So how do I control an electronic device over USB via purely analog signals -- i.e. without requiring the connecting component to have a USB host controller and software? I don't think the manufacturer of $20 boombox with a dock connector is going to want to spend the money on the necessary hardware/software.
Why would you need the boom box to directly control the device? The touch screen is right there in front of you. It has to be, as the $20 boom box doesn't have a display.
There is no real use case where you need external control of the device holding your music and also need to use the device for display. Once you have an external display, you've spent enough that USB host mode isn't much of an extra expense.
Some of us like to bypass the lowest-bidder digital amplifier circuit inside the iPhone and use an amplifier that's worth a damn.
Using USB would also allow you to bypass the lowest-bidder D/A converter inside the iDevice.
The only reason to use analog out is when you are plugging the iDevice into something that uses the iDevice screen for display but has buttons to control the playback. This means you are either using a boom-box-like host (which means audio quality doesn't matter), or you've paid extra money for an Apple docking port on a host that can play back with some quality. This would make you doubly stupid, as you would have spent the extra money and still are using the crappy D/A converter in the iDevice.
Personally, anything that specifically advertises an iDevice dock (car, home stereo equpiment, etc.) goes into my "do not buy" category, as I would rather have the money spent on USB so that any device would work better. Since the vast majority of devices are not made by Apple, wasting money targeting one specific device vendor shows me that price/performance is not a feature of anything with a Apple proprietary connector.
it's just that most people associate RPGs with EverQuest and WoW, or Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, rather than the original Choose Your Own Adventure style activity.
Wouldn't the best description now be something on the order of "it's like World of Warcraft, but without a computer, so the players use their imaginations to 'see' what is happening"?
Or, "it's kind of like 'Farmville' but instead of pretending to be a farmer, each player pretends to be a heroic knight/space explorer/hitman/soldier/whatever".
And while people won't be shutting down every background process to play a game, they don't tend to run anything heavy while gaming.
I was quite interested in TFA's data on performance while transcoding video, as I do that quite often myself. Their data mirrors my own anecdotal experiences...a low-priority video encode won't hurt much if you have a decent number of cores.
And all the regular stuff (web browser with a zillion tabs loaded, email client, IM client, torrent client,...) is pretty negligible CPU-wise.
One of the things that does kill performance for me is moderately heavy background disk activity. Download-speed activity isn't a big deal, but a few GB of robocopy across the LAN will bring a lot of games to a halt for a second or two.
Then, after I had succeeded in hiring a good lawyer, and maybe a bodyguard, depending on who I thought was after me... start posting whatever it was I saw to every communal blog and forum I could think of, then start spamming newspapers with it, too.
This is the plot hole in every one of these "hunted by the corrupt government" stories.
If you aren't the "only one that knows", you are much safer. If millions of people know or suspect, rational bad guys won't compound the original crime by killing you...they would instead spend all their time coming up with ways to show that although what you saw really happened, it wasn't them that did it. You still might get killed just for spite, but at least there's a chance that somebody would answer for the crimes.
Consider the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 2012 compared to the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 1985.
If by "depth" you mean "pretty pictures", then, yes, the 2012 game has more. If, on the other hand, you mean "broad non-linear story, great replay value, and 100 or so hours for first-time play", then maybe the 2012 game beats the 1985 game, but try comparing to the 1990-1995 era, and the 2012 games pale in comparison.
Seriously, try something playing something like "Darklands" (1995, available from GOG) with no reference to any walkthough/item database/etc. on the Internet and see how long it takes you to completely "finish" just the main quest. Then, try and complete pretty much every type of side quest, too. The sad part is that although I loved that game, it's pretty bad compared to many that were released in the next 5 years or so, since many of the side-quests are randomly generated and generic. The number of "all time great" games that come from before 2001 is pretty large considering how bad the graphics are at times. Take this list from just last year, and you can see that single-player games from the last century are well-represented.
Since about 2003, though, pretty pictures and multiplayer became more of a focus for developers, and only games that break through beyond those features are considered as "deep".
Even if they put all the day-1 content on the disc and delay the certification and release by a month, you'd still have idle developers during cert/pressing/distribution.
Based on the number of bugs we are seeing in "certified" games, there should never be idle developers.
That "down" time could be used for more rigorous testing like finding and fixing of bugs not caught by the "certification" process. I'm playing Fallout 2 for the first time right now, and the nearly 500 extra bug fixes from the "unofficial" patch makes the game much more playable. Add in the nearly 300 bugs fixed before this by official patches, plus the fact that about 30 or so of these bugs were of the "game crashed, hope you saved" type and I really wonder what the developers and testers were doing before the game was actually released.
Yes, I know that games are big and complicated, but the reality is that they are made up of many small parts, and it's pretty easy to make sure each of those parts works as intended. The problem is that it costs money to do that testing, and game developers have long ago crossed into the "prettier pictures, bigger name voice talent" realm at the expense of game play and reliability.
The D/A converter derives the clock from the S/PDIF interface, which requires PLL filtering for a stable clock.
Note that even though this problem is completely insignificant anyway, it doesn't exist at all with any packet-based, error-corrected audio like Dolby Digital.
So, if you think jitter is truly an issue, the solution is to have a sound card that can encode to Dolby Digital on the fly (Dolby Digital Live).
Or ever, based on the hardware they are throwing at it. Verizon has been pretty clear that they won't ever oversubscribe FiOS, at least not on the neighborhood level.
They could have rolled out the "Quantum" much earlier with no actual issues, but in each neighborhood they waited until every piece of hardware could handle 100% bandwidth at 100% uptake. What this means is that right now, in my neighborhood, every home could get 300/65 Mbps FiOS with no contention, ever. In some parts of the country, the hardware is better or worse, so those places have different max speed plans available.
So, if only 50% of my neighborhood purchases FiOS, and the average speed they buy is 50Mbps, then only 8% of the bandwidth for the neighborhood is actually being used. This allows another neighborhood to use more than average and still keep the overall Verizon network at less than 100% capacity. By the time there is enough uptake, Verizon will be able to upgrade their backbones to handle the aggregate.
The only thing that bothers me is that instead of doing this with the funds they got in the 90s, Verizon is building the network with money they get now from subscribers. Since FiOS is far faster than any other ISP where it is available, there is enough uptake to allow buildout of the next area. Also, their prices are not going down as they expected they would (and did for a while), because other ISPs are raising theirs, and FiOS still wins the price/performance battle.
The other thing to remember is that FiOS has symmetric speed available, and the only reason Verizon doesn't sell it that way at very high speeds is because of peering agreement costs. So, it's possible to saturate your personal upstream FiOS without ever even coming close to bothering anybody else's performance, even if FiOS ever becomes oversubscribed.
So now we got you and all your neighbours using the 1Gbps at roughly the same time.
That's where you miss the reality of FiOS...there is something like 50Gbps available per neighborhood. Even before "Quantum", each neighborhood had more than 3Gbps available.
By the way, my #5 is completely at odds with your idea. The ones I've been to have had so much wasted floor (and vertical) space they coul easily carry all the products they carry and many more. They're going to *lose* my sale if they show me a 55" Samsung and I say "I like this one, but do you have the smaller model and they say "no, sorry, we only carry the best in class."
Overall, more efficient use of the space they have is the obvious solution. What I meant was that they should only have the 3 "best" 55" TVs, the 3 "best" 50", etc., where "best" is by some criteria that works for them. In that case, they should have what you want.
I had seen it from about 5.x all the way up to 13.x, but updated a few days ago and I'm still at less than 500MB used total, with no change in browsing habits or addons.
BTW verizon has never throttled my torrent download. Of course I'm only using 700kbit/s so maybe that's why.
My average speed over the last year was 1.1/6.8 Mbps (down/up with Verizon FiOS). Verizon doesn't need to throttle, because they don't oversubscribe FiOS, and DSL is self-limiting (because of the distance from the DSLAM).
I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible unless you encrypt the connection, and even then it's still very slow.
It's possible that your "legit" torrents never leave your ISPs network. It's usually only at boundaries that they throttle. So, check the location of the peers on the torrents and see which ones are fast and which are slow.
It doesn't matter whether you are on FIOS or on DSL or on Cable.. the bottleneck is just in different points along the ISP's chain depending on the technology.
Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed. Every user could use 100% of their bandwidth at the same time and it would work to the edge of the Verizon network. The tricky issue would be finding sources that could provide that much data into the Verizon network.
Yes, I know that there is still a "bottleneck" in my example, but you can't blame your ISP for things out of their control. Within their own network, Verizon gives FiOS users 100% of bandwidth, and it's not their fault if other ISPs can't feed the Verizon network fast enough to keep up.
Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time.
This fallacy is exactly the thinking that ISPs in the US encourage. Actual costs for bandwidth are dropping, but prices are no longer dropping. Instead, we are seeing price jumps and ads for faster and faster "up to" rates that seldom (with the exception of Verizon FiOS) are truly available 24/7. Even Verizon is now raising FiOS prices because they can. When other ISPs charge $60/month for "not-really 20Mbps", it's pretty much a no-brainer for Verizon to sell "really 50Mbps" for $80.
ISPs do their best to contribute to the feeling by people that they need more (both by the "up to" issue and their pricing structures). Verizon advertises their $80 50/25 as "Recommended Internet for 3-4 devices", which is a lot less than it can really handle. Right next to that, they have 150/65 service for just $20 more, and I'm sure a lot of people will go ahead and pay for that even though there is no way they can actually use it (not because the speed isn't there, but simply because the uses aren't there). Yet, a typical home can't use more than about 50Mbps. You could max that out for a while with torrents, but unless you're a leech and don't share back, after a month or so you probably have a full hard drive and can't download any more.
If there were actual competition in the US instead of government-sanctioned monopolies, pretty much every private home could get far more than they need for about $50/month, and the ISPs would still be making 30-40% profit.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to find another copy and was only able to read them for a short while a few years ago at a house I was visiting. I don't even remember what the collection was called.
Asimov was so prolific that I don't think he ever did anything "just once".
A Whiff of Death and Murder at the ABA were mystery novels, but he also published five collections of mostly science fiction mysteries. In addition, there were six collections of the Black Widowers mysteries. For all the gory details, see the bottom of his bibliography.
The fact is I have created the job regardless of what the person does. They still get money from me.
Until you run out of money because you are paying people who don't add any value to your company.
As an example, IBM could probably afford to pay every unemployed person in the US a living wage to do nothing, but even they would burn through their money pretty quickly doing that, and then all those jobs would disappear, along with all current jobs that IBM has created that were being used to finance their generosity to the unemployed. A "created" job doesn't have to exist forever, but it does have to add value to the company while the job does exist.
however, with amazon and probably newegg biting hard into their overhead, this might be part of a strategy to expand their online presence.
The dumbest thing Best Buy could do is expand online and compete even more with Amazon and Newegg.
What Best Buy has is a lot of retail stores, and they need to find a way to better utilize that real estate. Hiring fewer but smarter people who don't have any sort of "commission" that controls the advice they give customers would be the best thing, because despite online reviews, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody. They also need a lot of computer programming to automate what gets stocked where, so that the retail space is best utilized. This would allow them to make sure they have a TV model in stock, but not 20 units of same model (unless it's just flying off the shelves at that store).
The next thing would be to stop trying to make the 1000% profit on the "extras", and advertise that Best Buy is the place to get what you need right now. Basically, start with the total price (wholesale plus shipping) of the 50 cables they got in the shipment, divide by 50, add a reasonable 10-15% markup, and set that as the price. Then show in ads what something would cost from them and from "online" with overnight shipping. The problem they have is that right now, they'd lose the comparison ($23 for a 10' HDMI cable overnight from Newegg, $35 for the cheapest one Best Buy has in their stores).
Next, they need to dump agreements they have with manufacturers who sell them "Best Buy-only" SKUs so that comparison shopping and price matching aren't possible. After that, they need to limit the number of models they carry to "best in class" (top 3 at most). That way, they wouldn't have 58 different TVs in the 40-49" range available in store varying in price from $500 to $2,200 (at least that's what their web site claims). It would be tough to do, but since they absolutely can't compete with the "no floor space" of online sellers, they have to cut their number of SKUs somehow.
I own a business. I can create a job by choosing to hire someone. The job is real; a person would earn money from doing it.
But, unless the labor you get from that person is worth as much or more than what you are paying, you won't "create a job". For example, it's unlikely you'll pay somebody who never has to show up except to collect the paycheck. So, if you don't have more work than your existing employees can handle, you won't ever "create a job".
Likewise, if you have an existing job that becomes open (employee moves, quits, whatever), hiring a replacement isn't "creating a job".
The files themselves were not hosted on Demonoid, just the index, comments, and tracker. The "stuff" still exists on everyone's hard drives. I'm sure a lot of it will pop back up on other locations.
AFAIK, torrents tracked by the Demonoid tracker were not required to be exclusive to that tracker. At this point, it's pretty much all tracked by other trackers or DHT. The only real issue would be the torrents that are not indexed anywhere else...they will still live on, but you won't be able to search for them.
about:memory says it's 80% "heap-unclassified". In other words, there is no detailed data available, which is the fault of the Firefox developers, as every memory request should be trackable. Clicking on "minimize memory usage" does nothing.
As for the standard cry of "disabling addons", why don't you just suggest I use IE, since Firefox isn't really a better browser these days without any addons. And, if that's how the devs think Firefox should work, then they should just get rid of the addon interface completely.
I have tried disabling all addons except for AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and TabMixPlus (which is what I consider to the minimum required to make the browser work reasonably), and it didn't make any difference. All of those are very popular and maintained very well, so if it's one of those, we'd hear about it. Also, without AdBlock and NoScript, the browser has to do a lot more, so I'd guess it would be a wash anyway
Er, no. People were complaining that Firefox leaked and wasted memory. Now they've been actively working to understand and reduce memory usage and Firefox is faster and less of a memory hog.
I see absolutely no evidence of this except for memory usage at startup, which admittedly is much lower than before.
But, after a single day of browsing (which generally is Slashdot, a few dozen static JPEG comics, a few eBay pages, Wikipedia, and some random blogs, but rarely any Flash or videos), it's not uncommon to see memory usage for Firefox at 2GB. This shouldn't be a problem (I have 12GB RAM), but at that point, typing this comment would be too painful to endure, as Firefox pauses for a second or two after every 10 characters or so of typing. If I'm running a video encode in the background (which uses 7 of the 8 cores at "Below Normal" priority), then the pause is 3-5 seconds every 5 or so characters. Note that if Firefox is using less than about 1GB of RAM, then these pauses don't happen, regardless of background tasks.
I have "opted in" to collection of data by Mozilla, but I don't see how they could see the issue I am having. I also have seen quite a few other people with the same problem, and my only guess as to why it isn't fixed is because the Firefox developers must not use the current stable version as their everyday browser.
Nobody could read the Silmarillion until 22 years after LotR was published. I was one who read LotR in that time period, and Tom Bombadil was obviously ushered off by Tolkien for exactly the reason I stated...he was too powerful.
Everything about the Tolkien mythos is about the the decline and fall of basically everything.
Except Bombidil.
The world is a dangerous place, the hobbits are fleeing from danger into danger, and they need help, and in the absence of Gandalf, Bombadil is the first helper after they've left the Shire. He's foreshadowing Aragorn's help, and later the Nine Walkers.
And yet, all these are still there helping later in the books, while Bombidil is mentioned only once after he is offstage with the very reason he is mentioned being that Gandalf is upset that he's sitting on his backside and not using his powers to help. Bombidil was a deus ex machina as written, but could easily have been toned down to be a viable character who simply could only help in a limited enough capacity to get the hobbits past the Barrows.
The primary reason that Bombadil wasn't in the movie is that his part in the LotR story is so small that it can easily be subsumed by actors/sets/locations that were already paid for. It's only because of other books that anybody thinks Bombadil is anything more than a nut who happens to help the hobbits. BTW, you really didn't want him in the movie, because I suspect that Robin Williams would have been the casting choice of management.
It is precisely because your system isn't calibrated that you need to change the volume during a movie.
For any rodern movie released to home video, I can just set my system at the reference volume (which happens to be -20dB from max on my system) and have no issues. All the dialog that is intended to be heard can be heard without straining, and explosions have the power they should. OTA HDTV also works fine this way, as pretty much every broadcaster has done the same thing, because they are using the same sound technology. TV from cable or satellite, radio, older formats (VHS, etc.) are all a crapshoot, though.
If you turn down the volume because the loud parts might disturb your neighbors, then either keep the volume down all the time (because the dialog penetrates a lot more than you think), cut down on the bass (again, correct calibration should solve this), or watch something a little less explosion-filled during hours when your neighbors might complain.
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So how do I control an electronic device over USB via purely analog signals -- i.e. without requiring the connecting component to have a USB host controller and software? I don't think the manufacturer of $20 boombox with a dock connector is going to want to spend the money on the necessary hardware/software.
Why would you need the boom box to directly control the device? The touch screen is right there in front of you. It has to be, as the $20 boom box doesn't have a display.
There is no real use case where you need external control of the device holding your music and also need to use the device for display. Once you have an external display, you've spent enough that USB host mode isn't much of an extra expense.
Some of us like to bypass the lowest-bidder digital amplifier circuit inside the iPhone and use an amplifier that's worth a damn.
Using USB would also allow you to bypass the lowest-bidder D/A converter inside the iDevice.
The only reason to use analog out is when you are plugging the iDevice into something that uses the iDevice screen for display but has buttons to control the playback. This means you are either using a boom-box-like host (which means audio quality doesn't matter), or you've paid extra money for an Apple docking port on a host that can play back with some quality. This would make you doubly stupid, as you would have spent the extra money and still are using the crappy D/A converter in the iDevice.
Personally, anything that specifically advertises an iDevice dock (car, home stereo equpiment, etc.) goes into my "do not buy" category, as I would rather have the money spent on USB so that any device would work better. Since the vast majority of devices are not made by Apple, wasting money targeting one specific device vendor shows me that price/performance is not a feature of anything with a Apple proprietary connector.
it's just that most people associate RPGs with EverQuest and WoW, or Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, rather than the original Choose Your Own Adventure style activity.
Wouldn't the best description now be something on the order of "it's like World of Warcraft, but without a computer, so the players use their imaginations to 'see' what is happening"?
Or, "it's kind of like 'Farmville' but instead of pretending to be a farmer, each player pretends to be a heroic knight/space explorer/hitman/soldier/whatever".
And while people won't be shutting down every background process to play a game, they don't tend to run anything heavy while gaming.
I was quite interested in TFA's data on performance while transcoding video, as I do that quite often myself. Their data mirrors my own anecdotal experiences...a low-priority video encode won't hurt much if you have a decent number of cores.
And all the regular stuff (web browser with a zillion tabs loaded, email client, IM client, torrent client, ...) is pretty negligible CPU-wise.
One of the things that does kill performance for me is moderately heavy background disk activity. Download-speed activity isn't a big deal, but a few GB of robocopy across the LAN will bring a lot of games to a halt for a second or two.
Then, after I had succeeded in hiring a good lawyer, and maybe a bodyguard, depending on who I thought was after me... start posting whatever it was I saw to every communal blog and forum I could think of, then start spamming newspapers with it, too.
This is the plot hole in every one of these "hunted by the corrupt government" stories.
If you aren't the "only one that knows", you are much safer. If millions of people know or suspect, rational bad guys won't compound the original crime by killing you...they would instead spend all their time coming up with ways to show that although what you saw really happened, it wasn't them that did it. You still might get killed just for spite, but at least there's a chance that somebody would answer for the crimes.
Consider the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 2012 compared to the depth of a $50 or $60 game in 1985.
If by "depth" you mean "pretty pictures", then, yes, the 2012 game has more. If, on the other hand, you mean "broad non-linear story, great replay value, and 100 or so hours for first-time play", then maybe the 2012 game beats the 1985 game, but try comparing to the 1990-1995 era, and the 2012 games pale in comparison.
Seriously, try something playing something like "Darklands" (1995, available from GOG) with no reference to any walkthough/item database/etc. on the Internet and see how long it takes you to completely "finish" just the main quest. Then, try and complete pretty much every type of side quest, too. The sad part is that although I loved that game, it's pretty bad compared to many that were released in the next 5 years or so, since many of the side-quests are randomly generated and generic. The number of "all time great" games that come from before 2001 is pretty large considering how bad the graphics are at times. Take this list from just last year, and you can see that single-player games from the last century are well-represented.
Since about 2003, though, pretty pictures and multiplayer became more of a focus for developers, and only games that break through beyond those features are considered as "deep".
Even if they put all the day-1 content on the disc and delay the certification and release by a month, you'd still have idle developers during cert/pressing/distribution.
Based on the number of bugs we are seeing in "certified" games, there should never be idle developers.
That "down" time could be used for more rigorous testing like finding and fixing of bugs not caught by the "certification" process. I'm playing Fallout 2 for the first time right now, and the nearly 500 extra bug fixes from the "unofficial" patch makes the game much more playable. Add in the nearly 300 bugs fixed before this by official patches, plus the fact that about 30 or so of these bugs were of the "game crashed, hope you saved" type and I really wonder what the developers and testers were doing before the game was actually released.
Yes, I know that games are big and complicated, but the reality is that they are made up of many small parts, and it's pretty easy to make sure each of those parts works as intended. The problem is that it costs money to do that testing, and game developers have long ago crossed into the "prettier pictures, bigger name voice talent" realm at the expense of game play and reliability.
The D/A converter derives the clock from the S/PDIF interface, which requires PLL filtering for a stable clock.
Note that even though this problem is completely insignificant anyway, it doesn't exist at all with any packet-based, error-corrected audio like Dolby Digital.
So, if you think jitter is truly an issue, the solution is to have a sound card that can encode to Dolby Digital on the fly (Dolby Digital Live).
Yet.
Or ever, based on the hardware they are throwing at it. Verizon has been pretty clear that they won't ever oversubscribe FiOS, at least not on the neighborhood level.
They could have rolled out the "Quantum" much earlier with no actual issues, but in each neighborhood they waited until every piece of hardware could handle 100% bandwidth at 100% uptake. What this means is that right now, in my neighborhood, every home could get 300/65 Mbps FiOS with no contention, ever. In some parts of the country, the hardware is better or worse, so those places have different max speed plans available.
So, if only 50% of my neighborhood purchases FiOS, and the average speed they buy is 50Mbps, then only 8% of the bandwidth for the neighborhood is actually being used. This allows another neighborhood to use more than average and still keep the overall Verizon network at less than 100% capacity. By the time there is enough uptake, Verizon will be able to upgrade their backbones to handle the aggregate.
The only thing that bothers me is that instead of doing this with the funds they got in the 90s, Verizon is building the network with money they get now from subscribers. Since FiOS is far faster than any other ISP where it is available, there is enough uptake to allow buildout of the next area. Also, their prices are not going down as they expected they would (and did for a while), because other ISPs are raising theirs, and FiOS still wins the price/performance battle.
The other thing to remember is that FiOS has symmetric speed available, and the only reason Verizon doesn't sell it that way at very high speeds is because of peering agreement costs. So, it's possible to saturate your personal upstream FiOS without ever even coming close to bothering anybody else's performance, even if FiOS ever becomes oversubscribed.
So now we got you and all your neighbours using the 1Gbps at roughly the same time.
That's where you miss the reality of FiOS...there is something like 50Gbps available per neighborhood. Even before "Quantum", each neighborhood had more than 3Gbps available.
By the way, my #5 is completely at odds with your idea. The ones I've been to have had so much wasted floor (and vertical) space they coul easily carry all the products they carry and many more. They're going to *lose* my sale if they show me a 55" Samsung and I say "I like this one, but do you have the smaller model and they say "no, sorry, we only carry the best in class."
Overall, more efficient use of the space they have is the obvious solution. What I meant was that they should only have the 3 "best" 55" TVs, the 3 "best" 50", etc., where "best" is by some criteria that works for them. In that case, they should have what you want.
It appears that 14.0 fixed this issue.
I had seen it from about 5.x all the way up to 13.x, but updated a few days ago and I'm still at less than 500MB used total, with no change in browsing habits or addons.
BTW verizon has never throttled my torrent download. Of course I'm only using 700kbit/s so maybe that's why.
My average speed over the last year was 1.1/6.8 Mbps (down/up with Verizon FiOS). Verizon doesn't need to throttle, because they don't oversubscribe FiOS, and DSL is self-limiting (because of the distance from the DSLAM).
I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible unless you encrypt the connection, and even then it's still very slow.
It's possible that your "legit" torrents never leave your ISPs network. It's usually only at boundaries that they throttle. So, check the location of the peers on the torrents and see which ones are fast and which are slow.
It doesn't matter whether you are on FIOS or on DSL or on Cable.. the bottleneck is just in different points along the ISP's chain depending on the technology.
Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed. Every user could use 100% of their bandwidth at the same time and it would work to the edge of the Verizon network. The tricky issue would be finding sources that could provide that much data into the Verizon network.
Yes, I know that there is still a "bottleneck" in my example, but you can't blame your ISP for things out of their control. Within their own network, Verizon gives FiOS users 100% of bandwidth, and it's not their fault if other ISPs can't feed the Verizon network fast enough to keep up.
Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time.
This fallacy is exactly the thinking that ISPs in the US encourage. Actual costs for bandwidth are dropping, but prices are no longer dropping. Instead, we are seeing price jumps and ads for faster and faster "up to" rates that seldom (with the exception of Verizon FiOS) are truly available 24/7. Even Verizon is now raising FiOS prices because they can. When other ISPs charge $60/month for "not-really 20Mbps", it's pretty much a no-brainer for Verizon to sell "really 50Mbps" for $80.
ISPs do their best to contribute to the feeling by people that they need more (both by the "up to" issue and their pricing structures). Verizon advertises their $80 50/25 as "Recommended Internet for 3-4 devices", which is a lot less than it can really handle. Right next to that, they have 150/65 service for just $20 more, and I'm sure a lot of people will go ahead and pay for that even though there is no way they can actually use it (not because the speed isn't there, but simply because the uses aren't there). Yet, a typical home can't use more than about 50Mbps. You could max that out for a while with torrents, but unless you're a leech and don't share back, after a month or so you probably have a full hard drive and can't download any more.
If there were actual competition in the US instead of government-sanctioned monopolies, pretty much every private home could get far more than they need for about $50/month, and the ISPs would still be making 30-40% profit.
And my person favorite is James P. Hogan
I have to second this. He is one of the better "hard" sci-fi authors out there that most people don't know.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to find another copy and was only able to read them for a short while a few years ago at a house I was visiting. I don't even remember what the collection was called.
Asimov was so prolific that I don't think he ever did anything "just once".
A Whiff of Death and Murder at the ABA were mystery novels, but he also published five collections of mostly science fiction mysteries. In addition, there were six collections of the Black Widowers mysteries. For all the gory details, see the bottom of his bibliography.
The fact is I have created the job regardless of what the person does. They still get money from me.
Until you run out of money because you are paying people who don't add any value to your company.
As an example, IBM could probably afford to pay every unemployed person in the US a living wage to do nothing, but even they would burn through their money pretty quickly doing that, and then all those jobs would disappear, along with all current jobs that IBM has created that were being used to finance their generosity to the unemployed. A "created" job doesn't have to exist forever, but it does have to add value to the company while the job does exist.
however, with amazon and probably newegg biting hard into their overhead, this might be part of a strategy to expand their online presence.
The dumbest thing Best Buy could do is expand online and compete even more with Amazon and Newegg.
What Best Buy has is a lot of retail stores, and they need to find a way to better utilize that real estate. Hiring fewer but smarter people who don't have any sort of "commission" that controls the advice they give customers would be the best thing, because despite online reviews, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody. They also need a lot of computer programming to automate what gets stocked where, so that the retail space is best utilized. This would allow them to make sure they have a TV model in stock, but not 20 units of same model (unless it's just flying off the shelves at that store).
The next thing would be to stop trying to make the 1000% profit on the "extras", and advertise that Best Buy is the place to get what you need right now. Basically, start with the total price (wholesale plus shipping) of the 50 cables they got in the shipment, divide by 50, add a reasonable 10-15% markup, and set that as the price. Then show in ads what something would cost from them and from "online" with overnight shipping. The problem they have is that right now, they'd lose the comparison ($23 for a 10' HDMI cable overnight from Newegg, $35 for the cheapest one Best Buy has in their stores).
Next, they need to dump agreements they have with manufacturers who sell them "Best Buy-only" SKUs so that comparison shopping and price matching aren't possible. After that, they need to limit the number of models they carry to "best in class" (top 3 at most). That way, they wouldn't have 58 different TVs in the 40-49" range available in store varying in price from $500 to $2,200 (at least that's what their web site claims). It would be tough to do, but since they absolutely can't compete with the "no floor space" of online sellers, they have to cut their number of SKUs somehow.
I own a business. I can create a job by choosing to hire someone. The job is real; a person would earn money from doing it.
But, unless the labor you get from that person is worth as much or more than what you are paying, you won't "create a job". For example, it's unlikely you'll pay somebody who never has to show up except to collect the paycheck. So, if you don't have more work than your existing employees can handle, you won't ever "create a job".
Likewise, if you have an existing job that becomes open (employee moves, quits, whatever), hiring a replacement isn't "creating a job".
The files themselves were not hosted on Demonoid, just the index, comments, and tracker. The "stuff" still exists on everyone's hard drives. I'm sure a lot of it will pop back up on other locations.
AFAIK, torrents tracked by the Demonoid tracker were not required to be exclusive to that tracker. At this point, it's pretty much all tracked by other trackers or DHT. The only real issue would be the torrents that are not indexed anywhere else...they will still live on, but you won't be able to search for them.
about:memory says it's 80% "heap-unclassified". In other words, there is no detailed data available, which is the fault of the Firefox developers, as every memory request should be trackable. Clicking on "minimize memory usage" does nothing.
As for the standard cry of "disabling addons", why don't you just suggest I use IE, since Firefox isn't really a better browser these days without any addons. And, if that's how the devs think Firefox should work, then they should just get rid of the addon interface completely.
I have tried disabling all addons except for AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and TabMixPlus (which is what I consider to the minimum required to make the browser work reasonably), and it didn't make any difference. All of those are very popular and maintained very well, so if it's one of those, we'd hear about it. Also, without AdBlock and NoScript, the browser has to do a lot more, so I'd guess it would be a wash anyway
Er, no. People were complaining that Firefox leaked and wasted memory. Now they've been actively working to understand and reduce memory usage and Firefox is faster and less of a memory hog.
I see absolutely no evidence of this except for memory usage at startup, which admittedly is much lower than before.
But, after a single day of browsing (which generally is Slashdot, a few dozen static JPEG comics, a few eBay pages, Wikipedia, and some random blogs, but rarely any Flash or videos), it's not uncommon to see memory usage for Firefox at 2GB. This shouldn't be a problem (I have 12GB RAM), but at that point, typing this comment would be too painful to endure, as Firefox pauses for a second or two after every 10 characters or so of typing. If I'm running a video encode in the background (which uses 7 of the 8 cores at "Below Normal" priority), then the pause is 3-5 seconds every 5 or so characters. Note that if Firefox is using less than about 1GB of RAM, then these pauses don't happen, regardless of background tasks.
I have "opted in" to collection of data by Mozilla, but I don't see how they could see the issue I am having. I also have seen quite a few other people with the same problem, and my only guess as to why it isn't fixed is because the Firefox developers must not use the current stable version as their everyday browser.
If you've read the Silmarillion
Nobody could read the Silmarillion until 22 years after LotR was published. I was one who read LotR in that time period, and Tom Bombadil was obviously ushered off by Tolkien for exactly the reason I stated...he was too powerful.
Everything about the Tolkien mythos is about the the decline and fall of basically everything.
Except Bombidil.
The world is a dangerous place, the hobbits are fleeing from danger into danger, and they need help, and in the absence of Gandalf, Bombadil is the first helper after they've left the Shire. He's foreshadowing Aragorn's help, and later the Nine Walkers.
And yet, all these are still there helping later in the books, while Bombidil is mentioned only once after he is offstage with the very reason he is mentioned being that Gandalf is upset that he's sitting on his backside and not using his powers to help. Bombidil was a deus ex machina as written, but could easily have been toned down to be a viable character who simply could only help in a limited enough capacity to get the hobbits past the Barrows.
The primary reason that Bombadil wasn't in the movie is that his part in the LotR story is so small that it can easily be subsumed by actors/sets/locations that were already paid for. It's only because of other books that anybody thinks Bombadil is anything more than a nut who happens to help the hobbits. BTW, you really didn't want him in the movie, because I suspect that Robin Williams would have been the casting choice of management.
It is precisely because your system isn't calibrated that you need to change the volume during a movie.
For any rodern movie released to home video, I can just set my system at the reference volume (which happens to be -20dB from max on my system) and have no issues. All the dialog that is intended to be heard can be heard without straining, and explosions have the power they should. OTA HDTV also works fine this way, as pretty much every broadcaster has done the same thing, because they are using the same sound technology. TV from cable or satellite, radio, older formats (VHS, etc.) are all a crapshoot, though.
If you turn down the volume because the loud parts might disturb your neighbors, then either keep the volume down all the time (because the dialog penetrates a lot more than you think), cut down on the bass (again, correct calibration should solve this), or watch something a little less explosion-filled during hours when your neighbors might complain.