The point was not to provide the greatest compatibility, but rather just the opposite! MS requested that the lasers be designed in such a way to not read CDR/CDRW/DVDR/DVDRW, but still manage to read most retail pressed media.
This, I believe, is the root cause for the premature failures of the drives. The drives that most closely met what MS wanted (Thompson), are also the drives that most commonly fail . The drives that have the least problems (Samsung), can read the highest varity of disks. I think this is due to the fact that they have a retail brother (616T) and thus share many of the same parts.
I feel sure MS was warned of this possibility when they made the requests to manufacturers, and probably assumed that QC on retail discs would be high enough to not pose a problem. Just another case of copy protection at the cost of quality, or in this case longevity, of the product.
IMHO MS knowingly and intentionaly used substandard hardware with an unreasonably high rate of failure, and should be held responsible for it.
Windows Update was deployed not just for IE fixes, but for Windows and everything that comes with it. Without it, general issue OS service packs balloon in size, because they need to contain every fix, not just the ones that apply to you. IE benifits from this distribution system, but MS would not have deployed it for something as small as IE alone.
Moreover, Mozilla hasn't reached the threshold to really consider an update system, since it's still under heavy development, but we may see one by the time it hits 1.0.
Try removing/inserting an ISA card in a running machine sometime, it works flawlesly in anything w/ isapnp (win95,nt4,linux,etc)
I'm sure it wasn't intentional when they layed out the ISA spec, but it works with the addidion of plug and play to the equation.
I agree with the need for compression, but it would have to be something lossless and quick, at the expense of compression ratio.
I've always wanted to see the Reed-Solomon routines get integrated into the filesystem. RAID is great, an PAR2 has opened up a lot of possibilities, but I still think it would be a good option to provide in the filesystem itself.
Encryption would be another great option, but it would have to be a method that actually deserves my trust, not ike the ntfs encryption.
Hopefully Reiser4 and plugins will make all that a reality in the near future.
I must admit I had not seen the GP post when I wrote that, and I don't agree with it. I just wanted to point out the fact that even our most trusted methods are still quite fallible.
I will present an interesting tidbit, not so much to show evidence for a 'new earth', but more to show that we don't know as much as we think we do.
The Geologist, Dec. 1862: "In Macoupin County, IL, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth.... The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or caoting of hard glossy matter, as black as the coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural."
The IL State Geological Survey dates that coal formation between 286 and 320 million years old, in the Carboniferous period.
So is geology wrong? Is evolution wrong? Both?
My take is that all science is a set of theories, constantly changing, and always imperfect. We never really know anything, we just have theories.
Most importantly, those theories should never be taken as dogma, as that only leads to suppression of good evidence, and promotion of bad theory. If the theory and the evidence don't jive, the theory needs to change, not the evidence.
As for the 'new earth' thing, I don't buy it either. It doesn't appear to be based on good evidence or good theory from what I've seen.
Carbon-dating, and indeed all other methods of radioactive-decay-based time measurement are based on the _ASSUMPTION_ of how much radioactive material was present in the object to begin with, and that no already-decayed material was introduced. No matter how precise and accurate we can measure the carbon or other elements, this type of dating will allways be based on these assumptions.
You forgot the most logical and only non-arbitrary Prime Meridian, Giza. Giza sits on the meridian that covers the most landmass of any possible meridian on the planet. Strangely, it also sits on the line of latitude that covers the most landmass of any on earth. The Giza Prime Meridian was proposed when the current Prime Meridian was decided, but they chose to go with the politically convenient, and scientifically arbitrary, choice of Greenwich, England.
That would be a pole shift, something predicted by Charles Hapgood almost 50 years ago. What they fail to mention in the aricle is that the magnetic pole is _moving_, as well as getting weaker magnetically.
Hapgood studied the same deep sea cores, but also noted the direction of the magnetic alignment, not just it's polarity. By combining sea core data from around the world he mapped the position of the poles throughout history, and found that they had indeed not always been where they are today.
Moreover, the sea core data correlated with paleoclimatatology data that much of North America was under an ice sheet while much of Antarica was ice-free. His data put the NP in the Hudson Bay(60N,83W), and the SP off the coast of Antarica(60S,97E) at that time. This led to the obvious conclusion that the magnetic pole and the rotational axis were somehow linked. In short he theorized that the poles can and do shift, though the exact mechanism is unknown.
If you want to know more, read his book: Charles Hapgood, 'Path of the Pole' 1958. Foreword by Albert Einstien
And what method would you propose that could not be easily defeated by the mother board manufacturers?
They get all the specs for the processors and chipsets for the MB's they are building, they are in the ultimate position to circumvent any locks or artificial limits. After all, most such locks and artifical limits are easily defeated by the end users w/o that kind of info.
This makes me wonder though, could anti-circumvention laws be applied to things like this? Could it actually become illegal to overclock your own computer? Scary thought.
I had the same thing happen to my cable modem two weeks ago! Killed a TV, VCR, Cable Modem, Wireles Router, KVM, Camera Base/Printer, 2 Motherboards, 1 PS, and every NIC connected over ethernet (I think I remembered everything).
Only the machines that were on the wireless network, and miraclously one on ethernet, were spared. My poor BP6 was running in its motherboard box (because it was having problems grounding pins it shouldn't), it didn't fare well completely ungrounded. When I looked at the coax closest to the wall, there was no center pin, it had been vaoprized, and the inside was charred black. The inside of the wireless router was equally charred black, and the back of the upstream port was literally blown off!
Everything was on UPS's, even the TV and VCR on their own UPS (low rated, just for the clocks), but UPS's won't do you a lick of good if the surge doesn't come from the power lines. I learned that a surge protecter w/ coax or an in line DC blocker are a _MUST_ for cable modems! Trust me, watching god knows how many amps/volts tear across your network and destroy nearly everything in less than a second really sucks!
IMHO, the real value in SW RAID is the hardware independence.
If your HW RAID controller dies, you have to get another one of the same controller, and hope that you can re-import your config w/o losing all your data. If your running SW RAID and your SCSI/IDE controller dies, you can replace it w/ whatever is cheap/available at the time. As long as the failure itself didn't bork your data, you shouldn't have to do much, if anything, to see your data again.
If you can afford to get the top of the line SCSI RAID controller from a good vendor it's probably the better option, but if cost is an issue, IDE SW RAID is the only way to go.
Personally I think openmosix and a IBM PPC bladecenter woulbe be the ideal option, but as I recall openmosix hasn't been ported to PPC yet. In the short term, I think the Opterons will have better linux support, but IBM certainly has the resources to change that if they want to.
Consider with the bladeservers, you can fit 14 SMP blades into a 7U bladecenter, double the density of using Apple's offering. IBM's PPC blades are slightly cheaper than Apple's xserve too. Not to mention that the PPC blades cost about as much as the Xeon ones, and they actually come w/ both procs.
I don't even want to imagine the power bill for 28 P4 Xeons @~200w each!
Actually, the 'make all folders like current folder' doesn't work for that. You still have to Rt-Click > explore or turn on the folder bar every time you forget. You have to set explore to the default it you want it to work right, which is... a registry hack!
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\(Default)=explore
I'm used to having to change nearly every option in a filemanager to make it intuitive to the way I work, from win95 and up, and Gnome2.6 is no different. I don't particularly mind having to use gconf do it either, but it is excessive for the average user.
The only reason the setting could be consiered 'esoteric and dangerous' (as an earlier poster did)is because that's how they implemented it, completely disabling spatial browsing. If implemented as a preference as to which mode to defualt to when dbl-clicking, it's prefectly safe and should be in the prefs.
The fact that there is this much debate over the issue should clue in developers that maybe they should just let the user decide what THEY want, especially when they've allready coded both interfaces!
/begin rant
The problem I have is how they choose to selectively belive whatever parts of Plato's story that suit their particular purposes. They can't accept his timescale because it flys in the face of "known" history, so the just butcher it until Atlans
tis can be anywhere.
It's just too hard for people to accept that the Greeks and Romans got every bit of their 'advanced' knowledege from the egyptian libraries. But if you look at every great Greek thinker, they always came back from Alexandria with thier astounding new discoveries, without fail. It's plain for me to see that these men got there grand new ideas by reading them in very old books.
IMO, If you want to find Atlantis, you have to accept Plato's story as a whole, and not discount parts as it suits you. It may or may not ever be found, it may not even exist, but changing the criteria to match the find is not the way to go about it.
/ end rant
If they can afford to get a top end RAID5 setup from a quality vendor, it's the better choice. You can be relatively assured that when that raid controller dies in a few years, you can get another card that can import your config and recover your data.
If you are trying to do things on the cheap, and cannot get the top of the line RAID card, software RAID provides the hardware independence to upgrade cards and drives as needed, with what ever is cheapest at the time they fail. There is certainly a speed penalty for software, but thats the price you pay.
The hardware raid setups in between that can't hotswap and auto rebuild, just aren't worth the cost/flexibility tradeoff IMHO.
For that kind of money I'd rather have a real F1 car. With a 1.5 liter 4 cylinder that makes 1000bhp, or for qualifying laps more like 1500bhp. Not to mention tremendously better handling.
They sell 1U 2U 4U and 5U ATX cases for about $100, and I have been very pleased with mine. Sure it's probably not the best on the market, but it's pretty darn good for the cheapest. The rack itself is probably best bought used from a closing company. I got mine for $80 when my work closed an old building. Most tower cases start at $50+ these days, so it's not that much of a premium to pay.
It does have an expert mode, just type expert at the semi-graphical screen when the cd first loads up. One of the first things it asks is what priority level questions you want to see. You get to see all the numerous options that are probably right anyway, but it lets you confirm each one. I usually only revert to expert if the install failed to work for some reason.
I think if more than %50 of the people ignore this, they simply won't have to the resources to aduit a signifigant portion of the possible offenders to make it worth while. If %80 or more of the people ignored it, it would probably take so much manpower that they would just have to give up on it altogether.
I suppose the same holds true on a larger scale, if no one paid their taxes at all, where the hell would they start? But when was the last time everybody agreed on anything.
Note the line of dichotomy. On one side there is ample evidence of a long history of impacts of all sizes. The other side of the line is several kilometers lower in altitude, and relativly unscarred.
The current thinking that big craters = old craters and small = new needs to be re-examined. Even if the theory were to hold mostly true, we shouldn't arrange the cronology of craters on their size alone.
In order to support oceans, it is reasonable to assume that Mars must have also had the requisite atomsphere and magnetic/gravitational forces support it. The lack atmosphere and oceans can be explained by a near miss, but the loss of the magnetic and gravtiational energies can only be suffeciently explained by a very large impact.
The unscarred side of Mars would seem to indicate that this took place fairly recently, and I would say more recently than the advent of simple life here. I geuss we don't hae any definiteve way of dating the event yet, but my hunch is that it was more recent than we'd expect, even within the last 100 million years.
Slashdot Mirror
The point was not to provide the greatest compatibility, but rather just the opposite! MS requested that the lasers be designed in such a way to not read CDR/CDRW/DVDR/DVDRW, but still manage to read most retail pressed media.
This, I believe, is the root cause for the premature failures of the drives. The drives that most closely met what MS wanted (Thompson), are also the drives that most commonly fail . The drives that have the least problems (Samsung), can read the highest varity of disks. I think this is due to the fact that they have a retail brother (616T) and thus share many of the same parts.
I feel sure MS was warned of this possibility when they made the requests to manufacturers, and probably assumed that QC on retail discs would be high enough to not pose a problem. Just another case of copy protection at the cost of quality, or in this case longevity, of the product.
IMHO MS knowingly and intentionaly used substandard hardware with an unreasonably high rate of failure, and should be held responsible for it.
Windows Update was deployed not just for IE fixes, but for Windows and everything that comes with it. Without it, general issue OS service packs balloon in size, because they need to contain every fix, not just the ones that apply to you. IE benifits from this distribution system, but MS would not have deployed it for something as small as IE alone.
Moreover, Mozilla hasn't reached the threshold to really consider an update system, since it's still under heavy development, but we may see one by the time it hits 1.0.
Try removing/inserting an ISA card in a running machine sometime, it works flawlesly in anything w/ isapnp (win95,nt4,linux,etc) I'm sure it wasn't intentional when they layed out the ISA spec, but it works with the addidion of plug and play to the equation.
I agree with the need for compression, but it would have to be something lossless and quick, at the expense of compression ratio.
I've always wanted to see the Reed-Solomon routines get integrated into the filesystem. RAID is great, an PAR2 has opened up a lot of possibilities, but I still think it would be a good option to provide in the filesystem itself.
Encryption would be another great option, but it would have to be a method that actually deserves my trust, not ike the ntfs encryption.
Hopefully Reiser4 and plugins will make all that a reality in the near future.
not long, its allready been done.
VoIP Wi-Fi Phone
That one may not use skype, but its VOIP.
I think they wanted this to happen. Search old /. stories for 'xfree86' and see what I mean.
First, XFree86 Core Team Disbands, then X.org and XFree86 Reform. Then a week later, XFree86 Alters License. I realise the 'merger' turned out to be more of an exodus, but I think the project was ready to die anyway.
The license change was really just a way of prompting everyone to move on, while not completely abandoning them.
Thats all just my guess, take it or leave it.
Here's a cheaper possible alternative. Nostromo SpeedPad n52
I must admit I had not seen the GP post when I wrote that, and I don't agree with it. I just wanted to point out the fact that even our most trusted methods are still quite fallible.
I will present an interesting tidbit, not so much to show evidence for a 'new earth', but more to show that we don't know as much as we think we do.
The Geologist, Dec. 1862: "In Macoupin County, IL, the bones of a man were recently found on a coal bed capped with two feet of slate rock, ninety feet below the surface of the earth.... The bones, when found, were covered with a crust or caoting of hard glossy matter, as black as the coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural."
The IL State Geological Survey dates that coal formation between 286 and 320 million years old, in the Carboniferous period.
So is geology wrong? Is evolution wrong? Both?
My take is that all science is a set of theories, constantly changing, and always imperfect. We never really know anything, we just have theories.
Most importantly, those theories should never be taken as dogma, as that only leads to suppression of good evidence, and promotion of bad theory. If the theory and the evidence don't jive, the theory needs to change, not the evidence.
As for the 'new earth' thing, I don't buy it either. It doesn't appear to be based on good evidence or good theory from what I've seen.
Carbon-dating, and indeed all other methods of radioactive-decay-based time measurement are based on the _ASSUMPTION_ of how much radioactive material was present in the object to begin with, and that no already-decayed material was introduced. No matter how precise and accurate we can measure the carbon or other elements, this type of dating will allways be based on these assumptions.
You forgot the most logical and only non-arbitrary Prime Meridian, Giza. Giza sits on the meridian that covers the most landmass of any possible meridian on the planet. Strangely, it also sits on the line of latitude that covers the most landmass of any on earth. The Giza Prime Meridian was proposed when the current Prime Meridian was decided, but they chose to go with the politically convenient, and scientifically arbitrary, choice of Greenwich, England.
That would be a pole shift, something predicted by Charles Hapgood almost 50 years ago. What they fail to mention in the aricle is that the magnetic pole is _moving_, as well as getting weaker magnetically.
Hapgood studied the same deep sea cores, but also noted the direction of the magnetic alignment, not just it's polarity. By combining sea core data from around the world he mapped the position of the poles throughout history, and found that they had indeed not always been where they are today.
Moreover, the sea core data correlated with paleoclimatatology data that much of North America was under an ice sheet while much of Antarica was ice-free. His data put the NP in the Hudson Bay(60N,83W), and the SP off the coast of Antarica(60S,97E) at that time. This led to the obvious conclusion that the magnetic pole and the rotational axis were somehow linked. In short he theorized that the poles can and do shift, though the exact mechanism is unknown.
If you want to know more, read his book:
Charles Hapgood, 'Path of the Pole' 1958.
Foreword by Albert Einstien
Perhaps because Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Accord , just like the ICC and ABM treaties.
And what method would you propose that could not be easily defeated by the mother board manufacturers?
They get all the specs for the processors and chipsets for the MB's they are building, they are in the ultimate position to circumvent any locks or artificial limits. After all, most such locks and artifical limits are easily defeated by the end users w/o that kind of info.
This makes me wonder though, could anti-circumvention laws be applied to things like this? Could it actually become illegal to overclock your own computer? Scary thought.
I had the same thing happen to my cable modem two weeks ago! Killed a TV, VCR, Cable Modem, Wireles Router, KVM, Camera Base/Printer, 2 Motherboards, 1 PS, and every NIC connected over ethernet (I think I remembered everything).
Only the machines that were on the wireless network, and miraclously one on ethernet, were spared. My poor BP6 was running in its motherboard box (because it was having problems grounding pins it shouldn't), it didn't fare well completely ungrounded. When I looked at the coax closest to the wall, there was no center pin, it had been vaoprized, and the inside was charred black. The inside of the wireless router was equally charred black, and the back of the upstream port was literally blown off!
Everything was on UPS's, even the TV and VCR on their own UPS (low rated, just for the clocks), but UPS's won't do you a lick of good if the surge doesn't come from the power lines. I learned that a surge protecter w/ coax or an in line DC blocker are a _MUST_ for cable modems! Trust me, watching god knows how many amps/volts tear across your network and destroy nearly everything in less than a second really sucks!
IMHO, the real value in SW RAID is the hardware independence.
If your HW RAID controller dies, you have to get another one of the same controller, and hope that you can re-import your config w/o losing all your data. If your running SW RAID and your SCSI/IDE controller dies, you can replace it w/ whatever is cheap/available at the time. As long as the failure itself didn't bork your data, you shouldn't have to do much, if anything, to see your data again.
If you can afford to get the top of the line SCSI RAID controller from a good vendor it's probably the better option, but if cost is an issue, IDE SW RAID is the only way to go.
Personally I think openmosix and a IBM PPC bladecenter woulbe be the ideal option, but as I recall openmosix hasn't been ported to PPC yet. In the short term, I think the Opterons will have better linux support, but IBM certainly has the resources to change that if they want to.
Consider with the bladeservers, you can fit 14 SMP blades into a 7U bladecenter, double the density of using Apple's offering. IBM's PPC blades are slightly cheaper than Apple's xserve too. Not to mention that the PPC blades cost about as much as the Xeon ones, and they actually come w/ both procs.
I don't even want to imagine the power bill for 28 P4 Xeons @~200w each!
Actually, the 'make all folders like current folder' doesn't work for that. You still have to Rt-Click > explore or turn on the folder bar every time you forget. You have to set explore to the default it you want it to work right, which is... a registry hack!
e
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\(Default)=explor
I'm used to having to change nearly every option in a filemanager to make it intuitive to the way I work, from win95 and up, and Gnome2.6 is no different. I don't particularly mind having to use gconf do it either, but it is excessive for the average user.
The only reason the setting could be consiered 'esoteric and dangerous' (as an earlier poster did)is because that's how they implemented it, completely disabling spatial browsing. If implemented as a preference as to which mode to defualt to when dbl-clicking, it's prefectly safe and should be in the prefs.
The fact that there is this much debate over the issue should clue in developers that maybe they should just let the user decide what THEY want, especially when they've allready coded both interfaces!
/begin rant The problem I have is how they choose to selectively belive whatever parts of Plato's story that suit their particular purposes. They can't accept his timescale because it flys in the face of "known" history, so the just butcher it until Atlans tis can be anywhere. It's just too hard for people to accept that the Greeks and Romans got every bit of their 'advanced' knowledege from the egyptian libraries. But if you look at every great Greek thinker, they always came back from Alexandria with thier astounding new discoveries, without fail. It's plain for me to see that these men got there grand new ideas by reading them in very old books. IMO, If you want to find Atlantis, you have to accept Plato's story as a whole, and not discount parts as it suits you. It may or may not ever be found, it may not even exist, but changing the criteria to match the find is not the way to go about it. / end rant
If you don't know the registry well enough to know what it does just by the path alone, you don't need to be using regedit. period.
My basic rule of thumb is this:
If they can afford to get a top end RAID5 setup from a quality vendor, it's the better choice. You can be relatively assured that when that raid controller dies in a few years, you can get another card that can import your config and recover your data.
If you are trying to do things on the cheap, and cannot get the top of the line RAID card, software RAID provides the hardware independence to upgrade cards and drives as needed, with what ever is cheapest at the time they fail. There is certainly a speed penalty for software, but thats the price you pay.
The hardware raid setups in between that can't hotswap and auto rebuild, just aren't worth the cost/flexibility tradeoff IMHO.
For that kind of money I'd rather have a real F1 car. With a 1.5 liter 4 cylinder that makes 1000bhp, or for qualifying laps more like 1500bhp. Not to mention tremendously better handling.
Thats just me though.
http://www.skyhawkusa.com/products.htm
They sell 1U 2U 4U and 5U ATX cases for about $100, and I have been very pleased with mine. Sure it's probably not the best on the market, but it's pretty darn good for the cheapest. The rack itself is probably best bought used from a closing company. I got mine for $80 when my work closed an old building. Most tower cases start at $50+ these days, so it's not that much of a premium to pay.
It does have an expert mode, just type expert at the semi-graphical screen when the cd first loads up. One of the first things it asks is what priority level questions you want to see. You get to see all the numerous options that are probably right anyway, but it lets you confirm each one. I usually only revert to expert if the install failed to work for some reason.
I think if more than %50 of the people ignore this, they simply won't have to the resources to aduit a signifigant portion of the possible offenders to make it worth while. If %80 or more of the people ignored it, it would probably take so much manpower that they would just have to give up on it altogether.
I suppose the same holds true on a larger scale, if no one paid their taxes at all, where the hell would they start? But when was the last time everybody agreed on anything.
Note the line of dichotomy. On one side there is ample evidence of a long history of impacts of all sizes. The other side of the line is several kilometers lower in altitude, and relativly unscarred.
The current thinking that big craters = old craters and small = new needs to be re-examined. Even if the theory were to hold mostly true, we shouldn't arrange the cronology of craters on their size alone.
In order to support oceans, it is reasonable to assume that Mars must have also had the requisite atomsphere and magnetic/gravitational forces support it. The lack atmosphere and oceans can be explained by a near miss, but the loss of the magnetic and gravtiational energies can only be suffeciently explained by a very large impact.
The unscarred side of Mars would seem to indicate that this took place fairly recently, and I would say more recently than the advent of simple life here. I geuss we don't hae any definiteve way of dating the event yet, but my hunch is that it was more recent than we'd expect, even within the last 100 million years.