can be considered alpha at best (the goal is to watch movies full screen over TV out).
The point I'm making here is that M$ can throw a ton of money at things. They also have industry contacts that no one in the Linux Community has (see above about my Neomagic TV out chipset). So if all these little cool features are ever going to get implemented in a timely fashion (eg, USB for linux is just getting stable), a big company is going to have to do it.
Personally, I would be thrilled if Redhat or another vendor was able to support all chipsets, code media players, etc. But Redhat seem too busy shipping CVS compilers and replacing inetd.conf with xinetd to do anything that would actually "bring Linux to the Desktop."
Call this flamebait if you want, but if you do, you are hiding from the truth. Truth is, people want to watch DVD's and divx on their desktops. This time of year, they want to be able to double-click on that elf-bowling2.exe file in their email and play it. And you can't do that with linux right now. For a while, people trashed the linux install process; now it is impeccable (Redhat and SuSE I have installed; much better than windows in my opinion).
95% of the time I use a computer, I am using it for "workstation" purposes: webserver admin, compiling code, creating and manipulating graphics. As a workstation, Linux (and the *BSD's) kick M$'s ass.
But now its time to actually think about Desktop things. KDE and Gnome need to work together. Tons of multimedia apps need to be written. Browsers need much improvement. And if a non-M$ company does it, I will be thrilled. If M$ does it, I wont be thrilled, but I know for sure that for that 5% of the time, I will be using it.
I laugh because I downloaded Xtheater (and all its dependencies) last night; I appreciate that someone is working on a movie player, and I am sure that it will get better, but right now it quite frankly SUCKS. It won't play any of the movies I have (Unbreakable, Charlie's angels, etc). My only option to see these movies right now is to boot my laptop's Win partition (the only remaining Win partition I have, out of a router, three workstations, and an 8-node cluster). I kept the partition on my laptop simply because I need to have TV out, and its the only TV out card I have; furthermore, X does not support TV out on the neomagic chipset within it.
This leads me back to saying that if M$ does get into the Linux market, it won't suck completely, that is, _if_ I can get TV out, a decent media player (btw, right now I mostly play mpegs, I simply do a "mtvp -z mpegfile.mpeg"), and a browser with decent JS support - all the trimmings.
Let's say that 5 years down the line, there exists an "M$ Linux." Finally, someone will be able to throw a ton of money at Linux. It will still be open-source, so we will still be able to fix all the bugs that M$ will no doubt generate in their "we release on a marketing schedule not a quality schedule" craze. On the good side, you and I will have a browser that doesn't suck, an Office Suite compatible with the rest of the world, movies players that support ASF, Divx;-), etc., and with any luck, decent game support under linux. FreeBSD, Redhat (I guess), SuSE, etc will still be available to all of us 133t h4x0rs (I hope you see the sarcasm in this). But now they would (in theory) have much better support for new and upcoming technologies (eg, USB, Firewire, Divx, etc). With the upfront statement that all this will suck if M$ close-sources everything and just makes some sort of "Reverse-Wine," I actually look forward to M$ jumping into this. No, I would never run an M$ version of anything, but it would be nice if SuSE and FreeBSD (and others) had some M$ source code on which to implement DVD, USB, ASF, and all the other trimmings.
The GCC steering committee has stated in a formal disapproval of the Redhat compiler situation that not only is their compiler a pre-beta, it's not even a CVS snapshot (they don't even recognize it as _existing_). It is also not supported by the GCC team. Also, anything compiled with gcc-2.96 (which does not exist!) will not be portable to any other system.
Not backwards compatible, not sideways compatible, not forwards compatible. but who cares? These GUI config thingies are so great!
By the way, if I had mod points, I would mod you way down. The sexist comment about women driving is probably the main reason chicks don't frequent /.
You're absolutely right.
/etc/inetd.conf. Guess what? There is no inetd.conf!
/etc!
"It would have been great if GCC 3.0 had been a released compiler and had all the quality, performance, functionality, and features that our various constituents required."
Am I the only who who sees Bill Gates saying this when I read it? Functionality is my #1 Bill word - he says it ALL the time. I'm surprised that there's no quote about Redhat needing "the freedom to innovate." (which reminds me....every time you hear M$ say innovate, just replace it with dominate)
"2.95 is the least stable release that we (the fsf gcc team) have shipped in a long time. It does ok on x86, but is pathetic on the other platforms that Red Hat cares about -- especially Alpha."
Yeah, we did it because we care about other platforms....thats why we dropped the SPARC port.
Don't get me wrong: I think somebody, and it would be great if it were Redhat, has to dumb-down Redhat if it is ever going to compete with Windows. But changing standard things is _NOT_ the way to do it. Shipping compilers that the GCC steering comittee doesn't even recognize as _existing_ is not the way to do it.
Screwing with industry-standard configuration files is also _not_ the way to do it: I had the distinct displeasure of having to admin one of my professor's boxes the other day (He put Redhat 7 on it, to learn how to use it). I went to disable ftp and telnet by outcommenting
Redhat: Please leave the standard config files in place! Stop molesting
Am I the only onw whose mind is boggled that A)Tom's Hardware, an alledgedly reputable hardware reviewer, chose to use FlaskMPEG (a buggy 0.5.9.4 BETA Piracy tool) to assess a processor? or that B)Slashdot didn't pick up on this?
I'm happy using either Intel or AMD procs, but let's face it people, this is a downright shitty and amateur way to review anything. It's not too much different than testing new procs by the amount of time it takes them to load WINE. I don't give a shit how many frames per second it can encode or play. Can it turn a gigaflop? How fast can it run computer simulations? How fast can it compile the latest linux kernel? This is the kinda shit I'm gonna be doing; this is also software that isn't BETA.
The use of a Beta piracy tool in a product test has brought Tom's reputability into SERIOUS question.
Nah....I'm more like Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor - I want more power! When you start spending all day compiling source code or running massively parallel simulation code, you'll understand why.
Actually no. See, if this were true, then *ALL* Sony laptops would run Firewire under linux, but not all do. This is because not all are OHCI, and all iLink/S400 (or 200 for that matter) are built from proprietary Sony chipsets, some of which are close enough to Firewire to work, and some of which aren't. However, your point about both 4 and 6 pin being part of Firewire, is true.
I've been learning a ton of stuff from the responses to this post, so I thought I'd share. For all of you out there who are thinking about buying a VAIO but are hesitant because of the Firewire (iLink) issue, you need to know that the only difference between plain-vanilla firewire and Sony's "iLink" is that the iLink does not provide power to FireWire Devices. The port on my laptop, a PCGF540, is an S400. It's the smaller type of Firewire port, and it only has 4 pins as opposed to the normal 6 (you guessed it - the missing pins are positive voltage and ground).
:)
In the latest 2.4 kernels, the Sony CXD-3222 chipset, which is what I've got, works like a charm. Not sure about FreeBSD tho. Anyways, if you're shopping for one, boot it up in Windoze, go to Control Panel --> System --> Device Manager --> 1394 Bus Controller. If you Sony CXD3222 OCHI, it will work
The you can use FIPS to get rid of the Win partition.
Windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Windows will now reboot in order for this change to take effect
Because I can't get the source code to Solaris :)