I'm a Windows user. I used to think that Firefox used too much RAM - I have about 30 tabs open in 2 windows, and it consumes over 140MB. In my book that's A LOT.
Few days ago I installed IE 7. I know, installing brand new MS software is a bad idea. But I'm reinstalling this OS soon anyway, so I wanted to give it a try. I opened the same tabs in the browser. Some of them didn't have my cookies, so slightly different pages loaded. But to my surprise, IE7 was taking up over 400MB of RAM. That's almost 3 times as much as Firefox. It got sluggish compared to Firefox. (I have a gig of RAM in a decently fast computer)
I'm sticking with Firefox. I'll test out 2.0 when it comes out, and baring bugs or bloat, I'll be using it as my main browser on all 3 computers I use.
Here's a trick I learned about buying a pineapple: try to pull out a leaf. If it comes out easily and at the base of the leaf, it's ripe. Otherwise, it's not.
Simple: Intel just lifted the NDA off Conroe, which is much more efficient than P4, and somewhat more efficient than AMD's K8 architecture. They then paid Congress to pass an initiative to highlight this. It was probably cheaper then printing advertisements in all major newspapers.
So when is Congress going to have product placements on CSPAN?
Well, I will fly against the grain, and I'll say that at least ABC is somewhat consistant. So far they are the only network that allows you to watch their shows for free on the 'net. All you need to do is watch the ads that are interspersed in the content. You can skip segments of the show, but you have to watch the commercial directly preceding the segment you do want to watch. It works very well - I watched the whole Commander In Chief without any problems (except that the show isn't very good).
(Or I should rather say, they allowed you to watch - appears the site is down till fall)
I understand that networks make their money from advertising. And I channel surf with the best of them, so their advertising does not reach me for the most part. But if there was a way to design DVRs the way they designed their show streaming, that would be OK with me, and their advertisers would actually get more exposure than they do now.
And in case anybody wonders, I do use a DVR right now, and I do skip all the commercials, and I'm loving it. But I'm also realistic in realizing that if everybody did this, we'd end up with product placements that are even more annoying than they are today, making the quality of the programs much worse.
Actually, with perfect competition, firms would charge their marginal cost of producing it. The intuition behind this is that if they did not, and there exists free entry (a requirement of perfect competition), then another firm would charge slightly lower, and thus get all of the customers. Of course, in the broadband industry, there exist fairly natural monopolies because of the huge fixed costs of the infrastructure and "last mile" runs.
Actually, you're wrong. With perfect competition goods should cost at least marginal cost of producing plus small percentage to have a positive return on investment. Otherwise, nobody would sell it, because buying bonds would be a better investment.
What about DRM? If they burn these on regular disks, I can make a copy. If they burn it on special disks, these disks will get even more expensive.
I suspect they'll do something similar to what Movielinks is doing - give you a DRM'ed file. That's fine, but if I can play it on any computer/DVD player, I still can copy it! And if I have to link it to a specific computer with a license, why would I want it in the first place?!
A sales tax based system causes poor people to pay a disproportionately large percentage of their income in taxes, compared to rich people.
A poor person, you end up spending your entire monthly income just to get by. So your entire income gets taxed. A rich person ends up only spending say 25% of their income on housing/food/etc, and puts the rest of it away as an investment. So the poor person ends up paying 4 times higher percentage of their income than the rich person. Is that "fair"? This suggestion is even worse than a flat income tax.
In general I find that anybody who talks about "fair" taxation has no idea what they're talking about. Taxes are not fair. You have valid contradictory arguments which all have to be taken into account to make a very difficult but workable compromise. It's not supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be beneficial to the society.
Most people agree (possibly through a force of habit, but nonetheless) that incremental tax brackets are good, and those who study this approach often use the "veil of ignorance" argument - imagine you are about to be born and don't know who your parents will be, what their financial/educational status is, what opportunities you will have, what disabilities you will have, etc; design a tax system that works. You may find that if you're born to a single parent living in a ghetto and going to a school that doesn't teach anything except violence, you would prefer if your parent doesn't need to get a third job just to be able to feed you. Even if it means that if you were born to a lawyer and a banker living in NJ and working in NYC, they could only afford to buy you one BMW for your 16th birthday.
This seems to me to be a system that actually prevents compliance with a Constitutional mandate. Why hasn't this been an avenue of legal challenge to DRM yet?
Because this hasn't happened yet, and courts don't like to deal with "just in case" issues. Not to mention the Supreme Court ruling that seemingly perpetual extensions to the copyright term are Constitutional. I have a huge problem with this one as well - people who paid to use the media covered by copyrights are essentially entering a contract: I'll pay you for this now, but you'll make it freely available to me in X years. Congress is breaking this contract with their extensions.
I am actually looking forward to the day when a very old tune is sold on iTunes or the like, and the copyright for it expires. I've read the DMCA, and I think it only covers works which are covered by the copyright. Would the courts accept the argument that the DRM for this work should be broken and shared in the open because it's not covered by copyright anymore, or would they accept that since the files aren't covered by copyright, the DRM that protects them should be openly broken?
This is just an example of BS that can be concocted with statistics.
Dell sells really cheap "servers" - SC430. Thousands of people buy them for cheap desktops. Just check a web site like fatwallet to see threads about buying these.
More interesting question would be how many licenses for Windows Server Edition?
The scientists proceeded to whip out their rifles and go hunting. The newly discovered species' expected survival time is no more than two years before repeated extinction.
I thinks parent's idea is important, and not just because the fraud team can verify an e-mail.
If a big company started signing their e-mails, suddenly all their customers would start seeing the signatures. They might ask the company what these signatures are, and get an answer. Next thing you know, maybe they'd start using signatures themselves, thus propagating signing of e-mails further.
We'd need a few things to happen first, of course.
First of all, we'd need a standard that is integrated with the major e-mail clients. That does include web mail, of course.
Second of all, we'd need to figure out how to store private keys on web mail sites. My personal preference would be to not store the keys there. Instead, store the keys on the computer used to check mail, and have javascript generate the signature. This wouldn't work for some locations (net coffee shops, or work computers). Alternatively we could store the private keys on the webservers, but encrypted, and use the password provided at sign-on to decrypt the key.
Finally, we'd have to get people to stop trusting e-mail. If it's not signed, don't trust it. Maybe get the client to pop up a window saying "you've clicked on an unverified link, are you sure?". If it's signed, CHECK THE SOURCE. You can have a ring of trusted keys, but it's very important to stop people from accepting just about any key to their ring.
I'm sure there are other problems to be solved, but the main point is this: it takes momentum to get people to change their behavior, and preaching won't do it, but leading by example might.
Aren't gas taxes basically a pay-per-use fee for motorists for infrustructure building?
Gas taxes have the advantage of being anonymous, plus they promote lower gas-usage vehicles. The only reason I can think that anybody would consider using GPS in favor of simply taxing fuel is that they want to LOWER the taxes on gas, thus prices at the pump. You lower gas prices, and you're GUARANTEED to get re-elected.
Once the initial novelty wore off, however, we quickly realized that the limits of this notebook are achieved with minimal effort. We launched Winamp, Firefox with 25 tabs, proceeded to check our e-mail, work on an excel file with Norton Internet Security and Antivirus 2005 running in the system tray.
Although this sounds like a lot load on a system, it's actually how many of you may utilize it. By the time we got to checking our e-mail and working on the excel file, the machine was already crawling, and our attempts at opening another one of these browser windows all but stopped the machine from doing anything whatsoever.
So yes, the machine is definitely underpowered and despite the 512MB of DDR2 RAM, the processor and the hard drive are letting it down.
I think that's backwards. The processor and HD can handle the load, if only you put more memory in it to stop it from thrashing.
I don't think the expected ease of use will be nearly as much as predicted by people who want to push this technology.
I carry three credit cards in my wallet. I don't really need the third one, but I always try to have at least two, just in case my primary card doesn't swipe correctly, goes over limit, or becomes otherwise useless.
So what will happen when I wave my wallet with three CCs in it in front of the reader? It'll probably ask me which card I'd like to use... Now I have to read the options (how many people carry 6 or 7 CCs in their wallets?!) and find the one I like and select it. Or just take it out of the wallet and swipe it. Which one will you chose?
Plus, this may make lives easier for women who can just wave their purse in front of the reader, so they don't have to take out the wallet and then the CC. But most men I know carry their wallet in their back pocket, and I don't think stores will be happy with men sticking their butts up to the readers on the counters. And if I have to take out the wallet, I may just as well take out the CC...
It will probably lead to people holding on to their books for the 3 weeks and having them automatically returned. A better system (IMHO) would automatically return the books after 4 weeks, after having charged a week's worth of late fees. That way people would probably try to actually read and return the book, instead of relying on a super safe "wait and see" attitude. Even though the book is out potentially for 4 weeks, it might actually increase book availability...
One huge advantage of asynchronous circuits is that you can turn the power down, and the chip simply slows down (up to a point, but you see the point). You turn power up (increase Vcc) and the chip runs faster. Same principles apply in overclocking your desktop chip, except here you don't need to crank voltage AND clock:)
Kroger became interested in the finger image machine three years ago, when the state of Texas began its own pilot program with the intention of eliminating food stamp fraud. It came out with a finger image version of the "Lone Star Card" used by food stamp recipients. The state approached Kroger and asked if it would participate in the pilot program.
After a budget cut, the state abandoned the program, but Kroger -- the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. -- continued to explore the system.
Is it me or did they abandon a cost-saving program because they had budget cuts? What horrible short-term thinking.
You bring up Guelph as an example. While I haven't been in Guelph lately (I'm from Toronto), I agree that getting people to separate their garbage is a bad idea, because they won't do it (or at least won't like it). The difference between that and this is that garbage separation is done after the fact and not up front. If you had to pay an extra quarter and they had somebody else separate the garbage for you, you'd do it and be glad that your quarter is being spent responsibly (to help the environment).
Secondly, you bring up EU. While I don't know anything about EU recycling cars, I believe that in Germany the manufacturers had to guarantee recycling of major appliances. This caused manufacturers to redesign their products so they contained less materials and were easier to recycle. The result were CHEAPER appliances that were more environmentally friendly.
You see, the problem with this legislation is not that it's up front and doesn't rely on people's good will and knowledge of the system. The problem is that it's not up front enough. This is more of an end-of-pipe approach than a solution to the real problem.
The government should make every manufacturer and importer pay out of their pocket a fee for transporting the equipment to their recycling facilities and make them recycle it. The result would be that the recycling fee would become included in the cost of the equipment, but it would be up to the manufacturer's ingenuity to reduce the cost and thus make their products cheaper. Creating a flat fee only allows the manufacturers to continue producing products that are not friendly and point their finger at the government and say "But they will recycle it!".
Remember, necessity is a mother of all inventions.
I saw Final Fantasy on a digital screen in Canada. I could see aliasing during the credits. Seems the resolution isn't enough for the really large screens in today's theatres. Somehow that doesn't affect film transfers (when a digital movie/effect is transferred to film).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Windows user. I used to think that Firefox used too much RAM - I have about 30 tabs open in 2 windows, and it consumes over 140MB. In my book that's A LOT.
Few days ago I installed IE 7. I know, installing brand new MS software is a bad idea. But I'm reinstalling this OS soon anyway, so I wanted to give it a try. I opened the same tabs in the browser. Some of them didn't have my cookies, so slightly different pages loaded. But to my surprise, IE7 was taking up over 400MB of RAM. That's almost 3 times as much as Firefox. It got sluggish compared to Firefox. (I have a gig of RAM in a decently fast computer)
I'm sticking with Firefox. I'll test out 2.0 when it comes out, and baring bugs or bloat, I'll be using it as my main browser on all 3 computers I use.
m
Here's a trick I learned about buying a pineapple: try to pull out a leaf. If it comes out easily and at the base of the leaf, it's ripe. Otherwise, it's not.
Enjoy sweet sweet pineapples!
m
Intelligent Designer put more and more powerful snakes on Earth, which forced primates to evolve into Humans.
Sheesh, everybody knows that!
m
Simple: Intel just lifted the NDA off Conroe, which is much more efficient than P4, and somewhat more efficient than AMD's K8 architecture. They then paid Congress to pass an initiative to highlight this. It was probably cheaper then printing advertisements in all major newspapers.
So when is Congress going to have product placements on CSPAN?
m
Well, I will fly against the grain, and I'll say that at least ABC is somewhat consistant. So far they are the only network that allows you to watch their shows for free on the 'net. All you need to do is watch the ads that are interspersed in the content. You can skip segments of the show, but you have to watch the commercial directly preceding the segment you do want to watch. It works very well - I watched the whole Commander In Chief without any problems (except that the show isn't very good).
(Or I should rather say, they allowed you to watch - appears the site is down till fall)
I understand that networks make their money from advertising. And I channel surf with the best of them, so their advertising does not reach me for the most part. But if there was a way to design DVRs the way they designed their show streaming, that would be OK with me, and their advertisers would actually get more exposure than they do now.
And in case anybody wonders, I do use a DVR right now, and I do skip all the commercials, and I'm loving it. But I'm also realistic in realizing that if everybody did this, we'd end up with product placements that are even more annoying than they are today, making the quality of the programs much worse.
m
Actually, with perfect competition, firms would charge their marginal cost of producing it. The intuition behind this is that if they did not, and there exists free entry (a requirement of perfect competition), then another firm would charge slightly lower, and thus get all of the customers. Of course, in the broadband industry, there exist fairly natural monopolies because of the huge fixed costs of the infrastructure and "last mile" runs.
Actually, you're wrong. With perfect competition goods should cost at least marginal cost of producing plus small percentage to have a positive return on investment. Otherwise, nobody would sell it, because buying bonds would be a better investment.
m
What about DRM? If they burn these on regular disks, I can make a copy. If they burn it on special disks, these disks will get even more expensive.
I suspect they'll do something similar to what Movielinks is doing - give you a DRM'ed file. That's fine, but if I can play it on any computer/DVD player, I still can copy it! And if I have to link it to a specific computer with a license, why would I want it in the first place?!
Sigh. I just don't understand the point of this.
m
A sales tax based system causes poor people to pay a disproportionately large percentage of their income in taxes, compared to rich people.
A poor person, you end up spending your entire monthly income just to get by. So your entire income gets taxed. A rich person ends up only spending say 25% of their income on housing/food/etc, and puts the rest of it away as an investment. So the poor person ends up paying 4 times higher percentage of their income than the rich person. Is that "fair"? This suggestion is even worse than a flat income tax.
In general I find that anybody who talks about "fair" taxation has no idea what they're talking about. Taxes are not fair. You have valid contradictory arguments which all have to be taken into account to make a very difficult but workable compromise. It's not supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be beneficial to the society.
Most people agree (possibly through a force of habit, but nonetheless) that incremental tax brackets are good, and those who study this approach often use the "veil of ignorance" argument - imagine you are about to be born and don't know who your parents will be, what their financial/educational status is, what opportunities you will have, what disabilities you will have, etc; design a tax system that works. You may find that if you're born to a single parent living in a ghetto and going to a school that doesn't teach anything except violence, you would prefer if your parent doesn't need to get a third job just to be able to feed you. Even if it means that if you were born to a lawyer and a banker living in NJ and working in NYC, they could only afford to buy you one BMW for your 16th birthday.
And yes, obviously I'm exaggerating.
m
This seems to me to be a system that actually prevents compliance with a Constitutional mandate. Why hasn't this been an avenue of legal challenge to DRM yet?
Because this hasn't happened yet, and courts don't like to deal with "just in case" issues. Not to mention the Supreme Court ruling that seemingly perpetual extensions to the copyright term are Constitutional. I have a huge problem with this one as well - people who paid to use the media covered by copyrights are essentially entering a contract: I'll pay you for this now, but you'll make it freely available to me in X years. Congress is breaking this contract with their extensions.
I am actually looking forward to the day when a very old tune is sold on iTunes or the like, and the copyright for it expires. I've read the DMCA, and I think it only covers works which are covered by the copyright. Would the courts accept the argument that the DRM for this work should be broken and shared in the open because it's not covered by copyright anymore, or would they accept that since the files aren't covered by copyright, the DRM that protects them should be openly broken?
m
They have pop3 now. Log in as admin and go to:
p y?answer=33384
https://www.google.com/support/hosted/bin/answer.
m
Many are pointing out that this sounds like Charles H. Duell, who wanted to close down the Patent Office.
Well, I too want to close down the patent office (for opposite reasons though) so I think I'm going to have to agree with this assessment!
m
This is just an example of BS that can be concocted with statistics.
Dell sells really cheap "servers" - SC430. Thousands of people buy them for cheap desktops. Just check a web site like fatwallet to see threads about buying these.
More interesting question would be how many licenses for Windows Server Edition?
m
The scientists proceeded to whip out their rifles and go hunting. The newly discovered species' expected survival time is no more than two years before repeated extinction.
m
EdAvis wrote:
I thinks parent's idea is important, and not just because the fraud team can verify an e-mail.
If a big company started signing their e-mails, suddenly all their customers would start seeing the signatures. They might ask the company what these signatures are, and get an answer. Next thing you know, maybe they'd start using signatures themselves, thus propagating signing of e-mails further.
We'd need a few things to happen first, of course.
First of all, we'd need a standard that is integrated with the major e-mail clients. That does include web mail, of course.
Second of all, we'd need to figure out how to store private keys on web mail sites. My personal preference would be to not store the keys there. Instead, store the keys on the computer used to check mail, and have javascript generate the signature. This wouldn't work for some locations (net coffee shops, or work computers). Alternatively we could store the private keys on the webservers, but encrypted, and use the password provided at sign-on to decrypt the key.
Finally, we'd have to get people to stop trusting e-mail. If it's not signed, don't trust it. Maybe get the client to pop up a window saying "you've clicked on an unverified link, are you sure?". If it's signed, CHECK THE SOURCE. You can have a ring of trusted keys, but it's very important to stop people from accepting just about any key to their ring.
I'm sure there are other problems to be solved, but the main point is this: it takes momentum to get people to change their behavior, and preaching won't do it, but leading by example might.
m
Aren't gas taxes basically a pay-per-use fee for motorists for infrustructure building?
Gas taxes have the advantage of being anonymous, plus they promote lower gas-usage vehicles. The only reason I can think that anybody would consider using GPS in favor of simply taxing fuel is that they want to LOWER the taxes on gas, thus prices at the pump. You lower gas prices, and you're GUARANTEED to get re-elected.
m
From the article:
Once the initial novelty wore off, however, we quickly realized that the limits of this notebook are achieved with minimal effort. We launched Winamp, Firefox with 25 tabs, proceeded to check our e-mail, work on an excel file with Norton Internet Security and Antivirus 2005 running in the system tray.
Although this sounds like a lot load on a system, it's actually how many of you may utilize it. By the time we got to checking our e-mail and working on the excel file, the machine was already crawling, and our attempts at opening another one of these browser windows all but stopped the machine from doing anything whatsoever.
So yes, the machine is definitely underpowered and despite the 512MB of DDR2 RAM, the processor and the hard drive are letting it down.
I think that's backwards. The processor and HD can handle the load, if only you put more memory in it to stop it from thrashing.
And you call that a review?
m
I don't think the expected ease of use will be nearly as much as predicted by people who want to push this technology.
I carry three credit cards in my wallet. I don't really need the third one, but I always try to have at least two, just in case my primary card doesn't swipe correctly, goes over limit, or becomes otherwise useless.
So what will happen when I wave my wallet with three CCs in it in front of the reader? It'll probably ask me which card I'd like to use... Now I have to read the options (how many people carry 6 or 7 CCs in their wallets?!) and find the one I like and select it. Or just take it out of the wallet and swipe it. Which one will you chose?
Plus, this may make lives easier for women who can just wave their purse in front of the reader, so they don't have to take out the wallet and then the CC. But most men I know carry their wallet in their back pocket, and I don't think stores will be happy with men sticking their butts up to the readers on the counters. And if I have to take out the wallet, I may just as well take out the CC...
Just a couple of thoughts..
m
Write viruses and trojans, of course!
m
It will probably lead to people holding on to their books for the 3 weeks and having them automatically returned. A better system (IMHO) would automatically return the books after 4 weeks, after having charged a week's worth of late fees. That way people would probably try to actually read and return the book, instead of relying on a super safe "wait and see" attitude. Even though the book is out potentially for 4 weeks, it might actually increase book availability...
m
I don't see how the contraption can both be small and deliver at a high pressure while operating off of one battery.
The air at depth is already at the appropriate pressure, so the apparatus does not have to re-pressurize it.
m
That's great. So let's publicize this mirror, so the government can block it. Perfect. I'll bet that's exactly what the mirror's creators wanted.
m
Simple. Crank up the voltage.
:)
One huge advantage of asynchronous circuits is that you can turn the power down, and the chip simply slows down (up to a point, but you see the point). You turn power up (increase Vcc) and the chip runs faster. Same principles apply in overclocking your desktop chip, except here you don't need to crank voltage AND clock
Of course doing this could ruin your chip.
m
Kroger became interested in the finger image machine three years ago, when the state of Texas began its own pilot program with the intention of eliminating food stamp fraud. It came out with a finger image version of the "Lone Star Card" used by food stamp recipients. The state approached Kroger and asked if it would participate in the pilot program.
After a budget cut, the state abandoned the program, but Kroger -- the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. -- continued to explore the system.
Is it me or did they abandon a cost-saving program because they had budget cuts? What horrible short-term thinking.
m
I disagree.
You bring up Guelph as an example. While I haven't been in Guelph lately (I'm from Toronto), I agree that getting people to separate their garbage is a bad idea, because they won't do it (or at least won't like it). The difference between that and this is that garbage separation is done after the fact and not up front. If you had to pay an extra quarter and they had somebody else separate the garbage for you, you'd do it and be glad that your quarter is being spent responsibly (to help the environment).
Secondly, you bring up EU. While I don't know anything about EU recycling cars, I believe that in Germany the manufacturers had to guarantee recycling of major appliances. This caused manufacturers to redesign their products so they contained less materials and were easier to recycle. The result were CHEAPER appliances that were more environmentally friendly.
You see, the problem with this legislation is not that it's up front and doesn't rely on people's good will and knowledge of the system. The problem is that it's not up front enough. This is more of an end-of-pipe approach than a solution to the real problem.
The government should make every manufacturer and importer pay out of their pocket a fee for transporting the equipment to their recycling facilities and make them recycle it. The result would be that the recycling fee would become included in the cost of the equipment, but it would be up to the manufacturer's ingenuity to reduce the cost and thus make their products cheaper. Creating a flat fee only allows the manufacturers to continue producing products that are not friendly and point their finger at the government and say "But they will recycle it!".
Remember, necessity is a mother of all inventions.
m
I saw Final Fantasy on a digital screen in Canada. I could see aliasing during the credits. Seems the resolution isn't enough for the really large screens in today's theatres. Somehow that doesn't affect film transfers (when a digital movie/effect is transferred to film).
m