The BBC micro had 16K of ROM for the built-in BASIC interpreter and low level "OS", another 16K of address space into which you could map any one (at a time) of the other 16K software ROMs in that machine Wrong, the "OS" was a 16K rom (though only 15.25K was accessible because some of it's space was stolen for IE) and the basic intepreter was another 16K rom banked into the same chunk of address space as the expansion roms.
Don't forget, XP is 5.1 and Windows 2000 is 5.0. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty "minor", but that doesn't mean that a lot of work has been done on the OS. It's always felt to me that there was more difference between XP RTM/SP1 and XP SP2 than there was between 2K and XP RTM/SP1 .
Since this is Slashdot, I have to mention that Linux i386 supports PAE just fine, It does indeed but I was under the impression that PAE mode was slower than long mode.
Linux also doesn't manage memory the same way as Windows, so the user/kernel split doesn't apply. I was under the impression that linux normally used a 3G/1G kernel/user split though there were patches to make both spaces 4GB (presumablly with some performance penalty for switches from user mode to kernel mode)
So Linux x86-64 has all the compatibility problems of Long Mode Most linux drivers are opensource and integrated in the kernel tree which means they got often ported to 64 bit much sooner then the corresponding windows drivers.
Most opensource apps are included with the distro and again the distros have sorted out getting them ported to 64 bit. Remember also that at least one major linux distro was supporting other 64 bit architectures before x86-64 so much of the porting work was already done.
Most propietry 32 bit linux apps also tend to run just fine on 64 bit linux provided the relavent libraries are in place.
One big issue for 64 bit linux has been browser plugins. Most linux distros ship 64 bit browsers but most propietry browser plugins are 32 bit only. Lukilly the two most important propietry plugins (flash and java) have recently been ported to 64 bit.
and get their panties in a bunch over 700 MB or so of "missing" RAM. Depends what kind of graphics card(s) they have, I have a friend who has a graphics card that pushes the usable ram down to to 2.5GB two of those would probablly push usable ram down to 1.5.
most of these people aren't actually ever going to use that much of RAM. Software always seems to grow more bloated over time. Firefox can easilly eat a gig under heavy use.
one thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the FAQ is how they are getting arround the legal issues surrounding fuel.
IIRC they claim the transition can run on both 100LL and some kind of road fuel. This raises two issues
1: I was under the understaning that leaded petrol was banned on the road, so if you ever fill up on 100LL you would have to clean out your tank before driving on the road. 2: I was under the impression that catalytic converters were incompatible with leaded petrol and yet were required for road vehircles.
Is my understanding wrong? have they got some kind of exception?
One big difference is that when driving unless you do something suspicious you are unlikely to have to speak to anyone outside your car for the whole journey.
Whereas to use this thing you will have to take it into an airport (past whatever security they have), switch to airplane mode, taxi to the runway and then take off maintaining contact with air traffic control. I would think most airports would ask questions if you weren't already known to them and/or you didn't seem to know all the flying jargon.
I guess you could try to take off from a road though you would probablly need two lanes and it would look very suspicious.
Remember current 32 bit desktop editions of windows are limited to 4GB of PHYSICAL ADDRESS SPACE. In a machine with onboard graphics or a low end card this normally gives about 3.25GB-3.5GB of usable ram but with high end graphics cards it can be much lower. I haven't personally seen a system with two high end cards in SLI but I suspect it would end up with less than 2GB of usable ram.
At uni I see lots of systems being deployed that have 4GB of ram but can't use it all because they are running a 32 bit desktop edition of windows. Sadly software compatibility issues are preventing many people switching to 64 bit (and cost prevents most people running server editions on thier desktop).
Is there some killer apps that will not run on XP? Not yet, software vendors will almost certainly stop supporting XP eventually, the only question is when.
Will vista or win7 really increase productivity? In itself probablly not much. Depending on your application however more ram may well do so and windows XP proffesional x64 edition has far worse driver availibility than vista x64.
Will vista or win7 really increase security? It really depends on your environment, if your users insist on running as admin and you don't have the power to force them not to then UAC is probablly a good thing if a little annoying sometimes. If your users don't run as admin then it makes no difference.
Also security updates for XP will stop in just over 5 years time. I suspect this stopping of security updates will be a trigger for many buisnesses to migrate and in turn for hardware and software vendors to stop supporting XP.
So it's probablly not yet time to start planning a complete migration but IMO it would be negligent to buy new hardware or software now that is XP only if you can reasonablly avoid it.
The default wine setup on most linux distros makes it trivial for windows apps to using the standard windows APIs find your homedir and dump some stuff in there to run on login and do malicious stuff.
Even if you restrict what parts of the filesystem that can be accessed through wines implementation of the windows API there is still nothing stopping the app running under wine making direct system calls.
I realize that they're talking about replacing them in 2017, but that's in 8 years. Why make a choice about this now? Why not wait to see whether the machines which were made last year are perforeming well in 2015, THEN make a decision? Because getting all the special features adapted for whatever base aircraft they select will almost certainly take years. Government bidding processes aren't exactly fast either.
The bidding process is probablly a sham anyway so they may as well get it out of the way sooner rather than later.
A source controls systems PRIMARY function is to keep track of how things changed over the history of a project.
So if you have a project that contains binary files like photos as well as code it makes sense to choose a version control system that can handle both at a tollerable speed so they can be versioned together.
P.S. I can think of ways to merge changes in images so if your vcs allows you to hook in custom merge tools you could probablly add image merge support (whether the results would be what you want is another matter of course).
meanwhile PCI connectors and game adapters that musicians use as MPU401 MIDI interfaces have completely disappeared from mainboards, Hmm, I think i've only once seen a board in person with no PCI slots (though I think it had one PCI-x slot which should work with double notch PCI cards)
I just went to dabs.com, looked at motherboards, sorted by popularity and looked through the first couple of pages, all of the ones for which the pic was clear enough to see the slot types seemed to have PCI slots (unfortunately DABs don't list PCI slot count in theier specs list so I had to go by the photos, if I was actually buying the boards I'd check the manuals but i'm just doing a quick survey).
Esata has two main advantages over interfaces like USB and firewire.
* Fast * No bridge board needed at the drive end
And several major disadvantages
* Doesn't carry power * less common than either USB or firewire (and not backwards compatible with either) * Only one level of port multipliers allowed and some controllers don't even support that. * While in theory it should be possible to make a wide variety of eSATA devices the only devices on the market seem to be hard drives and optical drives * Neither eSATA ports nor anything they are backwards compatible with are very common (I think i've seen them once or twice on a desktop and never on a laptop). You can add them easilly enough to a desktop with an adaptor bracket but that means getting permission to open the case and using an adaptor bracket rather than a port intended to be eSATA may cause hotplugging issues.
So I think it's destined to remain a niche interface.
You state that USB controllers use DMA, parents says not. I don't know which is true. Perhaps there is DMA support for USB controllers, but the packets are small enough and flowing at a high enough rate that it feels like the CPU is doing all the work? That was the impression I got from the various sources I have read. I also think I remember reading that they are planning to fix this with USB 3.
The eee pcs use an Intel Atom processor, and most models can be purchased with XP for an operating system. So I doubt either Microsoft or Intel would care to stop the trend. Well when they initially came out they only came with linux and I'm pretty sure that this gave MS quite a scare.
MS has responded by extending the life of XP home for such machines and it is rumored also reducing the price. In doing so they seem to have captured most of the netbook market.
The 747s being made at the moment are an old design which is not good for a plane they probablly want to maintain for a long time.
I bet they will end up going for a design based on the 747-8, it's not availible yet but should be availible by the time they have given for replacing theese planes and it's american.
At this stage though they have to at least pretend to look at multiple suppliers;)
The vast majority of the deaths in GTA are not accidental. I guess that depends on whether you consider deaths from driving on the pavement to make a deadline accidental or not;)
but it's not clear to me how to get a valid ipv6 address assigned to me. If you use an IPV6 ISP (either directly or via a tunnel, there are a number of free tunnel providers out there) your ISP gives you an address block. Stingy ones give you a/64 (only enough for one subnet if you want to use the stateless autoconfiguration system), better ones give you more.
If you use 6to4 then the addres of your block is formed from your V4 address ( 2002::::/48
IPv6 does have an autoconfiguration mechanism which selects the machines address from a combinaion of announcements of the networks address and the machines mac address. I've no idea what program linux distros use to handle this though.
Proxies are certainly a possibility. a Proxy can quite happilly sit between a V6 client and a V4 server or vice-versa and if you have a socks proxy or a http proxy with "connect" enabled (afaict most proxies are by default configured to allow connect to port 443 only, browsers use this to support https over http proxies) than applications can use this to connect to other services too .
Many corps like to tightly control interactions between thier equipment and the internet anyway so proxies are probablly quite a good soloution.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC micro had 16K of ROM for the built-in BASIC interpreter and low level "OS", another 16K of address space into which you could map any one (at a time) of the other 16K software ROMs in that machine
Wrong, the "OS" was a 16K rom (though only 15.25K was accessible because some of it's space was stolen for IE) and the basic intepreter was another 16K rom banked into the same chunk of address space as the expansion roms.
Don't forget, XP is 5.1 and Windows 2000 is 5.0. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty "minor", but that doesn't mean that a lot of work has been done on the OS.
It's always felt to me that there was more difference between XP RTM/SP1 and XP SP2 than there was between 2K and XP RTM/SP1 .
Since this is Slashdot, I have to mention that Linux i386 supports PAE just fine,
It does indeed but I was under the impression that PAE mode was slower than long mode.
Linux also doesn't manage memory the same way as Windows, so the user/kernel split doesn't apply.
I was under the impression that linux normally used a 3G/1G kernel/user split though there were patches to make both spaces 4GB (presumablly with some performance penalty for switches from user mode to kernel mode)
So Linux x86-64 has all the compatibility problems of Long Mode
Most linux drivers are opensource and integrated in the kernel tree which means they got often ported to 64 bit much sooner then the corresponding windows drivers.
Most opensource apps are included with the distro and again the distros have sorted out getting them ported to 64 bit. Remember also that at least one major linux distro was supporting other 64 bit architectures before x86-64 so much of the porting work was already done.
Most propietry 32 bit linux apps also tend to run just fine on 64 bit linux provided the relavent libraries are in place.
One big issue for 64 bit linux has been browser plugins. Most linux distros ship 64 bit browsers but most propietry browser plugins are 32 bit only. Lukilly the two most important propietry plugins (flash and java) have recently been ported to 64 bit.
and get their panties in a bunch over 700 MB or so of "missing" RAM.
Depends what kind of graphics card(s) they have, I have a friend who has a graphics card that pushes the usable ram down to to 2.5GB two of those would probablly push usable ram down to 1.5.
most of these people aren't actually ever going to use that much of RAM.
Software always seems to grow more bloated over time. Firefox can easilly eat a gig under heavy use.
I would think in the time it would take to unfold the wings the police could easilly render this thing unflyable by ramming.
one thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the FAQ is how they are getting arround the legal issues surrounding fuel.
IIRC they claim the transition can run on both 100LL and some kind of road fuel. This raises two issues
1: I was under the understaning that leaded petrol was banned on the road, so if you ever fill up on 100LL you would have to clean out your tank before driving on the road.
2: I was under the impression that catalytic converters were incompatible with leaded petrol and yet were required for road vehircles.
Is my understanding wrong? have they got some kind of exception?
One big difference is that when driving unless you do something suspicious you are unlikely to have to speak to anyone outside your car for the whole journey.
Whereas to use this thing you will have to take it into an airport (past whatever security they have), switch to airplane mode, taxi to the runway and then take off maintaining contact with air traffic control. I would think most airports would ask questions if you weren't already known to them and/or you didn't seem to know all the flying jargon.
I guess you could try to take off from a road though you would probablly need two lanes and it would look very suspicious.
Remember current 32 bit desktop editions of windows are limited to 4GB of PHYSICAL ADDRESS SPACE. In a machine with onboard graphics or a low end card this normally gives about 3.25GB-3.5GB of usable ram but with high end graphics cards it can be much lower. I haven't personally seen a system with two high end cards in SLI but I suspect it would end up with less than 2GB of usable ram.
At uni I see lots of systems being deployed that have 4GB of ram but can't use it all because they are running a 32 bit desktop edition of windows. Sadly software compatibility issues are preventing many people switching to 64 bit (and cost prevents most people running server editions on thier desktop).
So can 32 bit server versions of windows, MS just crippled the desktop editions (they claim this was due to driver compatibility issues)
Is there some killer apps that will not run on XP?
Not yet, software vendors will almost certainly stop supporting XP eventually, the only question is when.
Will vista or win7 really increase productivity?
In itself probablly not much. Depending on your application however more ram may well do so and windows XP proffesional x64 edition has far worse driver availibility than vista x64.
Will vista or win7 really increase security?
It really depends on your environment, if your users insist on running as admin and you don't have the power to force them not to then UAC is probablly a good thing if a little annoying sometimes. If your users don't run as admin then it makes no difference.
Also security updates for XP will stop in just over 5 years time. I suspect this stopping of security updates will be a trigger for many buisnesses to migrate and in turn for hardware and software vendors to stop supporting XP.
So it's probablly not yet time to start planning a complete migration but IMO it would be negligent to buy new hardware or software now that is XP only if you can reasonablly avoid it.
My guess is the chineese government will give them a "cooperate or be blocked" ultimatum.
The default wine setup on most linux distros makes it trivial for windows apps to using the standard windows APIs find your homedir and dump some stuff in there to run on login and do malicious stuff.
Even if you restrict what parts of the filesystem that can be accessed through wines implementation of the windows API there is still nothing stopping the app running under wine making direct system calls.
I realize that they're talking about replacing them in 2017, but that's in 8 years. Why make a choice about this now? Why not wait to see whether the machines which were made last year are perforeming well in 2015, THEN make a decision?
Because getting all the special features adapted for whatever base aircraft they select will almost certainly take years. Government bidding processes aren't exactly fast either.
The bidding process is probablly a sham anyway so they may as well get it out of the way sooner rather than later.
A source controls systems PRIMARY function is to keep track of how things changed over the history of a project.
So if you have a project that contains binary files like photos as well as code it makes sense to choose a version control system that can handle both at a tollerable speed so they can be versioned together.
P.S. I can think of ways to merge changes in images so if your vcs allows you to hook in custom merge tools you could probablly add image merge support (whether the results would be what you want is another matter of course).
hmm, reminds me of the description in the comment in http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sys/pci/if_rl.c (just below the license header)
"The 8139 supports bus-master DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance gains that bus-master DMA usually offers."
meanwhile PCI connectors and game adapters that musicians use as MPU401 MIDI interfaces have completely disappeared from mainboards,
Hmm, I think i've only once seen a board in person with no PCI slots (though I think it had one PCI-x slot which should work with double notch PCI cards)
I just went to dabs.com, looked at motherboards, sorted by popularity and looked through the first couple of pages, all of the ones for which the pic was clear enough to see the slot types seemed to have PCI slots (unfortunately DABs don't list PCI slot count in theier specs list so I had to go by the photos, if I was actually buying the boards I'd check the manuals but i'm just doing a quick survey).
Thats only the minimum in-spec voltage, real voltages will most likely be much the same under the same load.
I suspect the lower minimum in-spec voltage is a result of higher volt drops at the higher currents they are using.
Afaict current USB can barely power a laptop HDD and has nowhere near enough power to supply a desktop HDD.
It seems USB 3 is increasing the max power but not by enough to run a desktop HDD.
Esata has two main advantages over interfaces like USB and firewire.
* Fast
* No bridge board needed at the drive end
And several major disadvantages
* Doesn't carry power
* less common than either USB or firewire (and not backwards compatible with either)
* Only one level of port multipliers allowed and some controllers don't even support that.
* While in theory it should be possible to make a wide variety of eSATA devices the only devices on the market seem to be hard drives and optical drives
* Neither eSATA ports nor anything they are backwards compatible with are very common (I think i've seen them once or twice on a desktop and never on a laptop). You can add them easilly enough to a desktop with an adaptor bracket but that means getting permission to open the case and using an adaptor bracket rather than a port intended to be eSATA may cause hotplugging issues.
So I think it's destined to remain a niche interface.
You state that USB controllers use DMA, parents says not. I don't know which is true. Perhaps there is DMA support for USB controllers, but the packets are small enough and flowing at a high enough rate that it feels like the CPU is doing all the work?
That was the impression I got from the various sources I have read. I also think I remember reading that they are planning to fix this with USB 3.
The eee pcs use an Intel Atom processor, and most models can be purchased with XP for an operating system. So I doubt either Microsoft or Intel would care to stop the trend.
Well when they initially came out they only came with linux and I'm pretty sure that this gave MS quite a scare.
MS has responded by extending the life of XP home for such machines and it is rumored also reducing the price. In doing so they seem to have captured most of the netbook market.
The 747s being made at the moment are an old design which is not good for a plane they probablly want to maintain for a long time.
I bet they will end up going for a design based on the 747-8, it's not availible yet but should be availible by the time they have given for replacing theese planes and it's american.
At this stage though they have to at least pretend to look at multiple suppliers ;)
The vast majority of the deaths in GTA are not accidental. ;)
I guess that depends on whether you consider deaths from driving on the pavement to make a deadline accidental or not
but it's not clear to me how to get a valid ipv6 address assigned to me. /64 (only enough for one subnet if you want to use the stateless autoconfiguration system), better ones give you more.
If you use an IPV6 ISP (either directly or via a tunnel, there are a number of free tunnel providers out there) your ISP gives you an address block. Stingy ones give you a
If you use 6to4 then the addres of your block is formed from your V4 address ( 2002::::/48
IPv6 does have an autoconfiguration mechanism which selects the machines address from a combinaion of announcements of the networks address and the machines mac address. I've no idea what program linux distros use to handle this though.
Proxies are certainly a possibility. a Proxy can quite happilly sit between a V6 client and a V4 server or vice-versa and if you have a socks proxy or a http proxy with "connect" enabled (afaict most proxies are by default configured to allow connect to port 443 only, browsers use this to support https over http proxies) than applications can use this to connect to other services too .
Many corps like to tightly control interactions between thier equipment and the internet anyway so proxies are probablly quite a good soloution.