. It has Wireless N/B/G, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, and is available in two basic configurations: $1799 for a 1.6GHz chip, plus 2GB of RAM and a 80GBs 4200 RPM Drive. For almost double the price at $3098, you can get a 1.8GHz chip with the same 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive module that, like all SSD, is shock resistant.
Neither of these are Netbooks. Netbooks are small (9"-10") cheap (<$500) minimalist (cheap but slow Atom processor, tiny SSD, horrid graphics/chipset) notebooks. Apple do small but they don't do cheap. The marketing term for Apple's small notebook is ultraportable - i.e. you pay a premium for a smaller machine. It's actually the opposite concept of a netbook. Now if you're a manufacturer it's better to make "ultra portables" than "netbooks" - you put a bit more powerful hardware in and charge higher margins than than regular notebooks (ultra portables) rather than lower ones (netbooks). Unfortunately in the world of PCs it only takes one manufacturer to break ranks and make a netbook and they will sell millions - like the Asus EEE pc or the Acer Aspire One. At that point everyone else is forced to compete with them. Of course there's only one vendor of Apple hardware and so they can just keep making "ultra portables" and ignore the netbook market.
Of course this is the reason it's better to be a user of an open, multi vendor platform like the PC than a closed, single vendor one like the Mac. But if you're Apple a closed platform is obviously better for you.
Netbooks have too low margins for everything. Even Microsoft was forced to drop the price of XP to something like US$15 to avoid getting stomped. Apple make a fortune out of a Mac Book. If they started allowing OS X to run on netbooks not only would they make less money but there's a risk a lot of people would buy a netbook and an OS X license (which makes them say US$50 tops) rather than a more expensive Mac Book ( which makes them probably US$ several hundreds ). So they could actually lose money as customers switch to a new, cheaper option. \\
And that's not including the support costs. If you license OS X to run on a load of netbooks, you pretty much have to be prepared to deal with bug reports on that hardware, even if you try as much as possible to push the support onto the netbook vendors. Right now they only need to support OS X on their own hardware and they can control that 100%.
Thus it's quite reasonable for Apple to decide that they basically don't want to enter the market.
Freeloader more like. How many people making Hackintoshes are actually paying for the software and how many get it off a torrent?
Even if they are paying retail price they're still violating the license. A copy of OS X and Mac is profitable for Apple. A copy of OS X and an netbook probably isn't. Now at this point people start to mumble something about buggy whip manufacturers, but guess what, that's a poor analogy. Buggy whip manufacturers went out of business because people didn't want their stuff. If Apple goes under it will be because people want their stuff but don't want to pay.
Even more irritatingly these tend to be the same sort of people who are outraged when some company uses Linux and doesn't make the source code available. And yeah, I know the GPL is a copyright license not an EULA. But in both cases people are using something in a way that the copyright holder has explicitly forbidden. Either you can have a copyright free world, in which case you can run OS X for free and keep your Linux fork closed source, or you live in a world with copyright where both things are illegal.
That being said I don't really like Linux or OS X. Still if you do, it seems like you need to follow the terms of the license the code is under. With Linux that means publishing your code and with OS X it means running it on Apple hardware.
When applied to NAND Flash, the Flash chip itself caches accessed pages internally and presents them through a DRAM or SRAM like interface as random access memory.
I've never seen a NAND chip that does this. Ok, OneNand does something like this but it is not really for XIP, more it's a way to allow the ARM to be reading one buffer out of SRAM while another buffer is being fetched, i.e. it was a performance hack. You can XIP a bootstrap though, but only one page's worth. Of course you could use a demand paging scheme to execute larger applications, just like a normal NAND. Still OneNand isn't smart enough to do this without additional software support.
Or at least it wasn't last time I checked. Mind you it could be done but if it was it means the hardware would need to handle bad blocks. Still you could just have a list of bad blocks/replacement blocks in some sort of TLB like content addressable memory and make sure any attempts to access them are redirected. From the devices I've used only around 1% of the blocks are potentially bad, so the CAM wouldn't have to be that large.
Then again not doing this sort of thing in hardware is probably what makes NAND so cheap.
I am familiar with various ARM based microcontrollers and they almost certainly use use NOR like Flash to inherently support Execute in Place because there are no delays when crossing Flash page boundaries and all accesses require the same number of wait states without any exceptions. Given the common real time nature of microcontroller applications, if there were delays when accessing new pages it would be highlighted in the specifications.
Actually I'm talking about mobile phones. They typically have quite a lot of flash memory - 128MB-512MB - above the point where NAND becomes cheaper than NOR. They also have a lot of SDRAM. All of this is offchip from the ARM.
The flash microcontrollers I've seen are 64K-256K and at that level NOR is apparently cheaper.
That used to be common back when NOR flash was. Now NAND is more common you need to copy stuff to RAM to execute it. Actually it's quite natural to demand page from NAND into RAM, i.e you have a chunk of virtual address space that is logically mapped to a chunk of RAM. When the CPU touches a page, a page fault occurs and the page is fetched from NAND.
Foreign policy of any country has more to do with game theory than good versus evil.
Hmm, that's odd. Normally Swedes lecture me how evil the US and the UK are, but carefully avoid mentioning the much more serious evil of their opponents. It reminds me a bit of this Orwell comment -
Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.
Mind you Sweden as a country clearly considers itself above taking any side whatsoever, just in case the bad guys win and (being bad guys) will want revenge. Still that only works so long as the Nazis, Commies and so one get defeated by someone else. It's hard to imagine Sweden surviving in a Europe totally dominated by Hitler and/or Stalin for example. As you say, Sweden has a lot of resources and a good location. It would was also very rich post World War II, and would have been a tempting target for both dictators.
Once you understand there is a game and it's not good (to say the least) to lose, you are on the way to enlightenment. Well maybe not, but it certainly makes it clearer who your allies are.
I'm going to kill Cory Doctorow right now. I know his chances of making it as Polemarch (or Archon or whatever, I can't be assed reading Ender's Game because I know the plot twist) are minimal but I can't take that chance.
Ok, Sweden has the openness. Still they weren't much help in either WWII or the Cold War. Nor really could they have been even if they'd wanted to. Which they didn't.
You need somewhere that combines an open society with somewhat more adventurous foreign policy, and a lot more heft.
Sweden is a bit like the Tollan in SG1 - it's an advanced society but one that is too aloof too be much help when you're about to get overrun by the bad guys.
I don't think any other government would do this - mistakes in the military would just get covered up as state secrets and anyone who tried to talk about them would get locked up or worse.
Eh. Forgive me, but do you have any basis whatsoever for this claim, or are you just being arrogant?
In the UK people have been locked up for breaching the official secrets act. Fair enough you may say, but many of them seem to have been guilty more of embarrassing the government than releasing information which hurt national security.
Now the UK is not particularly bad at this sort of thing. In far less free societies like China people have been executed because they "might" have commented on the health of senior leaders and quoted information which was publicly available. In fact most of the charges against them are never even released -
The nonconfidential version of the verdict released to the family March 24 reveals only two of eight "top secret" charges, any of which could result in the death penalty. One relates to charges from a witness that Wo "might" have intentionally passed on information about the health of senior leaders to Taiwan, Chen and Michael Rolufs said.
A second alleges that Wo collected technical information on missiles for the Taiwanese. The other six such charges were not revealed. The verdict also claims Wo received $400,000 from Taiwan.
Chen seriously doubts that Wo had access to confidential information on senior leaders' health status and notes that the verdict's use of "might" suggests a lack of certainty. On the more serious charge of obtaining technical information on Chinese missiles, the verdict suggests Wo got information from magazines. But these were all from a publicly accessible library, Chen said.
Wow. People complain about the US government. Still look at the transparency. The GAO wrote a very readable report for the House Of Representatives and now we can all read it on the web. It's not unreasonable to think that the US's vast military superiority over everyone else on the planet is at least in part due to this sort of thing. I don't think any other government would do this - mistakes in the military would just get covered up as state secrets and anyone who tried to talk about them would get locked up or worse.
> Yet, the times the West has faced Russian hardware (I.E. Vietnam, various Middle East conflicts), the hardware has, on average, performed pretty well against equivalent Western hardware.
That's not true. The regular Vietnamese army by and large lost when it fought the Americans head on. The Viet Cong were basically able to take over the country using terror tactics and declining support for the conflict forced a US pull out. Only then did North Vietnam send its army to conquer South Vietnam.
Back when the US was still fighting, they could not do that, because it would be obliterated
The leadership in Hanoi must have been initially despondent about the outcome of their great gamble.[151][152] Their first and most ambitious goal, producing a general uprising, had ended in a dismal failure. In total, approximately 85,000–100,000 communist troops had participated in the initial onslaught and in the follow-up phases. Overall, during the "Border Battles" of 1967 and the nine-month winter-spring campaign, 45,267 communist troops had been killed in action.[153]
The keys to the failure of Tet are not difficult to discern. Hanoi had underestimated the strategic mobility of the allied forces, which allowed them to redeploy at will to threatened areas; their battle plan was too complex and difficult to coordinate, which was amply demonstrated by the 30 January attacks; their violation of the principle of mass, attacking everywhere instead of concentrating their forces on a few specific targets, allowed their forces to be defeated piecemeal; the launching of massed attacks headlong into the teeth of vastly superior firepower; and last, but not least, the incorrect assumptions upon which the entire campaign was based.[154] According to General Tran Van Tra: "We did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy, did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities, and that our capabilities were limited, and set requirements that were beyond our actual strength
Almost half of the North Vietnamese troops in the Tet Offensive died and none of their military objectives were met. The US had better technology, better firepower and was more reactive to events.
In the Middle East it was even more uneven. The Israelis using Western equipment have done very well e.g.
The US army totally outclassed the Iraqi army when it fought - thousands of times more Iraqi soldiers died than American ones in the Gulf War and many more only survived because they deserted. In fact it was the perception that Soviet equipment is worthless that became common after the Gulf War that lead to the argument that the US was only facing "Monkey Model" hardware, not the real stuff.
Actually I think the real explanation was that the North Vietnamese and Iraqis had "Monkey Model" societies compared to the US, i.e. tyrannies that are unable to process information properly or engineer effective armaments. That means that their armies have a tendency to get slaughtered when they fight determined democracies.
That's assuming you can do it yourself. Syria is hardly a hotbed of industry and innovation, and most of the Middle East is even worse. E.g. when Libya gave up their "nuclear and biological weapons program", which had been reasonably well funded and resourced over several decades had lead to only one viable weapon, a landmine spiked with human faeces.
Libya's biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream.
So it's not too surprising these sorts of countries decided to buy stuff from the USSR instead. Unfortunately for them the Russians had a cunning plan with weapons. Soviet weapons systems actually came in two variants - a high end one to be made in peace time and a stripped down one to be made in a war quickly and in larger quantities. The export customers got the stripped down version, known as the 'monkey model'.
The term was popularized in the West by Viktor Suvorov, in Inside the Soviet Army. Suvorov states that the simplified monkey model was designed for massive production in wartime, to replace front-line stocks if a war should last for several weeks. In peacetime, Soviet industry gained experience building both standard and monkey-model variants, the latter being for sale "to the 'brothers' and 'friends' of the USSR as the very latest equipment available." He also cites the benefit of disinformation when an exported monkey model fell into the hands of Western intelligence, who "naturally gained a completely false impression of the true combat capabilities of the BMP-1 and of Soviet tanks".
I.e. the monkey model looked the same or similar to the domestic version but was cheaper to make and had far inferior capabilities.
But to alow regular people access to those vehicles would cause far more problems than it's worth. They can barely stay on a road, you think they're going to fare better in the air?
I think the way flying cars would work is that you get into and say "Take me to work/home/wherever" and then after that it would navigate by GPS and talking to the other cars / central airtraffic control servers to avoid collisions. You'd need radar too to avoid cars that had a mechanical or software problem but there would not be any way for the 'driver' to do any driving.
So essentially there's be a protocol that made sure that working vehicles had time to detect and avoid non working ones as they glided to the ground.
The odd thing is that it would be easier to do this in 3D because you can effectively stack 'roads' on top of each other as high as you like. And you could even have more advanced protocols higher up, much like as higher frequencies became technically feasible it was possible to mandate more advanced modulation methods in radio. You can't do that on a conventional 2D road, and it would be hard to support a mixed environment where some cars were on various types of autopilot and some were manually driven.
Politically it would be very hard to ban manually driven cars on conventional roads and require autopilot, but for something new and cool like flying cars you could just license different height ranges for different protocols. There's be compliance tests too, but you need those for regular cars. I imagine flying cars would look a bit like a microlight aircraft but with some sort of autopilot and probably a clever safety system so they would glide and/or parachute to safety should they have problems. The other cars would detect this an avoid them on the way down. The normal autopilot system would basically make sure that there was enough space between vehicles to make sure this process was safe.
> It's too bad that Windows uses UCS-2 (now UTF-16) internally though - I'd much prefer the simpler UTF-8.
Back when it was developed Unicode was a fixed width 16 bit encoding and UTF-8 hadn't been invented - UTF-8 was invented in 1993, the choice of character set in NT was made a few years earlier. One of the reasons for choosing UCS-2 was that all the cruft of variable length encodings could be avoided in the kernel.
Windows does now support UTF-8 as a code page, and the kernel internally supports UTF-16 as you say, but you have to wonder if supporting UTF-8 from the start would have been better.
Actually it has always slightly irritated me was that USB uses UCS-2 (or maybe UTF-16 now) for device names. That's ridiculous because every device I've seen uses US ASCII. UCS-2 or UTF-16 just doubles the size of the strings in the device ROM where space is really at a premium. Sure now it doesn't matter, but back when USB was invented and devices had tiny ROMs that decision had a price.
Outlook us using about 40MB of Private Working Set on my machine. I've always wondered how ancient applications like Outlook are written actually - they probably predate MFC. Still if you look at an Outlook process it seems to have the ATL, MFC and.Net DLLs loaded. My guess is that Outlook was originally a large and abominable pure C++ application, but some later additions used MFC when that was fashionable. Later on as ATL took over new bits were written in that and some old bits were rewritten. Same with.Net.
Actually if your application is a big mass of COM objects you could use any of these.
Well I dunno about that. Both DCL and the Dos batch file environment seem to be laughably crippled to me compared to a typical Unix shell enviroment.
Windows has made a few changes batch files though - you can write a which.bat file that searches you path for the first match. Useful if you have several compilers for different platforms and several copies of make and want to make sure the right ones are being run.
Still batch files have a killer advantage that if you can express what you want to do in one, you know it will run without the user needing to install Perl or Powershell. If you want to solve a problem like which.bat solves on someone else's machine, that's actually quite useful.
Today, Dave Cutler’s team is using Alpha-based systems to develop 64-bit NT. At WinHEC (April 99), Microsoft was able to boot 64-bit NT on an Alpha-based computer. However, at the current pace of development, Intel might deliver its 64-bit chip (Merced) by the time 64-bit NT is ready. If this happens, the fact that Alpha was first would offer little competitive advantage. Microsoft will position the 64-bit NT Server as a high-end, low-volume solution for those applications that need maximum scalability—e.g., a large SQL Server database that needs gigabytes of RAM for caching. Would the 64-bit version of NT perform significantly better on the Alpha vs. Merced for this type of application? If not, then being first and fastest would NOT overcome Intel’s competitive advantages: compatibility and cost. In the past, Compaq would position VMS, True64, or a Himalaya system for a highly scalable database application. Will Compaq position 64-bit NT against VMS, Tru64, or Himalaya? Not likely. Could a 64-bit Alpha Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro) workstation save Alpha on NT? No way. Therefore, Alpha on NT is dead.
Ubuntu runs rather like treacle on netbooks too. And basically I wouldn't use it even if it run quickly because it doesn't run the applications I want to use. Still, I guess I'm not an elite hacker like you.
Someone should set up a service where people in the US/UK would volunteer their machines as proxies so people in the other country could watching streaming video from sites that won't accept international IP addresses.
Of course the BBC and Hulu would ban proxies by IP address if they found them so there'd need to be a bit of subtlety. Plus you'd need some way to encourage people to not free load. Still it could be done.
Now in some ways Tor attempts to solve the same problem but unfortunately it doesn't really encourage high bandwidth users.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean this one
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/apple-ibook-g4-12/4505-3121_7-31466301.html
That's was $999.
Or the MacBook Air
http://gizmodo.com/348753/macbook-air-review
. It has Wireless N/B/G, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, and is available in two basic configurations: $1799 for a 1.6GHz chip, plus 2GB of RAM and a 80GBs 4200 RPM Drive. For almost double the price at $3098, you can get a 1.8GHz chip with the same 2GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive module that, like all SSD, is shock resistant.
Neither of these are Netbooks. Netbooks are small (9"-10") cheap (<$500) minimalist (cheap but slow Atom processor, tiny SSD, horrid graphics/chipset) notebooks. Apple do small but they don't do cheap. The marketing term for Apple's small notebook is ultraportable - i.e. you pay a premium for a smaller machine. It's actually the opposite concept of a netbook. Now if you're a manufacturer it's better to make "ultra portables" than "netbooks" - you put a bit more powerful hardware in and charge higher margins than than regular notebooks (ultra portables) rather than lower ones (netbooks). Unfortunately in the world of PCs it only takes one manufacturer to break ranks and make a netbook and they will sell millions - like the Asus EEE pc or the Acer Aspire One. At that point everyone else is forced to compete with them. Of course there's only one vendor of Apple hardware and so they can just keep making "ultra portables" and ignore the netbook market.
Of course this is the reason it's better to be a user of an open, multi vendor platform like the PC than a closed, single vendor one like the Mac. But if you're Apple a closed platform is obviously better for you.
Netbooks have too low margins for everything. Even Microsoft was forced to drop the price of XP to something like US$15 to avoid getting stomped. Apple make a fortune out of a Mac Book. If they started allowing OS X to run on netbooks not only would they make less money but there's a risk a lot of people would buy a netbook and an OS X license (which makes them say US$50 tops) rather than a more expensive Mac Book ( which makes them probably US$ several hundreds ). So they could actually lose money as customers switch to a new, cheaper option. \\
And that's not including the support costs. If you license OS X to run on a load of netbooks, you pretty much have to be prepared to deal with bug reports on that hardware, even if you try as much as possible to push the support onto the netbook vendors. Right now they only need to support OS X on their own hardware and they can control that 100%.
Thus it's quite reasonable for Apple to decide that they basically don't want to enter the market.
Freeloader more like. How many people making Hackintoshes are actually paying for the software and how many get it off a torrent?
Even if they are paying retail price they're still violating the license. A copy of OS X and Mac is profitable for Apple. A copy of OS X and an netbook probably isn't. Now at this point people start to mumble something about buggy whip manufacturers, but guess what, that's a poor analogy. Buggy whip manufacturers went out of business because people didn't want their stuff. If Apple goes under it will be because people want their stuff but don't want to pay.
Even more irritatingly these tend to be the same sort of people who are outraged when some company uses Linux and doesn't make the source code available. And yeah, I know the GPL is a copyright license not an EULA. But in both cases people are using something in a way that the copyright holder has explicitly forbidden. Either you can have a copyright free world, in which case you can run OS X for free and keep your Linux fork closed source, or you live in a world with copyright where both things are illegal.
That being said I don't really like Linux or OS X. Still if you do, it seems like you need to follow the terms of the license the code is under. With Linux that means publishing your code and with OS X it means running it on Apple hardware.
When applied to NAND Flash, the Flash chip itself caches accessed pages internally and presents them through a DRAM or SRAM like interface as random access memory.
I've never seen a NAND chip that does this. Ok, OneNand does something like this but it is not really for XIP, more it's a way to allow the ARM to be reading one buffer out of SRAM while another buffer is being fetched, i.e. it was a performance hack. You can XIP a bootstrap though, but only one page's worth. Of course you could use a demand paging scheme to execute larger applications, just like a normal NAND. Still OneNand isn't smart enough to do this without additional software support.
Or at least it wasn't last time I checked. Mind you it could be done but if it was it means the hardware would need to handle bad blocks. Still you could just have a list of bad blocks/replacement blocks in some sort of TLB like content addressable memory and make sure any attempts to access them are redirected. From the devices I've used only around 1% of the blocks are potentially bad, so the CAM wouldn't have to be that large.
Then again not doing this sort of thing in hardware is probably what makes NAND so cheap.
I am familiar with various ARM based microcontrollers and they almost certainly use use NOR like Flash to inherently support Execute in Place because there are no delays when crossing Flash page boundaries and all accesses require the same number of wait states without any exceptions. Given the common real time nature of microcontroller applications, if there were delays when accessing new pages it would be highlighted in the specifications.
Actually I'm talking about mobile phones. They typically have quite a lot of flash memory - 128MB-512MB - above the point where NAND becomes cheaper than NOR. They also have a lot of SDRAM. All of this is offchip from the ARM.
The flash microcontrollers I've seen are 64K-256K and at that level NOR is apparently cheaper.
That used to be common back when NOR flash was. Now NAND is more common you need to copy stuff to RAM to execute it. Actually it's quite natural to demand page from NAND into RAM, i.e you have a chunk of virtual address space that is logically mapped to a chunk of RAM. When the CPU touches a page, a page fault occurs and the page is fetched from NAND.
Sounds like a particularly disturbing dystopian universe.
Maybe opening your trunk should require a series of motions, like a physical password of sorts, to make sure you're doing it intentionally.
"Let's see...right foot in, right foot out, right foot in, shake it all about..."
How about the Truffle Shuffle?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5whaRkuipU
Foreign policy of any country has more to do with game theory than good versus evil.
Hmm, that's odd. Normally Swedes lecture me how evil the US and the UK are, but carefully avoid mentioning the much more serious evil of their opponents. It reminds me a bit of this Orwell comment -
Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
Mind you Sweden as a country clearly considers itself above taking any side whatsoever, just in case the bad guys win and (being bad guys) will want revenge. Still that only works so long as the Nazis, Commies and so one get defeated by someone else. It's hard to imagine Sweden surviving in a Europe totally dominated by Hitler and/or Stalin for example. As you say, Sweden has a lot of resources and a good location. It would was also very rich post World War II, and would have been a tempting target for both dictators.
Once you understand there is a game and it's not good (to say the least) to lose, you are on the way to enlightenment. Well maybe not, but it certainly makes it clearer who your allies are.
I'm going to kill Cory Doctorow right now. I know his chances of making it as Polemarch (or Archon or whatever, I can't be assed reading Ender's Game because I know the plot twist) are minimal but I can't take that chance.
Ok, Sweden has the openness. Still they weren't much help in either WWII or the Cold War. Nor really could they have been even if they'd wanted to. Which they didn't.
You need somewhere that combines an open society with somewhat more adventurous foreign policy, and a lot more heft.
Sweden is a bit like the Tollan in SG1 - it's an advanced society but one that is too aloof too be much help when you're about to get overrun by the bad guys.
Eh. Forgive me, but do you have any basis whatsoever for this claim, or are you just being arrogant?
In the UK people have been locked up for breaching the official secrets act. Fair enough you may say, but many of them seem to have been guilty more of embarrassing the government than releasing information which hurt national security.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/216868.stm
Now the UK is not particularly bad at this sort of thing. In far less free societies like China people have been executed because they "might" have commented on the health of senior leaders and quoted information which was publicly available. In fact most of the charges against them are never even released -
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0243.html
The nonconfidential version of the verdict released to the family March 24 reveals only two of eight "top secret" charges, any of which could result in the death penalty. One relates to charges from a witness that Wo "might" have intentionally passed on information about the health of senior leaders to Taiwan, Chen and Michael Rolufs said.
A second alleges that Wo collected technical information on missiles for the Taiwanese. The other six such charges were not revealed. The verdict also claims Wo received $400,000 from Taiwan.
Chen seriously doubts that Wo had access to confidential information on senior leaders' health status and notes that the verdict's use of "might" suggests a lack of certainty. On the more serious charge of obtaining technical information on Chinese missiles, the verdict suggests Wo got information from magazines. But these were all from a publicly accessible library, Chen said.
I think the guy has a point (altough he's being a bit nationalistic about it)
I'm actually English and I live in Taiwan. I've got no plans to ever live in the US, so it's not really about nationalism.
FreeDos would run very well in 32MB of Ram.
There is a good GAO report on this.
This one?
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/im92026.htm
Wow. People complain about the US government. Still look at the transparency. The GAO wrote a very readable report for the House Of Representatives and now we can all read it on the web. It's not unreasonable to think that the US's vast military superiority over everyone else on the planet is at least in part due to this sort of thing. I don't think any other government would do this - mistakes in the military would just get covered up as state secrets and anyone who tried to talk about them would get locked up or worse.
> Yet, the times the West has faced Russian hardware (I.E. Vietnam, various Middle East conflicts), the hardware has, on average, performed pretty well against equivalent Western hardware.
That's not true. The regular Vietnamese army by and large lost when it fought the Americans head on. The Viet Cong were basically able to take over the country using terror tactics and declining support for the conflict forced a US pull out. Only then did North Vietnam send its army to conquer South Vietnam.
Back when the US was still fighting, they could not do that, because it would be obliterated
E.g. here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive#North_Vietnam
The leadership in Hanoi must have been initially despondent about the outcome of their great gamble.[151][152] Their first and most ambitious goal, producing a general uprising, had ended in a dismal failure. In total, approximately 85,000–100,000 communist troops had participated in the initial onslaught and in the follow-up phases. Overall, during the "Border Battles" of 1967 and the nine-month winter-spring campaign, 45,267 communist troops had been killed in action.[153]
The keys to the failure of Tet are not difficult to discern. Hanoi had underestimated the strategic mobility of the allied forces, which allowed them to redeploy at will to threatened areas; their battle plan was too complex and difficult to coordinate, which was amply demonstrated by the 30 January attacks; their violation of the principle of mass, attacking everywhere instead of concentrating their forces on a few specific targets, allowed their forces to be defeated piecemeal; the launching of massed attacks headlong into the teeth of vastly superior firepower; and last, but not least, the incorrect assumptions upon which the entire campaign was based.[154] According to General Tran Van Tra: "We did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy, did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities, and that our capabilities were limited, and set requirements that were beyond our actual strength
Almost half of the North Vietnamese troops in the Tet Offensive died and none of their military objectives were met. The US had better technology, better firepower and was more reactive to events.
In the Middle East it was even more uneven. The Israelis using Western equipment have done very well e.g.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj89/win89/hurley.html
The US army totally outclassed the Iraqi army when it fought - thousands of times more Iraqi soldiers died than American ones in the Gulf War and many more only survived because they deserted. In fact it was the perception that Soviet equipment is worthless that became common after the Gulf War that lead to the argument that the US was only facing "Monkey Model" hardware, not the real stuff.
Actually I think the real explanation was that the North Vietnamese and Iraqis had "Monkey Model" societies compared to the US, i.e. tyrannies that are unable to process information properly or engineer effective armaments. That means that their armies have a tendency to get slaughtered when they fight determined democracies.
That's assuming you can do it yourself. Syria is hardly a hotbed of industry and innovation, and most of the Middle East is even worse. E.g. when Libya gave up their "nuclear and biological weapons program", which had been reasonably well funded and resourced over several decades had lead to only one viable weapon, a landmine spiked with human faeces.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/21/politics.libya
Libya's biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream.
So it's not too surprising these sorts of countries decided to buy stuff from the USSR instead. Unfortunately for them the Russians had a cunning plan with weapons. Soviet weapons systems actually came in two variants - a high end one to be made in peace time and a stripped down one to be made in a war quickly and in larger quantities. The export customers got the stripped down version, known as the 'monkey model'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_model
The term was popularized in the West by Viktor Suvorov, in Inside the Soviet Army. Suvorov states that the simplified monkey model was designed for massive production in wartime, to replace front-line stocks if a war should last for several weeks. In peacetime, Soviet industry gained experience building both standard and monkey-model variants, the latter being for sale "to the 'brothers' and 'friends' of the USSR as the very latest equipment available." He also cites the benefit of disinformation when an exported monkey model fell into the hands of Western intelligence, who "naturally gained a completely false impression of the true combat capabilities of the BMP-1 and of Soviet tanks".
I.e. the monkey model looked the same or similar to the domestic version but was cheaper to make and had far inferior capabilities.
I know several IT companies that will only hire Gitmo alumni as managers. Or at least that's the best explanation I can think of.
But to alow regular people access to those vehicles would cause far more problems than it's worth. They can barely stay on a road, you think they're going to fare better in the air?
I think the way flying cars would work is that you get into and say "Take me to work/home/wherever" and then after that it would navigate by GPS and talking to the other cars / central airtraffic control servers to avoid collisions. You'd need radar too to avoid cars that had a mechanical or software problem but there would not be any way for the 'driver' to do any driving.
So essentially there's be a protocol that made sure that working vehicles had time to detect and avoid non working ones as they glided to the ground.
The odd thing is that it would be easier to do this in 3D because you can effectively stack 'roads' on top of each other as high as you like. And you could even have more advanced protocols higher up, much like as higher frequencies became technically feasible it was possible to mandate more advanced modulation methods in radio. You can't do that on a conventional 2D road, and it would be hard to support a mixed environment where some cars were on various types of autopilot and some were manually driven.
Politically it would be very hard to ban manually driven cars on conventional roads and require autopilot, but for something new and cool like flying cars you could just license different height ranges for different protocols. There's be compliance tests too, but you need those for regular cars. I imagine flying cars would look a bit like a microlight aircraft but with some sort of autopilot and probably a clever safety system so they would glide and/or parachute to safety should they have problems. The other cars would detect this an avoid them on the way down. The normal autopilot system would basically make sure that there was enough space between vehicles to make sure this process was safe.
> It's too bad that Windows uses UCS-2 (now UTF-16) internally though - I'd much prefer the simpler UTF-8.
Back when it was developed Unicode was a fixed width 16 bit encoding and UTF-8 hadn't been invented - UTF-8 was invented in 1993, the choice of character set in NT was made a few years earlier. One of the reasons for choosing UCS-2 was that all the cruft of variable length encodings could be avoided in the kernel.
Windows does now support UTF-8 as a code page, and the kernel internally supports UTF-16 as you say, but you have to wonder if supporting UTF-8 from the start would have been better.
Actually it has always slightly irritated me was that USB uses UCS-2 (or maybe UTF-16 now) for device names. That's ridiculous because every device I've seen uses US ASCII. UCS-2 or UTF-16 just doubles the size of the strings in the device ROM where space is really at a premium. Sure now it doesn't matter, but back when USB was invented and devices had tiny ROMs that decision had a price.
Outlook us using about 40MB of Private Working Set on my machine. I've always wondered how ancient applications like Outlook are written actually - they probably predate MFC. Still if you look at an Outlook process it seems to have the ATL, MFC and .Net DLLs loaded. My guess is that Outlook was originally a large and abominable pure C++ application, but some later additions used MFC when that was fashionable. Later on as ATL took over new bits were written in that and some old bits were rewritten. Same with .Net.
Actually if your application is a big mass of COM objects you could use any of these.
DO NOT RUN TASTY OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS! WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!
(Please don't mod me down, they paid me good money to post this.)
Well I dunno about that. Both DCL and the Dos batch file environment seem to be laughably crippled to me compared to a typical Unix shell enviroment.
Windows has made a few changes batch files though - you can write a which.bat file that searches you path for the first match. Useful if you have several compilers for different platforms and several copies of make and want to make sure the right ones are being run.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/20/357225.aspx
Of course it is still primitive.
Mind you in Windows 7 you apparently get the PowerShell and it will be backported to XP and Vista.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
Still batch files have a killer advantage that if you can express what you want to do in one, you know it will run without the user needing to install Perl or Powershell. If you want to solve a problem like which.bat solves on someone else's machine, that's actually quite useful.
http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/7153/the-death-of-alpha-on-nt.html
The Future
Today, Dave Cutler’s team is using Alpha-based systems to develop 64-bit NT. At WinHEC (April 99), Microsoft was able to boot 64-bit NT on an Alpha-based computer. However, at the current pace of development, Intel might deliver its 64-bit chip (Merced) by the time 64-bit NT is ready. If this happens, the fact that Alpha was first would offer little competitive advantage. Microsoft will position the 64-bit NT Server as a high-end, low-volume solution for those applications that need maximum scalability—e.g., a large SQL Server database that needs gigabytes of RAM for caching. Would the 64-bit version of NT perform significantly better on the Alpha vs. Merced for this type of application? If not, then being first and fastest would NOT overcome Intel’s competitive advantages: compatibility and cost. In the past, Compaq would position VMS, True64, or a Himalaya system for a highly scalable database application. Will Compaq position 64-bit NT against VMS, Tru64, or Himalaya? Not likely. Could a 64-bit Alpha Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro) workstation save Alpha on NT? No way. Therefore, Alpha on NT is dead.
Ubuntu runs rather like treacle on netbooks too. And basically I wouldn't use it even if it run quickly because it doesn't run the applications I want to use. Still, I guess I'm not an elite hacker like you.
Someone should set up a service where people in the US/UK would volunteer their machines as proxies so people in the other country could watching streaming video from sites that won't accept international IP addresses.
Of course the BBC and Hulu would ban proxies by IP address if they found them so there'd need to be a bit of subtlety. Plus you'd need some way to encourage people to not free load. Still it could be done.
Now in some ways Tor attempts to solve the same problem but unfortunately it doesn't really encourage high bandwidth users.