Of course like Num Lock and Scroll Lock, practically useless these days (as is Sys Rq..). But I have a couple of games that use it (show/hide ship stats or so in strategy games). And they provide no GUI notification that a feature is "enabled". Why not? Because you have lights on your keyboard!
And remember the awesomeness of the Amiga keyboard which had it's caps lock light embedded in the key, so you knew exactly when it was on or not just by looking at the key (and not the opposite side of the keyboard).
Maybe they shouldn't remove it, but leave the lights and toggle switches, just rename the keys? Or put them in the USB hotkeys group with lights around so you can press them and make 'em glow.
I'd miss the key even if I never use it to type caps:)
I think Apple are having problems not because of the switch but simply a gain in popularity. Even without Intel switching, their markets have been only going up (PowerBooks and iBooks were very popular, not to mention non-computer stuff like the iPod).
Teething troubles trying to produce more systems than they have ever sold before? Yeah. Everyone has that though. Apple just have a lot of dieherd fans and over-zealous non-fans, so when they make a tiny mistake (that nobody would ever notice on an HP or Sony device), there are 100 articles and a million consequent banner clicks which fund some hack journalist who wanted to cause a fuss.
Not enough fun to balance out the "shiny" of the console design.
Sony made their Playstation originally with all manner of ports and peripheral connector options. Eventually they just removed them all. What was the point of putting those interfaces on anyway? Added complexity.. the console is just trying to do too much these days.
Even Nintendo I think have gotten it awkward, the Wii would be a super duper discrete console, and then you need to have 3 controllers to play all the games (Wiimote & Nunchuck, "classic gamecube" style controller, etc. and maybe even a few ORIGINAL gamecube controllers) and all the sensor bar stuff.. then there is a flap for the Gamecube stuff. Overcomplicated. I would love just a slotloading console with no flappy flaps or hundreds of peripheral ports, and just a plain ordinary uncomplicated controller (like the Wiimote without the wand functionality) just to play a couple games on.
That said I love the new ideas on the Wii too, I just think.. well.. there is such a thing as having way too much in the box and even with wireless controllers, there is still going to be a box next to your TV or down the side of the couch full of wires, blobs of plastic, and stuff you aren't using.
iSCSI exports... disks.... over... a TCP/IP network. It's not more expensive UNLESS you are figuring fiber channel and special initiator cards, in fact it is more flexible, you can pick up any hardware, any disk type (ATA, SATA, SCSI,...), network it how you want, any topology or connection and all the things you want are there to get what you need.
I don't see the point in it, since iSCSI is not bound to fiber channel nor does TCP/IP overhead really matter (I think you'd lose a lot more to reimplementing TCP/IP features in software, at the end of the day)
Do you actually have an ATA RAID array that can perform 10 Gigabits/s full-duplex? I would love to see that, I really don't think those disks really exist though (maybe a couple or 10 10Krpm WD ones..:)
Right, so in the article this one guy says that "using the second network port and a dedicated switch adds more security". So despite being non-routable he gave it a dedicated network anyway. There's also a guy in the article talking about that he "believes" that iSCSI would have been harder to configure. I seriously doubt this, having set up a number of iSCSI networks. I don't think it's at all because he wants more security, or because he knows what he is talking about, but because he got told to configure it that way in the Coraid blade manual.
The reason you'd dedicate a switch to ATAoE is probably purely because you would get some serious bandwidth conflicts with other TCP/IP applications.
Even if you got an iSCSI network there you'd probably want to dedicate a switch to it too, but if you couldn't, or had to share the network with something else for some other reason, this is what QoS and traffic shaping is for. You can easily prioritise your disks over the other stuff. ATAoE.. I think you are stuck with buying another switch and buying client machines with two ethernet ports.
You can easily stop TCP/IP from routing by using non-routable addresses or implementing a firewall between segments. You could even have this firewall on your server to restrict access to the disks from machines on the same network. This kind of security is ALSO offloadable (see latest Intel and nVidia chipsets).
ATAoE reimplements it with "config strings"... buhhh...
The problem with saturating a 10GE network is not down to TCP but ethernet frame size, too. If you have the network cards to handle a 10GE network they pretty much reduce the building of large TCP frames to zero like you said. Everything's offloaded already for iSCSI, or you can buy a card that offloads it.
I suppose this is the expensive part! iSCSI initiators are costly, but really only because they are a rare form of ethernet card. If everyone used iSCSI they probably wouldn't be (you could bet that iSCSI initiator support would be in every nForce chipset..)
So basically what they have is a requirement to use ATA disks only (as opposed to iSCSI where it can be any damned disk, even and ESPECIALLY relaying other iSCSI networks), bundled with an unoffloadable ethernet protocol, which they reimplemented all the best features of TCP/IP into, for the reason of.... what?
I think I know! It's so they can sell "disk blades" and not have to "compete". Snake oil..
So. Coraid has not, in a whole year, explained why iSCSI is somehow more expensive (disks + Linux kernel + network.. all the same) than their ATAoE implementation.
They'll give excuses about the cost of iSCSI hardware offload.. but you don't need that. ATAoE is all software anyway it's just a protocol over ethernet, rather than layered on top of TCP/IP.
What is wrong with using TCP/IP - which is already standard and reliable? Nothing. We know TCP/IP provides certain things for us.. resilience (through retransmits), and routing, are a good couple, and what about QoS?
ATAoE needs to be all the same network, close together, they're reimplemented the resilience, you can't use inbuilt common TCP checksum, segmentation and other offloads in major ethernet chipsets because they're a layer too low for it.
No point in it. Just trying to gain a niche. They could have implemented products around iSCSI, gotten the same performance with the same features, for the same price. Bunkum!
Undoubtedly be a big blow-job for the PHP project members who forced him out, but I don't think that much Open Source software really reels that much from people quitting anymore.
When projects DIE (OpenDarwin, byebye) that is a bad thing. Everyone quits. The entire infrastructure supporting it disappears, and the code is left to rot. PHP is still going to be actively developed and has tons of project/component leaders. Most software can handle the leaving, or worse a death, of a developer (PearPC is a good example. Being hit by a train is not good for your code, but it's still in development by the other developers)
It isn't as if Linus left Linux.. now that is a project that would flail around a bit. Not because Linus contributes masses of useful code or anything, but he is the guy who puts the releases together and makes the final decisions. BDFL's are hard to replace, how do you replace a dictator these days? War! And after 3 or 4 years, maybe a [rigged] democratic vote.
Get squashfs 3.0 and mksquashfs your source filesystem.
unsquashfs it to the destination.
You can build, add, delete files from the filesystem using the same tools, and even just mount it as a filesystem.
We use it at Genesi for our Linux installer. However.. squashfs 3.0 is pretty new, we had some serious problems getting it to unpack and restore setuid bits. Windows should be a hell of a lot easier as all the permission information is in ACL's and can just be shoved in as an NTFS stream, we can't do that for ext3 and squashfs:(
I would love to see LZO and bzip2 (or some other nice format..) in squashfs, to improve performance or provide crappy performance but insane compression benefits.
You know one day they will invent an RFID tag type product which is actually enhanced by tinfoil beanies and aluminium-wallet-tacos. Then you'll be in trouble!
Yeah. Procedural synthesis should be where it's at. The XBox 360 apparently is geared to "generate" content on the chip (for instance subtley modify trees so you don't end up with 100 of the same tree in the forest. All the branches and leaves would be procedurally generated).
Pixel and Vertex shaders are also the BIG THING that comes to mind, which kind of came out a damp squib. With pixel and vertex shaders (and whatever unified model comes out next) you can change the look of any surface, including bumpiness, shininess, the colour, wood grain, metal brush, blah blah, procedurally. With a procedural function in the pixel shader or vertex shader. How come people aren't using it that way?
It just seems that the cool thing to do is to slap a texture on a polygon and then use vertex shaders to make it glint in the sun. HDR came along and took the light away (narf!) from all the cool things they SHOULD have been doing.
If I saw another rapper/game company collaboration turn up a "nigger runs down da street and pops caps in bitches' asses" game again, I would have gone popped a cap in some bitch's ass.
Just means they'll install this, right? Thin client be damned, it runs fine as a desktop OS (if a bit slowly, but no slower than Windows 98 ever did on that hardware)
You do get booted if you jump up and add a dollar to the price 20 times, each time as the auctioneer lowers his little gavel..
A serious auction you would give your highest price and you'd only have to interrupt him once. Some auctions it is not about paying "the bare minimum for the item" by adding a dollar every time, but getting the item at all. eBay doesn't seem to cater for those auctions.
Either way the solution is to discipline eBay users, or add in some kind of anti-sniping method so the auction ends.. perhaps a random 1-3 minutes before the real end, or maybe 20 minutes after, or let the owner of the auction specify extension rules to combat sniping (i.e. no re-bidding within 'n' minutes, like they do on posting to Slashdot) or a scaling minimum bid increment (not $1 and not fixed) so that the more expensive and close to the end of an auction an item gets, the more you need to pay to snipe.
The arbitrary time limit ("this painting must be sold by 13:14:01 today!") is completely.. umm.. arbitrary..:D
Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.net) encourage it though, which is ace.
Although I can't find the page which explains it outside of my account pages (needs login, sigh) you can resell your connection and also sell your neighbours all-new connections, using a plan they have in place.
Given the stupidity of bidding over and over jacking up your "maximum bid" for an item, and an extension of an hour every time someone did it, this would just lead to huge prices and auctions that go days and days over their intended end.
Bid on a ticket for a show you really want to see and want to pay $100 for it? Someone bids $101.10. You bid $110. Auction extended by an hour. You really want that ticket. So do they.
2 days later the show was over already, you're bidding a dollar over to try and keep your bid at the top, thinking sniping is how to do it.. and you end up paying $158 for a ticket, you only really had $100 (get a dictionary and look up MAXIMUM) in the first place... fun isn't it.
I think online auctioning is going to fail as long as there is an automatic arbiter for the auction process. CGI script, cron job, database table, whatever, in a real auction you have a guy at the end of the room who gets to say "hahaha too late" or not pay attention to the guy who keeps jumping up and shouting "ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND TEN CENTS MORE" at the last second. Most people who did that in a real auction would be carted out by the big burly men and booted out of the door.
One of the things that's interesting about why Eisenhower pushed for the highway system was that he saw the Autobahn system in Germany during the occupation post-WWII and knew that that was one of the things that the United States needed to develop.
Shame the yanks slipped up and implemented a speed limit, though, isn't it? The Autobahn has local limits when it gets near to a city or so (which is reasonable) but seriously.. the entire state of Oregon limited to 55mph? Ridiculous when you're driving through potato farms and desert. What makes it funnier is you skip the state line from Portland, OR on the way to Seattle and suddenly you can go 70mph....
Now we're running what is supposedly no. 8.0 - I have always been able to call people on the phone from my MSN client. I think they just tied it into Windows Live instead of "pick your crazy provider from our affiliates page".
Slashdot Mirror
Of course like Num Lock and Scroll Lock, practically useless these days (as is Sys Rq..). But I have a couple of games that use it (show/hide ship stats or so in strategy games). And they provide no GUI notification that a feature is "enabled". Why not? Because you have lights on your keyboard!
:)
And remember the awesomeness of the Amiga keyboard which had it's caps lock light embedded in the key, so you knew exactly when it was on or not just by looking at the key (and not the opposite side of the keyboard).
Maybe they shouldn't remove it, but leave the lights and toggle switches, just rename the keys? Or put them in the USB hotkeys group with lights around so you can press them and make 'em glow.
I'd miss the key even if I never use it to type caps
I think Apple are having problems not because of the switch but simply a gain in popularity. Even without Intel switching, their markets have been only going up (PowerBooks and iBooks were very popular, not to mention non-computer stuff like the iPod).
Teething troubles trying to produce more systems than they have ever sold before? Yeah. Everyone has that though. Apple just have a lot of dieherd fans and over-zealous non-fans, so when they make a tiny mistake (that nobody would ever notice on an HP or Sony device), there are 100 articles and a million consequent banner clicks which fund some hack journalist who wanted to cause a fuss.
At least it ain't Dvorak though, eh?
Too big.
Too complex.
Not enough fun to balance out the "shiny" of the console design.
Sony made their Playstation originally with all manner of ports and peripheral connector options. Eventually they just removed them all. What was the point of putting those interfaces on anyway? Added complexity.. the console is just trying to do too much these days.
Even Nintendo I think have gotten it awkward, the Wii would be a super duper discrete console, and then you need to have 3 controllers to play all the games (Wiimote & Nunchuck, "classic gamecube" style controller, etc. and maybe even a few ORIGINAL gamecube controllers) and all the sensor bar stuff.. then there is a flap for the Gamecube stuff. Overcomplicated. I would love just a slotloading console with no flappy flaps or hundreds of peripheral ports, and just a plain ordinary uncomplicated controller (like the Wiimote without the wand functionality) just to play a couple games on.
That said I love the new ideas on the Wii too, I just think.. well.. there is such a thing as having way too much in the box and even with wireless controllers, there is still going to be a box next to your TV or down the side of the couch full of wires, blobs of plastic, and stuff you aren't using.
Lag, yes. Delayed reaction to controller input, maybe.
PING TIME AND RESPONSE????
You people seriously need to get off the computers once in a while and stop mixing your words around like you know something.
No thanks.
So okay, this is news?
Every year March 10th comes around and we don't get a bunch of news posts from Nintendo fans because it's MAR10 day yet again.
It can't be that slow on a Tuesday in August. What is the world coming to?
It exports ATA over Ethernet.
...), network it how you want, any topology or connection and all the things you want are there to get what you need.
Which forces you to use ATA disks..
And Ethernet.
iSCSI exports... disks.... over... a TCP/IP network. It's not more expensive UNLESS you are figuring fiber channel and special initiator cards, in fact it is more flexible, you can pick up any hardware, any disk type (ATA, SATA, SCSI,
I don't see the point in it, since iSCSI is not bound to fiber channel nor does TCP/IP overhead really matter (I think you'd lose a lot more to reimplementing TCP/IP features in software, at the end of the day)
Do you actually have an ATA RAID array that can perform 10 Gigabits/s full-duplex? I would love to see that, I really don't think those disks really exist though (maybe a couple or 10 10Krpm WD ones..
Right, so in the article this one guy says that "using the second network port and a dedicated switch adds more security". So despite being non-routable he gave it a dedicated network anyway. There's also a guy in the article talking about that he "believes" that iSCSI would have been harder to configure. I seriously doubt this, having set up a number of iSCSI networks. I don't think it's at all because he wants more security, or because he knows what he is talking about, but because he got told to configure it that way in the Coraid blade manual.
The reason you'd dedicate a switch to ATAoE is probably purely because you would get some serious bandwidth conflicts with other TCP/IP applications.
Even if you got an iSCSI network there you'd probably want to dedicate a switch to it too, but if you couldn't, or had to share the network with something else for some other reason, this is what QoS and traffic shaping is for. You can easily prioritise your disks over the other stuff. ATAoE.. I think you are stuck with buying another switch and buying client machines with two ethernet ports.
You can easily stop TCP/IP from routing by using non-routable addresses or implementing a firewall between segments. You could even have this firewall on your server to restrict access to the disks from machines on the same network. This kind of security is ALSO offloadable (see latest Intel and nVidia chipsets).
ATAoE reimplements it with "config strings"... buhhh...
The problem with saturating a 10GE network is not down to TCP but ethernet frame size, too. If you have the network cards to handle a 10GE network they pretty much reduce the building of large TCP frames to zero like you said. Everything's offloaded already for iSCSI, or you can buy a card that offloads it.
I suppose this is the expensive part! iSCSI initiators are costly, but really only because they are a rare form of ethernet card. If everyone used iSCSI they probably wouldn't be (you could bet that iSCSI initiator support would be in every nForce chipset..)
So basically what they have is a requirement to use ATA disks only (as opposed to iSCSI where it can be any damned disk, even and ESPECIALLY relaying other iSCSI networks), bundled with an unoffloadable ethernet protocol, which they reimplemented all the best features of TCP/IP into, for the reason of..
I think I know! It's so they can sell "disk blades" and not have to "compete". Snake oil..
So. Coraid has not, in a whole year, explained why iSCSI is somehow more expensive (disks + Linux kernel + network.. all the same) than their ATAoE implementation.
They'll give excuses about the cost of iSCSI hardware offload.. but you don't need that. ATAoE is all software anyway it's just a protocol over ethernet, rather than layered on top of TCP/IP.
What is wrong with using TCP/IP - which is already standard and reliable? Nothing. We know TCP/IP provides certain things for us.. resilience (through retransmits), and routing, are a good couple, and what about QoS?
ATAoE needs to be all the same network, close together, they're reimplemented the resilience, you can't use inbuilt common TCP checksum, segmentation and other offloads in major ethernet chipsets because they're a layer too low for it.
No point in it. Just trying to gain a niche. They could have implemented products around iSCSI, gotten the same performance with the same features, for the same price. Bunkum!
I don't see them complaining.
Undoubtedly be a big blow-job for the PHP project members who forced him out, but I don't think that much Open Source software really reels that much from people quitting anymore.
When projects DIE (OpenDarwin, byebye) that is a bad thing. Everyone quits. The entire infrastructure supporting it disappears, and the code is left to rot. PHP is still going to be actively developed and has tons of project/component leaders. Most software can handle the leaving, or worse a death, of a developer (PearPC is a good example. Being hit by a train is not good for your code, but it's still in development by the other developers)
It isn't as if Linus left Linux.. now that is a project that would flail around a bit. Not because Linus contributes masses of useful code or anything, but he is the guy who puts the releases together and makes the final decisions. BDFL's are hard to replace, how do you replace a dictator these days? War! And after 3 or 4 years, maybe a [rigged] democratic vote.
Doesn't look like anger to me.
:)
Suicidal depression, perhaps?
Get squashfs 3.0 and mksquashfs your source filesystem.
unsquashfs it to the destination.
You can build, add, delete files from the filesystem using the same tools, and even just mount it as a filesystem.
We use it at Genesi for our Linux installer. However.. squashfs 3.0 is pretty new, we had some serious problems getting it to unpack and restore setuid bits. Windows should be a hell of a lot easier as all the permission information is in ACL's and can just be shoved in as an NTFS stream, we can't do that for ext3 and squashfs
I would love to see LZO and bzip2 (or some other nice format..) in squashfs, to improve performance or provide crappy performance but insane compression benefits.
The one that's Malcom's mom, or the other one from older series' like when Sideshow Bob is being released?
You know one day they will invent an RFID tag type product which is actually enhanced by tinfoil beanies and aluminium-wallet-tacos. Then you'll be in trouble!
Yeah. Procedural synthesis should be where it's at. The XBox 360 apparently is geared to "generate" content on the chip (for instance subtley modify trees so you don't end up with 100 of the same tree in the forest. All the branches and leaves would be procedurally generated).
Pixel and Vertex shaders are also the BIG THING that comes to mind, which kind of came out a damp squib. With pixel and vertex shaders (and whatever unified model comes out next) you can change the look of any surface, including bumpiness, shininess, the colour, wood grain, metal brush, blah blah, procedurally. With a procedural function in the pixel shader or vertex shader. How come people aren't using it that way?
It just seems that the cool thing to do is to slap a texture on a polygon and then use vertex shaders to make it glint in the sun. HDR came along and took the light away (narf!) from all the cool things they SHOULD have been doing.
Well good on these guys.
If I saw another rapper/game company collaboration turn up a "nigger runs down da street and pops caps in bitches' asses" game again, I would have gone popped a cap in some bitch's ass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Fundamentals_ for_Legacy_PCs
Just means they'll install this, right? Thin client be damned, it runs fine as a desktop OS (if a bit slowly, but no slower than Windows 98 ever did on that hardware)
Fortunately for my mamma, they don't have the same mamma.
How old is your kid?
:D
I have 4 brothers and sisters far younger than me (3, 4, 6 and 14) and they swear more than I ever do, and I am really good at it.
It's fun watching a 3 year old tell your Dad that he is a fucking wanker
You do get booted if you jump up and add a dollar to the price 20 times, each time as the auctioneer lowers his little gavel..
:D
A serious auction you would give your highest price and you'd only have to interrupt him once. Some auctions it is not about paying "the bare minimum for the item" by adding a dollar every time, but getting the item at all. eBay doesn't seem to cater for those auctions.
Either way the solution is to discipline eBay users, or add in some kind of anti-sniping method so the auction ends.. perhaps a random 1-3 minutes before the real end, or maybe 20 minutes after, or let the owner of the auction specify extension rules to combat sniping (i.e. no re-bidding within 'n' minutes, like they do on posting to Slashdot) or a scaling minimum bid increment (not $1 and not fixed) so that the more expensive and close to the end of an auction an item gets, the more you need to pay to snipe.
The arbitrary time limit ("this painting must be sold by 13:14:01 today!") is completely.. umm.. arbitrary..
Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.net) encourage it though, which is ace.
Although I can't find the page which explains it outside of my account pages (needs login, sigh) you can resell your connection and also sell your neighbours all-new connections, using a plan they have in place.
This has been there for yeaaars.
Given the stupidity of bidding over and over jacking up your "maximum bid" for an item, and an extension of an hour every time someone did it, this would just lead to huge prices and auctions that go days and days over their intended end.
Bid on a ticket for a show you really want to see and want to pay $100 for it? Someone bids $101.10. You bid $110. Auction extended by an hour. You really want that ticket. So do they.
2 days later the show was over already, you're bidding a dollar over to try and keep your bid at the top, thinking sniping is how to do it.. and you end up paying $158 for a ticket, you only really had $100 (get a dictionary and look up MAXIMUM) in the first place... fun isn't it.
I think online auctioning is going to fail as long as there is an automatic arbiter for the auction process. CGI script, cron job, database table, whatever, in a real auction you have a guy at the end of the room who gets to say "hahaha too late" or not pay attention to the guy who keeps jumping up and shouting "ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND TEN CENTS MORE" at the last second. Most people who did that in a real auction would be carted out by the big burly men and booted out of the door.
One of the things that's interesting about why Eisenhower pushed for the highway system was that he saw the Autobahn system in Germany during the occupation post-WWII and knew that that was one of the things that the United States needed to develop.
Shame the yanks slipped up and implemented a speed limit, though, isn't it? The Autobahn has local limits when it gets near to a city or so (which is reasonable) but seriously.. the entire state of Oregon limited to 55mph? Ridiculous when you're driving through potato farms and desert. What makes it funnier is you skip the state line from Portland, OR on the way to Seattle and suddenly you can go 70mph....
So has MSN Messenger.. like.. since version 4.0?
Now we're running what is supposedly no. 8.0 - I have always been able to call people on the phone from my MSN client. I think they just tied it into Windows Live instead of "pick your crazy provider from our affiliates page".