Posts by Christopher E. Stith

phonetics are fine for two things

You can teach someone to read with phonetics and context. Just remind them that certain letters can make different sounds in certain situation. The other is to help kids learn to spell a good deal of words. Again, exceptions must be kept.

It seems this guy wants to get rid of exceptions. That's pretty nice in theory I guess, but I don't see how it would ever work in the real world.

word omitted in the first sentence...

s/to started/to get started/

perhaps s/to started/to start/

Also, showing off the xterm is nice for the new users, but if you're just running one command from it you might as well run that command from the command window. That is, unless you really need the STDOUT and STDERR for feedback.

Is a boot-loader for low-end computers a bad place to be?

The low-end computers used to be IBM-compatible PCs running DOS. Apple had the artists, while SGI and Intergraph had CAD and simulation. The AS/400 had accounting and commercial Unix had the small servers. Almost anything big was the s3xx family or a very limited production supercomputer like a Cray. You almost never saw anything from Commodore, Texas Instruments, Atari, or Tandy (except some of the IBM PC compatibles) on a business desktop.

If Google's Gears becomes the platform of choice for the basic business apps and Linux (or even BSD) becomes the layer under Gears, that's probably not a bad deal. There are already lots of local applications for those systems. The selection is not as broad as on Windows, but it can definitely supplement the Gears apps. Once there are more desktops out there for which Linux and KDE, GnuStep, or GNOME (probably with the libraries for all three) are available, more native applications will be written for it, too.

Even without Gears or Chrome, if someone can get by with OpenOffice (and most MS Office users below expert level can) and Firefox then they can use a Linux desktop for work. The IT department will love the way the system locks down compared to a Windows system, too.

It's possible to do much less desktop support with a well-designed permissions system. It's even easy to make it so the user can't mount portable media from home and to make sure their saved files are on the server instead of the desktop. The biggest desktop support issue IME is that people save documents to a local drive instead of the properly redundant server with daily backups. Then, when a nominally standard issue and interchangeable desktop gives up the magic smoke, weeks of work is lost. Lock down the permissions on the local directories and give the users a home directory on the SAN. I know it's possible to have a remote personal folder with Windows, but how often is that really done? Usually it's just an admonition from IT to stop saving local files and use the network drive.

trade-ins for original PSP?

Come on, Sony. You promised TV output and other features for the original PSP that only the Slim has. Give us half of what we paid on your aborted bastard child towards this new one. Choads.

usage test or viewers shown a demo?

Information Week says that Microsoft doesn't just have a video of the users who doubted Vista using "Mojave",. They are reporting that the "users" were simply shown a demo of what the OS was supposed to be able to do. Any OS can look good as screenshots and canned demos. What's the real deal here?

@Chad Larson -- Why would Sun support PostgreSQL over MySQL, which they own?

MySQL is missing a few enterprise features, but it does support stored procedures, triggers, and foreign key enforcement now. Sun bought MySQL AB, too, in case you haven't heard. It's probably a good thing that the company who owns it is willing to support it.

Get the vendor there.

If they paid multiple millions of dollars, even as devalued as the dollar is right now, the vendor should be happy to send an engineer over to pop the cork on these systems. It should be easy for someone familiar enough with the systems who has physical access.

The last MS OS to fulfill its promises was MS-DOS 5

6.2 didn't even meet its promises, because the "Microsoft disk compression technology" was proven in court to infringe on Stac Electronics properties. 6.21 Was then released without compression and 6.22 had a new compression scheme.

The main reason DOS met its promises is because it made so few. It was a single-user, single-tasking OS with paltry drivers and no security, but MS didn't build a web of lies around it saying otherwise.

If MS can prove a competitor has been spreading outright lies, that's for the courtroom. If they're calling someone a liar that they can't prove is lying, that's defamation. They should spend more time making the software do what it's supposed to do and less time convincing people it's alright that it doesn't.

US cultural revolution

"Burn the PCs, burn the Intarwebs. Smart, awkward men are addicts, and addicts support terror and all that." Leave it to some outsider who doesn't understand it all to say that ARGUING with your spouse is a better way to spend time than reading El Reg.

A bit of a cheat, yeah?

WTF would you kill 30% of your performance for a benchmark? You've enabled a workaround for a problem your part doesn't have for what reason? Why not overclock the overclocking-specific part? Is the Q6600 actually the same price as the Phenoms or several pounds more per unit than many of them, as they are at NewEgg? ($209.99 American for the Q6600, $148.99 for the 8450, $165.99 for the 8650, the 8750 and the 9550 each for $195, $215 for the 9750, and $235 for the 9850 BE today). How much extra do you spend on an Intel-compatible motherboard?

Since the X3 Phenoms start cheaper than the E6550 Core 2 Duo, and the X4 ones start at a little more than the E8400 C2D, where are those comparisons? You also fail to mention that the Athlon x2 and Athlon 64 x2 lines compete just fine, price per performance, with the Core 2 Duo when you knocked the Phenoms for not having a two-core part.

AMD doesn't have the technological lead they did a few years ago, but there's no reason you can't give them a fair showing. They trail a bit in desktop benchmarks, but at street prices (in the US anyway), the performance per investment is worth considering.

Tux is from Finland, surely.

After all, he's the mascot for Linux. Just because penguins naturally come from the Southern hemisphere does not mean a cartoon mascot is worried about finding an ample supply of herring off the Ross ice shelf.

We are living in a surveillance age. These in Sweden can hope that this intrusion is actually used for national security there and not the prosecution of various and sundry local crimes as has been the case with the US's Unpatriotic Act.

Linux and games

The secret to getting games to run well on Linux is to buy or download games that are native to the OS. Yes, that does limit your selection. TANSTAAFL. WINE widens your selection some, but at the expense of stability and speed. Having two OSes on two separate computers or dual booting fixes the issues most people have, but that's twice the expense.

The difference between Intel and AMD

The difference between Intel and AMD in this situation is that Intel has enough other products out in enough quantity (and have enough cash in reserve) that this is just a small bump in the road. When AMD has a months-long delay on a new chip the effect is so serious precisely because they depend on new revenue from new chip lines so heavily.

Hopefully the ATI purchase, which gives them revenue from graphics processors and a better chipset division will someday allow AMD some leeway in this area. Perhaps the NexGen products could be promoted more heavily on the low end, too, for more revenue from established lines.

Whether you favor one company over the other, no matter which, it'd be nice for competition if one didn't appear to be dangling just above bankruptcy every time a launch is delayed.

No anti-anything?

So, I guess the Greens and Libertarians are successfully screwed one more way now. We USians can't be against the Democrats and Republicans screwing the people and defecating on the Constitution of the US and get AdWords revenue to pay for our sites and our political movements? What's next, no bitching about the news media covering Paris and Britney instead of the news, or your ads get cut?

linear drop or a curve?

It's easy to get the total time wrong if you're assuming a constant linear fade rather than a front-loaded curve that starts to flatten (or the other way around). I think the measurement and graph plotting methods need to be made along with any claims such as this.

negative kywords when available, or limiting the ad networks?

If these people can only advertise on ad networks that allow exclusion of ads based on certain words, that's limiting the businesses with which they are allowed to market. Sure, they probably wouldn't want to use any ad network that didn't offer those features anyway, but this seems like an overly broad restriction on their trade if it requires them only to use certain companies.

All digital circuits are built from analog parts

That's why, for example, memory has timings. If you read it faster than it's rated, you don't know its value.

This is also one reason CPUs tend to have clock cycles. It takes some time for the circuits involved to change state. You must wait until the state change you initiated takes place before depending on it. A clock is one of the simpler ways to do that -- just don't try anything until after the circuit has had plenty of time to stabilize.

Latches and flip-flops are needed in many circuits so that the results of computation are around long enough to read.

Digital computers are an abstraction over the analog nature of electric circuits. There's no magic involved.

It's a funny reminder of the bubble...

Remember when AOL bought Time Warner-Turner to become AOL-Time Warner? Now the renamed TIme Warner wants to sell the AOL portion of the company and can't find a buyer.

I have a free tip for them. Perhaps they should merge the AOL division with the Time Warner Cable division and make it AOL Cable. They could offer the cable connection, the Internet access, the AOL forums and ads, and the TV channel delivery all in one package. Then they could sell that and be done with two lackluster portions of the company.

some things

Actually, Iowa uses a caucus, not a primary ballot election.

The cost to export food from the US is based around the price of oil in the US. Oil and everything else in the US is going up partly because of "what if" scenarios over Iraq and Iran driving up the price of oil futures and partly because the US dollar is dropping in value fairly rapidly.

The share of fuels being produced from food crops isn't huge, but it is adding a bit to the problem. The fact that no pipelines that carry oil in the US from place to place are rated to transport ethanol means more energy goes to transport ethanol to market (using tanker trucks) than oil, petrol, or natural gas (using pipelines for much of the distribution), so that's probably part of the issue too.

Never mind the cost of food crops themselves. Once farmers in the US are paying more to ship their crops overseas to markets than those markets will support, they won't be shipped there. It's more efficient and cheaper to let the crops rot in the States than to ship them overseas and have them rot in markets there. If you'd like to make the argument that the food sellers overseas could just buy them, have them shipped, and sell them, don't bother. Why would they pay to buy them and ship them to let them rot, either?

The issue of supply and demand can't be fully understood if you don't understand the economic definition of "demand". "Demand", in the economic sense, doesn't just mean someone wants to buy something, but also that they have the means to do so and are willing to pay the asking price. When nobody will pay the asking price, there is no demand. Yet prices only respond to supply outstripping demand when the cost to create the supply is less than the price that will create more demand in the market. Nobody wants to sell at a loss in any kind of large volume (although sometimes people will sell at a loss in small volumes to attract customer loyalty, companion goods sales, or whatever).

USB sticks fit in pockets

If they can search your laptop but not your person, just put your data on your person.

@ Solomon Grundy

Why do you feel sorry for Open Source types? Because we only have 13 or so years worth of development we can reuse openly from MySQL for whatever purpose and at no cost vs. the volumes of SQL Server and Oracle source code you've got for the same?

There's nothing proprietary about EFI

Intel created it as an open standard to make it easier for companies to develop motherboards for Itanium.

If emulating vanilla EFI makes a computer boot OS X just fine, then there's nothing wrong between these people and Apple but the EULA. There's lots of debate over whether that part of the EULA will stand. That makes the whole OpenComputer/OpenPro a gamble, but what product isn't? This is just a bigger gamble for a potentially bigger payoff. It's good to see they thought it better to change the name from "OpenMac" that they had been using, though.

They do need to get an EFI emulator that they're allowed to use, though. That's pretty likely to be an issue.

trespassing

The sales associate was a dick for reporting a helpful consumer to management. The guy was helping a customer make a purchase he'd be happier with in the future (as opposed, apparently, to the one on which Best Buy made the higher margin).

The store manager was a dick to ask the guy to leave.

After the guy was asked to leave, though, he was trespassing by not leaving. The Best Buy store is not public property, and you are only allowed onto or into private property at the pleasure of the owner or leaseholder. In this case, the store manager was a representative of the owner or leaseholder.

If the customer had left and come back the next day, the workers probably wouldn't have even noticed him. He could have called customer service after leaving the store. Now that he's been escorted by police out of the building, there's a good chance he'll not be allowed back in.

Long story short, when you're asked to leave private property, you have a legal obligation to do so, even if the person asking you to leave is a first rate ass.

The story here is that Best Buy employees are dicks when you call them on their crap products and point out that their "guaranteed lowest price " is a farce. It's not news that you can be escorted by police if you refuse to leave private property.

"386SX-like"

All of the the 386SX, the 68008, and the 68EC020 had narrower physical memory paths than what they allowed the programmer to address. The fact that Ix86 and M68k are not compatible doesn't mean the comparison is invalid. They used the same technique to make lower-end, cheaper machines possible.

@David Taylor

It slows main memory bandwidth, sure. It's much faster than if you have to swap to disk because of your capacity. Chances are, too, that if they're bright enough to pull this off they might just have other RAM-related technologies up their sleeves in the future. He might be alluding to something coming.

top500.org?

If a few hundred x86 or Power systems tied together can make top500, think of what tying together 4 or 8 z10s as a cluster would do.

@ b shubin

Your disbelief in a higher power is based on the assumption that said higher power is benevolent, all-powerful, understands and faithfully answers all prayers, and is not prone to practical jokes.

Any Murhpyite should know that if there is, in fact, a powerful spirit able to act on behalf of humans, that He or She does not always do so according to the wishes of the Murhpyite in question. If He or She does help sometimes but not always (for whatever reason), the help will stop at the worst possible time. If He or She opposes your goal intermittently, the opposition will likewise come at the worst possible time. If humor is involved, your goals will be squashed when it is found by the deity in question to be most humorous, which is typically when it causes the Murphyite the most problems.

Therefore, a true Murphyite should know that the question of any deity not under supplication to the Murphyite is moot, as the Rule of Murphy will determine the interaction of the deity with the Murhpyite. How could it be otherwise, as the true Murphyite believes in the Rule of Murphy as an absolute?

404? Really?

Is this actually done when a server returns a 404, or is it a "server not found" error? Those two, despite confusing usage by some parties, are fundamentally different types of errors. A 404 from a server means the page isn't found but the server is. A DNS error or an invalid domain means the server was never reached.

Also, I agree that an optional bit of software providing me a search option is not at all the same as adulterating the content of a page I'm viewing.

@DR

So there are no unencrypted MP3s other than copied corporate music? Gee, I could've sworn I'd downloaded podcasts, indie music samples, and speeches in that format.