The IMAX3D is pure marketing. The technology used is not standardized. In some locations they use linear polarization, in others they use circular polarization, and in some places they even use LCD shutter glasses.
RealD always uses circular polarization, although the glasses polarization is actually slightly elliptical. If you tilt you head while wearing them the brightness of the film can vary some, but ghosting does not occur. Of course, tilting your head by too much will destroy the image. (Thing about watching the move with your head at a 90 degree angle to the horizon. The images would then appear to overlap "vertically" rather than horizontally, and since they don't when overlapped) like that...)
Dolby 3D does not use the old 2 color glasses trick, but does use a related trick, where there are two red wavelengths used, two blue wavelengths used, and 2 green wavelengths used. One set of RGB wavelengths is intended for each eye, and the glasses contain filters so only the correct light for each eye enters. This can cause some issues with color perception, as at most one of those could be tuned to the optimal wavelengths for each of the cones in the eye. Further the fact that the different eyes are seeing different wavelengths can result in different perceptions of brightness of two "equal" reds for example.
The Doctor's goal here is not really to detect malware that has infected the system, but to attempt to get the system into a clean state, with the ability to detect the system actually reaches a clean state or not.
The idea is you want to do online banking, but the system may have malware. So you swap out everything except a small engine, and perform his procedure.
If the external verifier detects that malware is still running, then it lights up a warning light, telling the user the system is infected, and so the online banking is not safe, regardless of what the rest of the computer says. Otherwise no such warning light turns on. In that case it is known that all that is in memory is the scanning engine, and it is known that the scanning engine is unmodified.
The scanning engine can load the kernel into memory, and verify it by checksum, or even better, verifying that it has a digital signature from the secret key whose corresponding public key is part of the scanning engine. If so, we know have in memory a known good kernel. It can then load and check and application again using either keys or signatures. Etc.
What the Doctor has invented is thus similar to TPM, except that with TPM a system must start up in protected mode, while under the doctor's system the system can start up in unprotected mode, and as long as there is no malware that actually remains in memory when the engine tries to swap it out, and assuming the scanning engine is not infected, it can transition into a protected mode without restarting. Both systems obviously can transition from protected mode to unprotected mode. Thus the Doctors system can attempt to transition to protected mode to run an app requiring high security, and upon finishing, can restore all the swapped out software, potentially including any swapped out malware.
But you should be aware that Windows 7's Task Scheduler comes by default (at least mine did) with a background defragmentation task set to run once a week, and only while the computer is idle. That should probably be enough for most users. One should be aware of this if one desires to use another defragmentation utility, because having two defragmenters fight about where a file should go (either actively fight, or just a file is moved between two locations every time the other is run) is not good.
hashes don't assure you of the source at all, they just provide a unique (within the limits of the hash type) fingerprint for the file. If you know what a file's hash should be, the source is irrelevent.
Sure, but cryptographically signed hashes tell you that somebody who possesses the private key used to sign the sha1sums file (or equivalent for other hashes) claims that the signed hash values are correct, so if you get a file with that hash you can be confident it has not been modified relative to what the key possessor calculated the hash on.
Thus, in this sense it assures you of the original source of the file, and that the file has not been tampered with, regardless of the end source the user gets the file from.
I'm wondering about that. Bone marrow by nature is about as highly protected as any cell source from outside forces that tend to cause mutations, such as high energy photons (UV light (skin cancer) though gamma rays at the very least).
as for internal forces, I'm not aware how well carcinogens can penetrate bones, but I would suspect it is harder to do so then to get into most other tissues.
Thus I would tend to guess that excepting cells that have ceased dividing, cells in bone marrow probably have fewer mutations than most other cells.
That would imply that injecting them elsewhere would not increase the risk of cancer, as the other cells in the injection area likely aready have more cancer friendly mutations than the stem cells.
Now, I do see several areas where this logic could go wrong.
Perhaps the marrow is more likely to be mutated, as a result of carcinogens that make it in to the marrow are unlikely to leave, so they continue to damage cells.
Perhaps the dozen to two dozen generations of cell growth used in this procedure significantly overcome any additional mutation protection bone marrow may provide. After all, ever cell division is another opportunity for mutation.
Perhaps these cells being normally protected by the bone are more susceptible to external mutation than other cells are, thus the transplanting being a danger in that regard, at least until the stem cells fully specialize.
Is there any evidence or reason to believe one of those three cases, or something similar is true? If not, I'd tend to question worries of cancer.
Very nice. Of course I'm not so sure the Ethernet port description is very useful anymore, since many computers are now shipping without a modem port, so there is no "small one".
Of course your Ethernet port description is of little use if you think the cord might be plugged in.
In that case you need need to ask about either a cord that looks like an over-sized phone cord, or a hole that looks like it would fit an over-sized phone cord. Or something like that.
You want headless you should be running Windows Server rather than regular Windows. You may have to jump through hoops to change from the server scheduler back to the regular scheduler if you feel that is important, and to turn off the aditional security features intended to prevent things like browsing the internet on the server, but once you do so, you basically have Windows Ultimate++.
Oh and Windows 7's Task Scheduler is equivalent to cron. It cannot be fully configured from the command line, and does not use the crontab format, but it otherwise has a super-set of the functionality of cron.
Although the license fail to explicitly state it, it appears to be Apple's policy to allow downgrades. If you want to upgrade an old mac that will not run the newest OS, and contact Apple they are likely to have you buy the latest version, and then provide the older version. That is at least what I have seen happen in the past.
Strike the last line there. HSX does model itself more like a stock exchange. That model probably cannot work for a real money system. Who would pay for the "stocks" when they close? If it was HSX then they would need to have the average IPO price exceed that of the closing price, which means that buying at IPO gives you a negative expected return. No thanks.
If they want to have a predictions market they can, others do exist, but please for the love of sanity do not call it a stock market, and don't use terms like stocks and bonds in the system except in cases where those words really apply.
I'm not sure what the correct term would be. Prediction market is the normal term, but that is not ideal.
It is not a spot commodities trading market, since in those cases you take delivery of the item, or in very few markets, the standard is for the seller to hold the item on your behalf, and while you can request delivery, it is rare. Besides it is based on a future event.
But it is also not a futures market. In a futures market, you are buying actual product too. In at least some markets what really happens is seller delivers the product to the standard destination unless a buyer has negotiated changes to that part of the contract. Then the items are usually sold immediately on the spot market, as the speculator who bought the product is not interested in having it.
But there are no physical products here. For Intrade (I suspect HSX is similar) the contract is for $10, but is contingent on an event occurring. In futures markets the product is not normally contingent.
It is definitely not like stocks, because in stocks there is a limited number of shares of any stock in existence. You cannot sell stock you don't have. You can simulate it by borrowing stock from somebody, but you need to buy replacement stock for them at some point. Here though, you can sell contracts even if you don't have any already. If you don't buy some back, then if the event occurs you must pay $10 to whoever currently owns the contract (although Intrade handles settling, so you just give Intrade the money, and they make sure it gets to the right place.)
Perhaps an insurance market is the best name, since insurance is a contract for cash contingent upon an event. Thus what you buy and sell on HSX would be better called "policies" than "shares" or "bonds".
I strongly suspect he he counting all the lines of code for the in-dash GPS, the head unit, and even the new digital dashboard systems, in addition to the ecu, and other small microcontrolers spread throughout the car.
Of course, I'm not particularly familiar with all of this, since the most recent car I've ever driven was probably a 2002, where the head unit probably had more code than the rest of the car combined, and of course was not part of an CAN bus. There easily could have been only 15 or so bus microcontrolers. Let's think: power windows, power locks, exterior light control, windshield wipers, clock, interior light control, airbags, and the unit that beeps when you do things like leave the key in the ignition, or start the engine with the driver seat-belt not yet buckled.
I've often wondered why hard-drive manufactures have never (AFAIK) made drives with a second arm mechanism. Place it on the other side of the disk so that the disk has 180 degree rotational symmetry.
Lets compare such a system to a raid-1 setup. RAID-1 uses standard disks, while this would be a special disk. RAID-1 requires 2 drive bays, while this would require only one[1]. Both could offer pretty much the exact same benefits to read time. The new solution would have better write times[2]. RAID-1 requires the cost of two drives, while the special disk if mass produced may cost less than two drives. RAID-1 benefits availability by allowing for drive failure, while this new disk would not.
Thus a two armed drive could potentially be cheaper than RAID-1 if it caught on, and could offer better performance than RAID-1, which might be ideal for some applications where RAID-1 is used for performance rather than for the benefits of redundancy.
[1] Unfortunately such disks would probably not be standard form factor, but slightly longer, although for the larger sizes like 3.5 one could get pretty close to fit a second arm without changing the form factor.
[2] RAID-1 has a slight penalty to writes compared to a single standard drive, since writes must occur on both drives, meaning it takes the same amount of time as the longer of two seeks. A two armed drive could use just the shorter seek time, and could use the other arm for simultaneous reads, or even a second write elsewhere on the disk.
In my area it was entirely possible to have a college (Associates) degree before a high school diploma thanks to a very similar program and the relative dates of the graduation ceremony.
The down side is that many decent Universities would normally allow one to transfer credits for non-major courses, except that those courses counted for high school credit, so they don't count, and may not even count for placement in the case of things like the University's Composition requirement and potentially others, even though the course would have if not counted for high-school credit. Thus the result is mandating that students effectively take certain courses twice.
I never said it was practical, or made economic sense, but it certainly is possible in theory. Perhaps in the event of an application needing memory with a different set of tradeoffs than is standard.
I could almost imagine specialty flash memory for say filming, where you would be writing into pre-erased cells, and are willing to have an absurd block size (perhaps even the whole core is one block) since the flow would be write one, potentially ready many, and then erase all. Perhaps not a great example since in practice standard flash banks seem to work fine for them, but it gives the idea of a specialty market with non-standard trade-offs that may be willing to stand a significant memory premium.
It does not exist as a useful concept outside of academia. In the real world it might be considered a moral or ethical failing, but is normally just considered common business practice.
Inside academia it may be an important concept, but it has no practical application outside of academia, which implies that using it in academia may be a mistake to begin with. In the real world it is not important to credit sources. Generally in the real world one worries about the veracity of facts, and any legal requirements surrounding the expression of facts and ideas such as those from copyright law, or patent law. [1]
That is the message I intended to convey with some short statements that may not be consistent if interpreted literally.
[1] Indeed the plagiarism concept honestly is more like patents than copyrights in that it applies to all expressions of an idea (all implementations of an invention), rather than the
No, for Gmail, if a mail is revived with a plus in the name, the address is stripped at the plus to determine the account in which to deposit the message.
The user's Outlook config? Are you kidding me? The vast majority of non-corporate users don't use any mail client at all, happy with the awful webmail interfaces. Even when they do, Outlook Express, or Windows Live Mail are more common clients for home users than Outlook.
All too true. I have no blessed Idea how to send a message to Microsoft in such a way that there is a hih probability a software developer would ever see it.
About the only way I can think of is to search the blogs until I find the name of the lead developer of the component in question, and e-mail him directly.
For FLOSS software, on the other hand it is almost too easy to contact the developers. The development lists are read by the developers, the bug tacker is publicly accessible, etc.The developers names are almost always public, so if I get to the point that all else has failed, I can almost always try writing directly, but honestly I've only ever written directly for really small packages where that is the documented way of getting support.
I'd love to know where you send your bug reports that you get anything back besides ab autoreply or a form letter that basically indicated that only the tile of your message was read, and asks for information you already provided in the body of the message.
Those are the only replies I've ever gotten from attempting to report bugs to Microsoft.
Windows 7 is pretty good, especially relative to previous offerings. It is rather solid, and because of the requirement for all signed drivers the likelyhood of kernel space problems has diminished significantly.
But I've noticed quite a few minor bugs, many of which would be completely overlooked by regular users, and most of the rest would be noticed and then ignored.
Take for exampl3e network naming. When one connects to a wireless network, windows names it after the SSID. That is fine and correct. If you then later connect to the same network via a wire, Windows will recognize the network somehow, and give the wired network the same name as the wireless network. That is wrong. IF the ssid name was 'myname-wireless', I definitely don't want Windows to call the wired network 'myname-wireless'. Also it does not work well in the case of one network with multiple different SSIDs which may indicate network zones, etc.
Not having a fab does not necessarily mean you are re-badging though. In the memory market this may be largely true, but the fabs still have the potential to create designs from third party masks much like with ASICs.
The problem was that he bought tow tickets for his flight, and attempted to get on the standby flight. The standby flight did not fill up with either confirmed passengers or standby passengers. So there were enough empty seats on the plane that he could have two. However, they were unwilling to attempt to find somebody who was willing to move so as to create two empty seats next to each other, so he could sit there.
Had he instead purchased just 1 regular ticket for this earlier flight he he could have gotten a pair of seats by boarding early enough that it was still possible to do so. Since the plane still had empty seats at the very end, he would not have been asked to leave.
Notice that the only difference besides outcome of those two scenarios is that in the real one he had 1 standby ticket, and in the hypothetical one he had 1 regular ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
The IMAX3D is pure marketing. The technology used is not standardized. In some locations they use linear polarization, in others they use circular polarization, and in some places they even use LCD shutter glasses.
RealD always uses circular polarization, although the glasses polarization is actually slightly elliptical. If you tilt you head while wearing them the brightness of the film can vary some, but ghosting does not occur. Of course, tilting your head by too much will destroy the image. (Thing about watching the move with your head at a 90 degree angle to the horizon. The images would then appear to overlap "vertically" rather than horizontally, and since they don't when overlapped) like that...)
Dolby 3D does not use the old 2 color glasses trick, but does use a related trick, where there are two red wavelengths used, two blue wavelengths used, and 2 green wavelengths used. One set of RGB wavelengths is intended for each eye, and the glasses contain filters so only the correct light for each eye enters. This can cause some issues with color perception, as at most one of those could be tuned to the optimal wavelengths for each of the cones in the eye. Further the fact that the different eyes are seeing different wavelengths can result in different perceptions of brightness of two "equal" reds for example.
The Doctor's goal here is not really to detect malware that has infected the system, but to attempt to get the system into a clean state, with the ability to detect the system actually reaches a clean state or not.
The idea is you want to do online banking, but the system may have malware. So you swap out everything except a small engine, and perform his procedure.
If the external verifier detects that malware is still running, then it lights up a warning light, telling the user the system is infected, and so the online banking is not safe, regardless of what the rest of the computer says. Otherwise no such warning light turns on. In that case it is known that all that is in memory is the scanning engine, and it is known that the scanning engine is unmodified.
The scanning engine can load the kernel into memory, and verify it by checksum, or even better, verifying that it has a digital signature from the secret key whose corresponding public key is part of the scanning engine. If so, we know have in memory a known good kernel. It can then load and check and application again using either keys or signatures. Etc.
What the Doctor has invented is thus similar to TPM, except that with TPM a system must start up in protected mode, while under the doctor's system the system can start up in unprotected mode, and as long as there is no malware that actually remains in memory when the engine tries to swap it out, and assuming the scanning engine is not infected, it can transition into a protected mode without restarting. Both systems obviously can transition from protected mode to unprotected mode. Thus the Doctors system can attempt to transition to protected mode to run an app requiring high security, and upon finishing, can restore all the swapped out software, potentially including any swapped out malware.
But you should be aware that Windows 7's Task Scheduler comes by default (at least mine did) with a background defragmentation task set to run once a week, and only while the computer is idle. That should probably be enough for most users. One should be aware of this if one desires to use another defragmentation utility, because having two defragmenters fight about where a file should go (either actively fight, or just a file is moved between two locations every time the other is run) is not good.
hashes don't assure you of the source at all, they just provide a unique (within the limits of the hash type) fingerprint for the file. If you know what a file's hash should be, the source is irrelevent.
Sure, but cryptographically signed hashes tell you that somebody who possesses the private key used to sign the sha1sums file (or equivalent for other hashes) claims that the signed hash values are correct, so if you get a file with that hash you can be confident it has not been modified relative to what the key possessor calculated the hash on.
Thus, in this sense it assures you of the original source of the file, and that the file has not been tampered with, regardless of the end source the user gets the file from.
I'm wondering about that. Bone marrow by nature is about as highly protected as any cell source from outside forces that tend to cause mutations, such as high energy photons (UV light (skin cancer) though gamma rays at the very least).
as for internal forces, I'm not aware how well carcinogens can penetrate bones, but I would suspect it is harder to do so then to get into most other tissues.
Thus I would tend to guess that excepting cells that have ceased dividing, cells in bone marrow probably have fewer mutations than most other cells.
That would imply that injecting them elsewhere would not increase the risk of cancer, as the other cells in the injection area likely aready have more cancer friendly mutations than the stem cells.
Now, I do see several areas where this logic could go wrong.
Perhaps the marrow is more likely to be mutated, as a result of carcinogens that make it in to the marrow are unlikely to leave, so they continue to damage cells.
Perhaps the dozen to two dozen generations of cell growth used in this procedure significantly overcome any additional mutation protection bone marrow may provide. After all, ever cell division is another opportunity for mutation.
Perhaps these cells being normally protected by the bone are more susceptible to external mutation than other cells are, thus the transplanting being a danger in that regard, at least until the stem cells fully specialize.
Is there any evidence or reason to believe one of those three cases, or something similar is true? If not, I'd tend to question worries of cancer.
Very nice. Of course I'm not so sure the Ethernet port description is very useful anymore, since many computers are now shipping without a modem port, so there is no "small one".
Of course your Ethernet port description is of little use if you think the cord might be plugged in.
In that case you need need to ask about either a cord that looks like an over-sized phone cord, or a hole that looks like it would fit an over-sized phone cord. Or something like that.
You want headless you should be running Windows Server rather than regular Windows. You may have to jump through hoops to change from the server scheduler back to the regular scheduler if you feel that is important, and to turn off the aditional security features intended to prevent things like browsing the internet on the server, but once you do so, you basically have Windows Ultimate++.
Oh and Windows 7's Task Scheduler is equivalent to cron. It cannot be fully configured from the command line, and does not use the crontab format, but it otherwise has a super-set of the functionality of cron.
Although the license fail to explicitly state it, it appears to be Apple's policy to allow downgrades. If you want to upgrade an old mac that will not run the newest OS, and contact Apple they are likely to have you buy the latest version, and then provide the older version. That is at least what I have seen happen in the past.
I just bought a cheap digital TV that takes almost 5 seconds to boot. Sad.
So? Many older analog televisions took up to 10 seconds to "boot", because thats how long it took to warm up the cathode ray tube.
Don't you mean "sudo -i". That will launch a root login shell. Using "sudo su -" just makes it look like you never read the sudo manpage.
Strike the last line there. HSX does model itself more like a stock exchange. That model probably cannot work for a real money system. Who would pay for the "stocks" when they close? If it was HSX then they would need to have the average IPO price exceed that of the closing price, which means that buying at IPO gives you a negative expected return. No thanks.
If they want to have a predictions market they can, others do exist, but please for the love of sanity do not call it a stock market, and don't use terms like stocks and bonds in the system except in cases where those words really apply.
I'm not sure what the correct term would be. Prediction market is the normal term, but that is not ideal.
It is not a spot commodities trading market, since in those cases you take delivery of the item, or in very few markets, the standard is for the seller to hold the item on your behalf, and while you can request delivery, it is rare. Besides it is based on a future event.
But it is also not a futures market. In a futures market, you are buying actual product too. In at least some markets what really happens is seller delivers the product to the standard destination unless a buyer has negotiated changes to that part of the contract. Then the items are usually sold immediately on the spot market, as the speculator who bought the product is not interested in having it.
But there are no physical products here. For Intrade (I suspect HSX is similar) the contract is for $10, but is contingent on an event occurring. In futures markets the product is not normally contingent.
It is definitely not like stocks, because in stocks there is a limited number of shares of any stock in existence. You cannot sell stock you don't have. You can simulate it by borrowing stock from somebody, but you need to buy replacement stock for them at some point. Here though, you can sell contracts even if you don't have any already. If you don't buy some back, then if the event occurs you must pay $10 to whoever currently owns the contract (although Intrade handles settling, so you just give Intrade the money, and they make sure it gets to the right place.)
Perhaps an insurance market is the best name, since insurance is a contract for cash contingent upon an event. Thus what you buy and sell on HSX would be better called "policies" than "shares" or "bonds".
He is not a professional blogger, rather he is an elite blogger, or so he captioned this photo: http://elitechoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/rob.jpg
Don't you know the difference?
I strongly suspect he he counting all the lines of code for the in-dash GPS, the head unit, and even the new digital dashboard systems, in addition to the ecu, and other small microcontrolers spread throughout the car.
Of course, I'm not particularly familiar with all of this, since the most recent car I've ever driven was probably a 2002, where the head unit probably had more code than the rest of the car combined, and of course was not part of an CAN bus. There easily could have been only 15 or so bus microcontrolers. Let's think: power windows, power locks, exterior light control, windshield wipers, clock, interior light control, airbags, and the unit that beeps when you do things like leave the key in the ignition, or start the engine with the driver seat-belt not yet buckled.
I've often wondered why hard-drive manufactures have never (AFAIK) made drives with a second arm mechanism. Place it on the other side of the disk so that the disk has 180 degree rotational symmetry.
Lets compare such a system to a raid-1 setup.
RAID-1 uses standard disks, while this would be a special disk.
RAID-1 requires 2 drive bays, while this would require only one[1].
Both could offer pretty much the exact same benefits to read time.
The new solution would have better write times[2].
RAID-1 requires the cost of two drives, while the special disk if mass produced may cost less than two drives.
RAID-1 benefits availability by allowing for drive failure, while this new disk would not.
Thus a two armed drive could potentially be cheaper than RAID-1 if it caught on, and could offer better performance than RAID-1, which might be ideal for some applications where RAID-1 is used for performance rather than for the benefits of redundancy.
[1] Unfortunately such disks would probably not be standard form factor, but slightly longer, although for the larger sizes like 3.5 one could get pretty close to fit a second arm without changing the form factor.
[2] RAID-1 has a slight penalty to writes compared to a single standard drive, since writes must occur on both drives, meaning it takes the same amount of time as the longer of two seeks. A two armed drive could use just the shorter seek time, and could use the other arm for simultaneous reads, or even a second write elsewhere on the disk.
In my area it was entirely possible to have a college (Associates) degree before a high school diploma thanks to a very similar program and the relative dates of the graduation ceremony.
The down side is that many decent Universities would normally allow one to transfer credits for non-major courses, except that those courses counted for high school credit, so they don't count, and may not even count for placement in the case of things like the University's Composition requirement and potentially others, even though the course would have if not counted for high-school credit. Thus the result is mandating that students effectively take certain courses twice.
I never said it was practical, or made economic sense, but it certainly is possible in theory. Perhaps in the event of an application needing memory with a different set of tradeoffs than is standard.
I could almost imagine specialty flash memory for say filming, where you would be writing into pre-erased cells, and are willing to have an absurd block size (perhaps even the whole core is one block) since the flow would be write one, potentially ready many, and then erase all. Perhaps not a great example since in practice standard flash banks seem to work fine for them, but it gives the idea of a specialty market with non-standard trade-offs that may be willing to stand a significant memory premium.
It does not exist as a useful concept outside of academia. In the real world it might be considered a moral or ethical failing, but is normally just considered common business practice.
Inside academia it may be an important concept, but it has no practical application outside of academia, which implies that using it in academia may be a mistake to begin with. In the real world it is not important to credit sources. Generally in the real world one worries about the veracity of facts, and any legal requirements surrounding the expression of facts and ideas such as those from copyright law, or patent law. [1]
That is the message I intended to convey with some short statements that may not be consistent if interpreted literally.
[1] Indeed the plagiarism concept honestly is more like patents than copyrights in that it applies to all expressions of an idea (all implementations of an invention), rather than the
No, for Gmail, if a mail is revived with a plus in the name, the address is stripped at the plus to determine the account in which to deposit the message.
The user's Outlook config? Are you kidding me? The vast majority of non-corporate users don't use any mail client at all, happy with the awful webmail interfaces. Even when they do, Outlook Express, or Windows Live Mail are more common clients for home users than Outlook.
All too true. I have no blessed Idea how to send a message to Microsoft in such a way that there is a hih probability a software developer would ever see it.
About the only way I can think of is to search the blogs until I find the name of the lead developer of the component in question, and e-mail him directly.
For FLOSS software, on the other hand it is almost too easy to contact the developers. The development lists are read by the developers, the bug tacker is publicly accessible, etc.The developers names are almost always public, so if I get to the point that all else has failed, I can almost always try writing directly, but honestly I've only ever written directly for really small packages where that is the documented way of getting support.
I'd love to know where you send your bug reports that you get anything back besides ab autoreply or a form letter that basically indicated that only the tile of your message was read, and asks for information you already provided in the body of the message.
Those are the only replies I've ever gotten from attempting to report bugs to Microsoft.
Windows 7 is pretty good, especially relative to previous offerings. It is rather solid, and because of the requirement for all signed drivers the likelyhood of kernel space problems has diminished significantly.
But I've noticed quite a few minor bugs, many of which would be completely overlooked by regular users, and most of the rest would be noticed and then ignored.
Take for exampl3e network naming. When one connects to a wireless network, windows names it after the SSID. That is fine and correct. If you then later connect to the same network via a wire, Windows will recognize the network somehow, and give the wired network the same name as the wireless network. That is wrong. IF the ssid name was 'myname-wireless', I definitely don't want Windows to call the wired network 'myname-wireless'. Also it does not work well in the case of one network with multiple different SSIDs which may indicate network zones, etc.
Not having a fab does not necessarily mean you are re-badging though. In the memory market this may be largely true, but the fabs still have the potential to create designs from third party masks much like with ASICs.
The problem was that he bought tow tickets for his flight, and attempted to get on the standby flight. The standby flight did not fill up with either confirmed passengers or standby passengers. So there were enough empty seats on the plane that he could have two. However, they were unwilling to attempt to find somebody who was willing to move so as to create two empty seats next to each other, so he could sit there.
Had he instead purchased just 1 regular ticket for this earlier flight he he could have gotten a pair of seats by boarding early enough that it was still possible to do so. Since the plane still had empty seats at the very end, he would not have been asked to leave.
Notice that the only difference besides outcome of those two scenarios is that in the real one he had 1 standby ticket, and in the hypothetical one he had 1 regular ticket.
Something seems screwy about that.