Posts by Paul Crawford730 posts • joined Thursday 15th March 2007 16:58 GMT
I was wondering about that, but also about the impact of a immersive cooling oil with relative permittivity values of 2-3 on the characteristic impedance and propagation delay-matching of high speed PCB tracks?
As a designed-for-oil system no problem, but as a normal board in oil it might cause issues with very high speed systems.
A lot. And also what do you do at night?
You need a lot of baseline generation, and storage (e.g. hydro) to smooth out renewable sources that are not constant (like geothermal).
Odd argument that they are altering the content so it is a copyright issue. As far as I can see the original content is not modified, all they do is allow you to see the bits you want and not the other bits.
Legislating against that would be bizarre as it would imply it is illegal to take a leak during the advert break!
The 'legality' is probably something that engineers can't begin to understand the dumbness of, but I guess they can't argue against a de-dupe system as all of the copies are logically separate in the sense you can modify one without altering anyone else's "copy".
So today a mid-high end storage system could de-dupe this effectively and save a *lot* of space at the usual expense of having to have enough RAM for the de-dupe hash tables, which is hardly an issue now.
The point is the OS should provide the appropriate restrictions for ALL applications, and regulated by only a few permission levels depending on what an app needs to do.
The beef here is MS want to play with APIs for IE and Office that others are not allowed to, a bit like the old Word vs. WordPerfect anti-trust case where MS, due to its inner knowledge of its own OS, could out-perform other software by using undocumented features (OK WordPerfect had other issues, but the API tricks are known).
Or the same tactic, used more sneakily, to break DR-DOS + Win3.0 etc.
No, the missed point about a usefull sub-orbital flight (as opposed to geostationary satellite launch) is that it goes from somewhere people are, to somewhere people want to be.
I can see flights from, say, UK to Australia (and vice-versa) in 2-3 hours being very popular if the cost was vaguely tolerable.
No worry, as win7 will be available for years due to demand just like XP got several stays of execution.
So please don't give them any more money then necessary?
Tux - 'cause he/she is cheap, and I like IT!
"So are you suggesting that they document how to use every piece of code in Windows?"
In a word - yes.
Or remove them completely so their own developer's don't have something special to play with.
Remember its not just IE that gets special treatment on WOA/WinRT, but they also have a special rule to allow Office to run without the dreaded metro interface. Why not allow LibreOffice this access?
Yes, I know, that was a rhetorical question...
The disbelief is not that 20% of software in use is not correctly licenses, but that (a) stopping this would not necessarily lead to 20% more income (a lot of expensive unlicensed software would not be bought, but cheaper alternatives used), and that (b) any such increase in income won't necessarily help the UK economy as a whole.
So while it may help some of the BAS' member's businesses, that is not the same as helping the UK was a whole as a significant proportion of such income would go overseas.
Where would the £1.2B come from? Its not like the UK has lots of spare cash in the cupboard, so other UK business & services would lose out. Robbing Peter to pay Paul?
More importantly from an economic point of view, where would most of the claimed £1.2 billion go, to Adobe/MS perhaps? Not in the UK's balance of trade advantage I'm sure.
A more useful thing would be for more home-grown (or open source) software to be used, that way the "missing" £1.2B can be spend on UK jobs & services.
If it ever existed in the first place.
Indeed, a small percentage are terrible drivers.
But speeding w.r.t. road sign values is only one aspect of this: not paying attention (for whatever reason: phone, kids, being senile, etc), being drunk/drugged up, having marginal knowledge of road rules, driving too fast for the prevailing conditions (fog, snow, etc), etc are all big factors that would be very difficult to deduce from GPS track data.
Is it just me, or are other surprised that the CPU is costing almost half of the machine?
Seems that is the reason Intel wants to push the 'Ultrabook', though as Big_Ted said, you could get a decent and flexible combination of machines for this sort of price if not wanting to ape Mac Air looks.
Machines writing software to logical rules is quite practice, the problem then is you need to define those logical rules to be complete and in-turn with what you actually *want* the system to do.
For simpler systems you already have this and it works quite well (e.g. MATLAB's code generation option to produce C/Ada/etc from a block diagram simulation system).
But although this may avoid simple coding errors, I think you will find that it is no easier (in fact possibly harder) to formalise a large complex system in strict logical terms, than to allow humans to fill in the gaps of the specification as they develop it.
The OS and its architecture can have a big impact on power dissipation depending on how it handles task switching and idle operation.
Also one argument for x86 is the huge (but often ugly and unsupported) "wintel" legacy of code that businesses rely on.
So far MS has failed to succeed on non-x86 (they supported then unceremoniously dropped Alpha, MIPS, etc with NT4) so the new WOA (WinRT) on tables is therefore a big gamble. However, Apple has made a successful transition from PowerPC to x86 for the Mac, and conceivably could do it again if ARM became attractive enough in cost/power/performance (given the success of iOS on ARM that is not unreasonable). Similarly Linux runs on practically everything.
So the OS choice matters in that Intel's success was tied to MS' past glory, and the x86 is a horrible design that no one in their right mind would *want* to use, so outside of MS' old PC ecosystem there is little reason to favour x86.
"...the new phone chip really does come close to the TDP of comparable ARM designs and it has more oomph"
How much of that is clever design (i.e specific to the x86 system) and how much of that is down to having a process technology a year or two ahead of the competition?
In other words, if you could get an ARM chip done with on the same Intel fab, would it then thrash it?
Funny, I thought XP was supported until 2014?
Also note that the latest stable version of Opera for Windows has the minimum requirements of "Windows 2000 on a Pentium II, 128 MB of RAM, 20 MB of free disk space"
Funny how other browsers can work on XP, but not MS' latest?
"Every time you hit Google.com with IE it tells you to download Chrome, so that's what such people do."
Makes sense in a sad resigned sort of way :(
As I virtually never use IE that escaped me.
"Why would you care, one way or another, what an ignorant fool thinks about you?"
It makes it harder to get the vicar's daughter undressed...
Going to the site and playing with the regions is interesting. Some like the UK or Netherlands shows noticeable weekend peaks for Safari, etc, and others like Germany show a much higher FF proportion.
Funny how IE and Chrome have such a weekly cycle opposite each other, where as FF/Safari/Opera shows very little variation.
Why would corporate locked-down users all choose much the *same* non-IE browser for home use, and not a balance closer to the other browser's respective shares?
The router probably holds the MAC addresses only temporarily in RAM. mine seems to have no permanent logs, so if it has been switched off at any point then any such MAC records will have been lost.
However, if there is a fixed port-forwarding rule to a specific MAC address (rather than a dynamic UPnP set-up for forwarding by the BitTorrent client) that would be available on inspection of the router. That is if they are willing to pay for expert evidence gathering and compensation costs for the accused's loss of access, profits, etc, should it turn out to be an error in their evidence.
Ultimately these companies are not in the game of proving copyright infringement, they are in the game of demanding money with legal menaces (more profitable), which the judge here clearly sees.
<= you missed the icon?
You also forgot to mention the large resulting compensation for legal costs, time & inconvenience when a large number of such accusations turn out to be false...
Very much so.
It sounds like it may end for them as for ACL:Law in the UK, where the lack of willingness to prove actual infringement by the accused in a court of law, and the general incompetence of their evidence processes, blew their chances and led to bankruptcy for the ambulance-chaser of the lawyer behind it.
So let me get this right, a 19" rack is too small, so lets go non-standard for only 4" more?
Why not go for 2*19=38" wide and be done with it, so you can mound old and new stuff in one rack?
Somehow I doubt that a few inches are so make-or-brake for cooling, and the real issue is just what is in a box and how it is cables. Most racks seem to end up messy for cabling, more so if you have servers on sliders to gain access and so have big loops on supports arms at the back. Why not have some "plug in" rack so the inter-unit cabling can be fixed, and the unit pulls out completely for repair, etc?
You seem to be lucky. We see less failures than the sometimes quoted MTBF = 4-5 years figure suggest, but still not great, and some get noisy and slow (so less effective) as they get old even without "complete failure".
..is often a web browser in our world. Why, oh, why does a web browser need GB of memory to keep a dozen or two tabs open?
Memo to Mozilla et al - please fix you damn leaky code and stop buggering around with version numbers and GUI changes.
Avoiding fans is a good idea if you want reliability over a long time. Some example info of bearing types vs. temperatures can be found here:
http://www.nmbtc.com/pdf/engineering/fans_ball_vs_sleeve.pdf
As usual, if you can run cool (and probably lower the fan speed as well) it lasts longer. Of course, if you need a fan, then running cool is probably not a typical case...and if you want it quiet (e.,g. media player) the no fan is best, or a really big low RPM one (acoustic noise is related to the 8th power of air speed!)
I don't particularly like MS, and of course prefer Linux's openness instead, but that is down to their behaviour of propitiatory protocols and dirty tricks to promote vendor lock-in (not the only company to do so, I hasten to add).
So if they are indeed properly supporting an open protocol that is a very good thing and as such the source code is not essential if it works properly with a good selection of other's products.
Slightly different if high trust is needed (e.g. encryption).
"And, really, how often do modern fans fail ?"
Few companies give MTBF figures, but those that do rarely say more then 40-50k hours, which is about 4-ish years. At at the MTBF (if correctly given and a constant rate) only 37% are working by then.
For always-on devices they are *significantly* more likely to fail than semiconductors.
I see a letter H in there.
It's Hammer time!
Class!
What usually happens is someone else comes along with a "better" fashion and the old guard get knocked down a bit towards retirement.
So the real question is not can he keep Apple going, but who can usurp them?
I don't see MS doing that, though they are so entrenched in the desktop PC world they won't vanish in spite of turd-like OS/GUI choices, and Nokia, Sony, etc, seem beyond hope now.
Permitting technical control on 'culture' in the form of DRM is by far the worst aspect of the whole game.
While I have serious reservations about the fairness of the "private company accuses" nature of the warning letters system, it is still a system that works on the basis of the majority being willing to do the right thing, and the minority freetards left over are probably not worth a serious fight over anyway.
But DRM is so much more toxic, as it hinders innovation ("can't do that boy, not without our license") and serves to render 'content' in current technology obsolete in due course and thus to force a re-licensing of stuff you have already paid for. Also it serves as a barrier to free speech and fair use by those who take copyright to cover far more than distribution of a copy.
Remember the revocation of "1984" by Amazon?
Come out AC, we know you are really Gene Simmons:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/gene-simmons-vs-anonymous-whos-the-bigger-asshole.ars
"terrorists, criminals and so on."
And what exactly are the "so on" category of suspects?
I dreamt of a watch with Sapphic glass, but it proved to be too distracting...
Why? Because they don't stop until they get several pints!
Well it could be a cure for over-population and associated ills :)
Assuming the religious nutters don't get all hot about it threatening their business model.
Really? Do you prefer "home grade" sex, or maybe splash out on "enterprise grade" sex with an upgrade assurance program and citlocker(TM) for keeping your dirty secrets really secret?
As others have mentioned, Dropbox only encrypts the link to its servers, all of your data is available there naked and, if something goes wrong at their end, to world+dog. But that is no worse than most folk's PCs so its acceptable for most users I guess.
What I would like is an option in Dropbox's client to use your own NAS for some data, as it would be faster & easier for a home setup to sync big files (videos, ISOs, etc) between multiple users without needing always-on networking & NAS. But I guess that would eat their financial lunch so not likely to happen.
"Don't put pictures of your balls AND face (in the same frame) on Dropbox."
At least half the population have no worries then!
Why, if your browser agent is set to report IE, will it attempt to load an ActiveX plug-in?
The old MS trick of favouring IE/Windows all over again, rather than being web standards compliant?
Still, Google's web offering also sucks so its not like there is a vastly better offer.
Funny you should mention that, two of my friends' hotmail accounts have spammed me since Sunday.
You are right about being incompetent about it - it was the Itanium designs he was hoping to flog?
Sadly I can remember when Sony was an honourable company, and a good example of Japanese excellence.
Probably about the time before it bought in to media and the USA way of litigation, DRM, etc.
It is all about this petty control, and getting you used to it before they discontinue optical disks in a decade or so.
Why bother stopping you copying anyway? if you are a dedicated 'freetard' you will get it pirated easily enough, so its not like those are going to change.
Make it nice & easy to use without needing an "approved" device (i.e. no DRM) and make the price & availability right and it will succeed. Sadly I fear they have not quite learned that yet...
Are you talking about Android on a locked bootloader system?
I.e. One you don't actually "own" in any real sense (i.e. can run what software/OS you please)?
"It's not helping anyone unless they start buying"
That is possibly the most succinct statement of the whole issue. While big media likes to portray 'piracy' as the cause of their financial downfall, its not the whole story and more laws to play whack-a-freetard are not really helping anyone.
As the author (who is very much pro-copyright) has pointed out before: legitimate services have by-and-large sucked. If they make paying for stuff easy and don't piss paying folk off with DRM and "you are probably a thief" messages, maybe things will improve.
But, and there is the rub, maybe the disposable money is never going to return to past levels enjoyed by the music/movie biz due to the range of other things Joe Public has to spend it on now (mobile phone contracts, fondle slabs, multi-player games, etrc)?
No doubt with the custom ROM fitted?
(apologies to XKCD)
"Sod this you smelly bastards, I'm off out for the day!"
What do you think the space-walks are for?
