Posts by vincent himpe 804 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2006
Should stay out of their hardware. Consumer hardware should be welded shut and then filled with epoxy resin. Sorry if i sound sarcastic but i have seen too many times the end results of some self proclaimed computer 'guru' (read:dimwit) that attempted to 'upgrade' their hardware and then come in whining about it doesn;t work and they want to swap it under warranty
... if it were 28$ a year , maybe .... and when you write your PHD thesis the chocolate factury can index and snoop around in it firsthand..
no thank you. i'll use a regular laptop , encrypted drive and offsite encrypted backup thank you.
besides 12.1 inch... probalby at 800x600 resolution too. i can;t see it running anything serious.
students these days use stuff like matlab, mathcad and other 'big-iron' apps.
even catastrophic hardware failures don't crash that thing.. Has a funny way of working. Kernel is sealed in the first page of the PC ( first 64K ) . All remaining memory is essentially a ramdrive.
A program is simply copied from disk and executed. Each program is allowed a scratchfile ( in the ramdrive ) the Os sets the max size of this ramdrive. Any variables used by the program reside in this scratchfile. If a program crashes it is simply reloaded into a different 'sector' and the link is restored to its scratchfile. This scratchfile also includes a stack , heap and all other constructs. Essentially this scratchfile acts as a VM.
I had an ion-implanter (made by Eaton) running on a 386 with a full windowed graphical user interface ( There is a graphical shell on top of iRMX ) Each button or menu is essentially a standalone program that interacts with others. All of a sudden the system console pops up : Memory error at address .. (i forgot the actual addres sbut it was in the high memory ). Reloading affected elements..
and a few seconds later the system was fully operational as if nothing happened.
The fault was a defective DIMM. iRMX had trapped an unstability , moved the corrupted programs to a different 'sector' and marked that portion of the 'ramdrive' as bad. After reloading fresh copies of the affected elemetns it simply pointed them back to their runtime file and they happily took of where the previous instance failed.
The machine kept on running for many more weeks until we shut it down for a scheduled maintenance at which point the faulty dimm was replaced.
As long as the first 64K of memory does not get corrupted by physical damage you cannot crash iRMX.
iRMX lives on as InTime, a concurrent RTOS that can coexist with other OS's and runs simultaneously on multicore processors. It is used for things such as medical equipment, machine control and other 'critical' applications. the critical portion runs on a dedicated core under iRMX. this communicates with a non critical host OS and lets the host do the visualisation and user interface. Even if the host Os fails the iRMX portion remains running and maintains integrity on the system to be controlled.
the headstacks would need to be on opposite corners of the drive assembly. in the current drive case this is not doable. you would need a physically larger case.
the headstack also counts for more than 50% against the cost of the drive. the platters and control electronics are peanuts.
The reliability would take a tremendous hit as well. the more heads the lower the mtbf. on modern drives more than 90% of catastrophic failures are cause by blown heads due to static discharge...
40 years ago we went to the moon and invented microprocessors , 30 years ago we built shuttles and had personal computers, 20 years ago the internet boomed and we had cellphones
Today it's 2011 and all people to is twitter and post nonsens on facebook while staring at a tiny little screen. Imagine what we will be doing 50 years from now. Probably back in a cave somewhere scribling on the wall with charcoal
even if it is an april fools ( and it is... )
here's the flagrant mistakes in the article that make this unbelievable
1) it is 3 heads per recording surface which would mean 6 per platter. ( platter has top and bottom. so 2 recording surfaces per platter. Mistake in title...
2) if it were possible to put 3 heads on an arm and switch electronically between them ( the switching is not a problem. Drives have been doing this for years. there is onyl one preamp with up to 8 heads attached. Each head consist of a read TMR or GMR element (Magnetoresistor), a write head ( inductive loop ) and a heating element to control flying height ( Bernoulli's law governs the gap between head and platter for a given speed. other factors that control flying height are temperature and pressure. Pressure doesn't change. Temperature does. Writing heats up the head , so when switching to reading that temperature must be maintained. Look up 'pole tip extrusion' (don't snigger! that's what it is called). right where was i ... ah yes 3 heads per arm : since the disc is round this would mean that the angular velocity of data flying under a head close to the hub is larger than that of data passing under a head on the rim. And that is not true. Can't do that.
So, to make this a believable April fools story : get the error's out of it. You can leave the pole tip extended.
problem solved.
I too have an iphone and ia m NOT impressed. Where are the really usefull applications ? All there is is games and 500+ fart applications.
the only stuff that gets used is the photocamera if you are in ahurry to snap a picture of price in a store, the google maps and the GPS ( i have tomtom installed) , email (to check, replying is done on the computer. keypad and key-prediction on the iphone are annoying and crummy) and the phone itself.
My next phone is not going to be from the fruit company...
I met himn a few years ago in the Computer History museum in Mountain View. Ken Olsen and Slug Russel were demoing the newly restored PDP-1 and the Spacewar program (amongst others, they also had the music playing program running.
I asked some technical questions on how the flipflops and registers were constrcuted and Ken just opened a side panel and yanked out a board to show how the individual components wer emounted and proceeded to draw the actual schematic of a memory cell and explain how they used multi level signalling to represent ones and zeros.
Interesting Guy.
May he find peace in silicon heaven.
You can get it in any color as long as its black ...
Ok the car analogy was not good. but my point is that : a run-out-of-the-box Mac comes with OSX , a sun with solaris, an sgi with irix, a pc with windows . An android phone with.. android, a Nokia with symbian , an Iphoone with IOS .
If you want anything else : up to you but we won't support it.
ANd there are plenty of companies selling computers without Os. go to any local computer store around the corner and they will happily build you one. Ok the 'big brands' may not have one but that is the case with anything. If campbells doesn't make soup with tofu based 'meatballs' in it you'll have to look for a different brand. Too bad.
If this flies then soon we will see lawsuits demanding iphones be sold without os so we can install android or windows mobile.
You buy a mac, it comes with OsX
You buy a PC, it comes with Windows
You buy a server , it comes with Red hat or Windows
You buy a ford it comes with a ford motor, you buy a peugeot it comes with a peugeot motor and steering wheel. You buy a sony tv it will have a sony user interface. You buy an iphone it will run Ios.
You wan't anything else ? feel free to buy a motherboard, cpu, case,memory,drive and vidoe card and assembly your rig and install whatever you want (linux, osx,windows, Solaris , beos, iRMX, OS/2, or write your own).
Got it ? now move on with your life. Thank you.
I have a hand built (Intel mobo+cpu , Quadro 4000 graphics and enterprise class drives) win7 plain vanilla (as opposed to machines you buy that come with a ton of junk preinstalled) with all these apps on it, runs perfectly fine. No command lines needed. Then again , i don't install junk on it and nobody touches it but me. I have a clone of the harddisk after the initial install and verify. Both drives sit in SATA hot plug trays with the cloned drive powered down. If my boot drive will ever crap out i will hotplug drive 2 and do a restore of my drive.( i already tried it. Works flawlessly, windows 7 has a tool to create the drive and the boot-cd to do such a restore. you kan even make a boot usb key.) And i have the clone image on a flashdrive as well. so if hotplug drive craps out i can still recover. The clone drive holds my 'golden install'.
My data lives on a separate drive in my box that is synched daily to a corporate filer.That machine is backed up on daily and weekly cycles (on and off site). So no worries there either.
And yes i run NIS2011 on the box. Never notice it kicking in.
as far as 'enjoying the command line'. its's nearly 2011... time to leave the fossils in the stone age. Command lines are so last century ... On a different note : i really don't care about what OS i use. I switch frequently between boxes running Solaris , Red Hat and Windows. All i care about is the APPLICATIONS. That is what i work with. The OS is just a tool to run them. ( and yes i have hot images of my -nix boxes too. I simply don't want to spend hours reconfiguring them when they go down due to software or hardware problems. re-image from the clone and tops 20 minutes later i am up and running and in full productive mode.
Storage is cheap. Think about it. A 2 terabyte drive is 80 bucks. and that will hold MANY 'golden installs'. you can easily make a golden snapshot of all machines in your posession. If it gets corrupted : restore and off you go. of course you need the discipline to -snapshot- prior to a mayor update or software install. After the install and verification that all is right : update the snapshot. done. Takes 15 minutes tops. Time well spent.
where i find these applications for this fabled OsX system ? I too would love to have a 'trusted system that doesn't lock up and has no problems with viruses'.
Here's what i use daily : Altium Designer , Cadence, Mentor , Quartus , Xilinx ISE , Various compilers from IAR, Keil and ARM, Labwindows and a bunch of other highly specialised productivity software.
Of course , Mac's don't get viruses , the same way they don't get any real applications either.... nobodoy writes them.
I see lot's of people complaining about Norton being bloatware and resource hogging.
My impression is that it may have been a resource hog up till 2007. Especially NIS2009 was a big speed up and the NIS2010 and NIS2011 are very fast and non-intrusive.
I have about 12 boxes running with NIS2011 now ( and up till a few weeks ago they were all on NIS2010) and have had
- zero false positives
- zero critical files deleted ( like the mcafee and avast and other misery that falsely identifies core modules and cripples the system beyond repair. )
- nice popup when intrusion is detected on the network
- scans usb connected drives upon plugin
- ZERO problems.
I had 1 machine that had trouble installing NIS2010 and that was because an outdated DLL refused to be uninstalled. I went to the norton help website and 2 minutes later got a phone call form symantec. They talked me through loading an application from their wite that allows them to do a remote login on the machine, The Symantech tech connected , replaced the dll, signed off rebooted and it installed just fine. I call that service ! And btw , i am not even a corporate customer, just an average joe-schmoe who happens to have a few 'puters.
Besides you can get Norton for cheap. 3- user licences can be had for the tax (after mail in rebates ) from outlets like Fry's or Tigerdirect. Norton has deals where, if you buy a piece of qualifying hardware you get 50$ mail in rebate. ( Buy an internal harddisk and you qualify )
can't beat that ...
just my 2 cents. bts i'm not affiliated with Symantec and i'm not a corporate user. just a happy customer running NIS.
car passengers , radio , video , tv , rain ,snow , fog , and while we are at it , other cars on the same road. that'll reduce it tremendously.
now , if we also gid rid of the curbs , traffic lights , light poles, trees along the road then there is no chanc e of hitting those either..
All these things are pure symptomatic solutions. Just take away the root cause of all these accidents : Car's ! if there are no car's i guarantee you there will be no car accidents . At all ! Zero , none , zilch !
Intel has such mechanisms too. They are even documented in their i386 users manual. If you care to take a look at the full blown technical manual for these cpu's you will find them under the chapter marked 'ICE' or in-circuit emulation. There are registers that let you single step the cpu and trace its internal contents. You can probe the cache memory and more.
Any chip made has test registers that are accessed by performing certain operations. This simply unlocks test mode and allow manipulations that are otherwise not possible.
During ATE test ( the final step before a chip is sold. This is where the entire chip is tested ) they use these special registers to test the built in ram's. This can be done much faster that way as opposed as to having the cpu run the test code itself. ATE test time is expensive. Very expensive. And it is cheaper to spend a couple of square mils on additional test hardware that can bypass normal operation thant o sacrifice test speed.
What is weird is that this is accessible using a software unlock. Normally this is done by pulling a certain pin high or low during the reset cycle ( a condition that does not normally occur at runtime and can be done only on specialised hardware )
exactly. ANd there is still tons of bugs and security issues, unstable drivers and all kinds of other misery.
For the reference : i don't own a mac and am a windows / unix user. But Steve has got a point.
Create a controlled environment. We provide the hardware and the software and the compiler. You can only do what we let you do. Step out of line and we boot you off our system. OF course this brings the danger of control freakery but, think about it.
I'm going to write a piece of code to read a certain memory area where sensitive information is stored to steal someones credit card info.. Err, sorry can't do that... compiler wont let you go to that area. ok, i'm going to hardcode it in a handcrafted assembler. err, it won't pass through our software submission procedure. we run code profiling you see. if there is access to that region of memory in your code that is a no-no as we provide an api to retrieve a key. that means we have a bit of code somewhere, that you need to call, that will verify if you are entitled to the contents of that memory. try to bypass that and we'll catch it.
fine fine. i'll compile it with my handcrafted tool , find a way to cram it on the phone using email attachment or security hole. ok, you can attempt that but we will close the hole in the next update.
That was the whole concept of having a ring 0 ni the processor. any code not running with ring 0 privileges does not get access to what is in there. except the programmers botched it by providing backdoors. ( it has to do with the fact that code in ring0 runs in ram and is thus subject to possible changing. )
is the lack of hardware support... afaik none of those linux tools have deck control, control surface interfaces (like a shuttlepro or even more advanced tools) let alone interface with hardware accelerators such as Matrox RTx , Avid Mojo or any of the Canopus / grass Valley hardware.
Other problems are codecs and the integration.
If you install CS5 or Final Cut Pro it comes with all codecs out of the box. Codecs that are optimised to work with the software. Linux software tends to rely on codecs that are installed in a video server, writtne by whomever. The editing software interacts with that. The problem is that the codecs don't come from the same provider and are not optimized.
I run CS5 on a 6 core combined with a Cuda based videocard. Adobe has spent a lot of time to optimize the code to run on multicore machines and uses the cuda programming environment to accelerate a lot of tasks. This to the point that anything i do happens realtime. There is no rendering involved.
if all you do is make youtube movies sure the linux software is a good enough thing. if you are doing some more serious hobby work you are better off with Adobe elements or Final cut and if you are really serious you need to look in a different direction altogether.
The warhouseclub being SteveCo who supplies you with consumables like music, movices, books , applications , none of which SteveCo produces. they are only a distrbutor.
Whatever iHardware you buy (pod,phone,tv,computer) is your entrance card to SteveCo.
It allows you to buy more consumables from SteveCo.
Jailbreaking allows you to use the iHardware to consume stuff from other companies.
a browser that does not write anything to a physical harddisk but uses a ramdrive ? ( remember ramdrives under dos ? )
Wwhen the browsing session ends : unmount the ramdrive. Game Over.
it should be easy to create a ramdrive under windows and move the temporary file folder to that volume.
Here is the analogy :
You buy the privilege of being allowed to shop at SteveCo. Just like you have to pay for a warehouse card to be allowed to shop at things like costco or sams club or Bj's.
And just like warehouse clubs this SteveCo sells things they did not produce at a markup ( books, movies, music ). Since they have a wide subscribers group Steveco determines aggressive pricing towards his suppliers (developers, musicians, writers).
And just like warehouse clubs SteveCo also has some house brand products and can decide what it will sell in its stores.
So there you have it. Either you shop at SteveCo and you pay for 'membership'. Or you keep using Safeway, Kroger , Walmart ( HP, Dell , Ibm etc.. )
all i see coming out of this whole linux 'commune' is more window managers, more color schemes, more file systems, more vi vs emacs flamewars...
The os is just a platform to run APPLICATIONS. Go make some of those. I am waiting to see some kick-ass software ... sadly ... so far ,none.
Don't release HTML5.. Call the new version something else like HTML-V and deliberately change some core feature. Claim that HTML is a beta releas ethat i sno longer supported with the introduction of HTML-V.
That'll leave them with an out-dated, unfunctional and unreleased 'standard'.
so the best they can come up with is to add some more eye candy. sure let's make another fork and have yet another UI with another color scheme... we only have about 6000 window manager and a kazillion color schemes. let's make a new one and call it Crufty Crap or Rusty Roger or whatever it is these things are called today. And along the way we can throw some more spit about vi vs emacs , gnome vs kde and firefox vs iceweasel...
Why don't you first make some applications that are finished and ready for prime time ?
I have always wondered why none of the usual software developers port their applications to linux ... is it because the platform is too restrictive because of all the licencing encumbrement ?
How come comapnies like Adobe, Corel don't develop for linux ? is it because the platform is so fragmented that making universal installers is impossible ? is it because every time there is a kernel update they delibrately break the API to force people to disclose their source ?
Sorry, but that is not commercially viable ... if i design a new bit of software with some clever algorithm that makes it way better than the rest , i want to capitalise on that. after all i spendt time and money developing it and at the end of the day there needs to be food on my plate and gas in my car. i can;t live off giving away stuff for free you know.
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