1.) Over time, paid firmware update will decrease the price of the new server and/or its initial support contract. Rather than paying for "lifetime updates" the initial owner gets to pay only for his/her actual usage of updates.
2.) A functional post-warranty firmware market (with a culture where paying for this service was widely accepted) would mean more vendors would support their hardware for longer.
All completely wrong.
There are many vendors today who don't charge the premium prices that HP, Cisco, Dell, etc., charge, yet support their product for free for more than 5 years. I'm not talking about something that requires a physical replacement (i.e., warranty repair/replace), but rather firmware updates, posting new knowledge base articles, etc.
As an example, we just bought a Cisco computer with 4 processors (32 cores), 1.5TB of RAM and 16 900GB SAS drives. The price from Cisco was around $120K, while buying that exact same hardware (reference motherboard from Intel, Seagate drives, Crucial RAM, LSI RAID cards, etc.) as a "white box" would cost around $40K. Since the individual components will have the exact same warranty that Cisco gives (more, in some cases, like the RAM), what, exactly does that extra $80K buy? And, how much do you think they will lower their price if they only have to produce firmware updates after the three-year warranty expires for people who pay for extended support?
Basically, the only way to get extra sales by not providing support is for these companies to slash the initial sales prices in half, and that's never going to happen. You might see a 5% drop, but knowing that you'll have to spend even more that than for the support, you'll go elsewhere.
Frankly, Microsoft has done everyone a huge disservice by supporting XP for so long, people have gotten this idea that computers should be updated forever.
Frankly, Linus has done everyone a huge disservice by supporting the Linux kernel for so long...people have gotten this idea that computers should be updated forever.
I can replace "Microsoft" and "XP" in your post with any number of computer manufacturers/developers and hardware/software that release patches for an extended period of time for free. Why did you pick Microsoft to "blame"?
I can see where HP could still provide real security fixes for free while providing patches simply to work with newer hardware, could fall under the blanket agreement.
That's really hard to do with firmware. You'd have to have multiple branches to satisfy the variety of customers. For example, if I stopped paying for support after getting the firmware update that allowed me to use 8-core CPUs, then all future "bug fix" firmware I download still need to have this feature, but not the 12-core CPU feature, which was released later.
You can see how this could grow untenable very quickly, with all the different combinations of new hardware supported.
They must use the same packing department as hp still.
And Cisco...although at least Cisco sent something physical inside the boxes.
We ordered RAM upgrades for 36 Cisco blades, for a total of 16 x 36 = 576 DIMMs. Each one came packed in an individual anti-static bag, inside a bubble-wrap bag, inside a small box, with 10 small boxes per large box, all on a couple of pallets to hold the 58 large boxes.
If you haven't paid them any money for THREE YEARS are you really their customer still?
Who says I'm not paying them money? I could have spent a lot of money buying other hardware from them. Part of the reason I'm likely buying new hardware from them is that three-to-five-year-old hardware that still generally works fine is a good sign that they make a quality product.
But, an issue could come up with that old hardware that a firmware update fixes, and the company has a choice: get me the patch or stop getting money from me for new hardware as I drop them for somebody with better customer service. Why should I keep paying money for the same hardware?
The key is, software/firmware patches are like any other digital data, in that they have essentially zero cost to the manufacturer after they are created. It's not like I'm asking them to replace an out-of-warranty hard drive for free. And, I'm perfectly fine with a company that says "we will stop writing any firmware updates for hardware X months after that hardware is last sold by us".
An example of a company that does it right is SuperMicro. I have pretty much nothing but their motherboards in my servers at home, and I can't afford bleeding edge, so I buy older hardware (but often still new in box). I have had no issues downloading firmware updates for what are now 5-year-old motherboards. One update increased the memory a motherboard could handle by a factor of four. That's a huge added value that makes me likely to keep that motherboard for even longer, and make me want them to support it even longer, and yet they did this for free. That's why I spent more money buying their hardware for later builds. And, for those of you who might want to talk smack about SuperMicro equipment, take a look at the motherboards and cases in hardware from EMC, Dell, and Penguin Computing, and you'll see that many are re-badged SuperMicro. It's no different from Dell, IBM, and Intel re-badging LSI RAID cards.
LTO5 tapes hold 1.5TB native and costs $25. Im really not clear why you'd use something ~4 times as expensive.
First, the price/TB is only about three times as much right now.
Second, a new tape drive will drop that to about twice as much, although the restore/re-write will take a while to gain that advantage.
Third, we have a fixed sized tape silo, and the investment to upgrade and increase slot capacity would be far more than spending more on the higher density tapes. Since much of what we store doesn't compress well (the data formats are already compressed), we really need as much storage per slot as possible. We're at about 4PB (native capacity) on the "used" tapes, and climbing at 25TB/day.
Now see you missed one of the cool things about the "enterprise" drives (vs LTO). Those T1k carts you purchased last year that stored 5TB, can now magically store 8.5 TB uncompressed with the latest T1kD tape drive.
I forgot about that, despite the fact that we have 8 of the -D drives on order right now.
Maybe you don't use them as much as Backblaze.
Just sitting there spinning, with their fluid bearings and pretty much no friction, they'll last forever.
Constantly moving the head and writing data puts extra stress on the drive.
Backblaze drives are basically just sitting there spinning, at least after the drive is filled up.
I write a lot more than 2TB to each of my 2TB drives over their lifetime, while a Backblaze usage model would have me only writing 2TB.
Install that drive in a server in an online backup company and see how long it lasts.
Probably longer, since once the drive is filled with data, it basically just sits there spinning. Sure, there might be a patrol read of the disk every month or so, but no real work.
I expect that almost all my drives in server environments would be running fine at 8-10 years, but most get replaced after about 6 simply because bigger drives are so much cheaper at that point.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the easiest math problem of all time!
Without domain knowledge, you won't get within an order of magnitude of the actual number of available card numbers.
For example, the first 6 digits of the card number are the "issuer identification number" (IIN), and the last digit is a check digit. So, not every arbitrary sequence of 16 digits can be used as a credit card number, and even fewer are possible because of the assigned IINs.
LTO6 is still pretty small at over 2TB per tape. No damn idea why Facebook wants to "stripe" that same dataset across 20+BDs.
T10000 tapes are the same size and store 5TB uncompressed, and cost no more than $300/each. That's about $0.06/GB, with Blu-Ray no less than $0.10/GB.
For storing less than 100TB, then hard drives plus infrastructure (drive bays, controllers, etc.) win on price/performance, and Blu-Ray or tape without auto-changer capabilities isn't far behind, while either with auto-changer is far more expensive. For storing thousands of terabytes, you're definitely going to need an auto-changer, so tape wins hands down.
Despite the fact that this is a tablet with known hardware and limited upgrade capabilities (basically only USB devices...nothing PCIe), the Windows 8 install includes every driver and every feature of Windows 8, ready and waiting in case you need it.
So, even though you probably don't want to run IIS, manage an Active Directory domain, or run an NFS server on your tablet, you're still devoting disk space to those "just waiting" features.
I've only thrown.mkv files at Plex, since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it).
It's because MKV isn't proprietary, is in active development, and was designed from the ground up to be able to contain completely arbitrary data, so even an "unsupported" format can be stored inside it as just a binary blob.
Add in the fact that it has direct support for nearly every codec in use today, plus the tools that can understand those formats enough to extract every bit of metadata along with the content, and you have the only reasonable container for movies.
XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.
I have a different version of the Netgear NeoTV (the NTV550), and also have XBMC, and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The NeoTV takes far less time to index my media collection, can play back Blu-Ray disk images including displaying menus, uses almost no power, is tiny, cost far less than any PC ($99), and generally has a better user experience, since the remote wasn't an add-on option.
XBMC has better display and search of metadata, can stream from more online sources, can handle more media items without a need to restart every month or so, and is more configurable (which is also a minus, as you can spend days just tweaking).
Other than that, both essentially support the same audio and video formats (although it wasn't until the latest version of XBMC that you could decode lossless commercial audio formats), the same ways to get to your local media (CIFS, NFS, and DLNA), and have the same quality of output. XBMC has a small advantage because it is running on a PC in that I can easily put a decent amount of content local to the player, while the NeoTV has no internal drives...but does support eSATA and USB.
Even from Blu-Ray, HD content is at most 50Mbps. Windows in any version (or any modern OS) has no issue delivering that speed from the disk to the network hardware.
At that point, it's entirely a hardware issue (cable quality, WiFi speed, etc.). And, for real-world bit rates of less than 10Mbps, you can use some pretty bad hardware and still have no issues.
Maybe NFS, but uPNP/DLNA is designed for the task.
DLNA is perhaps the worst method of delivery, as it's entirely dependent on the client and server software being able to negotiate the right format to use for the audio and video. Even with success at that point, the negotiation of the container to allow subtitles, chapter marks (including names), alternate audio, overlay video, etc., is where DLNA completely sucks.
Ubuntu numbering is a decent way to do it, but names only work in conjunction with number, like saying "Ubuntu 13.10" followed by "Saucy Salamander." When people say things like "Oh, that's not supported in Gutsy Gibbon, the feature was added in Natty Narwhal." I want to whack them with a whacking stick.
Starting with 5.10 (Breezy Badger), it's fairly easy to tell the version ordering from the names, as they are in alphabetical order.
How do you know your car doesn't have a transmitter built in?
Because of issues I had with my radio/nav system, I have a pretty good understanding of how all pieces go together (thanks to a very helpful service tech), where the antenna connects, and how you can't get any significant signal (cell, GPS, etc.) in or out of the cage that holds the head unit. That means an external antenna is required, and there just isn't one.
If this was $2000, or even $1000 I'd agree with you, but at $500 many of us can easily afford it and get plenty of use out of it
I have a very reasonable PC at work (Core2Quad with 8GB of RAM and SSD drive and a pair of 24" 1920x1200 monitors), but I couldn't use one of these 4K monitors even if it was free, since the built-in Radeon HD 2400 Pro won't support a resolution that high. My home desktop has an HD 4850, which does just fine at 1920x1200 and can play games that aren't bleeding edge, but it can't drive one of these monitors, either.
Unless you are doing serious graphics work, it's really unlikely that a work PC will have the graphics card to drive a 4K monitor, and if you have a small-form-factor (SFF) box, you likely won't be able to add a graphics card that will drive the monitor. And an SFF enclosure doesn't have to mean a crap system...you can fit the latest Ivy Bridge with 16GB of RAM and an SSD in a very small package.
I understand why people would have a GPS in their car, and why a recording of their actions might be stored on the car (although even more than a short history should be easily erased), but why doesn't this information need to be transmitted back to the car company at all?
Unless their newest cars have changed radically (I have a 2011 Ford), nothing is transmitted back, because there is no transmitter built in to the car. You can have your cell phone connected via bluetooth, but that doesn't give the car access to the data network (although it does have access to make phone calls, obviously).
The GPS data may be stored, and it might be recoverable in some way, but if you don't take your car into a Ford dealer and don't send a "vehicle health report", I don't see any way that Ford can get the data.
Wow, you sure are mad aren't you? Why would you get so angry over this subject..
I get upset when anybody posts nonsense about any subject. From your statement about "if they have their way" I suspect you've the one who is angry at publishers of some content (books, movies, music, etc.) and haven't truly investigated eBooks and readers, but are merely relying on the one or two exceptional cases that made the news. If you had done your homework to look past those, you wouldn't be making silly claims in the face of open eBook formats and open-source readers.
I'll just keep enjoying my lovely old paper books, and it's all good.
Until I can get every book I want as an eBook, I'll keep the paper versions, which means I don't get to reclaim a couple of rooms in my house as soon as I expected.
Quotes around words doesn't guarantee you get that exact string. For example "LGA 2011" and "LGA2011" sometimes return results with the other version as the only one on the page. I think it's a "synonym" for Google, so they return both. Granted, with quotes, you get the version you type much more often than the other.
I hadn't known about "Verbatim", but it's a still a pain to have to change the results after you see them. It would be nice to have something I could type in the search box. I might be able to add "&tbs=li:1" (which enables "verbatim") to my default Firefox Google search, though.
The real noise is the link spam crap. When I search for stuff I get pages with my search terms but nothing else but ads or nothing related. Or worse I get unrelated pages without my search terms at all.
It used to be you could require that results contain a term by using +"term", but it doesn't work any more.
Basically, Google is now being more "helpful" in returning results that seem to match, but don't really.
For one thing win 7 has a sane memory manager, like XP XP X64 will start pimpslapping swap even with plenty of memory left while Win 7 will try to avoid swap and will use unneeded memory for caching to help speed up response.
I've never seen this, but then with 12GB of RAM, I don't often get close to using that much for apps (cache, etc., of course). Maybe with less memory or a much larger workload than I have (which includes VMware Workstation running a couple of local VMs and displaying 4-5 remote VM consoles, audio and video editing and encodling, and non-bleeding edge games).
There is the increased security of low rights mode browsing and running everything under user instead of admin
If you don't use IE (which I haven't for years), and you constantly have to run full admin tasks, you don't get any advantage from either of these.
, breadcrumbs and jumplists make it trivial to get back to what you were doing previously,
Breadcrumbs are only a fraction of a second faster than just clicking "back" a few times or editing the path manually. Also, you lose the "up" button, which is the navigation I use more than "back to the last place". Jumplists would be great if you could edit and create your own without arcane knowledge of the filesystem. There are so many apps where the jumplist items are insanely stupid, like VMware Workstation, with the only item being "Create a new virtual machine". Outlook (a Microsoft app) doesn't have any jumplist, where things like "new eMail" would be insanely useful.
I have Win7 at work, and nothing is pinned to the taskbar, because I rarely have apps that need only one instance (which is the default if you just click the pinned app). Pinning to the start menu, the old "quick launch", and "Classic Start Menu" with custom shortcuts to give me back a nested, organized structure do what I need. I do like the "search" on the new start menu, though. And, don't get me started on the uselessness of "Libraries". I want to know where all my files are stored...I don't want the GUI shell to hide that info from me.
The actual OS of Windows 7 really doesn't offer a lot more than XP, although it does have some nice things that keep you from having to download something to do the job, like real-time TRIM support for SSDs (in XP, a scheduled job using the manufacturer's "toolbox" does good enough for real-world use), built-in UDF 2.5 support, built-in CD burning (although ImgBurn is still much better), etc. Notice that most of what both you and I list are user-space items that can be added to XP.
As for negatives, some of the extra security (like TrustedInstaller) makes for a pain in the butt if you want to customize some things (like standard MMC layouts). And, although it is easy to move an individual user's profile directory from C:\Users, moving all user data that can get large (C:\Users, C:\ProgramData) to another disk isn't nearly as easy as in XP. The tools to do the move in Win7 assume you are deploying many installs, so the task is much harder if you are just doing one machine.
Next, we need a time machine to go 10 years into the future. I'm being nice because I have books much older than that. In 10 year will your e-reader still work? Probably not.
Who cares? My eBooks are all in EPUB format, and if for some bizarre reason no "eBook reader device" in 10 years supports this open format, the actual text of the book is nothing more than HTML and CSS.
If you seriously think I won't be able to find a device that will render HTML 10 years from now, you're paranoid beyond belief.
Meanwhile there will always be a market for printed books, which I will continue to read and enjoy for decades to come, free of any censorship, legal issues, anyone taking them away from me, breakdowns, battery issues, or anything else that comes with e-readers.
Again, EPUB is completely safe from being "taken away", and hardware issues really don't matter when you have a format that can be read on virtually any device. As for "censorship", read about how you can no longer get the original version of this book in a physical book, yet my eBook version has the deleted text added back, because I did it myself. Sure, you might be able to hunt down a first edition and pay big money for it, but I'd rather spend far less money and a few minutes of my time to get the same result.
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1.) Over time, paid firmware update will decrease the price of the new server and/or its initial support contract. Rather than paying for "lifetime updates" the initial owner gets to pay only for his/her actual usage of updates.
2.) A functional post-warranty firmware market (with a culture where paying for this service was widely accepted) would mean more vendors would support their hardware for longer.
All completely wrong.
There are many vendors today who don't charge the premium prices that HP, Cisco, Dell, etc., charge, yet support their product for free for more than 5 years. I'm not talking about something that requires a physical replacement (i.e., warranty repair/replace), but rather firmware updates, posting new knowledge base articles, etc.
As an example, we just bought a Cisco computer with 4 processors (32 cores), 1.5TB of RAM and 16 900GB SAS drives. The price from Cisco was around $120K, while buying that exact same hardware (reference motherboard from Intel, Seagate drives, Crucial RAM, LSI RAID cards, etc.) as a "white box" would cost around $40K. Since the individual components will have the exact same warranty that Cisco gives (more, in some cases, like the RAM), what, exactly does that extra $80K buy? And, how much do you think they will lower their price if they only have to produce firmware updates after the three-year warranty expires for people who pay for extended support?
Basically, the only way to get extra sales by not providing support is for these companies to slash the initial sales prices in half, and that's never going to happen. You might see a 5% drop, but knowing that you'll have to spend even more that than for the support, you'll go elsewhere.
Frankly, Microsoft has done everyone a huge disservice by supporting XP for so long, people have gotten this idea that computers should be updated forever.
Frankly, Linus has done everyone a huge disservice by supporting the Linux kernel for so long...people have gotten this idea that computers should be updated forever.
I can replace "Microsoft" and "XP" in your post with any number of computer manufacturers/developers and hardware/software that release patches for an extended period of time for free. Why did you pick Microsoft to "blame"?
I can see where HP could still provide real security fixes for free while providing patches simply to work with newer hardware, could fall under the blanket agreement.
That's really hard to do with firmware. You'd have to have multiple branches to satisfy the variety of customers. For example, if I stopped paying for support after getting the firmware update that allowed me to use 8-core CPUs, then all future "bug fix" firmware I download still need to have this feature, but not the 12-core CPU feature, which was released later.
You can see how this could grow untenable very quickly, with all the different combinations of new hardware supported.
They must use the same packing department as hp still.
And Cisco...although at least Cisco sent something physical inside the boxes.
We ordered RAM upgrades for 36 Cisco blades, for a total of 16 x 36 = 576 DIMMs. Each one came packed in an individual anti-static bag, inside a bubble-wrap bag, inside a small box, with 10 small boxes per large box, all on a couple of pallets to hold the 58 large boxes.
If you haven't paid them any money for THREE YEARS are you really their customer still?
Who says I'm not paying them money? I could have spent a lot of money buying other hardware from them. Part of the reason I'm likely buying new hardware from them is that three-to-five-year-old hardware that still generally works fine is a good sign that they make a quality product.
But, an issue could come up with that old hardware that a firmware update fixes, and the company has a choice: get me the patch or stop getting money from me for new hardware as I drop them for somebody with better customer service. Why should I keep paying money for the same hardware?
The key is, software/firmware patches are like any other digital data, in that they have essentially zero cost to the manufacturer after they are created. It's not like I'm asking them to replace an out-of-warranty hard drive for free. And, I'm perfectly fine with a company that says "we will stop writing any firmware updates for hardware X months after that hardware is last sold by us".
An example of a company that does it right is SuperMicro. I have pretty much nothing but their motherboards in my servers at home, and I can't afford bleeding edge, so I buy older hardware (but often still new in box). I have had no issues downloading firmware updates for what are now 5-year-old motherboards. One update increased the memory a motherboard could handle by a factor of four. That's a huge added value that makes me likely to keep that motherboard for even longer, and make me want them to support it even longer, and yet they did this for free. That's why I spent more money buying their hardware for later builds. And, for those of you who might want to talk smack about SuperMicro equipment, take a look at the motherboards and cases in hardware from EMC, Dell, and Penguin Computing, and you'll see that many are re-badged SuperMicro. It's no different from Dell, IBM, and Intel re-badging LSI RAID cards.
LTO5 tapes hold 1.5TB native and costs $25. Im really not clear why you'd use something ~4 times as expensive.
First, the price/TB is only about three times as much right now.
Second, a new tape drive will drop that to about twice as much, although the restore/re-write will take a while to gain that advantage.
Third, we have a fixed sized tape silo, and the investment to upgrade and increase slot capacity would be far more than spending more on the higher density tapes. Since much of what we store doesn't compress well (the data formats are already compressed), we really need as much storage per slot as possible. We're at about 4PB (native capacity) on the "used" tapes, and climbing at 25TB/day.
Now see you missed one of the cool things about the "enterprise" drives (vs LTO). Those T1k carts you purchased last year that stored 5TB, can now magically store 8.5 TB uncompressed with the latest T1kD tape drive.
I forgot about that, despite the fact that we have 8 of the -D drives on order right now.
Maybe you don't use them as much as Backblaze. Just sitting there spinning, with their fluid bearings and pretty much no friction, they'll last forever. Constantly moving the head and writing data puts extra stress on the drive.
Backblaze drives are basically just sitting there spinning, at least after the drive is filled up.
I write a lot more than 2TB to each of my 2TB drives over their lifetime, while a Backblaze usage model would have me only writing 2TB.
Install that drive in a server in an online backup company and see how long it lasts.
Probably longer, since once the drive is filled with data, it basically just sits there spinning. Sure, there might be a patrol read of the disk every month or so, but no real work.
I expect that almost all my drives in server environments would be running fine at 8-10 years, but most get replaced after about 6 simply because bigger drives are so much cheaper at that point.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the easiest math problem of all time!
Without domain knowledge, you won't get within an order of magnitude of the actual number of available card numbers.
For example, the first 6 digits of the card number are the "issuer identification number" (IIN), and the last digit is a check digit. So, not every arbitrary sequence of 16 digits can be used as a credit card number, and even fewer are possible because of the assigned IINs.
LTO6 is still pretty small at over 2TB per tape. No damn idea why Facebook wants to "stripe" that same dataset across 20+BDs.
T10000 tapes are the same size and store 5TB uncompressed, and cost no more than $300/each. That's about $0.06/GB, with Blu-Ray no less than $0.10/GB.
For storing less than 100TB, then hard drives plus infrastructure (drive bays, controllers, etc.) win on price/performance, and Blu-Ray or tape without auto-changer capabilities isn't far behind, while either with auto-changer is far more expensive. For storing thousands of terabytes, you're definitely going to need an auto-changer, so tape wins hands down.
Despite the fact that this is a tablet with known hardware and limited upgrade capabilities (basically only USB devices...nothing PCIe), the Windows 8 install includes every driver and every feature of Windows 8, ready and waiting in case you need it.
So, even though you probably don't want to run IIS, manage an Active Directory domain, or run an NFS server on your tablet, you're still devoting disk space to those "just waiting" features.
I've only thrown .mkv files at Plex, since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it).
It's because MKV isn't proprietary, is in active development, and was designed from the ground up to be able to contain completely arbitrary data, so even an "unsupported" format can be stored inside it as just a binary blob.
Add in the fact that it has direct support for nearly every codec in use today, plus the tools that can understand those formats enough to extract every bit of metadata along with the content, and you have the only reasonable container for movies.
XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.
I have a different version of the Netgear NeoTV (the NTV550), and also have XBMC, and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The NeoTV takes far less time to index my media collection, can play back Blu-Ray disk images including displaying menus, uses almost no power, is tiny, cost far less than any PC ($99), and generally has a better user experience, since the remote wasn't an add-on option.
XBMC has better display and search of metadata, can stream from more online sources, can handle more media items without a need to restart every month or so, and is more configurable (which is also a minus, as you can spend days just tweaking).
Other than that, both essentially support the same audio and video formats (although it wasn't until the latest version of XBMC that you could decode lossless commercial audio formats), the same ways to get to your local media (CIFS, NFS, and DLNA), and have the same quality of output. XBMC has a small advantage because it is running on a PC in that I can easily put a decent amount of content local to the player, while the NeoTV has no internal drives...but does support eSATA and USB.
Even from Blu-Ray, HD content is at most 50Mbps. Windows in any version (or any modern OS) has no issue delivering that speed from the disk to the network hardware.
At that point, it's entirely a hardware issue (cable quality, WiFi speed, etc.). And, for real-world bit rates of less than 10Mbps, you can use some pretty bad hardware and still have no issues.
Maybe NFS, but uPNP/DLNA is designed for the task.
DLNA is perhaps the worst method of delivery, as it's entirely dependent on the client and server software being able to negotiate the right format to use for the audio and video. Even with success at that point, the negotiation of the container to allow subtitles, chapter marks (including names), alternate audio, overlay video, etc., is where DLNA completely sucks.
All java apps that I've been used for years (IDE's, various clients) have a native look-and-feel, you can't tell it's not native.
Yes, I can.
Pretty much every Java app uses non-native File Open/Save dialog boxes, even when the rest of the app does look correct.
Ubuntu numbering is a decent way to do it, but names only work in conjunction with number, like saying "Ubuntu 13.10" followed by "Saucy Salamander." When people say things like "Oh, that's not supported in Gutsy Gibbon, the feature was added in Natty Narwhal." I want to whack them with a whacking stick.
Starting with 5.10 (Breezy Badger), it's fairly easy to tell the version ordering from the names, as they are in alphabetical order.
How do you know your car doesn't have a transmitter built in?
Because of issues I had with my radio/nav system, I have a pretty good understanding of how all pieces go together (thanks to a very helpful service tech), where the antenna connects, and how you can't get any significant signal (cell, GPS, etc.) in or out of the cage that holds the head unit. That means an external antenna is required, and there just isn't one.
If this was $2000, or even $1000 I'd agree with you, but at $500 many of us can easily afford it and get plenty of use out of it
I have a very reasonable PC at work (Core2Quad with 8GB of RAM and SSD drive and a pair of 24" 1920x1200 monitors), but I couldn't use one of these 4K monitors even if it was free, since the built-in Radeon HD 2400 Pro won't support a resolution that high. My home desktop has an HD 4850, which does just fine at 1920x1200 and can play games that aren't bleeding edge, but it can't drive one of these monitors, either.
Unless you are doing serious graphics work, it's really unlikely that a work PC will have the graphics card to drive a 4K monitor, and if you have a small-form-factor (SFF) box, you likely won't be able to add a graphics card that will drive the monitor. And an SFF enclosure doesn't have to mean a crap system...you can fit the latest Ivy Bridge with 16GB of RAM and an SSD in a very small package.
I understand why people would have a GPS in their car, and why a recording of their actions might be stored on the car (although even more than a short history should be easily erased), but why doesn't this information need to be transmitted back to the car company at all?
Unless their newest cars have changed radically (I have a 2011 Ford), nothing is transmitted back, because there is no transmitter built in to the car. You can have your cell phone connected via bluetooth, but that doesn't give the car access to the data network (although it does have access to make phone calls, obviously).
The GPS data may be stored, and it might be recoverable in some way, but if you don't take your car into a Ford dealer and don't send a "vehicle health report", I don't see any way that Ford can get the data.
Wow, you sure are mad aren't you? Why would you get so angry over this subject..
I get upset when anybody posts nonsense about any subject. From your statement about "if they have their way" I suspect you've the one who is angry at publishers of some content (books, movies, music, etc.) and haven't truly investigated eBooks and readers, but are merely relying on the one or two exceptional cases that made the news. If you had done your homework to look past those, you wouldn't be making silly claims in the face of open eBook formats and open-source readers.
I'll just keep enjoying my lovely old paper books, and it's all good.
Until I can get every book I want as an eBook, I'll keep the paper versions, which means I don't get to reclaim a couple of rooms in my house as soon as I expected.
Quotes around words doesn't guarantee you get that exact string. For example "LGA 2011" and "LGA2011" sometimes return results with the other version as the only one on the page. I think it's a "synonym" for Google, so they return both. Granted, with quotes, you get the version you type much more often than the other.
I hadn't known about "Verbatim", but it's a still a pain to have to change the results after you see them. It would be nice to have something I could type in the search box. I might be able to add "&tbs=li:1" (which enables "verbatim") to my default Firefox Google search, though.
The real noise is the link spam crap. When I search for stuff I get pages with my search terms but nothing else but ads or nothing related. Or worse I get unrelated pages without my search terms at all.
It used to be you could require that results contain a term by using +"term", but it doesn't work any more.
Basically, Google is now being more "helpful" in returning results that seem to match, but don't really.
For one thing win 7 has a sane memory manager, like XP XP X64 will start pimpslapping swap even with plenty of memory left while Win 7 will try to avoid swap and will use unneeded memory for caching to help speed up response.
I've never seen this, but then with 12GB of RAM, I don't often get close to using that much for apps (cache, etc., of course). Maybe with less memory or a much larger workload than I have (which includes VMware Workstation running a couple of local VMs and displaying 4-5 remote VM consoles, audio and video editing and encodling, and non-bleeding edge games).
There is the increased security of low rights mode browsing and running everything under user instead of admin
If you don't use IE (which I haven't for years), and you constantly have to run full admin tasks, you don't get any advantage from either of these.
, breadcrumbs and jumplists make it trivial to get back to what you were doing previously,
Breadcrumbs are only a fraction of a second faster than just clicking "back" a few times or editing the path manually. Also, you lose the "up" button, which is the navigation I use more than "back to the last place". Jumplists would be great if you could edit and create your own without arcane knowledge of the filesystem. There are so many apps where the jumplist items are insanely stupid, like VMware Workstation, with the only item being "Create a new virtual machine". Outlook (a Microsoft app) doesn't have any jumplist, where things like "new eMail" would be insanely useful.
I have Win7 at work, and nothing is pinned to the taskbar, because I rarely have apps that need only one instance (which is the default if you just click the pinned app). Pinning to the start menu, the old "quick launch", and "Classic Start Menu" with custom shortcuts to give me back a nested, organized structure do what I need. I do like the "search" on the new start menu, though. And, don't get me started on the uselessness of "Libraries". I want to know where all my files are stored...I don't want the GUI shell to hide that info from me.
The actual OS of Windows 7 really doesn't offer a lot more than XP, although it does have some nice things that keep you from having to download something to do the job, like real-time TRIM support for SSDs (in XP, a scheduled job using the manufacturer's "toolbox" does good enough for real-world use), built-in UDF 2.5 support, built-in CD burning (although ImgBurn is still much better), etc. Notice that most of what both you and I list are user-space items that can be added to XP.
As for negatives, some of the extra security (like TrustedInstaller) makes for a pain in the butt if you want to customize some things (like standard MMC layouts). And, although it is easy to move an individual user's profile directory from C:\Users, moving all user data that can get large (C:\Users, C:\ProgramData) to another disk isn't nearly as easy as in XP. The tools to do the move in Win7 assume you are deploying many installs, so the task is much harder if you are just doing one machine.
Next, we need a time machine to go 10 years into the future. I'm being nice because I have books much older than that. In 10 year will your e-reader still work? Probably not.
Who cares? My eBooks are all in EPUB format, and if for some bizarre reason no "eBook reader device" in 10 years supports this open format, the actual text of the book is nothing more than HTML and CSS.
If you seriously think I won't be able to find a device that will render HTML 10 years from now, you're paranoid beyond belief.
Meanwhile there will always be a market for printed books, which I will continue to read and enjoy for decades to come, free of any censorship, legal issues, anyone taking them away from me, breakdowns, battery issues, or anything else that comes with e-readers.
Again, EPUB is completely safe from being "taken away", and hardware issues really don't matter when you have a format that can be read on virtually any device. As for "censorship", read about how you can no longer get the original version of this book in a physical book, yet my eBook version has the deleted text added back, because I did it myself. Sure, you might be able to hunt down a first edition and pay big money for it, but I'd rather spend far less money and a few minutes of my time to get the same result.