Adaptec used to do the same thing: buy competitors and close them; happened to more than one of the vendors I used.
When LSI Logic (only significant competitor for Adaptec at the time, and particularly useful in embedded systems) came on the block, the sale was blocked, so we weren't forced into a single (and, IMO, less competent) source for SCSI chips.
For years, the legal profession was a major user of WordPerfect, because, regardless of newer versions, documents, such as depositions, could be read with the latest version. I personally loaded documents from the Amiga version (WP4 on a big endian CPU) to the Linux version (WP 8 on a little endian CPU). Seems to me that a similar case (yeah, I know) could be made for using Libre Office. It's native document format is open, so, even if it completely goes away, creating a reader and/or translator would be possible.
I agree that the trade-off has value. I haven't bought a game in a long time, and see no reason to start now, so I've saved a LOT of money compared to what I used to spend.
You do realize, don't you, that in the case of either a temporary or permanent outage, while the servers are down, you have NOTHING for the money that you spent on the game. Additionally, if/when your ISP starts counting the bytes, you will be paying THEM to play a game that you "bought" in the store or on-line.
I've got a 2K box that still plays the Windows games I bought back then, and I'm going to virtualize it for continued play of those games, plus I can run whatever runs under WINE or native on Linux.
And no, it has very little to do with piracy, regardless of the BS spewed by the game companies. Pirates fall into a very few camps: try-before-buy, since a lot of games are stinkers; never would have paid for it, regardless of how much the game is enjoyed; want a really usable version and the DRM breaks that; "yeah, I coulda bought it, but why bother if I can download a crack". I know a lot of gamers, and none of them fall into the last category, but several fall into the first and third, and those people have enough alternatives for their time and money to just skip games that don't work as well as they want, and the second category, which may be quite large, is not lost sales/revenue, unlike the last.
Thunderbolt is PCIe and "DisplayPort" over wires/fiber. That's not really "other protocols", except that, of course, PCIe can carry the traffic for any sort of adapter, just as it does inside a desktop/laptop.
Firewire, BTW, as well as USB handle networking natively, although IP over Firewire is more robust than the relatively new USB-IP.
There already ARE PCIeUSB 3.0 bridges. Thunderbolt is just PCIe, so, no, it doesn't have USB protocol over the Thunderbolt wires, which is why it needs the bridge.
I remember it (for the really early Macs), Wikipedia mentions it (no footnote), and I have an old SCSI spec' for it (and SCSI Ethernet) around somewhere.
Sounds like more of the same. Connect a general-purpose interface to a box with some limited resource (no I/O slots in the original Mac, and only a few dedicated mass storage slots in most current portables) and there will be someone to use the GP interface to run a display.
Without X support as a major piece of the Linux distribution, it is useless to me as a desktop environment. I think I only have one of seven Linux kernels running on various hardware that do not have at least one application displaying on a non-local X server.
I use "evince" running on a Linux box to display PDFs from a Windows machine's shared storage to a Cygwin X server on the same box to avoid the security issues with Acrobat Reader. Firefox worked well that way for web browsing until the developers decided to only run one instance (fixed by having multiple "users", but still); Chromium still does.
At home I have thoroughly "sandboxed" Flash by having it as a single-user installation for a non-privileged account. Only that account can run Flash and it has no read access to any other user directory, and no write access to any system files, so no snooping in my email folders, for example. The Flash-enabled Firefox normally displays on the same desktop X server as my other applications, though.
Putting X-terms from Linux boxes on my workplace Windows machine is trivial, as is running Eclipse. One of my co-workers even bothered to bring over the whole desktop, starting with a GDM launch, I think. We do this to allow easy copy/cut/paste into the company's dedicated Windows-only applications.
If you actually bother to think about how the display paradigm is shifting back to a (now-graphic) 3270 model, where the back end of an application runs elsewhere and the display is local to a user, with all of the input/input validation and rendering done on the smart terminal (pad, 'phone'...), then Wayland makes even less sense. It is trying to solve a performance problem (native 3D Linux games, and "cutesy" desktop graphic effects) that doesn't even exist, except in the developer's sad fantasies.
The nice part (which definitely is NOT the price for a personal subscription) is that the front has readily-accessible news articles, the middle has the "some math helps for the physics" research papers and inside the back cover are "speculative fiction" short stories ranging from good enough to AWESOME.
I wish they'd publish the short story wherein a reindeer-drawn sleigh makes a forced landing on an RAF base, which IMO, is the best Christmas story ever.
Yeah, like the losers who blockaded Lord Charles Cornwallis' resupply and reinforcements at Yorktown, and the ground troops that reinforced the perimeter to help prevent a breakout.. Without the help of the French, both in North America and in keeping the British busy elsewhere, there would likely be no United States of America.
Perhaps the French defeats that passed into folklore (Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Dien Bien Phu) have done so because the French were, at the time, a major power (which takes winning a lot) that got some comeuppance, as the USofA did at, for example, Little Big Horn.
Wrong way 'round. The "web" hinders my enjoyment of Linux (the Internet, pre-web, was really quite useful and enjoyable).
Back when I could use SunOS/Solaris, Unix System 5.[34], and Linux (bsd, too, but I was rarely on such a system) to access the Internet, I could communicate with individuals, share data with communities, and acquire information, without having to fight my way through web sites designed for mouth-breathers who not only don't know that Flash is a major back door into their system, but only have a couple of sexual references for the term "back door" anyway, and no capability to understand what what it might mean in a computer context.
Most NICs support either intentional or "back-door" MAC address cloning. Cloud-computing resources can crack your WEP (trivial), WPA (harder/slower), and WPA2 (much harder and slower, but still doable, unless you rotate them daily).
Then, if you have implemented some reasonable level of security, when the jackboots kick in your door, you'll have a much harder time defending yourself during the pre-trial investigation, and, then, assuming you live long enough, in court, due to the security you put into place, obviously trying to hide your evil actions.
At best, you can discourage casual (mis-)use of your WiFi, but that wouldn't help against a long-term attack like this one.
If you're worried about it, shut it off, and run the cable, as I have.
I've watched the Windows users at work deal with it, and it looks like it's a royal pain, compared to Cygwin+Cygwin-X that I use on the same platforms. It doesn't seem like it's very well integrated into the Windows clipboard, and, at least the version they're using doesn't work with the keyboard shortcuts neatly, either. Maybe they just don't use it well.
For example, with Cygwin, I can highlight and paste with a middle-click, just as on X-Windows, if I'm using an xterm or other X client application; the highlight also populates the Windows clipboard, so I can paste into an Outlook email, for example, using either the Windows application menu edit-paste or the standard keyboard shortcut (CTRL-v).
On a Linux box, I have at least one telnet client, an ssh client (and server, if I want it), various FTP client choices, and xterms, so what would PuTTY bring to the table? 'Bout the only thing missing on most modern distributions is a default xterm readily available in the menu-customization system.
âoeNo one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.â
Although western Europe is hardly earthquake-free, once you look away from collision zones of the Urals (eastern Europe, I know), Alps, and a large chunk of Scandinavia, there are large swaths of land free of earthquakes in a couple thousand years of historic record. There are also plenty of rivers to provide cooling water.
There is evidence of tsunamis, perhaps from the Canary Islands, but further south; avoiding the lower Atlantic shores would be more paranoia than prudence, but it sea water is not the only available cooling water, unlike Southern California.
Germany still has coal deposits, but it makes no sense for Germany to do without nuclear power.
If you're gonna stream porn on the Windows guest, instead of something useful like original Star Craft/Brood War, keep your clean guest image for reloads. You're better off streaming the porn on a Linux guest, since the embedded malware is much less likely to run.
If "patient 0" was was the result of DoD, DoE, CIA, or corporate experiments, they'd probably cover that up and blame it on "terrorists", 'specially if they could cover up human experimentation in some minor country, like, say, Costa Rica.
My wife's Mac has a separate account for her, and I'm not entirely sure I remember the password on the privileged-by-default first account. I do the same thing on Linux; my user name is not in the privileged list. If want to be root, I damn well have to do it on purpose.
And, no, Flash is not available on either of our accounts, or the privileged ones.
At most, on the Mac, I MAY bother to do software updates by switching the screen to the other account, but Apple breaks enough stuff, and slips in enough shovelware, that I'd really rather not bother
I used to use ZoneAlarm on Windows (still a version on my Win2K Starcraft PC), and tried NetBarrier for the PPC Macs. Both worked similarly, and I thought ZA was the greatest addition to Windows, ever.
Sounds like my impending Color Nook will be getting one of these, day 1.
You forget that the filters used in the digital-to-analog conversion have phase artefacts that extend several octaves below the nominal sample frequency, decreasing with "distance" from the filter cutoff frequency. The phase artefacts affect the perception of location by the instrument. Violins, or female voice in the upper registers, in particular, are location-obscured because the overtones have a different phase relationship than the fundamentals.
I don't have to have 22K hearing to observe the phase effects, since they occur noticeably down to 5500.
This was one of the problems addressed by the 176KHz conversion process used in some extremely high-end CD players. By oversampling the 44.1 (doing a bit of interpolation while at it), the filter artefacts were moved to frequencies well above even good human hearing.
The Nyquist number doesn't indicate anything to do with signal to noise. 16 bits is just not enough to encompass what the human hearing system can distinguish.
Both of these are fundamental problems with the format, and, if you've ever listened, as I have, to back-to-back blind samples of good vinyl (like the albums I bought in Europe) and even the best CD, the difference is glaringly obvious.
Actually, the last bit is subject to quantization noise, so it's really 84. Compared to top-quality preamps with 96-+ dB signal to noise, it's down by 12, at least.
Too bad they couldn't have used even a $0.10 (back then) codec to get the bit density up, though. Even four more bits per sample (each for left and right), or, better, eight, and, 56,000 samples/second, would have made the CDs actually sound pretty good, and would not have changed the cost of production of the CDs, themselves.
Sure, they were more difficult to scratch than vinyl, and repeated plays on low-cost equipment didn't do damage, but the dynamic range is way down (12-18 dB, depending on the vinyl preamp quality) and the lower sample rate led to audible filter artifacts that particularly affect imaging, most noticeably on orchestral pieces.
All-in-all, I'd really rather he had waited to do it better, or not bothered.
Once they took out one of the only two play modes I would ever use (LAN play), and threw in the DRM, I was never going to have "fun" with it, since I wasn't going to buy it.
I either need to get SC/BW running under WINE, or get a dedicated VM going for it, so I can repurpose the Win2K box that I use for playing the original.
I lose access to TWC's DNS servers regularly (yes, I will be setting up my own, when it becomes annoying enough). Although you can do a quick-and-dirty load-balancing by setting them up as follows, there's no redundancy for the customers when there's a link failure.
It was implemented for the US Navy in an early EDMICS prototype back in the mid-80s. Slightly different purpose (looking at a few-hundred DPI images of E-size ((36x48 in.)) engineering drawings on Sun 3/50 ((1152x900 pix.)) workstations), but the same feature.
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Adaptec used to do the same thing: buy competitors and close them; happened to more than one of the vendors I used.
When LSI Logic (only significant competitor for Adaptec at the time, and particularly useful in embedded systems) came on the block, the sale was blocked, so we weren't forced into a single (and, IMO, less competent) source for SCSI chips.
For years, the legal profession was a major user of WordPerfect, because, regardless of newer versions, documents, such as depositions, could be read with the latest version. I personally loaded documents from the Amiga version (WP4 on a big endian CPU) to the Linux version (WP 8 on a little endian CPU). Seems to me that a similar case (yeah, I know) could be made for using Libre Office. It's native document format is open, so, even if it completely goes away, creating a reader and/or translator would be possible.
I agree that the trade-off has value. I haven't bought a game in a long time, and see no reason to start now, so I've saved a LOT of money compared to what I used to spend.
You do realize, don't you, that in the case of either a temporary or permanent outage, while the servers are down, you have NOTHING for the money that you spent on the game. Additionally, if/when your ISP starts counting the bytes, you will be paying THEM to play a game that you "bought" in the store or on-line.
I've got a 2K box that still plays the Windows games I bought back then, and I'm going to virtualize it for continued play of those games, plus I can run whatever runs under WINE or native on Linux.
And no, it has very little to do with piracy, regardless of the BS spewed by the game companies. Pirates fall into a very few camps: try-before-buy, since a lot of games are stinkers; never would have paid for it, regardless of how much the game is enjoyed; want a really usable version and the DRM breaks that; "yeah, I coulda bought it, but why bother if I can download a crack". I know a lot of gamers, and none of them fall into the last category, but several fall into the first and third, and those people have enough alternatives for their time and money to just skip games that don't work as well as they want, and the second category, which may be quite large, is not lost sales/revenue, unlike the last.
Thunderbolt is PCIe and "DisplayPort" over wires/fiber. That's not really "other protocols", except that, of course, PCIe can carry the traffic for any sort of adapter, just as it does inside a desktop/laptop.
Firewire, BTW, as well as USB handle networking natively, although IP over Firewire is more robust than the relatively new USB-IP.
There already ARE PCIeUSB 3.0 bridges. Thunderbolt is just PCIe, so, no, it doesn't have USB protocol over the Thunderbolt wires, which is why it needs the bridge.
I remember it (for the really early Macs), Wikipedia mentions it (no footnote), and I have an old SCSI spec' for it (and SCSI Ethernet) around somewhere.
Sounds like more of the same. Connect a general-purpose interface to a box with some limited resource (no I/O slots in the original Mac, and only a few dedicated mass storage slots in most current portables) and there will be someone to use the GP interface to run a display.
Not a bad idea, just not terribly original.
Without X support as a major piece of the Linux distribution, it is useless to me as a desktop environment. I think I only have one of seven Linux kernels running on various hardware that do not have at least one application displaying on a non-local X server.
I use "evince" running on a Linux box to display PDFs from a Windows machine's shared storage to a Cygwin X server on the same box to avoid the security issues with Acrobat Reader. Firefox worked well that way for web browsing until the developers decided to only run one instance (fixed by having multiple "users", but still); Chromium still does.
At home I have thoroughly "sandboxed" Flash by having it as a single-user installation for a non-privileged account. Only that account can run Flash and it has no read access to any other user directory, and no write access to any system files, so no snooping in my email folders, for example. The Flash-enabled Firefox normally displays on the same desktop X server as my other applications, though.
Putting X-terms from Linux boxes on my workplace Windows machine is trivial, as is running Eclipse. One of my co-workers even bothered to bring over the whole desktop, starting with a GDM launch, I think. We do this to allow easy copy/cut/paste into the company's dedicated Windows-only applications.
If you actually bother to think about how the display paradigm is shifting back to a (now-graphic) 3270 model, where the back end of an application runs elsewhere and the display is local to a user, with all of the input/input validation and rendering done on the smart terminal (pad, 'phone' ...), then Wayland makes even less sense. It is trying to solve a performance problem (native 3D Linux games, and "cutesy" desktop graphic effects) that doesn't even exist, except in the developer's sad fantasies.
There's a copy at (Harnessing the Brane-Deer):
http://www.concatenation.org/futuresindex.html
The nice part (which definitely is NOT the price for a personal subscription) is that the front has readily-accessible news articles, the middle has the "some math helps for the physics" research papers and inside the back cover are "speculative fiction" short stories ranging from good enough to AWESOME.
I wish they'd publish the short story wherein a reindeer-drawn sleigh makes a forced landing on an RAF base, which IMO, is the best Christmas story ever.
Yeah, like the losers who blockaded Lord Charles Cornwallis' resupply and reinforcements at Yorktown, and the ground troops that reinforced the perimeter to help prevent a breakout.. Without the help of the French, both in North America and in keeping the British busy elsewhere, there would likely be no United States of America.
Perhaps the French defeats that passed into folklore (Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Dien Bien Phu) have done so because the French were, at the time, a major power (which takes winning a lot) that got some comeuppance, as the USofA did at, for example, Little Big Horn.
Wrong way 'round. The "web" hinders my enjoyment of Linux (the Internet, pre-web, was really quite useful and enjoyable).
Back when I could use SunOS/Solaris, Unix System 5.[34], and Linux (bsd, too, but I was rarely on such a system) to access the Internet, I could communicate with individuals, share data with communities, and acquire information, without having to fight my way through web sites designed for mouth-breathers who not only don't know that Flash is a major back door into their system, but only have a couple of sexual references for the term "back door" anyway, and no capability to understand what what it might mean in a computer context.
Most NICs support either intentional or "back-door" MAC address cloning. Cloud-computing resources can crack your WEP (trivial), WPA (harder/slower), and WPA2 (much harder and slower, but still doable, unless you rotate them daily).
Then, if you have implemented some reasonable level of security, when the jackboots kick in your door, you'll have a much harder time defending yourself during the pre-trial investigation, and, then, assuming you live long enough, in court, due to the security you put into place, obviously trying to hide your evil actions.
At best, you can discourage casual (mis-)use of your WiFi, but that wouldn't help against a long-term attack like this one.
If you're worried about it, shut it off, and run the cable, as I have.
Why would they bother to port/package it?
I've watched the Windows users at work deal with it, and it looks like it's a royal pain, compared to Cygwin+Cygwin-X that I use on the same platforms. It doesn't seem like it's very well integrated into the Windows clipboard, and, at least the version they're using doesn't work with the keyboard shortcuts neatly, either. Maybe they just don't use it well.
For example, with Cygwin, I can highlight and paste with a middle-click, just as on X-Windows, if I'm using an xterm or other X client application; the highlight also populates the Windows clipboard, so I can paste into an Outlook email, for example, using either the Windows application menu edit-paste or the standard keyboard shortcut (CTRL-v).
On a Linux box, I have at least one telnet client, an ssh client (and server, if I want it), various FTP client choices, and xterms, so what would PuTTY bring to the table? 'Bout the only thing missing on most modern distributions is a default xterm readily available in the menu-customization system.
âoeNo one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.â
Henry Louis Mencken
Although western Europe is hardly earthquake-free, once you look away from collision zones of the Urals (eastern Europe, I know), Alps, and a large chunk of Scandinavia, there are large swaths of land free of earthquakes in a couple thousand years of historic record. There are also plenty of rivers to provide cooling water.
There is evidence of tsunamis, perhaps from the Canary Islands, but further south; avoiding the lower Atlantic shores would be more paranoia than prudence, but it sea water is not the only available cooling water, unlike Southern California.
Germany still has coal deposits, but it makes no sense for Germany to do without nuclear power.
If you're gonna stream porn on the Windows guest, instead of something useful like original Star Craft/Brood War, keep your clean guest image for reloads. You're better off streaming the porn on a Linux guest, since the embedded malware is much less likely to run.
If "patient 0" was was the result of DoD, DoE, CIA, or corporate experiments, they'd probably cover that up and blame it on "terrorists", 'specially if they could cover up human experimentation in some minor country, like, say, Costa Rica.
My wife's Mac has a separate account for her, and I'm not entirely sure I remember the password on the privileged-by-default first account. I do the same thing on Linux; my user name is not in the privileged list. If want to be root, I damn well have to do it on purpose.
And, no, Flash is not available on either of our accounts, or the privileged ones.
At most, on the Mac, I MAY bother to do software updates by switching the screen to the other account, but Apple breaks enough stuff, and slips in enough shovelware, that I'd really rather not bother
Absolutely serious!
I used to use ZoneAlarm on Windows (still a version on my Win2K Starcraft PC), and tried NetBarrier for the PPC Macs. Both worked similarly, and I thought ZA was the greatest addition to Windows, ever.
Sounds like my impending Color Nook will be getting one of these, day 1.
You forget that the filters used in the digital-to-analog conversion have phase artefacts that extend several octaves below the nominal sample frequency, decreasing with "distance" from the filter cutoff frequency. The phase artefacts affect the perception of location by the instrument. Violins, or female voice in the upper registers, in particular, are location-obscured because the overtones have a different phase relationship than the fundamentals.
I don't have to have 22K hearing to observe the phase effects, since they occur noticeably down to 5500.
This was one of the problems addressed by the 176KHz conversion process used in some extremely high-end CD players. By oversampling the 44.1 (doing a bit of interpolation while at it), the filter artefacts were moved to frequencies well above even good human hearing.
The Nyquist number doesn't indicate anything to do with signal to noise. 16 bits is just not enough to encompass what the human hearing system can distinguish.
Both of these are fundamental problems with the format, and, if you've ever listened, as I have, to back-to-back blind samples of good vinyl (like the albums I bought in Europe) and even the best CD, the difference is glaringly obvious.
Actually, the last bit is subject to quantization noise, so it's really 84. Compared to top-quality preamps with 96-+ dB signal to noise, it's down by 12, at least.
Too bad they couldn't have used even a $0.10 (back then) codec to get the bit density up, though. Even four more bits per sample (each for left and right), or, better, eight, and, 56,000 samples/second, would have made the CDs actually sound pretty good, and would not have changed the cost of production of the CDs, themselves.
Sure, they were more difficult to scratch than vinyl, and repeated plays on low-cost equipment didn't do damage, but the dynamic range is way down (12-18 dB, depending on the vinyl preamp quality) and the lower sample rate led to audible filter artifacts that particularly affect imaging, most noticeably on orchestral pieces.
All-in-all, I'd really rather he had waited to do it better, or not bothered.
Once they took out one of the only two play modes I would ever use (LAN play), and threw in the DRM, I was never going to have "fun" with it, since I wasn't going to buy it.
I either need to get SC/BW running under WINE, or get a dedicated VM going for it, so I can repurpose the Win2K box that I use for playing the original.
I lose access to TWC's DNS servers regularly (yes, I will be setting up my own, when it becomes annoying enough). Although you can do a quick-and-dirty load-balancing by setting them up as follows, there's no redundancy for the customers when there's a link failure.
search socal.rr.com
nameserver 209.18.47.61
nameserver 209.18.47.62
It was implemented for the US Navy in an early EDMICS prototype back in the mid-80s. Slightly different purpose (looking at a few-hundred DPI images of E-size ((36x48 in.)) engineering drawings on Sun 3/50 ((1152x900 pix.)) workstations), but the same feature.