And its spiritual follower, "Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." was even more so.
I do agree Xena isn't. It's clearly fantasy, not Sci-Fi, not that that means much really.
Lost is a borderline case. There is dramatic Sci-Fi, and if you read the stuff on the next of what people have figured out (I recommend you don't, BTW, it spoils it), it's probably Sci-Fi.
Lexx sucked. Not sure why people keep calling for that. Hell, "Cleopatra 2525" was better than Lexx and I wouldn't put it on the list either.
Dark Angel sucked too, how that made the list, I dunno.
What, do you think we'll generate all the power for the world?
Most reactors would have to be fast breeders, even those outside the US.
But the biggest problem is that wide-spread acceptance of fast breeders for legitimate power-producing purposes would provide great cover for those with ill intentions. Right now, if a country signals an intention to make any fast breeder it's a red flag event.
I'm very pro-nuclear power. But this is a serious issue. Honestly, it'd be less of an issue if we had a reasonable method of handling our own security other than "lets bomb everyone we are a bit nervous about". But we don't have that, and thus the practicality issue looms large.
Things are horrible now. That Bush was able to put forth nuclear energy as a canard (knowing it wouldn't fly) as part of his energy plan to fix energy "shortages" created purely for profit by his buddy Kenny Lay is an indication of how far we are away from acceptance of nuclear energy in the US.
This is now no longer comical. These guys need a real reality check.
In other news: BP/Amoco says: "We're not selling any more gas until we get a cut of Toyota's profits."
Give me a break. These guys already get an enormous amount of cash just for the rights to duplicate and sell something they already paid for making.I'm not saying they shouldn't profit, but each additional sale is just more profit for them. Isn't that enough?
And in addition to letting them release in different places, it also allows them to release at different prices in different areas. It also allows them to sell the rights to distribute to different companies in different areas.
The different prices helps because if your product is the same everywhere, and you set a price people can actually afford to pay in a place with a low standard of living (say India), then your sellers in places with high standard of living, like the US and Europe will actually buy product perhaps even at discounted retail in India and resell it in the US. They do this because it increases their profit, but of course, it automatically decreases yours.
The different companies in different places can increase profits by allowing you to sell the movie multiple times. Or leverage the work of your licensees. Say a movie doesn't do all that well, and you release it in Japan. Because it didn't do well, you don't put any money in it yourself, your licensee in Japan spends all the money on the packaging, transfer and puts in some dynamite extras. They also market it wisely. And it's a hit. Now your movie is a hit and you can charge more to license it for other countries at a higher rate to those zones that you hadn't sold yet without fear of worldwide competition from other distributors.
So all of this is find and good, but really the region codes don't enable this stuff, they make it easier and more strong. Since distributors make their own packaging, even without region codes, there would be a difference between the US version of a movie and the Indian version, just by looking at the box. But is that enough to keep retailers from trying to resell the foreign version? Perhaps it is. Especially if you don't let them put an English soundtrack on the Indian version.
Well, there's a big explanation for you as to why the movie companies like regions. I too wish they would give them up. Honestly, if they make it difficult for me to get a movie I want as an import, I can always pirate it over the internet (region codes don't even slow that down) and then they get no money at all.
As an added note, I was surprised to find some of my movies I buy in the US are region-free. Not the major releases, but still.
Noise pollution mostly. They make this whup-whup noise, which is very low frequency, travels well and is very annoying.
Honestly though, wind turbines biggest enemy is themselves. Try as they might, it's really difficult to operate them effectively due to maintenance costs and low power output in general.
Wind is perhaps part of the solution, but a small part.
In order to use nuclear power in a widespread fashion, we'd relaly have to have fast breeder reactors, to extend the lifetime of our supply of fissionable materials.
The problem is that fast breeder reactors are perfect for making weapons-grade Plutonium too.
So although I very much lament how poorly most people understand nuclear power and how they don't understand how much cleaner it is than any alternative (except solar), there are other impediments too.
I have to say I found it hilarious that North Korea demanded the US build them a light-water reactor. We suck at power reactors. They should ask the French to help them build one of their reactor types instead. Better yet, get the French to make you a pebble-bed reactor.
This iPod is not made by Asus or Inventec. The Mini was not made by Asus either. No, it wasn't made by Apple either. But you and your sources overlooked one company, I don't know how that happened. Additional note, your Inventec link is wrong. inventec.com is a different company than http://www.iac.com.tw/IAC Taiwan. Also, I don't believe Inventec makes laptops under any name. See link above. They do make OKWAP phones and some other stuff. They also make a lot of TI calculators.
But anyway, you describe the situation well from a consumer point of view, but I think you miss on some other points.
The reasons the "pure brands" are going away is at least as much because Wal-Mart and Best Buy want them to as because the Chinese manufacturers want them to. Retailers are so powerful now, they see the margins of the brands and decide to take it for themselves. Make no mistake, the margins to the Chinese manufacturers are not going up much, the freed-up money goes to the retailer.
Home Depot really started this for items of value (power and hand tools) and everyone has jumped right on. It's leading to brand desensitization, so much so that CostCo sells many many big-screen TVs with nearly one-off brand names. Price drives these sales.
Anyway, as to Flextronics, they're doing great in certain markets. But as far as something like an iPod, they just can't manage it. The Xbox debacle (5 years ago now) really taught the industry a lesson. If you want a good device, Flex is okay. If you want a very stylish, cutting-edge device, Flex can't handle it themselves. They could never have designed the Nano. They could manufacture it, but they don't really like to play in that market like they used to from what I can tell. I mean, if you're making XBoxes or iPods, they'd probably bid on it, but otherwise, they'd rather design it also.
If you are representative of the people there, I'm glad I'm not there.
Deleting links to sites because you can't control the content bothers me. Off-topic or no. Delete extra copies of the links or whatever, but just plain deleting them all doesn't seem right to me.
If you give people any credit, allow them to decide slashdot is a wasteland on their own.
The problem is that the VAR in question put up an already trojaned copy. If you checked the sums against VAR sums, they would have matched.
And I never said a central authority means you are getting a clean build. I said that without one you cannot guarantee you are getting a clean build.
With Mozilla's central authority you can have some more confidence, but of course you can't be sure of anything. You can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow.
The point was again, and I was the one who made it (a couple posts up now) that the claims that Mozilla patches within 24 hours aren't really useful to most people, because the first thing that most people need to be concerned with is getting a clean build. Then it's important that every possible bug be patched, after that.
Yes, md5sums protect you from trojaned software. Well, in as much as they help you know that you got what you were supposed to get. Whether the person who put that up might have trojaned it by accident or mistake doesn't really have much to do with md5 at all.
They project me if the software was trojaned after the md5sums were made and the person who trojaned it didn't think to update the sums.
The sums only check to be sure you got what the VAR sent. It doesn't mean it is clean. The parent says you should check them against a reputable location. If you don't check against Mozilla.org, you aren't getting any safety at all. But if the VAR wants to patch, then the sums won't match.
My point here, which you missed twice is that without a central patching/release authority, there is no way to have users be sure they are getting a safe build.
Thus the theory that you can get updates on a moment's notice with Mozilla is undercut. Yes, you can do so, but you aren't sure what you are getting. You trade one risk for another.
Again, the logistics of doing a large release are significant. Making statements like "Mozilla patches are available in under 24 hours!" belittles the actual process of ensuring safe software gets to people properly.
So you're saying that Firefox is string 750MB of data it got off the web?
Well, let's see, my DSL is quite fast, it is 6mbits/second actually (lucky me). That means that Firefox is storing the equivalent of 1,000 seconds or about 20 minutes of continuous downloading. For other people it could be easily double that.
Why doesn't that seem entirely correct to me? I'd know if I sat through 20 minutes total downloading.
BTW, IE doesn't soak up as much RAM, and it's pretty damn fast.
Firefox probably needs to look at more memory-efficient caching.
When Mozilla has a bug in it (like two weeks ago), all the slashdotters say "the good thing is you can patch it yourself!, here's the change!". And that's true. But the problem is now the produced binary doesn't match the md5sums on the Mozilla site.
So if a VAR were to want to "do the right thing" and patch immediately, as open source allows you to do, they then open up their customers to trojan problems because the md5sums don't match the Mozilla site anymore.
Just pointing out how the logistics of releasing a patch are fairly significant, so that perhaps some people can understand why MS can't patch every problem in under 30 days. And we haven't even talked about testing...
For example, I assert that Mozilla has 300 vulnerabilities. Mozilla hasn't confirmed them, but you count them. So now the numbers are skewed in IE's favor. Yes, this is a somewhat forced example, but it shows how you can't just go counting all accusations.
I know there are problems with letting the fox guard the henhouse (in the case of Mozilla or IE), but really it is the writer(s)/manager(s) of the respective browsers who best know the code and behavior of the app, and before they confirm something you just don't have any real idea whether it is truly as the accuser says. Even if people can reproduce it, so you know it can happen, the people who made the app can best determine the scope of the problem, that is, what percentage of people are likely to be at risk.
I find it odd that people say the good part of open source is that lots of eyes look at it and find the problems and presumably they get fixed (see hidden bugs in Mozilla database right now). Yet when problems are found (and usually fixed) in IE, it's seen as showing IE is junk. If going over something with a fine tooth comb helps you improve something, then both Firefox and IE are being improved right now.
Anyway. I do know the hackers go after IE primarily. So it'll be tough for IE to come out as the more secure browser (that and it running ActiveX controls at the drop of a hat), but I am also not conviced the people at Mozilla really know all the ins and outs of security either.
I'll also say that the level of vulnerability being found in IE now is pretty fine-grained. There are plenty of programs of the complexity of IE that have never reached this level of security such that we need to look this far into the cracks to find the problems. When I started using UNIX back in 1987, it had holes far larger than IE currently has in many many tasks, many of which ran as root (think of the original sendmail internet worm). So things are not as bad as people make it seem right now.
Finally, having worked at a company that releases major software products that many many people use, I agree that if possible it is best to release patches on a schedule so that users have some time to keep up. If a user has to patch and reboot every couple days, it gets annoying. Eventually, they'll just stop patching due to the annoyance of it. Out of phase patches should only be used in emergencies.
For the record, I use IE (I'm using it right now). But I recently changed the security settings so that only specially selected sites (of which I have none right now) can use ActiveX controls.
Don't get me wrong, you do have a right to do what you say, for your own personal use.
But it is a complete misstatement to attribute this ability to the doctrine of "fair use". Fair Use covers situations where the reproduction is used commercially (or similarly), not just for personal use.
Perhaps the home taping act is what gives you this right? I'm not sure.
And honestly, many mobo companies had problems with this at that time. There was a company making knockoff capacitors that appears to be high quality components. Many good mobo makers got taken by this. It was covered on slashdot.
I personally won't buy Abit again if I can avoid it, for different reasons. My high end from them is still working, but I had significant problems in the beginning and minor problem all along, and they just never even responded to my queries on their forums.
Gasoline Direct Injection is already in use. It isn't just the Japanese either. Current Audis (like the A3) with the 2.0T use it. (Audi calls it FSI).
In the US, since we have sulfur in our gas (outside California), the sulfur will crystalize in the catalytic converter if we used lean-burn techniques on the 2.0T. So Audi switches that off in the US. In Europe, the 2.0T uses lean burn as much as possible (it has to switch back from time to time to keep the catalytic converter hot enough to work).
These still rely on spark ignition, but of course, when you lean burn, it would usually ignite itself if they didn't spark it. There is talk of developing engines that proceed more heavily into the compression ratios on gas, and therefore would essentially become Diesels, even if they run on regular gas.
Honestly, you can keep your Diesels. I know they're a lot better than they used to be. They don't even rattle, except at startup. But they still make soot under heavy acceleration and they still smell funny. I don't like either of those. And finally, it seems to take gobs of extra doodads to extract decent HP out of Diesel per powerplant unit volume (dip volume, not displacement). Witness Mercedes' new tri-turbo 320, the pinnacle of car Diesel power output right now. A state of the art normally-aspirated gas engine of similar size and weight would produce about as much power, and a turbocharged one would make it look poor. Of course, both would use more fuel, but given the high initial cost of Diesels, I'm not sure you ever make it back in light-duty (car-type) applications.
Most comparisons that actually show Diesel ahead for regular car usage typically are matching a Diesel with far worse power and acceleration versus the gas engine. Match those up, and it doesn't make nearly as much sense. Otherwise, I'll just take a smaller gas engine, and save a lot of money.
That wording you speak of is just eEye's wording of "remote code execution exploit". Firefox has these too. There's no difference.
Well, there is a difference, eEye makes money selling people fixes/workarounds for security problems. So eEye wants to make this look like as big a deal as possible.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with slashdot for running this story. This story doesn't have any actual information in it, it just says a company alleges IE has a vulnurability. Well, they already said it had 11, is one more that big a deal? Personally, I don't think it warrants a story with no other actual info.
It's far faster than UltraSPARC (heck, ask SUN), Alpha is slow on current measures. It's measureably faster than PowerPC. And MIPS64 isn't keeping up with the current marketplace much better than UltraSPARC. It might not be faster than IA64, depending on how you measure it.
The reasons all those have lower clock speeds than current x86 (well, P4) is because they are designed to do more per clock, with less clocks. It's pretty simple. Like Pentium M. Either that or because they just don't perform as well (like PPC, SPARC, Alpha).
Note, the 8086 (first x86) was not a filler move between other unrelated product lines. It was a follow on 16-bit extension to the 8080, before the "real" 16-bit processor Intel was working on. Kind of like x86-64 versus Itanium. So it really was a filler move between a related line and a non-related line.
I do agree the ISA sucks. And I hate little endian. But given how little time people (even programmers) spend looking at object code or writing assembly nowadays, the ISA is near immaterial.
But anyway, Intel picked one method of running a lot of code, super-pipelining. It worked for a while, but is running into problems, and they are going to a different approach. AMD shows you can have good x86 ISA performance without 30 stages of pipelining, so don't throw the ISA baby out with the P4 bathwater.
As an aside, I don't get the worship of Alpha on/. Alpha was the first super-pipelined, superscalar processor. In that way, it bears a huge resemblance to P4 (Netburst). And if you saw the chips (and their heatsinks), you'd see a resemblance on performance per watt too! I'm not saying I hate Alpha, but I just don't get how you can hate on superscalar/super-pipelined in one case and worship another.
If Altavista didn't get me the pages I wanted, I wouldn't hve used it. But I did use it. You didn't?
I'm not saying Google doesn't improve upon altavista, they clearly did. And improvement is a legitimate business. But Google didn't "invent" search, and they didn't revolutionize search results in my book (their speed was revolutionary though).
I don't think search was so poor before Google that it failed to be useful. Plenty of companies agreed with my, getting into the search busines (including Google). If the business was really so poorly served, it would seem like it would have had fewer customers and thus not so much of a rush of companies jumping into that market.
Like I said, I already told you that bridge controllers might be different. That doesn't mean there is LBA48 hardware.
As to the extra chip, a 74LCV02A is just a quad 2-input NOR gate. I'm not quite sure why this chip would help them do 48-bit addressing.
I would more expect it is used to block the signal coming from the DMA controller to the drive, so that they can run their DMA controller multiple times in a row without the controller signalling to the drive that the transaction is complete after the first 128KiB.
Again, this is a bridge-specific thing, because their bridge is too smart. On a PC there is no reason you can't run the DMA controller several times back to back without it aborting the transaction without need for additional hardware.
If Maxtor were to put on a different method of doing LBA48 without supporting >256 sector transactions or double writes, then this bridge would work just fine. Do they do that? I dunno.
But again, it's more of a concern with bridge chips. Bridge chips use things like 16MHz CPUs to super-fast transfers, and thus they often have specialized hardware that cannot be reprogrammed. You take this information and expand it too far, to say that there are LBA48 requirements for controllers, not just special-purpose bridge chips.
I think the information that you got from this Oxford person that tells you that LBA48 wasn't even being considered in 1997, yet TiVos that were built in 1997 (surely designed in 1996) are capable of doing it with new software underscores my point about controllers and LBA48 pretty strongly.
With Yonah and Dothan, Intel is already ahead on power in the category of "non top speed chipset". So I don't see how Apple is making a mistake here.
Apple is taking a risk that Intel will not be able to reform their top of the line chips to match AMDs superb offerings. But honestly, tower configurations don't account for much of Apple's sales anyway, so it's not a huge risk.
Anyway, I as I've said before, I think there are other reasons Apple chose Intel over AMD. To get Northbridges with integrated graphics and chipsets with integrated wireless, etc. is the main reason. Apple mostly makes all-in-one type machines. In order to be cost-effective, these machines will have to be much more integrated than they currently are. And AMD doesn't offer much besides a processor. They don't make chipsets right now.
So I don't think AMD really made much sense to Apple at this time.
Except "nuclear proliferation is tolerated". I'm not thrilled about our relationship with Israel either. But I do have to ask a question:
What would we do to indicate proliferation is not tolerated?
Perhaps the reason it happens isn't because we tolerate it, but because there is nothing we can do to stop it?
We first made a bomb 60 years ago. Can you think of anything else that we could do in the US 60 years ago that is still technologically difficult to do today? Building a bomb just isn't that tough. We're going to have to face this some day. Perhaps the only way to reduce our chances of getting nuked is to not make so many enemies?
Your number only has meaning if you assume everyone wants to work. Thus it is less useful than the other figure.
Yes, you could make another figure that factors out all the stuff that doesn't seem intelligent about your figure. But that would be basically admitting your figure isn't terribly useful on its own to compare job markets, especially between countries. Which is how this conversation started.
For example, if I wanted to use your figure to measure the job market in Saudi Arabia, how would it be? Relatively few women work at all, and many many people who could work get money from the government and so don't. So your figure would be very low. So how can I compare this figure to one from another country, like the US, to compare their job markets?
the reason you can replace them with newer ones that have large drive support is because:
There's more profit in selling you a new card than letting you update the old ones! Ta-Daa!
Anyway, you can just plain skip the logic anyway. I've written ATA drivers for controllers before. I know how it's done, and I personally have done it and know that there is no restriction to what controllers can have LBA48 software written for them.
Go get the spec from t13.org ourself. All you have to do is write 4 registers twice. The drive remembers both the most recently written and the previously written value. The controller does nothing new at all.
As to bridge boards, they could be out of code space, they might have limits on the size of the data to be stored (can't store >28 bits of sector or >8 bits of sector count), or they just might want to sell new chips too.
Oxford might have made a "smart controller" and don't feel like switching over and going to "dumb mode" to get it to work. Or perhaps their controller is "too smart" and thus cannot be made to work in LBA48 mode. I know that the >8 bits of sector count (which allows transfers larger than 512KB at once) means your DMA equipment in your bridge might have to be able to do transfers larger than 128KiB. This was a problem on a device I worked on. It might be a probem on special bridge chips that DMA straight from the drive to the bus (like the Cypress USB chips).
Or perhaps they just want to sell new chips too. It doesn't matter, I never said all bridge chips can be updated to do LBA48, in fact, I believe I gave reasons you perhaps couldn't.
I can assure you this isn't the case with any PC interface, since they all have to work with the standard Windows driver in order to boot Windows, and thus have a "dumb mode" where you can write any registers in any order you'd like. You then write the 4 registers in question twice and run the DMA engine a couple times in a row (actually, Windows doesn't do transfers larger then 128KiB anyway with the default drivers) and you're there.
As I said, any PC controller can do it. Bridge chips can be different, due to various factors.
As to your last paragraph, well, again there is no requirement for LBA48 hardware. And the software is clearly running in LBA48 mode (despite being on what you call "non-LBA48 hardware"), since without it, you can only address 2^28 sectors, and thus you simply have no way to access those sectors above 128GiB.
I do appreciate applying logic to a situation. But in this case, you're wrong, and you should do some research about it before looking even more foolish.
As perhaps something to spur you to this, let me give you a link about how series 1 Tivos (which were released in 1997 or 1998) can use LBA48, with a new kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
And its spiritual follower, "Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." was even more so.
I do agree Xena isn't. It's clearly fantasy, not Sci-Fi, not that that means much really.
Lost is a borderline case. There is dramatic Sci-Fi, and if you read the stuff on the next of what people have figured out (I recommend you don't, BTW, it spoils it), it's probably Sci-Fi.
Lexx sucked. Not sure why people keep calling for that. Hell, "Cleopatra 2525" was better than Lexx and I wouldn't put it on the list either.
Dark Angel sucked too, how that made the list, I dunno.
What a mess this list is.
What, do you think we'll generate all the power for the world?
Most reactors would have to be fast breeders, even those outside the US.
But the biggest problem is that wide-spread acceptance of fast breeders for legitimate power-producing purposes would provide great cover for those with ill intentions. Right now, if a country signals an intention to make any fast breeder it's a red flag event.
I'm very pro-nuclear power. But this is a serious issue. Honestly, it'd be less of an issue if we had a reasonable method of handling our own security other than "lets bomb everyone we are a bit nervous about". But we don't have that, and thus the practicality issue looms large.
Things are horrible now. That Bush was able to put forth nuclear energy as a canard (knowing it wouldn't fly) as part of his energy plan to fix energy "shortages" created purely for profit by his buddy Kenny Lay is an indication of how far we are away from acceptance of nuclear energy in the US.
This is now no longer comical. These guys need a real reality check.
In other news: BP/Amoco says: "We're not selling any more gas until we get a cut of Toyota's profits."
Give me a break. These guys already get an enormous amount of cash just for the rights to duplicate and sell something they already paid for making.I'm not saying they shouldn't profit, but each additional sale is just more profit for them. Isn't that enough?
And in addition to letting them release in different places, it also allows them to release at different prices in different areas. It also allows them to sell the rights to distribute to different companies in different areas.
The different prices helps because if your product is the same everywhere, and you set a price people can actually afford to pay in a place with a low standard of living (say India), then your sellers in places with high standard of living, like the US and Europe will actually buy product perhaps even at discounted retail in India and resell it in the US. They do this because it increases their profit, but of course, it automatically decreases yours.
The different companies in different places can increase profits by allowing you to sell the movie multiple times. Or leverage the work of your licensees. Say a movie doesn't do all that well, and you release it in Japan. Because it didn't do well, you don't put any money in it yourself, your licensee in Japan spends all the money on the packaging, transfer and puts in some dynamite extras. They also market it wisely. And it's a hit. Now your movie is a hit and you can charge more to license it for other countries at a higher rate to those zones that you hadn't sold yet without fear of worldwide competition from other distributors.
So all of this is find and good, but really the region codes don't enable this stuff, they make it easier and more strong. Since distributors make their own packaging, even without region codes, there would be a difference between the US version of a movie and the Indian version, just by looking at the box. But is that enough to keep retailers from trying to resell the foreign version? Perhaps it is. Especially if you don't let them put an English soundtrack on the Indian version.
Well, there's a big explanation for you as to why the movie companies like regions. I too wish they would give them up. Honestly, if they make it difficult for me to get a movie I want as an import, I can always pirate it over the internet (region codes don't even slow that down) and then they get no money at all.
As an added note, I was surprised to find some of my movies I buy in the US are region-free. Not the major releases, but still.
Noise pollution mostly. They make this whup-whup noise, which is very low frequency, travels well and is very annoying.
Honestly though, wind turbines biggest enemy is themselves. Try as they might, it's really difficult to operate them effectively due to maintenance costs and low power output in general.
Wind is perhaps part of the solution, but a small part.
In order to use nuclear power in a widespread fashion, we'd relaly have to have fast breeder reactors, to extend the lifetime of our supply of fissionable materials.
The problem is that fast breeder reactors are perfect for making weapons-grade Plutonium too.
So although I very much lament how poorly most people understand nuclear power and how they don't understand how much cleaner it is than any alternative (except solar), there are other impediments too.
I have to say I found it hilarious that North Korea demanded the US build them a light-water reactor. We suck at power reactors. They should ask the French to help them build one of their reactor types instead. Better yet, get the French to make you a pebble-bed reactor.
This iPod is not made by Asus or Inventec. The Mini was not made by Asus either. No, it wasn't made by Apple either. But you and your sources overlooked one company, I don't know how that happened. Additional note, your Inventec link is wrong. inventec.com is a different company than http://www.iac.com.tw/IAC Taiwan. Also, I don't believe Inventec makes laptops under any name. See link above. They do make OKWAP phones and some other stuff. They also make a lot of TI calculators.
But anyway, you describe the situation well from a consumer point of view, but I think you miss on some other points.
The reasons the "pure brands" are going away is at least as much because Wal-Mart and Best Buy want them to as because the Chinese manufacturers want them to. Retailers are so powerful now, they see the margins of the brands and decide to take it for themselves. Make no mistake, the margins to the Chinese manufacturers are not going up much, the freed-up money goes to the retailer.
Home Depot really started this for items of value (power and hand tools) and everyone has jumped right on. It's leading to brand desensitization, so much so that CostCo sells many many big-screen TVs with nearly one-off brand names. Price drives these sales.
Anyway, as to Flextronics, they're doing great in certain markets. But as far as something like an iPod, they just can't manage it. The Xbox debacle (5 years ago now) really taught the industry a lesson. If you want a good device, Flex is okay. If you want a very stylish, cutting-edge device, Flex can't handle it themselves. They could never have designed the Nano. They could manufacture it, but they don't really like to play in that market like they used to from what I can tell. I mean, if you're making XBoxes or iPods, they'd probably bid on it, but otherwise, they'd rather design it also.
If you are representative of the people there, I'm glad I'm not there.
Deleting links to sites because you can't control the content bothers me. Off-topic or no. Delete extra copies of the links or whatever, but just plain deleting them all doesn't seem right to me.
If you give people any credit, allow them to decide slashdot is a wasteland on their own.
The problem is that the VAR in question put up an already trojaned copy. If you checked the sums against VAR sums, they would have matched.
And I never said a central authority means you are getting a clean build. I said that without one you cannot guarantee you are getting a clean build.
With Mozilla's central authority you can have some more confidence, but of course you can't be sure of anything. You can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow.
The point was again, and I was the one who made it (a couple posts up now) that the claims that Mozilla patches within 24 hours aren't really useful to most people, because the first thing that most people need to be concerned with is getting a clean build. Then it's important that every possible bug be patched, after that.
Yes, md5sums protect you from trojaned software. Well, in as much as they help you know that you got what you were supposed to get. Whether the person who put that up might have trojaned it by accident or mistake doesn't really have much to do with md5 at all.
They project me if the software was trojaned after the md5sums were made and the person who trojaned it didn't think to update the sums.
The sums only check to be sure you got what the VAR sent. It doesn't mean it is clean. The parent says you should check them against a reputable location. If you don't check against Mozilla.org, you aren't getting any safety at all. But if the VAR wants to patch, then the sums won't match.
My point here, which you missed twice is that without a central patching/release authority, there is no way to have users be sure they are getting a safe build.
Thus the theory that you can get updates on a moment's notice with Mozilla is undercut. Yes, you can do so, but you aren't sure what you are getting. You trade one risk for another.
Again, the logistics of doing a large release are significant. Making statements like "Mozilla patches are available in under 24 hours!" belittles the actual process of ensuring safe software gets to people properly.
So you're saying that Firefox is string 750MB of data it got off the web?
Well, let's see, my DSL is quite fast, it is 6mbits/second actually (lucky me). That means that Firefox is storing the equivalent of 1,000 seconds or about 20 minutes of continuous downloading. For other people it could be easily double that.
Why doesn't that seem entirely correct to me? I'd know if I sat through 20 minutes total downloading.
BTW, IE doesn't soak up as much RAM, and it's pretty damn fast.
Firefox probably needs to look at more memory-efficient caching.
When Mozilla has a bug in it (like two weeks ago), all the slashdotters say "the good thing is you can patch it yourself!, here's the change!". And that's true. But the problem is now the produced binary doesn't match the md5sums on the Mozilla site.
So if a VAR were to want to "do the right thing" and patch immediately, as open source allows you to do, they then open up their customers to trojan problems because the md5sums don't match the Mozilla site anymore.
Just pointing out how the logistics of releasing a patch are fairly significant, so that perhaps some people can understand why MS can't patch every problem in under 30 days. And we haven't even talked about testing...
Otherwise, anyone can skew the outcome.
For example, I assert that Mozilla has 300 vulnerabilities. Mozilla hasn't confirmed them, but you count them. So now the numbers are skewed in IE's favor. Yes, this is a somewhat forced example, but it shows how you can't just go counting all accusations.
I know there are problems with letting the fox guard the henhouse (in the case of Mozilla or IE), but really it is the writer(s)/manager(s) of the respective browsers who best know the code and behavior of the app, and before they confirm something you just don't have any real idea whether it is truly as the accuser says. Even if people can reproduce it, so you know it can happen, the people who made the app can best determine the scope of the problem, that is, what percentage of people are likely to be at risk.
I find it odd that people say the good part of open source is that lots of eyes look at it and find the problems and presumably they get fixed (see hidden bugs in Mozilla database right now). Yet when problems are found (and usually fixed) in IE, it's seen as showing IE is junk. If going over something with a fine tooth comb helps you improve something, then both Firefox and IE are being improved right now.
Anyway. I do know the hackers go after IE primarily. So it'll be tough for IE to come out as the more secure browser (that and it running ActiveX controls at the drop of a hat), but I am also not conviced the people at Mozilla really know all the ins and outs of security either.
I'll also say that the level of vulnerability being found in IE now is pretty fine-grained. There are plenty of programs of the complexity of IE that have never reached this level of security such that we need to look this far into the cracks to find the problems. When I started using UNIX back in 1987, it had holes far larger than IE currently has in many many tasks, many of which ran as root (think of the original sendmail internet worm). So things are not as bad as people make it seem right now.
Finally, having worked at a company that releases major software products that many many people use, I agree that if possible it is best to release patches on a schedule so that users have some time to keep up. If a user has to patch and reboot every couple days, it gets annoying. Eventually, they'll just stop patching due to the annoyance of it. Out of phase patches should only be used in emergencies.
For the record, I use IE (I'm using it right now). But I recently changed the security settings so that only specially selected sites (of which I have none right now) can use ActiveX controls.
lameness filter in action!
lameness filter in action!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Don't get me wrong, you do have a right to do what you say, for your own personal use.
But it is a complete misstatement to attribute this ability to the doctrine of "fair use". Fair Use covers situations where the reproduction is used commercially (or similarly), not just for personal use.
Perhaps the home taping act is what gives you this right? I'm not sure.
Not transistors.
And honestly, many mobo companies had problems with this at that time. There was a company making knockoff capacitors that appears to be high quality components. Many good mobo makers got taken by this. It was covered on slashdot.
I personally won't buy Abit again if I can avoid it, for different reasons. My high end from them is still working, but I had significant problems in the beginning and minor problem all along, and they just never even responded to my queries on their forums.
Gasoline Direct Injection is already in use. It isn't just the Japanese either. Current Audis (like the A3) with the 2.0T use it. (Audi calls it FSI).
In the US, since we have sulfur in our gas (outside California), the sulfur will crystalize in the catalytic converter if we used lean-burn techniques on the 2.0T. So Audi switches that off in the US. In Europe, the 2.0T uses lean burn as much as possible (it has to switch back from time to time to keep the catalytic converter hot enough to work).
These still rely on spark ignition, but of course, when you lean burn, it would usually ignite itself if they didn't spark it. There is talk of developing engines that proceed more heavily into the compression ratios on gas, and therefore would essentially become Diesels, even if they run on regular gas.
Honestly, you can keep your Diesels. I know they're a lot better than they used to be. They don't even rattle, except at startup. But they still make soot under heavy acceleration and they still smell funny. I don't like either of those. And finally, it seems to take gobs of extra doodads to extract decent HP out of Diesel per powerplant unit volume (dip volume, not displacement). Witness Mercedes' new tri-turbo 320, the pinnacle of car Diesel power output right now. A state of the art normally-aspirated gas engine of similar size and weight would produce about as much power, and a turbocharged one would make it look poor. Of course, both would use more fuel, but given the high initial cost of Diesels, I'm not sure you ever make it back in light-duty (car-type) applications.
Most comparisons that actually show Diesel ahead for regular car usage typically are matching a Diesel with far worse power and acceleration versus the gas engine. Match those up, and it doesn't make nearly as much sense. Otherwise, I'll just take a smaller gas engine, and save a lot of money.
That wording you speak of is just eEye's wording of "remote code execution exploit". Firefox has these too. There's no difference.
Well, there is a difference, eEye makes money selling people fixes/workarounds for security problems. So eEye wants to make this look like as big a deal as possible.
I have to say I'm really disappointed with slashdot for running this story. This story doesn't have any actual information in it, it just says a company alleges IE has a vulnurability. Well, they already said it had 11, is one more that big a deal? Personally, I don't think it warrants a story with no other actual info.
It's far faster than UltraSPARC (heck, ask SUN), Alpha is slow on current measures. It's measureably faster than PowerPC. And MIPS64 isn't keeping up with the current marketplace much better than UltraSPARC. It might not be faster than IA64, depending on how you measure it.
/. Alpha was the first super-pipelined, superscalar processor. In that way, it bears a huge resemblance to P4 (Netburst). And if you saw the chips (and their heatsinks), you'd see a resemblance on performance per watt too! I'm not saying I hate Alpha, but I just don't get how you can hate on superscalar/super-pipelined in one case and worship another.
The reasons all those have lower clock speeds than current x86 (well, P4) is because they are designed to do more per clock, with less clocks. It's pretty simple. Like Pentium M. Either that or because they just don't perform as well (like PPC, SPARC, Alpha).
Note, the 8086 (first x86) was not a filler move between other unrelated product lines. It was a follow on 16-bit extension to the 8080, before the "real" 16-bit processor Intel was working on. Kind of like x86-64 versus Itanium. So it really was a filler move between a related line and a non-related line.
I do agree the ISA sucks. And I hate little endian. But given how little time people (even programmers) spend looking at object code or writing assembly nowadays, the ISA is near immaterial.
But anyway, Intel picked one method of running a lot of code, super-pipelining. It worked for a while, but is running into problems, and they are going to a different approach. AMD shows you can have good x86 ISA performance without 30 stages of pipelining, so don't throw the ISA baby out with the P4 bathwater.
As an aside, I don't get the worship of Alpha on
If Altavista didn't get me the pages I wanted, I wouldn't hve used it. But I did use it. You didn't?
I'm not saying Google doesn't improve upon altavista, they clearly did. And improvement is a legitimate business. But Google didn't "invent" search, and they didn't revolutionize search results in my book (their speed was revolutionary though).
I don't think search was so poor before Google that it failed to be useful. Plenty of companies agreed with my, getting into the search busines (including Google). If the business was really so poorly served, it would seem like it would have had fewer customers and thus not so much of a rush of companies jumping into that market.
Like I said, I already told you that bridge controllers might be different. That doesn't mean there is LBA48 hardware.
As to the extra chip, a 74LCV02A is just a quad 2-input NOR gate. I'm not quite sure why this chip would help them do 48-bit addressing.
I would more expect it is used to block the signal coming from the DMA controller to the drive, so that they can run their DMA controller multiple times in a row without the controller signalling to the drive that the transaction is complete after the first 128KiB.
Again, this is a bridge-specific thing, because their bridge is too smart. On a PC there is no reason you can't run the DMA controller several times back to back without it aborting the transaction without need for additional hardware.
If Maxtor were to put on a different method of doing LBA48 without supporting >256 sector transactions or double writes, then this bridge would work just fine. Do they do that? I dunno.
But again, it's more of a concern with bridge chips. Bridge chips use things like 16MHz CPUs to super-fast transfers, and thus they often have specialized hardware that cannot be reprogrammed. You take this information and expand it too far, to say that there are LBA48 requirements for controllers, not just special-purpose bridge chips.
I think the information that you got from this Oxford person that tells you that LBA48 wasn't even being considered in 1997, yet TiVos that were built in 1997 (surely designed in 1996) are capable of doing it with new software underscores my point about controllers and LBA48 pretty strongly.
With Yonah and Dothan, Intel is already ahead on power in the category of "non top speed chipset". So I don't see how Apple is making a mistake here.
Apple is taking a risk that Intel will not be able to reform their top of the line chips to match AMDs superb offerings. But honestly, tower configurations don't account for much of Apple's sales anyway, so it's not a huge risk.
Anyway, I as I've said before, I think there are other reasons Apple chose Intel over AMD. To get Northbridges with integrated graphics and chipsets with integrated wireless, etc. is the main reason. Apple mostly makes all-in-one type machines. In order to be cost-effective, these machines will have to be much more integrated than they currently are. And AMD doesn't offer much besides a processor. They don't make chipsets right now.
So I don't think AMD really made much sense to Apple at this time.
Except "nuclear proliferation is tolerated". I'm not thrilled about our relationship with Israel either. But I do have to ask a question:
What would we do to indicate proliferation is not tolerated?
Perhaps the reason it happens isn't because we tolerate it, but because there is nothing we can do to stop it?
We first made a bomb 60 years ago. Can you think of anything else that we could do in the US 60 years ago that is still technologically difficult to do today? Building a bomb just isn't that tough. We're going to have to face this some day. Perhaps the only way to reduce our chances of getting nuked is to not make so many enemies?
Your number only has meaning if you assume everyone wants to work. Thus it is less useful than the other figure.
Yes, you could make another figure that factors out all the stuff that doesn't seem intelligent about your figure. But that would be basically admitting your figure isn't terribly useful on its own to compare job markets, especially between countries. Which is how this conversation started.
For example, if I wanted to use your figure to measure the job market in Saudi Arabia, how would it be? Relatively few women work at all, and many many people who could work get money from the government and so don't. So your figure would be very low. So how can I compare this figure to one from another country, like the US, to compare their job markets?
the reason you can replace them with newer ones that have large drive support is because:
There's more profit in selling you a new card than letting you update the old ones! Ta-Daa!
Anyway, you can just plain skip the logic anyway. I've written ATA drivers for controllers before. I know how it's done, and I personally have done it and know that there is no restriction to what controllers can have LBA48 software written for them.
Go get the spec from t13.org ourself. All you have to do is write 4 registers twice. The drive remembers both the most recently written and the previously written value. The controller does nothing new at all.
As to bridge boards, they could be out of code space, they might have limits on the size of the data to be stored (can't store >28 bits of sector or >8 bits of sector count), or they just might want to sell new chips too.
Oxford might have made a "smart controller" and don't feel like switching over and going to "dumb mode" to get it to work. Or perhaps their controller is "too smart" and thus cannot be made to work in LBA48 mode. I know that the >8 bits of sector count (which allows transfers larger than 512KB at once) means your DMA equipment in your bridge might have to be able to do transfers larger than 128KiB. This was a problem on a device I worked on. It might be a probem on special bridge chips that DMA straight from the drive to the bus (like the Cypress USB chips).
Or perhaps they just want to sell new chips too. It doesn't matter, I never said all bridge chips can be updated to do LBA48, in fact, I believe I gave reasons you perhaps couldn't.
I can assure you this isn't the case with any PC interface, since they all have to work with the standard Windows driver in order to boot Windows, and thus have a "dumb mode" where you can write any registers in any order you'd like. You then write the 4 registers in question twice and run the DMA engine a couple times in a row (actually, Windows doesn't do transfers larger then 128KiB anyway with the default drivers) and you're there.
As I said, any PC controller can do it. Bridge chips can be different, due to various factors.
As to your last paragraph, well, again there is no requirement for LBA48 hardware. And the software is clearly running in LBA48 mode (despite being on what you call "non-LBA48 hardware"), since without it, you can only address 2^28 sectors, and thus you simply have no way to access those sectors above 128GiB.
I do appreciate applying logic to a situation. But in this case, you're wrong, and you should do some research about it before looking even more foolish.
As perhaps something to spur you to this, let me give you a link about how series 1 Tivos (which were released in 1997 or 1998) can use LBA48, with a new kernel.
http://www.courtesan.com/tivo/bigdisk.html
I know this isn't a "knockout blow" to your theory, but perhaps it is enough to spur you to look further and realize your mistake.
Finally, here's the link to the ATA spec site.
http://t13.org/#Project_drafts
Their specs aren't exactly transparent, but maybe you can learn something from those too.