Honestly, having the main user non-priviledged just doesn't make sense for most people. Try using Mac OS X a while with the box popping up and asking for your root password all the time. That's not good either, and as soon as worm writers decide to take advantage of it, we'll see that it's a false sense of security.
Your principles are great, when there is an administrator-in house. Then only that person gets the privileges. And plenty of companies run their Windows systems the same way.
Home machines will be less secure, that's the way it is. People just aren't as careful as professional administrators.
If you just mean flat, there are many projection TVs, with LCD, DLP and LCOS (LCOS under various names) to choose from. Some of these are as thin as 12", even the deep ones are under 20" deep, which isn't bad for a 60" projector. These don't have the same viewing angle as the hang-on-the-wall types, but are a lot cheaper and often have a better picture.
I saw a friend's brand-new (model) Pioneeer last night. He's had it for about 3 months, and I could already see words burnt into the left and right areas (outside the 4:3 box). The burnt-in text was quite readable. And the borders of the 4:3 box were noticeable too. That disgusted me, burn-in is very bothersome. I had heard that it wasn't a problem on new plasmas, but apparently that's not quite true.
After hating on plasma due to power useage/heat, thickness/weight, flicker/sparkle/ugly darks, low-resolution and burn-in, I was kind of warming up to it.
Seeing the true 1920x1080 TVs out now, the difference between them and the normal 1024x768 plasmas, the resolution differences are not as significant as I expected. The problem with flicker/sparkle/ugly darks on plasma is greatly reduced from 3 years ago. Flicker/sparkle/dither patterning is not apparent much anymore. The ugly darks are better looking, but still noticeable. Power usage/heat is down too, although it's still more than competiting technologies.
All those improvements really moved plasma up in my eyes, even considering it for my next TV. But honestly, the burn-in problem is not improving as much as I expected, so I have to rule it out again.
LCD looks great, but I want 50+ inches, and I don't see those coming down to a price I want to pay soon.
So I guess it's back to projection. The new LCOS units are going to have a huge impact.
Sure it's perhaps the most popular web server for major sites. But the number of non web-servers on the internet vastly outnumbers the number of webservers.
And besides, servers are likely to be set up with the main user not running as administrator. It's tough to get traction on those systems. Better to attack loosely administered user systems, regardless of OS.
Measure it. In volume, IIRC, it is something like 40% larger than the equivalent iPod of the day. It is very well shaped, so it doesn't seem large, but it is. In other words, it hides its girth well. But it is really thick,
It was (IIRC) bigger than the thick iPods of the day, and you understand that the 20GB of the day was one of the thin ones, right?
Let me do a little searching. The dimensions of the Karma is (consensus, I averaged a bit) are 3"x2.7"x1.1". Do that's 76.2mm x 69mm x 27.9mm. This is a volume of 146,692mm^3.
The 20G is a thin one (the 10-15G in the diagram was outdated.)
So the iPod is 103.5mm x 61.8mm x 15.7mm. That's 100,421.91mm^3.
The 20G Karma was over 33% larger than a 20G iPod at the time.
The thick iPods (40G) at the time were 119,610.81mm^3. The Karma is still 10% bigger than those too.
(Note, if you redo my math, you'll see I used a bit different numbers. These calculations are calculating volume by 3-dimensions, but that corner protruding from the Karma means that one dimension, the 3.0" one is inflated and thus the volumes are overstated perhaps 5%, so I cut them down a bit in my % comparisons.)
Like I said, it hid its size well. Looking at it, you wouldn't notice, because it was mostly depth. But it was rather large.
You could have perhaps found these figures yourself before you insinuated I was a bald-faced liar.
It was not cheaper than a 20GB iPod on day one, which is when I got mine. I know it came down in price after a while. I don't know where I got the idea that it was $100 more than an iPod. Maybe I got confused as to the hard drive sizes. I think with less cachet, bad software, and being bigger than an iPod, it's tough to justify that price in my mind.
By the time the price came down, the word was out, they just weren't reliable. And so they didn't sell well. See the other people's reviews on here. See reviews on cnet shopper. See nearly anywhere.
I did miss one thing in my comments. There is a difference in the line out on the Karma. It has better stereo separation than a headphone out has. That can be pretty significant.
The Karma was a good unit, usability-wise. They were horribly unreliable, but I'll let that slide.
As to your comments:
The line out was nothing special. 97dB wasn't even unusual at the time. You can get that much through the headphone jack on other units. I'm not saying it sounded bad, but it didn't sound any better than anythine else.
100MBps ethernet port. Well, it was a 10/100 NIC in there, and the 100mbps light would light up on my hub. But the throughput was AWFUL on the Karma. I remember measuring it at 6 mbps or so. It was nice to be able to dock it and sync with your computer across the room (in another room in my case) but if you wanted to move a reasonable number of files, you had to put it on USB 2.0 to get it done.
The Java app was horrible. Unbelieveably slow on my Mac OS X machine. I mean astounding. Like serial speeds. And the UI was pretty, but pretty odd too. Also you could select a lot of songs to add to your library at once IIRC. A decent effort, and I liked how it was on the unit for download. But it was symbolic more than anything.
The glowing was fun. I found the flashing annoying.
All in all, really it was the first iPod killer. But it was expensive ($100 more than an iPod retail) and unreliable. Still, if more people had looked at it, more might have bought it and forced Apple to add a few of these features.
A great effort. Honestly, when Rio did that well so long ago and nobody noticed, perhaps they should have stopped and realized it would be difficult to top that technically and threw in the towel sooner. They really couldn't match the iPod marketing.
Just because it isn't available in the US doesn't mean you are forced to pirate it. You could also do without. This is what you would do if it were a physical object that you wanted and no one would sell it to you.
But I agree that there are times that people pirate (myself specifically) when they would gladly pay in the normal way if that option were available.
Companies that put people in this position likely lose money they could have easily have captured.
What I mean to say is that there are certain issues with evaluating a companies' IPO based upon their targets for customers instead of their actual customer list.
If you ask me, $750/customer is far too much.
The idea that an IPO is to fuel "explosive growth" is hilarious. That's.com talk. The original reason to go public was to get working capital so you could grow the company in ways you couldn't without it. But in reality there are very few companies that are only separated from success by lack of money.
Current income is greatly related to how much money you want to raise, because in order to raise the money you are selling a portion of the company. The less your current income, the less your company is worth, so the larger percentage of your company you have to sell to raise a given amount of cash.
Honestly, when a company goes IPO, I have to ask. If this company thinks their stock is so damn valuable, why are they selling it? The answer is usually something other than "this is the best way to raise the cash we need to grow". It's more often "our VCs want their cash out so they can put it somewhere better". Wonderful, I wish the VCs would please let me in on this investment opportunity that is better than this company that's going IPO. I'll invest in that instead.
I went public with a company. This was pre.com days, so I didn't make a lot of dough. I'll say this, it destroyed the company. The company had to replace their competent principals with people with "business experience" and had to take on a CEO who looked the part to Wall Street types. Then the execs couldn't tell us anything about future plans anymore because of SEC rules. And they bought a company that was in a different business than ours, because underwriters didn't like to take one-trick companies public (at that time).
That was the end of the company. It turned into a whole new company.
Which is really the #1 thing I learned about companies going public. If you liked a company, you don't want them to go public. Because they will turn into a new company when they go public, and there's no guarantee you'll like that one too.
Vonage is a decent company I guess. I'd never invest in them though. Just because you're the lead in a business doesn't mean you're going to do well. Look at TiVo.
K750i is an okay phone. It's no iPod, but I can see where you're coming from here.
The k750i doesn't even have a proper headphone jack. Pretty crazy for a music player, eh?
I don't know what your idea that iPods don't have game play functionality. iPods currently have 4 games on them. Honestly, if you ask me, that's 4 too many. But either way, I don't see how you can say they don't have it.
For the price of that 2GB MS Pro Duo, you could pretty much have an iPod.
I'd have a k750i if it had GSM 850. But I know it wouldn't replace my iPod. I like to leave my iPod in the car when I go inside the store, or even play music from it at home. I'd prefer to have my phone in my pocket while doing these things.
When flash was SLC (stored a single bit per cell). Now NAND flash stores multiple bits per cell (2 bits, 4 values) and the lifetime of the cell is rated at 10,000 writes instead of 100,000. Now I can agree you'll likely get a lot more writes than that, but it'll be more like 100,000 instead of the 1,000,000 you quote.
NAND flash systems use wear levelling, so they spread out that wear, and the flash should last a long time. I still think a hard drive would last longer, but I dunno.
A mini-disc player is larger than an iPod mini. The (2nd gen, since February) iPod mini plays "18 hours" (tests show more like 25) on the internal rechargeable battery. An iPod mini holds 4X as much (although it cannot be swapped). It actually does take mp3s, and fast. Unlike the mini-disc which has to convert them. Slowly, using that awful software. It has playlist management on the device. iPod Mini cannot record. iPod mini doesn't skip either. It's smaller than the mini-disc player. It has USB in only.
And it works with a good program, iTunes, not a crappy one.
I'm not saying what you have isn't serviceable. But if you used the iPod Mini, you'd be able to tell the difference, you'd understand.
Mini-disc was doing very well in many countries outside the US. Its market share is now a tiny sliver of the market with the release of good mp3 players like the iPod mini. Even in Japan, Mini-Disc is over now.
First of all, you don't need LOCK to make an OS. It turns out you don't even need MESI/MERSI! The OS I work on day to day works on hardware with no atomic operations at all and dual processors. There's some cool stuff in there, a lot of computer science I never knew.
But beyond that, if you can't figure out how to do the stuff with MESI/MERSI that you did with atomic operations before, then you need to go back to school. MESI has replaced atomic operations, you don't need bus locking, and you'll do a lot better if you don't use it. Power PC doesn't support bus locking at all.
I said that processors don't talk to each other. They don't. You're right, they do intersignal for cache coherency (MESI/MERSI). I mentioned this in my post. But most cache lines are Shared, they don't cause stop and wait hazards. [Multiple lines saying how NUMA is nice and Intel will adopt it deleted, just read the post you replied to for the info.]
I do not agree with your statements that crossing HT to the CPU won't affect the GPU. If you accept that bringing the memory controller onto the CPU was responsible for reducing memory latencies for the CPU, then you must also accept that moving the memory controller out of the north bridge will increase memory latencies for devices in the north bridge (GPU in this case).
Honestly, I don't accept either. But regardless, you can't have it both ways. Either there's no reason to move the memory controller to the CPU because it doesn't reduce latency, or else there is, but it will cause a slow down for the GPU on the north bridge.
Dual-ported VRAM is a no-go. VRAM isn't cost-effective. It would destroy the entire reason to move the GPU into the north bridge by making the overall system too costly.
The diagrams of the AMD workstations are misleading. Yes, they add more memory channels, but the problem is that the memory all occupies a single memory space. OSes don't know to keep data apart (partly because the programmer of even applications would have to hint it to do so). So one processor has to cross to the other to get its data at often.
Honestly, I don't see a future in splitting memory like that. It'd be better to just quad-interleave a single bank of memory and share it. Then, when only one processor is hitting memory (the other is stopped or in cache), you can use all the bandwidth for that single processor, instead of wasting it. And when both processors do both hit the memory, it's still no slower. This is all especially true when the cores are all in one package.
The marketing slide is funny. It says how you need fewer chips for a basic workstation (reduces cost). Except you've removed a few $1 Super I/O cores and $2 PCI-X bridges that could have been on a single chip for under $5. And in return? All you have to do is put in twice as much RAM at $50/stick. A steal.
An FSB exists in all processors. On an AMD64, the FSB is the DDR memory bus directly, not an intermediate bus from processor to memory controller.
LOCK is an outdated instruction. It is used for indivisible memory accesses. This idea went out in 1990. Processors use MESI (or MERSI or MOESI) protocol now, because bus locking is not efficient (nor always even possible) in multi-processor systems.
MERSI works by having the two processors watch each other's memory accesses so they can keep their caches coherent, instead of locking.
Also note that the only CPU dedicated memory (outside of the register file) in a multi-processor system is the caches for each processor. So each AMD processor does have a dedicated link to its own caches, the bandwidth to that cache is reserved for that processor. But caches are relatively small, and switching tasks on a single core will flush out the cache about as much as moving to the other core anyway.
So I said processors don't talk to each other. I did oversimplify, but here's the gist of my comments. What good is 20GB/sec between processors? You don't need it to send a MERSI flag to other processors for each 32 bytes line accessed. You would need it to copy vast amounts of data between the processors, if you did that. Like I said, there is no instruction to copy data between processors, you must use memory to get between them.
Intel's effeciency is lower when accessing some areas that are highly contested between processors. But most areas of memory are "Shared", not Modified or Reserved by one processor.
AMD's system is better, but it's really easy to overstate the value of it.
We'll see if Intel goes to a system that allows cache line state signalling faster than the FSB. I would imagine their new chips (which can even use the L1 and L2 caches for one processor when the other is shut down) do this, at least when on the same die.
Putting the GPU on the HT bus would be interesting. It would have the negative side effect of causing the GPU to go through the CPU when it needs to access memory. That is because the memory controller is in the CPU on AMD systems. But it would seem that when accessing VRAM, the HT bus speed could be useful.
Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the thing for a while. Winchester is a great core, and Prescott is a power hog, but your Winchester will not withstand hard use on a passive heatsink without a LOT of airflow.
When you said Prescott EE, I figured you meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You should be more specific.
Yonah is dual-core, and two of these new chips are also dual-core. I know you can't get either yet, but the tone of the post was that with this announcement, Intel announced a bunch of stuff, but "Intel should have gone multi-core". They did. The complaints about them not doing so were far off base.
Measuring on the wall is a VERY poor way to measure power usage. If you subtract a little bit too much for overhead (and that's easy to do) you end up making the difference seem larger than it is.
As to "normal" numbers, not only don't I believe Winchester uses 1/3rd the power of Prescott in normal useage, but I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's new processors on "normal" power usage when you don't even have any info on it.
Finally, if your Winchester is 3X better per Watt than Prescott and the new Intel is 5X, then the new Intel is merely 66% better than your Winchester. That seems pretty significant to me.
My next machine was going to be an AMD. Because I like Winchester. But I'd rather not be stuck with DDR, and I'd like a cost-effective dual-core machine, and AMD doesn't seem interested in producing it. Plus just on total power usage, AMD's power consumption for dual core (110W) is too high for me, Intel's new chips will use half as much (50W).
No hyperthreading? AMD doesn't have it either. Intel's reason for not having it (outside of Netburst) is surely the same as AMD's. That is, it doesn't make as much sense when you don't have the huge pipeline of Netburst that you must keep fed.
Integrated Memory Controller? Not a good thing. AMD locks you into DDR, while DDR2 drops in price below DDR. I don't like my processor manufacturer dictating what memory I can use. And besides, I need a north bridge (the traditional home of the memory controller) anyway because the north bridge is the new home of the GPU on all but the highest end machines. Integrated north bridge doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'd like low-latency RAM access, but if it takes an integrated memory controller to get it, I'm not quite as certain it makes sense.
Interprocessor HT comms? Processors don't talk to each other. Think of the instruction on the processor that accesses the other processor? Can't think of one? There isn't one. Processors only interact through memory. Memory is accessed through the FSB, not HT, even on AMD chips. Thus I don't need interprocessor HT. The chips can snoop each others memory busses just fine.
No vector processing (SIMD)? What happened to SSE? These chips have MMX & SSE1-3, which are all vector processing. AMD has them too.
I don't see cell processors as the future for PCs, for the same reason Apple doesn't use the PPC Cell processor. They're not good performers on machines that have to run legacy code. And PCs run a lot of legacy code.
I do agree these processors are a simple evolution. But I don't see that as a bad thing. Processor work is almost always evolutionary. And the 386 architecture/instruction set has evolved a lot, from 20 MIPS to perhaps thousands.
But even wth dual cores, against Prescott EE's one (I used the 3.4GHz model as my power reference I believe), AMD X2 4800+ isn't 5X as powerful. Even 3X is a long stretch. In general, I'd say each AMD core perhaps clocks in at 25% faster than a Prescott EE 3.4GHz. That's 2.5X faster, at 10% more power.
I'll say this, Intel made their numbers look good by using their worst performance/Watt chip in recent memory.
Beyond that, the main thrust here is the misunderstanding of the parent (like saying Intel's chips should have gone multi core, when they did).
AMD does not have 5x as good performance per watt as Prescott.
Prescott EE is 103 Watts max. Athlon X2 4800+ is 110W max.
So unless you think the AMD chip is 5.4 times faster than the Prescott EE (hint, it isn't), you're off base.
And I don't know what your comments are about Intel should have gone multi-core with P-M. Both Conroe and Merom (the chips they announced) are dual core and they are derivatives of P-M.
As the article said, you'll know more about the chips later this week. My guess is they didn't under hype the announcement, they just stretched the announcement out.
But perhaps you're saying MS simply bought up enough hard drives years ago to last the length of the Xbox run. Well, there's two problems with that.
1. They didn't. I've opened at least one Xbox a year and I know what drives are in them. I didn't just make up the model number on that drive, you know. They are that particular Seagate 40G drive right now with the 10G firmware. And a friend who deals with OEM drives told me it is the only 40G available. And he appears to be correct. 2. That wouldn't be cost effective either. The whole point is to get drives cheaper now than you did before. If you bought them all at the start, you'd have fixed your cost for the life of the product, which ensures it wouldn't drop.
The iPod drive is not custom made, it was sold by Toshiba before the iPod even came out. Just no one else thought to use it for what Apple did. And Apple is a victim of the same problem. Toshiba doesn't make a 1.8" drive below 20GB now. Many people would be happy with 15G, but Toshiba refuses to make it (more accurately, won't make it and sell it for less than the 20G).
The drive vendors are smart. They protect their revenues. They don't want them to drop. Additionally, the problem is that it isn't cheaper to make a (capacity-wise) smaller drive than a bigger one. The current heads and media are capable of 80-133GB per platter in the 3.5" range, you don't save any money by not filling at least one side up.
I love how you use "custom made" and "cheap" in the same sentence. They don't go together. The way to get something cheap is to buy commodity parts, and have multiple suppliers at the ready. If you buy custom, you blow that away.
And since there's only one supplier of 40G HDs, the price on them isn't going to be as good as if they were in the meat of the market where there is competition. Going to 2.5" put them at the cost-effective low-end of the market, where they wanted to be, instead of as a specialty item.
I know I'd love my Xbox 360 to be a lard-drived media server, like my HD TiVo with 400G in it. And why wouldn't MS want to sell me media over the internet to the 360? I'm a little bummed they didn't go that direction.
I was going to respond to the parent, but I'll respond to you instead.
Brownouts are killers. Because switching power supplies have an effective negative impedance, brownouts cause them to draw more current than normal and die.
We had a serious brownout here at my place a year ago (down to about 50V, I measured). My fluorescent lights kept working apparently normally, so it took some time for me to figure out what was going on. I thought I had lost just one leg of my power. But once I noticed it was a brownout, I flipped the main breaker at my place.
But it was too late, the power supply on one of my ethernet switches killed itself in the classic fashion. But at least I saved myself more trouble.
Anyway, back to the parent poster, I'd rather the brownouts did trigger breakers and cause blackouts, cause as you point out, they cause a lot less damage. Honestly, I'd think the power company would feel the same way. Stuff that breaks under brownouts will tend to be more expensive than the stuff hurt in a regular voltage surge.
Explain to me how you learned to run Gedit, Kate or OpenOffice Writer from the man page.
No? You learned from other docs? Me too. Some even free. Yes, you can learn to run Word from the help files that come with Word, just like you learned these other programs with the docs that came with them.
But none of that is the same as the dummies books. Dummies books don't list command switches in alphabetical order just because it's simple. They explain the minimum to get by, and in order of importance.
See, you just lump all documentation together, not seeing that there is reason for other kinds of documentation and support than what comes with the software. GNU understands this, and Cygnus has made money this way.
You just go much too far in saying that Windows is the only program some people can't figure out how to run without some extra documentation.
I never said the writer of the vi man page wasted their time. Although I'll say it now. The vi man page sucks, it is a waste. But it is the exception. Most man pages explain some useful info, even if it isn't enough to really know how to use the tool completely.
The hard drive is the single biggest mistake MS made with the Xbox, from a unit cost perspective.
Why? Because you have to drop the price of a game machine over its lifetime. So you hope that the price of making it gets lower over its lifetime. The problem is that hard drives don't really get cheaper over time, they get bigger.
When the Xbox came out, MS got a deal on some left over Western Digital 8GB and Quantum (I think) 10GB drives. They maybe paid $40 for each. How much is a 8GB or 10GB drive now? Answer, you can't get one, even as an OEM. The smallest drive made now is 40GB. It's the Seagate ST340015A. And it's sold to OEMs only. It's the same drive Sony sells in their PS2 HDD add-on.
So MS buys that and gets a custom firmware for it to limit it to 10GB (and then limits to 8GB in software). How much does that drive cost, in quantity? Maybe $30. And it's the only 40GB drive left, if Seagate didn't make it, they'd be buying 80GB or 120GB drives from someone else at an even higher cost (perhaps $40).
A PIII (w/Celeron sized-cache) was mildly expensive 4 years ago. Now? Peanuts, in quantity. 64MB RAM? Cheap, perhaps $10. A GeForce 3-class video chip? $50 at Fry's on a card in a box with 128MB VRAM (Xbox has no VRAM), surely under $15 OEM.
This is also probably why MS selected a 2.5" drive. They simply couldn't get a 3.5" drive with small enough capacity. By going 2.5", they can get a 20GB drive (of which Xbox emulation will take up 8GB) and sell you an upgrade later. In 3.5", they could get a 40GB today, probably 80GB tomorrow. By the end of the life of Xbox 360, it'd be 120GB minimum, easy.
Meanwhile, the sell price of Xbox has dropped from $300 to $150. With perhaps 25% of that locked up in the hard drive, it's a tough squeeze. And we all know the real profit is in selling games. If you bought an Xbox 4 years ago, MS probably sold you 8-10 games by now. If you buy one today, how many will you buy before you move on? 5? How many will be for the full $50 and not $20 platinum hits?
It's no surprise to me MS wants to get 360 on the road ASAP. Selling an Xbox is near a losing proposition for them now, better to get people on the next platform, where they can buy $50 controllers and $20 battery packs/chargers for them.
Making the HD optional clears a path to a lot more cost cutting in the future. It makes a ton of sense. So I was shocked (in the E3 timeframe) to hear MS was jumping on that grenade again and including one standard. Don't go expecting a PS3 to have a standard hard drive.
But I hope both make good use of the optional drives. It really does improve the gameplay, a lot. And it's a near necessity if you want to sell online add-on packs for games at $5 every two months.
I agree many hardcore gamers won't buy XBox 360 at the $400 price. I know my hardcore friends are mostly staying away. And that's bad news for MS, because if you were at E3, you know there weren't many A-list titles in the pipe for XBox. MS has to get gamers over to Xbox 360 and fast.
My personal theory on the price is that MS expects very short supplies before Xmas. They're already floating a November (even Black Friday!) release date. That's last-minute. Surely the schedule is already up against the wall, and if doesn't slip at all, it'll make Xmas, but not with many units to sell. So, if you have only a few units to sell, why not make as much as possible off them? As long as you sell them all out, you can't lose. So make it a $400 launch and drop the price to $300 in February.
BTW, I have a 360 ($400 version) on order. But none of my friends (some who even work in the console gaming industry) do. Good luck MS, it's going to be tough getting this thing established the way you wanted to before PS3 comes out.
That is layered on top of HDMI or DVI. It isn't an interface.
HDMI is like DVI but without the analog and with audio (two channel only according to spec). I don't think it's a successor to DVI, since it doesn't have analog or dual-link. It definitely isn't "proposed", as I have two devices with HDMI connectors in my house already (connected together, no less).
I think you mistyped a bit up there.
Converting DVI to VGA is very difficult, unless the DVI connector has the VGA signal on it, which is can. Then you don't convert, it's just a connector change. If you actually needed to convert, it'd be expensive.
I don't know if HDMI supports dual-link, and I know it doesn't support analog.
I think this is roughly what you meant to say, but a single typo made a bit of a mess of it.
These kids are 17, not 7. It's time for them to start doing things right for the right reasons, not just because they might get a whuppin'. This is just one example. My neighbor I grew up with who was kept strongly in line by his father (which only encouraged his rebellion) and ended up in jail immediately after HS graduation is another example. Or the stereotypical "Catholic schoolgirl".
I also cannot agree on your fighting the charges because you don't like them. Don't like the law? Write your congressman. The courts apply the laws, not make them. Honestly, these kids will likely all plead down to misdemeanors anyway.
Part of my complaints here come from my concern that people think our court system was created so that people with great lawyers can escape punishment. I don't agree. It was created to keep the innocent from being convicted wrongly, not to let those who actually did wrongs get away with it. I know that is a side-effect, possibly an unavoidable one, but I'm not going to say it's okay just because we can't figure out a way to stop it.
I think these kids records are probably safe. Juvenile records are not easy to access once a kid reaches adulthood. I could be wrong though.
I don't see down below how your statement that after they did something wrong, they should have explained it was wrong and applied new software, and explain the next steps is any different from what happened. They were caught once with little effects, they did it again. That's how they got in the big trouble.
I don't think the administrative support staff needs an object lesson. The lesson is already this: if you have physical access to a machine you can compromise it. End of story. I'm sure they knew that already. They put locks on the computers for the same reason I put locks on my house, to keep honest people out. Right next to my locked door I have a window that is easily broken. I don't bar it, because I know it's a battle I can't win, and I'm content with the level of security I have.
But I don't have the equivalent of these kids in my neighborhood breaking into houses. If I did, I might just consider moving, instead of making my house a citadel. Yes, I know this is the equivalent of your "take the computer away" proposition, so I do see the merits of it. I just don't see how the fact that they didn't do it makes the kids blameless for what they did. Just like me moving away doesn't solve the crime problem in my (now old) neighborhood, taking away these kids opportunity to do wrong doesn't necessarily help them learn not to do it, at least as far as I can see.
Apology accepted for the end of your post. I did find it out of line, but I wasn't offended. No ill will here.
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Users make their own decisions.
Honestly, having the main user non-priviledged just doesn't make sense for most people. Try using Mac OS X a while with the box popping up and asking for your root password all the time. That's not good either, and as soon as worm writers decide to take advantage of it, we'll see that it's a false sense of security.
Your principles are great, when there is an administrator-in house. Then only that person gets the privileges. And plenty of companies run their Windows systems the same way.
Home machines will be less secure, that's the way it is. People just aren't as careful as professional administrators.
Then for now, there's plasma and LCD.
There is also SED/FED coming.
If you just mean flat, there are many projection TVs, with LCD, DLP and LCOS (LCOS under various names) to choose from. Some of these are as thin as 12", even the deep ones are under 20" deep, which isn't bad for a 60" projector. These don't have the same viewing angle as the hang-on-the-wall types, but are a lot cheaper and often have a better picture.
I saw a friend's brand-new (model) Pioneeer last night. He's had it for about 3 months, and I could already see words burnt into the left and right areas (outside the 4:3 box). The burnt-in text was quite readable. And the borders of the 4:3 box were noticeable too. That disgusted me, burn-in is very bothersome. I had heard that it wasn't a problem on new plasmas, but apparently that's not quite true.
After hating on plasma due to power useage/heat, thickness/weight, flicker/sparkle/ugly darks, low-resolution and burn-in, I was kind of warming up to it.
Seeing the true 1920x1080 TVs out now, the difference between them and the normal 1024x768 plasmas, the resolution differences are not as significant as I expected.
The problem with flicker/sparkle/ugly darks on plasma is greatly reduced from 3 years ago. Flicker/sparkle/dither patterning is not apparent much anymore. The ugly darks are better looking, but still noticeable.
Power usage/heat is down too, although it's still more than competiting technologies.
All those improvements really moved plasma up in my eyes, even considering it for my next TV. But honestly, the burn-in problem is not improving as much as I expected, so I have to rule it out again.
LCD looks great, but I want 50+ inches, and I don't see those coming down to a price I want to pay soon.
So I guess it's back to projection. The new LCOS units are going to have a huge impact.
Sure it's perhaps the most popular web server for major sites. But the number of non web-servers on the internet vastly outnumbers the number of webservers.
And besides, servers are likely to be set up with the main user not running as administrator. It's tough to get traction on those systems. Better to attack loosely administered user systems, regardless of OS.
Measure it. In volume, IIRC, it is something like 40% larger than the equivalent iPod of the day. It is very well shaped, so it doesn't seem large, but it is. In other words, it hides its girth well. But it is really thick,
m ensions.pdf
It was (IIRC) bigger than the thick iPods of the day, and you understand that the 20GB of the day was one of the thin ones, right?
Let me do a little searching. The dimensions of the Karma is (consensus, I averaged a bit) are 3"x2.7"x1.1". Do that's 76.2mm x 69mm x 27.9mm. This is a volume of 146,692mm^3.
Now look at the iPod dimensions:
http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ipod/3GiPoddi
The 20G is a thin one (the 10-15G in the diagram was outdated.)
So the iPod is 103.5mm x 61.8mm x 15.7mm. That's 100,421.91mm^3.
The 20G Karma was over 33% larger than a 20G iPod at the time.
The thick iPods (40G) at the time were 119,610.81mm^3. The Karma is still 10% bigger than those too.
(Note, if you redo my math, you'll see I used a bit different numbers. These calculations are calculating volume by 3-dimensions, but that corner protruding from the Karma means that one dimension, the 3.0" one is inflated and thus the volumes are overstated perhaps 5%, so I cut them down a bit in my % comparisons.)
Like I said, it hid its size well. Looking at it, you wouldn't notice, because it was mostly depth. But it was rather large.
You could have perhaps found these figures yourself before you insinuated I was a bald-faced liar.
See links
p /t-2975.htmlt ml
http://forums.designtechnica.com/archive/index.ph
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/sep/08ipod.h
It was not cheaper than a 20GB iPod on day one, which is when I got mine. I know it came down in price after a while. I don't know where I got the idea that it was $100 more than an iPod. Maybe I got confused as to the hard drive sizes. I think with less cachet, bad software, and being bigger than an iPod, it's tough to justify that price in my mind.
By the time the price came down, the word was out, they just weren't reliable. And so they didn't sell well. See the other people's reviews on here. See reviews on cnet shopper. See nearly anywhere.
I did miss one thing in my comments. There is a difference in the line out on the Karma. It has better stereo separation than a headphone out has. That can be pretty significant.
The Karma was a good unit, usability-wise. They were horribly unreliable, but I'll let that slide.
As to your comments:
The line out was nothing special. 97dB wasn't even unusual at the time. You can get that much through the headphone jack on other units. I'm not saying it sounded bad, but it didn't sound any better than anythine else.
100MBps ethernet port. Well, it was a 10/100 NIC in there, and the 100mbps light would light up on my hub. But the throughput was AWFUL on the Karma. I remember measuring it at 6 mbps or so. It was nice to be able to dock it and sync with your computer across the room (in another room in my case) but if you wanted to move a reasonable number of files, you had to put it on USB 2.0 to get it done.
The Java app was horrible. Unbelieveably slow on my Mac OS X machine. I mean astounding. Like serial speeds. And the UI was pretty, but pretty odd too. Also you could select a lot of songs to add to your library at once IIRC. A decent effort, and I liked how it was on the unit for download. But it was symbolic more than anything.
The glowing was fun. I found the flashing annoying.
All in all, really it was the first iPod killer. But it was expensive ($100 more than an iPod retail) and unreliable. Still, if more people had looked at it, more might have bought it and forced Apple to add a few of these features.
A great effort. Honestly, when Rio did that well so long ago and nobody noticed, perhaps they should have stopped and realized it would be difficult to top that technically and threw in the towel sooner. They really couldn't match the iPod marketing.
Well, almost completely.
Just because it isn't available in the US doesn't mean you are forced to pirate it. You could also do without. This is what you would do if it were a physical object that you wanted and no one would sell it to you.
But I agree that there are times that people pirate (myself specifically) when they would gladly pay in the normal way if that option were available.
Companies that put people in this position likely lose money they could have easily have captured.
Like I said, I have a couple common instances where I'd like my mp3 player and my phone to be two separate devices.
Kinda cool though I guess. Thanks for the info. BTW, your link didn't work for me. But a quick search worked since you gave the info.
Then it'd be only $7.50 per customer!
.com talk. The original reason to go public was to get working capital so you could grow the company in ways you couldn't without it. But in reality there are very few companies that are only separated from success by lack of money.
.com days, so I didn't make a lot of dough. I'll say this, it destroyed the company. The company had to replace their competent principals with people with "business experience" and had to take on a CEO who looked the part to Wall Street types. Then the execs couldn't tell us anything about future plans anymore because of SEC rules. And they bought a company that was in a different business than ours, because underwriters didn't like to take one-trick companies public (at that time).
What I mean to say is that there are certain issues with evaluating a companies' IPO based upon their targets for customers instead of their actual customer list.
If you ask me, $750/customer is far too much.
The idea that an IPO is to fuel "explosive growth" is hilarious. That's
Current income is greatly related to how much money you want to raise, because in order to raise the money you are selling a portion of the company. The less your current income, the less your company is worth, so the larger percentage of your company you have to sell to raise a given amount of cash.
Honestly, when a company goes IPO, I have to ask. If this company thinks their stock is so damn valuable, why are they selling it? The answer is usually something other than "this is the best way to raise the cash we need to grow". It's more often "our VCs want their cash out so they can put it somewhere better". Wonderful, I wish the VCs would please let me in on this investment opportunity that is better than this company that's going IPO. I'll invest in that instead.
I went public with a company. This was pre
That was the end of the company. It turned into a whole new company.
Which is really the #1 thing I learned about companies going public. If you liked a company, you don't want them to go public. Because they will turn into a new company when they go public, and there's no guarantee you'll like that one too.
Vonage is a decent company I guess. I'd never invest in them though. Just because you're the lead in a business doesn't mean you're going to do well. Look at TiVo.
K750i is an okay phone. It's no iPod, but I can see where you're coming from here.
The k750i doesn't even have a proper headphone jack. Pretty crazy for a music player, eh?
I don't know what your idea that iPods don't have game play functionality. iPods currently have 4 games on them. Honestly, if you ask me, that's 4 too many. But either way, I don't see how you can say they don't have it.
For the price of that 2GB MS Pro Duo, you could pretty much have an iPod.
I'd have a k750i if it had GSM 850. But I know it wouldn't replace my iPod. I like to leave my iPod in the car when I go inside the store, or even play music from it at home. I'd prefer to have my phone in my pocket while doing these things.
When flash was SLC (stored a single bit per cell). Now NAND flash stores multiple bits per cell (2 bits, 4 values) and the lifetime of the cell is rated at 10,000 writes instead of 100,000. Now I can agree you'll likely get a lot more writes than that, but it'll be more like 100,000 instead of the 1,000,000 you quote.
NAND flash systems use wear levelling, so they spread out that wear, and the flash should last a long time. I still think a hard drive would last longer, but I dunno.
A mini-disc player is larger than an iPod mini.
The (2nd gen, since February) iPod mini plays "18 hours" (tests show more like 25) on the internal rechargeable battery.
An iPod mini holds 4X as much (although it cannot be swapped).
It actually does take mp3s, and fast. Unlike the mini-disc which has to convert them. Slowly, using that awful software.
It has playlist management on the device.
iPod Mini cannot record.
iPod mini doesn't skip either.
It's smaller than the mini-disc player.
It has USB in only.
And it works with a good program, iTunes, not a crappy one.
I'm not saying what you have isn't serviceable. But if you used the iPod Mini, you'd be able to tell the difference, you'd understand.
Mini-disc was doing very well in many countries outside the US. Its market share is now a tiny sliver of the market with the release of good mp3 players like the iPod mini. Even in Japan, Mini-Disc is over now.
Burt Rutan born in 1943. The X-15 project started in 1953. The X-15 first flew in 1959.
So, if Burt was one of the engineers on the original X-15 team, he was 10 (perhaps 9) when he joined.
He's quite a remarkable man, isn't he?
First of all, you don't need LOCK to make an OS. It turns out you don't even need MESI/MERSI! The OS I work on day to day works on hardware with no atomic operations at all and dual processors. There's some cool stuff in there, a lot of computer science I never knew.
But beyond that, if you can't figure out how to do the stuff with MESI/MERSI that you did with atomic operations before, then you need to go back to school. MESI has replaced atomic operations, you don't need bus locking, and you'll do a lot better if you don't use it. Power PC doesn't support bus locking at all.
I said that processors don't talk to each other. They don't. You're right, they do intersignal for cache coherency (MESI/MERSI). I mentioned this in my post. But most cache lines are Shared, they don't cause stop and wait hazards. [Multiple lines saying how NUMA is nice and Intel will adopt it deleted, just read the post you replied to for the info.]
I do not agree with your statements that crossing HT to the CPU won't affect the GPU. If you accept that bringing the memory controller onto the CPU was responsible for reducing memory latencies for the CPU, then you must also accept that moving the memory controller out of the north bridge will increase memory latencies for devices in the north bridge (GPU in this case).
Honestly, I don't accept either. But regardless, you can't have it both ways. Either there's no reason to move the memory controller to the CPU because it doesn't reduce latency, or else there is, but it will cause a slow down for the GPU on the north bridge.
Dual-ported VRAM is a no-go. VRAM isn't cost-effective. It would destroy the entire reason to move the GPU into the north bridge by making the overall system too costly.
The diagrams of the AMD workstations are misleading. Yes, they add more memory channels, but the problem is that the memory all occupies a single memory space. OSes don't know to keep data apart (partly because the programmer of even applications would have to hint it to do so). So one processor has to cross to the other to get its data at often.
Honestly, I don't see a future in splitting memory like that. It'd be better to just quad-interleave a single bank of memory and share it. Then, when only one processor is hitting memory (the other is stopped or in cache), you can use all the bandwidth for that single processor, instead of wasting it. And when both processors do both hit the memory, it's still no slower. This is all especially true when the cores are all in one package.
The marketing slide is funny. It says how you need fewer chips for a basic workstation (reduces cost). Except you've removed a few $1 Super I/O cores and $2 PCI-X bridges that could have been on a single chip for under $5. And in return? All you have to do is put in twice as much RAM at $50/stick. A steal.
An FSB exists in all processors. On an AMD64, the FSB is the DDR memory bus directly, not an intermediate bus from processor to memory controller.
i ndex.x?pg=2
LOCK is an outdated instruction. It is used for indivisible memory accesses. This idea went out in 1990. Processors use MESI (or MERSI or MOESI) protocol now, because bus locking is not efficient (nor always even possible) in multi-processor systems.
See link:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/
MERSI works by having the two processors watch each other's memory accesses so they can keep their caches coherent, instead of locking.
Also note that the only CPU dedicated memory (outside of the register file) in a multi-processor system is the caches for each processor. So each AMD processor does have a dedicated link to its own caches, the bandwidth to that cache is reserved for that processor. But caches are relatively small, and switching tasks on a single core will flush out the cache about as much as moving to the other core anyway.
So I said processors don't talk to each other. I did oversimplify, but here's the gist of my comments. What good is 20GB/sec between processors? You don't need it to send a MERSI flag to other processors for each 32 bytes line accessed. You would need it to copy vast amounts of data between the processors, if you did that. Like I said, there is no instruction to copy data between processors, you must use memory to get between them.
Intel's effeciency is lower when accessing some areas that are highly contested between processors. But most areas of memory are "Shared", not Modified or Reserved by one processor.
AMD's system is better, but it's really easy to overstate the value of it.
We'll see if Intel goes to a system that allows cache line state signalling faster than the FSB. I would imagine their new chips (which can even use the L1 and L2 caches for one processor when the other is shut down) do this, at least when on the same die.
Putting the GPU on the HT bus would be interesting. It would have the negative side effect of causing the GPU to go through the CPU when it needs to access memory. That is because the memory controller is in the CPU on AMD systems. But it would seem that when accessing VRAM, the HT bus speed could be useful.
Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the thing for a while. Winchester is a great core, and Prescott is a power hog, but your Winchester will not withstand hard use on a passive heatsink without a LOT of airflow.
When you said Prescott EE, I figured you meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You should be more specific.
Yonah is dual-core, and two of these new chips are also dual-core. I know you can't get either yet, but the tone of the post was that with this announcement, Intel announced a bunch of stuff, but "Intel should have gone multi-core". They did. The complaints about them not doing so were far off base.
Measuring on the wall is a VERY poor way to measure power usage. If you subtract a little bit too much for overhead (and that's easy to do) you end up making the difference seem larger than it is.
As to "normal" numbers, not only don't I believe Winchester uses 1/3rd the power of Prescott in normal useage, but I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's new processors on "normal" power usage when you don't even have any info on it.
Finally, if your Winchester is 3X better per Watt than Prescott and the new Intel is 5X, then the new Intel is merely 66% better than your Winchester. That seems pretty significant to me.
My next machine was going to be an AMD. Because I like Winchester. But I'd rather not be stuck with DDR, and I'd like a cost-effective dual-core machine, and AMD doesn't seem interested in producing it. Plus just on total power usage, AMD's power consumption for dual core (110W) is too high for me, Intel's new chips will use half as much (50W).
No hyperthreading? AMD doesn't have it either. Intel's reason for not having it (outside of Netburst) is surely the same as AMD's. That is, it doesn't make as much sense when you don't have the huge pipeline of Netburst that you must keep fed.
Integrated Memory Controller? Not a good thing. AMD locks you into DDR, while DDR2 drops in price below DDR. I don't like my processor manufacturer dictating what memory I can use. And besides, I need a north bridge (the traditional home of the memory controller) anyway because the north bridge is the new home of the GPU on all but the highest end machines. Integrated north bridge doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'd like low-latency RAM access, but if it takes an integrated memory controller to get it, I'm not quite as certain it makes sense.
Interprocessor HT comms? Processors don't talk to each other. Think of the instruction on the processor that accesses the other processor? Can't think of one? There isn't one. Processors only interact through memory. Memory is accessed through the FSB, not HT, even on AMD chips. Thus I don't need interprocessor HT. The chips can snoop each others memory busses just fine.
No vector processing (SIMD)? What happened to SSE? These chips have MMX & SSE1-3, which are all vector processing. AMD has them too.
I don't see cell processors as the future for PCs, for the same reason Apple doesn't use the PPC Cell processor. They're not good performers on machines that have to run legacy code. And PCs run a lot of legacy code.
I do agree these processors are a simple evolution. But I don't see that as a bad thing. Processor work is almost always evolutionary. And the 386 architecture/instruction set has evolved a lot, from 20 MIPS to perhaps thousands.
Prescott EE isn't dual-core as far as I know.
But even wth dual cores, against Prescott EE's one (I used the 3.4GHz model as my power reference I believe), AMD X2 4800+ isn't 5X as powerful. Even 3X is a long stretch. In general, I'd say each AMD core perhaps clocks in at 25% faster than a Prescott EE 3.4GHz. That's 2.5X faster, at 10% more power.
I'll say this, Intel made their numbers look good by using their worst performance/Watt chip in recent memory.
Beyond that, the main thrust here is the misunderstanding of the parent (like saying Intel's chips should have gone multi core, when they did).
AMD does not have 5x as good performance per watt as Prescott.
Prescott EE is 103 Watts max.
Athlon X2 4800+ is 110W max.
So unless you think the AMD chip is 5.4 times faster than the Prescott EE (hint, it isn't), you're off base.
And I don't know what your comments are about Intel should have gone multi-core with P-M. Both Conroe and Merom (the chips they announced) are dual core and they are derivatives of P-M.
As the article said, you'll know more about the chips later this week. My guess is they didn't under hype the announcement, they just stretched the announcement out.
Microsoft doesn't make harddrives.
But perhaps you're saying MS simply bought up enough hard drives years ago to last the length of the Xbox run. Well, there's two problems with that.
1. They didn't. I've opened at least one Xbox a year and I know what drives are in them. I didn't just make up the model number on that drive, you know. They are that particular Seagate 40G drive right now with the 10G firmware. And a friend who deals with OEM drives told me it is the only 40G available. And he appears to be correct.
2. That wouldn't be cost effective either. The whole point is to get drives cheaper now than you did before. If you bought them all at the start, you'd have fixed your cost for the life of the product, which ensures it wouldn't drop.
The iPod drive is not custom made, it was sold by Toshiba before the iPod even came out. Just no one else thought to use it for what Apple did. And Apple is a victim of the same problem. Toshiba doesn't make a 1.8" drive below 20GB now. Many people would be happy with 15G, but Toshiba refuses to make it (more accurately, won't make it and sell it for less than the 20G).
The drive vendors are smart. They protect their revenues. They don't want them to drop. Additionally, the problem is that it isn't cheaper to make a (capacity-wise) smaller drive than a bigger one. The current heads and media are capable of 80-133GB per platter in the 3.5" range, you don't save any money by not filling at least one side up.
I love how you use "custom made" and "cheap" in the same sentence. They don't go together. The way to get something cheap is to buy commodity parts, and have multiple suppliers at the ready. If you buy custom, you blow that away.
And since there's only one supplier of 40G HDs, the price on them isn't going to be as good as if they were in the meat of the market where there is competition. Going to 2.5" put them at the cost-effective low-end of the market, where they wanted to be, instead of as a specialty item.
I know I'd love my Xbox 360 to be a lard-drived media server, like my HD TiVo with 400G in it. And why wouldn't MS want to sell me media over the internet to the 360? I'm a little bummed they didn't go that direction.
I was going to respond to the parent, but I'll respond to you instead.
Brownouts are killers. Because switching power supplies have an effective negative impedance, brownouts cause them to draw more current than normal and die.
We had a serious brownout here at my place a year ago (down to about 50V, I measured). My fluorescent lights kept working apparently normally, so it took some time for me to figure out what was going on. I thought I had lost just one leg of my power. But once I noticed it was a brownout, I flipped the main breaker at my place.
But it was too late, the power supply on one of my ethernet switches killed itself in the classic fashion. But at least I saved myself more trouble.
Anyway, back to the parent poster, I'd rather the brownouts did trigger breakers and cause blackouts, cause as you point out, they cause a lot less damage. Honestly, I'd think the power company would feel the same way. Stuff that breaks under brownouts will tend to be more expensive than the stuff hurt in a regular voltage surge.
Explain to me how you learned to run Gedit, Kate or OpenOffice Writer from the man page.
No? You learned from other docs? Me too. Some even free. Yes, you can learn to run Word from the help files that come with Word, just like you learned these other programs with the docs that came with them.
But none of that is the same as the dummies books. Dummies books don't list command switches in alphabetical order just because it's simple. They explain the minimum to get by, and in order of importance.
See, you just lump all documentation together, not seeing that there is reason for other kinds of documentation and support than what comes with the software. GNU understands this, and Cygnus has made money this way.
You just go much too far in saying that Windows is the only program some people can't figure out how to run without some extra documentation.
I never said the writer of the vi man page wasted their time. Although I'll say it now. The vi man page sucks, it is a waste. But it is the exception. Most man pages explain some useful info, even if it isn't enough to really know how to use the tool completely.
Of course, I could be wrong.
The hard drive is the single biggest mistake MS made with the Xbox, from a unit cost perspective.
Why? Because you have to drop the price of a game machine over its lifetime. So you hope that the price of making it gets lower over its lifetime. The problem is that hard drives don't really get cheaper over time, they get bigger.
When the Xbox came out, MS got a deal on some left over Western Digital 8GB and Quantum (I think) 10GB drives. They maybe paid $40 for each. How much is a 8GB or 10GB drive now? Answer, you can't get one, even as an OEM. The smallest drive made now is 40GB. It's the Seagate ST340015A. And it's sold to OEMs only. It's the same drive Sony sells in their PS2 HDD add-on.
So MS buys that and gets a custom firmware for it to limit it to 10GB (and then limits to 8GB in software). How much does that drive cost, in quantity? Maybe $30. And it's the only 40GB drive left, if Seagate didn't make it, they'd be buying 80GB or 120GB drives from someone else at an even higher cost (perhaps $40).
A PIII (w/Celeron sized-cache) was mildly expensive 4 years ago. Now? Peanuts, in quantity. 64MB RAM? Cheap, perhaps $10. A GeForce 3-class video chip? $50 at Fry's on a card in a box with 128MB VRAM (Xbox has no VRAM), surely under $15 OEM.
This is also probably why MS selected a 2.5" drive. They simply couldn't get a 3.5" drive with small enough capacity. By going 2.5", they can get a 20GB drive (of which Xbox emulation will take up 8GB) and sell you an upgrade later. In 3.5", they could get a 40GB today, probably 80GB tomorrow. By the end of the life of Xbox 360, it'd be 120GB minimum, easy.
Meanwhile, the sell price of Xbox has dropped from $300 to $150. With perhaps 25% of that locked up in the hard drive, it's a tough squeeze. And we all know the real profit is in selling games. If you bought an Xbox 4 years ago, MS probably sold you 8-10 games by now. If you buy one today, how many will you buy before you move on? 5? How many will be for the full $50 and not $20 platinum hits?
It's no surprise to me MS wants to get 360 on the road ASAP. Selling an Xbox is near a losing proposition for them now, better to get people on the next platform, where they can buy $50 controllers and $20 battery packs/chargers for them.
Making the HD optional clears a path to a lot more cost cutting in the future. It makes a ton of sense. So I was shocked (in the E3 timeframe) to hear MS was jumping on that grenade again and including one standard. Don't go expecting a PS3 to have a standard hard drive.
But I hope both make good use of the optional drives. It really does improve the gameplay, a lot. And it's a near necessity if you want to sell online add-on packs for games at $5 every two months.
I agree many hardcore gamers won't buy XBox 360 at the $400 price. I know my hardcore friends are mostly staying away. And that's bad news for MS, because if you were at E3, you know there weren't many A-list titles in the pipe for XBox. MS has to get gamers over to Xbox 360 and fast.
My personal theory on the price is that MS expects very short supplies before Xmas. They're already floating a November (even Black Friday!) release date. That's last-minute. Surely the schedule is already up against the wall, and if doesn't slip at all, it'll make Xmas, but not with many units to sell. So, if you have only a few units to sell, why not make as much as possible off them? As long as you sell them all out, you can't lose. So make it a $400 launch and drop the price to $300 in February.
BTW, I have a 360 ($400 version) on order. But none of my friends (some who even work in the console gaming industry) do. Good luck MS, it's going to be tough getting this thing established the way you wanted to before PS3 comes out.
That is layered on top of HDMI or DVI. It isn't an interface.
HDMI is like DVI but without the analog and with audio (two channel only according to spec). I don't think it's a successor to DVI, since it doesn't have analog or dual-link. It definitely isn't "proposed", as I have two devices with HDMI connectors in my house already (connected together, no less).
I think you mistyped a bit up there.
Converting DVI to VGA is very difficult, unless the DVI connector has the VGA signal on it, which is can. Then you don't convert, it's just a connector change. If you actually needed to convert, it'd be expensive.
I don't know if HDMI supports dual-link, and I know it doesn't support analog.
I think this is roughly what you meant to say, but a single typo made a bit of a mess of it.
These kids are 17, not 7. It's time for them to start doing things right for the right reasons, not just because they might get a whuppin'. This is just one example. My neighbor I grew up with who was kept strongly in line by his father (which only encouraged his rebellion) and ended up in jail immediately after HS graduation is another example. Or the stereotypical "Catholic schoolgirl".
I also cannot agree on your fighting the charges because you don't like them. Don't like the law? Write your congressman. The courts apply the laws, not make them. Honestly, these kids will likely all plead down to misdemeanors anyway.
Part of my complaints here come from my concern that people think our court system was created so that people with great lawyers can escape punishment. I don't agree. It was created to keep the innocent from being convicted wrongly, not to let those who actually did wrongs get away with it. I know that is a side-effect, possibly an unavoidable one, but I'm not going to say it's okay just because we can't figure out a way to stop it.
I think these kids records are probably safe. Juvenile records are not easy to access once a kid reaches adulthood. I could be wrong though.
I don't see down below how your statement that after they did something wrong, they should have explained it was wrong and applied new software, and explain the next steps is any different from what happened. They were caught once with little effects, they did it again. That's how they got in the big trouble.
I don't think the administrative support staff needs an object lesson. The lesson is already this: if you have physical access to a machine you can compromise it. End of story. I'm sure they knew that already. They put locks on the computers for the same reason I put locks on my house, to keep honest people out. Right next to my locked door I have a window that is easily broken. I don't bar it, because I know it's a battle I can't win, and I'm content with the level of security I have.
But I don't have the equivalent of these kids in my neighborhood breaking into houses. If I did, I might just consider moving, instead of making my house a citadel. Yes, I know this is the equivalent of your "take the computer away" proposition, so I do see the merits of it. I just don't see how the fact that they didn't do it makes the kids blameless for what they did. Just like me moving away doesn't solve the crime problem in my (now old) neighborhood, taking away these kids opportunity to do wrong doesn't necessarily help them learn not to do it, at least as far as I can see.
Apology accepted for the end of your post. I did find it out of line, but I wasn't offended. No ill will here.