It's not the temperature of the CPU that I think is the issue.
Sorry. I wasn't referring to this particular issue... I was just saying it brings up larger issues of safety and what temperature is "okay" for a laptop to run at. --ThinkingInBinary
I have a Pentium M. The second Google result for "Asus M2400Ne" shows this. I would never buy a Pentium 4 laptop, for the same reason that I'm not buying a Conroe laptop, even if Merom comes out later. They are too hot, and are really absurd. (From what I've heard, they run at something like 50% CPU speed when unplugged, get ridiculously low battery life, circa 1-2 hours, and are full of fans and fan noise. I'm not saying any of this is true--it's just what I've heard.)
That sounds absolutely awesome. We could do a whole series of SCO shows, like SCO Survivor, where the remaining employees fight each other for control of the company, and they use lawsuits as the competitions. Or SCO Idol, where viewers get to vote for the SCO lawyer with the most ridiculous claim in a lawsuit. The possibilities are endless!
First, my major point was that any company that sponsors SCO or their activities is evil.
Second, what I was saying is that, given that MySQL's business model involves, for the most part, giving away software and selling support, and given that they've gotten a lot of help from open-source developers, I think it would be better and nicer if they gave away all of their software, and charged for support, just like they do with the MySQL database itself. I would wager that the higher-end enterprise stuff is pretty complex to configure, and most companies would be happy to pay for support instead of wandering around trying to figure it out themselves.
Hmmm... on a completely cough random topic, I think I might switch from MySQL to Postgres.
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that. (Although I believe some of the MySQL products are available only to enterprise customers, which is evil.)
Linux is an open-source version of Unix designed for Intel chips.
No, it's a clone of Unix, and it is no longer designed only for Intel chips. It was originally designed just for the 386, but now runs on anything, including your toaster.
SCO is now concentrating on allowing businesses to create "biztones for quick distribution of business information, tied to business applications."
What the hell is a "biztone"?! Is it some sort of ringtone for your cell phone where instead of ringing it goes, "Yeah, um, about those TPS reports..."?
This is such a waste of their time. Do they really think anyone is going to take them seriously? Sure, a few misguided folks might, but, as far as I know, SCO's reputation is now squat in the tech industry. Besides, the incentives SCO offers probably won't be enough to pay off the lawsuits that SCO will file against you before you've finished your app.
Perhaps they should create a contest for "most creative way to destroy SCO" or something like that instead. It'd be much more fun. (Although seeing who actually enters this contest might be interesting.)
Perhaps this will convince manufacturers to start thinking about the temperatures that their computers run at. Sure, they make sure that the processor and hard drive run below their rated maximum temperatures, but in a practical sense, they've been letting computers run too hot. My Asus M2400Ne runs pretty cool most of the time, but the hard drive and AC adapter (both the power brick and the plug) can get so hot that they burn you a little if you hold them for a few seconds. This is ridiculous. You can't build a product that reaches insane temperatures, and then stick a little label that says "Do not use with less than 3 feet of space next to eachvent" on it! Let's see some better cooling. Personally, I think a laptop with one big (4 to 6 inches), slowly rotating fan in the middle of the bottom, plus exhaust vents on the sides and back, would actually look nice, keep the laptop much cooler (no more "hot spots" on the keyboard), and run quietly. (You'd need rubber feet to hold it up enough, but most bottom vents need them.) This would probably also help with blocked vents, since it's much harder to block a huge circle-shaped vent in the middle of the case than a small square vent near the side, where the laptop is likely to rest on your leg.
For those who, like me, are wondering about how the Levanta Intrepid (the actual box) can remotely manage servers with such "precision"... I looked it up on their website.
Basically, all of the servers that are managed by the Intrepid are set up to network boot, and use network disks. So the Intrepid controls the kernel they boot with and their filesystems. This gives it the ability to install or uninstall software behind-the-scenes, as well as make byte-level backups of servers and transition them to other machines (simply by switching around which server boots to which disk).
I've seen Levanta's ads in Linux Journal before. Besides the silly name, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise--remote administration, deployment, and management of servers. I don't know how well it actually works, or how painful the integration with the managed servers is, but it certainly sounds cool.
Do you think the browsing model where active content is executed in the user's browser broken? How is it different from active content in office documents? Can these models be fixed?
Well of course you do have to be careful. It's our responsibility to help users be safe, but users also want a pleasant user experience. Imagine an extensibility model so severely limited that you can't save files you download from the Internet, run any application, or save settings. It's our job to draw a line between those two extremes, and that's what we've been doing for the last few years - refining that line.
I want to point out that every browser has an extensibility model of some sort, and they all have security & usability challenges to overcome.
I think IE could do better in this area. There's a very simple definition of what active code in a browser should be able to do. Simply put, it should not be able to touch any other part of the system without user permission. When it is allowed to access other parts of the system (to open or save files, or to print a web page) the user should be asked if it's okay, and the question should be asked unambiguously. (For example, the dialog box could pop up like a balloon message, pointing to the web page's tab and saying "This web page at www.domain.com wants to load the file C:\path\to\file.txt. This will give www.domain.com access to the contents of the file. Is this okay?" or something like that.)
I also wish they would stop with the EXE-blocking stuff. Frankly, a browser shouldn't offer crackers or spyware peddlers any vulnerabilities to exploit, but it shouldn't make the assumption that all content is bad. If a user opens, or is redirected to, an executable file, it is their responsibility to make sure it is valid. Use code signing or something, if you want. But don't just block all programs.
I think the whole Web 2.0 trend (using heavy JavaScript DOM, XmlHttpRequest, and CSS) will probably boost innovation in browsers. As these apps (and "mashups" thereof) get more complicated, it becomes easier for developers to just say "use a standards-compliant browser". This will result in larger and larger groups of people downloading Firefox, Opera, or other standards-compliant browsers, because their friends told them about a site that needs it.
Web browser innovation is fueled by web site innovation, and vice-versa. If we want "cooler" features in our browsers, we need to develop sites and services that fully utilize the existing features, and push the envelope, while still accomodating enough of the user base to make them useful.
I disagree. There is revolutionary development in browsers; by the nature of the web, though, it has to happen slowly. In the past few years, I can list a handful of things that have been added to many browsers: JavaScript DOM, PNG, SVG, XMLHttpRequest, CSS (increasingly, and newer versions), and RSS/other feed systems. These types of things have to be phased in over time, because web developers simply won't release a site that most people can't use.
I can think of only two companies that have attempted to sell robots in the domestic market, Sony and its err.. Dog, and Dyson with a robotic vacumm cleaner.
Um, iRobot? The Roomba (and the Scooba, more recently)? They're much more well-known than Dyson's robotic vacuum, and much more useful and reasonably priced than the Aibo. The Roomba and Scooba seem to fulfill the goals of safety and functionality. They have a simple enough task that safety is just a matter of stopping if something is in their way, and they have dedicated hardware to do their job.
Admittedly, they aren't general-purpose robots, but I predict that specialized robots like the ones iRobot makes will be much more commonplace and useful than humanoid robots that can vaguely interact with real humans, wander around, and not do much else. Building a robot for the purpose of vacuuming or mopping a floor is 1000x easier than building a robot that could learn how to vacuum, if you gave it an upright vacuum and it had the dexterity to operate it. Robots should not use human tools, they should be tools.
This is sorta off-topic, but MIT actually uses client certificates for authentication to some internal web sites. It's cool to see the stuff they can implement when most of their user base is technically competent.
Seriously, that's really cool. I know if something like that was ever going to be rolled out in the U.S., it 1) wouldn't, because people would be scared of privacy issues, and it 2) would have all the fun crypto removed, because people here are stupid and would think (maybe rightfully, who knows) that it would allow the government to spy on your computer or that adding good crypto to something makes it vulnerable to hackerz! (People here are idiots sometimes. I wish they weren't.)
If the trend is towards virtual machines, why are we using emulated virtual machines? Things like VMware are taking off, and Intel has Virtualization Technology (TM) that essentially allows a program to run another protected mode task, with any privilege level, and simply trap any privileged IO operations. If any mainstream OS implemented it right, they could basically do what "386 Enhanced" mode did for older programs, and sandbox them while running at full speed for the rest of the code (that doesn't require interaction with the sandbox to decide whether it's okay, or redirect it to host resources).
it'd be far more practical if it were an external device that you could take off...How would a thin stick-on magnet that you could attach to a finger work?
That's just what I was thinking.
I don't want a magnet *in* my finger, but I'd love a way to sense magnetic fields that was entirely external. I wonder if the nerve endings inside the finger are that much more sensitive that it wouldn't work outside the finger. (/me needs to go find a very small magnet and a piece of Scotch tape.)
It's not a "fairly standard application" that we all take for granted. It's Google, a big corporation, openly and freely providing one of their major software applications for Linux (albeit using Wine). This does NOT happen very often, and we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it! It's NOT just a "regular" software release.
"Debug everywhere" is true. My phone's JVM crashed once because I overflowed an integer. In Java, a supposedly "safe" language. Phone manufacturers really need to get their acts together. Perhaps if some company came out with a Java-on-a-chip solution that allowed most of the phone to run in Java, then interfacing would be easier and reliability would be higher (because you're only debugging the one Java implementation instead of the native OS plus a JVM tacked on to that).
J2ME will never be write-once, run-anywhere. And it's not Sun's fault, it's the developers' fault. Just like on Windows, all the devs want their applications to have cool, skinned UI's, and they all create (relatively) proprietary, skinned, custom interfaces. Of course the images have to be a different size and the buttons have to be labelled differently for each phone, so they have to make different versions. Add on to that the stack of API's that are only supported on some phones (JTWI helped, but not much), and you have a system that basically requires building custom JAR files for each phone, if not actually recompiling the program itself.
We should really praise these efforts, since anything that encourages portability is good, but, realistically, developers are too lazy and too obsessed with looks to write an app that just uses a standard GUI and/or adjusts to screen size and device features.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. I wasn't referring to this particular issue... I was just saying it brings up larger issues of safety and what temperature is "okay" for a laptop to run at. --ThinkingInBinary
I have a Pentium M. The second Google result for "Asus M2400Ne" shows this. I would never buy a Pentium 4 laptop, for the same reason that I'm not buying a Conroe laptop, even if Merom comes out later. They are too hot, and are really absurd. (From what I've heard, they run at something like 50% CPU speed when unplugged, get ridiculously low battery life, circa 1-2 hours, and are full of fans and fan noise. I'm not saying any of this is true--it's just what I've heard.)
That sounds absolutely awesome. We could do a whole series of SCO shows, like SCO Survivor, where the remaining employees fight each other for control of the company, and they use lawsuits as the competitions. Or SCO Idol, where viewers get to vote for the SCO lawyer with the most ridiculous claim in a lawsuit. The possibilities are endless!
First, my major point was that any company that sponsors SCO or their activities is evil.
Second, what I was saying is that, given that MySQL's business model involves, for the most part, giving away software and selling support, and given that they've gotten a lot of help from open-source developers, I think it would be better and nicer if they gave away all of their software, and charged for support, just like they do with the MySQL database itself. I would wager that the higher-end enterprise stuff is pretty complex to configure, and most companies would be happy to pay for support instead of wandering around trying to figure it out themselves.
Hmmm... on a completely cough random topic, I think I might switch from MySQL to Postgres.
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that. (Although I believe some of the MySQL products are available only to enterprise customers, which is evil.)
No, it's a clone of Unix, and it is no longer designed only for Intel chips. It was originally designed just for the 386, but now runs on anything, including your toaster.
What the hell is a "biztone"?! Is it some sort of ringtone for your cell phone where instead of ringing it goes, "Yeah, um, about those TPS reports..."?
This is such a waste of their time. Do they really think anyone is going to take them seriously? Sure, a few misguided folks might, but, as far as I know, SCO's reputation is now squat in the tech industry. Besides, the incentives SCO offers probably won't be enough to pay off the lawsuits that SCO will file against you before you've finished your app.
Perhaps they should create a contest for "most creative way to destroy SCO" or something like that instead. It'd be much more fun. (Although seeing who actually enters this contest might be interesting.)
Perhaps this will convince manufacturers to start thinking about the temperatures that their computers run at. Sure, they make sure that the processor and hard drive run below their rated maximum temperatures, but in a practical sense, they've been letting computers run too hot. My Asus M2400Ne runs pretty cool most of the time, but the hard drive and AC adapter (both the power brick and the plug) can get so hot that they burn you a little if you hold them for a few seconds. This is ridiculous. You can't build a product that reaches insane temperatures, and then stick a little label that says "Do not use with less than 3 feet of space next to eachvent" on it! Let's see some better cooling. Personally, I think a laptop with one big (4 to 6 inches), slowly rotating fan in the middle of the bottom, plus exhaust vents on the sides and back, would actually look nice, keep the laptop much cooler (no more "hot spots" on the keyboard), and run quietly. (You'd need rubber feet to hold it up enough, but most bottom vents need them.) This would probably also help with blocked vents, since it's much harder to block a huge circle-shaped vent in the middle of the case than a small square vent near the side, where the laptop is likely to rest on your leg.
For those who, like me, are wondering about how the Levanta Intrepid (the actual box) can remotely manage servers with such "precision"... I looked it up on their website.
Basically, all of the servers that are managed by the Intrepid are set up to network boot, and use network disks. So the Intrepid controls the kernel they boot with and their filesystems. This gives it the ability to install or uninstall software behind-the-scenes, as well as make byte-level backups of servers and transition them to other machines (simply by switching around which server boots to which disk).
To me, at least, this seems quite clever.
I've seen Levanta's ads in Linux Journal before. Besides the silly name, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise--remote administration, deployment, and management of servers. I don't know how well it actually works, or how painful the integration with the managed servers is, but it certainly sounds cool.
I know. That was my point. The article and I were both talking about IE 7.
I think IE could do better in this area. There's a very simple definition of what active code in a browser should be able to do. Simply put, it should not be able to touch any other part of the system without user permission. When it is allowed to access other parts of the system (to open or save files, or to print a web page) the user should be asked if it's okay, and the question should be asked unambiguously. (For example, the dialog box could pop up like a balloon message, pointing to the web page's tab and saying "This web page at www.domain.com wants to load the file C:\path\to\file.txt. This will give www.domain.com access to the contents of the file. Is this okay?" or something like that.)
I also wish they would stop with the EXE-blocking stuff. Frankly, a browser shouldn't offer crackers or spyware peddlers any vulnerabilities to exploit, but it shouldn't make the assumption that all content is bad. If a user opens, or is redirected to, an executable file, it is their responsibility to make sure it is valid. Use code signing or something, if you want. But don't just block all programs.
I think the whole Web 2.0 trend (using heavy JavaScript DOM, XmlHttpRequest, and CSS) will probably boost innovation in browsers. As these apps (and "mashups" thereof) get more complicated, it becomes easier for developers to just say "use a standards-compliant browser". This will result in larger and larger groups of people downloading Firefox, Opera, or other standards-compliant browsers, because their friends told them about a site that needs it.
Web browser innovation is fueled by web site innovation, and vice-versa. If we want "cooler" features in our browsers, we need to develop sites and services that fully utilize the existing features, and push the envelope, while still accomodating enough of the user base to make them useful.
I disagree. There is revolutionary development in browsers; by the nature of the web, though, it has to happen slowly. In the past few years, I can list a handful of things that have been added to many browsers: JavaScript DOM, PNG, SVG, XMLHttpRequest, CSS (increasingly, and newer versions), and RSS/other feed systems. These types of things have to be phased in over time, because web developers simply won't release a site that most people can't use.
Um, iRobot? The Roomba (and the Scooba, more recently)? They're much more well-known than Dyson's robotic vacuum, and much more useful and reasonably priced than the Aibo. The Roomba and Scooba seem to fulfill the goals of safety and functionality. They have a simple enough task that safety is just a matter of stopping if something is in their way, and they have dedicated hardware to do their job.
Admittedly, they aren't general-purpose robots, but I predict that specialized robots like the ones iRobot makes will be much more commonplace and useful than humanoid robots that can vaguely interact with real humans, wander around, and not do much else. Building a robot for the purpose of vacuuming or mopping a floor is 1000x easier than building a robot that could learn how to vacuum, if you gave it an upright vacuum and it had the dexterity to operate it. Robots should not use human tools, they should be tools.
This is sorta off-topic, but MIT actually uses client certificates for authentication to some internal web sites. It's cool to see the stuff they can implement when most of their user base is technically competent.
<whine>I WANT ONE!</whine>
Seriously, that's really cool. I know if something like that was ever going to be rolled out in the U.S., it 1) wouldn't, because people would be scared of privacy issues, and it 2) would have all the fun crypto removed, because people here are stupid and would think (maybe rightfully, who knows) that it would allow the government to spy on your computer or that adding good crypto to something makes it vulnerable to hackerz! (People here are idiots sometimes. I wish they weren't.)
I have the game. It's called Lights Out. Here is the manufacturer's page (it's made by Tiger), and here is an interesting page about it.
If the trend is towards virtual machines, why are we using emulated virtual machines? Things like VMware are taking off, and Intel has Virtualization Technology (TM) that essentially allows a program to run another protected mode task, with any privilege level, and simply trap any privileged IO operations. If any mainstream OS implemented it right, they could basically do what "386 Enhanced" mode did for older programs, and sandbox them while running at full speed for the rest of the code (that doesn't require interaction with the sandbox to decide whether it's okay, or redirect it to host resources).
That's just what I was thinking.
I don't want a magnet *in* my finger, but I'd love a way to sense magnetic fields that was entirely external. I wonder if the nerve endings inside the finger are that much more sensitive that it wouldn't work outside the finger. (/me needs to go find a very small magnet and a piece of Scotch tape.)
It's Core Duo, not Duo Core. Core Duo is a dual-core CPU. No wonder everyone's confused--even us geeks can't get it right.
It's not a "fairly standard application" that we all take for granted. It's Google, a big corporation, openly and freely providing one of their major software applications for Linux (albeit using Wine). This does NOT happen very often, and we should bow down and praise those (Google) who do it! It's NOT just a "regular" software release.
"Debug everywhere" is true. My phone's JVM crashed once because I overflowed an integer. In Java, a supposedly "safe" language. Phone manufacturers really need to get their acts together. Perhaps if some company came out with a Java-on-a-chip solution that allowed most of the phone to run in Java, then interfacing would be easier and reliability would be higher (because you're only debugging the one Java implementation instead of the native OS plus a JVM tacked on to that).
J2ME will never be write-once, run-anywhere. And it's not Sun's fault, it's the developers' fault. Just like on Windows, all the devs want their applications to have cool, skinned UI's, and they all create (relatively) proprietary, skinned, custom interfaces. Of course the images have to be a different size and the buttons have to be labelled differently for each phone, so they have to make different versions. Add on to that the stack of API's that are only supported on some phones (JTWI helped, but not much), and you have a system that basically requires building custom JAR files for each phone, if not actually recompiling the program itself.
We should really praise these efforts, since anything that encourages portability is good, but, realistically, developers are too lazy and too obsessed with looks to write an app that just uses a standard GUI and/or adjusts to screen size and device features.
It's not the voltage that breaks it, it's the extra heat generated by the extra power being used. I think.