(Luckily I use gmail for my domain, and out of ~2000 monthly spam, only 2 hit my inbox. And only 1 false positive to date) I had an address that had been unobfuscated on a website on usenet for about 15 years and used to get hundreds of spam messages per day. Thunderbird reduced this to a 1 per day after the filter had been trained. I redirected it to gmail and gmail reduces it to a maybe 1 or two per year. With no false postives that I've found. Remarkable really, gmail's spam filtering beats Thunderbird's handily and Thunderbird's was quite good enough to use.
I think he's right. This Drudge Retort guy is clearly taking advantage of the Drudge Report's high alexa rating. And most of his original content is scrapped.
He can go on about parody, mashups and so on. But in the end it reminds me of Victor Lewis Smith's quip that "imitation is the sincerest form of being an unoriginal thieving bastard"
Here's the full text of the original story. Normally I don't do this but I don't see Drudge objecting. Anyhow according to Internet Law I have Mashup Rights because I added some and tags before I posted. This paragraph is also orginal content that I wrote without using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V at all. And I added a link to the original story.
I'm currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing "'hot news' misappropriation under New York state law." An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.
The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline.
Here's one of the six disputed blog entries:
Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. "I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds," she said. "I think that is the natural progression that one would expect."
If you follow the link, you'll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.
I have all the expertise in intellectual property law of somebody who's never been sued, so standard disclaimers apply. But I have difficulty seeing how it violates copyright law for a blogger to link to a news story with a short snippet of the story in furtherance of public discussion.
AP feels otherwise. In a June 3 letter, AP's Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman told me:
... you purport that the Drudge Retort's users reproduce and display AP headlines and leads under a fair use defense. Please note that contrary to your assertion, AP considers that the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.
In another DMCA takedown, AP contends that the following user comment is a copyright violation:
Well, the oil execs just put another refinery in South Dakota. Maybe they're a bunch of retards.
www.foxnews.com
Hyperion has said the project, about 60 miles south of Sioux Falls, would create 1,800 permanent jobs and another 4,500 construction jobs over a four-year period. Construction could begin in 2010.
The Hyperion Energy Center would process 400,000 barrels of thick Canadian crude oil a day, which company executives say would help the U.S. reduce its dependence on overseas oil. The company has said it will bring in the crude oil by pipeline but has announced no sp
All my friends use Real Player - all of them! It is the "best player" for windows. When it fails, THEN they give Vlc a try. This is true. All the "cool kids" use Real Player. When one of them saw me using it she asked if I wanted to "go hang with them".
1) you still have a VCR? Unless you collect obsolete media players, you fail at geekdom. Maybe as a videophile he prefers the warm, organic quality of VHS video, just like knowledgeable audiophiles prefer LP sound.
So will this mean in the end we will have 2 competing USB standards? USB-Intel and USB-AMD? I think this is about host controller specs not wire protocols. So it will be like with USB 1.0 where there was OHCI and UHCI. Universal Host Controller Interface was Intel and Vias controller standard and OHCI was everyone else's. Including Microsoft. OHCI was supposed to be do more in hardware, though I don't think it made much difference in practice. But both controllers were compatible on the wire - you could easily make devices that worked with both. IIRC there were cases where the OHCI controller, because it had more informatation about the protocol could respond to information from a device inside the same frame. UHCI controllers were basically dumb and needed intervention from software on the host, so they'd respond to some device condition during the next frame, after the host stack had had a chance to think.
But according to the USB spec both behaviours are correct since the device can't make any assumptions about what overheads exist on the host.
I can't find the reference to device visible differences between UHCI and OHIC and in any case it was a very rare case. I did find this presentation by Intel that shows OHCI and UHCI performing almost identically despite the fact that OHCI controllers basically do the USB protocol in software and UHCI is just a bus master DMA engine attached to a serial interface with the protocol is done in software.
With USB 2.0 there was a push to a unified host controller spec called EHCI. From what I can tell this spat means that there will possibly be two rival host controller specs because Intel haven't published their spec in time for other people to implement it. But I don't think that will fork the wire protocol, I think it just means that OSs will need to have two new host controller like USB 1.0 drivers rather than one like USB 2.0.
You could argue that UHCI was a good thing since it uses less hardware and performs about the same.
Incidentally Wikipedia writes this up based on the "Good open standards vs vile proprietary standards" meme, which seems a bit unfair. Both OHCI and UHCI are based on published specifications which are freely available. I don't know if you need to pay a license fee to implement either or both of them - I actually think you don't since USB was successful because you didn't need to pay a per port fee when it was introduced, unlike Firewire.
The difference seems to me more like a software engineer view (Microsoft want to do it all in hardware like OHCI) of the world vs a hardware engineer view of the world (Intel say do it all in software with UHCI)
Where can I get Gareth's Cookie Cop / Dirty Bertie / any other obscure novelty products featured in The Office?
We don't know, sorry. These things must have come from somewhere... though if you desperately want one it could be that you missed the entire point of the show.
The user doesn't know the spec... tell users they were idiots for not understanding the spec... A non powered hub may well limit downstream power, so USB hard drives won't work if you connect them to it. Or the PC will detect overcurrent and disable the port. Or you'll end running the host port way outside its max power rating. This is a place where it would be correct to enforce the rules because not doing so may actually destroy the host.
... OR, you could enforce the rules all over, forcing companies to produce compliant USB devices (or their customers will return them for not working) instead of leaving the user to wonder why they can't plug their "cheap USB gizmo" in and have it work (and STILL be returned for not working).
And then, instead of having to know all of the corner cases of the spec with regards to various types of hubs and devices, it would all just work and the user wouldn't have to know the spec at all. Ok, you start to do that. And I won't. And I'll take all your customers;-)
The point is that market forces strongly discourage companies from taking the line you suggestto the point that if only one company is willing to not take that line, that company will get 100% market share and all the competitors will go bankrupt.
That sounds like babble detection. Intel controllers will disable the port if the device keeps talking on D+ and D- after its alloted time. Babble is very dangerous - if the host didn't cut off the device data from other devices would be corrupted, or the host USB stack might get confused enough to bring down the OS.
But I have seen 2.5" hard drives with only one USB connector, so they must have been drawing 1A peak on one port's supply line for the few hundred milliseconds spin up time. This seems to be a step too far even for no name Chinese manufacturers since the drive will fail to work on some hosts or cause others (cheap laptops) to freeze. The people that buy them tend to return them as defective unless they are very lucky with the selection of PCs they use them on. They do work sometimes though. E.g desktop PCs motherboards will usually wire the 5V line from the PSU in parallel to all USB ports. This can supply tens of amps, and the limit is on the total current on the 5V line, not on individual USB ports. In which case drawing 1A peak from a USB port will work..
But a Y cable which violates the current limit before enumeration but not the per port 500mA peak current is very common and in my experience always seems to work if you connect both connectors to a PC or powered hub. It won't work on a non powered hub though. But USB devices will usually say "high current device" somewhere on the packaging, and I think non powered hubs protect themselves and the host from high current devices.
Here's what Maxim say about USB. http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3241
With any standard, it's interesting to see how actual practice diverges from the printed spec or how undefined parts of the spec take shape. Though USB is, with little doubt, one of the best thought out, reliable, and useful standards efforts in quite some time, it has not been immune to the impact of the real world. Some observed USB characteristics that may not be obvious, yet can influence power designs, are: * USB ports do NOT limit current. Though the USB spec provides details about how much current a USB port must supply, there are mile-wide limits on how much it might supply. Though the upper limit specifies that the current never exceed 5A, but a wise designer should not rely on that. In any case, a USB port can never be counted on to limit its output current to 500mA, or any amount near that. In fact, output current from a port often exceeds several Amps since multi-port systems (like PCs) frequently have only one protection device for all ports in the system. The protection device is set above the TOTAL power rating of all the ports. So a four-port system may supply over 2A from one port if the other ports are not loaded. Furthermore, while some PCs use 10-20% accurate IC-based protection, other will use much less accurate poly-fuses (fuses that reset themselves) that will not trip until the load is 100% or more above the rating. * USB Ports rarely (never) turn off power: The USB spec is not specific about this, but it is sometimes believed that USB power may be disconnected as a result of failed enumeration, or other software or firmware problems. In actual practice, no USB host shuts off USB power for anything other that an electrical fault (like a short). There may an exception to this statement, but I have yet to see it. Notebook and motherboard makers are barely willing to pay for fault protection, let alone smart power switching. So no matter what dialog takes place (or does not take place) between a USB peripheral and host, 5V (at either 500mA or 100mA, or even maybe 2A or more) will be available. This is born out by the appearance in the market of USB powered reading lights, coffee mug warmers, and other similar items that have no communication capability. They may not be "compliant," but they do function.
Hal Porter said: The computer will supply at least 5V 500mA to a device before it enumerates. and got moderated Informative for it.
I don't know who did this moderating, but it must be someone who, like Hal Porter, does not know the USB spec.
A USB device may only draw 100 mA before it is enumerated. When it is enumerated, it may negotiate more power with the driver, up to a maximum of 500 mA. When it is connected via a USB-powered hub, the driver will decline this request, and current stays 100 mA max. I know what the spec says, I'm just pointing out that a PC won't enforce that 100mA limit for the excellent reason that loads of devices use USB just as a handy 5V supply and don't have the necessary smarts to enumerate.
If it did enforce it, people would return it as incompatible with this sort of device.
And that's really the point here. The spec isn't the whole story and most USB hosts were designed by people who wanted to maximize compatibility with devices that skirt the rules rather than robotically enforce "ze rules" and then tell users they were idiots for not understanding the spec. It's like something out of theoldnewthing really. The user doesn't know the spec, they just buy cheap USB gizmos. And cheap USB devices will most likely work like this because they don't need a microcontroller. Telling the user you won't support their device and they were an idiot for buying it is just being a jobsworth.
Otherwise, you could draw 2A from any USB port by simply connecting 4 devices through a hub. Ok that's a different case. A non powered hub may well limit downstream power, so USB hard drives won't work if you connect them to it. Or the PC will detect overcurrent and disable the port. Or you'll end running the host port way outside its max power rating. This is a place where it would be correct to enforce the rules because not doing so may actually destroy the host.
Enforcing the "100mA before enumeration" rule is silly though and that's why no USB host I have seen does it.
Dude, if you read the article I linked to you can see they didn't discard the VM idea because of performance concerns. It's a usability issue, running old applications on what would look like a Remote Desktop is much less convenient that running them on the same desktop as your new applications.
Wouldn't the standard need only specify certain amperage minimums the supply would have to produce?
I mean once you've fixed the voltage the devices themselves could throw in a resistor of their choice to get the amperage they want unless the device simply can't meet the demand. Isn't this how house electricity works? There is a high amperage limit at the fuse box for the whole room but no specification for the amps at an individual outlet. That's not very future proof. I think it should work like this. The charger would send some XML that would say "Hello, I support 0-200V DC adjustible with an 8 bit D-A, 0-5A, 4 bit D to A"
The firmware in the iPod player would then think, no sorry you are not an Apple charger since you didn't sign your XML with the Apple private key. Goodbye.
Don't they simply output the power laid out by the USB spec? iPod Touches require a non standard USB charger that outputs 2.5V on the data lines as well as the usual 5V.
I have an Apple ipod charger, just a wallwart with a usb port. My brother can also plug his Sansa USB cable into it and charge it with the same adapter just fine. Yes, but you couldn't charge your Apple from a Sansa USB charger becuse it's designed not to work.
The problem is the *computer*, not the phone, and it's a function of how USB manages power.
USB devices have two levels of power they can draw - one very tiny amount, and a larger amount (guess which one charging your phone requires?) The computer will supply at least 5V 500mA to a device before it enumerates. That's why USB fans and lights, which don't enumerate but just leach power work. And if you look at a USB 2.5" hard drive it will typically have a Y cable with two USB plugs and one device plug. It does this because it needs about 1A to spin up. But for that to work one of the USB plugs must draw 500mA before enumeration because only one plug has an enumerable device behind it. The other plug is just there to leach power.
So even though the spec says that devices should not draw vast amounts of power before they enumerate no host device will enforce this restriction because it would break all those lights, fans and portable 2.5" hard drives. Designing devices which are pedantic about not drawing power until they have enumerated this just pisses people off, since they need to install drivers to get charging to work.
iPod Touches are the same. A PC without the driver won't charge. Specifically the Touch won't charge until the PC driver sends a USB configuration is set to a non standard value and a vendor specific command is sent.
A generic USB charger won't charge an iPod either, unless it supplies 2.5V on D+ and D-, not just 5V and ground. This is totally non standard of course and the Touch only requires it so you can't use a generic USB charger.
I have a Win2k machine at work. New iTunes refuses to install on it and old iTunes doesn't have iPod Touch support. So because of all these obstacles Apple have strewn in my path I need to buy a charger to charge my Touch at work. As a point of principle I got a non Apple one. Some of the third party USB charger companies have learned the 2.5V trick and advertise themselves as "iPod Touch/iPhone compatible"
Actually the Touch annoys me so much I've gone back to using Winamp and a 2.5" hard disk in a USB case.
actually,thanks for making my point for me. I knew there was an article around that summed it up nicely but couldn't find it,so thanks! But if you read my post I NEVER said they were bad coders,quite the opposite. I said that I still believe Win2K pro was the best desktop OS that MSFT ever made,bar none. And anyone who has kept up with my history here on slashdot knows that I am typing this on a Win2K pro box that I've had for 8 years and never had a single BSOD.
What that article sums up better than I can,but I'll try to anyway for the "never RTFL" crowd,is that they do clean code. But if you'll look at the comments nearly all the ugliness comes from backwards compatibility. If I had to guess I'd say there is just too much legacy crap that should have been VM'd left floating in the system folder. I do remember reading an article where Allchin himself spent two weeks cooking up a VERY ugly hack involving memory pointers just so that Sim City would run in Win95,because apparently it exploited a bug in the DOS memory subsystem.
And while IMHO I agreed with the backwards compatibility above all mantra when they were converting the DOS users to Win9x to me it seemed the height of insanity to keep all the kludge in once we passed the 1.0Ghz mark when a VM could have run it without leaving a bunch of garbage behind. I mean honestly who cares if a program written for a 30Mhz 486 can't run at the full speed of your 2.0Ghz CPU? Personally I'd like a VM that I could control the speed of,then I wouldn't need DOSbox and MOSLO for ancient programs. I could go one about how Vista is proof that backwards compatibility plus new technologies ultimately don't mix,but hopefully anyone who wishes to know more will check out the link to the excellent article you found. Thanks again for that BTW. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV
Vitual machines provide a bad user experience http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/05/477317.aspx
For Windows 95, we actually tried this virtual machine idea. Another developer and I got Windows 3.1 running in a virtual machine within Windows 95. There was a Windows 3.1 desktop with Program Manager, and inside it were all your Windows 3.1 programs. (It wasn't a purely isolated virtual machine though. We punched holes in the virtual machine in order to solve the file sharing problem, taking advantage of the particular way Windows 3.1 interacted with its DPMI host.) Management was intrigued by this capability but ultimately decided against it because it was a simply dreadful user experience. The limitations were too severe, the integration far from seamless. Nobody would have enjoyed using it, and explaining how it works to a non-technical person would have been nearly impossible.
Have you actually looked at the Windows source code? When that chunk of the Win2K Pro source code hit the net I had to look(I still think it was the best Windows version ever made) and I was torn between being saddened and LMAO. It had tons of comments like "Don't know what this actually does but if removed Office prior to 2K will destroy every doc it touches so DON'T TOUCH" and "THIS IS A HACK which we haven't a clue what does but Windows crashes horribly if removed so LEAVE IT ALONE" I've seen that code and what you wrote is FUD and bullshit
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795
Despite the above, the quality of the code is generally excellent. Modules are small, and procedures generally fit on a single screen. The commenting is very detailed about intentions, but doesn't fall into "add one to i" redundancy.
There is some variety in the commenting style. Sometimes blocks use a// at every line, sometimes the/* */ style. In some modules functions have a history, some do not. Some functions describe their variables in a comment block, some don't. Microsoft appears not to have fallen into the trap of enforcing over-rigid standards or universal use of over-complicated automatic tools. They seem to trust their developers to comment well, and they do .
Do you seriously believe that the English language is broken and lacks the tools to explain the FSF's ideas? Or any ideas for that matter. Isn't it more likely that the person who said that just sucks at explaining the ideas and is arrogant enough to blame the language. Please, man. The grand parent just said that "language which lacks the proper tools to make that easy.". The point is that, should Richard Stallman be Brazilian, he would have coined the expression "Software livre". But as an American, the expression that came to him was "Free Software", which is ambiguous. What expression could have we coined with a single adjective next to the word "software"? I don't know of a simple adjective in English that is an unambiguous translation of the Portuguese word "livre". So English does not make the job easy in this regard. The point is: we are not saying it is impossible to express this idea in Enlish. We are saying that it is *not easy* to express it *with a simple, short expression* like "Software livre". He could have called it Software Libre, or FSF Software, or Stallman software if the word free doesn't capture the meaning.
Or why not "open source"?
In fact since his definition of Free only includes GPL software wouldn't it be more honest to call it GPL software.
Besides, exFAT still costs money to the user, as Vista SP1's license explicitly requires that the user has bought a valid license for Vista, which almost never costs zero, except if the user got it through some channels as MSDNAA. Well so what. I don't have exFAT on my machine that came with Vista. I download SP1. I have exFAT. According to the non FSF definition of "free" exFAT is free. I didn't have to pay for it. Oh, please. I cannot have it without paying Microsoft. Simple enough. You don't need to pay Microsoft to get exFAT. You need to pay them for Vista, or rather the person you bought your machine did. You don't need to pay them for SP1. Hence it's free.
I think the point is well made: It is said - that Eskimos have 6 words for "snow" while Hawaii has only one word for "weather". I would appear the nature of languages to sustain words which are used often while shedding words which are not. The worst case scenario for a language may well be "conflation" because the conflation of terms does not create an opportunity for a new and more clear word to emerge - rather it imprisons both words in a perpetual confusion.
Just because a language/could/ be used to express an idea - doesn't mean that it doesn't have weaknesses. Far more importantly, the inhabitants of a single language are often cognitively imprisoned by the limitations, conflations, and ambiguities of their one language. This is why you FSF types must replace English with GnuSpeak, the first Xyztq language. Xyztq being an adjective in GnuSpeak which cannot be translated into any other language.
Our language for example contemplates - winning and losing - there really is no way for the American-English-only people to accept a resolution of intractable problems - such as are common in the middle-east - unless it can be celebrated in terms of "victory" and "defeat." "Pyhrric victory" is not a native concept - and has no place in common thought or discourse - more importantly, the idea of a "Pyhrric victory avoided" cannot be reduced to a commonly recognized sound-bite. Thus, in some languages - it is "simpler" to advocate for "never surrender" than it is to promote "the benefits of avoiding a quagmire". Weaknesses in a language have a direct and limiting effect on the peoples those languages serve. You realised Quagmire or Pyhrric victory are way to explain these concepts in English right? And that the fact that it's possible for you to post these arguments in English rather than GnuSpeak means that English is not cognitively imprisoning you.
American in Kiev
If we continue to allow works of the Press to be treated as works protected under Copyright, than eventually we will no longer be allowed to claim the sky to be blue, for a fact to be true, or for 1+1 to equal 2, without infringing copyright and becoming enemies of the State. No John, you are the demons.
Slashdot Mirror
Get his home email address
Enter it here (don't visit from work, do it from a web cafe and behind 7 proxies)
http://www.spamyourenemies.com/
After a while he'll go off the idea. You might want to recommend Thunderbird to him.
I think he's right. This Drudge Retort guy is clearly taking advantage of the Drudge Report's high alexa rating. And most of his original content is scrapped.
He can go on about parody, mashups and so on. But in the end it reminds me of Victor Lewis Smith's quip that "imitation is the sincerest form of being an unoriginal thieving bastard"
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3368/ap-files-7-dmca-takedowns-against-drudge
AP Files 7 DMCA Takedowns Against Drudge Retort
I'm currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing "'hot news' misappropriation under New York state law." An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.
The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline.
Here's one of the six disputed blog entries:
Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. "I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds," she said. "I think that is the natural progression that one would expect."
If you follow the link, you'll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.
I have all the expertise in intellectual property law of somebody who's never been sued, so standard disclaimers apply. But I have difficulty seeing how it violates copyright law for a blogger to link to a news story with a short snippet of the story in furtherance of public discussion.
AP feels otherwise. In a June 3 letter, AP's Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman told me:
In another DMCA takedown, AP contends that the following user comment is a copyright violation:
Well, the oil execs just put another refinery in South Dakota. Maybe they're a bunch of retards.
www.foxnews.com
Hyperion has said the project, about 60 miles south of Sioux Falls, would create 1,800 permanent jobs and another 4,500 construction jobs over a four-year period. Construction could begin in 2010.
The Hyperion Energy Center would process 400,000 barrels of thick Canadian crude oil a day, which company executives say would help the U.S. reduce its dependence on overseas oil. The company has said it will bring in the crude oil by pipeline but has announced no sp
snagged up because of the assumed better people skills.
Jesus Christ. Shut the fuck up about fucking people skills.1) you still have a VCR? Unless you collect obsolete media players, you fail at geekdom. Maybe as a videophile he prefers the warm, organic quality of VHS video, just like knowledgeable audiophiles prefer LP sound.
Fedayeen? Mod parent down, -1 Terrorist.
But according to the USB spec both behaviours are correct since the device can't make any assumptions about what overheads exist on the host.
I can't find the reference to device visible differences between UHCI and OHIC and in any case it was a very rare case. I did find this presentation by Intel that shows OHCI and UHCI performing almost identically despite the fact that OHCI controllers basically do the USB protocol in software and UHCI is just a bus master DMA engine attached to a serial interface with the protocol is done in software.
http://www.usb.org/developers/presentations/pres0598/bulkperf.ppt
With USB 2.0 there was a push to a unified host controller spec called EHCI. From what I can tell this spat means that there will possibly be two rival host controller specs because Intel haven't published their spec in time for other people to implement it. But I don't think that will fork the wire protocol, I think it just means that OSs will need to have two new host controller like USB 1.0 drivers rather than one like USB 2.0.
You could argue that UHCI was a good thing since it uses less hardware and performs about the same.
Incidentally Wikipedia writes this up based on the "Good open standards vs vile proprietary standards" meme, which seems a bit unfair. Both OHCI and UHCI are based on published specifications which are freely available. I don't know if you need to pay a license fee to implement either or both of them - I actually think you don't since USB was successful because you didn't need to pay a per port fee when it was introduced, unlike Firewire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OHCI
The difference seems to me more like a software engineer view (Microsoft want to do it all in hardware like OHCI) of the world vs a hardware engineer view of the world (Intel say do it all in software with UHCI)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/feedback/faq_facts.shtml The Office
Where can I get Gareth's Cookie Cop / Dirty Bertie / any other obscure novelty products featured in The Office?
We don't know, sorry. These things must have come from somewhere... though if you desperately want one it could be that you missed the entire point of the show.
And then, instead of having to know all of the corner cases of the spec with regards to various types of hubs and devices, it would all just work and the user wouldn't have to know the spec at all. Ok, you start to do that. And I won't. And I'll take all your customers
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
The point is that market forces strongly discourage companies from taking the line you suggestto the point that if only one company is willing to not take that line, that company will get 100% market share and all the competitors will go bankrupt.
I doubt that. You need a very large capacitor to do that and these devices weren't much bigger than the actual drive mechanism.
I think they're relying on the PC not limiting current to the USB port. See the Naxim page I linked to elsewhere in this thread.
But I have seen 2.5" hard drives with only one USB connector, so they must have been drawing 1A peak on one port's supply line for the few hundred milliseconds spin up time. This seems to be a step too far even for no name Chinese manufacturers since the drive will fail to work on some hosts or cause others (cheap laptops) to freeze. The people that buy them tend to return them as defective unless they are very lucky with the selection of PCs they use them on. They do work sometimes though. E.g desktop PCs motherboards will usually wire the 5V line from the PSU in parallel to all USB ports. This can supply tens of amps, and the limit is on the total current on the 5V line, not on individual USB ports. In which case drawing 1A peak from a USB port will work..
But a Y cable which violates the current limit before enumeration but not the per port 500mA peak current is very common and in my experience always seems to work if you connect both connectors to a PC or powered hub. It won't work on a non powered hub though. But USB devices will usually say "high current device" somewhere on the packaging, and I think non powered hubs protect themselves and the host from high current devices.
Here's what Maxim say about USB.
http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3241 With any standard, it's interesting to see how actual practice diverges from the printed spec or how undefined parts of the spec take shape. Though USB is, with little doubt, one of the best thought out, reliable, and useful standards efforts in quite some time, it has not been immune to the impact of the real world. Some observed USB characteristics that may not be obvious, yet can influence power designs, are:
* USB ports do NOT limit current. Though the USB spec provides details about how much current a USB port must supply, there are mile-wide limits on how much it might supply. Though the upper limit specifies that the current never exceed 5A, but a wise designer should not rely on that. In any case, a USB port can never be counted on to limit its output current to 500mA, or any amount near that. In fact, output current from a port often exceeds several Amps since multi-port systems (like PCs) frequently have only one protection device for all ports in the system. The protection device is set above the TOTAL power rating of all the ports. So a four-port system may supply over 2A from one port if the other ports are not loaded. Furthermore, while some PCs use 10-20% accurate IC-based protection, other will use much less accurate poly-fuses (fuses that reset themselves) that will not trip until the load is 100% or more above the rating.
* USB Ports rarely (never) turn off power: The USB spec is not specific about this, but it is sometimes believed that USB power may be disconnected as a result of failed enumeration, or other software or firmware problems. In actual practice, no USB host shuts off USB power for anything other that an electrical fault (like a short). There may an exception to this statement, but I have yet to see it. Notebook and motherboard makers are barely willing to pay for fault protection, let alone smart power switching. So no matter what dialog takes place (or does not take place) between a USB peripheral and host, 5V (at either 500mA or 100mA, or even maybe 2A or more) will be available. This is born out by the appearance in the market of USB powered reading lights, coffee mug warmers, and other similar items that have no communication capability. They may not be "compliant," but they do function.
The computer will supply at least 5V 500mA to a device before it enumerates.
and got moderated Informative for it.
I don't know who did this moderating, but it must be someone who, like Hal Porter, does not know the USB spec.
A USB device may only draw 100 mA before it is enumerated.
When it is enumerated, it may negotiate more power with the driver, up to a maximum of 500 mA.
When it is connected via a USB-powered hub, the driver will decline this request, and current stays 100 mA max. I know what the spec says, I'm just pointing out that a PC won't enforce that 100mA limit for the excellent reason that loads of devices use USB just as a handy 5V supply and don't have the necessary smarts to enumerate.
If it did enforce it, people would return it as incompatible with this sort of device.
And that's really the point here. The spec isn't the whole story and most USB hosts were designed by people who wanted to maximize compatibility with devices that skirt the rules rather than robotically enforce "ze rules" and then tell users they were idiots for not understanding the spec. It's like something out of theoldnewthing really. The user doesn't know the spec, they just buy cheap USB gizmos. And cheap USB devices will most likely work like this because they don't need a microcontroller. Telling the user you won't support their device and they were an idiot for buying it is just being a jobsworth. Otherwise, you could draw 2A from any USB port by simply connecting 4 devices through a hub. Ok that's a different case. A non powered hub may well limit downstream power, so USB hard drives won't work if you connect them to it. Or the PC will detect overcurrent and disable the port. Or you'll end running the host port way outside its max power rating. This is a place where it would be correct to enforce the rules because not doing so may actually destroy the host.
Enforcing the "100mA before enumeration" rule is silly though and that's why no USB host I have seen does it.
Dude, if you read the article I linked to you can see they didn't discard the VM idea because of performance concerns. It's a usability issue, running old applications on what would look like a Remote Desktop is much less convenient that running them on the same desktop as your new applications.
Faster computers don't change that.
I mean once you've fixed the voltage the devices themselves could throw in a resistor of their choice to get the amperage they want unless the device simply can't meet the demand. Isn't this how house electricity works? There is a high amperage limit at the fuse box for the whole room but no specification for the amps at an individual outlet. That's not very future proof. I think it should work like this. The charger would send some XML that would say "Hello, I support 0-200V DC adjustible with an 8 bit D-A, 0-5A, 4 bit D to A"
The firmware in the iPod player would then think, no sorry you are not an Apple charger since you didn't sign your XML with the Apple private key. Goodbye.
USB devices have two levels of power they can draw - one very tiny amount, and a larger amount (guess which one charging your phone requires?) The computer will supply at least 5V 500mA to a device before it enumerates. That's why USB fans and lights, which don't enumerate but just leach power work. And if you look at a USB 2.5" hard drive it will typically have a Y cable with two USB plugs and one device plug. It does this because it needs about 1A to spin up. But for that to work one of the USB plugs must draw 500mA before enumeration because only one plug has an enumerable device behind it. The other plug is just there to leach power.
So even though the spec says that devices should not draw vast amounts of power before they enumerate no host device will enforce this restriction because it would break all those lights, fans and portable 2.5" hard drives. Designing devices which are pedantic about not drawing power until they have enumerated this just pisses people off, since they need to install drivers to get charging to work.
iPod Touches are the same. A PC without the driver won't charge. Specifically the Touch won't charge until the PC driver sends a USB configuration is set to a non standard value and a vendor specific command is sent.
http://matt.colyer.name/projects/iphone-module/
A generic USB charger won't charge an iPod either, unless it supplies 2.5V on D+ and D-, not just 5V and ground. This is totally non standard of course and the Touch only requires it so you can't use a generic USB charger.
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=166847
I have a Win2k machine at work. New iTunes refuses to install on it and old iTunes doesn't have iPod Touch support. So because of all these obstacles Apple have strewn in my path I need to buy a charger to charge my Touch at work. As a point of principle I got a non Apple one. Some of the third party USB charger companies have learned the 2.5V trick and advertise themselves as "iPod Touch/iPhone compatible"
Actually the Touch annoys me so much I've gone back to using Winamp and a 2.5" hard disk in a USB case.
What that article sums up better than I can,but I'll try to anyway for the "never RTFL" crowd,is that they do clean code. But if you'll look at the comments nearly all the ugliness comes from backwards compatibility. If I had to guess I'd say there is just too much legacy crap that should have been VM'd left floating in the system folder. I do remember reading an article where Allchin himself spent two weeks cooking up a VERY ugly hack involving memory pointers just so that Sim City would run in Win95,because apparently it exploited a bug in the DOS memory subsystem.
Vitual machines provide a bad user experienceAnd while IMHO I agreed with the backwards compatibility above all mantra when they were converting the DOS users to Win9x to me it seemed the height of insanity to keep all the kludge in once we passed the 1.0Ghz mark when a VM could have run it without leaving a bunch of garbage behind. I mean honestly who cares if a program written for a 30Mhz 486 can't run at the full speed of your 2.0Ghz CPU? Personally I'd like a VM that I could control the speed of,then I wouldn't need DOSbox and MOSLO for ancient programs. I could go one about how Vista is proof that backwards compatibility plus new technologies ultimately don't mix,but hopefully anyone who wishes to know more will check out the link to the excellent article you found. Thanks again for that BTW. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/05/477317.aspx For Windows 95, we actually tried this virtual machine idea. Another developer and I got Windows 3.1 running in a virtual machine within Windows 95. There was a Windows 3.1 desktop with Program Manager, and inside it were all your Windows 3.1 programs. (It wasn't a purely isolated virtual machine though. We punched holes in the virtual machine in order to solve the file sharing problem, taking advantage of the particular way Windows 3.1 interacted with its DPMI host.) Management was intrigued by this capability but ultimately decided against it because it was a simply dreadful user experience. The limitations were too severe, the integration far from seamless. Nobody would have enjoyed using it, and explaining how it works to a non-technical person would have been nearly impossible.
Obama is a Finnish 'Manchurian Candidate'. That much is obvious.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 Despite the above, the quality of the code is generally excellent. Modules are small, and procedures generally fit on a single screen. The commenting is very detailed about intentions, but doesn't fall into "add one to i" redundancy.
There is some variety in the commenting style. Sometimes blocks use a
The point is: we are not saying it is impossible to express this idea in Enlish. We are saying that it is *not easy* to express it *with a simple, short expression* like "Software livre". He could have called it Software Libre, or FSF Software, or Stallman software if the word free doesn't capture the meaning.
Or why not "open source"?
In fact since his definition of Free only includes GPL software wouldn't it be more honest to call it GPL software. Besides, exFAT still costs money to the user, as Vista SP1's license explicitly requires that the user has bought a valid license for Vista, which almost never costs zero, except if the user got it through some channels as MSDNAA. Well so what. I don't have exFAT on my machine that came with Vista. I download SP1. I have exFAT. According to the non FSF definition of "free" exFAT is free. I didn't have to pay for it. Oh, please. I cannot have it without paying Microsoft. Simple enough. You don't need to pay Microsoft to get exFAT. You need to pay them for Vista, or rather the person you bought your machine did. You don't need to pay them for SP1. Hence it's free.
I think the point is well made: It is said - that Eskimos have 6 words for "snow" while Hawaii has only one word for "weather".
I would appear the nature of languages to sustain words which are used often while shedding words which are not. The worst case scenario for a language may well be "conflation" because the conflation of terms does not create an opportunity for a new and more clear word to emerge - rather it imprisons both words in a perpetual confusion.
Just because a language
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RBQIx5jiTsg