It makes you wonder if my netbook (XP, limited user) is more secure than my notebook (Vista, UAC). Both have Microsoft Security Essentials and Secunia PSI.
Sadly PSI doesn't complain about Flash being insecure even though I only have 10.2.152.26, even though that's what it is installed for.
Yup, I was actually pretty surprised to get emails saying people had tested my formatter on 3TB drives and it had worked because I didn't know there were USB hard drives that expose their native 4K sector size to the host.
> I very well may be incorrect here, but it sounds to me like you're confusing clusters (aka, allocation units) of a file format and physical disk sectors.
No, not at all - I'm talking about physical sector size, not cluster size.
The limit on both FAT32 and MBR is 2^32 physical sectors. FAT32 allows for clusters of 2^n sectors where n is 1 to 7.
> Since historically magnetic disks have always had 512 byte sectors
In the US hard and floppy disks are both 512 bytes. But Japanese PC-98 machines had floppy formats with 1024 byte sectors. And CD and DVDs have always had 2048 byte sectors. So do DVD-RAM disks. Windows supports 512,1024,2048 and 4096 byte sector sizes, and so does the USB mass storage class. ATA doesn't support anything but 512 byte sectors - there's probably a proposal to do so but I don't know of any hard drives that currently implement it. You'd also need Bios and OS boot code changes to make this work. At present Advanced Format drives have 4K sectors internally but emulate 512 byte when talking over ATA.
> I'm not completely sure, but I *think* that you *should* be able to install and boot a 32-bit OS with native Advanced Format and EFI/GPT support (note that that excludes all Windows OSs currently), an Advanced Format drive, and a GPT/EFI setup all with a disk larger than 2TiB.
EFI supports drives with 2^64 sectors. If you want a >2TB drive and MBR partitioning that drive needs to have physical sectors bigger than 512 bytes. E.g. a 3TB drive will have more than 2^32 sectors if they are 512 byte but less if they are 4096 byte.
Unfortunately Windows - at least x86 Windows - can't boot off an UEFI Bios and you need an UEFI Bios to boot off GPT. It's also pretty hard to find commodity x86 motherboards with UEFI (all Itanium boards are EFI and Intel Macs are a sort of bastardised EFI), which is why Microsoft didn't make it work. You can get UEFI boards with x64 though, and this is supported in Vista x64 SP1
All of which presents hard disk manufacturers with a bit of a problem for >2TB drives - they could emulate 512 byte sectors but then they'd need to use GPT which x86 Windows won't boot off. Or they could expose the 4K sectors but ATA and Bioses don't yet support that.
However if they make an USB external drive they can expose 4K sectors to the outside world since USB Mass Storage supports this (it had to because of Japanese floppies and optical disks) and there will be less than 2^32 sectors so MBR partitioning will still work.
This actually presents a 4096 byte physical sector size to the OS. Handily this means that MBR partitioning will still work with it - that has a limit of 2^32 sectors but with a 4K sector size that is 16TB..
Windows is fine with >512 byte sectors at least post boot but I don't think it's possible to use them over ATA on any current OS. I.e. there are Advanced Format drives with 4K sectors but currently they all emulate 512 byte sectors over ATA. Probably moving to 4K native sector size on ATA is going to take some time since that requires changes to the ATA spec, drives, Bios and OS boot code.
Since the USB mass storage driver has supported >512 byte sectors for ages because CDs and DVD Roms have 2K byte sectors it's actually easier to get >2TB drives working over USB.
The reason I know about this stuff? I wrote this free tool
It so happens that it works fine with the 3tb Goflex USB drive because it has a 4K physical sector size. FAT32 has the same limit 2^32 sector limit as MBR.
So you can have 16TB FAT32 volumes to share your AVI files between your PC, Mac, Linux box and games console/media player. 16TB is a lot of movies, maybe even all of them.
Now some might say that it's insane to use such an old format. That's sort of true but FAT32 is good because it's so widely implemented. It's hard to imagine anything else being supported across such a wide range of devices. Also if all you're doing is streaming AVI files FAT32 is actually good enough - because it is so simple it is trivial to implement it and get stability and performance very close to the raw performance of the device. More modern file systems are not like that.
This. Windows Mobile was endlessly customisable. It allowed you to install software from cab files you'd obtained from various sources. You could flash custom Roms with pretty much any UI you wanted. You could use removable SD cards.
Windows Phone 7 won't run the old applications and the one application I really like on Windows Mobile - Pleco Chinese dictionary - won't rewrite to run on WinPhone 7. The specs prohibit removable SD cards and force you to install from their app store. It's like Microsoft thinks that the reason people like iPhones is because they are locked the fuck down.
I think people that like Apple will keep buying Apple. People that liked the flexibility of WinMo will probably end up on Android. Most of the ISVs for Windows Mobile will probably end up there too. Pleco runs on iPhone and is planned to run on Android.
Windows Phone 7 is one of those things that got a few good reviews but I think it is a much worse disaster for Microsoft than Vista in the long run. Windows Mobile may have been a minority choice but all Windows Phone 7 will do is drive that minority to Apple or Google for their next phone. IE their market share will drop to zero in the mobile market.
It's a shame really - my HD2 with the Cookie Energy Rom is a really nice device. There's loads of software around for WinMo too.
More to the point in the Battle of Britain Hitler stopped targeting military airfields and bombed London. It was a catastrophically bad decision - the RAF were on the verge of collapse at that point and the targeting switch gave them a chance to rebuild and eventually win.
. When Galadriel talks to Sam and Frodo about the operation of the Mirror of Galadriel, she quite clearly challenges the validity of the term "magic" as Sam would us it.
'Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal,' she answered, 'and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?' Frodo did not answer. 'And you? ' she said, turning to Sam. 'For this is what your folk would call magic. I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?' -"The Mirror of Galadriel"
A desktop CPU in an FPGA will always cost more and perform worse (i.e. slower clock rate) than a full custom chip from Intel or AMD. Mind you I've seen embedded designs where a microcontroller, Ram, Rom and custom logic are implemented in a $10 FPGA - especially where volumes are too low for an ASIC.
On the other hand I could definitely see programmable logic inside Intel or AMD CPUs, a sort of super SSE. Then again even there you'd probably be better off using GPU like custom hardware for the heavy lifting. In fact I can see CPU/GPU hybrids being very common in low end machines. Full custom logic is always going to have a performance per $ advantage over FPGAs unless FPGA technology chains drastically.
Sadly I think your joke just hit the nail on the head of one of the things that is seriously fucked up about this country. I mean here we are, factories shuttered all over the place, people losing their homes left and right, over 22,000 factories offshored since 2001, and debt climbing like there is no tomorrow and
BOOM
stupid Osprey turkey while we are at it. We already have the most tech heavy military on the planet but as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan all that means exactly jack and squat against the enemies of today. quit blowing money on stupid weapons already, Sheesh.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear you over the sound of how awesome my 32MJ rail gun is.
The bailout was intended to get them through the bankruptcy by allowing them to shed obligations that made it impossible to continue doing business as they had. Union contracts were renegotiated, and pension and medical obligations were reduced. It allowed GM to cut the overhead by several thousand dollars per vehicle. The European and Japanese companies building in the US were not hampered by such heavy requirements, and have long been able to undercut GM on costs because of this.
Well that would be a great idea in theory. In practice UAW gives a lot of money to Obama and they weren't likely to get wiped out.
The United Auto Workers union has gone from a drag on the company to a part owner. How the new relationship will play out is still unknown.
The UAW owns 17.5 percent of GM right now, and has the option to buy 2.5 percent more before the end of 2015. It could sell stock during the IPO or hunker down and remain a major player.
But arguments over wages will likely start cropping up, and will become even tougher to deal with as GM talks about how financially secure the company is now.
The biggest grumbling among autoworkers is the new two-tier wage system, under which some workers can earn $29 an hour and new hires get only half that. It's a system that makes shareholders and executives happy because it brings labor costs in line with non-unionized workers at Toyota and Honda plants in the South. But it could spell trouble for GM if the new wage system creates unrest with workers.
"It's hard to run a business where some people are making double what others are making for the identical job," Robinson says.
Besides the wage issue, there is mounting pressure on the UAW from its members and from other unions to demand that benefits lost during the auto crisis be restored.
"The three major US (auto) companies are making profits again . we demand that they do right by the workers who have done right by them," Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said in a speech at the UAW's major convention last summer. "Because just as there has been shared sacrifice in periods of pain, there must be shared prosperity in periods of gain."
GM is a shitty brand and will remain so. the support / warranty is horrible at gm dealerships. the car looks like a 4 door shitbox compared to the sleek demo presented originally. no one is going to buy a $40,000 car which looks like a $20,000 kia made by government motors.
People said that about the Trabant. But I remember how happy were when we finally managed to save up the bribe for a bureaucrat to put our name went on to the twenty year waiting list for one back in 1978.
Microsoft won't let you install any other updates until you've rebooted to finish installing the previous one,
That's because they test the old version, update 1 applied fully, update 1+2 applied fully and so on.
They don't test all possible chimeric system configurations e.g. where updates 1+2+3 were applied fully, 4 was applied to libraries but there is no reboot so the kernel has the updates 1-3 but not 4 and 5 was applied fully.
I've got a T shirt with "Ten thousand hands serve the Empire!" in Japanese with a large swastika. It's cool because it celebrates Japanese imperialism not Nazi imperialism. When people ask me I tell them it's a Buddhist phrase meaning "world peace and vegetarianism"
How do you feel about that? Should I be able to use that phrase as my XBox handle?
The guys tone seems to be that he knows best and that his view is commonly held, and that the people arguing are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes you wonder if my netbook (XP, limited user) is more secure than my notebook (Vista, UAC). Both have Microsoft Security Essentials and Secunia PSI.
Sadly PSI doesn't complain about Flash being insecure even though I only have 10.2.152.26, even though that's what it is installed for.
Is that the headquarters of the English Nazi Party or something? Creepy.
> A lot of people hate it when people speak in absolutes...
FTFY
Yup, I was actually pretty surprised to get emails saying people had tested my formatter on 3TB drives and it had worked because I didn't know there were USB hard drives that expose their native 4K sector size to the host.
> I very well may be incorrect here, but it sounds to me like you're confusing clusters (aka, allocation units) of a file format and physical disk sectors.
No, not at all - I'm talking about physical sector size, not cluster size.
The limit on both FAT32 and MBR is 2^32 physical sectors. FAT32 allows for clusters of 2^n sectors where n is 1 to 7.
> Since historically magnetic disks have always had 512 byte sectors
In the US hard and floppy disks are both 512 bytes. But Japanese PC-98 machines had floppy formats with 1024 byte sectors. And CD and DVDs have always had 2048 byte sectors. So do DVD-RAM disks. Windows supports 512,1024,2048 and 4096 byte sector sizes, and so does the USB mass storage class. ATA doesn't support anything but 512 byte sectors - there's probably a proposal to do so but I don't know of any hard drives that currently implement it. You'd also need Bios and OS boot code changes to make this work. At present Advanced Format drives have 4K sectors internally but emulate 512 byte when talking over ATA.
> I'm not completely sure, but I *think* that you *should* be able to install and boot a 32-bit OS with native Advanced Format and EFI/GPT support (note that that excludes all Windows OSs currently), an Advanced Format drive, and a GPT/EFI setup all with a disk larger than 2TiB.
EFI supports drives with 2^64 sectors. If you want a >2TB drive and MBR partitioning that drive needs to have physical sectors bigger than 512 bytes. E.g. a 3TB drive will have more than 2^32 sectors if they are 512 byte but less if they are 4096 byte.
Unfortunately Windows - at least x86 Windows - can't boot off an UEFI Bios and you need an UEFI Bios to boot off GPT. It's also pretty hard to find commodity x86 motherboards with UEFI (all Itanium boards are EFI and Intel Macs are a sort of bastardised EFI), which is why Microsoft didn't make it work. You can get UEFI boards with x64 though, and this is supported in Vista x64 SP1
All of which presents hard disk manufacturers with a bit of a problem for >2TB drives - they could emulate 512 byte sectors but then they'd need to use GPT which x86 Windows won't boot off. Or they could expose the 4K sectors but ATA and Bioses don't yet support that.
However if they make an USB external drive they can expose 4K sectors to the outside world since USB Mass Storage supports this (it had to because of Japanese floppies and optical disks) and there will be less than 2^32 sectors so MBR partitioning will still work.
Actually USB mass storage can support >512 byte sectors easily
E.g.
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/28840-so-i-bought-the-new-3tb-goflex-desk/
This actually presents a 4096 byte physical sector size to the OS. Handily this means that MBR partitioning will still work with it - that has a limit of 2^32 sectors but with a 4K sector size that is 16TB..
Windows is fine with >512 byte sectors at least post boot but I don't think it's possible to use them over ATA on any current OS. I.e. there are Advanced Format drives with 4K sectors but currently they all emulate 512 byte sectors over ATA. Probably moving to 4K native sector size on ATA is going to take some time since that requires changes to the ATA spec, drives, Bios and OS boot code.
Since the USB mass storage driver has supported >512 byte sectors for ages because CDs and DVD Roms have 2K byte sectors it's actually easier to get >2TB drives working over USB.
The reason I know about this stuff? I wrote this free tool
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm
It so happens that it works fine with the 3tb Goflex USB drive because it has a 4K physical sector size. FAT32 has the same limit 2^32 sector limit as MBR.
So you can have 16TB FAT32 volumes to share your AVI files between your PC, Mac, Linux box and games console/media player. 16TB is a lot of movies, maybe even all of them.
Now some might say that it's insane to use such an old format. That's sort of true but FAT32 is good because it's so widely implemented. It's hard to imagine anything else being supported across such a wide range of devices. Also if all you're doing is streaming AVI files FAT32 is actually good enough - because it is so simple it is trivial to implement it and get stability and performance very close to the raw performance of the device. More modern file systems are not like that.
Don't be homonymphobic.
My psychiatrist always told me I was a very special patient.Oh and that I should try his liver and fava beans.
This. Windows Mobile was endlessly customisable. It allowed you to install software from cab files you'd obtained from various sources. You could flash custom Roms with pretty much any UI you wanted. You could use removable SD cards.
Windows Phone 7 won't run the old applications and the one application I really like on Windows Mobile - Pleco Chinese dictionary - won't rewrite to run on WinPhone 7. The specs prohibit removable SD cards and force you to install from their app store. It's like Microsoft thinks that the reason people like iPhones is because they are locked the fuck down.
I think people that like Apple will keep buying Apple. People that liked the flexibility of WinMo will probably end up on Android. Most of the ISVs for Windows Mobile will probably end up there too. Pleco runs on iPhone and is planned to run on Android.
Windows Phone 7 is one of those things that got a few good reviews but I think it is a much worse disaster for Microsoft than Vista in the long run. Windows Mobile may have been a minority choice but all Windows Phone 7 will do is drive that minority to Apple or Google for their next phone. IE their market share will drop to zero in the mobile market.
It's a shame really - my HD2 with the Cookie Energy Rom is a really nice device. There's loads of software around for WinMo too.
I'm sure if he was discussing the merits of the German Liberal Party you'd say "Oh vote Nazi and shut up. tl;dr and no-one else did either"
I wish I could afford to try free software. I'd like a free lunch too, but I haven't managed to find one yet.
More to the point in the Battle of Britain Hitler stopped targeting military airfields and bombed London. It was a catastrophically bad decision - the RAF were on the verge of collapse at that point and the targeting switch gave them a chance to rebuild and eventually win.
. When Galadriel talks to Sam and Frodo about the operation of the Mirror of Galadriel, she quite clearly challenges the validity of the term "magic" as Sam would us it.
Do you mean this
http://ballz.ababa.net/dreamflower/quoteslotr.html
'Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal,' she answered, 'and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?'
Frodo did not answer.
'And you? ' she said, turning to Sam. 'For this is what your folk would call magic. I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?'
-"The Mirror of Galadriel"
A desktop CPU in an FPGA will always cost more and perform worse (i.e. slower clock rate) than a full custom chip from Intel or AMD. Mind you I've seen embedded designs where a microcontroller, Ram, Rom and custom logic are implemented in a $10 FPGA - especially where volumes are too low for an ASIC.
On the other hand I could definitely see programmable logic inside Intel or AMD CPUs, a sort of super SSE. Then again even there you'd probably be better off using GPU like custom hardware for the heavy lifting. In fact I can see CPU/GPU hybrids being very common in low end machines. Full custom logic is always going to have a performance per $ advantage over FPGAs unless FPGA technology chains drastically.
Well at least they won't shoot modders and dump the bodies in a lime pit like Apple are going to do.
Sadly I think your joke just hit the nail on the head of one of the things that is seriously fucked up about this country. I mean here we are, factories shuttered all over the place, people losing their homes left and right, over 22,000 factories offshored since 2001, and debt climbing like there is no tomorrow and
BOOM
stupid Osprey turkey while we are at it. We already have the most tech heavy military on the planet but as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan all that means exactly jack and squat against the enemies of today. quit blowing money on stupid weapons already, Sheesh.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear you over the sound of how awesome my 32MJ rail gun is.
"Site down due to overload: Please donate now so we can buy more bandwidth"
"Site down due to DDOS attacks: Please donate now so we can buy more bandwidth"
The bailout was intended to get them through the bankruptcy by allowing them to shed obligations that made it impossible to continue doing business as they had. Union contracts were renegotiated, and pension and medical obligations were reduced. It allowed GM to cut the overhead by several thousand dollars per vehicle. The European and Japanese companies building in the US were not hampered by such heavy requirements, and have long been able to undercut GM on costs because of this.
Well that would be a great idea in theory. In practice UAW gives a lot of money to Obama and they weren't likely to get wiped out.
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131328191/reasons-investors-may-want-to-sit-out-gm-s-ipo
GM is a shitty brand and will remain so. the support / warranty is horrible at gm dealerships. the car looks like a 4 door shitbox compared to the sleek demo presented originally. no one is going to buy a $40,000 car which looks like a $20,000 kia made by government motors.
People said that about the Trabant. But I remember how happy were when we finally managed to save up the bribe for a bureaucrat to put our name went on to the twenty year waiting list for one back in 1978.
From what I've read bipolar systems have good days - where they're the BEST IN THE WORLD and bad days where EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO SHIT.
Spam is an excellent alternative to gold. It's inflation proof lasts for ever and you can eat it if the balloon goes up.
Microsoft won't let you install any other updates until you've rebooted to finish installing the previous one,
That's because they test the old version, update 1 applied fully, update 1+2 applied fully and so on.
They don't test all possible chimeric system configurations e.g. where updates 1+2+3 were applied fully, 4 was applied to libraries but there is no reboot so the kernel has the updates 1-3 but not 4 and 5 was applied fully.
whereas Ubuntu couldn't give a damn.
Err, never mind.
I've got a T shirt with "Ten thousand hands serve the Empire!" in Japanese with a large swastika. It's cool because it celebrates Japanese imperialism not Nazi imperialism. When people ask me I tell them it's a Buddhist phrase meaning "world peace and vegetarianism"
How do you feel about that? Should I be able to use that phrase as my XBox handle?
How much fun would Raiders of the Lost Ark have been without swastikas?
The guys tone seems to be that he knows best and that his view is commonly held, and that the people arguing are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing.
Yeah, like Hitler did.