Not to mention that the streets of Silicon Valley are littered with the corpses of commercial operating systems that tried to take Microsoft on on their own turf (OS/2, BeOS, Novell, and others). Sometimes it's better not to wake the sleeping lion.
True, there's no escaping the speed of light. The biggest issue, however, isn't latency itself; it's the fact that TCP scales badly across high-latency connections - the transmitting host will send packets up to the maximum window size, and then spend so much time waiting for the ACK to come back such that big pipes don't get efficiently utilized. There are solutions available, both hardware-based and service-based, however, which proxy the TCP transmission for maximum throughput no matter what the latency is.
It would be nice if Wal-Mart did opt to pay what they would be paying for health insurance to the employee directly, but they don't. A lot of Wal-Mart employees barely make enough to feed their families, much less pay for private health insurance. That's why they qualify for Medicaid.
That's because in Europe (UK inclusive) everyone uses GSM, and every carrier has roaming agreements with practically everyone else. Here in the US it's technically impossible for T-Mobile's customers to roam on Verizon's or Sprint's networks. Gotta love competing standards!
...of a friend of mine who registered billgates.com way back in the day. He set up a website that showed the most recently received emails to the domain. Quite entertaining...a lot of people actually seemed to believe that emailing Bill with your sob story would result in a cash handout. Wacky.
Anyone have info on when we'll be seeing desktop/server motherboards that support the Core Duo? I'd love to be able to run a ultra-power-efficient server on it...
This would be very similar to what happened to legacy 680x0 apps when the first-gen Power Macs appeared on the scene - a 680x0 app would run much slower than a native PPC-compiled version, but because the PPC 601s had clock speeds that were twice that of the fastest 68040, most apps still ran faster on a Power Mac 6100 than they did on a Quadra 950. The exceptions were mostly 3D rendering apps, as the emulator didn't emulate the 040's FPU.
This is most likely due to the upcoming Intel transition. IE is written against the Carbon APIs (and most likely in CodeWarrior), which by all accounts (including Jobs himself) takes substantially more code refactoring to make Intel-compatible than a Cocoa application. IE simply looked at the dev costs of continued maintenance in light of making it Mactel compatible, and said "meh, it's not doing anything for us anyway". And they need those brains working on porting Office:mac, which actually does make MS money. Personally, I haven't launched IE on my Mac in months, so I doubt I'm going to miss it.
If they're going to automatically shut down accounts overnight, they should have staff on hand to immediately unfreeze said accounts as soon as it's determined that it's legit. I can understand paranoia, as long as the wrongs can be righted quickly and expeditiously. Apparently that is Paypal's failure.
Another big factor is the ubitiqousness of GSM in Europe, which means that any phone can roam on anyone's tower, assuming roaming agreements are in place - you don't have several incompatible standards like you do in the US. This also allows commercial buildings to install GSM amps/repeaters, which increases indoor signal quality dramatically for every mobile inside - you'd need a box that speaks GSM, CDMA, TDMA, and whatever-the-hell-Nextel-uses to accomplish the same goal here.
Also, SIMs make it *much* easier to switch carriers in Europe, which means more competition, which means shorter contracts, lower prices, and better customer service. Oh yeah, and cooler phones.
64kbps is the technical limit of vanilla GPRS. However, T-Mobile is pretty far along with their EDGE rollout in most metro areas - here in Atlanta I have to go outside the perimeter before I lose EDGE coverage. Real-world transfer rates are in the 80-100kbps range almost everywhere I've checked where I have more than one bar. Check this forum for user's reports.
AFAIK T-Mobile is waiting for the deployment to be completed before they begin marketing the service, but there's not going to be any additional charges for it beyond what they charge for GPRS today. They have just begun to sell the v330, which has EDGE support (I use an unlocked v551).
As far as T-Mobile's coverage, I will note that the higher-frequency band (they're on 1800 or 1900MHz in the US, Cingular uses 850) does cause the signal to drop out sooner inside buildings than Cingular's - for some reason it happens a lot in supermarkets - due to faster attenuation of higher-frequency signals. But other than that, I don't have problems in metro areas. Rural/suburban areas are a different story, I've heard...
Most VoIP customers use cable internet, not DSL. And probably cancelled their land line. I use Vonage on my DSL line, but only because I got the DSL "bare", without having to buy dialtone from BellSouth on the line.
One factoid: phone companies are required to allow one to dial 911 on any phone line, whether it's active or not. So even if you cancel your phone service, you can still make a 911 call on the pair even if you don't have dialtone. Same deal with cellphones...any cellphone tower will take a 911 call from any compatible (GSM, DCMA, etc) phone in the area regardless of what provider it's subscribed to.
Oh, and don't forget, thanks to various legislative and FCC actions, the LEC doesn't have to let any other ISP have access to the DSLAM. No Speakeasy for you!:/
IIRC, Apple's plans for the retail Mactel boxes include a custom BIOS. The reason the existing dev release is so easy to run on generic PCs is that the dev kit boxes use a standard PC BIOS; once the "real" Mactel machines are moved to a custom BIOS, I would make an uninformed guess that getting it to boot on a generic PC with a standard BIOS would be much more difficult.
Can someone who knows more about BIOS foo comment on this? I'm curious myself...
I think the point isn't so much that Apple hardware is more reliable, as in less prone to hardware failures; it's that because Apple tightly controls the hardware *specifications*, you don't have the dozens to hundreds of hardware configurations that have all their own quirks that Apple has to worry about supporting. Thus, fewer, better-tested hardware drivers, and more reliable software.
Slashdot Mirror
Or rather, broken hardware, bad drivers, or spyware/trojans/bots...
Not to mention that the streets of Silicon Valley are littered with the corpses of commercial operating systems that tried to take Microsoft on on their own turf (OS/2, BeOS, Novell, and others). Sometimes it's better not to wake the sleeping lion.
True, there's no escaping the speed of light. The biggest issue, however, isn't latency itself; it's the fact that TCP scales badly across high-latency connections - the transmitting host will send packets up to the maximum window size, and then spend so much time waiting for the ACK to come back such that big pipes don't get efficiently utilized. There are solutions available, both hardware-based and service-based, however, which proxy the TCP transmission for maximum throughput no matter what the latency is.
It would be nice if Wal-Mart did opt to pay what they would be paying for health insurance to the employee directly, but they don't. A lot of Wal-Mart employees barely make enough to feed their families, much less pay for private health insurance. That's why they qualify for Medicaid.
That's because in Europe (UK inclusive) everyone uses GSM, and every carrier has roaming agreements with practically everyone else. Here in the US it's technically impossible for T-Mobile's customers to roam on Verizon's or Sprint's networks. Gotta love competing standards!
...of a friend of mine who registered billgates.com way back in the day. He set up a website that showed the most recently received emails to the domain. Quite entertaining...a lot of people actually seemed to believe that emailing Bill with your sob story would result in a cash handout. Wacky.
10.5 is "Leopard".
I say that because this is the first incident ever being reported where an SSL cert was obtained illegitimately.
Um, no.
Anyone have info on when we'll be seeing desktop/server motherboards that support the Core Duo? I'd love to be able to run a ultra-power-efficient server on it...
Someone's webhosting career melted...
This would be very similar to what happened to legacy 680x0 apps when the first-gen Power Macs appeared on the scene - a 680x0 app would run much slower than a native PPC-compiled version, but because the PPC 601s had clock speeds that were twice that of the fastest 68040, most apps still ran faster on a Power Mac 6100 than they did on a Quadra 950. The exceptions were mostly 3D rendering apps, as the emulator didn't emulate the 040's FPU.
Oh, as if that's never happened before...
This is most likely due to the upcoming Intel transition. IE is written against the Carbon APIs (and most likely in CodeWarrior), which by all accounts (including Jobs himself) takes substantially more code refactoring to make Intel-compatible than a Cocoa application. IE simply looked at the dev costs of continued maintenance in light of making it Mactel compatible, and said "meh, it's not doing anything for us anyway". And they need those brains working on porting Office:mac, which actually does make MS money. Personally, I haven't launched IE on my Mac in months, so I doubt I'm going to miss it.
...um, don't forget there's no IE for Linux to begin with...
No need - your IPv6-enabled DSL/cable modem will contain a Router Advertisement Daemon that takes care off all that for you.
It's very easy to record multiple tracks as a single mp3 in iTunes...look ma, no gaps!
If they're going to automatically shut down accounts overnight, they should have staff on hand to immediately unfreeze said accounts as soon as it's determined that it's legit. I can understand paranoia, as long as the wrongs can be righted quickly and expeditiously. Apparently that is Paypal's failure.
Why not .tar them? It takes far less time to untar than to unzip, and the file size is the same...
Another big factor is the ubitiqousness of GSM in Europe, which means that any phone can roam on anyone's tower, assuming roaming agreements are in place - you don't have several incompatible standards like you do in the US. This also allows commercial buildings to install GSM amps/repeaters, which increases indoor signal quality dramatically for every mobile inside - you'd need a box that speaks GSM, CDMA, TDMA, and whatever-the-hell-Nextel-uses to accomplish the same goal here.
Also, SIMs make it *much* easier to switch carriers in Europe, which means more competition, which means shorter contracts, lower prices, and better customer service. Oh yeah, and cooler phones.
Not that I'm jealous.
64kbps is the technical limit of vanilla GPRS. However, T-Mobile is pretty far along with their EDGE rollout in most metro areas - here in Atlanta I have to go outside the perimeter before I lose EDGE coverage. Real-world transfer rates are in the 80-100kbps range almost everywhere I've checked where I have more than one bar. Check this forum for user's reports.
AFAIK T-Mobile is waiting for the deployment to be completed before they begin marketing the service, but there's not going to be any additional charges for it beyond what they charge for GPRS today. They have just begun to sell the v330, which has EDGE support (I use an unlocked v551).
As far as T-Mobile's coverage, I will note that the higher-frequency band (they're on 1800 or 1900MHz in the US, Cingular uses 850) does cause the signal to drop out sooner inside buildings than Cingular's - for some reason it happens a lot in supermarkets - due to faster attenuation of higher-frequency signals. But other than that, I don't have problems in metro areas. Rural/suburban areas are a different story, I've heard...
That would be the PPG Wave, although I believe only the oscillators were digital; the filters were still analog.
Most VoIP customers use cable internet, not DSL. And probably cancelled their land line. I use Vonage on my DSL line, but only because I got the DSL "bare", without having to buy dialtone from BellSouth on the line.
One factoid: phone companies are required to allow one to dial 911 on any phone line, whether it's active or not. So even if you cancel your phone service, you can still make a 911 call on the pair even if you don't have dialtone. Same deal with cellphones...any cellphone tower will take a 911 call from any compatible (GSM, DCMA, etc) phone in the area regardless of what provider it's subscribed to.
Oh, and don't forget, thanks to various legislative and FCC actions, the LEC doesn't have to let any other ISP have access to the DSLAM. No Speakeasy for you! :/
IIRC, Apple's plans for the retail Mactel boxes include a custom BIOS. The reason the existing dev release is so easy to run on generic PCs is that the dev kit boxes use a standard PC BIOS; once the "real" Mactel machines are moved to a custom BIOS, I would make an uninformed guess that getting it to boot on a generic PC with a standard BIOS would be much more difficult.
Can someone who knows more about BIOS foo comment on this? I'm curious myself...
I think the point isn't so much that Apple hardware is more reliable, as in less prone to hardware failures; it's that because Apple tightly controls the hardware *specifications*, you don't have the dozens to hundreds of hardware configurations that have all their own quirks that Apple has to worry about supporting. Thus, fewer, better-tested hardware drivers, and more reliable software.