Actually earth rotational speed has to do more with the moon's orbit. The moon is taking energy from Earth's rotation via tidal bulge which speeds up the moon and increases its orbit and slows us down. What we really have to worry about (well, not really the human race so much) is as the moon moves away, our planetary wobble increases. Planetary wobble wrecks havoc on our weather paterns and can turn fertile areas in to deserts in a matter of years, while causing ice fields and floods in other places.
You are talking about lossless compression and you are completely correct that 5:1 lossless compression isn't ever going to happen. Entropy of normal network data is too high, 5:1 would be many standard deviations from the real world. On the other hand, if you read the article carefully, they state that it is UP TO 5:1 compression for web and email only. This will be lossy compression on images, which make up a bulk of the data in web conditions. Much like a web proxy for a mobile phone browsing situation. E.G. with my t-mobile phone proxy, I get the full real web page (not WAP) but all of the images have been reduced to about 64 colors and had their resolution reduced by the proxy before they make it to my phone. I think this is great because most web pages are about 1/8th their size so it saves me money and time when I don't care all that much about browsing images on my phone (but they are nice to have). In this case up to 5x faster is much more probable, especially when you throw in the force majeure clause of "up to". Of course, I'm a geeky engineer with broadband and I'd never buy this crap anyway. =) Have a nice day.
Have you ever seen an apple iBook or Powerbook breathing while its sleeping (LED fading in and out)? That isn't controlled by current limiting, it is pulse width modulation to save battery life (so it can still pluse for a long time even if the main battery is removed). Try moving it around quickly in a dark room and its easy to see.
Although all I play on it is Karateka (sp?). That damn bird...
That's okay, I only use my//gs to play Wings of Fury. There is just something about that game on that platform that I can't replicate using a modern clunky joystick on an emulator. I still haven't mastered the short landing approach but I'm now the grand master rocket launcher.
Clean our all your folders... or just run it on the iPhoto app and reduce its size by a whopping 80%! Even leaving english, spanish and norwegian on my laptop and removing the rest saves hundreds of megs. I hope that helps ya'.
How the heck is this +4 interesting?? Its time to hunts some mods... it looks like a 16 year old 1st poster trying to use the word "superconductor" in a sentence, it doesn't contribute to the discussion in any way.
Yes, we are all curious to see what the future holds for superconductors and smei-conductors (DUH). Yes, the two have nothing to do with each other in the context of this article. Superconductors can be used for transmition of signal, definitely important to computing, but not creation of logic; fundamentally, you need something that passes information in one direction under certain conditions but doesn't pass information when the same outside conditions are applied in the opposite direction (e.g. semi-conductive materials). Moore's Law doesn't need to be revived yet. It still holds true. Will it fail eventually? absolutely. But if Grove could pull his head out of his ass and see the wood for the tree, he'd realize that it isn't going to happen soon. People stopped lauging at Quantum, Bio and other computing theories a long time ago. If you step back and look at the big picture, you'll see Moore's law happily marching along and geeks like us making it happen. Grove is just shouting "look at me! i'm talking about theory of computing but saying nothing!"
Re:bitrate limitations
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While you are correct about the pipe being big enough for 300kB/s I have a few minor corrections because I am anal retentive. =P
12megabits/sec (Mb/s) is 1.5 megabytes/sec (MB/s) which is the theoretical max for full speed USB. You can take about 1/3 of that off for packet overhead and timing as well leaving a full speed device about 1MB/sec of isoch data to play with. That is more than enough for a decent video stream like you said.
One other thing, you see low speed USB devices all the time. What do you think your USB mouse is?
Yup, I was going to say the same thing. I'm not even admining my small companies network but I ran a security audit on my own corner of the network one day and I could see everything with ettercap. Its free people, if you want to monitor, don't buy from AOL. The other fun thing is that you can insert spooffed text in to IM sessions. Not that i'd ever do such a thing. But ettercap is great! if you want to prove to your admins or boss that they should offer SSL or encrypted logins on the email server, just hand them a list of their email passwords. =) Of course, if you don't know what you're doing when you poison the ARP table, you could take the network down for a couple of minutes. Play with it at home if you don't understand how ARP (layer 2/ethernet to layer 3/IP addressing) works.
Actually, if you are refering to the quote from the simpsons it was, "Moses is coming, Everybody look busy!"
That was the episode involving the 8th commandment in season two when the Simpson's steel cable. Moses comes down from the mountain with the tablets and homer the theif makes his quote and they all start performing their individual acts of sin. =)
If that's not what you were quoting, then have a nice day.
Am I the only one that thinks Symbian is a bloated, piss poor operating system? The idea that MS and Symbian are duking it out for embedded space scares the crap out of me. Symbian is doing well because it has great applications. The OS was designed by a bunch of Apps people who realized, "Hey, we need an OS to run our apps on instead of buying someone else's." They wrote this 16 meg (average complement of libraries) giant with C++ libs and very poor resource management. The reason it sells is they have the apps to back it up so an embedded deivce maker doesn't have to go out and buy them or develope their own.
I'm not poo pooing their success, hey, I've developed drivers for symbian devices, it pays the bills but for f-ks sake; if you are developing an embedded device and want efficient use of memory and battery, PLEASE consider small OSes like VxWorks or Nucleus. This is what happens when you trust a bunch of English high level application developers write an OS... they drink beer and throw C++ bloat and undergraduate operating system classes at the problem. j/k/me ducks... I kid because I love you guys...
...and the next time you slam someone for suggesting running linux on a mac, think before opening your mouth. The previous poster is probably making some generalized statement like; if you're on slashdot, you probably/should have at least one machine running linux and that the scanner he mentioned will run on linux. He made no mention of OS X. I happen to have 3 macs, all of them have at least one partition running debian for linux network development from my academic days, aside from another mac os. So if he likes that scanner, he might be able to use it with linux on his mac.
My suggestion to the scanner issue is get one of those $80 ultra slim USB flatbed scanners. My best friend has one for his Pismo mac laptop that fits perfectly in his bag with his laptop and I belive is bus powered though I think it'd be difficult running a scanner bulb with less than 300mA. I think its a cannon like this one but older and not USB2.0. They used to make a high end for $120 and a low end at $90 but I'm sure older models are super cheap these days.
lastly, I have indeed used my 2.1 mega pixel digital elph to take macro pictures of pages and OCR them later. It works fine.
You and many others are missing the point in this USB OTG Vs. Firewire debate. OTG is meant for small/portable devices that you might want to act as a host at some point. It basically uses a USB 1.1 (OHCI) host controller to act as a host (e.g. a PDA or camera acting as a host to a printer or mp3 player to another mp3 player). USB 1.1 runs at a much lower frequency and thus uses less power. When the OTG product is a device/slave running 2.0 (EHCI), it is bus powered and can utilize the higher frequency USB 2.0 speeds. Simply put, OTG does have similar functionality to Firewire but its target platform is low power/battery powered devices where Firewire would suck it batteries dry in no time! I hope this helps kill this debate. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at SoftConnex which is owned by TransDimension, a company in the article, I do not represent TransDimension with my comments... blah blah blah.
Its not like you can't project 35mm on an IMAX screen right now. The Irvine Spectrum in southern cali does it all the time. I've seen spiderman, star wars and minority report on their huge IMAX screen that they show their 3D IMAX films on during the day. On nights and weekends though, they can pack huge opening weekend audience in to the big screen auditorium and make a lot of cash. The picture is obviously not as sharp as an IMAX film up close but if you don't sit too close (adjust for the relative screen size), it doesn't look bad at all! They project it to utilize the entire width of the screen and the speaker system in there... damn. =) Can somemone explain to me how much is gained by doing this expensive process on 35mm film? Is it really worth it when existing 35mm movies don't look half bad on IMAX screens already?
Solving a maze is great. We did this in my 2nd intro class. After learning a few linked list methods we had to solve a maze using a deapth first (explore one path at a time), then a breadth first method (take one step down every possible path each cycle). We also, as someone mentioned earlier, did simple image processing. E.g. take a two dimenssional array and run a blur filter by averaging each pixel with its neighboring pixels value. We didn't do game of life till the GUI class using Java.
(preface, I know I'm a geek) When I dropped out of band my junior year to take zero period AutoCad, our teacher let us have Friday as game day as a reward for behaving the rest of the week. We'd play doom and that stunt driving game on our drafting machines. It also gave those that were behind on their projects, a chance to get some one on one with the teacher and catch up. It wasn't networked and it wasn't really school sanctioned but the CAD lab was off in its own dark corner of the school where us well behaved geeks slunk in the shadows. It didn't affect me too much. These days, I only get the urge to pull out my shotgun and start blowing things away if they have sharp teeth, look two dimesnsional and chase me in to the underworld.
Cool, I'll have to check out LQ. I'm origionally from Fullerton. When I said lots of laser tag/joust/quest game locations I meant LQ and the no-so-impressive setups at all of the Family Fun centers and similar places (e.g. camelot - Placentia, Downey...). I know a couple of companies in Irvine that need GOOD IS/Network people since they lost me to USB/Imbedded development (my company included, we had to explain the difference between OSI layers 1,2 and 3 to her when she thought you could only put one IP on each link on the switch).
I have to agree. I've only played once and never against any organized groups but we were running up and down stairs, constantly hurdling barriers and sprinting around maze like corridors. I'm in really good shape and I still got some good cardio playing a couple games in a row. Its cheaper than paint balling (no special gear to buy, everyone is evenly equiped), the loud punk and techno music and laser lights area geek bonus and there are a bunch of locations in my area (orange county CA).
...I suppose there could be confusion about this. While yes, it does need to aim at the earth by some means. I'm sure most people would assume it uses electric gyroscopes for this type of adjustment like many near earth satelites/probes do but this isn't the case for deep space probes, especially older ones. Even electricity is a rare comodity out past saturn. The solar cells pick up enough light to power the CPU and transmitions. It turns out, it is more efficient to send a deep space probe packing with compressed gas to do these minor adjustments.
I could see this being VERY usefull for skiing. I've been skiing in zero degree weather and layered so much that I couldn't help but get really hot while skiing aggressively but then find myself bundling up as much as possible and still being a bit chilly on the windy lift ride up the face of a mountain. I wasn't terribly uncomfortable but if I had a lighter amount of clothes on for skiing and could just power up my jacket or even better plug my jacket in to a socket on the chair lift, that would definitely kick ass.
Am I the only one that thought "Router Information Protocol" before "Rest In Peace"?...damn that's wrong.
I can't count the hours I spent watching the Road Runner cartoons, there's a legacy I will share with my children. Along with all the stress and the mundane things that compete
unceasingly for our time and energy, we are granted an essential element.
We have the gift to love humor. That gift helps to weave some threads of
sense and meaning into this place that we call the universe. It is a big
universe. I think that it is going to take a lot of threads and a lot of
weaving to get the job done. Thanks to Chuck for his great contributions. Meep Meep...
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
This is not some new technique. Its been working without any side effect for some time. They've been doing the same thing in the greater Los Angeles are since I was a kid. When the fruit fly population started taking heavy tolls on crops, they sprayed the whole area with malathion for a few years to kill the majority of them then started dumping irratiated/sterilized fruit flies to finish the job which they still do on ocasion till this day (my bro knows some of the pilots that dump them from Fullerton airport). There haven't been any mutant bugs (the radiation dosage is too little) and our fruit crops are happily competing in our capitalist market.
Of course, this case in Africa is MUCH less important. We're only talking about saving human lives here. I think the fly population is far more important so I'm going to move over there and LIVE with the flies and protect them as you should too....too many of you worry about the wrong f-ing thing. It blows me away.
>level three is the network layer that differentiates Ethernet from, say, Token ring.
He's off on that statement too. Ethernet and Token ring exist on layer two (the broadcast domain). Layer 3 doesn't care what type of hardware you are running on. It handles routing across networks (it separates collision AND broadcast domains). E.g. you can run IP over ethernet or token or any other layer 2...
Also, I've looked at wavelet theory for things like image compression. I can't imagine it is any less susceptible to noise than QAM. Sure you can move more data down the line but noise has a better chance at disrupting the very high resolution wave structure so a little noise can wipe out all that extra data no prob. I'd like to see some technical docs or I'll just assume these claims go the way of the SEC hoax sites...
I already did this before I started reading comments but his @home address is already down. Try his consulting address instead:
bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
I thanked him for his entertaining read and suggested a more objective course of action... e.g. hide out in the hole you dug your career in to for a while.
I'm guessing this has happened to a limited number of people. I used the old iTunes2 installer on a number of machines with multiple partitions as have my friends and none of us lost any data. What conditions cause this "feature" to occur?
(cross posted this on macslash) My friends and I have been early adopters of OSX and we've never actually had IE execute a downloaded app. Yes, it de-archives things for us all of the time through its helper app settings. We've upgraded to IE 5.1 and not changed a single preference setting and none of us have never seen this occur. Is there some special archive/helper app setting I'm not seeing??
Slashdot Mirror
Actually earth rotational speed has to do more with the moon's orbit. The moon is taking energy from Earth's rotation via tidal bulge which speeds up the moon and increases its orbit and slows us down. What we really have to worry about (well, not really the human race so much) is as the moon moves away, our planetary wobble increases. Planetary wobble wrecks havoc on our weather paterns and can turn fertile areas in to deserts in a matter of years, while causing ice fields and floods in other places.
You are talking about lossless compression and you are completely correct that 5:1 lossless compression isn't ever going to happen. Entropy of normal network data is too high, 5:1 would be many standard deviations from the real world. On the other hand, if you read the article carefully, they state that it is UP TO 5:1 compression for web and email only. This will be lossy compression on images, which make up a bulk of the data in web conditions. Much like a web proxy for a mobile phone browsing situation. E.G. with my t-mobile phone proxy, I get the full real web page (not WAP) but all of the images have been reduced to about 64 colors and had their resolution reduced by the proxy before they make it to my phone. I think this is great because most web pages are about 1/8th their size so it saves me money and time when I don't care all that much about browsing images on my phone (but they are nice to have). In this case up to 5x faster is much more probable, especially when you throw in the force majeure clause of "up to". Of course, I'm a geeky engineer with broadband and I'd never buy this crap anyway. =) Have a nice day.
Have you ever seen an apple iBook or Powerbook breathing while its sleeping (LED fading in and out)? That isn't controlled by current limiting, it is pulse width modulation to save battery life (so it can still pluse for a long time even if the main battery is removed). Try moving it around quickly in a dark room and its easy to see.
That's okay, I only use my //gs to play Wings of Fury. There is just something about that game on that platform that I can't replicate using a modern clunky joystick on an emulator. I still haven't mastered the short landing approach but I'm now the grand master rocket launcher.
find / \! -name "English.lproj" -name "*.lproj" -type d -exec rm -r -- {} \;
Clean our all your folders... or just run it on the iPhoto app and reduce its size by a whopping 80%! Even leaving english, spanish and norwegian on my laptop and removing the rest saves hundreds of megs. I hope that helps ya'.
Yes, we are all curious to see what the future holds for superconductors and smei-conductors (DUH). Yes, the two have nothing to do with each other in the context of this article. Superconductors can be used for transmition of signal, definitely important to computing, but not creation of logic; fundamentally, you need something that passes information in one direction under certain conditions but doesn't pass information when the same outside conditions are applied in the opposite direction (e.g. semi-conductive materials).
Moore's Law doesn't need to be revived yet. It still holds true. Will it fail eventually? absolutely. But if Grove could pull his head out of his ass and see the wood for the tree, he'd realize that it isn't going to happen soon. People stopped lauging at Quantum, Bio and other computing theories a long time ago. If you step back and look at the big picture, you'll see Moore's law happily marching along and geeks like us making it happen. Grove is just shouting "look at me! i'm talking about theory of computing but saying nothing!"
12megabits/sec (Mb/s) is 1.5 megabytes/sec (MB/s) which is the theoretical max for full speed USB. You can take about 1/3 of that off for packet overhead and timing as well leaving a full speed device about 1MB/sec of isoch data to play with. That is more than enough for a decent video stream like you said.
One other thing, you see low speed USB devices all the time. What do you think your USB mouse is?
Yup, I was going to say the same thing. I'm not even admining my small companies network but I ran a security audit on my own corner of the network one day and I could see everything with ettercap. Its free people, if you want to monitor, don't buy from AOL. The other fun thing is that you can insert spooffed text in to IM sessions. Not that i'd ever do such a thing. But ettercap is great! if you want to prove to your admins or boss that they should offer SSL or encrypted logins on the email server, just hand them a list of their email passwords. =) Of course, if you don't know what you're doing when you poison the ARP table, you could take the network down for a couple of minutes. Play with it at home if you don't understand how ARP (layer 2/ethernet to layer 3/IP addressing) works.
Actually, if you are refering to the quote from the simpsons it was, "Moses is coming, Everybody look busy!"
That was the episode involving the 8th commandment in season two when the Simpson's steel cable. Moses comes down from the mountain with the tablets and homer the theif makes his quote and they all start performing their individual acts of sin. =)
If that's not what you were quoting, then have a nice day.
I'm not poo pooing their success, hey, I've developed drivers for symbian devices, it pays the bills but for f-ks sake; if you are developing an embedded device and want efficient use of memory and battery, PLEASE consider small OSes like VxWorks or Nucleus. /me ducks...
This is what happens when you trust a bunch of English high level application developers write an OS... they drink beer and throw C++ bloat and undergraduate operating system classes at the problem. j/k
I kid because I love you guys...
...and the next time you slam someone for suggesting running linux on a mac, think before opening your mouth. The previous poster is probably making some generalized statement like; if you're on slashdot, you probably/should have at least one machine running linux and that the scanner he mentioned will run on linux. He made no mention of OS X. I happen to have 3 macs, all of them have at least one partition running debian for linux network development from my academic days, aside from another mac os. So if he likes that scanner, he might be able to use it with linux on his mac.
My suggestion to the scanner issue is get one of those $80 ultra slim USB flatbed scanners. My best friend has one for his Pismo mac laptop that fits perfectly in his bag with his laptop and I belive is bus powered though I think it'd be difficult running a scanner bulb with less than 300mA. I think its a cannon like this one but older and not USB2.0. They used to make a high end for $120 and a low end at $90 but I'm sure older models are super cheap these days.
lastly, I have indeed used my 2.1 mega pixel digital elph to take macro pictures of pages and OCR them later. It works fine.
You and many others are missing the point in this USB OTG Vs. Firewire debate. OTG is meant for small/portable devices that you might want to act as a host at some point. It basically uses a USB 1.1 (OHCI) host controller to act as a host (e.g. a PDA or camera acting as a host to a printer or mp3 player to another mp3 player). USB 1.1 runs at a much lower frequency and thus uses less power. When the OTG product is a device/slave running 2.0 (EHCI), it is bus powered and can utilize the higher frequency USB 2.0 speeds. Simply put, OTG does have similar functionality to Firewire but its target platform is low power/battery powered devices where Firewire would suck it batteries dry in no time! I hope this helps kill this debate.
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at SoftConnex which is owned by TransDimension, a company in the article, I do not represent TransDimension with my comments... blah blah blah.
Its not like you can't project 35mm on an IMAX screen right now. The Irvine Spectrum in southern cali does it all the time. I've seen spiderman, star wars and minority report on their huge IMAX screen that they show their 3D IMAX films on during the day. On nights and weekends though, they can pack huge opening weekend audience in to the big screen auditorium and make a lot of cash. The picture is obviously not as sharp as an IMAX film up close but if you don't sit too close (adjust for the relative screen size), it doesn't look bad at all! They project it to utilize the entire width of the screen and the speaker system in there... damn. =)
Can somemone explain to me how much is gained by doing this expensive process on 35mm film? Is it really worth it when existing 35mm movies don't look half bad on IMAX screens already?
Solving a maze is great. We did this in my 2nd intro class. After learning a few linked list methods we had to solve a maze using a deapth first (explore one path at a time), then a breadth first method (take one step down every possible path each cycle). We also, as someone mentioned earlier, did simple image processing. E.g. take a two dimenssional array and run a blur filter by averaging each pixel with its neighboring pixels value. We didn't do game of life till the GUI class using Java.
(preface, I know I'm a geek) When I dropped out of band my junior year to take zero period AutoCad, our teacher let us have Friday as game day as a reward for behaving the rest of the week. We'd play doom and that stunt driving game on our drafting machines. It also gave those that were behind on their projects, a chance to get some one on one with the teacher and catch up. It wasn't networked and it wasn't really school sanctioned but the CAD lab was off in its own dark corner of the school where us well behaved geeks slunk in the shadows. It didn't affect me too much. These days, I only get the urge to pull out my shotgun and start blowing things away if they have sharp teeth, look two dimesnsional and chase me in to the underworld.
Cool, I'll have to check out LQ. I'm origionally from Fullerton. When I said lots of laser tag/joust/quest game locations I meant LQ and the no-so-impressive setups at all of the Family Fun centers and similar places (e.g. camelot - Placentia, Downey...).
I know a couple of companies in Irvine that need GOOD IS/Network people since they lost me to USB/Imbedded development (my company included, we had to explain the difference between OSI layers 1,2 and 3 to her when she thought you could only put one IP on each link on the switch).
I have to agree. I've only played once and never against any organized groups but we were running up and down stairs, constantly hurdling barriers and sprinting around maze like corridors. I'm in really good shape and I still got some good cardio playing a couple games in a row. Its cheaper than paint balling (no special gear to buy, everyone is evenly equiped), the loud punk and techno music and laser lights area geek bonus and there are a bunch of locations in my area (orange county CA).
...I suppose there could be confusion about this. While yes, it does need to aim at the earth by some means. I'm sure most people would assume it uses electric gyroscopes for this type of adjustment like many near earth satelites/probes do but this isn't the case for deep space probes, especially older ones. Even electricity is a rare comodity out past saturn. The solar cells pick up enough light to power the CPU and transmitions. It turns out, it is more efficient to send a deep space probe packing with compressed gas to do these minor adjustments.
I could see this being VERY usefull for skiing. I've been skiing in zero degree weather and layered so much that I couldn't help but get really hot while skiing aggressively but then find myself bundling up as much as possible and still being a bit chilly on the windy lift ride up the face of a mountain. I wasn't terribly uncomfortable but if I had a lighter amount of clothes on for skiing and could just power up my jacket or even better plug my jacket in to a socket on the chair lift, that would definitely kick ass.
Am I the only one that thought "Router Information Protocol" before "Rest In Peace"? ...damn that's wrong.
I can't count the hours I spent watching the Road Runner cartoons, there's a legacy I will share with my children. Along with all the stress and the mundane things that compete unceasingly for our time and energy, we are granted an essential element. We have the gift to love humor. That gift helps to weave some threads of sense and meaning into this place that we call the universe. It is a big universe. I think that it is going to take a lot of threads and a lot of weaving to get the job done. Thanks to Chuck for his great contributions. Meep Meep...
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
...too many of you worry about the wrong f-ing thing. It blows me away.
This is not some new technique. Its been working without any side effect for some time. They've been doing the same thing in the greater Los Angeles are since I was a kid. When the fruit fly population started taking heavy tolls on crops, they sprayed the whole area with malathion for a few years to kill the majority of them then started dumping irratiated/sterilized fruit flies to finish the job which they still do on ocasion till this day (my bro knows some of the pilots that dump them from Fullerton airport). There haven't been any mutant bugs (the radiation dosage is too little) and our fruit crops are happily competing in our capitalist market.
Of course, this case in Africa is MUCH less important. We're only talking about saving human lives here. I think the fly population is far more important so I'm going to move over there and LIVE with the flies and protect them as you should too.
>level three is the network layer that differentiates Ethernet from, say, Token ring.
He's off on that statement too. Ethernet and Token ring exist on layer two (the broadcast domain). Layer 3 doesn't care what type of hardware you are running on. It handles routing across networks (it separates collision AND broadcast domains). E.g. you can run IP over ethernet or token or any other layer 2...
Also, I've looked at wavelet theory for things like image compression. I can't imagine it is any less susceptible to noise than QAM. Sure you can move more data down the line but noise has a better chance at disrupting the very high resolution wave structure so a little noise can wipe out all that extra data no prob. I'd like to see some technical docs or I'll just assume these claims go the way of the SEC hoax sites...
I already did this before I started reading comments but his @home address is already down. Try his consulting address instead:
bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
I thanked him for his entertaining read and suggested a more objective course of action... e.g. hide out in the hole you dug your career in to for a while.
I'm guessing this has happened to a limited number of people. I used the old iTunes2 installer on a number of machines with multiple partitions as have my friends and none of us lost any data. What conditions cause this "feature" to occur?
(cross posted this on macslash) My friends and I have been early adopters of OSX and we've never actually had IE execute a downloaded app. Yes, it de-archives things for us all of the time through its helper app settings. We've upgraded to IE 5.1 and not changed a single preference setting and none of us have never seen this occur. Is there some special archive/helper app setting I'm not seeing??