I wish manufacturers would expose the flash storage and allow the OS to manage this layer, but they're too busy profiting from the illusion of firmware as just another part of the hardware.
They do...such devices are called MTD or memory technology devices. Basically bare NAND/NOR flash exposed to the OS. There are special filesystems designed for working with it, like jffs2.
They're a pain in the butt to deal with, which is why hiding the details behind an abstraction layer and treating it like a disk is appealing.
The way things are currently set up, people with power and influence can keep bringing up legislation that they want to get passed until eventually people get tired of fighting it or they manage to slip it in attached to some other critical legislation.
As an individual voter, this seems inherently unfair. Why should I need to keep fighting the same battles over and over and over? Once the people have spoken the legislators shouldn't be able to propose similar legislation for some amount of time.
In that price range you'd be hard pressed to beat the Koss Porta Pro. Very old-school styling, on-ear, and no isolation, but the sound is really good for the price.
My upscale headphones are AKG 501s, driven with a homemade PPA amplifier with a custom bass-boost filter designed to compensate for the bass rolloff in the headphones themselves.
If you want isolation, you're either looking at DJ-style headphones or else isolating earbuds. I can't help you there.
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents.
Sorry, no. I'm a professional linux kernel developer. Unless you have something cooperating within the OS to set up a mapping any DMA request from the thunderbolt device is going to get dumped on the floor by the IOMMU. (See the IOMMU wikipedia article if you're unsure how this works.)
I can see keyboard/mouse and maybe audio going wireless. When you're pushing a high resolution monitor (24-30") wireless display isn't all that great. Also, even with dual-chanel 5GHz wifi a gigabit ethernet cable is still substantially faster.
Personally I have a Dell with a docking station connector on the bottom. Docking bay has all the ports you need: power/usb/ethernet/audio/DVI/displayport/VGA/eSATA.
There are relatively few things you can do to *permanently* mess up your hardware, even from a device driver. A network driver for instance will load up default setting from the EEPROM. It's possible to reflash the EEPROM but it takes special tools that aren't included by default in any linux distribution.
Similarly, installing linux isn't going to write to your BIOS, or reprogram other EEPROMS. Basically, installing linux may make things unstable or not functional for linux itself, but if you reboot to Windows or some other OS it will go right back to the defaults.
Yes, you used to be able to kill some CRT monitors by sending them signals that are out-of-spec, but those days are long gone. Yes, you used to be able to melt CPUs by running malicious code, but CPUs now clock themselves down if they get too hot, so incomplete thermal drivers can't hurt anything seriously.
I'm a software guy. I would love to be able to run with a web browser, several files open (being coded), and several lab displays showing live status all visible simultaneously. I'm currently at 1920x1200, I would love to have more pixels available to play with. I've got good eyes, I can tolerate small fonts as long as they're detailed.
I've benched my laptop using wifi vs wired. For really high bandwidth stuff (dumping big files around) wired is far superior, even compared to double-channel 5GHz with line-of-site to the access point.
I don't need the "retina" aspect of it, I want the _pixels_. Even with virtual desktops I'm always running out of room...I'd be more efficient with a bigger screen.
Sure, you can go multimonitor (and I do) but the gap between the screens just annoys me.
You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated).
Are you kidding? I would love an HDR display. Imagine being able to truly recreate the dynamic range present in an outside scene with the sun visible as well as shadows--with full detail in both. A sunny day has a contrast ratio of something like 100000:1.
Define "Mainframe". From what I can see, "mainframe" is a term for very expensive ultra performance hardware.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
Current state-of-the-art in off-the-shelf ATCA gear (chassis, switch cards, compute cards, etc.) provides redundant 40-gigabit backplane connectivity on the data fabric. It's available with linux support.
It's telco-grade stuff, so redundant power supplies, redundant fans, redundant networking, redundant shelf management, etc.
Red Hat pays $99 once to get their key included in the BIOS. This lets them boot up their bootloader (signed with their key) which then boots whatever they decide to allow--could be OS kernels signed with their key, could be arbitrary stuff. I'd guess that RHEL might lock things down tight by default, with Fedora being more permissive.
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I foresee a locked-down Win8 install that exists only to run WinXP or Win7 in a virtual machine.
I wish manufacturers would expose the flash storage and allow the OS to manage this layer, but they're too busy profiting from the illusion of firmware as just another part of the hardware.
They do...such devices are called MTD or memory technology devices. Basically bare NAND/NOR flash exposed to the OS. There are special filesystems designed for working with it, like jffs2.
They're a pain in the butt to deal with, which is why hiding the details behind an abstraction layer and treating it like a disk is appealing.
I see nothing wrong with having a pint and driving home. Even several pints, if I'm there for several hours.
Caveat--I'm a 6' 200lb male. My 95lb female friend may require different standards.
The way things are currently set up, people with power and influence can keep bringing up legislation that they want to get passed until eventually people get tired of fighting it or they manage to slip it in attached to some other critical legislation.
As an individual voter, this seems inherently unfair. Why should I need to keep fighting the same battles over and over and over? Once the people have spoken the legislators shouldn't be able to propose similar legislation for some amount of time.
In that price range you'd be hard pressed to beat the Koss Porta Pro. Very old-school styling, on-ear, and no isolation, but the sound is really good for the price.
My upscale headphones are AKG 501s, driven with a homemade PPA amplifier with a custom bass-boost filter designed to compensate for the bass rolloff in the headphones themselves.
If you want isolation, you're either looking at DJ-style headphones or else isolating earbuds. I can't help you there.
Get out the hot glue gun... Any device with thunderbolt has the full PCI bus exposed. Plug in the right gadget, which cops and crooks WILL have, and you completely and utterly own the system down to the lowest level, memory and drive contents.
Sorry, no. I'm a professional linux kernel developer. Unless you have something cooperating within the OS to set up a mapping any DMA request from the thunderbolt device is going to get dumped on the floor by the IOMMU. (See the IOMMU wikipedia article if you're unsure how this works.)
I can see keyboard/mouse and maybe audio going wireless. When you're pushing a high resolution monitor (24-30") wireless display isn't all that great. Also, even with dual-chanel 5GHz wifi a gigabit ethernet cable is still substantially faster.
Personally I have a Dell with a docking station connector on the bottom. Docking bay has all the ports you need: power/usb/ethernet/audio/DVI/displayport/VGA/eSATA.
There are relatively few things you can do to *permanently* mess up your hardware, even from a device driver. A network driver for instance will load up default setting from the EEPROM. It's possible to reflash the EEPROM but it takes special tools that aren't included by default in any linux distribution.
Similarly, installing linux isn't going to write to your BIOS, or reprogram other EEPROMS. Basically, installing linux may make things unstable or not functional for linux itself, but if you reboot to Windows or some other OS it will go right back to the defaults.
Yes, you used to be able to kill some CRT monitors by sending them signals that are out-of-spec, but those days are long gone. Yes, you used to be able to melt CPUs by running malicious code, but CPUs now clock themselves down if they get too hot, so incomplete thermal drivers can't hurt anything seriously.
it's up to the store to provide good customer service. If they don't the customer is absolutely entitled to bitch and moan.
If they don't, then they're not serving their market that actually has functioning eyesight but would like more information density.
I'm a software guy. I would love to be able to run with a web browser, several files open (being coded), and several lab displays showing live status all visible simultaneously. I'm currently at 1920x1200, I would love to have more pixels available to play with. I've got good eyes, I can tolerate small fonts as long as they're detailed.
I've benched my laptop using wifi vs wired. For really high bandwidth stuff (dumping big files around) wired is far superior, even compared to double-channel 5GHz with line-of-site to the access point.
I don't need the "retina" aspect of it, I want the _pixels_. Even with virtual desktops I'm always running out of room...I'd be more efficient with a bigger screen.
Sure, you can go multimonitor (and I do) but the gap between the screens just annoys me.
You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated).
Are you kidding? I would love an HDR display. Imagine being able to truly recreate the dynamic range present in an outside scene with the sun visible as well as shadows--with full detail in both. A sunny day has a contrast ratio of something like 100000:1.
You're comparing a commonly available retail product with something off ebay where you need to ship it back to Korea if anything goes wrong?
You forgot to factor in distance to the screen. 100dpi on a monitor 24" away is like 300dpi on a phone 8" away.
Season 5 of Eureka is currently being aired, the last episode is slated for July 16.
Define "Mainframe". From what I can see, "mainframe" is a term for very expensive ultra performance hardware.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
Current state-of-the-art in off-the-shelf ATCA gear (chassis, switch cards, compute cards, etc.) provides redundant 40-gigabit backplane connectivity on the data fabric. It's available with linux support.
It's telco-grade stuff, so redundant power supplies, redundant fans, redundant networking, redundant shelf management, etc.
You're going to pay for it though.
those that can pay for optimization, and those that can't. The gulf between the two gets ever-wider.
What about the people that terminate because it's a girl?
So they can test to reasonable levels of assurance.
For custom software work, that level of testing is generally too expensive to give unlimited guarantees.
Likely there's a bunch of Itanium code out there and people don't want to spend the money rebuilding it for x86.
then they should either do what they said or else pay out whatever penalties were specified in the contract.
If there was no contract or nothing specified in it, then it goes to the courts...which is exactly what has happened.
Red Hat pays $99 once to get their key included in the BIOS. This lets them boot up their bootloader (signed with their key) which then boots whatever they decide to allow--could be OS kernels signed with their key, could be arbitrary stuff. I'd guess that RHEL might lock things down tight by default, with Fedora being more permissive.
There is no per-machine fee.