Because Intel and the rest want to keep their wear-leveling algorithm and proprietary controller as much of a secret as possible so they can try to keep on top of the SSD market.

Moving wear-levelling into the filesystem - especially an open source one - effectively also defeats the ability to change the low-level operation of the drive when it comes to each flash chip - and of course, having a filesystem and a special MTD driver for *every single SSD drive manufactured* when they change flash chips or tweak the controller, could get unwieldy.

Backing them behind SATA is a wonderful idea, but this reliance on CHS values I think is what's killing it. Why is the Linux block subsystem still stuck in the 20MB hard-disk era like this?

Yeah, hard disk manufacturers.

Since they moved to large disks which require LBA, they've been fudging the CHS values returned by the drive to get the maximum size available to legacy operating systems. Since when did a disk have 63 heads? Never. It doesn't even make sense anymore when most hard disks are single platter (therefore having 1 or 2) and SSDs don't even have heads.

What they need to do is define a new command structure for accurately determining the best structure on the disk - on an SSD this would report the erase block size or so, on a hard disk, how many sectors are in a cylinder, without fucking around with some legacy value designed in the 1980's.

> So why should I get a SSD vs. a CF card?

10 times better performance and wear-leveling worth a crap.

Agreed about the lack of loss of freedom. Agreed about the waste of tax money.

The problem with montoring a street full of shops is the people involved are about [---] this big on the camera which is not enough to discern an actual individual. You could say, there are 4 people raiding the shops.. they're wearing black hoodies.. that's about it.

However you could make a case that if they added more cameras the cross-referencing becomes easier. 4 guys in hoodies is useless in the UK as a decription of a small gang of criminals - that would account for 20% of the jerks who walk through the town every day.

But if they tracked everyone who parked nearby and took the license plate and watched them getting out... 50 minutes later when 4 guys in hoodies rob a shop, it's a pretty safe bet it's the same 4 guys in hoodies who got out of that car. And then got back into that car and drove away with some stolen goods :)

The real problem is that when a small town gets a CCTV system they have one or two police offers assigned to watch it, the entire day is taped, and they're using their little jog shuttle and joystick to watch what is going on right then and there. There is no big effort to cross-reference or track or any automated heuristic detection system.

When a crime happens one of these officers gets to sit behind - at worst, a tape deck and at best a PC with a DVD drive and a copy of Windows Media Player) and watch 9 hours of footage from each of 15 cameras.. it's quite obvious they prioritise other things and I am not sure any CCTV-monitoring police officer has the nous to work out theories on the route the criminals took, the most likely place they parked the getaway car, which camera might have gotten the best footage of their faces, and their license plate.

If they did they wouldn't have been shoved on CCTV duty, they'd be in the CID..

It may be that the Demolition Man-style automated monitoring system and global tracking of cars, faces and what clothes you're wearing on every camera image is exactly what will save our tax money, but nobody would dare implement it. What needs to be done is some computer flags that "a crime happened" - an alarm went off at some store on the high street - and then an officer reviews the captured data and can go back and pull out the data involved around that - based on the computer identifying 4 individuals at the crime scene and tracking back to the last time it saw 4 individuals in similar getup on the scene.

That's because "high crime" is a statistic, the more crime reported or monitored, the higher it gets.

Nobody should be worried about cameras on every corner unless they are a criminal worried about being caught in the act.

To run around ranting that cameras invade privacy and erode civil liberties is fundamentally mis-targeted - it's not the cameras that invade privacy, and it's not within the function of a mere imaging device to erode your civil liberties.

To say that a camera does this, implies that you're of the assumption that civil liberties exist to allow you to freely commit crimes, to take the risk if you will.
The topic is right; "the cameras do nothing". They are passive. Put as many up as you like, I don't mind.

What you have to be worried about is the repurposing of the data captured by the camera. This is entirely a "people problem" - people watching the cameras, people putting those images in databases, people cross-referencing that data in ways which DO invade privacy..

However I cannot think of a single instance where the presence of a camera did any harm to anyone. I can think of several instances where while it may be disconcerting but really all they capture is ordinary life, something anyone can do with a camera phone (the current popular choice for catching a cop beating on some black guy or using excessive force). And if they are capturing criminal acts, well then the people behind the cameras can do their jobs. If they are corrupt, then maybe that footage will disappear; what there needs to be is accountability for the data and procedures in place, and THAT is the important thing.

Let's stop whining about "cameras" and fix the corrupt law enforcement and data-selling practises that come with cameras.

FUCK THE PARTIALLY SIGHTED! FUCK THEM IN THE EAR!!!!!!!

Because that's pretty much what it amounts to.

I wonder what the difference is between reading a book on your computer with a screen reader software (if you're partially sighted for example or just don't want to burn your eyes out) and Kindle text-to-speech?

Is Apple's text-to-speech illegal too? The Amiga narrator.device and translator.library, used to read out, say, a quote from a book? Text to speech goes back a hell of a long way in computers....

While you can download the FixIt on any OS (after all you may be grabbing it on a different machine, at work, at a library or so if your internet at home is down because of a problem you're trying to FixIt) if you run the FixIt application you got on the wrong OS.. it simply tells you the Fix is not meant for you. If it's already applied it silently churns away says, the fix is done and doesn't change a thing.

Sniffing for user agents basically means you're restricting your fixes to systems which accurately report their OS to the webpage, which may not be true from another system, through certain proxies, using another web browser than IE, etc.

All it says is, while you may see exactly what's going on through means available to you like firewalls and antivirus programs, you are not allowed to look too hard through it because that's tantamount to working out how our P2P protocol works.

I guess, you're not going to see a WireShark module for Octoshape protocol any time soon. Or maybe you will..

How does this mean Apple are planning it?

They've just shoved every idea into the patent so if anyone tries to go one better on the iPhone with a competitive product that DOES video conferencing, it will turn out they have to license the Apple Patent to do it. Apple wins!

Which is the whole point of patenting it really. Apple won't allow video calling; it would cripple the carrier data networks. The same way they don't allow Skype; it would cripple the ability for the carrier to make money on calls. The only concession they have made is instant messaging rather than SMS, and given the cost of SMS these days (compared to AIM on an unlimited data plan) that's a seller for the phone (and any smart-ish phone that comes with some form of AIM or MSN client etc. - pretty much all of them since 2003 by my reckoning). But that's because instant messaging doesn't throw about half a megabit of data in both directions for a 30 minute stretch..

I wish someone WOULD create something like that :)

There's nothing stopping you having a kernel with QEMU in it's initrd, booting it up and picking up a virtual hard disk installed in your "Other OS" partition. This may have Windows or something else on it, requiring x86. QEMU will happily emulate most processors on top of whatever host processor (ARM->x86, ARM->PPC, PPC->x86, x86->PPC, add MIPS and whatever else into the mix)

It depends what you mean by "too slow". The PPU on the PS3 is pretty darn fast by any comparison, but obviously you're not going to get equivalent performance to a Core 2 Duo out of it. Would you be happy running Windows XP on a ~450MHz Pentium III? Because I think you could average out the performance to something like that.

What would really suck is the lack of available memory. The PS3 has 256MB of memory and after setting up the simplest of framebuffers (albeit accelerated using DMA transfers from XDR to the GPU last I checked) you get ~200MB of "high performance" swap in the leftover video RAM to play with. With additional technology like CompCache (http://code.google.com/p/compcache) you can get some more data in there if you like, and of course disk-based swap is always an option, but you're still going to be limited to a very memory-limited environment inside the emulation based on the underlying hardware.

Please, though, someone PLEASE go ahead and try this and see what can actually be done.. booting Windows XP on a PS3 would be pretty damn awesome by any standards, even if it is lacking in some obvious performance areas..

It's more likely he's just trolling than astroturfing. As for posting as AC, I do that all the time, it's usually because I'm too lazy to log in.

Firefox, I can't agree with you. Not in the slightest. It crashes all the time on every platform I've run it on (Windows, Linux x86, Linux PPC, FreeBSD) and has some real annoyances like still using far too much memory (which causes horrible problems if you want to do something like LTSP).

Right now I've come to prefer things like Arora (simplicity at its best) and I'm toying with the developer channel version of Chrome.. which also has it's bugs but they're getting fixed faster than Firefox's release strategy, and I'm getting my work done faster even in a beta browser.

Am I most users? No. I actually watched the development of Mozilla for a number of years for the sheer morbidity of it, while they were completely rewriting their entire codebase (I was working on a browser project at the time, and we just completely rewrote ours too) and I must say the development process, the code, is just frightful. The closest thing to a decent web browser right now is Safari. If only they'd get rid of that godawful brushed metal dark-on-dark monstrosity of a UI on Windows I might actually use it..

OpenOffice, I like, but it's really falling down because for an office package that supposedly usurps the Microsoft monopoly on Office software, it's not any smaller once it's installed (so, still bloat..) and half the features I'm used to in Office are missing. It's not really an alternative; and it suffers the same memory usage flaws of Firefox (something I can't imagine Microsoft Word managing to do, which is make my system start swapping like a lunatic). The development process is ridiculously slow and yet again the code and the people running it are frightful..

So basically neither project does it any better than the alternative, which right now seems to be IE8 RC1 (which I find pleasing to use if jarring moving from browser to browser and losing 10% of my screen real estate to that awful toolbar) and Microsoft Office 2007, which you can now run in a web browser too, if you can find one that doesn't suck :)

The great thing about buying commercial hardware and software like this is once you have it, you have it.

And then it becomes part of LAST YEAR'S grant budget, and therefore becomes absolutely free :)

He doesn't have to be a Microsoft-loving weenie, he just has to be a Firefox or OO.o user to think that.

I really thought the whole "if you don't like it then YOU MUST LOVE BILL GATES AND MICRO$UCK!!!!! LOLOLOL" attitude had died away at Slashdot, too, but you seem to be keeping it alive and well. And you've brought back the paranoia that everything that's related to a bad comment about Linux is somehow officially sanctioned and a direct marketing or political ploy engineered by Microsoft itself..

Congratulations, man.

They're NOT confusing, if you consider Vista has exactly the same SKUs.

Starter Edition is basically for India and South America and such. It's basically crippled - you can only run a certain number of GUI apps at once, get 1GB of memory maximum, no ability to run servers (it won't accept incoming connections so you're limited to passive web browsing) and won't run on "high end" processors (tops out on non-HT Pentium 4).

I got that from the bloody Wikipedia article and plenty of press releases for it are abound. I can't believe anyone could be so confused when they have Google :D

Hoo-fucking-ray!

At last some common sense..

Qt outstrips GTK/GNOME just as a GUI toolkit and a bunch of middleware, even before you start thinking about stuff like KDE.

The only thing stopping it's use - at least in the strange mix of preinstalled Linux distributions on standard hardware - was that weird problem of having to have every one of your developers buy a license just to run their app - on a Dell for example - if their license was even slightly incompatible. That was a real turn-off if you were a hardware company wanting to take advantage of open source and build communities around open source software.

I'm glad that so soon after Nokia announced the LGPL relicensing, people are taking notice of what is quite obviously a far superior middleware solution than the GTK/GNOME nightmare, and considering developing solutions that work because of code quality and wealth of features, and not *just* because it's GPL.