One potentially very valid use case for this sort of thing is where there is known to be data with different access patterns, such as file metadata vs file data itself. The former needs to be updated more frequently than the latter, so one could envision a mechanism that tags certain operations as being for "frequently modified" data, and dynamically applies the single-bit-per-MLC-cell trick to that data while retaining the multi-bit capability for the bulk data. This is the sort of thing we've done for years, but using different storage elements for the two varieties (e.g. Fe-RAM + SLC, for example). The messiest part would be tagging the appropriate operations, but in some applications a simple approach such as defining the first 5% (say) of the storage to be for metadata can work well. Remember, with things like journal-ling file systems, a single update can trigger three distinct (sets of) writes: the data, the metadata, and the journal.
Another concept may be to offer users different resilience/capacity options in much the same way as RAID storage systems have tended to do: enable the user to configure one bunch of flash as "endurance" memory, and another bunch of the same stuff as "capacity" storage.
By the way, @Stuart Longland: the likelihood of anyone grouping three TLC cells into an 8+1 arrangement is vanishingly low. But grouping 176 of the three-bit things to create a 528 bit entity offering 512bits +16 bits of ECC protection (i.e. 64 byte entities), and multiples thereof, is, shall we say, rather more likely...
President Obama does not. He uses a General Dynamics Sectéra® Edge™.
As to those who wonder why Boeing would select Android, the answer is simple: they can get Android and sweep the code line-by-line, add restrictions on what can be installed (like the app signing stuff that Windows 7 does), etc.
The idea that anyone would use an iThing for secure applications is laughable: Apple deliberately keeps stuff close to their vest, and won't release the keys to iTunes, so there's no way to deliver trusted apps to a hypothetical "secure" iPhone.
Oh, and the notion that Android is (inherently) full of malware and vulnerabilities is baseless. Sure, a lot of phones that run Android may well be, but the same is true of every other operating environment. The crux of the matter is that Google makes it possible to scrutinize Android, while Microsoft, RIM, and Apple do not...
Metavisor: while California does indeed ban below cost sales, the cost in question is the cost the article being sold, i.e. an eBook (or a video or music track or whatever). So if a publisher prices an eBook at $10, Apple could sell it at $7 by simply waiving their 30% commission and would not trigger the Unfair Practices definitions.... but no other vendor could buy the thing at less than $10 because of the MFN clause, and so could not match Apple's price without falling foul of the below-cost sales laws. The only way another vendor could match Apple's price is by negotiating their own agency agreement (a tall order without Apple's breadth), and even then Apple's MFN clause guarantees that no other vendor could do better than match Apple's 30% commission.
I really don't think Seagate says that it's drive streams data at up to 300GB/sec.
Think about a 320GB drive; I doubt you can read it in 1.07 seconds, even if you were not limited by the nearly three orders of magnitude slower SATA interface (3Gb/s vs 2.4Tb/s).
Please, El Reg & Iain Thomson, please fix that implication that the PET was some kind of reaction to the Apple II; chronology doesn't support it:
January 1977: in the mainstream (then as now) CES show in Chicago, Commodore introduces the PET.
April 1977: Commodore ships the first PETs, priced at $595.
April 1977: The Apple I's price is reduced from $666 to $475 (which of course doesn't include many of the PETs features, such as a screen or a cassette deck).
April 1977: at the West Coast Computer Faire, Apple introduces the Apple II.
June 1977: Apple ships the first Apple ][, priced at $1298 excluding monitor, etc.
These days the fiction that the Apple II was "the first" home computer seems pervasive, just as the equally fictitious notion that the Mac was "the first" WIMP machine seems to be common.
And that's unfortunate, because it's people like Jack Tramiel that showed Apple what to do.
The idea that AT&T allowing unlocking might create a competitive advantage over T-Mobile is flawed, because T-Mo will already unlock any of their phones while still in contract. It doesn't get you out of the contract, but if you want to pay someone else _as well_ for airtime, why would any sane company care? So I can run my T-Mo Android thing on AT&T's network if I feel like it, juts by buying an AT&T SIM (or by swapping one out of a colleague's phone).
More relevant, I've run my in-contract T-Mo (USA) phone using PAYG SIMs in the UK, Germany and Australia.
So where's this "competitive advantage" of which you speak?
It's worth noting that Jobs may well have been angry that Android was making the inroads on iStuff that it was, but it doesn't automatically follow that Jobs was angry at Google -- had it been Nokia who stepped up to the competitive plate, then it may well have been Symbian that attracted Job's ire.
And that's the point: those who claim Android was a copy of iOS need to recognize that iOS was a copy of Symbian and/or whatever Palm called their stuff. Of course, the iPhone did _most_ things better than, say, the Nokia E61, but it did some things worse (tethering, for instance). What the iPhone did achieve was a marketing success based on the alliance of the functionality with the "usability" of the device -- but the number of "original" things that Android could have copied (from iOS) is smaller than you think; it copies more from Palm and Nokia than Apple.
The biggest is, of course, that you don't need all that ground equipment -- noise suppression water systems, gantries, etc, plus you can launch from anywhere on the planet.
There are plenty of runways long enough (Kennedy and Edwards both have them. Actually, both Kennedy Space Center and John F. Kennedy International airport could serve, but obviously the latter _might_ raise hazard eyebrows.
One point is that this is already a "known" technology: not only does the SpaceShipOne (and Two) use it, but so does Orbital Sciences with their Pegasus launcher, which was the first private commercial vehicle to offer launch services.
The key issue, though, seems to me to be that this is "just" another low-to-medium payload system. What we need is a big truck, and what this (and Falcon 9, and Antares, and everything else) is a transit van. Cheap, effective, as long as things you want to carry aren't too big or heavy.
Here's the nub of the thing: Ariane, Proton, Long March 5, Titan IVB and the Space Shuttle could/can (theoretically) put something over 20,000kg (but less than 25,000kg) into LEO . This is good, but....
It would appear that, if a company like JB HiFi is prepared to shoulder the cost of actual warranty service, the added cost of maintaining a VPN connection and proxy service for their customers is relatively small. So they could, say, have a VPN from Victoria to Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever they get the goods, and back that with a public facing web proxy (possibly with authentication that the user bought from them, but more likely why bother).
Joe Punter goes now to JB HiFi for the latest firmware for the gadget with the geolocked firmware, and pulls the firmware from Singapore/Hong Kong/Wherever rather than from Australia... at least as far as the gadget maker is concerned.
This, of course, fails if there's some specific Australian content, but in that situation there is no parallel import: there is in-country added-value.
Does anyone else find the idea of "Linux vs Unix" as nonsensical?
In my little world view, "Unix" is a generic term that encompasses a wealth of OS implementations, including: AIX, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, BSD, and "Linux", amongst others (and, yeah, I get to work with old stuff). None of the above are interchangeable, and they all have strengths and costs and weaknesses... but I submit that the differences between Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu are not qualitatively different from the differences between Solaris and Red Hat, Suse and AIX, etc. But throw someone comfortable with from any of those into VMS and watch them flounder...
[ The differences change depending on viewpoint: from the perspective of a driver developer, all Linuxen tend towards looking the same, but very different from e.g. AIX; from the perspective of a developer using an X-based toolkit, they all tend to look similar with trivial differences in (e.g.) type faces right up until you get to integration with desktops. Etc. ]
In sum, this article is really not talking about "Unix" vs anything, but proprietary hardware vs commodity hardware. Turns out the former is more expensive but tends towards "better", while the latter is cheaper.
There seems to be a touching, albeit naive, view that reliability is a static concept: you can compare a disk with a tape and come up with a reliability metric.
Unfortunately, this is just not so. As things age, the relative reliability shifts. So a tape drive may be considered (for some bizarre reason) to be less reliable than a disk today, but how do the two stack up when you try to access the data on each in 5 years? 10 years? 40 years? Tape is inherently more stable.
Do you (for some value of "you") care? Maybe. It probably depends whether you are thinking of backups vs archives, since those are very different things.
P.s. those cautionary tale about tape backup errors? You know they apply equally to any other type of backup, right?
@Ian Michael Gumby references a clock in Boulder, Colorado - presumably NIST-F1. He is a little confused: there is a transmitter in Fort Collins, Co. (WWVB) that broadcasts a time signal derived from a (bunch of) cesium clock(s) at the transmitter site, although those clocks are synchronized from NIST-F1 in Boulder. In NTP terms, NIST-F1 is the highest stratum, WWVB's clocks are a stratum lower than NIST-F1.
BUT none of that has any relevance to the GPS constellation: NIST-F1 provides civilian time. Military timekeeping centers around the US Naval Opservatory in Washington, which provides the top-level time reference for GPS, and LORAN-C using "dozens of cesium clocks" and a dozen of Hydrogen Maser clocks. GPS time signal correction is relayed vie Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Co.
Ironically, GPS may actually provide better timekeeping than a single source time signal like WWVB or MSF, because the propagation delay of the terrestrial signals depends on the distance one happens to be from the transmitter, whereas a GPS time reference *can* (but usually isn't) be derived from the aggregate signals from 12 or more satellites, even more so if you already know your precise location.
Oh, and has been implied earlier, the 60Hz reference in the article is just dumb, and not just because of the missing "k": in the time biz we distinguish between time interval and time reference. The time reference can show up at whatever interval you like ("At the third stroke, the time will be..."), the time interval is the duration between successive reference "hacks" ("Beeeep!"). So if you get a time interval reference at, say, 0.0166 recurring Hz (i.e. once a minute), and you know that the time reference is accurate to within 2 or 3ns of the USNO's equivalent datum point, then your problem becomes creating a clock that is sufficiently accurate to run freely for that one minute.
In short, if someone gives you a 60Hz signal whose time hack (rising edge, beep, whatever) is accurate to within 2ns of the One True Time (whatever that is), making a clock that won't drift far between ticks is generally a solved problem (it's not easy, but there's not a lot of point in getting too good because the reference is going to waffle around by up to 2ns).
Oh, and PTP (IEEE1588) will distribute network time far more accurately than NTP, for what it's worth.
Bunch of historical revisionists! The M1911 design was formally ADOPTED by the US Army in 1911 (March 29th, apparently). But the thing had been in trials against other designs since 1906, and prior to that there had been another set of trials in 1904 in which the requirements for the pistol evolved.
So it is reasonable to assert that the M1911 was "invented" sometime between the 1904 trials and the start of the 1906 contest. So let's say it was "invented" in 1905 (actually, it was just refined from earlier designs).
Certainly, in 1910 it was proving its mettle.
For what its worth, it was adopted by the US Navy & USMC in 1913, So we can do this all over again in a couple of years! (And let's not forget the M1911A1 from 1924...)
Sorry, Naughtyhorse, but you've been drinking the kool-aid: the 40 grand figure is the total paid to his partner, not the portion paid since renting from one's partner became inappropriate. So there is no question that the figure is less than 40K.
And more important: had Laws rented on the open market (as he was 100% entitled to do), he'd have spent more for the accommodation. Which we would have paid.
Jobs has done a great Job (hah!) of blending two related but distinct issues, and El Reg's Orlowski has continued the confusion (obviously, Jobs did it deliberately, not sure why Orlowski did).
The first is the merits (or lack thereof) of the Flash environment for developing web apps.
The second is the merits (or lack thereof) of the Flash player for deploying those apps.
Claims that the player side is "closed" are just false; others have pointed to FOSS players. Yet that is what Jobs wants to convey. And all this started because Adobe produced something that would translate Flash apps into something THAT WASN'T FLASH, but would run on the iThings.
Comments about the quality of the developer environment are all very well, but like it or not, I'm not seeing anything like the Flash developer environment for HTML5/CSS/H.264 *at the moment*. They will come, I'm sure, but you need more than tools, you need classes in tech and design schools, you need confidence that the thing will prevail, etc.
Finally, Jobs makes a big deal about how Flash crashes Macs etc. So why doesn't he spend a little of that mountain of cash in having his engineers make the FOSS Flash players run on Macs? Oh, right... he doesn't care about that. He cares about the cross-platform nature of Flash. So... what do we think Apple is going to do to block cross-platform development of HTML/CSS/H.264 apps? Hmmm..
Not sure why so many people think Photoshop has any relevance on the Flash saga, but:
The UI of PS (at least since PS CS3) is virtually identical regardless of whether you use a Mac or a PC. OK, so you have to substitute the Apple key for the Alt key (or the Alt for the Apple), and the app-control mechanisms are native to the platform (so minimize/switch window/maximize etc. operate as the platform user would expect). Granted, this last bit can make it harder for a Mac user to work with PC Photoshop (and vice versa), but it's the exactly same with (say) Firefox!
(Actually, I happen to believe that the windowing capabilities of CS2 was *better* on a PC than on a Mac, but Adobe made them common with CS3).
As a former employee, I can authoritatively state that the idea that Dick Egan would create a company called "EMC Corporation" (which he did) where the "C" stood for "Corporation" is laughable ("Egan Marino Corporation Corporation"???? That would have been stupid, and Dick was never that!)
"C" was actually the third partner in the early furniture-business discussions, who dropped out before the business actually started. Something like "Cruickshank", IIRC (which I probably don't). The three met to discuss selling the furniture, which planted the idea of the "EMC" name. "C" dropped out, leaving Egan and Marino.
As to the mechanics of Dick's death, those who try to make a political comment out of it never knew the man. Had he wanted to die in a clinic in (say) Switzerland, he would have done... but the man was Boston Irish, and the way he went seems like the way a scrappy fighter would want to go.
BUT in 2005 you could happily buy a 1Ds or (I think) a 1Ds Mk 2, which gave you full-frame goodness. The only real distinction for between the 1Ds and 5D was the cost (important, but I think most customers for the 5D would be happy with a 1Ds!)
Yes, there's room. These are intended for LEO, which has the advantage that the orbits decay and the satellites eventually burn up (unlike GEO, where they just sit around). LEO is typically something in the 160km to 2000km altitude range, but for comms satellites, something greater than 500km is normal.
So let's take an altitude of 500km; with a earth diameter of 12,740km, that gives an orbital diameter of 13740km, and thus an orbital circumference of 43,165km. USSTRATCOM is currently tracking ~8500 objects larger than 10cm in size in LEO, which gives an average of one object every 5km or so.
Given the relative sizes of the objects involved, and the fact that everything is moving in the same direction, this is rather better than we expect for airliners over the ocean...
An interesting philosophical (and soon to be legal) question: where is the line between hardware and software? If, for example, Apple sold a keyboard with a license that it were only to be used on Mac's, the chances are extremely high that they'd lose attempts to enforce that: once purchased, you can use it as a doorstop (a good purpose for an Apple keyboard, IMO) if you like.
But that keyboard contains (a lot of) hardware and (a little) software. Change things around so you're buying a little hardware (a disk) and a lot of software (an OS). Most people seem to feel that's a different case, and restrictions on use are not inappropriate.
So where's the line?
Of course, what this really all about is Apple trying to have their cake and eat it to: they could have stated that you can only get Mac OS with a Mac (one free copy with every computer), and then sold upgrades that required a registered piece of hardware before they'd work (activated over one's iPhone, probably!). That's hardly complicated. But they wanted, instead, to sell the software as if it were a commodity product, and now someone is challenging their posturing: if they will sell me a copy without caring if I have a Mac (and they will), and they don't care if I just leave it on a shelf (and they don't), how can they suddenly care if I do something else with it?
While I have no great interest either way in the outcome of this particular squabble, I am eager to see fail these sorts of legalistic attempts to enforce unnatural restrictions. To me, this is like the DMCA: using the law to restrict usage because you're too lazy to use technology is culturally troubling.
The same seats and systems could be fitted in any type of aircraft, because that stuff is Buyer Furnished Equipment (BFE) not Airbus. Relatively little of what a passenger sees in an aircraft has much to do with the airframer (Boeing or Airbus, these days).
The notion of using WORM for "Black Box" recorders is quite laughable: the whole point of such recorders is that they are "endless loop" things, so that you'll *always* have the last XXX minutes of flight information. Using a WORM, you _will_ end up with a situation where the blasted thing is full, and then the aircraft would have to stop flying until the card was replaced... this may be problematic if the aircraft was in flight at the moment that the WORM fills!
What these WILL be good for is data distribution: you can put a bunch of files on the card and _know_ that if you can read them, _then_ the data is the data that the creator wanted you to have, not some hacked-up version. That has value...
While a hard drive _platter_ may hold its data for 20-30 years (a claim I don't know enough to dispute, although that reference contains enough questionable statements that it's probably disputable!), the drive mechanism almost certainly won't. If you leave a disk inoperative for even a few years, phenomena such a stiction (to name just one) will likely kill the mechanism, so you won't be able to spin up the disk.
Therein lies the biggest flaw with hard disk as a backup: failure modes for disks tend to result in the thing being unusable (and therefore all the data being lost) a lot more frequently than failure modes for (e.g.) tapes or DVDs or CDs...
This leads to the issue of "acceptable" loss criteria; many applications are OK with the idea of (say) 99% of the data being retrievable after 50 years, which is not wildly different than with paper archives!
Oh, and ECC won't help you at all if all your ECC is on the same device...
First, there are two issues going on. You may not like either of them, but there's a civil action for damages (between the MPAA/RIAA/whoever and Pirate Bay) and a criminal action (between the Swedish state and Pirate Bay).
If the cop _was_ talking about a job with Warner before the investigation concluded, so what? Warner doesn't direct the findings of the Swedish government, so this is only an issue if you're trying to create a controversy, possibly to mask the weakness of your defense.
Regarding damage to equipment allegedly caused by airport screening machines...
a) newer security systems are smarter and use lower dosages, thereby invalidating sample sets using older systems,
b) how do you know the problem was with the security regime, not the travel regime? e.g. maybe it was the use of laptops on aircraft (in turbulence) that was killing the disks, not the travel through the x-ray machine?
I'm not saying that the security at airports ISN'T bad for laptops. Just that we don't know that it IS!
Bush is alleging, with no visible means of support, that without *retroactive* immunity, this bill is worthless. That's so obviously wrong that it's funny, and Pelosi is spot on to point that out.
This bill, as written, protects the telcos if they cooperate with the FISA court. As it should. But pretending that you need to provide immunity for actions that happened prior to this bill passing is just silly.
The core problem seems to me that Bush told the telco's "trust me, we'll take care of you". And now it seems increasingly likely that he never had the authority to do that. And while I agree that's unfair on the telco's who believed him, some of the telco's DID decline to participate in some of the scheme(s).
Chad wrote: "edge is what, 200Kbps at optimum rate. Much less in real world use? While we're complaining, let's winge the iPhone won't sync with a commodore 64!"
You seem to have forgotten that the iPhone can do WiFi. Which is, what, 54000kbps optimum...
So would you _really_ like to try to justify the notion that there's no reason why anyone would want to have, say, an ability to place a VoIP call from their iPhone phonebook? Maybe because they're indoors and have poor cellular reception, or because they're calling overseas and don't want to pay AT&T's rates?
(You know, just like you can with Nokia Series 60 phones like the E61)...
As a point of fact, you can't hijack something you own. Like it or not, the US gov't paid for the establishment of the domain name system as well as the IP address system.
The problem is not that the US owns ".com" (and is nice enough to let any old Johnny Foreigner to use it, too), but that the non-US agents came up with cumbersome and ugly national alternatives. Why ".co.uk" instead of, say, ".ukcom" or ".couk"? Or ".Brit"? And, granted, that's a charge you can levy on the US gov't, 'cos they hogged the good names and forced everyone else into the two letter country codes. But still, blame the Brit gov't for being dumb enough to subdivide the ".uk": they could have reserved ".gov.uk" and "edu.uk", etc. and let the rest just have ".uk" domains (as in "www.theregister.uk").
That said, the statement in the original article that the only way to get off the list is to go back to the bureaucrats is incorrect: you could sue the OFAC in US Federal Court.
"What he means is that the federal courts cannot take American companies to task for their actions regarding Internet traffic between persons abroad."
NO, THAT's ERRONEOUS... because...
"Federal courts lack jurisdiction in cases where both the plaintiff and defendant are located outside the country."
If the COMPANY is American, then Federal courts DO have jurisdiction, because they are located _inside_ the country...
If a Brit writes to a German and somehow AT&T (or someone) does something to offend one or both the Brit/German, then they can sue AT&T (or someone) in Federal Court because AT&T (or etc.) is located in the USA.
There's no anticompetitive issue here. The agreement between Tosh and SKG Dreamworks would have been tied up as a technology license (for the HD-DVD tech) and a marketing agreement (for the HD-DVD only bit: SKG agreed to promote HD-DVD in return for cash).
The car companies do things like this all the time: dealers can claim lots of cash from the manufacturer to cover things like advertising and showroom stocking, but ONLY if they agree not to sell or promote competitors.
It's really no different from exclusivity deals in which a given company is granted the right to sell a product (e.g. a phone) in a given market (e.g. the UK)....
The thing with HDD vs any kind of optical disk is the longevity: put a good BD disk on a reasonably cool shelf, and chances are it will be fine in 10+ years. Put an HDD on that same disk, and the chances are it won't. There's also the _type_ of failure: the average optical drives defect may result in lost data, but the whole may still be more-or-less usable. HDDs have a large set of failure modes in which the thing becomes a brick.
Moral of the story: use HDDs for short-term and scratch storage, but not for archival use.
But the model you describe where an HDD is used for renting a movie is perfect... especially if you extend it to a standardized license that permits you to redownload the thing onto a new disk should the old one fail...
The issue is not whether or not we should bug terrorists, but about the oversight required for various types of bugging operations. We should indeed be able to bug pretty much anyone -- including lawyers -- ALWAYS PROVIDED that the appropriate oversight exists to ensure that the power isn't being abused in a J. Edgar Hoover sort of way (e.g. bugging your political rivals to ensure your success, or bugging a lawyer to get a true understanding of "what really happened").
This is the problem with the USA's "FISA doesn't apply to anyone Bush says it doesn't" "warrantless wiretapping". It's not that the wiretapping is a bad thing in any way, BUT without a judge to look over the justification, the risk of abuse is significant.
"Apple says it has sold 3.7m iPhones in total. AT&T says it has sold 2m iPhones, and European operators are believed to have sold between 300,000 and 400,000 handsets."
So: total sold through every channel, including off the back of a Hong Kong lorry: 3.7m. Of that, AT&T and the European operators have sold (say) 2.4m. Therefore Apple has moved 1.3m through other channels (possibly including warranty replacements, since we're talking marketing numbers).
As Greg noted, there are allegedly up to 3.2m phones in the production pipeline for the next 6 months, which makes some kind of sense based on the sales of the last 6 months. But that still leaves us with a grand total of 6.9m phones _built_ by June, when Apple is claiming it expects to have sold 10m.
Which suggests that Apple is planning on selling phone futures!
In other news, good to see that Apple Fanbois are still well represented...
The notion that Novell was somehow duped by Microsoft is, frankly, risible. At that time, Novell (not MS) had the dominant products in two fields: network servers, and word processing.
So here Novell is acting all surprised that MS messed up their development plans... not once, but twice! (First when they pulled/changed/whatever the shell extensions thing -- hardly critical to a word processor, but nevermind -- and then again when they re-instated them). The fact is that Novell _could_ have released a version of WP 5.1 that lacked any kind of shell extensions, and if they decided they needed them, then the effort they made to work around the lack of documentation doesn't magically cease to work when MS re-released to docs.
MS is right: Novell screwed WP -- or rather, WP screwed WP and sold themselves in a screwed state to Novell, who were themselves screwed up in their own special way.
Think about it: is it a coincidence that both Netware and WP stalled for as long as they did?
Steve, I doubt whether all those "hundreds" of admins really believe that they can't be breached, any more than the true museum quality storage people think they can't be.
All that's at issue is whether the security precuations match the value and worth of the items secured.
Now, you advocate criminal charges, but I'd disagree: statutory civil damages would be more effective, for two reasons: the first is the simple one of the standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of evidence), therefore it's easier to win a civil suit than a criminal trial.
The second is more important: the criminal case goes against the CEO and CIO, and if they get convicted, the company will get another. The *civil* case, though, goes against the shareholder's pockets. This means that the shareholders will be motivated to do it properly. Think Enron: was it Ken Leay who was entirely at fault, or the entire group of people who were making the money off the scam?
It's also more appropriate: as you note, your ID is worth a lot more to you than it is to the company, so having a statutory level of damages that avoids you having to prove that the company's actions caused you X amount of harm.
That the problem isn't whether or not the ISP can shape traffic, but _how_ they shape traffic.
If they were to say "Download X megabytes and upload Y MB at full speed, then after that we'll throttle you to something less than full speed _if we need to_ (i.e. dynamically, i.e. during busy periods), and it doesn't matter what you download or upload" then everybody should be happy. Every user gets guaranteed the same deal, but those who go off into the territory of exceptional usage get slowed, but not stopped!
Just because the 787 will be Boeing's first airplane with large amounts of composite materials it doesn't mean that the industry doesn't have plenty of experience with the concept.
Airbus aircraft have had significant composite content for years. So most of the complaints are demonstrably false.
You lot (well, a lot of you lot) seem confused about what a trademark is...
A trademark allows you the exclusive use of a mark in a particular type of business. So there's no confusion between the trademark AA referring to an organization formerly intended for British motorists but now, well, not and the trademark AA referring to an airline.
Your best clue may well lie with Apple and, umm, Apple. One makes records, the other wishes it did.
And for those who think this is about searches like "I want to fly only on American airlines", think again. This is about people SELLING "space" on that search...
Just a note about "bad science" and "public policy"...
Ryan Nix's comment seems fine as far as it goes, but let's not lose site of the fact that the "public policy" in question here is actually "there should be no restrictions on polluting the atmosphere". The onus really should be on those who wish to dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stuff to show that there will be no adverse consequences, rather than the opposite (that people who don't want the dumping having to show that the dumped by-products are harmful).
That doesn't change the fact that bad science shouldn't drive public policy. But the "bad science" here lies the notion that the existing and historical levels of pollution are not harmful, rather than the consensus that, to some degree or other, it is...
Mr Dawson is doing an impressive job of trying to create a smokescreen, but in so doing he's missing a few key points.
For example, while it may, or may not, be true that in the UK the "secular and authoritarian section of the left" is pushing hardest, that in no way implies that the theocrats are _not_ also pushing hard.
And regardless of what's happening in the UK, this particular article is about the situation in Australia, where the announcements were made at that hardly secular or left-leaning community that attends "megachurches". And, in passing, it should be noted that the Australian demagoguery seems similar to that in the USA.
But far more importantly, while there _might_ be some truth in noting that there is a secular left-leaning group lobbying for restrictions, there is undeniable truth in noting that the most vigorous opposition to restrictions is coming from (a different) left-leaning community, while there tends to be a deafening silence from the religious right.
And that's the crux: it may well be that "uptight christian moralists" tend to have limiting factors placed on them (although the Crusades and the Inquisition are object lessons in just how limiting those factors can be), but I know of few, if any, "uptight christian moralists" who argue with much zeal against censorship.
Still, the Irony of Mr Dawson blaming progressives for John Howard choosing a megachurch for his announcement is quite exquisite...
... Can be used to buy stuff, not just rent a movie. Which is kinda relevant, 'cos you might notice that the whole thrust of the piece was that Google is discontinuing the sales AND RENTAL operation.
I reckon that the $2 thing is a trial balloon. If people push back hard enough, they may throw a bit more dosh at those who push hardest.
1. Most organizations *like* real press-people to contact them via their press office before writing anything that could be seen as potentially negative. Anyone with half-a-clue should appreciate why this is...
2. From a strictly business perspective, Google is missing an opportunity here: *if* they sent "come clean up your mailbox" messages, then people would visit the site and see all those nice ads that are being avoided.
3. Google themselves have noted that they over-use the "Beta" tag.
4. What, exactly, does "personal use only" mean? Does it mean "non-commerical use only" or does it mean "use by you, as one individual only"? Common English suggess the latter, not the former.
5. Sad to say, but many journalists do have a slightly skewed view of the importance of their own opinions. I don't say this as a critique of Kewney, but as a critique of a press office that doesn't do a better job of keeping their egos happy...
When the iPod appeared, there was no broad-based, well known company who had something like it. Apple producedthe iPod, and partly through luck, partly through skill they had a design and feature set that worked (and I say luck because it's always an element). Plus, the thing was stand-alone, and would work just fine no matter what other "stuff" you may have.
The iPhone, though, is tied to Cingular. And, like it or not, it's not "revolutionary". It may (or may not) be "the best" implementation of what it does, but Nokia and Sony and the rest all have phone/camera/MP3 player/browser products, so Apple is jumping into a pool which is already occupied.
The best indicator that Apple knows all this is the fact that their ads include verbiage along the lines "there's never been an iPod like this". Apple seem to want people to look at the iPhone as an iPod with extra stuff. And that's a hard strategy to knock. But it's limited, primarily to those who want the extra stuff (e.g. watching videos... ick?) and who aren't encumbered by the Cingular-only stuff.
Poor old Otto! Apparently he's unaware that something over 10% of the population are gay, and selectively reading bits of the Bible as definitive indications of "morality" (while happily ignoring bits that don't reinforce his bigotry) won't change that.
Meanwhile, one wonders if Otto has considered the implications of the fact that Yahoo! is (apparently) "the most popular destination". Either Yahoo! is mystically forcing business to their site, or possibly it's Otto who is out of touch with reality!
Still, maybe Otto would be more comfortable in a place like Saudi Arabia or Iran? In many respects, those nations seem a better fit for the sort of views that Otto is pushing! In the USA, "conservative" doesn't have to mean "intolerant", but all to often small-minded individuals like Otto conflate the two.
Re: "Over the next few years we'll see more mobile music devices, ... , mobile web browsers, ..., all of which happen to have a SIM card, and which can make calls - but making calls is a secondary use".
Hmm... That's what the vendors would like, because a phone doesn't allow much product differentiation. But is it a valid characterization? When Joe Punter is rushing down to the shops to pick up something, what does he grab as he heads out the door? Is it the phone-capability or the music-playing capability? (Jane Punter may well have both by default because she carries a handbag rather than tries to stuff things on belts or in pockets).
So I'm not buying the "making calls is ... secondary" argument. Particularly when all that other stuff is going to negatively impact battery life and size.
Of course, there wil be some from whom combining two of their existing pocket devices is irrestible. But even here, you have the issue that a whole bunch of, say, iPod customes like the the fact that they can carry their _whole_ music collection, all 10GB to 80GB of it. iPhone won't help them any.
Where Apple could make a big difference is in driving a unified headset system, so that (through Bluetooth or whatever) a single headset with the associated cables and/or chargers could seamlessly work with everything. But they don't seem very interested in that side of the puzzle, given the lack of anything apart from the stock "ear buds" (which just fall out of my ears).
The thing looks very useful for crowd control, by operating as an instant observation tower.
Plus it offers 2.4GHz video transmitters, so a CONOPS could be: Van shows up near site; At time "T" drone "A" launches, and gets on station at (say) time T+4. At time T+10 drone "B" launches, reaches station at T+14; at T+15 observer switches to drone "B", and drone "A" returns to launch site (arriving at T+19), has its battery replaced, and repeats, arriving back on station at T+24, just in time for drone "B" to leave at T+25. The van needs two operator stations, one observer station, and a large battery charging bench!
The thing is small and quiet, so most people won't notice it, which rather limits the fear of it being shot down.
And for events such as protest marches, the idea of being able to observe (and photograph) the participants without being confrontational seems a rather good idea.
The cop overstepped the line. That's a given. But the accused was offered, and agreed to, the $400/40 hour thing, so as to avoid a criminal record had he gone to court and been convicted.
Now, we may agree that the chance of a conviction were slight, IF the cafe owner was willing to testify that she was OK with what he was doing. But a closer reading suggests that maybe she wasn't completely OK, but thought she had no options. So there would be a chance that the perp would have been convicted, and faced jail time. Given that, it's no wonder that he opted for the diversion and the fixed penalty.
Even more entertainingly, eventually someone is going to get hit with a similar charge, at a time when they were not actively being a customer, but had recently been one. For example, if you buy your morning coffee at the cafe, but check your e-mail at lunchtime. Are you still "unauthorized", because you are a customer of the business?
Register
50 posts • joined Wednesday 23rd May 2007 20:36 GMT
One potentially very valid use case for this sort of thing is where there is known to be data with different access patterns, such as file metadata vs file data itself. The former needs to be updated more frequently than the latter, so one could envision a mechanism that tags certain operations as being for "frequently modified" data, and dynamically applies the single-bit-per-MLC-cell trick to that data while retaining the multi-bit capability for the bulk data. This is the sort of thing we've done for years, but using different storage elements for the two varieties (e.g. Fe-RAM + SLC, for example). The messiest part would be tagging the appropriate operations, but in some applications a simple approach such as defining the first 5% (say) of the storage to be for metadata can work well. Remember, with things like journal-ling file systems, a single update can trigger three distinct (sets of) writes: the data, the metadata, and the journal.
Another concept may be to offer users different resilience/capacity options in much the same way as RAID storage systems have tended to do: enable the user to configure one bunch of flash as "endurance" memory, and another bunch of the same stuff as "capacity" storage.
By the way, @Stuart Longland: the likelihood of anyone grouping three TLC cells into an 8+1 arrangement is vanishingly low. But grouping 176 of the three-bit things to create a 528 bit entity offering 512bits +16 bits of ECC protection (i.e. 64 byte entities), and multiples thereof, is, shall we say, rather more likely...
No, President Obama doesn't use a Blackberry...
Senator, and Candidate, Obama used Blackberries.
President Obama does not. He uses a General Dynamics Sectéra® Edge™.
As to those who wonder why Boeing would select Android, the answer is simple: they can get Android and sweep the code line-by-line, add restrictions on what can be installed (like the app signing stuff that Windows 7 does), etc.
The idea that anyone would use an iThing for secure applications is laughable: Apple deliberately keeps stuff close to their vest, and won't release the keys to iTunes, so there's no way to deliver trusted apps to a hypothetical "secure" iPhone.
Oh, and the notion that Android is (inherently) full of malware and vulnerabilities is baseless. Sure, a lot of phones that run Android may well be, but the same is true of every other operating environment. The crux of the matter is that Google makes it possible to scrutinize Android, while Microsoft, RIM, and Apple do not...
On the other other hand...
Metavisor: while California does indeed ban below cost sales, the cost in question is the cost the article being sold, i.e. an eBook (or a video or music track or whatever). So if a publisher prices an eBook at $10, Apple could sell it at $7 by simply waiving their 30% commission and would not trigger the Unfair Practices definitions.... but no other vendor could buy the thing at less than $10 because of the MFN clause, and so could not match Apple's price without falling foul of the below-cost sales laws. The only way another vendor could match Apple's price is by negotiating their own agency agreement (a tall order without Apple's breadth), and even then Apple's MFN clause guarantees that no other vendor could do better than match Apple's 30% commission.
Careful...
I really don't think Seagate says that it's drive streams data at up to 300GB/sec.
Think about a 320GB drive; I doubt you can read it in 1.07 seconds, even if you were not limited by the nearly three orders of magnitude slower SATA interface (3Gb/s vs 2.4Tb/s).
Please, El Reg & Iain Thomson, please fix that implication that the PET was some kind of reaction to the Apple II; chronology doesn't support it:
January 1977: in the mainstream (then as now) CES show in Chicago, Commodore introduces the PET.
April 1977: Commodore ships the first PETs, priced at $595.
April 1977: The Apple I's price is reduced from $666 to $475 (which of course doesn't include many of the PETs features, such as a screen or a cassette deck).
April 1977: at the West Coast Computer Faire, Apple introduces the Apple II.
June 1977: Apple ships the first Apple ][, priced at $1298 excluding monitor, etc.
These days the fiction that the Apple II was "the first" home computer seems pervasive, just as the equally fictitious notion that the Mac was "the first" WIMP machine seems to be common.
And that's unfortunate, because it's people like Jack Tramiel that showed Apple what to do.
No advantage over T-Mobile
The idea that AT&T allowing unlocking might create a competitive advantage over T-Mobile is flawed, because T-Mo will already unlock any of their phones while still in contract. It doesn't get you out of the contract, but if you want to pay someone else _as well_ for airtime, why would any sane company care? So I can run my T-Mo Android thing on AT&T's network if I feel like it, juts by buying an AT&T SIM (or by swapping one out of a colleague's phone).
More relevant, I've run my in-contract T-Mo (USA) phone using PAYG SIMs in the UK, Germany and Australia.
So where's this "competitive advantage" of which you speak?
Ah, but what is "anger"?
It's worth noting that Jobs may well have been angry that Android was making the inroads on iStuff that it was, but it doesn't automatically follow that Jobs was angry at Google -- had it been Nokia who stepped up to the competitive plate, then it may well have been Symbian that attracted Job's ire.
And that's the point: those who claim Android was a copy of iOS need to recognize that iOS was a copy of Symbian and/or whatever Palm called their stuff. Of course, the iPhone did _most_ things better than, say, the Nokia E61, but it did some things worse (tethering, for instance). What the iPhone did achieve was a marketing success based on the alliance of the functionality with the "usability" of the device -- but the number of "original" things that Android could have copied (from iOS) is smaller than you think; it copies more from Palm and Nokia than Apple.
Benefits of air launch...
The biggest is, of course, that you don't need all that ground equipment -- noise suppression water systems, gantries, etc, plus you can launch from anywhere on the planet.
There are plenty of runways long enough (Kennedy and Edwards both have them. Actually, both Kennedy Space Center and John F. Kennedy International airport could serve, but obviously the latter _might_ raise hazard eyebrows.
One point is that this is already a "known" technology: not only does the SpaceShipOne (and Two) use it, but so does Orbital Sciences with their Pegasus launcher, which was the first private commercial vehicle to offer launch services.
The key issue, though, seems to me to be that this is "just" another low-to-medium payload system. What we need is a big truck, and what this (and Falcon 9, and Antares, and everything else) is a transit van. Cheap, effective, as long as things you want to carry aren't too big or heavy.
Here's the nub of the thing: Ariane, Proton, Long March 5, Titan IVB and the Space Shuttle could/can (theoretically) put something over 20,000kg (but less than 25,000kg) into LEO . This is good, but....
Saturn V could put 118,000kg into the same orbit.
That's what VPN's are for...
It would appear that, if a company like JB HiFi is prepared to shoulder the cost of actual warranty service, the added cost of maintaining a VPN connection and proxy service for their customers is relatively small. So they could, say, have a VPN from Victoria to Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever they get the goods, and back that with a public facing web proxy (possibly with authentication that the user bought from them, but more likely why bother).
Joe Punter goes now to JB HiFi for the latest firmware for the gadget with the geolocked firmware, and pulls the firmware from Singapore/Hong Kong/Wherever rather than from Australia... at least as far as the gadget maker is concerned.
This, of course, fails if there's some specific Australian content, but in that situation there is no parallel import: there is in-country added-value.
Is it just me, or...
Does anyone else find the idea of "Linux vs Unix" as nonsensical?
In my little world view, "Unix" is a generic term that encompasses a wealth of OS implementations, including: AIX, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, BSD, and "Linux", amongst others (and, yeah, I get to work with old stuff). None of the above are interchangeable, and they all have strengths and costs and weaknesses... but I submit that the differences between Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu are not qualitatively different from the differences between Solaris and Red Hat, Suse and AIX, etc. But throw someone comfortable with from any of those into VMS and watch them flounder...
[ The differences change depending on viewpoint: from the perspective of a driver developer, all Linuxen tend towards looking the same, but very different from e.g. AIX; from the perspective of a developer using an X-based toolkit, they all tend to look similar with trivial differences in (e.g.) type faces right up until you get to integration with desktops. Etc. ]
In sum, this article is really not talking about "Unix" vs anything, but proprietary hardware vs commodity hardware. Turns out the former is more expensive but tends towards "better", while the latter is cheaper.
Gosh. Colour me surprised!
What is "reliability"?
There seems to be a touching, albeit naive, view that reliability is a static concept: you can compare a disk with a tape and come up with a reliability metric.
Unfortunately, this is just not so. As things age, the relative reliability shifts. So a tape drive may be considered (for some bizarre reason) to be less reliable than a disk today, but how do the two stack up when you try to access the data on each in 5 years? 10 years? 40 years? Tape is inherently more stable.
Do you (for some value of "you") care? Maybe. It probably depends whether you are thinking of backups vs archives, since those are very different things.
P.s. those cautionary tale about tape backup errors? You know they apply equally to any other type of backup, right?
Time -- the reality!
A coupe of points:
@Ian Michael Gumby references a clock in Boulder, Colorado - presumably NIST-F1. He is a little confused: there is a transmitter in Fort Collins, Co. (WWVB) that broadcasts a time signal derived from a (bunch of) cesium clock(s) at the transmitter site, although those clocks are synchronized from NIST-F1 in Boulder. In NTP terms, NIST-F1 is the highest stratum, WWVB's clocks are a stratum lower than NIST-F1.
BUT none of that has any relevance to the GPS constellation: NIST-F1 provides civilian time. Military timekeeping centers around the US Naval Opservatory in Washington, which provides the top-level time reference for GPS, and LORAN-C using "dozens of cesium clocks" and a dozen of Hydrogen Maser clocks. GPS time signal correction is relayed vie Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Co.
Ironically, GPS may actually provide better timekeeping than a single source time signal like WWVB or MSF, because the propagation delay of the terrestrial signals depends on the distance one happens to be from the transmitter, whereas a GPS time reference *can* (but usually isn't) be derived from the aggregate signals from 12 or more satellites, even more so if you already know your precise location.
Oh, and has been implied earlier, the 60Hz reference in the article is just dumb, and not just because of the missing "k": in the time biz we distinguish between time interval and time reference. The time reference can show up at whatever interval you like ("At the third stroke, the time will be..."), the time interval is the duration between successive reference "hacks" ("Beeeep!"). So if you get a time interval reference at, say, 0.0166 recurring Hz (i.e. once a minute), and you know that the time reference is accurate to within 2 or 3ns of the USNO's equivalent datum point, then your problem becomes creating a clock that is sufficiently accurate to run freely for that one minute.
In short, if someone gives you a 60Hz signal whose time hack (rising edge, beep, whatever) is accurate to within 2ns of the One True Time (whatever that is), making a clock that won't drift far between ticks is generally a solved problem (it's not easy, but there's not a lot of point in getting too good because the reference is going to waffle around by up to 2ns).
Oh, and PTP (IEEE1588) will distribute network time far more accurately than NTP, for what it's worth.
The M1911 was invented way before 1911, sorry
Bunch of historical revisionists! The M1911 design was formally ADOPTED by the US Army in 1911 (March 29th, apparently). But the thing had been in trials against other designs since 1906, and prior to that there had been another set of trials in 1904 in which the requirements for the pistol evolved.
So it is reasonable to assert that the M1911 was "invented" sometime between the 1904 trials and the start of the 1906 contest. So let's say it was "invented" in 1905 (actually, it was just refined from earlier designs).
Certainly, in 1910 it was proving its mettle.
For what its worth, it was adopted by the US Navy & USMC in 1913, So we can do this all over again in a couple of years! (And let's not forget the M1911A1 from 1924...)
Use some thought: Laws saved us money
Sorry, Naughtyhorse, but you've been drinking the kool-aid: the 40 grand figure is the total paid to his partner, not the portion paid since renting from one's partner became inappropriate. So there is no question that the figure is less than 40K.
And more important: had Laws rented on the open market (as he was 100% entitled to do), he'd have spent more for the accommodation. Which we would have paid.
So Laws got slimed for actually saving us money.
Good dea! Thank you, The Telegraph. Nice work!
Blending issues
Jobs has done a great Job (hah!) of blending two related but distinct issues, and El Reg's Orlowski has continued the confusion (obviously, Jobs did it deliberately, not sure why Orlowski did).
The first is the merits (or lack thereof) of the Flash environment for developing web apps.
The second is the merits (or lack thereof) of the Flash player for deploying those apps.
Claims that the player side is "closed" are just false; others have pointed to FOSS players. Yet that is what Jobs wants to convey. And all this started because Adobe produced something that would translate Flash apps into something THAT WASN'T FLASH, but would run on the iThings.
Comments about the quality of the developer environment are all very well, but like it or not, I'm not seeing anything like the Flash developer environment for HTML5/CSS/H.264 *at the moment*. They will come, I'm sure, but you need more than tools, you need classes in tech and design schools, you need confidence that the thing will prevail, etc.
Finally, Jobs makes a big deal about how Flash crashes Macs etc. So why doesn't he spend a little of that mountain of cash in having his engineers make the FOSS Flash players run on Macs? Oh, right... he doesn't care about that. He cares about the cross-platform nature of Flash. So... what do we think Apple is going to do to block cross-platform development of HTML/CSS/H.264 apps? Hmmm..
Not exactly relevant... but Photoshop....
Not sure why so many people think Photoshop has any relevance on the Flash saga, but:
The UI of PS (at least since PS CS3) is virtually identical regardless of whether you use a Mac or a PC. OK, so you have to substitute the Apple key for the Alt key (or the Alt for the Apple), and the app-control mechanisms are native to the platform (so minimize/switch window/maximize etc. operate as the platform user would expect). Granted, this last bit can make it harder for a Mac user to work with PC Photoshop (and vice versa), but it's the exactly same with (say) Firefox!
(Actually, I happen to believe that the windowing capabilities of CS2 was *better* on a PC than on a Mac, but Adobe made them common with CS3).
The "C" never used to stand for "Corporation"
As a former employee, I can authoritatively state that the idea that Dick Egan would create a company called "EMC Corporation" (which he did) where the "C" stood for "Corporation" is laughable ("Egan Marino Corporation Corporation"???? That would have been stupid, and Dick was never that!)
"C" was actually the third partner in the early furniture-business discussions, who dropped out before the business actually started. Something like "Cruickshank", IIRC (which I probably don't). The three met to discuss selling the furniture, which planted the idea of the "EMC" name. "C" dropped out, leaving Egan and Marino.
As to the mechanics of Dick's death, those who try to make a political comment out of it never knew the man. Had he wanted to die in a clinic in (say) Switzerland, he would have done... but the man was Boston Irish, and the way he went seems like the way a scrappy fighter would want to go.
RIP, Dick.
Malc.
Not exactly an accurate start...
An interesting review... thank you.
BUT in 2005 you could happily buy a 1Ds or (I think) a 1Ds Mk 2, which gave you full-frame goodness. The only real distinction for between the 1Ds and 5D was the cost (important, but I think most customers for the 5D would be happy with a 1Ds!)
@dervheid
Yes, there's room. These are intended for LEO, which has the advantage that the orbits decay and the satellites eventually burn up (unlike GEO, where they just sit around). LEO is typically something in the 160km to 2000km altitude range, but for comms satellites, something greater than 500km is normal.
So let's take an altitude of 500km; with a earth diameter of 12,740km, that gives an orbital diameter of 13740km, and thus an orbital circumference of 43,165km. USSTRATCOM is currently tracking ~8500 objects larger than 10cm in size in LEO, which gives an average of one object every 5km or so.
Given the relative sizes of the objects involved, and the fact that everything is moving in the same direction, this is rather better than we expect for airliners over the ocean...
Malc.
Where does software end and hardware begin?
An interesting philosophical (and soon to be legal) question: where is the line between hardware and software? If, for example, Apple sold a keyboard with a license that it were only to be used on Mac's, the chances are extremely high that they'd lose attempts to enforce that: once purchased, you can use it as a doorstop (a good purpose for an Apple keyboard, IMO) if you like.
But that keyboard contains (a lot of) hardware and (a little) software. Change things around so you're buying a little hardware (a disk) and a lot of software (an OS). Most people seem to feel that's a different case, and restrictions on use are not inappropriate.
So where's the line?
Of course, what this really all about is Apple trying to have their cake and eat it to: they could have stated that you can only get Mac OS with a Mac (one free copy with every computer), and then sold upgrades that required a registered piece of hardware before they'd work (activated over one's iPhone, probably!). That's hardly complicated. But they wanted, instead, to sell the software as if it were a commodity product, and now someone is challenging their posturing: if they will sell me a copy without caring if I have a Mac (and they will), and they don't care if I just leave it on a shelf (and they don't), how can they suddenly care if I do something else with it?
While I have no great interest either way in the outcome of this particular squabble, I am eager to see fail these sorts of legalistic attempts to enforce unnatural restrictions. To me, this is like the DMCA: using the law to restrict usage because you're too lazy to use technology is culturally troubling.
The fact that it's an A380 is irrelevant...
The same seats and systems could be fitted in any type of aircraft, because that stuff is Buyer Furnished Equipment (BFE) not Airbus. Relatively little of what a passenger sees in an aircraft has much to do with the airframer (Boeing or Airbus, these days).
Malc.
Same deal is available now...
For $79 plus the CF cards:
http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad2sahdcf.asp
Plus that gives you USB as well as SATA connectivity.
(No relation with Addonics beyond that of a customer).
Black boxes? Don't be daft!
The notion of using WORM for "Black Box" recorders is quite laughable: the whole point of such recorders is that they are "endless loop" things, so that you'll *always* have the last XXX minutes of flight information. Using a WORM, you _will_ end up with a situation where the blasted thing is full, and then the aircraft would have to stop flying until the card was replaced... this may be problematic if the aircraft was in flight at the moment that the WORM fills!
What these WILL be good for is data distribution: you can put a bunch of files on the card and _know_ that if you can read them, _then_ the data is the data that the creator wanted you to have, not some hacked-up version. That has value...
Hard Drive Life -- @Alex D
While a hard drive _platter_ may hold its data for 20-30 years (a claim I don't know enough to dispute, although that reference contains enough questionable statements that it's probably disputable!), the drive mechanism almost certainly won't. If you leave a disk inoperative for even a few years, phenomena such a stiction (to name just one) will likely kill the mechanism, so you won't be able to spin up the disk.
Therein lies the biggest flaw with hard disk as a backup: failure modes for disks tend to result in the thing being unusable (and therefore all the data being lost) a lot more frequently than failure modes for (e.g.) tapes or DVDs or CDs...
This leads to the issue of "acceptable" loss criteria; many applications are OK with the idea of (say) 99% of the data being retrievable after 50 years, which is not wildly different than with paper archives!
Oh, and ECC won't help you at all if all your ECC is on the same device...
Lots of bogus assertions, here..
First, there are two issues going on. You may not like either of them, but there's a civil action for damages (between the MPAA/RIAA/whoever and Pirate Bay) and a criminal action (between the Swedish state and Pirate Bay).
If the cop _was_ talking about a job with Warner before the investigation concluded, so what? Warner doesn't direct the findings of the Swedish government, so this is only an issue if you're trying to create a controversy, possibly to mask the weakness of your defense.
@Jacqui
Regarding damage to equipment allegedly caused by airport screening machines...
a) newer security systems are smarter and use lower dosages, thereby invalidating sample sets using older systems,
b) how do you know the problem was with the security regime, not the travel regime? e.g. maybe it was the use of laptops on aircraft (in turbulence) that was killing the disks, not the travel through the x-ray machine?
I'm not saying that the security at airports ISN'T bad for laptops. Just that we don't know that it IS!
Hey, @AC...
Bush is alleging, with no visible means of support, that without *retroactive* immunity, this bill is worthless. That's so obviously wrong that it's funny, and Pelosi is spot on to point that out.
This bill, as written, protects the telcos if they cooperate with the FISA court. As it should. But pretending that you need to provide immunity for actions that happened prior to this bill passing is just silly.
The core problem seems to me that Bush told the telco's "trust me, we'll take care of you". And now it seems increasingly likely that he never had the authority to do that. And while I agree that's unfair on the telco's who believed him, some of the telco's DID decline to participate in some of the scheme(s).
@Chad... EDGE is not the only connectivity...
Chad wrote: "edge is what, 200Kbps at optimum rate. Much less in real world use? While we're complaining, let's winge the iPhone won't sync with a commodore 64!"
You seem to have forgotten that the iPhone can do WiFi. Which is, what, 54000kbps optimum...
So would you _really_ like to try to justify the notion that there's no reason why anyone would want to have, say, an ability to place a VoIP call from their iPhone phonebook? Maybe because they're indoors and have poor cellular reception, or because they're calling overseas and don't want to pay AT&T's rates?
(You know, just like you can with Nokia Series 60 phones like the E61)...
Malc.
@Not That Andrew
As a point of fact, you can't hijack something you own. Like it or not, the US gov't paid for the establishment of the domain name system as well as the IP address system.
The problem is not that the US owns ".com" (and is nice enough to let any old Johnny Foreigner to use it, too), but that the non-US agents came up with cumbersome and ugly national alternatives. Why ".co.uk" instead of, say, ".ukcom" or ".couk"? Or ".Brit"? And, granted, that's a charge you can levy on the US gov't, 'cos they hogged the good names and forced everyone else into the two letter country codes. But still, blame the Brit gov't for being dumb enough to subdivide the ".uk": they could have reserved ".gov.uk" and "edu.uk", etc. and let the rest just have ".uk" domains (as in "www.theregister.uk").
That said, the statement in the original article that the only way to get off the list is to go back to the bureaucrats is incorrect: you could sue the OFAC in US Federal Court.
Malc.
Boot Recognition Fault..
Otto, Otto, Otto... thigh-highs are so called because they come up to the thighs. Lacy is wearing knee-highs.
Malc.
-- Mine's the long, studded, black leather with the interesting zips.
@Henry...
Henry...
"What he means is that the federal courts cannot take American companies to task for their actions regarding Internet traffic between persons abroad."
NO, THAT's ERRONEOUS... because...
"Federal courts lack jurisdiction in cases where both the plaintiff and defendant are located outside the country."
If the COMPANY is American, then Federal courts DO have jurisdiction, because they are located _inside_ the country...
If a Brit writes to a German and somehow AT&T (or someone) does something to offend one or both the Brit/German, then they can sue AT&T (or someone) in Federal Court because AT&T (or etc.) is located in the USA.
@Lee Sexton
There's no anticompetitive issue here. The agreement between Tosh and SKG Dreamworks would have been tied up as a technology license (for the HD-DVD tech) and a marketing agreement (for the HD-DVD only bit: SKG agreed to promote HD-DVD in return for cash).
The car companies do things like this all the time: dealers can claim lots of cash from the manufacturer to cover things like advertising and showroom stocking, but ONLY if they agree not to sell or promote competitors.
It's really no different from exclusivity deals in which a given company is granted the right to sell a product (e.g. a phone) in a given market (e.g. the UK)....
Malc.
@Mr B... magnetic disks vs optical disks
The thing with HDD vs any kind of optical disk is the longevity: put a good BD disk on a reasonably cool shelf, and chances are it will be fine in 10+ years. Put an HDD on that same disk, and the chances are it won't. There's also the _type_ of failure: the average optical drives defect may result in lost data, but the whole may still be more-or-less usable. HDDs have a large set of failure modes in which the thing becomes a brick.
Moral of the story: use HDDs for short-term and scratch storage, but not for archival use.
But the model you describe where an HDD is used for renting a movie is perfect... especially if you extend it to a standardized license that permits you to redownload the thing onto a new disk should the old one fail...
Malc.
Ron Hughes
Ron,
The issue is not whether or not we should bug terrorists, but about the oversight required for various types of bugging operations. We should indeed be able to bug pretty much anyone -- including lawyers -- ALWAYS PROVIDED that the appropriate oversight exists to ensure that the power isn't being abused in a J. Edgar Hoover sort of way (e.g. bugging your political rivals to ensure your success, or bugging a lawyer to get a true understanding of "what really happened").
This is the problem with the USA's "FISA doesn't apply to anyone Bush says it doesn't" "warrantless wiretapping". It's not that the wiretapping is a bad thing in any way, BUT without a judge to look over the justification, the risk of abuse is significant.
Sigh.. let's read the article, peeps...
The words say:
"Apple says it has sold 3.7m iPhones in total. AT&T says it has sold 2m iPhones, and European operators are believed to have sold between 300,000 and 400,000 handsets."
So: total sold through every channel, including off the back of a Hong Kong lorry: 3.7m. Of that, AT&T and the European operators have sold (say) 2.4m. Therefore Apple has moved 1.3m through other channels (possibly including warranty replacements, since we're talking marketing numbers).
As Greg noted, there are allegedly up to 3.2m phones in the production pipeline for the next 6 months, which makes some kind of sense based on the sales of the last 6 months. But that still leaves us with a grand total of 6.9m phones _built_ by June, when Apple is claiming it expects to have sold 10m.
Which suggests that Apple is planning on selling phone futures!
In other news, good to see that Apple Fanbois are still well represented...
Hmmm, Novell has few legs to stand on...
The notion that Novell was somehow duped by Microsoft is, frankly, risible. At that time, Novell (not MS) had the dominant products in two fields: network servers, and word processing.
So here Novell is acting all surprised that MS messed up their development plans... not once, but twice! (First when they pulled/changed/whatever the shell extensions thing -- hardly critical to a word processor, but nevermind -- and then again when they re-instated them). The fact is that Novell _could_ have released a version of WP 5.1 that lacked any kind of shell extensions, and if they decided they needed them, then the effort they made to work around the lack of documentation doesn't magically cease to work when MS re-released to docs.
MS is right: Novell screwed WP -- or rather, WP screwed WP and sold themselves in a screwed state to Novell, who were themselves screwed up in their own special way.
Think about it: is it a coincidence that both Netware and WP stalled for as long as they did?
@Steve Keller...
Steve, I doubt whether all those "hundreds" of admins really believe that they can't be breached, any more than the true museum quality storage people think they can't be.
All that's at issue is whether the security precuations match the value and worth of the items secured.
Now, you advocate criminal charges, but I'd disagree: statutory civil damages would be more effective, for two reasons: the first is the simple one of the standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of evidence), therefore it's easier to win a civil suit than a criminal trial.
The second is more important: the criminal case goes against the CEO and CIO, and if they get convicted, the company will get another. The *civil* case, though, goes against the shareholder's pockets. This means that the shareholders will be motivated to do it properly. Think Enron: was it Ken Leay who was entirely at fault, or the entire group of people who were making the money off the scam?
It's also more appropriate: as you note, your ID is worth a lot more to you than it is to the company, so having a statutory level of damages that avoids you having to prove that the company's actions caused you X amount of harm.
Seems to me...
That the problem isn't whether or not the ISP can shape traffic, but _how_ they shape traffic.
If they were to say "Download X megabytes and upload Y MB at full speed, then after that we'll throttle you to something less than full speed _if we need to_ (i.e. dynamically, i.e. during busy periods), and it doesn't matter what you download or upload" then everybody should be happy. Every user gets guaranteed the same deal, but those who go off into the territory of exceptional usage get slowed, but not stopped!
Boeing aren't the _only_ aircraft maker...
Just because the 787 will be Boeing's first airplane with large amounts of composite materials it doesn't mean that the industry doesn't have plenty of experience with the concept.
Airbus aircraft have had significant composite content for years. So most of the complaints are demonstrably false.
You lot (well, a lot of you lot) seem confused about what a trademark is...
A trademark allows you the exclusive use of a mark in a particular type of business. So there's no confusion between the trademark AA referring to an organization formerly intended for British motorists but now, well, not and the trademark AA referring to an airline.
Your best clue may well lie with Apple and, umm, Apple. One makes records, the other wishes it did.
And for those who think this is about searches like "I want to fly only on American airlines", think again. This is about people SELLING "space" on that search...
Just a note about "bad science" and "public policy"...
Ryan Nix's comment seems fine as far as it goes, but let's not lose site of the fact that the "public policy" in question here is actually "there should be no restrictions on polluting the atmosphere". The onus really should be on those who wish to dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stuff to show that there will be no adverse consequences, rather than the opposite (that people who don't want the dumping having to show that the dumped by-products are harmful).
That doesn't change the fact that bad science shouldn't drive public policy. But the "bad science" here lies the notion that the existing and historical levels of pollution are not harmful, rather than the consensus that, to some degree or other, it is...
Invent-an-Irony...
Mr Dawson is doing an impressive job of trying to create a smokescreen, but in so doing he's missing a few key points.
For example, while it may, or may not, be true that in the UK the "secular and authoritarian section of the left" is pushing hardest, that in no way implies that the theocrats are _not_ also pushing hard.
And regardless of what's happening in the UK, this particular article is about the situation in Australia, where the announcements were made at that hardly secular or left-leaning community that attends "megachurches". And, in passing, it should be noted that the Australian demagoguery seems similar to that in the USA.
But far more importantly, while there _might_ be some truth in noting that there is a secular left-leaning group lobbying for restrictions, there is undeniable truth in noting that the most vigorous opposition to restrictions is coming from (a different) left-leaning community, while there tends to be a deafening silence from the religious right.
And that's the crux: it may well be that "uptight christian moralists" tend to have limiting factors placed on them (although the Crusades and the Inquisition are object lessons in just how limiting those factors can be), but I know of few, if any, "uptight christian moralists" who argue with much zeal against censorship.
Still, the Irony of Mr Dawson blaming progressives for John Howard choosing a megachurch for his announcement is quite exquisite...
Google Checkout...
... Can be used to buy stuff, not just rent a movie. Which is kinda relevant, 'cos you might notice that the whole thrust of the piece was that Google is discontinuing the sales AND RENTAL operation.
I reckon that the $2 thing is a trial balloon. If people push back hard enough, they may throw a bit more dosh at those who push hardest.
Reality Check...
1. Most organizations *like* real press-people to contact them via their press office before writing anything that could be seen as potentially negative. Anyone with half-a-clue should appreciate why this is...
2. From a strictly business perspective, Google is missing an opportunity here: *if* they sent "come clean up your mailbox" messages, then people would visit the site and see all those nice ads that are being avoided.
3. Google themselves have noted that they over-use the "Beta" tag.
4. What, exactly, does "personal use only" mean? Does it mean "non-commerical use only" or does it mean "use by you, as one individual only"? Common English suggess the latter, not the former.
5. Sad to say, but many journalists do have a slightly skewed view of the importance of their own opinions. I don't say this as a critique of Kewney, but as a critique of a press office that doesn't do a better job of keeping their egos happy...
Why iPhone is not an iPod...
... at least, with regards to the early adopters.
When the iPod appeared, there was no broad-based, well known company who had something like it. Apple producedthe iPod, and partly through luck, partly through skill they had a design and feature set that worked (and I say luck because it's always an element). Plus, the thing was stand-alone, and would work just fine no matter what other "stuff" you may have.
The iPhone, though, is tied to Cingular. And, like it or not, it's not "revolutionary". It may (or may not) be "the best" implementation of what it does, but Nokia and Sony and the rest all have phone/camera/MP3 player/browser products, so Apple is jumping into a pool which is already occupied.
The best indicator that Apple knows all this is the fact that their ads include verbiage along the lines "there's never been an iPod like this". Apple seem to want people to look at the iPhone as an iPod with extra stuff. And that's a hard strategy to knock. But it's limited, primarily to those who want the extra stuff (e.g. watching videos... ick?) and who aren't encumbered by the Cingular-only stuff.
Bigotted AND ignorant! Whoo!
Poor old Otto! Apparently he's unaware that something over 10% of the population are gay, and selectively reading bits of the Bible as definitive indications of "morality" (while happily ignoring bits that don't reinforce his bigotry) won't change that.
Meanwhile, one wonders if Otto has considered the implications of the fact that Yahoo! is (apparently) "the most popular destination". Either Yahoo! is mystically forcing business to their site, or possibly it's Otto who is out of touch with reality!
Still, maybe Otto would be more comfortable in a place like Saudi Arabia or Iran? In many respects, those nations seem a better fit for the sort of views that Otto is pushing! In the USA, "conservative" doesn't have to mean "intolerant", but all to often small-minded individuals like Otto conflate the two.
Yes, Peter, we know
We know the concept isn't new. The article explicitly says that it isn't new. And I'm not seeing the word "novel" used either.
This is about a development: putting the concept to work in a Bluetooth headset.
Cart/Horse Topology Reversal?
Re: "Over the next few years we'll see more mobile music devices, ... , mobile web browsers, ..., all of which happen to have a SIM card, and which can make calls - but making calls is a secondary use".
Hmm... That's what the vendors would like, because a phone doesn't allow much product differentiation. But is it a valid characterization? When Joe Punter is rushing down to the shops to pick up something, what does he grab as he heads out the door? Is it the phone-capability or the music-playing capability? (Jane Punter may well have both by default because she carries a handbag rather than tries to stuff things on belts or in pockets).
So I'm not buying the "making calls is ... secondary" argument. Particularly when all that other stuff is going to negatively impact battery life and size.
Of course, there wil be some from whom combining two of their existing pocket devices is irrestible. But even here, you have the issue that a whole bunch of, say, iPod customes like the the fact that they can carry their _whole_ music collection, all 10GB to 80GB of it. iPhone won't help them any.
Where Apple could make a big difference is in driving a unified headset system, so that (through Bluetooth or whatever) a single headset with the associated cables and/or chargers could seamlessly work with everything. But they don't seem very interested in that side of the puzzle, given the lack of anything apart from the stock "ear buds" (which just fall out of my ears).
Oh, be fair!
The thing looks very useful for crowd control, by operating as an instant observation tower.
Plus it offers 2.4GHz video transmitters, so a CONOPS could be: Van shows up near site; At time "T" drone "A" launches, and gets on station at (say) time T+4. At time T+10 drone "B" launches, reaches station at T+14; at T+15 observer switches to drone "B", and drone "A" returns to launch site (arriving at T+19), has its battery replaced, and repeats, arriving back on station at T+24, just in time for drone "B" to leave at T+25. The van needs two operator stations, one observer station, and a large battery charging bench!
The thing is small and quiet, so most people won't notice it, which rather limits the fear of it being shot down.
And for events such as protest marches, the idea of being able to observe (and photograph) the participants without being confrontational seems a rather good idea.
Here's the situation...
The cop overstepped the line. That's a given. But the accused was offered, and agreed to, the $400/40 hour thing, so as to avoid a criminal record had he gone to court and been convicted.
Now, we may agree that the chance of a conviction were slight, IF the cafe owner was willing to testify that she was OK with what he was doing. But a closer reading suggests that maybe she wasn't completely OK, but thought she had no options. So there would be a chance that the perp would have been convicted, and faced jail time. Given that, it's no wonder that he opted for the diversion and the fixed penalty.
Even more entertainingly, eventually someone is going to get hit with a similar charge, at a time when they were not actively being a customer, but had recently been one. For example, if you buy your morning coffee at the cafe, but check your e-mail at lunchtime. Are you still "unauthorized", because you are a customer of the business?