When your product relies on something like Windows Vista because MS won't let you keep selling XP, which is what customers actually want. The crazy thing is they can keep selling XP by putting a vista buisness or ultimate license on and using the included downgrade rights. But for some reason they won't do it on most of thier consumer machines (and on the few consumer machines where they will do it they make you buy ultimate rather than the much cheaper buisness).
They won't give airtime and data bandwidth away for free...nor should they. No they won't, but equally customers need to be warned when they are moving to a network that is considerablly more expensive than thier home network, not just get autoconnected and allowed to go on as before racking up insane bills.
credit check or not I don't belive that the current cellphone roaming system where it is difficult to figure out what roaming from a given network will cost and the default is to automatically roam to any network that will accept the connection regardless of price and then on top of that they make no effort to tell your or let you reduce your credit limit is reasonable.
But none of the telcos have any motivation to change this, screwing a customer out of $20K once is probablly going to make you as much profit as keeping them a customer for life.
I would think if you were running an intelligence agency or similar and had the ability to retrive erased data from modern hard drives you would make sure that information about that ability (both the fact you could do it and how you did it) was classified.
at least here in europe they dropped the version of the PS3 with backwards compatibility. It can be purchased secondhand of course but they were never very common so the secondhand price is pretty high.
Well sega has been killed off as a console manufacturer and afaict nintendo have survived only by making a sideways move (leaving the traditional "console with best graphics" game and creating what is essentially a completely new market that they dominate).
note: the below information is based on my knowlage and information I have gleaned from the web, there may be errors in it.
Implementation of va_list is a platform abi (sometimes known as the C abi since C is the standard language on most operating operating systems) issue. The platform abi defines such things as the sizes of standard types and the calling conventions Generally the platform abi is standardised for a particular OS/CPU architecture combination. Changing it would break binary compatibility.
Remember that in C you DO NOT have to declare functions before using them. And even if you do declare them you don't have to declare thier argument list. Therefore a function with varargs MUST have the same ABI as a function that takes the same arguments in the normal way.
i386 linux has a very simple C abi with all parameters on the stack, this allows va_list to simply be a pointer to the first varidic argument and then the retrival function simply moves the pointer by the size of the argument retrived.
Architectures with more general purpose registers tend to use those registers for passing parameters. Since some of the parameters are not on the stack va_list clearly cannot simply be a pointer but must deal with multiple lists of values retrived from different types of registers as well as a pointer to parameters that were passed on the stack.
The first is relative speed, it is extremely difficult to collect something that is moving at thousands of miles per hour relative to you. Shuttle missions to visit/retrive something existing (e.g. the ISS or the hubble) have to be carefully planned so they match orbits.
The second is even if you found a way to retrive them they aren't going to be all that valuable. Afaict most of the cost of a sattalite is in the cost of the precision engineering and the cost of the launch not the cost of the raw materials.
The trouble with that is that say you need an hour to plan and exectute an avoidence manoeuvre (and I bet in practice it takes much longer).
Lets assume that the junk is in a similar orbit to the ISS but going in the opposite direction. That would place the junk over 30 thousand miles away at planning time. That is a long way away and going to be extremely difficult to detect. It may even be too far away to see at all due to the earth obscuring the view (remember the ISS is only a couple of hundred miles high)
It makes much more sense to do the tracking from a large network of ground based stations that between them can monitor most if not all of the sky and can track objects continuously.
However there is always an error margin. No measurement is perfect for a variety of reasons. It then becomes a matter of risk assesment to decide whether to make an avoidence manovure given the availible data.
It sounds like he has replaced pretty much everything that is designed to be easilly replaceable. That still leaves the motherboard, processor (which is soldered to the motherboard) and case. Those are the parts that largely define the size, weight and feel of the machine.
however for selling software/music/movies on physical media (maybe this whole buisness model will die out eventually but I suspect it will take quite a while especailly with the way more and more ISPs are moving to limit bandwidth use) what is more important is the cost per item of bulk copies.
CDs and DVDs are dirt cheap to produce in bulk, blu-ray disks are a little more expensive but afaict it is still in the range of a dollar or two. Flash sticks are complex electronic devices that I doubt will ever drop below about $10 (not counting clearence sales)
This has all happened before, but without the ease of transition offered by BluRay players being able to, for the most part, up-convert the technology they are replacing. It has happened once yes (VHS-DVD). On the other hand there has also been at least one format that became popular with the home cinema guys like blue-ray has done but never replaced VHS in the mass market.
A couple of comparisons
VHS vs DVD: * DVD offers significantly higher quality than VHS and VHS quality was low enough that you could tell the difference on an ordinary sized TV * DVD wouldn't play in your existing VCR but it would play in your PC and in your playstation 2. * DVD eliminated rewinding and was far more wear resistant than VHS. * DVD was far more compact than VHS. * DVD did have copy protection as part of the standard but macrovision was already in use on VHS tapes. Indeed for those without electronics skills DVD is probablly easier to copy than protected VHS. * DVD did have some annoying anti user features like forced content before reaching the menus but most DVD manufacturers didn't use theese too much.
Blu-ray vs DVD * Blu-ray does offer significant quality improvements over DVD but you need a large TV or unusually small viewing distances to really appreciate them. * Blu-ray has a very heavy menu system, I have heared a lot of complains that while the PS3 can handle this at acceptable speeds many other players can't. * Blu-ray has far stronger copy protection than DVD. * Anything that will play blu-ray will also play DVD.
I think blu-ray has at least as much chance of ending up as the next lazerdisk as it does of ending up as the next DVD.
That only applies if the pollution kills off a signifiant number of people after thier parents can no longer reproduce but before they reproduce themselves.
I think a botnet is unlikely, it would only take one peice of network analysis gear that didn't play along to see the networks probes and be noticed by it's owner and people would start to get suspicious. Especially if the packets were showing up on some network analysis kit and not others.
OTOH if they only use the vulnerability very selectively thier use of it is far less likely to be noticed.
Remember huge volumes of currencies are traded all the time both by speculators and by those with a direct need to buy another currency. If a new seller with a significant stash of dollars turns up and undercuts the existing sellers then the existing sellers will have to lower thier prices too or they won't find any customers. Likewise if a new buyer with large ammounts of other currencies comes along offering more than the existing buyers then other buyers will have to raise thier offers to compete.
Afaict all the google earth images where you can make out individual people are aerial photographs not sattalite images (google earth uses aerial photographs where they are available and sattalite imageary where they are not).
I think with this new satalite you might see a slight difference in pixel color where a person was standing if the background was even but you wouldn't be able to tell it was a person. Another order of magnitude improvement and it would probablly be comparable to the aerial photographs you get on google earth.
I would be very surprised if nvidia hadn't researched the rohs exceptions very carefully and made sure they fitted into one. The very high lead solders exception is far from the only exception.
I find it very unlikely that nvidia would make chips that couldn't be sold in the EU.
There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem. Afaict there is no buisness gaurantee that MS will either at least not unless you buy a seperate and very expensive support package (and i'm sure sun has support packages for OO too)
Do you have a source for that claim? My brother has an EEE 900 and at least according to windows the drives are SSDs and everything I have read online says the same.
Tiny hard drives do indeed exist but my understanding is they are rather slow.
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When your product relies on something like Windows Vista because MS won't let you keep selling XP, which is what customers actually want.
The crazy thing is they can keep selling XP by putting a vista buisness or ultimate license on and using the included downgrade rights. But for some reason they won't do it on most of thier consumer machines (and on the few consumer machines where they will do it they make you buy ultimate rather than the much cheaper buisness).
They won't give airtime and data bandwidth away for free...nor should they.
No they won't, but equally customers need to be warned when they are moving to a network that is considerablly more expensive than thier home network, not just get autoconnected and allowed to go on as before racking up insane bills.
credit check or not I don't belive that the current cellphone roaming system where it is difficult to figure out what roaming from a given network will cost and the default is to automatically roam to any network that will accept the connection regardless of price and then on top of that they make no effort to tell your or let you reduce your credit limit is reasonable.
But none of the telcos have any motivation to change this, screwing a customer out of $20K once is probablly going to make you as much profit as keeping them a customer for life.
I would think if you were running an intelligence agency or similar and had the ability to retrive erased data from modern hard drives you would make sure that information about that ability (both the fact you could do it and how you did it) was classified.
at least here in europe they dropped the version of the PS3 with backwards compatibility. It can be purchased secondhand of course but they were never very common so the secondhand price is pretty high.
Well sega has been killed off as a console manufacturer and afaict nintendo have survived only by making a sideways move (leaving the traditional "console with best graphics" game and creating what is essentially a completely new market that they dominate).
note: the below information is based on my knowlage and information I have gleaned from the web, there may be errors in it.
Implementation of va_list is a platform abi (sometimes known as the C abi since C is the standard language on most operating operating systems) issue. The platform abi defines such things as the sizes of standard types and the calling conventions Generally the platform abi is standardised for a particular OS/CPU architecture combination. Changing it would break binary compatibility.
Remember that in C you DO NOT have to declare functions before using them. And even if you do declare them you don't have to declare thier argument list. Therefore a function with varargs MUST have the same ABI as a function that takes the same arguments in the normal way.
i386 linux has a very simple C abi with all parameters on the stack, this allows va_list to simply be a pointer to the first varidic argument and then the retrival function simply moves the pointer by the size of the argument retrived.
Architectures with more general purpose registers tend to use those registers for passing parameters. Since some of the parameters are not on the stack va_list clearly cannot simply be a pointer but must deal with multiple lists of values retrived from different types of registers as well as a pointer to parameters that were passed on the stack.
There are two problems.
The first is relative speed, it is extremely difficult to collect something that is moving at thousands of miles per hour relative to you. Shuttle missions to visit/retrive something existing (e.g. the ISS or the hubble) have to be carefully planned so they match orbits.
The second is even if you found a way to retrive them they aren't going to be all that valuable. Afaict most of the cost of a sattalite is in the cost of the precision engineering and the cost of the launch not the cost of the raw materials.
The trouble with that is that say you need an hour to plan and exectute an avoidence manoeuvre (and I bet in practice it takes much longer).
Lets assume that the junk is in a similar orbit to the ISS but going in the opposite direction. That would place the junk over 30 thousand miles away at planning time. That is a long way away and going to be extremely difficult to detect. It may even be too far away to see at all due to the earth obscuring the view (remember the ISS is only a couple of hundred miles high)
It makes much more sense to do the tracking from a large network of ground based stations that between them can monitor most if not all of the sky and can track objects continuously.
However there is always an error margin. No measurement is perfect for a variety of reasons. It then becomes a matter of risk assesment to decide whether to make an avoidence manovure given the availible data.
So how do you know they are US objects?
I don't think so at least not unless you have the facilities to desolder and replace a BGA chip.
When a laptop designer is trying to save bulk the CPU socket is often sacrificed and this was certainly the case with the EEE.
http://www.tweaktown.com/popImg.php?img=EeePC1000H14l.png
It sounds like he has replaced pretty much everything that is designed to be easilly replaceable. That still leaves the motherboard, processor (which is soldered to the motherboard) and case. Those are the parts that largely define the size, weight and feel of the machine.
no it was saying that egcs would support va_copy allowing code that misuses va_list to be fixed more easilly but the code still has to be fixed.
however for selling software/music/movies on physical media (maybe this whole buisness model will die out eventually but I suspect it will take quite a while especailly with the way more and more ISPs are moving to limit bandwidth use) what is more important is the cost per item of bulk copies.
CDs and DVDs are dirt cheap to produce in bulk, blu-ray disks are a little more expensive but afaict it is still in the range of a dollar or two. Flash sticks are complex electronic devices that I doubt will ever drop below about $10 (not counting clearence sales)
This has all happened before, but without the ease of transition offered by BluRay players being able to, for the most part, up-convert the technology they are replacing.
It has happened once yes (VHS-DVD). On the other hand there has also been at least one format that became popular with the home cinema guys like blue-ray has done but never replaced VHS in the mass market.
A couple of comparisons
VHS vs DVD:
* DVD offers significantly higher quality than VHS and VHS quality was low enough that you could tell the difference on an ordinary sized TV
* DVD wouldn't play in your existing VCR but it would play in your PC and in your playstation 2.
* DVD eliminated rewinding and was far more wear resistant than VHS.
* DVD was far more compact than VHS.
* DVD did have copy protection as part of the standard but macrovision was already in use on VHS tapes. Indeed for those without electronics skills DVD is probablly easier to copy than protected VHS.
* DVD did have some annoying anti user features like forced content before reaching the menus but most DVD manufacturers didn't use theese too much.
Blu-ray vs DVD
* Blu-ray does offer significant quality improvements over DVD but you need a large TV or unusually small viewing distances to really appreciate them.
* Blu-ray has a very heavy menu system, I have heared a lot of complains that while the PS3 can handle this at acceptable speeds many other players can't.
* Blu-ray has far stronger copy protection than DVD.
* Anything that will play blu-ray will also play DVD.
I think blu-ray has at least as much chance of ending up as the next lazerdisk as it does of ending up as the next DVD.
That only applies if the pollution kills off a signifiant number of people after thier parents can no longer reproduce but before they reproduce themselves.
I think a botnet is unlikely, it would only take one peice of network analysis gear that didn't play along to see the networks probes and be noticed by it's owner and people would start to get suspicious. Especially if the packets were showing up on some network analysis kit and not others.
OTOH if they only use the vulnerability very selectively thier use of it is far less likely to be noticed.
As a brit I would much rather the US had the ability to spy on us through such backdoors than the chineese had that ability.
Remember huge volumes of currencies are traded all the time both by speculators and by those with a direct need to buy another currency. If a new seller with a significant stash of dollars turns up and undercuts the existing sellers then the existing sellers will have to lower thier prices too or they won't find any customers. Likewise if a new buyer with large ammounts of other currencies comes along offering more than the existing buyers then other buyers will have to raise thier offers to compete.
Afaict all the google earth images where you can make out individual people are aerial photographs not sattalite images (google earth uses aerial photographs where they are available and sattalite imageary where they are not).
I think with this new satalite you might see a slight difference in pixel color where a person was standing if the background was even but you wouldn't be able to tell it was a person. Another order of magnitude improvement and it would probablly be comparable to the aerial photographs you get on google earth.
Using what definition of accident?
I would be very surprised if nvidia hadn't researched the rohs exceptions very carefully and made sure they fitted into one. The very high lead solders exception is far from the only exception.
I find it very unlikely that nvidia would make chips that couldn't be sold in the EU.
rohs has exceptions for very fine pitch stuff iirc.
There's no business guarantee that OO will respond in a timely manner to the problem.
Afaict there is no buisness gaurantee that MS will either at least not unless you buy a seperate and very expensive support package (and i'm sure sun has support packages for OO too)
Do you have a source for that claim? My brother has an EEE 900 and at least according to windows the drives are SSDs and everything I have read online says the same.
Tiny hard drives do indeed exist but my understanding is they are rather slow.