Muscle weighs more then fat. So the muscle bound meathead steroid junkie will be caught out by this more then the morbidly obese.
Which is just as much a choice as eating too much is in most cases, so said meathead's muscle weight is his problem just as my fat is my problem.
Airport and Airline staff have enough to deal with already without having a dimwitted, arrogant, idiot with a serious inferiority complex hopped up on testosterone laced steroids upset because he's been thrown in with the fatties.
Fair point, but should we really alter our rules just to cause less problems for people like that? Anyway, let him kick-off. Security have tazers these days and many tests on primates show that electric shocks are a way to encourage desired behaviour in future (for the humour impaired: that last part is more-or-less in jest, I did not intend to insult other primates by linking them to our meatheads). People keep behaving like that if they keep getting away with getting what they want by behaving like that.
In fact, they shouldn't be sorting passengers at all.
Because of the variation in people, the one-size-fits-all situation that currently exists is becoming unpleasant, if not completely impractical, for those next to the larger people that the size fits. Are their any fair ways of dealing with the issue? A limited number of larger seats? (the PC mob would come down on that as segregation) Making larger people buy two seats? (though I hope the arm rest between those two seats can be folded away!)
There are too many factors for this to be effectively sorted out so it isn't just an extra charge which will be abused by the airlines.
Well, they'll abuse us some other way anyway... Would not a straight set or weight benchmarks (for passenger and luggage) be more fair and transparent than more subjective measures? Of course it wouldn't be that simple, for your example of children they take less fuel (due to less mass) but take up a full seat and so forth.
If he was really too fat to fly they never should have sold him a ticket.
I understand the sentiment, but how would you implement that? Are you going to make people weigh in before they can buy a ticket? Going to rely on self reporting?
I've always thought that people should be counted in the weight allowance instead of just luggage. A bit porky like me? You get to bring less stuff (or pay more for the same stuff). Properly obese? You get even less. That and people who are for too large to fit in a single seat (with people to their sides being comfortable too) should be made to purchase the double seat they need.
Of course there are logistical complications to this. Firstly there is weight distribution between the passenger cabin and luggage hold which may affect the handling of the craft if most of the passengers are porkies with little luggage. And there is the issue of defining what constitutes too big for one seat. And finally there will be the people who cry like babies and moan that "it isn't my fault" - well it might not be (in which case get a medical cert and we'll consider some extra compassion) but it isn't the airline's fault either and it certainly isn't the fault of the other passengers who get less space between them because of your lardy presence. Another complication is what to do at the other end of the scale - it would be important not to encourage the "a stick of celery and half a tomato is more than enough for lunch" mob so there would need to be lower limit on the luggage gains (perhaps the weight distribution issue would be a legitimate reason for imposing this lower limit).
FYI: I'm a chunk overweight myself and not exactly getting any less so as time passes, and I would have no problem with getting a lower luggage allowance than someone of more healthy proportions. It seems quite fair to me: I want you to transport X kilograms of stuff from here to there which will use up Y amount of fuel, it just so happens that Z% of that mass is me and the heavy boots I prefer to wear. What's that? Xkg is over the total allowance and I'll have to pay a fee for the extra? Fair enough.
The license says you must affix the proof of authenticity to the exterior of the machine.
Does the license say how much they're going to pay me for advertising their crappy product on my pc case?
No it doesn't, at least as far as I know. As far as they are concerned, if you don't want to agree to their EULA then you are free to not use the software (whether you've paid for it or not). Not that I have the POA sticker for my desktop machine at home on the case mind, though the machines at work all do for the sake of obvious signs of compliance.
AC didn't say what his or her major was. I'd expect different computer competencies from a Computer Science major and a French Literature major.
I would expect anyone of decent intelligence and a little life experience to both know the value of keeping a backup on different media (preferably in a different location) and to have a fair idea where to turn if the lights do go out at the worst time (surely the AC knows or has access to some techie people - we aren't as rare as we once were any more). Then again, people often fail to meet expectations so maybe I've just shot down my own arguement.
If the system requirements say "an Internet connection", especially if the licensing agreement states the same requirement, and you don't have the resources to argue your case (through the legal system, arbitration, or some other channel) I'd say you are probably up a certain creak without access to the appropriate rowing equipment.
Caveat: I've not checked what the sysreqs or license say, I'm just speculating here.
Hell, Microsoft reauthorized my OEM copy of Vista Home Premium twice when I moved the install to a new system, in spite of the license saying they don't allow that. Awfully kind of them, I thought.
That comes down to it being difficult to tell the difference between a certain amount of upgrading and a completely new machine, rather than MS being nice about it. The license says you must affix the proof of authenticity to the exterior of the machine. Upgrading the CPU which may well mean a new motherboard & RAM, which implies a new graphics card controller if you are using an integrated controller rather than a plug-in card, and may necessitate a complete reinstall - from the OS's perspective this looks no different to having been reinstalled on a complete new machine rather than an "upgraded one" where the upgrade happens to cover a large chunk of the components.
But you really shouldn't have to reboot to switch devices.
Video devices are not something that has previously been needed to be "hot swappable" so unlike many other things the driver model for graphics hardware probably doesn't allow for devices to be turned on and off. In the case of your Intel/nVida combo I'm guessing that the BIOS enabled one or the other at boot and relied on Windows to detect this and switch drivers on next start. While Windows can work with two distanct graphics cards of different types they both need to be running at boot and until shutdown. I'm guessing that this is implemented in such a way as Windows doesn't actually see a device change but instead just sees it as a monitor change (if that) so this will only work with nVidia chips for both low power and high power use (so Windows can use the same driver for each and the driver+chipset sort out sending work to the right place with out any help from the rest of the OS).
Yep. Mine halves the core and memory clocks when full 3D power is not required (or at least it claims to). Though it still see the need to have its cooling fans going on minimum during normal operation so either this doesn't save as much power as I think it should or the fans don't actually have an "off" state (or my case's airflow is insufficient, though I do not believe that to be the case as nothing gets ridiculously hot under prolonged heavy load).
Not everyone subscribes to the idea that they MUST purchase the latest and greatest OS for their hardware. I don't believe that thinking "I'm not going to blow $100 on an upgrade I DON'T NEED or I CAN'T USE" is an esoteric reason at all. Step out of your reality distortion field.
I agree with you in general here (which is why my main Windows machine is still running XP - the only thing I might particularly want at this point is DX10/11 support and I'm not interested enough to pay £100 for that), but there is a mitigating factor here in that, IIRC, Apple themselves no longer support OSX10.4 as they only support the current and previous releases so you aren't getting security updates for the OS you currently run. Personally I would not wish to encourage the general public to run an OS that potentially has unpatched security vulnerabilities to run their machine connected to the Internet... This isn't just Apple bashing (I have no particular axe to grind, at least not one that is relevant to this discussion) - I would say the same for Ubuntu 7.04 or prior (aside from 6.06 for server use, as this is supported until June 2011), or by May this year Ubuntu 7.10.
Even if an application isn't multithreaded the OS is - so even running a single task a multicore processor will give you a performance boost.
Not quite. A single single-threaded process will not run faster on a multi-core processor (in fact it might run a little slower if the OS doesn't keep it running on the same core for the whole run, as jumping the task between cores uses L1 and L2 cache less efficiently) because the OS will not know how to try and split it up, but running multiple single-threaded tasks (i.e. your five instances of DeVeDe) will most likely benefit significantly (unless other bottlenecks such as I/O bandwidth/latency kick in).
Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of "IN 3D"!!!!!1!!!!!?
It seems to be that they think no one will go see any film unless it has IN 3D writ large at the end of the trailer and on every poster, and they the film makers think that some 3D element will somehow make their film great whether it is or not without being IN 3D.
I know such singleton action is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but I for one will make an effort to get through 2010 without seeing any film that shouts the IN 3D gimick in its pitch.
Please tell me I'm not the only one. Please tell me the average cinema goer isn't a Bay fan wanting nothing more than EXPLOSIONS IN 3D who is going to be suckered into thinking this new gimmick is what makes films great...
"DRAM is yesterday's news. SSDs are the future. And they cost a lot more than a pile of memory chips, therefore they must be better. Order fifty." -- Some PHB
SSDs are cheaper per Gb then DRAM. Compare the price of a 64Gb SSD to 64Gb with of decent DDR2/3 RAM. The per-Gb price difference is likely to grow too as SSD prices are falling more sharply than DRAM prices at the moment.
In order to appear as one storage device in Windows, SilverStone has needed to use some software to...
There is the turn off for me. If I were to use something like this I would want an OS agnostic solution. Of course that would mean the caching would have to be done at the block level rather than the file level so it might not be able to be as bright (a block level cache manager wouldn't know to deallocate space on the SSD immediately when a file is deleted for instance), but it should be quite practical to design an algorithm that keeps the most often used blocks in the cache (the SSD) without the whole thing being needless wiped first time you copy a massive data file in (you wouldn't want that 20Gb file to be written to the SSD first time it is laid down, at the expense of dropping blocks frmo OS startup files and such, in case it is hardly ever accessed again - for instance an image of a blueray disc that you are copying to another disc would not want to touch the cache as it'll probably be written one, read once then wiped. How this block-based cache management algorithm would work in detail is left as an exercise for the reader...
Even speaking as a non-America, I can appreciate why the even was so important in the minds of the people that where there, saw it on the news, or at least were alive, at the time - and it is not a purely American phenominon by any means. I was only 5 at the time so barely remember the actual event in a "first person" way (I'd have been more interested in dinosaurs at the time, rather than space exploration, and remeber more vivdly that we were snowed out of school due to an unusually cold winter that year) but for children a little older (or just more interested in space at that age) these people where what they wanted to be - they were their heros doing what they aspired to do. For the elder youngsters the "teacher in space" thing was something new, something that had never been done before, something that was therefore an acheivement of their era. For the adults of the audience this launch was special because someone more "normal" was going up, a teacher rather than a test pilot of scientist, bringing the age of space closer to the reach (or so it would have felt) of the common person, making her a hero (or at very least a significant figurehead) to joe public young and old alike.
It isn't just that those seven people were special in some way that the even gets such treatment - it is that the mission, had it gone as planned, was destined to be special for other (obviously better) reasons and those seven people would still have gone down in history (no pun intended) particularly the teacher. The event punctured people's colletive confidence in our abilities and technology, "our" there being both the whole of those parts of the world that were watching and the American public more specifically. For those that get "mawkish" to use your word, the thoughts they have on the subject are usually (to my mind) as much about what the launch and subsequent mission could have been and could have represented in the long term as they are about what the event actually was (an expensive explosion that took out seven highly trained people and some of the world's dreams).
If I leave Slashdot open all night, nothing bad happens. If I leave a long Facebook tab open all night, I have to close it before I can use my browser in the morning, even on my shiny new 4GB RAM system, let alone on my 1GB machines. If they want to improve the user experience, they should try cleaning up their crap Javascript.
I've noticed similar things, though in the general case I thing Firefox (much as I like it, it is still my browser of choice) and/or its Javascript sub-system may be to blame, at least in part, here. The key difference between slashdot and most facebook pages it that slashdot does nothing unless you activley use it, but most facebook pages perform automatic updates to refresh relative posting times (the "x minutes/hours ago") that are displayed and to check for (& display if found) new posts. I suspect that the issue is one of memory fragmentation due to the constant allocation and deallocation of resources for new/changed objects (in the DOM structure, the JS environment's structures, or both) which over time makes the job of the garbage collector and memory allocation routines harder and harder. Once it seems to get into a state where this is an issue updating, navigating too, or navigating from, any relatively complex page or opening/closing a tab/window incurs a noticeable lag during which the processor (well, one core there-of as FF is resolutely single threaded for the time being unless you count certain development trees) is busy).
This is most noticeable on a slower system such as an Atom based netbook. Once the issue is noticeable simply closing FF (with "close and save" so open windows/tabs are remembered) and restarting it brings things back to a better level of responsiveness.
Having said that, I can't blame just internal memory fragmentation in FF for the FaceBook "pop-out" chat page, which always seems to consume 100% CPU time on my netbook (well, 50% - but on a single core hyper-threaded CPU like the Atom running a thread-unaware app like FF 50% is 100% of one virtual core which is effectively 100% as the chip doesn't really have two cores but most performance counters see that it has). This I suspect it due to FB chat updating its display *far* more often that it needs to resulting in excess re-draw operations, which make little difference with a quick desktop CPU but are much more apparent on a power-conservation-over-performance optimized arrangement. It gets worse over time (until restarting the browser), if I'm right due to growing memory fragmentation, but it consumes that sort of CPU time even on my Atom based machine even if it is the second window/tab opened since FF was started clean.
If your eee is anything like my Acer, the most noticeable speed problems with Ubuntu are due to the write speed of the internal SSD - I've got microSD cards that reliably write about three times faster (in fact I've got two of them plugged in and run the thing off a RAID0 array over them, and just use the internal SSD as a local backup location and for storing a couple of videos when I'm travelling). This is why it is rare to see SSD based netbooks at the moment, aside for the ones you get "free" when signing up for an expensive 3G contract, as the spinning disks write much faster and the other alternative (a better SSD) would be prohibitively expensive for the main target markets.
There are a number of things you can do to mitigate this though, especially if you have a little spare RAM to play with (though if you've got the stock 512Mb, you might be a little more limited there), particularly things like keeping FF3's profile in RAM (i.e. that sqlite DBs it writes large chunks too every time it loads a new page) except between boots.
You are right that it won't run well on this new device though. 128Mb of memory simply isn't enough for a standard Ubuntu desktop or UNR setup. To be frank I think you'd struggle to get much going these days on that little RAM even with a very basic Debian + X + minimal WM + simple browser. Sticking with Android which is presumably much better optimised for this sort of kit is probably your best bet.
Shouldn't BSkyB just get back whatever they paid EDS/HP for the project, e.g. £48 million? What's the rest of the £200 million/£700 million claim for?
Money spent: £48m
+ legal fees
+ other costs incurred during the project (project management and other staff time for planning/training/whatever within BSkyB)
+ money expected to be needed to implement a replacement or fix
+ money to cover the time and process of finding a new partner for said replacement/fix
+ losses considered to be due to the failed project, including difficult/impossible to financially assess issues such as reputation (it was a customer relations system that failed, after all)
+ anything else the contract seems to state they might be able claim for if they can prove the circumstances are right for them to do so
I don't know how EDS stays in business. Kickbacks to purchasing officers with no stake in the projects is my guess.
Government contracts for one thing. Hardly anyone (or no one) else of notable size bids for them most of the time as they simply don't want to deal with the red tape and other hassle (taking part in a procurement process can be very expensive in terms of time and effort, especially for large projects, especially for governments), so EDS get some fairly lucrative contracts due to being the only real contender in the procurement process.
I've worked alongside EDS (they managed the IT and other infrastructure for a company we did a pile of work for over the course of a few years) and I can tell you there are some very good people in there. A lot of chaff too, but that is the way of things (in a large organisation chaff that know they are chaff can hide behind others, and once found can be difficult to legally sack), and they often move at the speed of a snail with severe alcohol poisoning (again, this I saw as mainly a function of the size of the beast). I've never dealt with the sales or management teams though, so things could be very different up those parts. There did seem to be notable communication disconnects between some levels of management and the people doing the work (I can't comment on sales - I never had reason to deal with them at all).
If your employer's finances are so bad that not working 1-2 months of unpaid overtime will bankrupt them, I advise that you start looking for another job.
While most economies are starting to recover from recent event, decent well paying jobs are still thin on the ground. He may well be looking for alternative employment while working the current job. No point going until you've got somewhere to go to...
Or someone wanting to collect information that they might be able to sell to an operative working on behalf of the Chinese government/police. The right data can be very valuable if you can contact the right people to sell it to...
Ah, memories of having to sign up for, and have running, both "Games for Windows" and "
This sort of junk reduces my willingness to pay good money for games. Going to the pub or buying a cheap DVD are both much less hassle ways to spend a little free time...
I think it's harder to validate if someone is Malware free than identify what OS they're running via modem data, no? I keep thinking ICMP or nmap, but I'm sure there are legitimate ways since the ISP already has your data.
With a proper router (rather than just a USB modem) in a sensible default situation where by default nothing incoming gets passed the router unless it is a response to an outgoing connection, the most you will be able to tell from that sort of probe is a few things about the router.
When I think of trying to identify malware, how would you know without inspecting packets? does malware consistently spam traffic? I would assume not all the time on that.
You're right, it would not be easy. Obviously someone thinks that it is practical to try though, or the plan would not have been conceived in the first place.
I can think of a few things that, while far from infallible, would provide clues. Most ISPs here block outgoing port 25 except to their own smarthosts unless you have a business line - for ISPs their that do the same many connection attempts on port 25 to arbitrary places would be a clue. A small number of connections would not indicate much (a friend may have just connected to the household wireless, and his mail client doesn't know about the smarthost) but a large number, especially over a long period, would be a good indicator of a problem. Also attempts to contact certain known malware C&C hosts could flag the need to check, though this would require some sort of database of problem hosts/protocols/ports to be maintained by someone. Once we start getting into packet inspection territory then identifying potentially abusive HTTP requests (trying to brute force password guesses, or exploit known security flaws in common scripts) would be easy enough - though again this means someone somewhere maintaining a database of things to look. For all the above there *will* be false positives, so some sort of weighting system as used by many mail filters would be needed - either that or some manual intervention (but would be just as error prone if you try use untrained staff, so would be expensive to do right).
None of the above would catch malware while it is just sat monitoring keystrokes or inserting extra adverts into HTTP streams, of course.
Back to your port scanning and fingerprinting idea, some malware opens its own little security window once it gets itself installed - if incoming connections are accepted (so such openings are remotely contactable) this could be detected by the ISP. Holes opened in browsers would be harder to detect without messing about with HTTP responses in transit, which would be a technical and legal minefield. I suppose you could require that users visit some sort of "computer medical checkup" site every once in a while, but if badly done (even if well done) this could just open yet another phishing method (your checkup is due!!!! click here!!!!).
I've never heard people suggest that before, but the idea of "using open source = discount on your internet bill" is a good idea.
Nope. Market for software/services to try make a Windows machine actively running IE look to the outside like a Linux machine running FF/Konq in 3... 2...
I see hitting people's wallets as a good ides in another case though. Some will take the being cut off as a simple inconvenience and will after reconnection continue to behave as before and get cut off again after a couple of months - lather, rinse, repeat. Charging them a reconnection fee the second and subsequent time might be extra useful encouragement.
Your discount idea might be good if reversed though: Give people 5% discount if they stay malware free for, say, three months. Maybe offering a higher discount after a longer period (10% after 12 months?). This would hopefully encourage careful behavior (behaviour is the key, not just software choice - someone who is fooled into runnin random crap that secretly sends out junk mail on a Windows box will be just as likely to run the Linux/Mac/what-ever equivalent) from the outset, and might be popular with the ISPs as a user retention policy (if you move, you have to wait the few months to get your discount back) if the discount is managed on a per ISP basis. In any case the ISP would have to be very careful to be sure that the traffic they see is a problem, that it is properly logged/recorded (being careful not to step on any privacy laws that may be in effect over there) and that there is some sort of appeals process in place in case the system somehow misidentifies the source of a problem, otherwise they might be opening themselves to compensation claims down the line - which is all starting to sound like far too much hassle to me...
Slashdot Mirror
Muscle weighs more then fat. So the muscle bound meathead steroid junkie will be caught out by this more then the morbidly obese.
Which is just as much a choice as eating too much is in most cases, so said meathead's muscle weight is his problem just as my fat is my problem.
Airport and Airline staff have enough to deal with already without having a dimwitted, arrogant, idiot with a serious inferiority complex hopped up on testosterone laced steroids upset because he's been thrown in with the fatties.
Fair point, but should we really alter our rules just to cause less problems for people like that? Anyway, let him kick-off. Security have tazers these days and many tests on primates show that electric shocks are a way to encourage desired behaviour in future (for the humour impaired: that last part is more-or-less in jest, I did not intend to insult other primates by linking them to our meatheads). People keep behaving like that if they keep getting away with getting what they want by behaving like that.
In fact, they shouldn't be sorting passengers at all.
Because of the variation in people, the one-size-fits-all situation that currently exists is becoming unpleasant, if not completely impractical, for those next to the larger people that the size fits. Are their any fair ways of dealing with the issue? A limited number of larger seats? (the PC mob would come down on that as segregation) Making larger people buy two seats? (though I hope the arm rest between those two seats can be folded away!)
There are too many factors for this to be effectively sorted out so it isn't just an extra charge which will be abused by the airlines.
Well, they'll abuse us some other way anyway... Would not a straight set or weight benchmarks (for passenger and luggage) be more fair and transparent than more subjective measures? Of course it wouldn't be that simple, for your example of children they take less fuel (due to less mass) but take up a full seat and so forth.
If he was really too fat to fly they never should have sold him a ticket.
I understand the sentiment, but how would you implement that? Are you going to make people weigh in before they can buy a ticket? Going to rely on self reporting?
I've always thought that people should be counted in the weight allowance instead of just luggage. A bit porky like me? You get to bring less stuff (or pay more for the same stuff). Properly obese? You get even less. That and people who are for too large to fit in a single seat (with people to their sides being comfortable too) should be made to purchase the double seat they need.
Of course there are logistical complications to this. Firstly there is weight distribution between the passenger cabin and luggage hold which may affect the handling of the craft if most of the passengers are porkies with little luggage. And there is the issue of defining what constitutes too big for one seat. And finally there will be the people who cry like babies and moan that "it isn't my fault" - well it might not be (in which case get a medical cert and we'll consider some extra compassion) but it isn't the airline's fault either and it certainly isn't the fault of the other passengers who get less space between them because of your lardy presence. Another complication is what to do at the other end of the scale - it would be important not to encourage the "a stick of celery and half a tomato is more than enough for lunch" mob so there would need to be lower limit on the luggage gains (perhaps the weight distribution issue would be a legitimate reason for imposing this lower limit).
FYI: I'm a chunk overweight myself and not exactly getting any less so as time passes, and I would have no problem with getting a lower luggage allowance than someone of more healthy proportions. It seems quite fair to me: I want you to transport X kilograms of stuff from here to there which will use up Y amount of fuel, it just so happens that Z% of that mass is me and the heavy boots I prefer to wear. What's that? Xkg is over the total allowance and I'll have to pay a fee for the extra? Fair enough.
The license says you must affix the proof of authenticity to the exterior of the machine.
Does the license say how much they're going to pay me for advertising their crappy product on my pc case?
No it doesn't, at least as far as I know. As far as they are concerned, if you don't want to agree to their EULA then you are free to not use the software (whether you've paid for it or not). Not that I have the POA sticker for my desktop machine at home on the case mind, though the machines at work all do for the sake of obvious signs of compliance.
AC didn't say what his or her major was. I'd expect different computer competencies from a Computer Science major and a French Literature major.
I would expect anyone of decent intelligence and a little life experience to both know the value of keeping a backup on different media (preferably in a different location) and to have a fair idea where to turn if the lights do go out at the worst time (surely the AC knows or has access to some techie people - we aren't as rare as we once were any more). Then again, people often fail to meet expectations so maybe I've just shot down my own arguement.
If the system requirements say "an Internet connection", especially if the licensing agreement states the same requirement, and you don't have the resources to argue your case (through the legal system, arbitration, or some other channel) I'd say you are probably up a certain creak without access to the appropriate rowing equipment.
Caveat: I've not checked what the sysreqs or license say, I'm just speculating here.
Hell, Microsoft reauthorized my OEM copy of Vista Home Premium twice when I moved the install to a new system, in spite of the license saying they don't allow that. Awfully kind of them, I thought.
That comes down to it being difficult to tell the difference between a certain amount of upgrading and a completely new machine, rather than MS being nice about it. The license says you must affix the proof of authenticity to the exterior of the machine. Upgrading the CPU which may well mean a new motherboard & RAM, which implies a new graphics card controller if you are using an integrated controller rather than a plug-in card, and may necessitate a complete reinstall - from the OS's perspective this looks no different to having been reinstalled on a complete new machine rather than an "upgraded one" where the upgrade happens to cover a large chunk of the components.
But you really shouldn't have to reboot to switch devices.
Video devices are not something that has previously been needed to be "hot swappable" so unlike many other things the driver model for graphics hardware probably doesn't allow for devices to be turned on and off. In the case of your Intel/nVida combo I'm guessing that the BIOS enabled one or the other at boot and relied on Windows to detect this and switch drivers on next start. While Windows can work with two distanct graphics cards of different types they both need to be running at boot and until shutdown. I'm guessing that this is implemented in such a way as Windows doesn't actually see a device change but instead just sees it as a monitor change (if that) so this will only work with nVidia chips for both low power and high power use (so Windows can use the same driver for each and the driver+chipset sort out sending work to the right place with out any help from the rest of the OS).
Yep. Mine halves the core and memory clocks when full 3D power is not required (or at least it claims to). Though it still see the need to have its cooling fans going on minimum during normal operation so either this doesn't save as much power as I think it should or the fans don't actually have an "off" state (or my case's airflow is insufficient, though I do not believe that to be the case as nothing gets ridiculously hot under prolonged heavy load).
Not everyone subscribes to the idea that they MUST purchase the latest and greatest OS for their hardware. I don't believe that thinking "I'm not going to blow $100 on an upgrade I DON'T NEED or I CAN'T USE" is an esoteric reason at all. Step out of your reality distortion field.
I agree with you in general here (which is why my main Windows machine is still running XP - the only thing I might particularly want at this point is DX10/11 support and I'm not interested enough to pay £100 for that), but there is a mitigating factor here in that, IIRC, Apple themselves no longer support OSX10.4 as they only support the current and previous releases so you aren't getting security updates for the OS you currently run. Personally I would not wish to encourage the general public to run an OS that potentially has unpatched security vulnerabilities to run their machine connected to the Internet... This isn't just Apple bashing (I have no particular axe to grind, at least not one that is relevant to this discussion) - I would say the same for Ubuntu 7.04 or prior (aside from 6.06 for server use, as this is supported until June 2011), or by May this year Ubuntu 7.10.
Even if an application isn't multithreaded the OS is - so even running a single task a multicore processor will give you a performance boost.
Not quite. A single single-threaded process will not run faster on a multi-core processor (in fact it might run a little slower if the OS doesn't keep it running on the same core for the whole run, as jumping the task between cores uses L1 and L2 cache less efficiently) because the OS will not know how to try and split it up, but running multiple single-threaded tasks (i.e. your five instances of DeVeDe) will most likely benefit significantly (unless other bottlenecks such as I/O bandwidth/latency kick in).
Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of "IN 3D"!!!!!1!!!!!?
It seems to be that they think no one will go see any film unless it has IN 3D writ large at the end of the trailer and on every poster, and they the film makers think that some 3D element will somehow make their film great whether it is or not without being IN 3D.
I know such singleton action is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but I for one will make an effort to get through 2010 without seeing any film that shouts the IN 3D gimick in its pitch.
Please tell me I'm not the only one. Please tell me the average cinema goer isn't a Bay fan wanting nothing more than EXPLOSIONS IN 3D who is going to be suckered into thinking this new gimmick is what makes films great...
if I'm reading it right, it should still work but show two disks.
At which point you migth as well just plug the two drives directly into your main I/O controller and not bother with the extra device...
I'll be in stall 3. ...waiting.
wish I had mod points to mod you up :(
As funny or informative?
"DRAM is yesterday's news. SSDs are the future. And they cost a lot more than a pile of memory chips, therefore they must be better. Order fifty." -- Some PHB
SSDs are cheaper per Gb then DRAM. Compare the price of a 64Gb SSD to 64Gb with of decent DDR2/3 RAM. The per-Gb price difference is likely to grow too as SSD prices are falling more sharply than DRAM prices at the moment.
In order to appear as one storage device in Windows, SilverStone has needed to use some software to...
There is the turn off for me. If I were to use something like this I would want an OS agnostic solution. Of course that would mean the caching would have to be done at the block level rather than the file level so it might not be able to be as bright (a block level cache manager wouldn't know to deallocate space on the SSD immediately when a file is deleted for instance), but it should be quite practical to design an algorithm that keeps the most often used blocks in the cache (the SSD) without the whole thing being needless wiped first time you copy a massive data file in (you wouldn't want that 20Gb file to be written to the SSD first time it is laid down, at the expense of dropping blocks frmo OS startup files and such, in case it is hardly ever accessed again - for instance an image of a blueray disc that you are copying to another disc would not want to touch the cache as it'll probably be written one, read once then wiped. How this block-based cache management algorithm would work in detail is left as an exercise for the reader...
Even speaking as a non-America, I can appreciate why the even was so important in the minds of the people that where there, saw it on the news, or at least were alive, at the time - and it is not a purely American phenominon by any means. I was only 5 at the time so barely remember the actual event in a "first person" way (I'd have been more interested in dinosaurs at the time, rather than space exploration, and remeber more vivdly that we were snowed out of school due to an unusually cold winter that year) but for children a little older (or just more interested in space at that age) these people where what they wanted to be - they were their heros doing what they aspired to do. For the elder youngsters the "teacher in space" thing was something new, something that had never been done before, something that was therefore an acheivement of their era. For the adults of the audience this launch was special because someone more "normal" was going up, a teacher rather than a test pilot of scientist, bringing the age of space closer to the reach (or so it would have felt) of the common person, making her a hero (or at very least a significant figurehead) to joe public young and old alike.
It isn't just that those seven people were special in some way that the even gets such treatment - it is that the mission, had it gone as planned, was destined to be special for other (obviously better) reasons and those seven people would still have gone down in history (no pun intended) particularly the teacher. The event punctured people's colletive confidence in our abilities and technology, "our" there being both the whole of those parts of the world that were watching and the American public more specifically. For those that get "mawkish" to use your word, the thoughts they have on the subject are usually (to my mind) as much about what the launch and subsequent mission could have been and could have represented in the long term as they are about what the event actually was (an expensive explosion that took out seven highly trained people and some of the world's dreams).
If I leave Slashdot open all night, nothing bad happens. If I leave a long Facebook tab open all night, I have to close it before I can use my browser in the morning, even on my shiny new 4GB RAM system, let alone on my 1GB machines. If they want to improve the user experience, they should try cleaning up their crap Javascript.
I've noticed similar things, though in the general case I thing Firefox (much as I like it, it is still my browser of choice) and/or its Javascript sub-system may be to blame, at least in part, here. The key difference between slashdot and most facebook pages it that slashdot does nothing unless you activley use it, but most facebook pages perform automatic updates to refresh relative posting times (the "x minutes/hours ago") that are displayed and to check for (& display if found) new posts. I suspect that the issue is one of memory fragmentation due to the constant allocation and deallocation of resources for new/changed objects (in the DOM structure, the JS environment's structures, or both) which over time makes the job of the garbage collector and memory allocation routines harder and harder. Once it seems to get into a state where this is an issue updating, navigating too, or navigating from, any relatively complex page or opening/closing a tab/window incurs a noticeable lag during which the processor (well, one core there-of as FF is resolutely single threaded for the time being unless you count certain development trees) is busy).
This is most noticeable on a slower system such as an Atom based netbook. Once the issue is noticeable simply closing FF (with "close and save" so open windows/tabs are remembered) and restarting it brings things back to a better level of responsiveness.
Having said that, I can't blame just internal memory fragmentation in FF for the FaceBook "pop-out" chat page, which always seems to consume 100% CPU time on my netbook (well, 50% - but on a single core hyper-threaded CPU like the Atom running a thread-unaware app like FF 50% is 100% of one virtual core which is effectively 100% as the chip doesn't really have two cores but most performance counters see that it has). This I suspect it due to FB chat updating its display *far* more often that it needs to resulting in excess re-draw operations, which make little difference with a quick desktop CPU but are much more apparent on a power-conservation-over-performance optimized arrangement. It gets worse over time (until restarting the browser), if I'm right due to growing memory fragmentation, but it consumes that sort of CPU time even on my Atom based machine even if it is the second window/tab opened since FF was started clean.
If your eee is anything like my Acer, the most noticeable speed problems with Ubuntu are due to the write speed of the internal SSD - I've got microSD cards that reliably write about three times faster (in fact I've got two of them plugged in and run the thing off a RAID0 array over them, and just use the internal SSD as a local backup location and for storing a couple of videos when I'm travelling). This is why it is rare to see SSD based netbooks at the moment, aside for the ones you get "free" when signing up for an expensive 3G contract, as the spinning disks write much faster and the other alternative (a better SSD) would be prohibitively expensive for the main target markets.
There are a number of things you can do to mitigate this though, especially if you have a little spare RAM to play with (though if you've got the stock 512Mb, you might be a little more limited there), particularly things like keeping FF3's profile in RAM (i.e. that sqlite DBs it writes large chunks too every time it loads a new page) except between boots.
You are right that it won't run well on this new device though. 128Mb of memory simply isn't enough for a standard Ubuntu desktop or UNR setup. To be frank I think you'd struggle to get much going these days on that little RAM even with a very basic Debian + X + minimal WM + simple browser. Sticking with Android which is presumably much better optimised for this sort of kit is probably your best bet.
Shouldn't BSkyB just get back whatever they paid EDS/HP for the project, e.g. £48 million? What's the rest of the £200 million/£700 million claim for?
I don't know how EDS stays in business. Kickbacks to purchasing officers with no stake in the projects is my guess.
Government contracts for one thing. Hardly anyone (or no one) else of notable size bids for them most of the time as they simply don't want to deal with the red tape and other hassle (taking part in a procurement process can be very expensive in terms of time and effort, especially for large projects, especially for governments), so EDS get some fairly lucrative contracts due to being the only real contender in the procurement process.
I've worked alongside EDS (they managed the IT and other infrastructure for a company we did a pile of work for over the course of a few years) and I can tell you there are some very good people in there. A lot of chaff too, but that is the way of things (in a large organisation chaff that know they are chaff can hide behind others, and once found can be difficult to legally sack), and they often move at the speed of a snail with severe alcohol poisoning (again, this I saw as mainly a function of the size of the beast). I've never dealt with the sales or management teams though, so things could be very different up those parts. There did seem to be notable communication disconnects between some levels of management and the people doing the work (I can't comment on sales - I never had reason to deal with them at all).
If your employer's finances are so bad that not working 1-2 months of unpaid overtime will bankrupt them, I advise that you start looking for another job.
While most economies are starting to recover from recent event, decent well paying jobs are still thin on the ground. He may well be looking for alternative employment while working the current job. No point going until you've got somewhere to go to...
Or someone wanting to collect information that they might be able to sell to an operative working on behalf of the Chinese government/police. The right data can be very valuable if you can contact the right people to sell it to...
Ah, memories of having to sign up for, and have running, both "Games for Windows" and "
This sort of junk reduces my willingness to pay good money for games. Going to the pub or buying a cheap DVD are both much less hassle ways to spend a little free time...
I think it's harder to validate if someone is Malware free than identify what OS they're running via modem data, no? I keep thinking ICMP or nmap, but I'm sure there are legitimate ways since the ISP already has your data.
With a proper router (rather than just a USB modem) in a sensible default situation where by default nothing incoming gets passed the router unless it is a response to an outgoing connection, the most you will be able to tell from that sort of probe is a few things about the router.
When I think of trying to identify malware, how would you know without inspecting packets? does malware consistently spam traffic? I would assume not all the time on that.
You're right, it would not be easy. Obviously someone thinks that it is practical to try though, or the plan would not have been conceived in the first place.
I can think of a few things that, while far from infallible, would provide clues. Most ISPs here block outgoing port 25 except to their own smarthosts unless you have a business line - for ISPs their that do the same many connection attempts on port 25 to arbitrary places would be a clue. A small number of connections would not indicate much (a friend may have just connected to the household wireless, and his mail client doesn't know about the smarthost) but a large number, especially over a long period, would be a good indicator of a problem. Also attempts to contact certain known malware C&C hosts could flag the need to check, though this would require some sort of database of problem hosts/protocols/ports to be maintained by someone. Once we start getting into packet inspection territory then identifying potentially abusive HTTP requests (trying to brute force password guesses, or exploit known security flaws in common scripts) would be easy enough - though again this means someone somewhere maintaining a database of things to look. For all the above there *will* be false positives, so some sort of weighting system as used by many mail filters would be needed - either that or some manual intervention (but would be just as error prone if you try use untrained staff, so would be expensive to do right).
None of the above would catch malware while it is just sat monitoring keystrokes or inserting extra adverts into HTTP streams, of course.
Back to your port scanning and fingerprinting idea, some malware opens its own little security window once it gets itself installed - if incoming connections are accepted (so such openings are remotely contactable) this could be detected by the ISP. Holes opened in browsers would be harder to detect without messing about with HTTP responses in transit, which would be a technical and legal minefield. I suppose you could require that users visit some sort of "computer medical checkup" site every once in a while, but if badly done (even if well done) this could just open yet another phishing method (your checkup is due!!!! click here!!!!).
I've never heard people suggest that before, but the idea of "using open source = discount on your internet bill" is a good idea.
Nope. Market for software/services to try make a Windows machine actively running IE look to the outside like a Linux machine running FF/Konq in 3... 2...
I see hitting people's wallets as a good ides in another case though. Some will take the being cut off as a simple inconvenience and will after reconnection continue to behave as before and get cut off again after a couple of months - lather, rinse, repeat. Charging them a reconnection fee the second and subsequent time might be extra useful encouragement.
Your discount idea might be good if reversed though: Give people 5% discount if they stay malware free for, say, three months. Maybe offering a higher discount after a longer period (10% after 12 months?). This would hopefully encourage careful behavior (behaviour is the key, not just software choice - someone who is fooled into runnin random crap that secretly sends out junk mail on a Windows box will be just as likely to run the Linux/Mac/what-ever equivalent) from the outset, and might be popular with the ISPs as a user retention policy (if you move, you have to wait the few months to get your discount back) if the discount is managed on a per ISP basis. In any case the ISP would have to be very careful to be sure that the traffic they see is a problem, that it is properly logged/recorded (being careful not to step on any privacy laws that may be in effect over there) and that there is some sort of appeals process in place in case the system somehow misidentifies the source of a problem, otherwise they might be opening themselves to compensation claims down the line - which is all starting to sound like far too much hassle to me...