Open Source CAs are pretty straightforward. All the code is available, and people are already doing it. The difficult part is establishing the trust model. The root CA needs to be well managed. But, more difficult is the process for issuing new certificates. If you just give cert's out without strong validation of who you're giving it to, your trust model is worthless. If anyone can go in and freely get a cert, what confidence do you have that the cert holder is not a "bad guy"?
That's why commercial CA's, like Verisign,cost money, and provide a real service. They do try to verify the organization they give cert's to. It may not be perfect,and many people complain about how strong that validation is. I can imagine what those people would think about an open source CA, and their level of validation before providing certs.
AppleTV does have a component video out, in addition to the HDMI output.
But, the AppleTV is by no means perfect. It seems to be underpowered for much HDTV content. Their specs limit HD to 720p @ 24fps at up to 5Mbps. That is not enough to be very flexible with HD. But, it's still hard to say how good it will be, because Apple doesn't have any HD content available.
Hopefully the Vudu has a more capable video chip, which offloads more of the decoding process. Those chips are available, I'm surprised Apple didn't use a real decoder rather than a standard Nvidia GPU.
Also, if the Vudu is more open, and inter-operates well with UPnP apps, photo management apps (including iPhoto), it will be much better than the AppleTV. But, that's all theoretical, I have no knowledge of what their solution will be like.
No, there are no OS's without security issues. Even OpenBSD has had a few. Since Mac OS X uses many open standards / open source components, they benefit from the wide deployment, review, and testing that turns up bugs in that code and generates fixes. In closed OS's, the holes are still there, they just cannot be easily analyzed, so it's mostly the highly motivated "black hat" types that discover them and use them for their devious purposes.
The Mac ads clearly referred to all the viruses, worms, spyware, etc. Which are VERY common on Windows PCs, and for whatever reason, are very uncommon on Macs. (I don't really care why they are not prevalent on Macs, I just care that my MacBook Pro is free of exploits, as are my Linux servers.)
Patched bugs are a good thing. Bugs are practically unavoidable. Unpatched bugs, as evidenced by rampant exploits, are the real problem.
That depends on what you're doing. My MythTV server box stays quite active with recording, commercial flagging, transcoding, and more. Not to mention it also acts as an smb file server, daapd iTunes music server, dns server, www server, mysql server, and is often compiling huge projects -- like MythTV daily snapshots, while doing everything else. In particular, the HD video activities on the MythTV processes are CPU hungry, and can be impacted by limits in CPU, DIsk IO, or network bandwidth.
That's just a small home server.. I plan on getting even better utilization out of the replacement I'm putting together now with a Core2Duo processor. It will perform many of the same functions, but with a larger RAID array, and several virtual hosts under Xen, including moving MySQL to one VM, and running Windows 2000 in another for those occasional Windows apps I might need. When the quad core CPUs reach reasonable home-user prices, I'll move to one of them and pile even more on it.. I'm sure I'll be able to keep the cores warm.
But, even more important are the apps on the systems with direct user interaction.. like my MythTV frontend box or my MacBook Pro laptop. Dual cores allows me better performance when one or two CPU hungry apps are running, without impacting multimedia output (e.g. HD video). On my MacBook, I can play the H.264 video, without closing down everything else on my system, or keep various Windows apps running in Parallels, without killing the performance of the Mac apps also running (of course, you also want at least 2GB of RAM).
Well, it won't take me long to decide whether to view those or not..
Am I the only one that hates the move to video everywhere on the Internet? If I wanted video, I would watch TV. I get news from the Internet because I can at a glance decide which item I want more information on, of the dozens of items listed, and I can skim it or look through the whole thing based on my interest. With video, you lose all that. And, on the odd occasion I do check the video, I'm shocked at the low quality people are willing to put up with.
When I go to cnn.com, half the stories linked there are to videos. If I go to espn.com, it automatically loads a video advertisement and starts playing it (don't check espn.com at work, the audio blasting from your PC alerts everyone within 30 feet that you're goofing off). A good percentage of the links at digg.com are video (and a high percentage of the rest is garbage).
No thanks. I already use flashblock, to avoid most videos and advertisements. I also changed my site viewing habits to avoid primarily video sites.
Not really. Multi-core doesn't mean you need multi-threaded apps to benefit from it. Take a loot at the processes running on your Linux/Mac/Windows box some thime.. there are a lot of them. While process A is running on CPU 0, it doesn't need to be switched out to let process B run on CPU 1.
Web apps, like Ruby on Rails, is a good example of why multi-threading is not needed. Web servers handle many simultaneous requests, so the workload is easily divisible based on individual requests. The web server itself may be mutlithreaded, use multiple processes, or both, but the downstream apps like Ruby don't need to be MT.
You get a ton of benefit from multiple cores for web apps, or many other multi-process functions.
There are some examples where the CPU needed by a single process is greater than a single core (High bit-rate H.264 video comes to mind) and these apps must be carefully coded to use multithreading. But, for the vast majority of other apps, multithreading is not worth the effort/complexity.
> if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs
Wow, that's the IT equivalent of martial law.. or worse.
Complete lockdown, to assure the employees that they are untrustworthy risks to mother company. How's that working out for you?
The problem is, you're locking down more and more obscure attacks, that require many other security measures in order to be truly secure (you need to lock down all copying, secure all long term storage, disable any printing, ban all laptops, disable cut&paste, deny camera phones, etc.)
The overhead of operating in this manner is not worth the effort. It impacts all employees - the vast majority of them not spys, and generally hurts your business, and generaly decreases productivity. All to add security that can be trivially bypassed by a suitably motivated person (digital pictures of the document displayed on the screen are not hard to do).
No, this technology is not about protecting businesses or my personal financial information (which I'm sure will also be thrown in there as one of the big benefits.. anti-phishing). This is all about the big media companies colluding with big software companies and chip manufacturers to lock down PCs from those dirty users. No thanks. I can live without blue-ray movies on my laptop if this is the cost of entry.
There are other variables than "How does 'The West Wing' look in HD when I'm sitting on my couch". Such as:
- 1080p provides a good display option for the most common HD broadcast format, 1080i. Since most new displays are based on natively progressive technologies (DLP, LCD, LCOS), you can't just do a 1080i output. So, 1080p allows them to just paint the two 1080i fields together into a progressive frame for high quality display.
- 720p upscales to 1080p easily. Probably better then downscaling 1080i to 720p and losing information.
- Computers attached to HDTVs are becoming more and more common (not just game consoles, true computers). Scaling or interlacing has nasty effects on computer displays and all those thin horizontal/vertical lines and detailed fonts. 1080p gives a great display performance for Home Theater PCs.
- You are not always sitting 12-15' back from the TV. 1080p maintains the quality when you do venture closer to the set.
- Front Projectors are increasingly common (and cheap), so the display size can be quite large (100-120"), allowing you to see more of the 1080p detail.
All that said.. If I were buying a new display today, I would still stick with 720p, for two main reasons:
- Price / Performance. 720p displays are a bargain today, 1080p is still priced at a premium.
- Quality of available content. The majority of what I watch in HD is from broadcast TV. Many broadcasters are bit-starving their HD channel by broadcasting sub-channels ( e.g. an SD mirror of the main channel, a full-time weather/radar channel, or some new crap channel from the network in an effort to milk more advertising $$). So, the 1080i broadcasts do not live up to the format's capabilities. Watching The Masters last weekend proved that dramatically. My local broadcaster has the bandwidth divided up quite aggressively, so any scenes with fast movement quickly degrade into a mushy field of macroblocks. Utter garbage, and very disappointing.
> We're talking about large, well known companies which hack people's computers and sue little kids. "Bad press" is pretty obviously not a deterrent.
Yeah, but that's the point. That behavior is attributed to the RIAA and MPAA, which obscures the fact that the real villains here are the big record labels and movie companies. Those acronyms are thrown around in the articles, as if they are independant entities.
When Sony got the bad press for their "root kit", they went into damage control mode, got a lot of ill will form the general public, and even had the opportunistic congressmen flaming them. They DO react to bad press, which is why I think removing the middle-man and making it very clear to the general public who the responsible parties are.
I don't like attributing these things to the lobbying organizations, MPAA and RIAA. That helps them hide the real source of this behavior. The companies who think they are above the law, and fund those organizations to use tactics like this. Why no give full credit where it is due:
RIAA is primarily: EMI, Sony/BMG, Universal, and Warner
MPAA is primarily: Disney, Sony, Paramount/Viacom, Fox, Universal, and Warner
So, we're not talking about some evil rogue organization that wants to legalize their fraudulent activities.. We're talking about large, well known companies, which would think twice about their means if they started to get bad press.
** I'm not supporting piracy here. They have the right to protect their property, and should crack down on those pirating it. But, they should do it within the law, and without subverting our political system to buy congressmen and legislation to change the rules.
They own the code. They can do whatever they want with it.
I was a big fan of BeOS. I went to their first demo-tour in Ann Arbor, way back when. I never bought a dual processor PowerPC BeBox, but I did install and use it once it became available for intel. So, I think their letting BeOS whither and die is a HUGE waste of all that good code, with incredible multimedia capabilities and many other advances that are still not met in Mac OS or Linux (and certainly not Windows).
When they were negotiating with Apple, I was ready to make the jump to Mac OS. (I eventually moved to Mac OS (NeXTStep based), after a while, because it was the best available desktop OS). When Palm bought the code, I was ready to more to using Palm devices. But, since they never released a product based on it, I never bought a Palm.
I, too would love to see a BeOS operating system available. But, it's their code. They are under no responsibility to release it, allow other people to benefit from it, or release the code. Such is life.
Well, yeah. I don't think they expect this to be a really high volume seller. It's just pushing up the topo'theline machine to new levels. People in businesses with big budgets, or people who can actually benefit from the horsepower (primarily video editing, maybe professional audio, perhaps pro photography) might go for it. Apple's media apps are already designed to use multi-core pretty well.
But, in general, it's just showing off and staking their claim as a serious performance option. Then, expecting most people to buy the more reasonably priced versions, or the iMacs.
It is probably worth a try.. I like Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4, but I'm not overly impressed with the accuracy and relevance of its results. I'm hoping it gets refined in Leopard and beyond. It often returns too many results that are not relevant. It seems like Spotlight needs a couple more controls to tweak the search.
I already get the GMail search effect, since I download a copy of my GMail messages to Apple's Mail application via POP3.
So, the real test comes down to how effective the Google system search is, compared to Spotlight. I'll probably give it a try. But, it will need to be clearly better to justify keeping another piece of software installed & running.
The article claims that Windows still requires the old compatibility modes to boot. Is this true? I could see how Win95-like OS's could because they basically boot on DOS. But, for NT and beyond, wouldn't they be fine with removing those old legacy capabilities?
The question that leads to is: What is gained by removing the legacy junk? The guy from Xen-Source in the article claimed "There's no reason why they couldn't ditch 60 percent of the transistors on the chip, most of which are for legacy modes." Which seems ridiculous. Maybe he's talking about 60% of the silicon in a certain subsystem of the CPU, because it certainly can't remove 60% of the total transistors.
If the savings is minimal, and those modes don't effect anything once you've changed to 32 or 64 bit protected mode, then maybe it's a moot point.
To really shift the Instruction Set, you obviously have to do it in an evolutionary way. Such as, allowing access to the lower level IS (i.e. the instructions that the x86 gets translated into) in a virtual machine environment. So, you could have a more efficient Linux OS running in a VM, and if the benefits of that are substantial, more people might use that mode for the host OS (which could then run x86 VMs for legacy). It's easy to see that being used for Linux and even Mac OS as their portability is already proven, and they began as modern OS's - working only in protected mode.
It uses a thin "hypervisor" layer os the Host OS, rather than a general purpose OS. The hypervisor is built to host virtual clients, so I would expect it to provide better performance than doing it on Linux. But, in any virtualization environment, there will surely be some overhead, and the performance will be lower than the client OS on raw hardware.
What are you talking about? Noone can tell the difference between true HD and downconverted SD? That's what he's talking about. The Tivo can record encrypted HD channels, because it has CableCard cards.
The Tivo cannot use those channels, so it would either need to record the SD version of the channel (ESPN vs. ESPN-HD), or control the cable box & record the S-Video (standard definition) output of ESPN-HD. There are no HD encoder cards available in the home-user price range.
The difference between a High Definition channel and the Standard Definition version is HUGE.
Despite this, I still use MythTV, because most of the programs that I watch are either broadcast over the air in (unscrambled)HD or are only available in SD. The big exception is ESPN-HD, but I can live without that.
For others moving from Linux to Mac OS X, like I did (for my laptop at least, my server & mythtv boxes are still Linux), iTerm is the first thing to install. Mac OS X has a terminal program, but it's weak at best. iTerm is a good terminal program, with multiple tabs and cutomizable display settings.
It looks like it might be an interesting device... Although, not much different than something like the OQO devices that are already available.
I just don't think a scaled down laptop is going to cut it. On the one hand, it's too small to be used efficiently as a laptop, on the other, it's too large to be a carry-everywhere device.
I think the better direction is a mid-sized tablet device. Not a clunky windows PC with tablet functions duct taped on, like MS has provided thus far. I'm thinking more of a scaled up iPhone-like device. Maybe 5in x 7in, or so, thin and durable.
Give a couple generations of low power CPU improvements, battery enhancements (or alternatives), and especially software development, and you may have a device that people would actually carry.
There was a Greg Egan book, maybe Teranesia, where the main character carried a small tablet device like this. He made a convincing description of the device in an environment of high CPU power, embedded GPS-like positioning, and ubiquitous high speed Internet access. That's all I want.. is that so hard?
In these days of outrageous compensation, with CEO's being gifted $200Million on retirement, it seems pretty reasonable to me that the inventor of a wildly popular technology would be compensated for it.
Or, how about Creative's settlement with Apple.. $100Million for a ridiculously obvious text menu system?
Consider how much the companies using the technology have made. Would it be better if that $1Billion was instead given 60% to Apple and the remaining 40% divided among the various other players?
If anything, it sounds like they were not compensated well enough (setting aside the whole issue of whether an algorithm should be patentable).
The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue. The issues were egregious violations of corporate security policy, and basic logic:
- His position at Intel was not involved in security, intrusion detection, or other areas that might actually call for "white hat hacking" as part of the job function. He was a contractor, not an Intel employee, which I'm sure made Intel even more concerned about his security violations.
- He had installed backdoors on Intel machines, which allowed him to access the Intel network from outside the company.
- He took passwd files and ran cracking tools against them to break other users passwords.
- Not only was he cracking password files from Intel organizations, he was using Intel systems to crack password files from other companies, including O'Reilly and Associates.
See this writeup for information from the person involved in shutting him down.
Whether this was "white hat" hacking could be debated. In any case, it was fucking stupid. Bypassing network security for an inbound back door?!? Cracking password files from other companies on Intel computers?!? These are just stupid moves, which anyone should expect to get fired for doing.
Yup, I'm in the same boat. Lately their DNS has been extremely shitty too. So, even requesting a valid name is slow and often fails.. a lookup for www.google.com failed and took me to their page. Of course, I opted out (which is bullshit, because it's cookie based and thus cannot help for non-browser apps), and it took me instead to microsoft's search rather than responding correctly with a DNS error. I'm also using a Mac, so the Microsoft search site is definitely not my default search.
So, I changed my router to use DNS servers I configured: 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4 Those servers behave correctly (as defined by the DNS RFC's) so I no longer have Charter's crap. Unfortunately, 99% of Charter customers will not realize what's happening and will suffer because of it.
After recently picking up a Digital SLR camera, I started looking around at the photo processing/management options. I tried both Aperture and Lightroom on my MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo, 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM). Everybody says the performance of Aperture is bad, but I found it to be fine on my machine. Maybe I'm not pushing as much data around as a professional photographer, but it handled my 10 MegaPixel RAW files fine. Of course, the app could be whittled down a bit, it has a huge memory footprint, and obviously doesn't fare well on older hardware.
But, probably the main thing that I like about Aperture is the full-screen editing/viewing mode. iPhoto 6 also has this, and when you're working in the smaller real estate of a 15" laptop display, it makes a huge difference. Maybe if I had a 20-30" external display it wouldn't be such a big deal. But, for laptop users, full screen mode is a must-have.
Also, iPhoto 6 doesn't have all the capabilities for workflow stuff. But, it's a pretty good alternative for non=professionals.
I also have Charter broadband (and am using Firefox on a MacBook Pro), and it does do the silly redirection for me.
It gives you a choice to "opt out", but that can only work for www browsers, since it relies on cookies. So, any other apps making network connections are subject to their redirections.
I hope there will be enough customer pushback to get this reversed. But, I'm not sure there will be. Most users won't realize what's happening. And, I personally don't have any other broadband options.. it's either charter or dialup.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Source CAs are pretty straightforward. All the code is available, and people are already doing it. The difficult part is establishing the trust model. The root CA needs to be well managed. But, more difficult is the process for issuing new certificates. If you just give cert's out without strong validation of who you're giving it to, your trust model is worthless. If anyone can go in and freely get a cert, what confidence do you have that the cert holder is not a "bad guy"?
That's why commercial CA's, like Verisign,cost money, and provide a real service. They do try to verify the organization they give cert's to. It may not be perfect,and many people complain about how strong that validation is. I can imagine what those people would think about an open source CA, and their level of validation before providing certs.
AppleTV does have a component video out, in addition to the HDMI output.
But, the AppleTV is by no means perfect. It seems to be underpowered for much HDTV content. Their specs limit HD to 720p @ 24fps at up to 5Mbps. That is not enough to be very flexible with HD. But, it's still hard to say how good it will be, because Apple doesn't have any HD content available.
Hopefully the Vudu has a more capable video chip, which offloads more of the decoding process. Those chips are available, I'm surprised Apple didn't use a real decoder rather than a standard Nvidia GPU.
Also, if the Vudu is more open, and inter-operates well with UPnP apps, photo management apps (including iPhoto), it will be much better than the AppleTV. But, that's all theoretical, I have no knowledge of what their solution will be like.
No, I think I'll wait for the unbelievably fair scheduler, or perhaps the ridiculously fair scheduler.
No, there are no OS's without security issues. Even OpenBSD has had a few. Since Mac OS X uses many open standards / open source components, they benefit from the wide deployment, review, and testing that turns up bugs in that code and generates fixes. In closed OS's, the holes are still there, they just cannot be easily analyzed, so it's mostly the highly motivated "black hat" types that discover them and use them for their devious purposes.
The Mac ads clearly referred to all the viruses, worms, spyware, etc. Which are VERY common on Windows PCs, and for whatever reason, are very uncommon on Macs. (I don't really care why they are not prevalent on Macs, I just care that my MacBook Pro is free of exploits, as are my Linux servers.)
Patched bugs are a good thing. Bugs are practically unavoidable. Unpatched bugs, as evidenced by rampant exploits, are the real problem.
That depends on what you're doing. My MythTV server box stays quite active with recording, commercial flagging, transcoding, and more. Not to mention it also acts as an smb file server, daapd iTunes music server, dns server, www server, mysql server, and is often compiling huge projects -- like MythTV daily snapshots, while doing everything else. In particular, the HD video activities on the MythTV processes are CPU hungry, and can be impacted by limits in CPU, DIsk IO, or network bandwidth.
That's just a small home server.. I plan on getting even better utilization out of the replacement I'm putting together now with a Core2Duo processor. It will perform many of the same functions, but with a larger RAID array, and several virtual hosts under Xen, including moving MySQL to one VM, and running Windows 2000 in another for those occasional Windows apps I might need. When the quad core CPUs reach reasonable home-user prices, I'll move to one of them and pile even more on it.. I'm sure I'll be able to keep the cores warm.
But, even more important are the apps on the systems with direct user interaction.. like my MythTV frontend box or my MacBook Pro laptop. Dual cores allows me better performance when one or two CPU hungry apps are running, without impacting multimedia output (e.g. HD video). On my MacBook, I can play the H.264 video, without closing down everything else on my system, or keep various Windows apps running in Parallels, without killing the performance of the Mac apps also running (of course, you also want at least 2GB of RAM).
Well, it won't take me long to decide whether to view those or not..
Am I the only one that hates the move to video everywhere on the Internet? If I wanted video, I would watch TV. I get news from the Internet because I can at a glance decide which item I want more information on, of the dozens of items listed, and I can skim it or look through the whole thing based on my interest. With video, you lose all that. And, on the odd occasion I do check the video, I'm shocked at the low quality people are willing to put up with.
When I go to cnn.com, half the stories linked there are to videos. If I go to espn.com, it automatically loads a video advertisement and starts playing it (don't check espn.com at work, the audio blasting from your PC alerts everyone within 30 feet that you're goofing off). A good percentage of the links at digg.com are video (and a high percentage of the rest is garbage).
No thanks. I already use flashblock, to avoid most videos and advertisements. I also changed my site viewing habits to avoid primarily video sites.
Not really. Multi-core doesn't mean you need multi-threaded apps to benefit from it. Take a loot at the processes running on your Linux/Mac/Windows box some thime.. there are a lot of them. While process A is running on CPU 0, it doesn't need to be switched out to let process B run on CPU 1.
Web apps, like Ruby on Rails, is a good example of why multi-threading is not needed. Web servers handle many simultaneous requests, so the workload is easily divisible based on individual requests. The web server itself may be mutlithreaded, use multiple processes, or both, but the downstream apps like Ruby don't need to be MT.
You get a ton of benefit from multiple cores for web apps, or many other multi-process functions.
There are some examples where the CPU needed by a single process is greater than a single core (High bit-rate H.264 video comes to mind) and these apps must be carefully coded to use multithreading. But, for the vast majority of other apps, multithreading is not worth the effort/complexity.
> if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs
Wow, that's the IT equivalent of martial law.. or worse.
Complete lockdown, to assure the employees that they are untrustworthy risks to mother company. How's that working out for you?
The problem is, you're locking down more and more obscure attacks, that require many other security measures in order to be truly secure (you need to lock down all copying, secure all long term storage, disable any printing, ban all laptops, disable cut&paste, deny camera phones, etc.)
The overhead of operating in this manner is not worth the effort. It impacts all employees - the vast majority of them not spys, and generally hurts your business, and generaly decreases productivity. All to add security that can be trivially bypassed by a suitably motivated person (digital pictures of the document displayed on the screen are not hard to do).
No, this technology is not about protecting businesses or my personal financial information (which I'm sure will also be thrown in there as one of the big benefits.. anti-phishing). This is all about the big media companies colluding with big software companies and chip manufacturers to lock down PCs from those dirty users. No thanks. I can live without blue-ray movies on my laptop if this is the cost of entry.
There are other variables than "How does 'The West Wing' look in HD when I'm sitting on my couch". Such as:
- 1080p provides a good display option for the most common HD broadcast format, 1080i. Since most new displays are based on natively progressive technologies (DLP, LCD, LCOS), you can't just do a 1080i output. So, 1080p allows them to just paint the two 1080i fields together into a progressive frame for high quality display.
- 720p upscales to 1080p easily. Probably better then downscaling 1080i to 720p and losing information.
- Computers attached to HDTVs are becoming more and more common (not just game consoles, true computers). Scaling or interlacing has nasty effects on computer displays and all those thin horizontal/vertical lines and detailed fonts. 1080p gives a great display performance for Home Theater PCs.
- You are not always sitting 12-15' back from the TV. 1080p maintains the quality when you do venture closer to the set.
- Front Projectors are increasingly common (and cheap), so the display size can be quite large (100-120"), allowing you to see more of the 1080p detail.
All that said.. If I were buying a new display today, I would still stick with 720p, for two main reasons:
- Price / Performance. 720p displays are a bargain today, 1080p is still priced at a premium.
- Quality of available content. The majority of what I watch in HD is from broadcast TV. Many broadcasters are bit-starving their HD channel by broadcasting sub-channels ( e.g. an SD mirror of the main channel, a full-time weather/radar channel, or some new crap channel from the network in an effort to milk more advertising $$). So, the 1080i broadcasts do not live up to the format's capabilities. Watching The Masters last weekend proved that dramatically. My local broadcaster has the bandwidth divided up quite aggressively, so any scenes with fast movement quickly degrade into a mushy field of macroblocks. Utter garbage, and very disappointing.
> We're talking about large, well known companies which hack people's computers and sue little kids. "Bad press" is pretty obviously not a deterrent.
Yeah, but that's the point. That behavior is attributed to the RIAA and MPAA, which obscures the fact that the real villains here are the big record labels and movie companies. Those acronyms are thrown around in the articles, as if they are independant entities.
When Sony got the bad press for their "root kit", they went into damage control mode, got a lot of ill will form the general public, and even had the opportunistic congressmen flaming them. They DO react to bad press, which is why I think removing the middle-man and making it very clear to the general public who the responsible parties are.
I don't like attributing these things to the lobbying organizations, MPAA and RIAA. That helps them hide the real source of this behavior. The companies who think they are above the law, and fund those organizations to use tactics like this. Why no give full credit where it is due:
RIAA is primarily: EMI, Sony/BMG, Universal, and Warner
MPAA is primarily: Disney, Sony, Paramount/Viacom, Fox, Universal, and Warner
So, we're not talking about some evil rogue organization that wants to legalize their fraudulent activities.. We're talking about large, well known companies, which would think twice about their means if they started to get bad press.
** I'm not supporting piracy here. They have the right to protect their property, and should crack down on those pirating it. But, they should do it within the law, and without subverting our political system to buy congressmen and legislation to change the rules.
They own the code. They can do whatever they want with it.
I was a big fan of BeOS. I went to their first demo-tour in Ann Arbor, way back when. I never bought a dual processor PowerPC BeBox, but I did install and use it once it became available for intel. So, I think their letting BeOS whither and die is a HUGE waste of all that good code, with incredible multimedia capabilities and many other advances that are still not met in Mac OS or Linux (and certainly not Windows).
When they were negotiating with Apple, I was ready to make the jump to Mac OS. (I eventually moved to Mac OS (NeXTStep based), after a while, because it was the best available desktop OS). When Palm bought the code, I was ready to more to using Palm devices. But, since they never released a product based on it, I never bought a Palm.
I, too would love to see a BeOS operating system available. But, it's their code. They are under no responsibility to release it, allow other people to benefit from it, or release the code. Such is life.
Well, yeah. I don't think they expect this to be a really high volume seller. It's just pushing up the topo'theline machine to new levels. People in businesses with big budgets, or people who can actually benefit from the horsepower (primarily video editing, maybe professional audio, perhaps pro photography) might go for it. Apple's media apps are already designed to use multi-core pretty well.
But, in general, it's just showing off and staking their claim as a serious performance option. Then, expecting most people to buy the more reasonably priced versions, or the iMacs.
It is probably worth a try.. I like Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4, but I'm not overly impressed with the accuracy and relevance of its results. I'm hoping it gets refined in Leopard and beyond. It often returns too many results that are not relevant. It seems like Spotlight needs a couple more controls to tweak the search.
I already get the GMail search effect, since I download a copy of my GMail messages to Apple's Mail application via POP3.
So, the real test comes down to how effective the Google system search is, compared to Spotlight. I'll probably give it a try. But, it will need to be clearly better to justify keeping another piece of software installed & running.
The article claims that Windows still requires the old compatibility modes to boot. Is this true? I could see how Win95-like OS's could because they basically boot on DOS. But, for NT and beyond, wouldn't they be fine with removing those old legacy capabilities?
The question that leads to is: What is gained by removing the legacy junk? The guy from Xen-Source in the article claimed "There's no reason why they couldn't ditch 60 percent of the transistors on the chip, most of which are for legacy modes." Which seems ridiculous. Maybe he's talking about 60% of the silicon in a certain subsystem of the CPU, because it certainly can't remove 60% of the total transistors.
If the savings is minimal, and those modes don't effect anything once you've changed to 32 or 64 bit protected mode, then maybe it's a moot point.
To really shift the Instruction Set, you obviously have to do it in an evolutionary way. Such as, allowing access to the lower level IS (i.e. the instructions that the x86 gets translated into) in a virtual machine environment. So, you could have a more efficient Linux OS running in a VM, and if the benefits of that are substantial, more people might use that mode for the host OS (which could then run x86 VMs for legacy). It's easy to see that being used for Linux and even Mac OS as their portability is already proven, and they began as modern OS's - working only in protected mode.
It uses a thin "hypervisor" layer os the Host OS, rather than a general purpose OS. The hypervisor is built to host virtual clients, so I would expect it to provide better performance than doing it on Linux. But, in any virtualization environment, there will surely be some overhead, and the performance will be lower than the client OS on raw hardware.
Oops, submitted that too quickly. Obviously the second paragraph should be "MythTV cannot use those channels" because it doesn't support CableCard.
What are you talking about? Noone can tell the difference between true HD and downconverted SD? That's what he's talking about. The Tivo can record encrypted HD channels, because it has CableCard cards.
The Tivo cannot use those channels, so it would either need to record the SD version of the channel (ESPN vs. ESPN-HD), or control the cable box & record the S-Video (standard definition) output of ESPN-HD. There are no HD encoder cards available in the home-user price range.
The difference between a High Definition channel and the Standard Definition version is HUGE.
Despite this, I still use MythTV, because most of the programs that I watch are either broadcast over the air in (unscrambled)HD or are only available in SD. The big exception is ESPN-HD, but I can live without that.
For others moving from Linux to Mac OS X, like I did (for my laptop at least, my server & mythtv boxes are still Linux), iTerm is the first thing to install. Mac OS X has a terminal program, but it's weak at best. iTerm is a good terminal program, with multiple tabs and cutomizable display settings.
http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
It looks like it might be an interesting device... Although, not much different than something like the OQO devices that are already available.
I just don't think a scaled down laptop is going to cut it. On the one hand, it's too small to be used efficiently as a laptop, on the other, it's too large to be a carry-everywhere device.
I think the better direction is a mid-sized tablet device. Not a clunky windows PC with tablet functions duct taped on, like MS has provided thus far. I'm thinking more of a scaled up iPhone-like device. Maybe 5in x 7in, or so, thin and durable.
Give a couple generations of low power CPU improvements, battery enhancements (or alternatives), and especially software development, and you may have a device that people would actually carry.
There was a Greg Egan book, maybe Teranesia, where the main character carried a small tablet device like this. He made a convincing description of the device in an environment of high CPU power, embedded GPS-like positioning, and ubiquitous high speed Internet access. That's all I want.. is that so hard?
In these days of outrageous compensation, with CEO's being gifted $200Million on retirement, it seems pretty reasonable to me that the inventor of a wildly popular technology would be compensated for it.
Or, how about Creative's settlement with Apple.. $100Million for a ridiculously obvious text menu system?
Consider how much the companies using the technology have made. Would it be better if that $1Billion was instead given 60% to Apple and the remaining 40% divided among the various other players?
If anything, it sounds like they were not compensated well enough (setting aside the whole issue of whether an algorithm should be patentable).
The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue. The issues were egregious violations of corporate security policy, and basic logic:
- His position at Intel was not involved in security, intrusion detection, or other areas that might actually call for "white hat hacking" as part of the job function. He was a contractor, not an Intel employee, which I'm sure made Intel even more concerned about his security violations.
- He had installed backdoors on Intel machines, which allowed him to access the Intel network from outside the company.
- He took passwd files and ran cracking tools against them to break other users passwords.
- Not only was he cracking password files from Intel organizations, he was using Intel systems to crack password files from other companies, including O'Reilly and Associates.
See this writeup for information from the person involved in shutting him down.
Whether this was "white hat" hacking could be debated. In any case, it was fucking stupid. Bypassing network security for an inbound back door?!? Cracking password files from other companies on Intel computers?!? These are just stupid moves, which anyone should expect to get fired for doing.
Yup, I'm in the same boat. Lately their DNS has been extremely shitty too. So, even requesting a valid name is slow and often fails.. a lookup for www.google.com failed and took me to their page. Of course, I opted out (which is bullshit, because it's cookie based and thus cannot help for non-browser apps), and it took me instead to microsoft's search rather than responding correctly with a DNS error. I'm also using a Mac, so the Microsoft search site is definitely not my default search.
So, I changed my router to use DNS servers I configured: 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4
Those servers behave correctly (as defined by the DNS RFC's) so I no longer have Charter's crap. Unfortunately, 99% of Charter customers will not realize what's happening and will suffer because of it.
After recently picking up a Digital SLR camera, I started looking around at the photo processing/management options. I tried both Aperture and Lightroom on my MacBook Pro (Core2 Duo, 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM). Everybody says the performance of Aperture is bad, but I found it to be fine on my machine. Maybe I'm not pushing as much data around as a professional photographer, but it handled my 10 MegaPixel RAW files fine. Of course, the app could be whittled down a bit, it has a huge memory footprint, and obviously doesn't fare well on older hardware.
But, probably the main thing that I like about Aperture is the full-screen editing/viewing mode. iPhoto 6 also has this, and when you're working in the smaller real estate of a 15" laptop display, it makes a huge difference. Maybe if I had a 20-30" external display it wouldn't be such a big deal. But, for laptop users, full screen mode is a must-have.
Also, iPhoto 6 doesn't have all the capabilities for workflow stuff. But, it's a pretty good alternative for non=professionals.
I also have Charter broadband (and am using Firefox on a MacBook Pro), and it does do the silly redirection for me.
It gives you a choice to "opt out", but that can only work for www browsers, since it relies on cookies. So, any other apps making network connections are subject to their redirections.
I hope there will be enough customer pushback to get this reversed. But, I'm not sure there will be. Most users won't realize what's happening. And, I personally don't have any other broadband options.. it's either charter or dialup.