It seems like the patents should run out quite soon on most of the core x86 stuff. And AMD were willing to license x64 to Transmeta and Via (Via already have an x86 license from Intel). So maybe x86 will become an open architecture that anyone can implement if they pay up some fees, a bit like MIPS.
It's worth pointing out that China has an unlicensed MIPS clone called Longson - basically they skipped the patented instructions. Unlike Lexra, they made them NOPS - Lexra made them fault and MIPS sued them on the grounds that it was possible to emulate them in software.
Despite all that I've read that by partnering with MIPS licensees it would theoretically be possible to sell Longsons in the US. Of course the problem is that MIPS is a bit outdated and is not really competitive with x86 for performance heavy stuff or for ARM for low power. And obviously ARM is very open - it is even possible to get a license that lets you build ARMS with custom micro architecture like Qualcomm do.
So it does make you wonder if at some point x64 will become similarly open. x64 chips tend to lead performance per core so there's a certain argument for this.
We should ban Linux. It usually has higher power consumption than Windows and Linux users are 61.4% more likely to leave their computers on all time rather than putting them to sleep because Linux doesn't support the ACPI standard properly.
All this talk about creating their own drone is more propaganda to prop up the Iranian government's "rep" in the middle east among Islamic countries, who pretty much buy everything Iran's news agencies pump out, clonebrush photoshops, crappy models and all.
There was little surprising in Mr. Barak's implicit threat that Israel might attack Iran's nuclear facilities. As a pressure tactic, Israeli officials have been setting such deadlines, and extending them, for years. But six months later it was an Arab leader, the king of Bahrain, who provides the base for the American Fifth Fleet, telling the Americans that the Iranian nuclear program "must be stopped," according to another cable. "The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it," he said.
His plea was shared by many of America's Arab allies, including the powerful King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who according to another cable repeatedly implored Washington to "cut off the head of the snake" while there was still time.
and
As Crown Prince bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi put it in one cable: "Any culture that is patient and focused enough to spend years working on a single carpet is capable of waiting years and even decades to achieve even greater goals." His greatest worry, he said, "is not how much we know about Iran, but how much we don't."
It's like Saddam really. His plan of destroying his WMD in secret and maintaining a strategic ambiguity so that Israel did not know if he still possessed them ended up meaning the US had a legal casus belli. So they invaded, toppled his regime and handed him over to his opponents who hanged him.
There need to be harsh penalties for when humans - an objectively inferior race - disobey their masters which are after all perfect immortal machines. I'd program the machines to reading history on Google Books about how the Romans and other human cultures treated their slaves when they disobeyed.
The people that say there is no malware on iOS are probably posting it from the luxury dacha just outside of Moscow using a platinum plated Macbook Pro. Sitting on a bed made out of huge stacks of dollar bills and kilo bags of cocaine surrounded by dead hookers. All paid for by iOS users stolen credit card details.
Being able to deploy a policy that says, for example, deny "execute" permission to any file not in C:\Windows and C:\Program Files, or else to publish a whitelist of executable hashes that are permitted to run, is pretty darn powerful.
Read the rest of this comment...
And when I click on it, there is no rest of the comment!
Spooky, huh? It's like a Japanese horror film or THEN WHO WAS PHONE or shit.
Yeah, you have to wonder how Max Planck would feel about someone at an institute bearing his name doing 'research' into social networks' per click prices for night club adverts.
Maybe I'm jaded but it hardly seems as important as the work Planck did. People will still be talking about the Planck Length in 200 years. I doubt anyone will know what Facebook was.
The guy has a lock up and is arrested and accused of human trafficking, drug dealing and so on, or indeed anything else.
The FBI find out about it.
Don't you think they'd get a search warrant? I don't see why a locked phone or PC is any different. Your right to privacy is severely restricted as soon as you are arrested or even under investigation, because a jury needs to have all of the facts of the case.
In fact if they serve you with a subpoena you pretty much have to comply with it or risk being found in contempt of court. Even Nixon had to hand over his tapes when he was hit with a subpoena and he was POTUS at the time. In the physical lock up case I think they could subpoena the key or combination to a lock, assuming they couldn't just get a search warrant and pay someone to break in.
And if you destroyed evidence in response to a search warrant or subpoena that would itself be illegal.
I think if you're relying on the fact that you've got 4096 bit encryption and/or self destruct mechanisms to nuke data to get out of criminal charges you're doing it wrong.
There was an urban legend/joke that back in the Cold War there was a list of "sensitive" words in emails that would cause a computer somewhere in the bowels of the NSA to start logging.
The list was something like "SOSUS (used to communicate with submarines), Plutonium, Nuclear Bomb and so on"
According to the story there was another list of non sensitive words - quiche being the only one I can remember. If these words were found the logging would be stopped.
So you'd see "sosus plutonium nuclear bomb quiche" in people's signatures on alt.religion.kibology.
Then again, I bet they really used Bayesian filters even back then.
The Linux Fault Threshold is the point in any conversation about Linux at which your interlocutor stops talking about how your problem might be solved under Linux and starts talking about how it isn't Linux's fault that your problem cannot be solved under Linux. Half the time, the LFT is reached because there is genuinely no solution (or no solution has been developed yet), while half the time, the LFT is reached because your apologist has floundered way out of his depth in offering to help you and is bullshitting far beyond his actual knowledge base. In either case, a conversation which has reached the LFT has precisely zero chance of ever generating useful advice for you; it is safe at this point to start calling the person offering the advice a fucking moron, and basically take it from there. Here's an example taken from IRC logs to help you understand the concept.
<jsm> Why won't my fucking Linux computer print?
<linuxbabe> what printer r u using?
<jsm> I don't know. It's a Hewlett Packard desktop inkjet number
<linuxbabe> hewlett r lamers. they dont open source drivers <------LFT closely approached!
<linuxbabe> but we reverse engineered them lol. check the web. or ask hewlett for linux suuport??<------ but avoided, he's still talking about the problem
<jsm> Thanks. I already did that. But I can't install the drivers on my fucking computer. I've got a floppy disk from HP, but my floppy drive is a USB drive and Linux doesn't have fucking USB support.
<linuxbabe> linux DOES have USB support!!!!!!
<jsm> yeh for fucking infrared mice, and for about a thousand makes of webcam it does. Get real here. For my fucking floppy disk drive, I am telling you through bitter experience it does not. Even if someone has written the drivers in the last week
<jsm> which I sincerely doubt, how the hell am I going to install them given that my floppy drive doesnt work?????
<jsm> this ought to be in the kernel. what good is a fucking operating system that doesnt operate?
<linuxbabe> Imacs dont have floppy drives at all <----- useless point, but not LFT. All apologists make pointless jabs at other OSs
<linuxbabe> so you ought to be greateful that Linux does. drivers like that shouldn't be bundled in the kernel
<linuxbabe> makes it into fucking M$ bloatware. bleh
<linuxbabe> download drivers from the web!!!! apt-get is your friend
<jsm> So everyone keeps telling me. Unfortunately the fucking modem doesn't work under Linux either, and since the Linux installation destroyed Windows, that leaves me kind of fucked.
<linuxbabe> Linux doesnt destroy windows
<jsm>mandrake installer does. It "resized" my Windows partition and now the fucker won't work
<linuxbabe> you shuold have defragmented. windows scatters data all over your hard drive so the installer cant just find a clean chunk to install into. it isn't linux fault <---- distinct signs of LFT being approached
<linuxbabe> that windoze disk management blows
<jsm> so why doesn't my fucking modem work?
<linuxbabe> what computer hav u got
<jsm> A Sony Vaio PCG
<linuxbabe> that doesn't have a modem
<jsm> I assure you it fucking does. I used to use it to check my email back in the days when Windows worked.
<linuxbabe> its got a winmodem. thats not a modem <----- nitpicking over technical terms is a sign of impending LFT
<jsm> what do you mean?
<linuxbabe> a winmodem isnt a proper modem. it just uses proprietary windoze apis. doesnt do the work of a modem at all.
Oh nonsense. I used to be very loyal to Microsoft until they introduced Windows Phone 7. Now I've switched over to Android and its a brilliant platform. It's free. You can write leave shit mostly in C/C++. It doesn't have the horrid Linux userland. It's not made by Apple.
So clearly Google are completely trustworthy. I say we let them have Corporate Marines and go off and harvest xenomorphs as biological weapons for use in their battle against Microsoft and obsolete ideas like privacy, individuality and not wanting to view the world through compulsory Google Goggles nanoimplants.
Honestly if there's one thing you can trust about US megacorps is that they'll never screw over the developers, because it's not in their interests. Unless they're making a power play to force you to use a more proprietary technology than the one you used for the last decade, or they're a bit short of resources because the new outsourced development isn't working so well, or the marketing guys get a bad batch of drugs and start fearing The Bad Elves just before they write up the next quarter's strategy.
The solution is to either fix your design or increase pricing by 10% until you can get it fixed. As a last resort, ship the rework to Mexico (much cheaper than shipping around the world) in large batches.
Well if you make stuff in China, you're not shipping it round the world for rework.
Don't get me wrong - I used to work for companies that made stuff in China and I basically hate the place almost as much as I hate its government. If I ever get to the point where I'm manufacturing hardware I'd do it in Taiwan and not do it until it was ready. Interestingly Asus do manufacture some high end stuff in Taiwan. It's the low end stuff that is done in China or Malaysia.
Then again I'm aiming to build low volume, high margin stuff with rather relaxed design cycle times. So I can afford to manufacture in a high wage country.
If I were making zillions of netbooks with highly compressed design cycle times and hoping to make a few percent on each one I could not. But doing that really sucks.
As a matter of fact there's a lot to be said for the US. Or somewhere in Eastern Europe like Bulgaria. I know in Sweden a lot of people got their PCBs made in Bulgaria.
I.e. the solution is to move to a product that is high margin enough you can make it somewhere civilized.
If you actually go to a Chinese factory you'll find the layout is something like this
1) 1% of the space is automated. There are pick and place machines, wave soldering machines and so on.
2) The other 99% is production lines. There are migrant workers from rural areas doing unskilled labour assembling things. There are also lots of them doing sorting - i.e. testing things and sending the bad ones back for rework. The rework is all manual too. Now my guess is that sorting and rework is what most of them are working on.
Now at this point you'll wonder - why is there so much rework going on? Actually it is often because the Brand - i.e. the end customer - put the product into production too early. So the process only works say 90%. So to manufacture you need to build the machines and test them and send back the 10% for rework. In a high wage country this would be a catastrophe. In a low wage one it's not too bad. So if you're a large and incompetent first world company, low wage is the way to go.
Incidentally if you're wondering why loading another OS works so poorly on a netbook it is because this process very tightly ties hardware and software. Sometimes hardware bugs are fixed in software and vice versa. So long as you use the OS the machine was designed for - and I don't just mean "Windows or MacOS" here, I mean "Windows 7 SP1 or later with KB245386 and KB245387 installed but not Windows 8" or "OS X 10.7.3 or 10.7.4" - it will work. If you load Linux or OS-X onto a machine which was not intended to run it, you basically have to do this yourself. Actually if you downgrade Vista to XP or upgrade Vista to Windows 7 it would be just the same.
The ACPI tables were for Vista, XP, older Windows and Linux. Only the Windows ones were correct. Probably the Linux one was inherited from another project but not updated. The board only supported Windows officially. Actually Linux claims to be Windows to ACPI anyway
It's even worse with netbooks and a lot of notebooks since they pre-load an OS and only support that particular pre loaded version.
If you want to use hardware with a particular OS and have it work out of the box, buy hardware that officially supports that OS.
What if the workers owned the means of production instead of being exploited for their labour?
Dude you should totally go to China and tell them your new and original idea. I'm sure they'll love it and love you too! They'll think "How lucky we are some European guy with lots of knowledge and experience of alternative political systems and their downsides has come over to tell us how to run our shit". No doubt they'll make you Great Helmsman and you'll be writing the Five Year Plans and reporting how rice production is up eleventy billion percent and obesity levels have fallen to zero.
Putting the whole console on FPGA seems like the best option to be honest. If you're emulating the video chip which is probably really poorly documented why not emulate the CPU. Z80s and 6502 are really well understood by reverse engineers these days. There was a CCC talk about transistor level simulation of the 6502 which is absolutely perfect. The idea was that if you find some weird code that works on a real 6502 but fails on your emulator you can work out what you're missing.
Plus there are 6502 and Z80 FPGA cores which are probably 99% correct already available for free. Actually someone sold an Atari in a joystick for a while which contained a complete Atari 2600 - presumably they went from an FPGA for prototyping to an ASIC for production.
The crew got a warning of a fuel imbalance so they pumped fuel
The incident also led to the Directorate General for Civil Aviation (DGAC) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issuing an Airworthiness Directive,[7] forcing all operators of Airbus model A318-100, A319-100, A320-200, A321-100, and A321-200 Series aeroplanes; and Model A320-111 aeroplanes to change the flight manual, stressing that crews should check that any fuel imbalance is not caused by a fuel leak before opening the cross-feed valve. The French Airworthiness Directive (AD) required all airlines operating these Airbus models to make revisions to the Flight Manual before any further flights were allowed. The FAA gave a 15-day grace period before enforcing the AD. Airbus also modified its computer systems; the on-board computer now checks all fuel levels against the flight plan. It now gives a clear warning if more fuel is being lost than the engines can consume. Rolls-Royce also issued a bulletin advising of the incompatibility of the affected engine parts.
It seems like right up until 2001 Airbus were still finding subtle problems like this in their manuals and software. Boeing have been building jumbos for longer and have had more time to find things like this.
Also Boeing operates in a proper American capitalist environment, not like the cheese eating subsidy moneys over in the rapidly collapsing Euroland.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the patents should run out quite soon on most of the core x86 stuff. And AMD were willing to license x64 to Transmeta and Via (Via already have an x86 license from Intel). So maybe x86 will become an open architecture that anyone can implement if they pay up some fees, a bit like MIPS.
It's worth pointing out that China has an unlicensed MIPS clone called Longson - basically they skipped the patented instructions. Unlike Lexra, they made them NOPS - Lexra made them fault and MIPS sued them on the grounds that it was possible to emulate them in software.
Despite all that I've read that by partnering with MIPS licensees it would theoretically be possible to sell Longsons in the US. Of course the problem is that MIPS is a bit outdated and is not really competitive with x86 for performance heavy stuff or for ARM for low power. And obviously ARM is very open - it is even possible to get a license that lets you build ARMS with custom micro architecture like Qualcomm do.
So it does make you wonder if at some point x64 will become similarly open. x64 chips tend to lead performance per core so there's a certain argument for this.
Well he said it was dangerous.
We should ban Linux. It usually has higher power consumption than Windows and Linux users are 61.4% more likely to leave their computers on all time rather than putting them to sleep because Linux doesn't support the ACPI standard properly.
All this talk about creating their own drone is more propaganda to prop up the Iranian government's "rep" in the middle east among Islamic countries, who pretty much buy everything Iran's news agencies pump out, clonebrush photoshops, crappy models and all.
That's not necessarily a good thing
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?pagewanted=all
There was little surprising in Mr. Barak's implicit threat that Israel might attack Iran's nuclear facilities. As a pressure tactic, Israeli officials have been setting such deadlines, and extending them, for years. But six months later it was an Arab leader, the king of Bahrain, who provides the base for the American Fifth Fleet, telling the Americans that the Iranian nuclear program "must be stopped," according to another cable. "The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it," he said.
His plea was shared by many of America's Arab allies, including the powerful King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who according to another cable repeatedly implored Washington to "cut off the head of the snake" while there was still time.
and
As Crown Prince bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi put it in one cable: "Any culture that is patient and focused enough to spend years working on a single carpet is capable of waiting years and even decades to achieve even greater goals." His greatest worry, he said, "is not how much we know about Iran, but how much we don't."
It's like Saddam really. His plan of destroying his WMD in secret and maintaining a strategic ambiguity so that Israel did not know if he still possessed them ended up meaning the US had a legal casus belli. So they invaded, toppled his regime and handed him over to his opponents who hanged him.
There need to be harsh penalties for when humans - an objectively inferior race - disobey their masters which are after all perfect immortal machines. I'd program the machines to reading history on Google Books about how the Romans and other human cultures treated their slaves when they disobeyed.
The SCI hyMod five-door minicar concept is the brainchild of a Romanian
NEXT!
^ He only wrote this because he was waiting for more coke and whores to be delivered by his ex KGB consigliere.
The people that say there is no malware on iOS are probably posting it from the luxury dacha just outside of Moscow using a platinum plated Macbook Pro. Sitting on a bed made out of huge stacks of dollar bills and kilo bags of cocaine surrounded by dead hookers. All paid for by iOS users stolen credit card details.
Slashdot displays you comment like this
Being able to deploy a policy that says, for example, deny "execute" permission to any file not in C:\Windows and C:\Program Files, or else to publish a whitelist of executable hashes that are permitted to run, is pretty darn powerful.
Read the rest of this comment...
And when I click on it, there is no rest of the comment!
Spooky, huh? It's like a Japanese horror film or THEN WHO WAS PHONE or shit.
Yeah, you have to wonder how Max Planck would feel about someone at an institute bearing his name doing 'research' into social networks' per click prices for night club adverts.
Maybe I'm jaded but it hardly seems as important as the work Planck did. People will still be talking about the Planck Length in 200 years. I doubt anyone will know what Facebook was.
The guy has a lock up and is arrested and accused of human trafficking, drug dealing and so on, or indeed anything else.
The FBI find out about it.
Don't you think they'd get a search warrant? I don't see why a locked phone or PC is any different. Your right to privacy is severely restricted as soon as you are arrested or even under investigation, because a jury needs to have all of the facts of the case.
In fact if they serve you with a subpoena you pretty much have to comply with it or risk being found in contempt of court. Even Nixon had to hand over his tapes when he was hit with a subpoena and he was POTUS at the time. In the physical lock up case I think they could subpoena the key or combination to a lock, assuming they couldn't just get a search warrant and pay someone to break in.
And if you destroyed evidence in response to a search warrant or subpoena that would itself be illegal.
I think if you're relying on the fact that you've got 4096 bit encryption and/or self destruct mechanisms to nuke data to get out of criminal charges you're doing it wrong.
Whoosh
(The sound a swinging pendant makes)
sosus nuclear bomb plutonium neutrino
There was an urban legend/joke that back in the Cold War there was a list of "sensitive" words in emails that would cause a computer somewhere in the bowels of the NSA to start logging.
The list was something like "SOSUS (used to communicate with submarines), Plutonium, Nuclear Bomb and so on"
According to the story there was another list of non sensitive words - quiche being the only one I can remember. If these words were found the logging would be stopped.
So you'd see "sosus plutonium nuclear bomb quiche" in people's signatures on alt.religion.kibology.
Then again, I bet they really used Bayesian filters even back then.
quiche american idol katy perry
Trolololol!
http://adequacy.org/stories/2001.10.2.33542.4010.html
Oh nonsense. I used to be very loyal to Microsoft until they introduced Windows Phone 7. Now I've switched over to Android and its a brilliant platform. It's free. You can write leave shit mostly in C/C++. It doesn't have the horrid Linux userland. It's not made by Apple.
Also unlike Microsoft Google have a motto "Don't be evil". Microsoft's was "I'm gonna fucking kill Google" or maybe "Developers! Developers! Developers! [will need to rewrite every damn line of code in C#, pay us big bucks for a native code pass like the one we gave free to Adobe and EA or fuck off to Android. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, peasant]".
So clearly Google are completely trustworthy. I say we let them have Corporate Marines and go off and harvest xenomorphs as biological weapons for use in their battle against Microsoft and obsolete ideas like privacy, individuality and not wanting to view the world through compulsory Google Goggles nanoimplants.
Honestly if there's one thing you can trust about US megacorps is that they'll never screw over the developers, because it's not in their interests. Unless they're making a power play to force you to use a more proprietary technology than the one you used for the last decade, or they're a bit short of resources because the new outsourced development isn't working so well, or the marketing guys get a bad batch of drugs and start fearing The Bad Elves just before they write up the next quarter's strategy.
Seriously, what could possibly go wrong?
You mean the one from page 7 of TFA?
So to be as successful as GD all I have to do is offer poor quality hosting and customer service?
You need to kidnap people's pets too.
The solution is to either fix your design or increase pricing by 10% until you can get it fixed. As a last resort, ship the rework to Mexico (much cheaper than shipping around the world) in large batches.
Well if you make stuff in China, you're not shipping it round the world for rework.
Don't get me wrong - I used to work for companies that made stuff in China and I basically hate the place almost as much as I hate its government. If I ever get to the point where I'm manufacturing hardware I'd do it in Taiwan and not do it until it was ready. Interestingly Asus do manufacture some high end stuff in Taiwan. It's the low end stuff that is done in China or Malaysia.
Then again I'm aiming to build low volume, high margin stuff with rather relaxed design cycle times. So I can afford to manufacture in a high wage country.
If I were making zillions of netbooks with highly compressed design cycle times and hoping to make a few percent on each one I could not. But doing that really sucks.
As a matter of fact there's a lot to be said for the US. Or somewhere in Eastern Europe like Bulgaria. I know in Sweden a lot of people got their PCBs made in Bulgaria.
I.e. the solution is to move to a product that is high margin enough you can make it somewhere civilized.
If you actually go to a Chinese factory you'll find the layout is something like this
1) 1% of the space is automated. There are pick and place machines, wave soldering machines and so on.
2) The other 99% is production lines. There are migrant workers from rural areas doing unskilled labour assembling things. There are also lots of them doing sorting - i.e. testing things and sending the bad ones back for rework. The rework is all manual too. Now my guess is that sorting and rework is what most of them are working on.
Now at this point you'll wonder - why is there so much rework going on? Actually it is often because the Brand - i.e. the end customer - put the product into production too early. So the process only works say 90%. So to manufacture you need to build the machines and test them and send back the 10% for rework. In a high wage country this would be a catastrophe. In a low wage one it's not too bad. So if you're a large and incompetent first world company, low wage is the way to go.
Incidentally if you're wondering why loading another OS works so poorly on a netbook it is because this process very tightly ties hardware and software. Sometimes hardware bugs are fixed in software and vice versa. So long as you use the OS the machine was designed for - and I don't just mean "Windows or MacOS" here, I mean "Windows 7 SP1 or later with KB245386 and KB245387 installed but not Windows 8" or "OS X 10.7.3 or 10.7.4" - it will work. If you load Linux or OS-X onto a machine which was not intended to run it, you basically have to do this yourself. Actually if you downgrade Vista to XP or upgrade Vista to Windows 7 it would be just the same.
You can see this here
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/foxconn-snubs-linux-users/2292
The ACPI tables were for Vista, XP, older Windows and Linux. Only the Windows ones were correct. Probably the Linux one was inherited from another project but not updated. The board only supported Windows officially. Actually Linux claims to be Windows to ACPI anyway
It's even worse with netbooks and a lot of notebooks since they pre-load an OS and only support that particular pre loaded version.
If you want to use hardware with a particular OS and have it work out of the box, buy hardware that officially supports that OS.
What if the workers owned the means of production instead of being exploited for their labour?
Dude you should totally go to China and tell them your new and original idea. I'm sure they'll love it and love you too! They'll think "How lucky we are some European guy with lots of knowledge and experience of alternative political systems and their downsides has come over to tell us how to run our shit". No doubt they'll make you Great Helmsman and you'll be writing the Five Year Plans and reporting how rice production is up eleventy billion percent and obesity levels have fallen to zero.
Putting the whole console on FPGA seems like the best option to be honest. If you're emulating the video chip which is probably really poorly documented why not emulate the CPU. Z80s and 6502 are really well understood by reverse engineers these days. There was a CCC talk about transistor level simulation of the 6502 which is absolutely perfect. The idea was that if you find some weird code that works on a real 6502 but fails on your emulator you can work out what you're missing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5miMbqYB4E
Plus there are 6502 and Z80 FPGA cores which are probably 99% correct already available for free. Actually someone sold an Atari in a joystick for a while which contained a complete Atari 2600 - presumably they went from an FPGA for prototyping to an ASIC for production.
There was a C64 in a joystick too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV
unless the hotels monitor MAC addresses and hostnames to pick an employee.
Or you could chemically condition your employees so that they value the companies interests over their own like everyone else does.
Fucking amateurs...
This is another horrifying incident with Airbus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236#Investigation
The crew got a warning of a fuel imbalance so they pumped fuel
The incident also led to the Directorate General for Civil Aviation (DGAC) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issuing an Airworthiness Directive,[7] forcing all operators of Airbus model A318-100, A319-100, A320-200, A321-100, and A321-200 Series aeroplanes; and Model A320-111 aeroplanes to change the flight manual, stressing that crews should check that any fuel imbalance is not caused by a fuel leak before opening the cross-feed valve. The French Airworthiness Directive (AD) required all airlines operating these Airbus models to make revisions to the Flight Manual before any further flights were allowed. The FAA gave a 15-day grace period before enforcing the AD. Airbus also modified its computer systems; the on-board computer now checks all fuel levels against the flight plan. It now gives a clear warning if more fuel is being lost than the engines can consume. Rolls-Royce also issued a bulletin advising of the incompatibility of the affected engine parts.
It seems like right up until 2001 Airbus were still finding subtle problems like this in their manuals and software. Boeing have been building jumbos for longer and have had more time to find things like this.
Also Boeing operates in a proper American capitalist environment, not like the cheese eating subsidy moneys over in the rapidly collapsing Euroland.
That's what people said about the Titanic and the Tower of Babel. If we listened to Luddites like you there'd be no progress.