A recession is when tabletop games have a small surge because people can't afford luxuries like computers and game consoles and have to make due sharing 1 phb and dmg between 8 people.
I don't know if the tech in my house had a clue or not (from Comcast in Seattle area) when he was installing my cablecards in my TivoHD (because 1 card was defective and the other just wouldn't activate the day I tried to self install) but he said that Comcast was implementing seprable security using a technology that WAS NOT CableCard. How is that any better than integrated security? I think the seprable security requirement, if it can be satisfied with a non standard system or even one that consumers aren't allowed to buy on thier own, is a total joke.
That said the other issue I have is that CableCards are only allowed in approved "closed" devices. There needs to be a way that I'm allowed to install a CableCard tuner in whatever device that needs it, my personal computer most of all, without having to do it exactly the way that the industry wants me to. I'm not a pirate, I just want to be able to watch at some future time on the PC of my choice (I know many people only have 1 but I have 4 or 5 in the house at any one time all capable of displaying the content if allowed) or on a mobile device. Heck I'm even fine if they somehow figured out how to force me to watch the commercials as long as I could watch them when and where I wanted to. It doesn't seem like the lack of cablecard tuners in unapproved pc's is slowing the piracy of TV much so why spend so much effort to do it?
What I fail to understand is why its so horrible for MS to have its format documented as a "standard". If it sucks noone has to use it. If the MS monopoly is the reason that people are afraid of OOXML then standardization won't matter as people will use it regardless of its status.
Just because a body votes on something doesn't make it a "standard" in the more spiritual sense. To me the importance of a standard is that everyone uses it properly. De facto standards are often far stronger than de jure standards only because of the fact that they are the ones people use. If ODF is the best then people should use it and if people use it, it will win. The downside of ODF winning is that MS will likely try to embrace and extend because thats what is smart for thier business.
Who's $500 million is it? It could either be $500 million in pirate revenue at pirate street prices or it could be the imagined value to the IP owner and it makes a big difference when you try to figure out how many copies of the items were seized.
I find it interesting that the original poster took the trouble to differentiate between open source and commercial offerings as if there has to be a difference.
60W incandecent produces about 900 lumens = 15 lumens/watt
13W CFL produces about 900 lumens = 69.2 lumens/watt
2.5W LED bulb produces about 60 lumens = 24 lumens/watt
So by pure numbers the CFL wins but I think there are other things to take into consideration. The LED has highly directional light so its possible that the LED produces more lumens per sq/in in its cone of coverage so would actually be brighter in that area than the CFL which casts light every which way. This would mean that there are applications where the LED would be more efficient due to the fact that a CFL or incandecent is lighting up a far larger area than necessary. Also the LED light should last much longer than the CFL which may be a win. Add to that the fact that I don't think there are the same level of hazadrous wastes in LED's it lets you play some interesting cost/benefit games.
I think that there is no Mecury in LED's and need not be any lead the LED's are a win over CFL's in that department. The downside is that currently LED's are either far more expensive or far less bright than CFL's. I looked into it the other day and found that its $30 for a 20 lumen (compared to about 200 lumen for 60W incandecent) LED light bulb and its light was highly directional so not appropriate for standard overhead lighting.
I extend the basic "its like the phone system for computers" definition to say that instead of people talking to each other the computers talk to each other. It has always gotten the point across but I also was explaining during a period of time when most people actually used modem's connected to phone lines to attach to the internet.
I think that MS doesn't think it matters for Home to run under virtualization because they don't see the Home user even knowing what virtualization is. That said, is what is the price on Business? It should be equal or less than Home Premium given that it sort has the same number but different features (no media center, but it supports domains).
If he didn't pay vonage for fax service the reason his fax does not work is that vonage filters out anything outside of human vocal frequency ranges and fax signalling is outside that range. This is done for compression reasons to save thier bandwidth and improve vocal call quality over lower bandwidth lines. Did the dude read the manual which says right in it that faxes and modems will not work on standard vonage lines?
That said I have seen wierd things with vonage over verizn dsl such as my routes all going through dozens of hops for a route with high latency while vonage phone adapter was up and running and then nearly instantly getting low hop numbers and low latency when the vonage phone adapter got disconnected. It could have been coincidence but it was pretty reproducable over a period of a week which is why I didn't end up getting vonage.
One place where Vista is dramtically faster than XP is repainting invalidated areas of a window (areas that were covered by another app and now are visible). This is a result of the DWM and hardware compositing. Apps get called to repaint less often as a result and while this might not be a measurable speed boost in normal cases it does mean that apps which are busy doing other work will not have the normal windows crap on them while they wait for a repaint because they won't need to.
If you have less than 2gb of ram and don't use ReadyBoost I have found that Vista is heavily bottlenecked paging to the disk. Pop in a readyboost qualified usb flash drive and you will see a near instant and dramatic increase in responsiveness in almost every aspect of the OS. Does this mean that Vista memory management needs to be tweaked? Maybe.
This isn't an analog vs digital argument as there and be perfectly tactile digital control. The keyboard I'm typing on has a bit over 100 digital controls on it all of which can easily be used without site. Its really about whether controls should be hard or soft and I see it sort of both ways. You need the right number of hard buttons to get tasks done that need to be done with less attention but soft buttons work for other tasks. My PocketPC phone is a reasonable example with the exception that it really would be nice to somehow have a hard 9 key pad on there for dialing. Dialing by touch is impossible and I think it will count against the iPhone.
They etched a series of microgrooves on the surface of the headsink to act as a channel for excess thermal paste. This is supposed to make much better contact than a smooth surface.
I find it kind of funny that after all these years of proper modders polishing the hell out of thier heatsink and spreader, along comes IBM and makes them rough and it cools better:)
That said, its probably only better in the average case but less good than the ideal case due to the fact of having less contact in the microgroove areas.
I'm not going to argue the EU commisioners overall contention but am I the only one that thinks the parts of her argument included in the article are sort of strange. She argues that Microsoft is gaining marketshare due to the fact its workstations work better than other companies such as Sun do. Isn't it Suns problem that connecting its workstations to each other is harder to do? If in fact the protocols that MS is protecting are so intuitive that they don't deserve protection why hasn't thier example Sun come up with thier own set of protocols that work just as easily?
That said part of the problem is the protocols changing from version to version and update to update on the Microsoft side. I maintain that even if MS provided the ideal specifications for free that were out instantly when the product released, that the industry would still struggle to make interoperable components that were as easy to use as the microsoft components purely for the fact they would have to be hitting a moving target.
Anyways, back to my original point, I don't argue that the EU has the right to take action on MS if they feel that they are breaking the law in regards to how they handle licening of protocols for the purpose of interoperability but siting market growth due to products that work better together seems like a poor argument. Its sort of like saying (and this is a bad analogy but I'll use it anyways) that GM should be fined billions because they did not make it easy for ford engines to interoperate with thier vehicles and GM. Of course neither GM nor Ford are anywhere near a monopoly so different rules apply.
Its actually proper and recommended e-mail retention policy. Anything that is not necessary for business or possibly pending litigation should be deleted after 60 or 90 days. Business necessary e-mail should only be retained until no longer necessary. Anything pending litigation should be turned over to the appropriate legal department for retention. At least this is the policy where I work and it is aided by a managed folder system in exchange. Unfortunately I have no idea how it is set up, I just know I have mail buckets and all mail goes into the short term bucket and its up to me to move the mail to one of the long term buckets so it won't get deleted.
Windows live mail works fine in firefox so why worry? Granted its the web interface but at least live mail (hotmail is still an older interface) is a decent ajax interface. In fact, I am looking at g-mail and live mail side by side in firefox (seemed more fair) and live mail looks far less cluttered to me. Searching mail is not difficult in live mail either now that the live search engine is used to do it.
I'm not sure how I feel about a university using live mail with no university sponsered alterative. On one hand it seems wrong from the standpoint of forcing students to live with advertisements in order to do schoolwork. On the other hand live mail (with the exception of not having a pop or imap interface) has better features than any university run mail server I've ever seen. Its also got far more space and no wierd rules (ok my college liked using VAX for e-mail, it was wierd and caused lots of support issues). Finally from the standpoint of the college and the students the mail service is entirely free being completely advertiser funded. It also has the benefit that most of the students likely use hotmail at home (and live mail works sort of like it) so will understand it better. It is also less likely to infect the users machine, a fact I base on knowing how the average student I went to college with protected thier machine from malware. Yes I know that messenger displayed an ad that could infect machines with malware but that is 1 incident in 6 years that I know of and my pop mail account downloads a few infected e-mail files a day. All of them are caught by my anti-virus software but most college students probably do not have anti-virus software even if its provided for free by the school.
Or the EU could just prevent MS from doing business in thier countries. To heck with seizing there assets the loss of business is worth more. Furthermore if MS is doing as little in the way of innovative work (yes I'm stretching what the EU panel said) then it will take no time at all to have a replacement product in place.
I'm not a mod but I wish I was. This is exactly the point I want to make. If you change the default search you go somewhere else. In IE 7 this is fairly easy (choose "Find other search providers" from the drop down next to the search box) and google and a number of other search engines are available to be set as the default search engine with only a couple clicks.
You know for a fact that this is done for unprotected content? Or are you assuming the same things that are causing many misconceptions about Vista. So far as I have read in responses from the Vista team at Microsoft, only protected content should be affected by the resolution downgrade and other DRM protections/restrictions. If this is not the case then definitely call MS on it but if its not the factual case then people should be told the real story. I have never seen a case where Vista has downgraded resolution on any content I've played on it and my video pipeline does NOT support HDCP and is not certified to maintain content protection and so should be downgrading everything.
I don't think that Microsoft is the driver of the certification. They will run a set of tests on the software for a company if that company allows them and possibly pays them. I think its just as likely that Adobe ect hasn't spent the time to go through certification yet as it is that Microsoft has some secret list of people they are not going to certify in order to prevent competition.
Looking at how Adobe dealt with the move to intel processors for Mac computers I think that its highly likely that the next big revision of each of those pieces of software will be acompanied with a windows vista certification.
What DRM issues are there? If you don't like DRM don't use files with DRM and you are good to go. Only the protected content pipeline is locked down, unprotected content of all types plays without restrictions.
If your real reason for hating Vista is that it makes it more difficult to break DRM then I can't really feel for you in that as much as I hate DRM (for purchased content) myself the real solution isn't to strip it from the files that have it but instead to never use those files.
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A recession is when tabletop games have a small surge because people can't afford luxuries like computers and game consoles and have to make due sharing 1 phb and dmg between 8 people.
I don't know if the tech in my house had a clue or not (from Comcast in Seattle area) when he was installing my cablecards in my TivoHD (because 1 card was defective and the other just wouldn't activate the day I tried to self install) but he said that Comcast was implementing seprable security using a technology that WAS NOT CableCard. How is that any better than integrated security? I think the seprable security requirement, if it can be satisfied with a non standard system or even one that consumers aren't allowed to buy on thier own, is a total joke.
That said the other issue I have is that CableCards are only allowed in approved "closed" devices. There needs to be a way that I'm allowed to install a CableCard tuner in whatever device that needs it, my personal computer most of all, without having to do it exactly the way that the industry wants me to. I'm not a pirate, I just want to be able to watch at some future time on the PC of my choice (I know many people only have 1 but I have 4 or 5 in the house at any one time all capable of displaying the content if allowed) or on a mobile device. Heck I'm even fine if they somehow figured out how to force me to watch the commercials as long as I could watch them when and where I wanted to. It doesn't seem like the lack of cablecard tuners in unapproved pc's is slowing the piracy of TV much so why spend so much effort to do it?
What I fail to understand is why its so horrible for MS to have its format documented as a "standard". If it sucks noone has to use it. If the MS monopoly is the reason that people are afraid of OOXML then standardization won't matter as people will use it regardless of its status.
Just because a body votes on something doesn't make it a "standard" in the more spiritual sense. To me the importance of a standard is that everyone uses it properly. De facto standards are often far stronger than de jure standards only because of the fact that they are the ones people use. If ODF is the best then people should use it and if people use it, it will win. The downside of ODF winning is that MS will likely try to embrace and extend because thats what is smart for thier business.
Yeah, the dupes around here are getting so bad that we have a dupe inside a single post.
Who's $500 million is it? It could either be $500 million in pirate revenue at pirate street prices or it could be the imagined value to the IP owner and it makes a big difference when you try to figure out how many copies of the items were seized.
I find it interesting that the original poster took the trouble to differentiate between open source and commercial offerings as if there has to be a difference.
Correction: a 60W incandecent produces nearer to 900 lumens.
60W incandecent produces about 900 lumens = 15 lumens/watt
13W CFL produces about 900 lumens = 69.2 lumens/watt
2.5W LED bulb produces about 60 lumens = 24 lumens/watt
So by pure numbers the CFL wins but I think there are other things to take into consideration. The LED has highly directional light so its possible that the LED produces more lumens per sq/in in its cone of coverage so would actually be brighter in that area than the CFL which casts light every which way. This would mean that there are applications where the LED would be more efficient due to the fact that a CFL or incandecent is lighting up a far larger area than necessary. Also the LED light should last much longer than the CFL which may be a win. Add to that the fact that I don't think there are the same level of hazadrous wastes in LED's it lets you play some interesting cost/benefit games.
I think that there is no Mecury in LED's and need not be any lead the LED's are a win over CFL's in that department. The downside is that currently LED's are either far more expensive or far less bright than CFL's. I looked into it the other day and found that its $30 for a 20 lumen (compared to about 200 lumen for 60W incandecent) LED light bulb and its light was highly directional so not appropriate for standard overhead lighting.
I extend the basic "its like the phone system for computers" definition to say that instead of people talking to each other the computers talk to each other. It has always gotten the point across but I also was explaining during a period of time when most people actually used modem's connected to phone lines to attach to the internet.
I think that MS doesn't think it matters for Home to run under virtualization because they don't see the Home user even knowing what virtualization is. That said, is what is the price on Business? It should be equal or less than Home Premium given that it sort has the same number but different features (no media center, but it supports domains).
If he didn't pay vonage for fax service the reason his fax does not work is that vonage filters out anything outside of human vocal frequency ranges and fax signalling is outside that range. This is done for compression reasons to save thier bandwidth and improve vocal call quality over lower bandwidth lines. Did the dude read the manual which says right in it that faxes and modems will not work on standard vonage lines?
That said I have seen wierd things with vonage over verizn dsl such as my routes all going through dozens of hops for a route with high latency while vonage phone adapter was up and running and then nearly instantly getting low hop numbers and low latency when the vonage phone adapter got disconnected. It could have been coincidence but it was pretty reproducable over a period of a week which is why I didn't end up getting vonage.
One place where Vista is dramtically faster than XP is repainting invalidated areas of a window (areas that were covered by another app and now are visible). This is a result of the DWM and hardware compositing. Apps get called to repaint less often as a result and while this might not be a measurable speed boost in normal cases it does mean that apps which are busy doing other work will not have the normal windows crap on them while they wait for a repaint because they won't need to.
If you have less than 2gb of ram and don't use ReadyBoost I have found that Vista is heavily bottlenecked paging to the disk. Pop in a readyboost qualified usb flash drive and you will see a near instant and dramatic increase in responsiveness in almost every aspect of the OS. Does this mean that Vista memory management needs to be tweaked? Maybe.
This isn't an analog vs digital argument as there and be perfectly tactile digital control. The keyboard I'm typing on has a bit over 100 digital controls on it all of which can easily be used without site. Its really about whether controls should be hard or soft and I see it sort of both ways. You need the right number of hard buttons to get tasks done that need to be done with less attention but soft buttons work for other tasks. My PocketPC phone is a reasonable example with the exception that it really would be nice to somehow have a hard 9 key pad on there for dialing. Dialing by touch is impossible and I think it will count against the iPhone.
They etched a series of microgrooves on the surface of the headsink to act as a channel for excess thermal paste. This is supposed to make much better contact than a smooth surface.
I find it kind of funny that after all these years of proper modders polishing the hell out of thier heatsink and spreader, along comes IBM and makes them rough and it cools better :)
That said, its probably only better in the average case but less good than the ideal case due to the fact of having less contact in the microgroove areas.
I'm not going to argue the EU commisioners overall contention but am I the only one that thinks the parts of her argument included in the article are sort of strange. She argues that Microsoft is gaining marketshare due to the fact its workstations work better than other companies such as Sun do. Isn't it Suns problem that connecting its workstations to each other is harder to do? If in fact the protocols that MS is protecting are so intuitive that they don't deserve protection why hasn't thier example Sun come up with thier own set of protocols that work just as easily?
That said part of the problem is the protocols changing from version to version and update to update on the Microsoft side. I maintain that even if MS provided the ideal specifications for free that were out instantly when the product released, that the industry would still struggle to make interoperable components that were as easy to use as the microsoft components purely for the fact they would have to be hitting a moving target.
Anyways, back to my original point, I don't argue that the EU has the right to take action on MS if they feel that they are breaking the law in regards to how they handle licening of protocols for the purpose of interoperability but siting market growth due to products that work better together seems like a poor argument. Its sort of like saying (and this is a bad analogy but I'll use it anyways) that GM should be fined billions because they did not make it easy for ford engines to interoperate with thier vehicles and GM. Of course neither GM nor Ford are anywhere near a monopoly so different rules apply.
Its actually proper and recommended e-mail retention policy. Anything that is not necessary for business or possibly pending litigation should be deleted after 60 or 90 days. Business necessary e-mail should only be retained until no longer necessary. Anything pending litigation should be turned over to the appropriate legal department for retention. At least this is the policy where I work and it is aided by a managed folder system in exchange. Unfortunately I have no idea how it is set up, I just know I have mail buckets and all mail goes into the short term bucket and its up to me to move the mail to one of the long term buckets so it won't get deleted.
Windows live mail works fine in firefox so why worry? Granted its the web interface but at least live mail (hotmail is still an older interface) is a decent ajax interface. In fact, I am looking at g-mail and live mail side by side in firefox (seemed more fair) and live mail looks far less cluttered to me. Searching mail is not difficult in live mail either now that the live search engine is used to do it.
I'm not sure how I feel about a university using live mail with no university sponsered alterative. On one hand it seems wrong from the standpoint of forcing students to live with advertisements in order to do schoolwork. On the other hand live mail (with the exception of not having a pop or imap interface) has better features than any university run mail server I've ever seen. Its also got far more space and no wierd rules (ok my college liked using VAX for e-mail, it was wierd and caused lots of support issues). Finally from the standpoint of the college and the students the mail service is entirely free being completely advertiser funded. It also has the benefit that most of the students likely use hotmail at home (and live mail works sort of like it) so will understand it better. It is also less likely to infect the users machine, a fact I base on knowing how the average student I went to college with protected thier machine from malware. Yes I know that messenger displayed an ad that could infect machines with malware but that is 1 incident in 6 years that I know of and my pop mail account downloads a few infected e-mail files a day. All of them are caught by my anti-virus software but most college students probably do not have anti-virus software even if its provided for free by the school.
Or the EU could just prevent MS from doing business in thier countries. To heck with seizing there assets the loss of business is worth more. Furthermore if MS is doing as little in the way of innovative work (yes I'm stretching what the EU panel said) then it will take no time at all to have a replacement product in place.
I'm not a mod but I wish I was. This is exactly the point I want to make. If you change the default search you go somewhere else. In IE 7 this is fairly easy (choose "Find other search providers" from the drop down next to the search box) and google and a number of other search engines are available to be set as the default search engine with only a couple clicks.
You know for a fact that this is done for unprotected content? Or are you assuming the same things that are causing many misconceptions about Vista. So far as I have read in responses from the Vista team at Microsoft, only protected content should be affected by the resolution downgrade and other DRM protections/restrictions. If this is not the case then definitely call MS on it but if its not the factual case then people should be told the real story. I have never seen a case where Vista has downgraded resolution on any content I've played on it and my video pipeline does NOT support HDCP and is not certified to maintain content protection and so should be downgrading everything.
I don't think that Microsoft is the driver of the certification. They will run a set of tests on the software for a company if that company allows them and possibly pays them. I think its just as likely that Adobe ect hasn't spent the time to go through certification yet as it is that Microsoft has some secret list of people they are not going to certify in order to prevent competition.
Looking at how Adobe dealt with the move to intel processors for Mac computers I think that its highly likely that the next big revision of each of those pieces of software will be acompanied with a windows vista certification.
What DRM issues are there? If you don't like DRM don't use files with DRM and you are good to go. Only the protected content pipeline is locked down, unprotected content of all types plays without restrictions.
If your real reason for hating Vista is that it makes it more difficult to break DRM then I can't really feel for you in that as much as I hate DRM (for purchased content) myself the real solution isn't to strip it from the files that have it but instead to never use those files.