However, MS's customers are no longer on the upgrade bandwagon so MS can't easily push new protocols into the market. Our company is still 100% on Office/Outlook 2003 and nobody wants to change that. And given the complaints I hear about Office 2007 I have a feeling that we're not alone.
It's as though people assume that ISPs are going to just drag a cable to your house that connects directly to "the Internet" without going through any switches or routers or anything else that could become a bottleneck at any point.
That's how a well designed DSL system works. AFAIK large ISPs usually don't have bottlenecks upstream of the DSLAM because they are close to the backbone. Smaller ones who rent bandwidth from the big guys might be different.
That reasoning may make sense. Now how many Jimbos and Jethros are there in particle physics? 10,000 maybe? So if there a 1% chance on average that they're wrong the probability that they're all wrong is on the order of 1E-6 (somewhat higher because they're not independent of each other.) This sounds very much like the usual global warming skeptic: "But the climatologists may be wrong!" Maybe, but not (almost) all of them all of the time.
My recent experience is that any non-trivial RAM problems take days to catch. I run memtest86+ for at least a weekend if I suspect a memory problem, less isn't worth it.
Performance isn't an issue for the BIOS anyway. It spends 99% of its time waiting for IO devices (or memory, in the memory test, which is usually skipped because you can't test GBs of memory in a tolerable time.) The only good reason why BIOSes are still mostly Assembler is legacy. Oh, and we used (some) C in the BIOS in the early 90s. Linking Borland C with Phoenix BIOS code was interesting though.
Not bad. I guess I'll have to check out more of that newfangled kiddie music than listening to the golden oldies like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep:)
You're right. I've become a, of all things, Evanescence fan. Without downloading "Fallen", more or less by accident, I would never have become exposed to that kind of music as a guy in my 40s. Now I've bought their 4 CDs.
Oh, and if you don't know them, download "Fallen" and listen to it a few times.
You'd be right if the energy cost of a large TV was noticeable in end users' wallets. But it's not.
It's the usual thing about internalizing energy costs. Energy is way too cheap for the market to have much of an effect. Why else would the US need gas mileage standards?
They get their ad revenue for sending them, not for you listening. Filtering them out can't be too hard and won't cost them. Just like AdBlock downloads the ads but doesn't display them.
I've seen several cases where OO.o could open files that MS Word or Excel wouldn't. Also, the ability to compare and merge two spreadsheets has been a lifesaver once when two people made changes to an important complicated spreadsheet. These days I use OO.o as the default and only open with MS Office when I have to (very rarely.) Oh, and I just relegated Outlook to a VirtualBox VM. I think that spare XP license will run in VirtualBox on any host. WGA accepted it without a hitch. Next step: Move the domain-enabled office PC into a VirtualBox jail as a disk image. I wanted a bigger disk anyway but reinstalling Windows and everything? Ouch.
I have to agree. The manufacturer can generally reload the firmware from scratch through a serial or diag port. After all that's what they do in manufacturing. When I worked with disk drives, we had ROMware, firmware (in flash) and Diskware. The ROM is mask programmed and has only boot code that can program the flash ROM, the flash ROM can be reloaded via the disk interface or a serial port (and can't do much more than load a track from disk), and the disk contains the actual code. Then we got rid of the flash ROM and things became a little more exciting because the code in ROM had to be able to read and write a few sectors reliably - for the entire lifetime of the product [line], including cost reductions.
On modern drives, the data is randomized internally. Since PRML has worse error rates for certain repeating patterns than for random data, all modern drives XOR your data with a pseudo random sequence before recording.
One reason why a single overwrite is probably enough: The MR element is much narrower than the write head gap (less than one half), so tracks can be packed tightly together; they actually interfere with their neighbors. So the only reason why any previous magnetic signal should be left over is if the drive writes slightly offtrack - in different directions on neighboring tracks. Recording is always done to saturation, so nothing is left over on the track itself.
Every disk and tape drive I've come to know well has a 3-wire TTL level RS232 port for diagnostics and manufacturing. But the specs for the ports are usually NDA level confidential.
Slashdot Mirror
However, MS's customers are no longer on the upgrade bandwagon so MS can't easily push new protocols into the market.
Our company is still 100% on Office/Outlook 2003 and nobody wants to change that. And given the complaints I hear about Office 2007 I have a feeling that we're not alone.
It is QOS if I get the full bandwidth I pay for and they allocate it between protocols. Otherwise it's throttling.
It's as though people assume that ISPs are going to just drag a cable to your house that connects directly to "the Internet" without going through any switches or routers or anything else that could become a bottleneck at any point.
That's how a well designed DSL system works. AFAIK large ISPs usually don't have bottlenecks upstream of the DSLAM because they are close to the backbone. Smaller ones who rent bandwidth from the big guys might be different.
That reasoning may make sense.
Now how many Jimbos and Jethros are there in particle physics? 10,000 maybe? So if there a 1% chance on average that they're wrong the probability that they're all wrong is on the order of 1E-6 (somewhat higher because they're not independent of each other.)
This sounds very much like the usual global warming skeptic: "But the climatologists may be wrong!" Maybe, but not (almost) all of them all of the time.
Who cares about economic? See the War on Drugs. It's always economic for *some*.
My recent experience is that any non-trivial RAM problems take days to catch. I run memtest86+ for at least a weekend if I suspect a memory problem, less isn't worth it.
Performance isn't an issue for the BIOS anyway. It spends 99% of its time waiting for IO devices (or memory, in the memory test, which is usually skipped because you can't test GBs of memory in a tolerable time.)
The only good reason why BIOSes are still mostly Assembler is legacy.
Oh, and we used (some) C in the BIOS in the early 90s. Linking Borland C with Phoenix BIOS code was interesting though.
Good stuff. Check out Lacuna Coil.
http://www.last.fm/music/Lacuna+Coil/_/Our+Truth
Yeah, but I can listen "Child in Time" every day. And hearing Ozzie wail "can you hear me calling out your name" still gives me the shivers sometimes.
Songsmith will make us laugh endlessly.
Van Halen - The Microsoft Songsmith Sessions vol. 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kxqMpGAL3I&feature=related
The father's name is Bill or Mac or Buddy or something.
Reminds me of a chili cook off when we called ours "Sphincter Burn." Jalapenos, habaneros and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce, yum.
Not bad. I guess I'll have to check out more of that newfangled kiddie music than listening to the golden oldies like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep :)
Better link for posterity... http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=n-q9Enl2O2Y
You're right. I've become a, of all things, Evanescence fan. Without downloading "Fallen", more or less by accident, I would never have become exposed to that kind of music as a guy in my 40s. Now I've bought their 4 CDs.
Oh, and if you don't know them, download "Fallen" and listen to it a few times.
You'd be right if the energy cost of a large TV was noticeable in end users' wallets. But it's not.
It's the usual thing about internalizing energy costs. Energy is way too cheap for the market to have much of an effect. Why else would the US need gas mileage standards?
They get their ad revenue for sending them, not for you listening.
Filtering them out can't be too hard and won't cost them. Just like AdBlock downloads the ads but doesn't display them.
Yup. Plus, neither Quantum nor Maxtor had manufacturing plants. Quantum drives were built by MKE and Maxtor also had contract manufacturers AFAIR.
I've seen several cases where OO.o could open files that MS Word or Excel wouldn't.
Also, the ability to compare and merge two spreadsheets has been a lifesaver once when two people made changes to an important complicated spreadsheet.
These days I use OO.o as the default and only open with MS Office when I have to (very rarely.) Oh, and I just relegated Outlook to a VirtualBox VM. I think that spare XP license will run in VirtualBox on any host. WGA accepted it without a hitch. Next step: Move the domain-enabled office PC into a VirtualBox jail as a disk image. I wanted a bigger disk anyway but reinstalling Windows and everything? Ouch.
I have to agree. The manufacturer can generally reload the firmware from scratch through a serial or diag port. After all that's what they do in manufacturing. When I worked with disk drives, we had ROMware, firmware (in flash) and Diskware. The ROM is mask programmed and has only boot code that can program the flash ROM, the flash ROM can be reloaded via the disk interface or a serial port (and can't do much more than load a track from disk), and the disk contains the actual code.
Then we got rid of the flash ROM and things became a little more exciting because the code in ROM had to be able to read and write a few sectors reliably - for the entire lifetime of the product [line], including cost reductions.
You can always use it as a boat anchor. If it's a real drive that is, not those puny ones they have these days. 8" FTW! Or at least a DLT drive.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/23/seagate_6000_job_cuts/
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/23/business/fi-maxtor23
This was practically all of Maxtor US, Longmont and Milpitas, including what was left of Quantum HDD, except Shrewsbury AFAIK.
On modern drives, the data is randomized internally. Since PRML has worse error rates for certain repeating patterns than for random data, all modern drives XOR your data with a pseudo random sequence before recording.
One reason why a single overwrite is probably enough: The MR element is much narrower than the write head gap (less than one half), so tracks can be packed tightly together; they actually interfere with their neighbors. So the only reason why any previous magnetic signal should be left over is if the drive writes slightly offtrack - in different directions on neighboring tracks. Recording is always done to saturation, so nothing is left over on the track itself.
Am I the only one who read that as 200 milliamp? For a moment I was astounded by the home's efficiency.
That just depends on the voltage you're using.
Every disk and tape drive I've come to know well has a 3-wire TTL level RS232 port for diagnostics and manufacturing. But the specs for the ports are usually NDA level confidential.