Windows Server may not be as dominate as Linux but it certainly is not dead. They compete in every server category and have decent market share while it is not dominate like desktops it is still a multi-billion dollar business that is certainly successful. Active Directory, SQL Server, ASP.Net, IIS these are all major products that run on WIndows Server, you can find thousands of jobs on any major job search engine. I think it is a mistake to say MS only has desktop operating systems, it is clearly still a player in the server market.
Don't forget Exchange. I'd wager that most of all productivity within a business is based on Active Directory, Exchange, and Office; all running on a Windows OS. And I say this as someone who works at a company with several times the number of *nix admins as Windows admins. You could run a large enterprise business without any Microsoft products, but why would you want to? Your efficiency would go out the window for everyone outside the IT department, and for many of those within it too.
Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
The linked page is a request for people to come forward if they have any patents covering VP8, not an indication that any such patents have been found. (Of course, with the current state of patents, realistically everything infringes some patent, it's just a matter of finding it.)
While the original argument was a bit heavy handed, you weren't exactly correct in all of your responses. Also, try to preview your comments to make sure you're distinguishing comments properly.
High speed rail for the US is a dumb idea. We have an EXTREMELY functional interstate system for local travel, and for all other domestic travel we have airplanes (very efficient and low cost if tickets are bought in advance. Don't like fees? Fly southwest).
The interstate system is very slow and energy inefficient compared to high speed rail.
Interstate systems are extremely flexible though. Where I live is a major rail conduit as well as road conduit. Both freight trains and semi trucks are used heavily. The freight for long distances to major hubs when time isn't a factor, and the semis for shorter distances and more flexible routes.
A high speed commuter train is efficient for getting between two small areas. However, in my limited experience, these areas often aren't either the source or destination of passengers, making vehicle faster. Public transportation and population density has a major impact on this though, so parts of the East coast would be ideal while the midwest and West coast would be terrible.
High Speed Rail would have the EXACT same security measures as airplanes,
Simply incorrect. Try visiting a country with high speed rail sometime.
On my recent visit to Europe I took the EuroStar (highspeed rail between London and France/Belgium). The security seemed on par with our airports, except that the guards were carrying automatic assault rifles instead of tasers. The tickets were also expensive, although much more flexible on dates/times than the airplane tickets.
Running it through multiple uncompromised hashing schemes does increase the complexity of attempting to reverse a valid password as it would require breaking multiple schemes first. Most passwords are simple enough that various forms of dictionary attacks or brute force are adequate, however not all are. An all lowercase 8 character password is the equivalent of a 38-bit key, and is a real candidate for brute force. A 10 character password potentially featuring mixed case, numbers, and symbols has roughly the same complexity of a 64-bit key. In such a case, a brute force attack is no longer practical, and reversing the key becomes the best option (assuming you've got the talent on hand to find good attack vectors).
10m is certainly long enough for systems in the same room. From system to switch to system it's 20m, which is 65ft. Less than half that distance between my desktop and server in the office. It's not going to make it to my HTPC in the living room, but gigabit is far more than I need there already. (I'm assuming the OP is talking about a home LAN, which isn't specified at all anywhere.) But yeah, in a corporate environment it isn't terribly useful unless your desktops share a wall with the datacenter.
60% (using the the maximum 600Mbps number). However that ignores the 802.11a devices out there, as well as the improvements in modulation theory that have been made in the past several years. There is also the discussion of how the frequencies react in the real world for the 5GHz, and whatever mythical range this new system uses. The 2.4 range is far better than the 5 range for wireless, except that there's so much blasted interference and legacy devices.
And finally, with this new specification that have the ability to enforce compliance to the full specification for this new frequency range. There are a lot of benefits for the 802.11n backwards compatibility capabilities, but they come with serious drawbacks. Ensuring all devices took advantage of all features of this more advanced specification should allow for far greater efficiencies than what is currently possible. (All this assumes that there really is a new frequency range that works well for the purposes of short range digital communications.)
You find a 10 gig switch with SFP ports and a few 10 gig SFP cards for your computers, and connect them using cables that have SFP connectors on the end. You limit your distance versus other methods, but it's perfect if you just need to hook a few systems together that are in the same room or two.
In dense environments, that's an advantage, but 802.11a/n on 5GHz already has that benefit.
A big issue with any wireless technology is latency. Higher modulation rates help that a bit, but most of the latency is in making sure it's safe for you to transmit, not in the actual transmission.
If you have a use case that needs higher throughput than 802.11n and isn't latency sensitive, then this will be a benefit, but for 99+% of users, it's completely unnecessary.
Corporate networks and venues.
I work in an office where 90% of the users have laptops that they carry around with them, and many of them don't even bother to dock them at their desk until they need power. There's a lot of users using the wireless at all times. Granted, must of the time the bandwidth requirements aren't high, but they are sometimes. And when you increase the total available bandwidth, you decrease the latency for if your used bandwidth stays the same, and that's important.
Venues are the other issue. I've seen many wireless networks in venues crumble under the sheer number of devices trying to use them. Imagine a conference room with 100 people with laptops. The presenter references some interesting YouTube video, and 20 people try to look up the video. Even if you have the backend infrastructure, your wireless network probably won't be able to provide reasonable service to everyone at that point.
Consider the Super Bowl from a couple of days ago. I've seen the internal stats for the number of devices that used the available Wi-Fi there, and how much they downloaded. It's staggering. Really, really big numbers. They managed to do it using around a thousand access points. If all of the devices had gigabit wireless, they could have provided better, faster, lower latency service, with less access points.
What applications do you use for all of these features? I've got a number of useful programs, but it's difficult to find what's good when the repositories have so many poorly labeled thousands of programs, many of which aren't compatible with the latest iOS.
No, the federal government can't copyright stuff by law, but they can own copyrights. So to get around this, they pay other businesses to produce and copyright a work, and the purchase the copyright.
I couldn't tell you why they think it's a good idea, but it's what they do.
My opinion: the first series' only asset was an oddly funny MacGyver faced with alternate realities, usually having to shoot his way out. The show really seemed like a one trick pony. Without MacGyver or the humor, what do you have?
Yeah, but that was really all they needed. Sometimes you just need a few great elements to make a good show. Sure, if all of the characters had been great actors, and they'd had great writers to develop the story lines it would have been a really amazing show. But it was good as it was. (Of course, MacGyver moved on eventually and the show petered out.)
ST:TNG was in a similar boat. Most of the actors there were just terrible, and the writers even worse. But when Patrick Stewart would get paired up with some decent writing, the show would turn amazing.
But it will probably result in a color-screen nSpire sooner than we might otherwise have seen one. Which is A Good Thing (tm) - some of the graphing uses of my nSpire would be much nicer with color to distinguish the plots.
I owned a Casio color graphing calculator 15-20 years ago, and the screen was terrible to use. Color LCD screen that aren't backlit have an extremely limited contrast.
Two gears isn't bad. And I wouldn't think they'd need anything more complicated than mechanisms to switch between two gears as you should be able to accurately align the RPM of the motor with that of the gears to the wheels. At least, in my head it seems like that would be pretty trivial.
I searched around for a while, but I couldn't find a clear list of numbers or a graph to describe how the efficiency scales with RPM. For instance, I might be willing to accept a 20% loss in efficiency for highway driving if I do it rarely. Especially if it vastly simplified the drive train. But if it's more like a 50% efficiency loss, that'd be too much.
I know that electric motors work better at low RPM and high torque, but I don't have any idea how it scales. Do you know how many gearings they ended up using?
That was also my impression, but the Wikipedia article has this bit,
"This drivetrain layout usually operates as a plug-in series hybrid design since mechanical power drives the generator, which in turn either charges the battery pack or provides power to the electric motor. At speeds higher than 70 miles per hour (110 km/h), if the battery is depleted, the IC engine is directly coupled to the wheels, hence the Volt operates as a power-split or series-parallel hybrid in this mode.[13][14]"
So it looks like it's been changed from the original concepts. I'm curious if adding all of this extra gearing is really that much more efficient than powering a generator to run the electric motors. Certainly their current solution is far more complex.
You guys have it quite a bit more together than the folks at the elections I've seen. We have a big enough problem just trying to keep them from changing our information displays to whatever TV shows are on. I suspect that doing something dirty in the election other places may be significantly easier than where you are.
The image from the engaget article doesn't look like the description. The description sounds very much like how a glass cutter works. You basically run a small metal instrument along the glass, which create a long grooved scratch. This would be similar to the effect of a tiny pebble being dragged along a glass plate with pressure. This creates a structural weakness that a small amount of pressure will cause to crack all of the way through. Even if done poorly and with sudden changes in direction, the break will be clean.
The image looks like the top part has had the glass powdered, which only happens with an impact. It looks pretty similar to other iPhones 2 through 3G screens that I've seen crack from dropping.
Yeah, with a 0.022 degree spread you'd end up with a receiving diamater of 600km. This sort of problem is usually just solved with relays. Receive the dispersed signal, and retransmit a new one. Of course, each level retransmitting adds that much more complexity to the system.
One thing that isn't mentioned is why they use infrared. Why use that, and how are they collecting it? Directional wireless power I've seen has always been with microwaves of some sort, which are easy to collect into power.
Ah, you're right. Geosynchronous orbit would be useless for solar wind collection. And even the Lagrange point between Earth and the moon wouldn't be any good at 60,000km if the magnetosphere is about 70,000km.
Beaming power to a single point on Earth from a geostationary orbit isn't so bad. Having to transition between a dozen(s) of power reception stations around the Earth (as the Earth rotates faster than the satellite) would be a nightmare. Realistically you'd need as many satellites as receiving stations to keep the power feeds constant, and your power grid would have to be pretty stable to handle all of the potential fluctuations.
Safety protocols on it are pretty simple though. You just keep transmitting a carrier signal from the ground to the satellites. If the satellite isn't oriented properly to receive the signal, it doesn't transmit.
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Windows Server may not be as dominate as Linux but it certainly is not dead. They compete in every server category and have decent market share while it is not dominate like desktops it is still a multi-billion dollar business that is certainly successful. Active Directory, SQL Server, ASP.Net, IIS these are all major products that run on WIndows Server, you can find thousands of jobs on any major job search engine. I think it is a mistake to say MS only has desktop operating systems, it is clearly still a player in the server market.
Don't forget Exchange. I'd wager that most of all productivity within a business is based on Active Directory, Exchange, and Office; all running on a Windows OS. And I say this as someone who works at a company with several times the number of *nix admins as Windows admins. You could run a large enterprise business without any Microsoft products, but why would you want to? Your efficiency would go out the window for everyone outside the IT department, and for many of those within it too.
Pity about all the patents they use but don't actually own. Unfortunately, royalty-free seems to equal indemnity-free (FYI, not a good kind of freedom to have).
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx
The linked page is a request for people to come forward if they have any patents covering VP8, not an indication that any such patents have been found. (Of course, with the current state of patents, realistically everything infringes some patent, it's just a matter of finding it.)
While the original argument was a bit heavy handed, you weren't exactly correct in all of your responses. Also, try to preview your comments to make sure you're distinguishing comments properly.
High speed rail for the US is a dumb idea. We have an EXTREMELY functional interstate system for local travel, and for all other domestic travel we have airplanes (very efficient and low cost if tickets are bought in advance. Don't like fees? Fly southwest).
The interstate system is very slow and energy inefficient compared to high speed rail.
Interstate systems are extremely flexible though. Where I live is a major rail conduit as well as road conduit. Both freight trains and semi trucks are used heavily. The freight for long distances to major hubs when time isn't a factor, and the semis for shorter distances and more flexible routes.
A high speed commuter train is efficient for getting between two small areas. However, in my limited experience, these areas often aren't either the source or destination of passengers, making vehicle faster. Public transportation and population density has a major impact on this though, so parts of the East coast would be ideal while the midwest and West coast would be terrible.
High Speed Rail would have the EXACT same security measures as airplanes,
Simply incorrect. Try visiting a country with high speed rail sometime.
On my recent visit to Europe I took the EuroStar (highspeed rail between London and France/Belgium). The security seemed on par with our airports, except that the guards were carrying automatic assault rifles instead of tasers. The tickets were also expensive, although much more flexible on dates/times than the airplane tickets.
Running it through multiple uncompromised hashing schemes does increase the complexity of attempting to reverse a valid password as it would require breaking multiple schemes first. Most passwords are simple enough that various forms of dictionary attacks or brute force are adequate, however not all are. An all lowercase 8 character password is the equivalent of a 38-bit key, and is a real candidate for brute force. A 10 character password potentially featuring mixed case, numbers, and symbols has roughly the same complexity of a 64-bit key. In such a case, a brute force attack is no longer practical, and reversing the key becomes the best option (assuming you've got the talent on hand to find good attack vectors).
10m is certainly long enough for systems in the same room. From system to switch to system it's 20m, which is 65ft. Less than half that distance between my desktop and server in the office. It's not going to make it to my HTPC in the living room, but gigabit is far more than I need there already. (I'm assuming the OP is talking about a home LAN, which isn't specified at all anywhere.) But yeah, in a corporate environment it isn't terribly useful unless your desktops share a wall with the datacenter.
60% (using the the maximum 600Mbps number). However that ignores the 802.11a devices out there, as well as the improvements in modulation theory that have been made in the past several years. There is also the discussion of how the frequencies react in the real world for the 5GHz, and whatever mythical range this new system uses. The 2.4 range is far better than the 5 range for wireless, except that there's so much blasted interference and legacy devices.
And finally, with this new specification that have the ability to enforce compliance to the full specification for this new frequency range. There are a lot of benefits for the 802.11n backwards compatibility capabilities, but they come with serious drawbacks. Ensuring all devices took advantage of all features of this more advanced specification should allow for far greater efficiencies than what is currently possible. (All this assumes that there really is a new frequency range that works well for the purposes of short range digital communications.)
A reasonable alternative to 10Gbps over Cat6e is direct attached SFP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet#SFP.2B_Direct_Attach
You find a 10 gig switch with SFP ports and a few 10 gig SFP cards for your computers, and connect them using cables that have SFP connectors on the end. You limit your distance versus other methods, but it's perfect if you just need to hook a few systems together that are in the same room or two.
In dense environments, that's an advantage, but 802.11a/n on 5GHz already has that benefit.
A big issue with any wireless technology is latency. Higher modulation rates help that a bit, but most of the latency is in making sure it's safe for you to transmit, not in the actual transmission.
If you have a use case that needs higher throughput than 802.11n and isn't latency sensitive, then this will be a benefit, but for 99+% of users, it's completely unnecessary.
Corporate networks and venues.
I work in an office where 90% of the users have laptops that they carry around with them, and many of them don't even bother to dock them at their desk until they need power. There's a lot of users using the wireless at all times. Granted, must of the time the bandwidth requirements aren't high, but they are sometimes. And when you increase the total available bandwidth, you decrease the latency for if your used bandwidth stays the same, and that's important.
Venues are the other issue. I've seen many wireless networks in venues crumble under the sheer number of devices trying to use them. Imagine a conference room with 100 people with laptops. The presenter references some interesting YouTube video, and 20 people try to look up the video. Even if you have the backend infrastructure, your wireless network probably won't be able to provide reasonable service to everyone at that point.
Consider the Super Bowl from a couple of days ago. I've seen the internal stats for the number of devices that used the available Wi-Fi there, and how much they downloaded. It's staggering. Really, really big numbers. They managed to do it using around a thousand access points. If all of the devices had gigabit wireless, they could have provided better, faster, lower latency service, with less access points.
What applications do you use for all of these features? I've got a number of useful programs, but it's difficult to find what's good when the repositories have so many poorly labeled thousands of programs, many of which aren't compatible with the latest iOS.
Yes, that's the right word. It didn't look quite right when I wrote it, but I was tired and in a hurry.
No, the federal government can't copyright stuff by law, but they can own copyrights. So to get around this, they pay other businesses to produce and copyright a work, and the purchase the copyright.
I couldn't tell you why they think it's a good idea, but it's what they do.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up. Civil suits simply aren't anywhere near the level of criminal suits, and the decisions can be almost trivial.
My opinion: the first series' only asset was an oddly funny MacGyver faced with alternate realities, usually having to shoot his way out. The show really seemed like a one trick pony. Without MacGyver or the humor, what do you have?
Yeah, but that was really all they needed. Sometimes you just need a few great elements to make a good show. Sure, if all of the characters had been great actors, and they'd had great writers to develop the story lines it would have been a really amazing show. But it was good as it was. (Of course, MacGyver moved on eventually and the show petered out.)
ST:TNG was in a similar boat. Most of the actors there were just terrible, and the writers even worse. But when Patrick Stewart would get paired up with some decent writing, the show would turn amazing.
I save money by purchasing cheap used cars. I'm betting I would have to drive the Mazda a long time before I ever broke even on the purchase.
Shhh! If you tell everyone the secret, everyone will buy used cards, and the price of used cars will go up so that it won't work anymore.
But it will probably result in a color-screen nSpire sooner than we might otherwise have seen one. Which is A Good Thing (tm) - some of the graphing uses of my nSpire would be much nicer with color to distinguish the plots.
I owned a Casio color graphing calculator 15-20 years ago, and the screen was terrible to use. Color LCD screen that aren't backlit have an extremely limited contrast.
Two gears isn't bad. And I wouldn't think they'd need anything more complicated than mechanisms to switch between two gears as you should be able to accurately align the RPM of the motor with that of the gears to the wheels. At least, in my head it seems like that would be pretty trivial.
I searched around for a while, but I couldn't find a clear list of numbers or a graph to describe how the efficiency scales with RPM. For instance, I might be willing to accept a 20% loss in efficiency for highway driving if I do it rarely. Especially if it vastly simplified the drive train. But if it's more like a 50% efficiency loss, that'd be too much.
I would say it "strongly implies" a mechanical coupling. I guess we won't know for sure until it ships and someone does a serious investigation.
Troll? Looks like the peddler has mod points.
I know that electric motors work better at low RPM and high torque, but I don't have any idea how it scales. Do you know how many gearings they ended up using?
That was also my impression, but the Wikipedia article has this bit,
"This drivetrain layout usually operates as a plug-in series hybrid design since mechanical power drives the generator, which in turn either charges the battery pack or provides power to the electric motor. At speeds higher than 70 miles per hour (110 km/h), if the battery is depleted, the IC engine is directly coupled to the wheels, hence the Volt operates as a power-split or series-parallel hybrid in this mode.[13][14]"
So it looks like it's been changed from the original concepts. I'm curious if adding all of this extra gearing is really that much more efficient than powering a generator to run the electric motors. Certainly their current solution is far more complex.
You guys have it quite a bit more together than the folks at the elections I've seen. We have a big enough problem just trying to keep them from changing our information displays to whatever TV shows are on. I suspect that doing something dirty in the election other places may be significantly easier than where you are.
I believe they stated the reason they went away from the metal back of the original iPhone is it caused reception problems, which would make sense.
Plastic can look pretty terrible after a while, but I always use a case so it never matters to me.
The image from the engaget article doesn't look like the description. The description sounds very much like how a glass cutter works. You basically run a small metal instrument along the glass, which create a long grooved scratch. This would be similar to the effect of a tiny pebble being dragged along a glass plate with pressure. This creates a structural weakness that a small amount of pressure will cause to crack all of the way through. Even if done poorly and with sudden changes in direction, the break will be clean.
The image looks like the top part has had the glass powdered, which only happens with an impact. It looks pretty similar to other iPhones 2 through 3G screens that I've seen crack from dropping.
Yeah, with a 0.022 degree spread you'd end up with a receiving diamater of 600km. This sort of problem is usually just solved with relays. Receive the dispersed signal, and retransmit a new one. Of course, each level retransmitting adds that much more complexity to the system.
One thing that isn't mentioned is why they use infrared. Why use that, and how are they collecting it? Directional wireless power I've seen has always been with microwaves of some sort, which are easy to collect into power.
Ah, you're right. Geosynchronous orbit would be useless for solar wind collection. And even the Lagrange point between Earth and the moon wouldn't be any good at 60,000km if the magnetosphere is about 70,000km.
Beaming power to a single point on Earth from a geostationary orbit isn't so bad. Having to transition between a dozen(s) of power reception stations around the Earth (as the Earth rotates faster than the satellite) would be a nightmare. Realistically you'd need as many satellites as receiving stations to keep the power feeds constant, and your power grid would have to be pretty stable to handle all of the potential fluctuations.
Safety protocols on it are pretty simple though. You just keep transmitting a carrier signal from the ground to the satellites. If the satellite isn't oriented properly to receive the signal, it doesn't transmit.