There are quite a lot of LCD screens that can be configured NOT to scale the resolution they receive. For example, on my Samsung T240 I can very well set the resolution to 800x600 or 1024x768 and have that resolution centered in the middle of the screen, with black bars all around.
The ATI driver also has some options to upscale in hardware the images, so let's say that if you have a 640x480 game, you could have the driver upscale in hardware to 1280x960 and then have the LCD screen center this 1280x960 resolution in the middle of the display. This is because the ATI upscaler is a bit better quality than the LCD screen's upscaler and the LCD's upscaler only upscales to the native resolution, 1920x1200
Yeah, people at the post office and customs can also open your packages on suspicion they contain drugs or other illegal materials and they could in theory read the letter but that doesn't mean they read the text of the letter. The same way people at the ISP could read the mail but that doesn't mean they do.
You can't hold me responsible for a murder on my property that I had no idea was going on, didn't see, didn't intentionally facilitate and would have attempted to stop had I known about it.. But when on any given day (in fact several thousand times EVERYDAY), I can look out my window and watch it happening, while I sit and drink my coffee, its a slightly different story. When the exclusive reason people come to my property is because I'll provide them with information on how to find victims, and then look the other way while they strangle those victims, I am most certainly responsible for the murders as much as the guy doing it.
I'm sorry but this is really a bad analogy.
Look at it in another way: You're the administrator of a hotel. Each day you get people (either man and woman, or just single men/women) coming in and reserving a room for one to three day.
Should you as an administrator make the assumption that all the people reserving room for one day are actually prostitutes and clients, so you should let them get in their rooms, wait half an hour and then bust in and ask them what they're doing, just to be sure they're not doing prostitution? Or should you just assume that there may be people who come to the city for 2 day conferences and they only need to sleep one night in your hotel?
If you think you should be allowed to bust in and check each person, you would be the one who thinks it should be Ok for police to raid your hotel and take out all the beds and lingerie and furniture as evidence (just as they took all the servers in the datacenter when TPB was raided) and sue you for allowing prostitution in your premises, because the local association of motels (the riaa/mpaa, the company that's hurt by your competition) sees the number of motel rooms reserved diminishing and they saw two prostitutes in your hotel.
If you don't think this is OK, you're just like The Pirate Bay, who offers people an infrastructure (the hotel) and people can use them for good (sleep, whatever) or bad (prostitution) purposes.
ps. I've specifically said man and woman or just single men/women because I assume people would say "the hotel owner would see the same woman checking in, it's obvious she's a prostitute". A man can also reserve room and then call in the city for a prostitute and she goes up his room as a visitor, without bothering to register at the hotel entrance so you can't really tell...
Would it have made a difference if it was called "The Legal Bay" ?
The Pirate Bay was not created specifically for works to be shared without permission from the authors, it was created for people to share their creations.
It just so happens that some people share music videos or music tracks honestly believing it's nothing wrong with that, thinking they promote the bands this way. Other people buy something legally and believe they're allowed to share it with some people, just as they would physically borrow it to other friends (a book for example) - they really see nothing wrong with that. Other people are just jerks and upload illegal files knowing well what they do.
The problem is that the Internet is INTERNATIONAL, and copyright laws are NOT international. There will always people in some countries where there are absolutely no laws or very lax laws about copyright infringement, people that are not educated or simply don't understand what all this copyright talk is about and will upload torrents with illegal content.
This happens with any site, including Youtube for example - no matter how many warnings you see before you get the chance to upload something, you'll easily find clips on Youtube with copyrighted audio tracks in them because in some countries there simply isn't even the notion of copyright infringement.
Youtube is even a worse offender than The Pirate Bay because it also stores the content with copyrighted audio on their server so they can do checks on the file any time they like and they can hire people to manually view and listed to each track - The Pirate Bay can't, they only store a torrent file holding just some file names and some file sizes and they'd have to download each torrent to view the contents which would be almost impossible.
But Youtube gets off easy because they implement the faulty audio identification scheme where publishers send Youtube signatures for audio files and Youtube removes audio from videos when an audio signature is found - but this has problems as this article says:
A publisher simply decided it owns copyright for a public domain audio track so they sent the signature to Youtube. Result: account disabled. Person decides to post a clip with public domain video recording from NASA. Associated Press gets permission from NASA to post the clip on their site, then claims the videos on Youtube infringe their copyright. Result: account disabled
The lawsuit the article is about is stupid. A court in Sweden says because they couldn't find out who is behind Reservela, the company owning "The Pirate Bay", they just assume those two people are still the owners and decide those two people are no longer allowed to work on it even though The Pirate Bay is no longer physically located in Sweden, the two people are no longer the owners and they're not even living in Sweden anymore.
It probably costs more to pull the copper wire for telephone lines compared to fiber optics. Copper WILL be stolen and sold to get money for food, fiber is kind of pointless to steal as no recycle center will pay for it.
You could literally pull fiber to a town neighborhood and from there you could just use regular utp cable and second / third hand utp switches or hubs. It will be probably cheaper compared to modems.
It's not the distributor's bandwidth and servers, it's Amazon's bandwidth and servers. Amazon deducts the costs from that 40-50% profit they'd have.
I never said servers and bandwidth is free, but it's not the distributor's problem just as it's not the distributor's problem how Amazon ships their books to people or handles returns from them.
It costs less than a dollar to server 1GB to a user so you can guess how much it costs to serve a 10-25 MB ebook. They already have the infrastructure in place (S3 storage, lots of servers and bandwidth already reserved for their video renting system and so on), it costs them almost nothing to serve ebooks to people downloading to PC.
On Kindle, maybe it costs more, 40 cents, a dollar - I guess it depends on the deals they made with cellphone providers for the traffic.
If it costs the publisher 18$ for the printed book, you can remove the 3-4$ printing cost, 2$ for shipping you're left with 12 bucks. Now add up 40-50% profit for the company selling the books online and you're back at 18$. Nowhere near 28$ they sell it for. It's just greed.
Well, anyway... this whole discussion is pointless, publishers will ask whatever they feel customers will pay, not the fair price.
No, I think what he means is that you can in theory buy the printed book, literally tear and remove the covers, the index pages, and the contents table and you're left with pages that have only his text, which he owns.
Now use a scanner to scan the pages, OCR them, and offer it for free. He says he won't sue you for the text he wrote. As there's nothing in your ebook version that belongs to Apress, you'd have no problems... again, in theory.
From 40$ only 18$ goes to the publisher, the rest is amazon's money, library's money, wasted on damaged books when shipped, on returns and so on.
From that 18$ publisher pays the 10% royalty (but only after they get back their $6000 advance), the printing company, the editors that formatted the books and then they have their profit.
I find it more ridiculous that Apress sells his ebook for 23.99$ when the printing costs, shipping and so on are non-existent. Basically, ebook brings Apress more profit than printed books at this point.
One 1000 mbps unmetered server in Europe (NL) is about 1600 Euro a month (quad core, 4 to 8 GB of memory, SAS/SCSI raid drives, the works).. Even colocated, the price is still reasonable, about 6-8000 Euro a month. In US, choopa.com has unmetered gigabit at 3995$ a month.
That's 330 TB or about 338.000 GB or about 110.000 downloads... Let's say 100.000 downloads and 10.000 Euro for the server(s) and bandwidth and it still costs you only 10 cents for each download.
Only you won't be able to max that out by probably more than 2-3 days. They'll cut you off saying you're flooding someone or you have viruses. The price is cheap because they figure people that want to download stuff a lot will get faster connections and you won't use your connection to download stuff.
Well, this is in US... here I have 24/4 cable in Romania and once every 2-3 weeks I download 50-60GB over 24 hours with no problems whatsoever and I pay 20$ for it..
I switched from CRT to LCD because after 8-10 years in front of the CRT display my eyes were tearing... The radiation a CRT makes can't be that good... I had a 21" CRT running at 1600x1200 and it's no match to 1920x1200 @ 24" nowadays.
It's even less... My quad core with a Radeon 4850 and 4 GB of memory won't go over 270W at full load, playing at 1920x1200 and highest settings. On idle, it's 167w... And this is with a bad power supply, a 460w with less than 75% power efficiency.
As for parent poster, I agree... Crysis and other games would most likely be rendered at maximum 720p and low to medium settings, because any better quality would just be lost on the compression and people won't notice it. 4:3 will probably be rendered at 1280x1024 and then software resized to 640x480 and encoded...
So what? Jobs were also lost when cars replaced horses and the buggies, jobs were also lost when typography machines were invented and people no longer had to duplicate by hand or place letters by hand on a form to print a page?
Maybe in a few years solar cells will be cheap enough and have performance good enough that each house will have them on their roofs so should we then ban them because jobs in power plants will be lost ?
No, I'm talking about other things besides just opening eight tabs and eight pages. That's doesn't mean anything for users.
Start using the browser... each time you access a page, the url is saved in the history, the favicon is also cached, some part of the 64-128 MB of cache is getting filled, use it as a regular person would use the browser for a few days, when logging in let the browse save the passwords and so on.
Then have 10-25 random people from the street site at the computer and tell them to go to a site that you previously visited and watch when they type the URL * if they type without taking eyes off keyboard keys * if they type watching only the screen * if their attention is diverted when the drop down menu appears so they lose focus and check the URL again before typing * maybe they use the mouse to click once on the address bar and then leave the mouse pointer an inch or so below the bar, so when they start typing they may accidentally move the mouse on the table and an entry from the drop down list gets selected and they end up with junk in the address bar because they keep typing and don't notice the address is now wrong
The idea is - how much time is wasted because the user is interrupted by the drop down list, how much time does it take for the suggestions to appear when the history and bookmarks databases have a lot of entries? This time over the course of a work day starts to gather up.
Then you have users who don't even know "Open in new tab exists", so they keep clicking on the left mouse button, thereby using only one-two tabs.
Other users (like me for example) got used to clicking the middle mouse button so all new pages are opened in new tab.
How much time is spent by the browser to create new tabs, reorder the tab list, and then load the page? Users in the first category may wait until the page is fully loaded until they start reading it and then they click on the next page and wait again so they waste time...
On the other hand, users on the other category keep reading the first page while next pages are opened using middle mouse button, in different tabs, so when they end reading the first page they just click on the next tab and they're ready to go.
How about modern features like session restore - when a power failure occurs, you reboot the computer how much time it takes when all programs compete for resources for the browser to reopen those tabs that were previously opened?
Scientifically, it would be relatively easy to write a software that would know where all the buttons on the browser interface usually are, would know to maximize the browser windows and type addresses in the toolbar, analyze how much time is spent on various locations and so on, bookmark sites, try typing previously opened sites to see how fast the browser suggests stuff (when it's only the browser open or when there's something like an antivirus accessing the drive) and so on and so forth).
So overall for me at least it doesn't mean anything that a browser is a few ms faster to open eight tabs and a page in each tab when users don't work like this almost anytime. I don't even care about memory usage when I have 4GB installed and can very well add about 4 GB of swap file... but I care about responsiveness and the browser not making me waste time while working.
It's obvious Chrome would be faster becuase of its simplicity...
What always bothers me is that these "testers" don't test the browsers after some "normal" or "not quite so normal" use. People don't just start a fresh install of a browser and open eight tabs, people have lots of bookmarks, passwords, saved forms in browsers and after a time, these affect the speed and performance of a browser.
A good tester should bookmark about 200 sites in various categories, save passwords for about 20-30 sites, have some forms saved, and then he should see how much latency browser has from the moment you start typing an URL in it's address bar and bringing URL's or suggestions from its separate SQLite databases that hold bookmarks and previously accessed websites history (it shouldn't matter but in reality users usually stop from typing when they see something changing on screen and check the url and suggestions and time is lost)
Also, in my case I work with various web apps that basically make me access hundreds of url's like site.com/page.php?id=[number] , so all these are saved in the history and after about a week, I basically have to clear the database because Firefox becomes too slow to load, it takes up to a second from the moment I start typing a website in the address bar and so on, I have to empty the history to make it work properly again...
I use Firefox and it's not perfect and not the fastest, but I still prefer it over Safari or Opera simply because of extensions like Firebug or Live HTTP Headers or even Screengrab, which make my life way easier.
Even easier, go to eBay and get a PCI video card for a couple of dollars. I got an ATI Rage with 8MB of memory for something like 2$ plus about 4$ shipping. It's only a few watts, which if you really freak out about power usage, you can recover by lowering the CPU voltage and the frequency to a bit lower than the normal. Well, anyways you'll make it more economic simply by replacing the power supply with a 80-85+ certified one, but it's probably more expensive than the whole computer, or the money saved in 2-3 years.
If Germany and Poland are not so good example, take the example of Romania, that's about 2 thirds of Germany, has about 18-19 million people and probably about 7-9 million cellphone users shared between 3 big companies and 2-3 smaller ones.
Cosmote Romania : http://www.cosmote.ro/ro/html/cosmote_romania_coverage_map_ro.html Smallest plan : 3.57 euro a month, 200 minutes in network, 200 SMS included, 0.107 Euro/ minute within network, 0.178 Euro/minute with other networks in country, SMS costs 0.059 Euro
There are of course options or plans that have let's say 800 minutes included for something like 20 euro a month, or there's even a 160 euro a month with unlimited calls and 2000 included minutes with other networks inside the country a certain regions of the world (US, Canada and so on)...
And regarding quality, the only time I get dropped calls is during the night 31st of December. Romania is not just flat, it has hills, mountains, everything, yet they manage to cover the whole country.
That's competition for you... all three major networks cover almost all the country. And it's obvious these companies have a profit, even with these small fees and low cost plans, so there shouldn't really be a reason no to be able to replicate this in each state of US..
Only Texas and Alaska have bigger surface than Romania, but they're both flatter than Romania. Only ten states have bigger people density than Romania (233 people / square mile) so the densitity is not really a big excuse.
Once the document has been scanned and introduced in the system, it costs almost nothing to distribute it.
You have almost fixed costs each month on people producing the documents, bandwidth, datacenter colocation, and some additional small costs on maintenance so a fee of 3 cents per page is not justified, especially if a document can get to hundreds of pages. You already run the system for years now, so you should know from statistics how many pages are read or how many documents are transferred and you should especially know how much it costs you overall so they could implement something like 50 cents / 1$ per document and still cover their yearly costs plus a very small profit.
... and they no longer have to pay a fee to On2 for each encoded video if what I hear (that they licensed some custom servers made by On2 for processing videos) is true
Kind of off topic but my Firefox has no issue with that page. Memory jumped from 248MB to about 265MB and went back to 251MB after, and as I type this it's down to 244MB.
But you are still on their records as a sex offender for 20 years and you have to report your email address and account information on social networking sites.... so it is quite an inconvenience, not to mention the problems you might have when trying to get a job.
* Level one (low risk); * Level two (medium risk); and * Level three (high risk).
Level 1 offenders are required to register for a minimum of twenty years, and level 2 and 3 offenders for life. Police and law enforcement have access to information on all sex offenders (levels 1, 2 and 3). However, under the law, information on level 1 (low-risk) offenders is not available on the public website. Only level 2 and 3 offenders are listed on the public website
A Level 1 offender means that the court has determined that there is a low risk to commit another sex crime. A Level 2 offender means that the court has determined that there is a moderate risk to commit another sex crime. A Level 3 offender means that the court has determined that there is a high risk to commit another sex crime.
The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act, which took effect on April 28, 2008, requires all registered sex offenders to report to DCJS all of their internet accounts and any e-mail addresses and screen names used for the purposes of chat, instant messaging or social networking. The Act does not limit a sex offender's use of the Internet. However, if the sex offender is on probation or parole, the terms of the offender's parole or probation may limit his or her use of the Internet.
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LCD screens are also sensitive... so I'd say maybe... Monochrome 640x480 LED Matrix and custom video chips.... or "Split-Flap type display" as seen here http://www.salient.com.au/products-splitflap.htm ... maybe some sort of adapted nixie tubes as seen here : http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_displays.html#ColdCathode
There are quite a lot of LCD screens that can be configured NOT to scale the resolution they receive. For example, on my Samsung T240 I can very well set the resolution to 800x600 or 1024x768 and have that resolution centered in the middle of the screen, with black bars all around.
The ATI driver also has some options to upscale in hardware the images, so let's say that if you have a 640x480 game, you could have the driver upscale in hardware to 1280x960 and then have the LCD screen center this 1280x960 resolution in the middle of the display. This is because the ATI upscaler is a bit better quality than the LCD screen's upscaler and the LCD's upscaler only upscales to the native resolution, 1920x1200
Yeah, people at the post office and customs can also open your packages on suspicion they contain drugs or other illegal materials and they could in theory read the letter but that doesn't mean they read the text of the letter.
The same way people at the ISP could read the mail but that doesn't mean they do.
You can't hold me responsible for a murder on my property that I had no idea was going on, didn't see, didn't intentionally facilitate and would have attempted to stop had I known about it.. But when on any given day (in fact several thousand times EVERYDAY), I can look out my window and watch it happening, while I sit and drink my coffee, its a slightly different story. When the exclusive reason people come to my property is because I'll provide them with information on how to find victims, and then look the other way while they strangle those victims, I am most certainly responsible for the murders as much as the guy doing it.
I'm sorry but this is really a bad analogy.
Look at it in another way: You're the administrator of a hotel. Each day you get people (either man and woman, or just single men/women) coming in and reserving a room for one to three day.
Should you as an administrator make the assumption that all the people reserving room for one day are actually prostitutes and clients, so you should let them get in their rooms, wait half an hour and then bust in and ask them what they're doing, just to be sure they're not doing prostitution? Or should you just assume that there may be people who come to the city for 2 day conferences and they only need to sleep one night in your hotel?
If you think you should be allowed to bust in and check each person, you would be the one who thinks it should be Ok for police to raid your hotel and take out all the beds and lingerie and furniture as evidence (just as they took all the servers in the datacenter when TPB was raided) and sue you for allowing prostitution in your premises, because the local association of motels (the riaa/mpaa, the company that's hurt by your competition) sees the number of motel rooms reserved diminishing and they saw two prostitutes in your hotel.
If you don't think this is OK, you're just like The Pirate Bay, who offers people an infrastructure (the hotel) and people can use them for good (sleep, whatever) or bad (prostitution) purposes.
ps. I've specifically said man and woman or just single men/women because I assume people would say "the hotel owner would see the same woman checking in, it's obvious she's a prostitute". A man can also reserve room and then call in the city for a prostitute and she goes up his room as a visitor, without bothering to register at the hotel entrance so you can't really tell...
Would it have made a difference if it was called "The Legal Bay" ?
The Pirate Bay was not created specifically for works to be shared without permission from the authors, it was created for people to share their creations.
It just so happens that some people share music videos or music tracks honestly believing it's nothing wrong with that, thinking they promote the bands this way. Other people buy something legally and believe they're allowed to share it with some people, just as they would physically borrow it to other friends (a book for example) - they really see nothing wrong with that. Other people are just jerks and upload illegal files knowing well what they do.
The problem is that the Internet is INTERNATIONAL, and copyright laws are NOT international. There will always people in some countries where there are absolutely no laws or very lax laws about copyright infringement, people that are not educated or simply don't understand what all this copyright talk is about and will upload torrents with illegal content.
This happens with any site, including Youtube for example - no matter how many warnings you see before you get the chance to upload something, you'll easily find clips on Youtube with copyrighted audio tracks in them because in some countries there simply isn't even the notion of copyright infringement.
Youtube is even a worse offender than The Pirate Bay because it also stores the content with copyrighted audio on their server so they can do checks on the file any time they like and they can hire people to manually view and listed to each track - The Pirate Bay can't, they only store a torrent file holding just some file names and some file sizes and they'd have to download each torrent to view the contents which would be almost impossible.
But Youtube gets off easy because they implement the faulty audio identification scheme where publishers send Youtube signatures for audio files and Youtube removes audio from videos when an audio signature is found - but this has problems as this article says:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091028/0306106704.shtml
A publisher simply decided it owns copyright for a public domain audio track so they sent the signature to Youtube. Result: account disabled.
Person decides to post a clip with public domain video recording from NASA. Associated Press gets permission from NASA to post the clip on their site, then claims the videos on Youtube infringe their copyright. Result: account disabled
The lawsuit the article is about is stupid. A court in Sweden says because they couldn't find out who is behind Reservela, the company owning "The Pirate Bay", they just assume those two people are still the owners and decide those two people are no longer allowed to work on it even though The Pirate Bay is no longer physically located in Sweden, the two people are no longer the owners and they're not even living in Sweden anymore.
It probably costs more to pull the copper wire for telephone lines compared to fiber optics. Copper WILL be stolen and sold to get money for food, fiber is kind of pointless to steal as no recycle center will pay for it.
You could literally pull fiber to a town neighborhood and from there you could just use regular utp cable and second / third hand utp switches or hubs. It will be probably cheaper compared to modems.
It's not the distributor's bandwidth and servers, it's Amazon's bandwidth and servers. Amazon deducts the costs from that 40-50% profit they'd have.
I never said servers and bandwidth is free, but it's not the distributor's problem just as it's not the distributor's problem how Amazon ships their books to people or handles returns from them.
It costs less than a dollar to server 1GB to a user so you can guess how much it costs to serve a 10-25 MB ebook. They already have the infrastructure in place (S3 storage, lots of servers and bandwidth already reserved for their video renting system and so on), it costs them almost nothing to serve ebooks to people downloading to PC.
On Kindle, maybe it costs more, 40 cents, a dollar - I guess it depends on the deals they made with cellphone providers for the traffic.
It was actually $27.99.
If it costs the publisher 18$ for the printed book, you can remove the 3-4$ printing cost, 2$ for shipping you're left with 12 bucks. Now add up 40-50% profit for the company selling the books online and you're back at 18$.
Nowhere near 28$ they sell it for. It's just greed.
Well, anyway... this whole discussion is pointless, publishers will ask whatever they feel customers will pay, not the fair price.
No, I think what he means is that you can in theory buy the printed book, literally tear and remove the covers, the index pages, and the contents table and you're left with pages that have only his text, which he owns.
Now use a scanner to scan the pages, OCR them, and offer it for free. He says he won't sue you for the text he wrote. As there's nothing in your ebook version that belongs to Apress, you'd have no problems... again, in theory.
From 40$ only 18$ goes to the publisher, the rest is amazon's money, library's money, wasted on damaged books when shipped, on returns and so on.
From that 18$ publisher pays the 10% royalty (but only after they get back their $6000 advance), the printing company, the editors that formatted the books and then they have their profit.
I find it more ridiculous that Apress sells his ebook for 23.99$ when the printing costs, shipping and so on are non-existent. Basically, ebook brings Apress more profit than printed books at this point.
My 10.000$ is for a 42U rack filled with servers, sharing a 1 gbps unmetered line in a datacenter with over 750gbps of bandwidth, in Europe.
An additional 10.000-20.000$ would bring another couple of racks in a datacenter in US (and the redundancy that comes with it).
One 1000 mbps unmetered server in Europe (NL) is about 1600 Euro a month (quad core, 4 to 8 GB of memory, SAS/SCSI raid drives, the works).. Even colocated, the price is still reasonable, about 6-8000 Euro a month.
In US, choopa.com has unmetered gigabit at 3995$ a month.
That's 330 TB or about 338.000 GB or about 110.000 downloads... Let's say 100.000 downloads and 10.000 Euro for the server(s) and bandwidth and it still costs you only 10 cents for each download.
Only you won't be able to max that out by probably more than 2-3 days. They'll cut you off saying you're flooding someone or you have viruses. The price is cheap because they figure people that want to download stuff a lot will get faster connections and you won't use your connection to download stuff.
Well, this is in US... here I have 24/4 cable in Romania and once every 2-3 weeks I download 50-60GB over 24 hours with no problems whatsoever and I pay 20$ for it..
I switched from CRT to LCD because after 8-10 years in front of the CRT display my eyes were tearing... The radiation a CRT makes can't be that good... I had a 21" CRT running at 1600x1200 and it's no match to 1920x1200 @ 24" nowadays.
It's even less... My quad core with a Radeon 4850 and 4 GB of memory won't go over 270W at full load, playing at 1920x1200 and highest settings. On idle, it's 167w... And this is with a bad power supply, a 460w with less than 75% power efficiency.
As for parent poster, I agree... Crysis and other games would most likely be rendered at maximum 720p and low to medium settings, because any better quality would just be lost on the compression and people won't notice it. 4:3 will probably be rendered at 1280x1024 and then software resized to 640x480 and encoded...
So what? Jobs were also lost when cars replaced horses and the buggies, jobs were also lost when typography machines were invented and people no longer had to duplicate by hand or place letters by hand on a form to print a page?
Maybe in a few years solar cells will be cheap enough and have performance good enough that each house will have them on their roofs so should we then ban them because jobs in power plants will be lost ?
No, I'm talking about other things besides just opening eight tabs and eight pages. That's doesn't mean anything for users.
Start using the browser... each time you access a page, the url is saved in the history, the favicon is also cached, some part of the 64-128 MB of cache is getting filled, use it as a regular person would use the browser for a few days, when logging in let the browse save the passwords and so on.
Then have 10-25 random people from the street site at the computer and tell them to go to a site that you previously visited and watch when they type the URL
* if they type without taking eyes off keyboard keys
* if they type watching only the screen
* if their attention is diverted when the drop down menu appears so they lose focus and check the URL again before typing
* maybe they use the mouse to click once on the address bar and then leave the mouse pointer an inch or so below the bar, so when they start typing they may accidentally move the mouse on the table and an entry from the drop down list gets selected and they end up with junk in the address bar because they keep typing and don't notice the address is now wrong
The idea is - how much time is wasted because the user is interrupted by the drop down list, how much time does it take for the suggestions to appear when the history and bookmarks databases have a lot of entries? This time over the course of a work day starts to gather up.
Then you have users who don't even know "Open in new tab exists", so they keep clicking on the left mouse button, thereby using only one-two tabs.
Other users (like me for example) got used to clicking the middle mouse button so all new pages are opened in new tab.
How much time is spent by the browser to create new tabs, reorder the tab list, and then load the page?
Users in the first category may wait until the page is fully loaded until they start reading it and then they click on the next page and wait again so they waste time...
On the other hand, users on the other category keep reading the first page while next pages are opened using middle mouse button, in different tabs, so when they end reading the first page they just click on the next tab and they're ready to go.
How about modern features like session restore - when a power failure occurs, you reboot the computer how much time it takes when all programs compete for resources for the browser to reopen those tabs that were previously opened?
Scientifically, it would be relatively easy to write a software that would know where all the buttons on the browser interface usually are, would know to maximize the browser windows and type addresses in the toolbar, analyze how much time is spent on various locations and so on, bookmark sites, try typing previously opened sites to see how fast the browser suggests stuff (when it's only the browser open or when there's something like an antivirus accessing the drive) and so on and so forth).
So overall for me at least it doesn't mean anything that a browser is a few ms faster to open eight tabs and a page in each tab when users don't work like this almost anytime. I don't even care about memory usage when I have 4GB installed and can very well add about 4 GB of swap file... but I care about responsiveness and the browser not making me waste time while working.
It's obvious Chrome would be faster becuase of its simplicity...
What always bothers me is that these "testers" don't test the browsers after some "normal" or "not quite so normal" use.
People don't just start a fresh install of a browser and open eight tabs, people have lots of bookmarks, passwords, saved forms in browsers and after a time, these affect the speed and performance of a browser.
A good tester should bookmark about 200 sites in various categories, save passwords for about 20-30 sites, have some forms saved, and then he should see how much latency browser has from the moment you start typing an URL in it's address bar and bringing URL's or suggestions from its separate SQLite databases that hold bookmarks and previously accessed websites history (it shouldn't matter but in reality users usually stop from typing when they see something changing on screen and check the url and suggestions and time is lost)
Also, in my case I work with various web apps that basically make me access hundreds of url's like site.com/page.php?id=[number] , so all these are saved in the history and after about a week, I basically have to clear the database because Firefox becomes too slow to load, it takes up to a second from the moment I start typing a website in the address bar and so on, I have to empty the history to make it work properly again...
I use Firefox and it's not perfect and not the fastest, but I still prefer it over Safari or Opera simply because of extensions like Firebug or Live HTTP Headers or even Screengrab, which make my life way easier.
Even easier, go to eBay and get a PCI video card for a couple of dollars. I got an ATI Rage with 8MB of memory for something like 2$ plus about 4$ shipping. It's only a few watts, which if you really freak out about power usage, you can recover by lowering the CPU voltage and the frequency to a bit lower than the normal. Well, anyways you'll make it more economic simply by replacing the power supply with a 80-85+ certified one, but it's probably more expensive than the whole computer, or the money saved in 2-3 years.
That's really no excuse.
If Germany and Poland are not so good example, take the example of Romania, that's about 2 thirds of Germany, has about 18-19 million people and probably about 7-9 million cellphone users shared between 3 big companies and 2-3 smaller ones.
Here's a list:
Orange Romania GSM coverage (old) : http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ro&net=mr 3G coverage: http://orange.ro/acoperire/index.html
Smallest plan 4 euro a month for 72 minutes in network, 25 with other networks, 0,119 euro/minute in any network inside the country
Vodafone Romania : GSM coverage : https://www.vodafone.ro/acoperire/acoperire-gsm/index.htm 3G coverage: https://www.vodafone.ro/acoperire/acoperire-gsm/index.htm
Smallest plan : 3.57 euro a month , 0.11 euro/minute within Vodafone , 0.17 euro/minute with other networks in the country
Cosmote Romania : http://www.cosmote.ro/ro/html/cosmote_romania_coverage_map_ro.html
Smallest plan : 3.57 euro a month, 200 minutes in network, 200 SMS included, 0.107 Euro/ minute within network, 0.178 Euro/minute with other networks in country, SMS costs 0.059 Euro
There are of course options or plans that have let's say 800 minutes included for something like 20 euro a month, or there's even a 160 euro a month with unlimited calls and 2000 included minutes with other networks inside the country a certain regions of the world (US, Canada and so on)...
And regarding quality, the only time I get dropped calls is during the night 31st of December. Romania is not just flat, it has hills, mountains, everything, yet they manage to cover the whole country.
That's competition for you... all three major networks cover almost all the country. And it's obvious these companies have a profit, even with these small fees and low cost plans, so there shouldn't really be a reason no to be able to replicate this in each state of US..
Only Texas and Alaska have bigger surface than Romania, but they're both flatter than Romania.
Only ten states have bigger people density than Romania (233 people / square mile) so the densitity is not really a big excuse.
In some countries like Norway, rehabilitation actually works.
Once the document has been scanned and introduced in the system, it costs almost nothing to distribute it.
You have almost fixed costs each month on people producing the documents, bandwidth, datacenter colocation, and some additional small costs on maintenance so a fee of 3 cents per page is not justified, especially if a document can get to hundreds of pages. You already run the system for years now, so you should know from statistics how many pages are read or how many documents are transferred and you should especially know how much it costs you overall so they could implement something like 50 cents / 1$ per document and still cover their yearly costs plus a very small profit.
... and they no longer have to pay a fee to On2 for each encoded video if what I hear (that they licensed some custom servers made by On2 for processing videos) is true
Kind of off topic but my Firefox has no issue with that page. Memory jumped from 248MB to about 265MB and went back to 251MB after, and as I type this it's down to 244MB.
But you are still on their records as a sex offender for 20 years and you have to report your email address and account information on social networking sites.... so it is quite an inconvenience, not to mention the problems you might have when trying to get a job.
As mentioned in http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1319889&cid=28882753 :
Sex offenders are classified by risk level:
* Level one (low risk);
* Level two (medium risk); and
* Level three (high risk).
Level 1 offenders are required to register for a minimum of twenty years, and level 2 and 3 offenders for life. Police and law enforcement have access to information on all sex offenders (levels 1, 2 and 3). However, under the law, information on level 1 (low-risk) offenders is not available on the public website. Only level 2 and 3 offenders are listed on the public website
Frequently Asked Questions http://www.criminaljustice.state.ny.us/nsor/index.htm
A Level 1 offender means that the court has determined that there is a low risk to commit another sex crime. A Level 2 offender means that the court has determined that there is a moderate risk to commit another sex crime. A Level 3 offender means that the court has determined that there is a high risk to commit another sex crime.
The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act, which took effect on April 28, 2008, requires all registered sex offenders to report to DCJS all of their internet accounts and any e-mail addresses and screen names used for the purposes of chat, instant messaging or social networking. The Act does not limit a sex offender's use of the Internet. However, if the sex offender is on probation or parole, the terms of the offender's parole or probation may limit his or her use of the Internet.