I'm sure you could put some code in the legacy MBR which the Bios could execute and have that code read the boot sector from a GPT partition though - it seems like something you could knock up in a few days. You'd need to make the boot time parts of Windows like OSLOADER support GPT when booting from a Bios too which they presumably don't at the moment. But if it can use GPT once it's running that's most of the problem solved. It would also let you install and use Windows on an Intel Mac on the same drive as MacOS.
In fact I don't really see why they didn't do this. It would mean that you could use GPT with a Bios machine and thus boot off drives bigger than 2TB.
Actually if all you want to do is to support big disks there's an even easier hack. Just define 0xFFFFFFFF in the partition length field in the MBR as "0xFFFFFFFF or more sectors". This is sort of the case with the protective MBR for GPT now - if the disk is bigger than 2TB, the protective partition has a length set to 0xFFFFFFFF. The difference is that in this case there is no GPT partition table containing the info - when the OS boots, it sizes the partition based on what the device returns. That would let you partition freely inside the the 2TB limit and have the last partition extend past it. Which actually covers most of the use cases for huge disks - e.g. one partion bigger than 2TB, or a boot partition smaller 2TB and a data partition bigger. The only one that is not covered is to have more than one partition bigger than 2TB.
I found some paper about PVT actuator reliability which says it obeys the Arrhenius law, where (presumbly failure) rate is proportional to e^T.
But maybe the the keyword is "excessively". 35C seems like a little hot, 55C seems like a slow cook. Less than room temperature seems like excessive, perhaps because of water condensation or thickening of the lubricants which protect the drive. So perhaps the total drive fail rate (as opposed to the PZT actuator fail rate) is lowest at room temp and increases exponentially as temperature increases.
And anecdotally, drives running at the top end of the temperature curve seem to fail faster as I mentioned. I'm actually not sure of the details, but I think chemical processes cause the fail, whether in the PVT actuator or elsewhere. And those all speed up with temperature.
Since the Bios only knows how to read the first sector, it has no problem with moving from MBR to GPT. GPT disks can have a protective MBR that allows them to boot with a Bios.
Of course, that means that all x86 OSs would need to support GPT, and Windows doesn't.
Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS.
That's true of APM - the OS actually made Bios calls and the Bios responded to events like pressing the suspend button directly. Since the Bios is real mode and non reentrant that was an issue. But it's not true of ACPI - the bios has methods in AML byte code but the OS is responsible for executing them via an interpreter. And the reason it uses byte code rather than native code is because it was designed to work on both x86 and Itanium. So EFI uses ACPI too for power management. Of course byte code in a virtual machine is hopefully a bit safer too.
And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it.
Which is an excellent place to stop. Trying to do more like ACPI or ARC firmware which it evolved from means you need to have filesystem drivers and network stacks in ROM. And magic system partitions which you need to start the machine and are mean a reinstall of everything if they get corrupted.
Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).
You can boot off the network with a normal Bios. Or anything else - you just need an option Rom which implements int 19h. Or the Bios itself could support network booting. And just because you don't understand it, don't assume it's a mass of hacks and workarounds.
Logical terminology is a bit like the Master in Doctor Who. Despite being burned/flamed to death attempting some evil scheme on numerous occasions, he always appears in later episodes unharmed.
A few equipment query functions and a lot of INT 13 calls to read sectors off the disk. And INT 13 supports 64 bit LBAs which will last essentially forever - drives of upto 8 Zetabytes ( 8*(2^70) bytes ) are possible.
The original reason for EFI was because Itaniums needed a firmware standard because the Bios is x86 only. Macs use it mostly to stop people booting OSX on normal PC hardware as far as I can see.
There's a good reason for not using EFI too. EFI graphics cards need to have EFI byte code in Flash along with a normal x86 Bios unless they want to only work on EFI systems. That means more flash memory. Or the installation utility could copy the EFI driver into a FAT formatted EFI system partition, but that means if something corrupts it the card will stop working on a legacy free EFI system.
Actually, come to think of it, video bioses are a special case. On Windows XP, the driver can use Int 10 to call the video bios.
So it seems like the Bios is used so little and is so futureproof that it doesn't do any harm to keep it. It's also small and simple and can run purely from Rom, whereas EFI needs a special partition which could be corrupted.
From here http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf "Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."
Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646 "Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."
Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature
So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy
says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.
Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.
I suspect that the running drives hot reduces the life - I got a new machine a few years ago with crap cooling, and installed two 7200rpm drives I've had two drives fail in two years. One was a Deathtar admittedly but the other was a Maxtor and they are supposed to be ok. I actually added a WD SATA drive, and had the same symptoms as the above poster and the drive was easily over 55C. On the old machine I never saw a single fail, and after I put more fans in the new one to keep the drive temperature at around 35C I've never had a problem.
So I can't prove it, but I think the increased hard drive fail rate I and a lot of other people saw around the move to 7200rpm was because the drives cooked themselves to death. It's not entirely the drives fault of course, modern PCs have a load of high power components packed very close together. Look at the trend in CPU and GPU power consumption over the last ten years. Oddly enough PATA cables make it worse by obstructing the air flow. I think the crap way most PCs are assembled with a tangled mass of cables, poor airflow and no chassis fans, combined with all components increased power consumption means it's now very easy to build a PC where the hard disk will cook.
Looks pretty compelling from here! Take a look at the 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks shown here for instance! If I was a game developer, I'd gladly take 40FPS over 30FPS if it only meant a recompile targeting a 64-bit platform!
That's nowhere near representative
E.g.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=29278 &mode=threaded I get unstable results in Vista x64 the range from as low as 4800 to as high as 5200, this is a massive instability when you consider that ins Vista x32 I get 5270 +/- 20 and on XP (both x86 and x64) I get 5300 +/- 15. If anyone would like the compare URLs I can post them, just ask
x64 and x32 perform identically. This is what I'd expect actually.
You only need to test two binaries if you also choose to support 32-bit as well - a suitably advanced app/game could just make a 64-bit capable AMD/Intel chip a prerequisite these days (DOOM required a 386 or better during a similiar 16/32-bit transition period)
Yeah but back then every gamer had a 386. Now everyone has an x64 compatible CPU but most of them are running 32 bit Windows.
PAE only gives you access to more memory, it doesn't enable the CPU 64-bit processing
x64 gives more registers, and you can use things like CMOV since you know all x64 CPUs support them.
Having more registers won't help that much I suspect - most games are limited by GPU or memory subsystem performance, not by CPU registers.
You'll never be able to accumulatarize consultancy dollars if you speak like some hick from the Mid West. Take your Mactop to your favourite ReCaPrO, get yourself a vegan skinny hicaf latte and start learning the lingo from the blargocube.
Only a fraction of the 64-bit capable desktops and workstations are running 64-bit applications. What's more, there are very few mainstream 64-bit applications out there, despite the fact that for gaming, audio processing, image processing/photoshop apps, and video there would still be performance advantages (memory bandwidth and operation throughput), even if you don't yet have > 4GB of RAM.
It's not really compelling - plus or minus a few percent. And you need to test two binaries which is expensive. So unless you're absolutely forced to use more than 4GB per process, I think people won't bother.
"Sherman set the wayback machine to the early 90's, and the great 16-32 bit transition" You might recollect the introduction of the mighty 386 processor, extended memory modes, the Win32s API, but probably most importantly, killer apps like DOOM loading up their own 32-bit memory managers to sidestep the OS, which really wasn't ready to provide good 32-bit native support. Apps that did this completely took over the system, putting the host OS in stasis until the app was exited.
Sounds much like the same situation - the majority of users are running an OS that can't tap the full potential their CPU has to offer. So - why aren't we seeing similar application tricks, like those that enabled 32-bit protected mode now? The proposition of writing an application which would sidestep Windows XP 32-bit and set up a mini 64-bit host environment (not really a full OS) is not that radically different, right?
If you really want 64 bit, I don't see why you can't use Windows x64. Sure you'll need to be careful that you have hardware which has x64 drivers, but that's life.
32 bit Windows already has PAE which is the moral equivalent of a Dos extender. I think Outlook and MS SQL server can use it. So there isn't really a hole for a 64 bit Windows extender.
I've often wondered what would happen if you could make bootable games - e.g. Linux+ATI and NVidia drivers+a game binary on a LiveCD. But to make it work you'd need to be able to offer much better graphics performance than regular Windows, just like Doom's extended Dos had better performance than regular Dos.
And given the amount of effort NVidia and ATI spend on Linux drivers compared to Windows ones, I'm not sure that's the case. DirectX is thinner layer over the driver than OpenGL too.
You'd also need to make a LiveCD which could boot on all PC hardware without any fiddling around with config files, which is probably non trivial given that new PC hardware is lauched all the time and OSs needed to be patched to support it.
Well I don't know. But my point is that even if they weren't trying to starve people, they were still morally responsible because the starvation was caused by the system which they imposed. It's like if you lock people up in prison and they starve. If were actually policy to create famine, that's a far more serious crime. But the Raj would have still have been criminal even if the people running it were well meaning because it stopped Indians from feeding themselves.
The famines in the Raj weren't just acts of God. The number of people who died in famines dropped off dramatically once India became a democracy. Actually I think most famines are the caused by bad government - in a country with free press, free elections and a free market it's almost impossible for a famine to happen. The Raj is actually a good example - the English weren't trying to cause famines, unlike Communist governments who actively prevented food going to enemy areas, but the political system they imposed seemed to make them inevitable.
Firefox without favourites? Without history? Let's just get this straight - you want people to switch to a browser which has less functionality than the one they are currently using? Again - a browser without favourites? How is this going to give people a positive experience of Firefox and make them want to do anything but work out how to uninstall it...?
They could fix that if they took out the uninstall feature.
Wikipedia says 1.5 million died in the Red Terror and 7 million died from famine.
(and is better termed a democide than a genocide.)
Mengistu was found guilty of genocide. But even if only 1.5 million people died in a mere democide, that would still make Communism a force for evil.
there is no indication that the Soviets manufactured the ouster of Halie Selassie to begin with, which is the issue at hand.
Do you really think the Derg would have been able to take over if the USSR wasn't around?
That calculus, of putting economic interests ahead of stopping genocide, is not limited to dictatorships, by any means.
Left wingers usually criticise Western foreign policy as being based on economic self interest. My point is that in a free society it is possible for individuals to argue for a more enlightened foreign policy. In a dictatorship it isn't, and so dictatorships will find it easier to ignore moral constraints than democracies. It's no accident that China's allies tend to be pariah states like Sudan and North Korea for example. Or murderous movements like the Khmer Rouge come to think of it.
You're right, apart from the 8.5 million Ethiopians who died in the Red Terror and government created famine, Soviet foreign policy in Africa was pretty benign.
What did China do in Africa that compares with any of the others?
With HIV being such a high profile disease, there is no way an effective vaccine will be slowed or stopped by politics and bullshit.
Yeah, it's not like paranoid schizophrenia where "human" "scientists" have known the cure for ages but they've kept it secret to protect their grant money.
Slashdot Mirror
> Of course, that means that all x86 OSs would need to support GPT, and Windows doesn't.
F AQ.mspx
Actually, Windows server 2003 32 bit and Windows XP x64 both boot using the Bios and they support GPT for data volume, just not for boot ones.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_
I'm sure you could put some code in the legacy MBR which the Bios could execute and have that code read the boot sector from a GPT partition though - it seems like something you could knock up in a few days. You'd need to make the boot time parts of Windows like OSLOADER support GPT when booting from a Bios too which they presumably don't at the moment. But if it can use GPT once it's running that's most of the problem solved. It would also let you install and use Windows on an Intel Mac on the same drive as MacOS.
In fact I don't really see why they didn't do this. It would mean that you could use GPT with a Bios machine and thus boot off drives bigger than 2TB.
Actually if all you want to do is to support big disks there's an even easier hack. Just define 0xFFFFFFFF in the partition length field in the MBR as "0xFFFFFFFF or more sectors". This is sort of the case with the protective MBR for GPT now - if the disk is bigger than 2TB, the protective partition has a length set to 0xFFFFFFFF. The difference is that in this case there is no GPT partition table containing the info - when the OS boots, it sizes the partition based on what the device returns. That would let you partition freely inside the the 2TB limit and have the last partition extend past it. Which actually covers most of the use cases for huge disks - e.g. one partion bigger than 2TB, or a boot partition smaller 2TB and a data partition bigger. The only one that is not covered is to have more than one partition bigger than 2TB.
Hmm, the link seems down.
9 93375
In another comment -
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=255669&cid=19
I found some paper about PVT actuator reliability which says it obeys the Arrhenius law, where (presumbly failure) rate is proportional to e^T.
But maybe the the keyword is "excessively". 35C seems like a little hot, 55C seems like a slow cook. Less than room temperature seems like excessive, perhaps because of water condensation or thickening of the lubricants which protect the drive. So perhaps the total drive fail rate (as opposed to the PZT actuator fail rate) is lowest at room temp and increases exponentially as temperature increases.
And anecdotally, drives running at the top end of the temperature curve seem to fail faster as I mentioned. I'm actually not sure of the details, but I think chemical processes cause the fail, whether in the PVT actuator or elsewhere. And those all speed up with temperature.
Since the Bios only knows how to read the first sector, it has no problem with moving from MBR to GPT. GPT disks can have a protective MBR that allows them to boot with a Bios.
h tml
Of course, that means that all x86 OSs would need to support GPT, and Windows doesn't.
But it can be done.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6978363-claims.
I think you can do it in an easier way than this patent incidentally.
If you wanted, you could roll out Windows Vista++ with support for GPT and all the other OSs would probably get dragged along.
Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS.
That's true of APM - the OS actually made Bios calls and the Bios responded to events like pressing the suspend button directly. Since the Bios is real mode and non reentrant that was an issue. But it's not true of ACPI - the bios has methods in AML byte code but the OS is responsible for executing them via an interpreter. And the reason it uses byte code rather than native code is because it was designed to work on both x86 and Itanium. So EFI uses ACPI too for power management. Of course byte code in a virtual machine is hopefully a bit safer too.
And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it.
Which is an excellent place to stop. Trying to do more like ACPI or ARC firmware which it evolved from means you need to have filesystem drivers and network stacks in ROM. And magic system partitions which you need to start the machine and are mean a reinstall of everything if they get corrupted.
Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).
You can boot off the network with a normal Bios. Or anything else - you just need an option Rom which implements int 19h. Or the Bios itself could support network booting. And just because you don't understand it, don't assume it's a mass of hacks and workarounds.
Logical terminology is a bit like the Master in Doctor Who. Despite being burned/flamed to death attempting some evil scheme on numerous occasions, he always appears in later episodes unharmed.
Quick list for those who don't care to click through one per page for 19 pages:
Or read the print version
http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263
Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days
d ownload.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017 -4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/WDDM_BIOS.doc+int+10+windo ws+vista+driver&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/winint/index2.html
A few equipment query functions and a lot of INT 13 calls to read sectors off the disk. And INT 13 supports 64 bit LBAs which will last essentially forever - drives of upto 8 Zetabytes ( 8*(2^70) bytes ) are possible.
The original reason for EFI was because Itaniums needed a firmware standard because the Bios is x86 only. Macs use it mostly to stop people booting OSX on normal PC hardware as far as I can see.
There's a good reason for not using EFI too. EFI graphics cards need to have EFI byte code in Flash along with a normal x86 Bios unless they want to only work on EFI systems. That means more flash memory. Or the installation utility could copy the EFI driver into a FAT formatted EFI system partition, but that means if something corrupts it the card will stop working on a legacy free EFI system.
Actually, come to think of it, video bioses are a special case. On Windows XP, the driver can use Int 10 to call the video bios.
Hmm, it seems that this is disabled on Vista -
http://72.14.235.104/search?q=cache:URuKNsrXQDAJ:
So it seems like the Bios is used so little and is so futureproof that it doesn't do any harm to keep it. It's also small and simple and can run purely from Rom, whereas EFI needs a special partition which could be corrupted.
Well Seagate say a maximum drive temperature of 60C
0 0389997c.pdf page 12
i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/1
But that might not be the whole story
From here
http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf
"Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."
Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/
"Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."
Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~wwalsh/arrhenius.html
So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy
http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item213/part3
says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.
Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.
2. Boat Anchor
You mean BOAT ANCHOR!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXZVJXIyqM
I liked "jumping up and down LIKE A JACK RUSSELL FUCKING TERRIER" and "You IDIOT you own a MACINTOSH! The file is FUCKING GONE!" too.
The drive is at 48C right now, with worst ever being 55C. (according to the SMART data, if I read it right)
f /24609792/m/857003655731?r=274009295731#2740092957 31
55C is actually just at the edge of the operating temperature range
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/
I suspect that the running drives hot reduces the life - I got a new machine a few years ago with crap cooling, and installed two 7200rpm drives I've had two drives fail in two years. One was a Deathtar admittedly but the other was a Maxtor and they are supposed to be ok. I actually added a WD SATA drive, and had the same symptoms as the above poster and the drive was easily over 55C. On the old machine I never saw a single fail, and after I put more fans in the new one to keep the drive temperature at around 35C I've never had a problem.
So I can't prove it, but I think the increased hard drive fail rate I and a lot of other people saw around the move to 7200rpm was because the drives cooked themselves to death. It's not entirely the drives fault of course, modern PCs have a load of high power components packed very close together. Look at the trend in CPU and GPU power consumption over the last ten years. Oddly enough PATA cables make it worse by obstructing the air flow. I think the crap way most PCs are assembled with a tangled mass of cables, poor airflow and no chassis fans, combined with all components increased power consumption means it's now very easy to build a PC where the hard disk will cook.
<ecode>
and employees get six. <--joke
^
|
joke
</ecode>
Exercise 1: What do I type to get &, < and > outside an ecode block?
Exercise 2: What about inside an ecode block?
Exercise 3: Why is your joke funny?
Looks pretty compelling from here! Take a look at the 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks shown here for instance! If I was a game developer, I'd gladly take 40FPS over 30FPS if it only meant a recompile targeting a 64-bit platform!
8 &mode=threaded
d ows-or-32-bit-versus-64bit-1349.shtml
That's nowhere near representative
E.g.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=2927
I get unstable results in Vista x64 the range from as low as 4800 to as high as 5200, this is a massive instability when you consider that ins Vista x32 I get 5270 +/- 20 and on XP (both x86 and x64) I get 5300 +/- 15. If anyone would like the compare URLs I can post them, just ask
x64 seems to have a graphics driver issue.
or
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-versus-Win
x64 and x32 perform identically. This is what I'd expect actually.
You only need to test two binaries if you also choose to support 32-bit as well - a suitably advanced app/game could just make a 64-bit capable AMD/Intel chip a prerequisite these days (DOOM required a 386 or better during a similiar 16/32-bit transition period)
Yeah but back then every gamer had a 386. Now everyone has an x64 compatible CPU but most of them are running 32 bit Windows.
PAE only gives you access to more memory, it doesn't enable the CPU 64-bit processing
x64 gives more registers, and you can use things like CMOV since you know all x64 CPUs support them.
Having more registers won't help that much I suspect - most games are limited by GPU or memory subsystem performance, not by CPU registers.
You'll never be able to accumulatarize consultancy dollars if you speak like some hick from the Mid West. Take your Mactop to your favourite ReCaPrO, get yourself a vegan skinny hicaf latte and start learning the lingo from the blargocube.
I always liked the idea of YL=young lady and XYL=wife
l
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=xy
As endorsed by Douglas Adams
And invented by Cy Endfield, the director of Zulu.
Only a fraction of the 64-bit capable desktops and workstations are running 64-bit applications. What's more, there are very few mainstream 64-bit applications out there, despite the fact that for gaming, audio processing, image processing/photoshop apps, and video there would still be performance advantages (memory bandwidth and operation throughput), even if you don't yet have > 4GB of RAM.
It's not really compelling - plus or minus a few percent. And you need to test two binaries which is expensive. So unless you're absolutely forced to use more than 4GB per process, I think people won't bother.
"Sherman set the wayback machine to the early 90's, and the great 16-32 bit transition" You might recollect the introduction of the mighty 386 processor, extended memory modes, the Win32s API, but probably most importantly, killer apps like DOOM loading up their own 32-bit memory managers to sidestep the OS, which really wasn't ready to provide good 32-bit native support. Apps that did this completely took over the system, putting the host OS in stasis until the app was exited.
Sounds much like the same situation - the majority of users are running an OS that can't tap the full potential their CPU has to offer. So - why aren't we seeing similar application tricks, like those that enabled 32-bit protected mode now? The proposition of writing an application which would sidestep Windows XP 32-bit and set up a mini 64-bit host environment (not really a full OS) is not that radically different, right?
If you really want 64 bit, I don't see why you can't use Windows x64. Sure you'll need to be careful that you have hardware which has x64 drivers, but that's life.
32 bit Windows already has PAE which is the moral equivalent of a Dos extender. I think Outlook and MS SQL server can use it. So there isn't really a hole for a 64 bit Windows extender.
I've often wondered what would happen if you could make bootable games - e.g. Linux+ATI and NVidia drivers+a game binary on a LiveCD. But to make it work you'd need to be able to offer much better graphics performance than regular Windows, just like Doom's extended Dos had better performance than regular Dos.
And given the amount of effort NVidia and ATI spend on Linux drivers compared to Windows ones, I'm not sure that's the case. DirectX is thinner layer over the driver than OpenGL too.
You'd also need to make a LiveCD which could boot on all PC hardware without any fiddling around with config files, which is probably non trivial given that new PC hardware is lauched all the time and OSs needed to be patched to support it.
Well I don't know. But my point is that even if they weren't trying to starve people, they were still morally responsible because the starvation was caused by the system which they imposed. It's like if you lock people up in prison and they starve. If were actually policy to create famine, that's a far more serious crime. But the Raj would have still have been criminal even if the people running it were well meaning because it stopped Indians from feeding themselves.
The famines in the Raj weren't just acts of God. The number of people who died in famines dropped off dramatically once India became a democracy. Actually I think most famines are the caused by bad government - in a country with free press, free elections and a free market it's almost impossible for a famine to happen. The Raj is actually a good example - the English weren't trying to cause famines, unlike Communist governments who actively prevented food going to enemy areas, but the political system they imposed seemed to make them inevitable.
Stop making excuses for him.
Mengistu killed millions of people purely because of his own ambition.
Firefox without favourites? Without history? Let's just get this straight - you want people to switch to a browser which has less functionality than the one they are currently using? Again - a browser without favourites? How is this going to give people a positive experience of Firefox and make them want to do anything but work out how to uninstall it...?
They could fix that if they took out the uninstall feature.
The figure for Ethiopia is 1.5 million
Wikipedia says 1.5 million died in the Red Terror and 7 million died from famine.
(and is better termed a democide than a genocide.)
Mengistu was found guilty of genocide. But even if only 1.5 million people died in a mere democide, that would still make Communism a force for evil.
there is no indication that the Soviets manufactured the ouster of Halie Selassie to begin with, which is the issue at hand.
Do you really think the Derg would have been able to take over if the USSR wasn't around?
That calculus, of putting economic interests ahead of stopping genocide, is not limited to dictatorships, by any means.
Left wingers usually criticise Western foreign policy as being based on economic self interest. My point is that in a free society it is possible for individuals to argue for a more enlightened foreign policy. In a dictatorship it isn't, and so dictatorships will find it easier to ignore moral constraints than democracies. It's no accident that China's allies tend to be pariah states like Sudan and North Korea for example. Or murderous movements like the Khmer Rouge come to think of it.
The USSR backed the Angola rebels, otherwise I don't recall them being that active in coups, revolts or the like.
)
e ws/2005/04/23/wsud23.xml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Ethiopia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6171429.stm
You're right, apart from the 8.5 million Ethiopians who died in the Red Terror and government created famine, Soviet foreign policy in Africa was pretty benign.
What did China do in Africa that compares with any of the others?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Funny how dictatorships consistently put their economic interests ahead of stopping genocide in far away places.
How do you know Nature invented it?
Not really. HIV SP2 is due out soon. I'm sure that will fix the security holes the vaccine exploits.
With HIV being such a high profile disease, there is no way an effective vaccine will be slowed or stopped by politics and bullshit.
Yeah, it's not like paranoid schizophrenia where "human" "scientists" have known the cure for ages but they've kept it secret to protect their grant money.