I think you're confusing concepts. Segmented memory was a hack, and protected nothing. Then they added protected mode, giving OS' the option of acting as the cop of memory. That has been on the x86 since the 286, and is of course widely used.

Everything that any process on your machine does in user-space has to be effectively "allowed" by the operating system. It is purely due to non-granular permission structures that modern OS' don't allow you to fine-tune every permission of even "native" executables.

You can make great photos with a low-end digital camera.

The hardware seldom contains creative potential. Yet digital allows you to experiment without blowing the bank.

Is it just me, or is this essentially a fundraising article?

Donate to us, because we got a patent revoked.

They're showing how they are fulfilling their mandate. What's the problem?

I would think that a lot of big companies would be filling the EFF's coffers, working together to take down the wolves that pray on those they can separate from the herd. Of course that won't happen, because many of those big companies occasionally become the target of the EFF.

You can't improve latency (seek) time with a RAID array; you can only improve throughput (sequential access).

Not entirely true. While you can't make any one drive go any faster, any decent RAID controller gangs requests (that sort of system usually has more than one on the go) and basically multitasks the array.

The effective I/Os are much higher on a large RAID array than on a single drive.

Landlines have always been unlimited. It's a single (cheap) flat rate and I could call my buddy with his landline and we could just leave the phones connected all month.

But of course you didn't just keep it off the hook all month long, did you? Because if you did, the phone company would have been calling (or rather mailing given that they couldn't get through) and forcing you to sign up for a dedicated line.

This was big news in the modem era, when more and more users started exceeding the infrastructure expectations, staying online all night downloading those low resolution TGA swimsuit pics.

And of course, all that was included in the "flat" rate was local calls within a very small radius. Once you started using more of the shared network, including the networks of other telcos, you go hit by massive long distance fees. Don't you remember paying like $0.60 / minute to make an out of state call?

Yeah, landlines are a terrible comparison, because telcos have been one of the most egregious abusers of the "utility" status.

As an aside, from years my telco was trying to get the CRTC to allow them to charge $0.25 per call.

Your post grossly misrepresents what the costs of circuits actually are.

My post didn't pretend to represent anything about the cost of circuits, or the cost of electricity, though it is predictable that so many so quickly start jerking their knees. It was a simple humorous comparison with the "utility" model that the congressman compared against.

In his case he talked about doctors (an odd group to portray as downtrodden...) who want to work at home but find the throughput costs prohibitive, to which you could say that I'd like to arc weld a submarine at home but find the electricity prices prohibitive, not to mention the various raw materials, so won't someone think of the poor submarine DIYers?

A connection is capable of handling X amount of data. It costs the same for the connection to move 0 bytes/second or max it out, the cost to run it does not change

Ugh. Another guy who needs to start an ISP.

Your connection from your cable modem to the local headend indeed costs them nothing whether it's transmitting or not. But guess what -- and you touched on this -- they oversell.

They have to oversell, or you'd be paying the $400 per month that we're paying to have a backup T1 line (that's 1/6th the speed of a cable modem, btw).

Your understanding of electricity could use some help. You aren't billed based on amps, you are billed on kilowatt hours.

Errrr...are you being serious?

I was referring to the peak draw of a given electric drop, which I think is clear to most every intelligent reader. My cable modem is 10Mbps, which would be comparable to the electricity drop.

Once the infrastructure is in place for an ISP

Boy, that's a pretty magically convenient way to think of it -- just imagine that the infrastructure magically appears for the peak demands of everyone saturating their pipes, and then there's "no additional cost". Brilliant.

You should start an ISP.

I don't have to pay by the minute to watch cable TV. Why should internet service be any different?

So we're comparing with cable TV now?

Well aside from the fact that it is largely unidirectional multicasting -- you DO pay to watching those VoD shows -- with cable you pay for the breadth of the available multicasting you can even view.

So given this purportedly favourable situation, I take it you would be good with the idea of signing up for the Google/YouTube/Yahoo package, or maybe you want the Facebook/Twitter/Digg combo?

If the electric company advertised their service as "unlimited" then your argument would make some sense.

I'm not trying to make that argument. I just find the comparison with utilities to be ill-advised and spurious.

However, if you'd like to engage in that argument, when is the last time you saw an internet connection advertised as unlimited? When that terminology first came out, it was relative to services like AOL where you had X hours per month, and the unlimited as related to the always-connected element of the service. Yet even ten years ago most services added a little asterisk there disclaiming that you didn't have unlimited throughput.

Except that switching to a per-byte type of plan would mean that their highest usage customers would pay through the nose while the majority of customers pay a few bucks a month for the bandwidth for their email.

They'll always make money. Again to use the utility comparison, given that it's right there in the summary, if I use zero water and zero electricity, I still pay a pretty good fee to both utility cos for various base hookup/customer fees.

The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.

This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.

Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.

I never understood the motivation in spending more for the speed of an SSD drive when a bunch of RAID drives can perform at multiples faster than a single drive. Plus you get the added disk space and redundancy built in

You would need a massive magnetic disk array to match the I/O performance of a modern SSD like the Intel X25-E.

And I/Os are what really matters, because a storage system spends most of its life satisfying small distributed requests, not reading GBs sequentially. This is why sequential throughput comparisons are so incredibly misleading, when the only time such performance comes into play is when you copy one massive conveniently defragmented file from one drive to another.

It would be foolhardy to claim that one or the other reigned supreme in all circumstances. For a file/media server, for instance, magnetic disks are almost certainly more than adequate, and the space is the principal value of the drive. For a database server, or even for most workstations, though, I/O speed is a much greater return.

SSDs are going to completely change the landscape of many enterprise systems, and for something like a netbook (where price isn't the focus), they seem like a no-brainer.

There have been a startling number of stories directly or peripherally about the Wii.

Doesn't anyone else see this for what it obviously is: a way for Microsoft to steal market share from Nintendo?

Wow, so you're telling us they're being competitive? Thanks for the brilliant insight.

Sony and Microsoft battled it out over pixel pushing, while Nintendo actually innovated (something Microsoft talks about a lot but never does) and built something new that people really liked -- something that actually got non-gamers onto the scene

And they kept being non-gamers after they shelved their Wii. I have a Wii -- I bought it when it first came. I have a Wii fit. I have a bunch of the games. I have three young children, perfectly in the demographic.

The console sucks. It is grossly overrated by people who bought it and stuffed it away, then making it their mission to present it as the second coming.

Then I bought an XBox 360 which cost me $100 less and is 100x the unit, and have been enjoying non-gimmicky, deep games since. Of course it did lack some of the family games, but is moving quickly in that direction, so it's becoming a unit that the whole family loves.

So now they're trying to build "Wii without the Wiimote." This is a "meeee toooo" play, which is Microsoft's usual way of doing business. YAWN.

This is nothing like the Wiimote, and the idea that the Wii has some sort of hold over the idea of physically interactive games...holy shit, you need to tone down the Wii-fanaticism. Guess what -- this has been the goal in games for decades, and certainly didn't suddenly come into existence the moment the Wii came out.

I don't know what the deal is but the learning curve seems really easy yet once you get there there is no way to differentiate between the 98 percentile player and the 99 percentile player

The 98th and 99th???

My 4 year old daughter bowled strike after strike after strike in Wii bowling, while my father-in-law -- a long-time bowler -- over-thought it and was trying to over-skill it, gutterballing endlessly.

It is hard to master the Wii-mote because it is an inaccurate measurement device, which is why the vast majority of the games keep it to broad, coarse movements.

The problem with controllers like this is the risk that they become gimmicky. Just look at virtually every port of games from other consoles to the Wii -- subtract most of the gameplace, downgrade the graphics, but add in a lot of hand shaking and call it gold.