The resolution is 640x360. Good for playing the original Wolfenstein... That is just about the only use I can think of. I suppose video would work, if you don't make the "screen" larger than 12" or so. Web browsing is not particularly realistic. You are better off just ignoring the projector and sticking with the 4" 800x480 screen on the phone.
"On Intel CPUs sysret to non-canonical address causes a fault on the sysret instruction itself after the stack pointer is set to guest value but before the CPL is changed. Systems running on AMD CPUs are not vulnerable to this issue as sysret on AMD CPUs does not generate a fault before the CPL change."
It is arguable whether it is a CPU bug or an OS/hypervisor bug. The CPU should not run the fault code with privileges, but on the other hand the OS should prevent the fault code from being called in the first place. AMD got the CPU part right, Intel didn't. I don't think anyone got the OS/hypervisor part right except by accident. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is not exploitable due to the way it limits task virtual memory to 511 GB. VMWare doesn't use sysret, so that isn't exploitable either.
No, there's much more missing than just the large screen and keyboard: Office applications, for one. A web browser is not enough.
Is there any point to office applications these days? I used to depend on Word/OpenOffice.org to read/edit documents, usually documents which arrived by email. Now I can't remember the last time I received anything but a PDF in an email. Internal stuff is all Wiki or otherwise web; if I need to share it with a partner I just print to PDF or copy from the Wiki into the email.
Actually that's not quite true, I have received quite a few Excel sheets too. I could actually do with a spreadsheet extension on the internal Wiki, now that I think about it.
You must not use it. It falls out at whim and is easily damaged. IDE,PCI and USB do not suffer from those epic failure points.
USB and SATA were criticized for the exact same failings. IDE certainly does not fall out on a whim, but it is quite easy to damage; it is useless if you plan to plug/unplug more than say once a week. Luckily IDE is dead. PCI does not have any locking mechanism built in, that is entirely up to the cases. The cases generally do a good job of it, but then cases could also provide proper locking mechanisms for HDMI -- it isn't the fault of the connector that they don't.
Micro USB is truly brilliant though, you can throw a device down on the connector and the cable will break, not the phone.
It's possible that while the run time is shorter, the power draw is higher--possibly more than proportionally higher.
Possible, but very unlikely. Current processors are quite bad at running at "half power", i.e. if not all function units are running full speed they still waste power. The scheduling strategy "hurry up and wait" still tends to beat other strategies, because modern CPU's are so very good at saving power when idling. You would have to waste an enormous amount of power during the "hurry up" part of the strategy to not win in the end during the "wait" phase.
In a few years this may change, as systems get better at handling partial load. If you could e.g. only keep the memory chips which are used by the current task awake, that would help quite a bit. Today it is AFAIK either all memory chips awake at once or all of them in power save mode. Software support would be fun, as the OS would have to try to keep the working set on as few memory chips as possible.
That is because Medicare is not a normal public system. It has most of the overhead associated with private systems. With Medicare you get to combine the disadvantages of a private system with the disadvantages of a public system.
If the government just paid your doctor wages instead of treating him like a small business, he would spend vastly more time treating patients and vastly less time dealing with paperwork. Why do we ask him to justify that he is useful, he's a doctor!
That said, for some reason general practitioners seem to be handled as small businesses in many countries with otherwise public systems. I do not get why.
You don't have to be rich to afford health care. You have to be rich to afford all the bullshit bureaucracy that comes with government healthcare.
Err what bureaucracy? People get treated, staff get paid, supplies get bought, all without having to justify every treatment (or decision to not treat) to insurance companies and lawyers.
Try comparing the part of total hospital staff who are doctors/nurses/porters/cleaners in a private system vs. a public system. You will find that the overhead is much lower in the public system, and it only gets worse when you consider how many are employed on the insurer side.
You can argue that the private system forces doctors and nurses to make better choices for their patients, but you cannot argue that it has lower overhead.
It seems to have been a somewhat reluctantly accepted theory though. Like, we know that all waves need a medium to move in, but we just can't find that medium. Still it HAS to be there, so we'll call it phlogiston.
Much like dark matter and dark energy today: Current theories require that they exist and so we give them names. At the same time everyone is quietly hoping that a proper explanation will turn up and we can either rename them or decide they don't exist after all.
Relativity theory was groundbreaking, to be sure, but both special and general relativity were widely accepted within a few years of publication because they so neatly solved so many problems which had been bugging so many physicists.
There was still a lot of resistance to relativity for a quite a while. Note that his Nobel Prize was awarded for the photoelectric effect, not for relativity.
A whole book has been written about the reception of the Theory of Relativity, so we probably can't do the subject justice in a few Slashdot comments. (No, I haven't read the book).
Looking at this from another direction, what happens if someone writes a proprietary library that duplicates the function of a GPL library? Does that infringe? I don't think so, because it doesn't use the GPL library, it replaces it. Now, what if someone (maybe even the same person or company) writes a proprietary program that uses this proprietary replacement? Does either the program or the proprietary library infringe? Again, I don't think so. Now for the really interesting part: what if someone runs the proprietary program with the now plug-compatible GPL library? Is anyone infringing? If so, who?
Your proposal is quite well know as "user-does-the-link". It works under 2 conditions: a) copyright law does not forbid linking without explicit license permission and b) you are not distributing the GPL library. The trick is that you do not have to accept the GPL to run a GPL'd program, only to distribute it.
Condition a) hopefully holds, although you never know when courts can decide that copying from disk to RAM is a copyright infringement unless you have a license allowing it. Condition b) is there because if you DO distribute the two together, you HAVE to accept the GPL, and then you have to abide by the GPL interpretation of derivative works even if it is broader than what normal copyright law requires.
Therefore neither you nor the user violate the GPL because neither of you have to accept the terms of the GPL at all!
Anyway, this is not a very useful exception because the only GPL library you are likely to encounter is the readline library, and that has at least one BSD-licensed implementation.
Why is that insightful? Everything takes longer to describe than it does to create. Duh
You're probably better at creating than I am, but in general I can describe code faster than I can create it. At least if "create" includes getting it somewhat debugged and vaguely correct. Doubly so if I'm writing XSLT...
If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does it mean I can use header files from Linux in my proprietary kernel module without having to go through all sorts of wrappers?
You certainly can. But beware, there is non-API in the header files too! Some of them contain inline functions or macros, and you cannot necessarily use those.
If you distribute your kernel module along with the kernel you have to accept the GPL terms with its definition of derived works which may be wider than the usual copyright law interpretation of derived works. This is mostly a problem if you are selling something with Linux preinstalled including proprietary modules.
It's all a bit moot though, nobody sues over Linux kernel license violations.
Yes, they make tiny little cavities inside the coax cabling where they install the fibre runs. Don't ever look at a Virgin cable when it isn't attached, it might blind you!
You can't meaningfully insure against this kind of flood unless you are government-sized. If you make a mistake in the modelling, then what you have to pay out is larger than what any company has available -- simply because all your clients have to be paid at once. You can try to reinsure, but not even Lloyds is big enough for this one.
Insurance only works if risk is spread out so you are reasonably sure that not everyone gets hit at once -- the ones who don't get flooded have to pay for those who do get flooded. In this case there might not be any who don't get flooded.
Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued.
The second does not follow from the first. You can easily make a legal system which allows suing corporations without calling them legal persons. It was just laziness that prevented doing a copy of existing laws followed by s/person/corporation/g on one copy.
I am not saying that it is necessarily a good idea to split the laws up like that, but it is certainly possible.
What exactly are the privacy extensions to autoconf - is it masking some of the bits obtained after autoconfiguration, so that the chances of figuring out other information like layer 2 addresses becomes more difficult?
It is simply a different way of acquiring IP addresses automatically, with guaranteed randomness if desired, and with the provision for regularly changing addresses.
Apple sells 13 millon iPhones in a quarter. They're ALL internet facing, no multi-tier architectures, and they ALL need IP addresses!
They don't get them. Asia has been doing 10/8 for mobile use practically from the beginning of mobile internet access there and Europe has done it for perhaps 10 years now. US is drowning in addresses, so you probably get a real IP address there, but that is not the case almost everywhere else.
Right but I can't even route to those addresses. What's the point of using public IP space if it's only internal?
Renumbering is a royal pain, and Ford probably uses 10/8 already. A/8 is too small to comfortably handle a global organisation these days. For most Fortune 500's, an extra/8 for private use would be absolutely great.
Every machine on my IPv4 network (ok, not Oracle boxes) gets its IP via DHCP (ya know, that's kinda like IPv6 autoconfiguration...). Merging with another network would be no problem.
Ha! Obviously said by someone who has never tried it.
Can you HONESTLY say that if someone showed you a pile of IP V6 addresses and said "One of these has a problem in either the address or the subnet" you could just pick it out on the fly?
Yes, definitely. It is generally much easier with IPv6, because you are likely working with either/64 or point-to-point. You are very rarely dealing with splitting stuff on non-nibble boundaries. For the most part you can just forget about the lower 64 bits unless they were manually assigned (and they are likely below 0x100 in that case, so easy as well). That leaves the upper 64 bits, where you can usually ignore the upper 32 (more likely 48) as well, they will almost always be the same for all addresses in an organization. Now you're down to handling just 32 (or even 16) bits, which is dead easy.
The additional space means room for giving sensible addresses to different parts of an organisation. Just hand them 16 subnets if they need 2, that way they won't come back and ask for more.
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The resolution is 640x360. Good for playing the original Wolfenstein... That is just about the only use I can think of. I suppose video would work, if you don't make the "screen" larger than 12" or so. Web browsing is not particularly realistic. You are better off just ignoring the projector and sticking with the 4" 800x480 screen on the phone.
Quote from Red Hat bug 813428:
"On Intel CPUs sysret to non-canonical address causes a fault on the sysret instruction itself after the stack pointer is set to guest value but before the CPL is changed. Systems running on AMD CPUs are not vulnerable to this issue as sysret on AMD CPUs does not generate a fault before the CPL change."
It is arguable whether it is a CPU bug or an OS/hypervisor bug. The CPU should not run the fault code with privileges, but on the other hand the OS should prevent the fault code from being called in the first place. AMD got the CPU part right, Intel didn't. I don't think anyone got the OS/hypervisor part right except by accident. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is not exploitable due to the way it limits task virtual memory to 511 GB. VMWare doesn't use sysret, so that isn't exploitable either.
I wonder what VIA Nano does...
No, there's much more missing than just the large screen and keyboard: Office applications, for one. A web browser is not enough.
Is there any point to office applications these days? I used to depend on Word/OpenOffice.org to read/edit documents, usually documents which arrived by email. Now I can't remember the last time I received anything but a PDF in an email. Internal stuff is all Wiki or otherwise web; if I need to share it with a partner I just print to PDF or copy from the Wiki into the email.
Actually that's not quite true, I have received quite a few Excel sheets too. I could actually do with a spreadsheet extension on the internal Wiki, now that I think about it.
You must not use it. It falls out at whim and is easily damaged. IDE,PCI and USB do not suffer from those epic failure points.
USB and SATA were criticized for the exact same failings. IDE certainly does not fall out on a whim, but it is quite easy to damage; it is useless if you plan to plug/unplug more than say once a week. Luckily IDE is dead. PCI does not have any locking mechanism built in, that is entirely up to the cases. The cases generally do a good job of it, but then cases could also provide proper locking mechanisms for HDMI -- it isn't the fault of the connector that they don't.
Micro USB is truly brilliant though, you can throw a device down on the connector and the cable will break, not the phone.
It's possible that while the run time is shorter, the power draw is higher--possibly more than proportionally higher.
Possible, but very unlikely. Current processors are quite bad at running at "half power", i.e. if not all function units are running full speed they still waste power. The scheduling strategy "hurry up and wait" still tends to beat other strategies, because modern CPU's are so very good at saving power when idling. You would have to waste an enormous amount of power during the "hurry up" part of the strategy to not win in the end during the "wait" phase.
In a few years this may change, as systems get better at handling partial load. If you could e.g. only keep the memory chips which are used by the current task awake, that would help quite a bit. Today it is AFAIK either all memory chips awake at once or all of them in power save mode. Software support would be fun, as the OS would have to try to keep the working set on as few memory chips as possible.
That is because Medicare is not a normal public system. It has most of the overhead associated with private systems. With Medicare you get to combine the disadvantages of a private system with the disadvantages of a public system.
If the government just paid your doctor wages instead of treating him like a small business, he would spend vastly more time treating patients and vastly less time dealing with paperwork. Why do we ask him to justify that he is useful, he's a doctor!
That said, for some reason general practitioners seem to be handled as small businesses in many countries with otherwise public systems. I do not get why.
You don't have to be rich to afford health care. You have to be rich to afford all the bullshit bureaucracy that comes with government healthcare.
Err what bureaucracy? People get treated, staff get paid, supplies get bought, all without having to justify every treatment (or decision to not treat) to insurance companies and lawyers.
Try comparing the part of total hospital staff who are doctors/nurses/porters/cleaners in a private system vs. a public system. You will find that the overhead is much lower in the public system, and it only gets worse when you consider how many are employed on the insurer side.
You can argue that the private system forces doctors and nurses to make better choices for their patients, but you cannot argue that it has lower overhead.
Phlogiston was once a widely accepted theory.
It seems to have been a somewhat reluctantly accepted theory though. Like, we know that all waves need a medium to move in, but we just can't find that medium. Still it HAS to be there, so we'll call it phlogiston.
Much like dark matter and dark energy today: Current theories require that they exist and so we give them names. At the same time everyone is quietly hoping that a proper explanation will turn up and we can either rename them or decide they don't exist after all.
Relativity theory was groundbreaking, to be sure, but both special and general relativity were widely accepted within a few years of publication because they so neatly solved so many problems which had been bugging so many physicists.
There was still a lot of resistance to relativity for a quite a while. Note that his Nobel Prize was awarded for the photoelectric effect, not for relativity.
A whole book has been written about the reception of the Theory of Relativity, so we probably can't do the subject justice in a few Slashdot comments. (No, I haven't read the book).
Looking at this from another direction, what happens if someone writes a proprietary library that duplicates the function of a GPL library? Does that infringe? I don't think so, because it doesn't use the GPL library, it replaces it. Now, what if someone (maybe even the same person or company) writes a proprietary program that uses this proprietary replacement? Does either the program or the proprietary library infringe? Again, I don't think so. Now for the really interesting part: what if someone runs the proprietary program with the now plug-compatible GPL library? Is anyone infringing? If so, who?
Your proposal is quite well know as "user-does-the-link". It works under 2 conditions: a) copyright law does not forbid linking without explicit license permission and b) you are not distributing the GPL library. The trick is that you do not have to accept the GPL to run a GPL'd program, only to distribute it.
Condition a) hopefully holds, although you never know when courts can decide that copying from disk to RAM is a copyright infringement unless you have a license allowing it. Condition b) is there because if you DO distribute the two together, you HAVE to accept the GPL, and then you have to abide by the GPL interpretation of derivative works even if it is broader than what normal copyright law requires.
Therefore neither you nor the user violate the GPL because neither of you have to accept the terms of the GPL at all!
Anyway, this is not a very useful exception because the only GPL library you are likely to encounter is the readline library, and that has at least one BSD-licensed implementation.
Luckily, no one in their right mind handles these things more than once a year.
I wish. Let me know when you can get reasonable rates world-wide with a single SIM card.
Why is that insightful? Everything takes longer to describe than it does to create. Duh
You're probably better at creating than I am, but in general I can describe code faster than I can create it. At least if "create" includes getting it somewhat debugged and vaguely correct. Doubly so if I'm writing XSLT...
Luckily I'm not a career programmer.
If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does it mean I can use header files from Linux in my proprietary kernel module without having to go through all sorts of wrappers?
You certainly can. But beware, there is non-API in the header files too! Some of them contain inline functions or macros, and you cannot necessarily use those.
If you distribute your kernel module along with the kernel you have to accept the GPL terms with its definition of derived works which may be wider than the usual copyright law interpretation of derived works. This is mostly a problem if you are selling something with Linux preinstalled including proprietary modules.
It's all a bit moot though, nobody sues over Linux kernel license violations.
Virgin cable is a full fibre service
Yes, they make tiny little cavities inside the coax cabling where they install the fibre runs. Don't ever look at a Virgin cable when it isn't attached, it might blind you!
You can't meaningfully insure against this kind of flood unless you are government-sized. If you make a mistake in the modelling, then what you have to pay out is larger than what any company has available -- simply because all your clients have to be paid at once. You can try to reinsure, but not even Lloyds is big enough for this one.
Insurance only works if risk is spread out so you are reasonably sure that not everyone gets hit at once -- the ones who don't get flooded have to pay for those who do get flooded. In this case there might not be any who don't get flooded.
We don't have a problem with copyright in general.
Don't pretend to speak for me.
Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued.
The second does not follow from the first. You can easily make a legal system which allows suing corporations without calling them legal persons. It was just laziness that prevented doing a copy of existing laws followed by s/person/corporation/g on one copy.
I am not saying that it is necessarily a good idea to split the laws up like that, but it is certainly possible.
What exactly are the privacy extensions to autoconf - is it masking some of the bits obtained after autoconfiguration, so that the chances of figuring out other information like layer 2 addresses becomes more difficult?
It is simply a different way of acquiring IP addresses automatically, with guaranteed randomness if desired, and with the provision for regularly changing addresses.
Apple sells 13 millon iPhones in a quarter. They're ALL internet facing, no multi-tier architectures, and they ALL need IP addresses!
They don't get them. Asia has been doing 10/8 for mobile use practically from the beginning of mobile internet access there and Europe has done it for perhaps 10 years now. US is drowning in addresses, so you probably get a real IP address there, but that is not the case almost everywhere else.
However, 17 is Apple... They could handily buy HP these days.
Right but I can't even route to those addresses. What's the point of using public IP space if it's only internal?
Renumbering is a royal pain, and Ford probably uses 10/8 already. A /8 is too small to comfortably handle a global organisation these days. For most Fortune 500's, an extra /8 for private use would be absolutely great.
You can do address shortening in IPv4 too if you want... The rules are confusing, and much equipment gets them wrong.
Every machine on my IPv4 network (ok, not Oracle boxes) gets its IP via DHCP (ya know, that's kinda like IPv6 autoconfiguration...). Merging with another network would be no problem.
Ha! Obviously said by someone who has never tried it.
Can you HONESTLY say that if someone showed you a pile of IP V6 addresses and said "One of these has a problem in either the address or the subnet" you could just pick it out on the fly?
Yes, definitely. It is generally much easier with IPv6, because you are likely working with either /64 or point-to-point. You are very rarely dealing with splitting stuff on non-nibble boundaries. For the most part you can just forget about the lower 64 bits unless they were manually assigned (and they are likely below 0x100 in that case, so easy as well). That leaves the upper 64 bits, where you can usually ignore the upper 32 (more likely 48) as well, they will almost always be the same for all addresses in an organization. Now you're down to handling just 32 (or even 16) bits, which is dead easy.
The additional space means room for giving sensible addresses to different parts of an organisation. Just hand them 16 subnets if they need 2, that way they won't come back and ask for more.
multicast will be f'n awesome
Don't expect multicast to happen. No one has demonstrated a way to make multicast scale to the Internet. It only works in controlled networks.