My trajectory was Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu. There was also a brief flirtation with Gentoo that was simultaneous with the latter part of the SUSE phase. My first Slackware install was in 1993.
Or, for that matter, with computer servers. Just about any device that consumes electricity will heat your house as efficiently as any other; the exceptions are heat pumps, which can be more efficient because they move heat from outside to inside. Air conditioners are simply heat pumps run in reverse.
I have a small unheated room in my house that I want to keep from freezing in the winter. I move my media server there for the season. It doesn't produce enough heat to keep the room WARM but it does keep it well above freezing, and thus prevents damage to the things stored there.
I think that the US has surpassed the UK in bottled beer at the high end; cheap beers like Budweiser and Watney's Red Barrel are swill no matter where you drink them. But there are some nice bottled products coming from across the pond. The UK remains strong in draught beer; any pub worth its salt will have at least one cask-conditioned ale as well as other decent choices on tap.
Your beer is warm by American standards, where the misguided fashion is to serve it at temperatures just above freezing. (Some better bars do get it right; if you're drinking at home and have to keep the beer in the fridge rather than the cellar remember to take it out for a bit before drinking.) And it's also less carbonated than American beer typically is. To be honest, I think most of our brewers go overboard with that and you Brits have it right.
If you live alone or your family only has one car, it's unlikely that an EV will suit your needs. There are too many use cases where the range is inadequate. Some people only need a car with more range a couple of times a year; they might be able to buy an EV and rent a suitable car for the rare long trips, or trade cars with a friend.
Families or other household groups with two or more cars are good candidates for EVs. They probably can't replace all their cars, but they could probably replace ONE of them. It would require more flexibility of car use than some couples have, as the primary EV driver might need to trade cars with the other member of the couple once in a while.
The "odd" sample rates of 88.2 and 176.4 are for easier downsampling to 44.1 for CD release. There was a time when that made a significant difference in final quality. Increasing computing power has made the use of high quality downsampling more feasible so it doesn't matter so much any more, but it may still make a small difference.
SACD is also designed around a very high multiple of 44.1. SACD releases that have been converted to high-resolution PCM (see HDTracks.com, they have quite a few for sale) are offered at 88.1 or 176.2 sampling rather than 96 or 192 because that preserves the original recording quality as much as possible. A large percentage of the high resolution tracks being offered online were originally mastered either for SACD or DVD-Audio release; the latter are either 96 or 192 because those are the usual sample rates used on DVD-Audio, although the format also supports 88.2 and 176.4.
According to TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/microsoft-sold-450-million-copies-of-windows-7/), Microsoft sold 450 million copies of Windows 7 in the two year period following its launch. That's 225 million a year. (There may have been a few residual sales of older versions as well.) The cost of a copy of Windows varies wildly depending on which version is it and how you get it; there are full retail copies, retail upgrades, Windows Anytime upgrades, System Builder copies, agreements with large OEMs, and volume licensing for corporations. The last two account for the vast majority of Windows sales.
Even if we assume a conservative $50/copy as the average price of Windows (the actual number is uncertain but likely to be higher; the price that large system manufacturers pay for Windows is not publicly disclosed), that adds up to over $11 billion a year. That would be a LOT of money for Microsoft to leave on the table. The software store would have to be incredibly profitable to make up for that loss of revenue.
Giving people the right to buy something even if the seller doesn't want to offer it is one of the basic tenets of utility regulation. For example, historically we required the phone company to offer phone service to every customer in a community they serve, and we still impose similar requirements on electric utilities. The FCC has no such requirements for cable companies but local governments often do.
Telecommunications is a business where the cost of infrastructure (both the dollar cost of putting it in and the disruption caused by installing it) is sufficiently high so that it is a natural monopoly (or at least a natural trust) business. The cost of entry is high, and therefore the number of providers available in a community will always be small; in rural and poor neighborhoods that number will be even smaller.
All telecommunication companies have certain economic interests in common that are inherent to the nature of the business, so in an unregulated market we can EXPECT them to censor content that advocates causes that are contrary to their economic interests, and services that compete with their own services. For example, if Comcast's network gets congested I fully expect that NBC.com will stream well, and ABC.com, CBS.com, FOX.com, etc. will not, because Comcast and NBC are owned by the same company - that is, unless we have regulation that forbids them from giving preferential treatment to their own web properties.
Libertarian theory is based on markets where the cost of entry is low; the key assumption is that if consumer needs are unfilled, new companies will emerge to serve them. A few economists have acknowledged that the theory breaks down in markets with a high cost of entry, and that regulation may be the lesser evil for such markets. To me it is clear that telecommunications is such a market.
A further argument in favor of regulating telecommunications companies is that they are granted special access to scarce public resources. Wired companies have the right to string cables on public easements (telephone poles that are placed on property that they do not own) and under public streets (again property they do not own). Wireless companies are using radio spectrum, which is a scarce resource that all societies regulate. In some cases they paid large sums of money in spectrum auctions, but even then the auctions had stipulations that were meant to assure that the spectrum would be used for the public good; the companies do not have unencumbered ownership of that spectrum. (Wireless companies also make significant use of wired infrastructure, which they either install themselves under these same privileges or lease from companies that have those privileges.) Requiring that they give something back in exchange for their privilege is reasonable government policy.
So far the government hasn't tried to do that with Social Security, but private companies do it all the time when they shed pension obligations and retiree health benefits when they're in Chapter 11. This amounts to making the employees and former employees take a retroactive pay cut - the value of those pensions was part of the package they agreed to when they took the job.
The companies argue that "we can't meet those obligations and stay in business". Fine then, don't stay in business; liquidate the company to fund the pensions. Keeping companies operating shouldn't be sacrosanct; requiring companies to fulfill their promises to employees SHOULD be.
The unlocked Galaxy Nexus from the Google Play store fills the bill. It has pentaband HSPA+ coverage (800, 900, 1700, 1900, and 2100MHz) so it will work on every HSPA+ carrier in the world, so far as I know. No quad core, sorry, but the dual core CPU is pretty snappy and the 720p OLED display is nice.
Boost has much better data service now. Two years ago Boost was using the old Nextel IDEN network, which meant a very limited selection of phones and 2G data speeds. Current Boost phones are CDMA on the main Sprint network (they have to be, IDEN is about to be decommissioned) so you at least get Sprint 3G data speeds (not great but better than what they had before) and one Boost phone (HTC EVO Design 4G) also has WiMAX 4G in places served by the Clearwire network. The plan with 2.5GB of full-speed data service and unlimited everything else is $50/month, gradually declining to $35/month if you stay on for a year and a half.
I'm one of the curmudgeons who doesn't pin applications to the taskbar. I've never liked conflating shortcuts to launch applications with icons for running ones; I didn't like it when Mac OS X did it and I didn't like it when Windows 7 copied the idea. One of the first things I do with a copy of Windows 7 is reinstall the Quick Launch toolbar. Fortunately you can still bring it back in the preview versions of Windows 8; I haven't heard whether that it still true in the RTM version.
And Canonical with Unity. I think they've actually come closer to a UI that works for both touch and mouse than the others have, but it's still an awkward compromise.
The first pre-release of Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 only did Metro apps. Perhaps because of pressure from the developer community, Microsoft backed down and enabled development of non-Metro applications in the free version.
Amazon already has an iPad app. They could easily do an Android app with the full capabilities of the Kindle Fire; they just haven't chosen to do it yet. The Kindle line isn't about making money on hardware; it's about delivering a sales device to people and then making money on those sales. Amazon likes the idea of the Kindle because they're the only seller there, but their store is strong and will be able to sell media (as well as physical goods) on other platforms. I have no interest in a closed tablet platform like the Kindle Fire but I might be persuaded to get an Amazon Prime subscription for my Nexus 7 if they offered it.
The main danger to Amazon is that the hardware companies could choose to make it difficult or impossible for them to do so. Apple has total control over what can be offered on the App Store and could withdraw approval of the Amazon app. Microsoft appears to be planning a similar model for the Surface. Android is the one space where Amazon appears to be safe. Google can't close Android to outside developers without destroying its unique selling proposition; Android's openness to everyone is a big factor in people choosing the platform.
Barnes and Noble is in a more difficult position. They don't have as much to offer as a merchant (they're doing fine with books but they don't have the other media content that Amazon does, let alone the physical goods), so it's not clear whether they can survive on platforms that are also open to other sellers. One possible survival path for B&N would be to use their strong academic ties to become a specialist in publishing e-textbooks.
Another option for dealing with the mess of payroll taxes is to outsource payroll to a specialized provider such as ADP. That also gets you direct deposit, which many employees like.
To be fair to the Quickbooks fans, Intuit also offers payroll services and they integrate easily with Quickbooks.
I don't think LeGuin can be characterized as underappreciated, especially given her popularity in lit-fic and academic circles. Two of the other names I've seen here, Philip K Dick and Samuel Delany, have also gotten huge amount of attention from "serious" readers and therefore don't qualify.
A director shouldn't be under desks on a daily basis. But he might do it to teach new hires, to fix the CEO's computer (which will contain especially sensitive data, or at least data he THINKS is sensitive, so he might prefer having a senior person work on it), or if something breaks before his staff is in for the day or after they leave.
I'm guessing it won't be nine hours, probably more like 7.5. The Hobbit is expected to be a more child-friendly film series than LoTR so I expect they targeted a shorter run length; 2.5 hours per film would be in the same neighborhood as the later films in the Harry Potter series.
Er.... road trip? I can definitely see a reason to have more than one movie on the tablet, and I would have loved to see an SD slot for that reason. I can see leaving it off the cheap version, but throwing it into the upsell 16GB tablet would have made it even more appealing.
56K modems (V.90 and V.92) depend on supporting equipment at the telco's central office, as well as requiring the ISP to have a special digital connection to the CO at their end. Basically, it works by using digital transmission from the ISP to your CO, and then analog just on your subscriber loop.
The problem is that in the remote areas where people still depend on dialup, the central offices often aren't equipped for digital data. (Or at least they weren't back in the days when people were adopting 56K modems.) If you are using your modem from a phone that connects to a CO that doesn't accept digital (in which case the D/A conversion is done farther down the connection) the 56K modem has to fall back to analog-based standards (most likely V.34bis) which have a maximum data rate of 33Kbps and less over noisy lines.
Disclosure: I worked for a modem company back in the 90s.
We know that women have had breasts for a long time. We even know that people have enjoyed looking at them, both from the bawdy songs of the Renaissance and from the fashions. The style that modern reenactors call "boobs on a plate" would be pointless unless breasts were a point of visual interest. We also know that supporting the breasts has been done for a while; corsets and tight bodices both perform that function. Corsets, by nipping in the waist, also serve to enhance the womanly shape; women (on average) have more contrast between waist and hip size than men do and corsets exaggerate that contrast. But that's another discussion.
What we had no evidence of was any undergarment resembling a modern bra - that is, something with cups to support the breasts and shoulder straps to hold up the whole thing. Based on the evidence, we had to assume that only bodices and corsets were used to support the bosom. Now, for the first time, we have a historical example of another kind of support garment. This is certainly of interest to fashion historians and reenactors - and if you don't think that reenactors are nerds, just talk to one some time.
It's not surprising that IE9 uses the least memory for one tab. Because of its privileged place in the OS (some of the code is also used for other purposes), a lot of its code is already in memory before you even launch it, so the incremental cost of opening that first tab is reduced.
The last version of "classic" Eudora was released in 2006. Since then there has been Eudora OSE which is really a reskinned version of Thunderbird, and that project has also been dead for a couple of years. The most recent version was based on Thunderbird 3.
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My trajectory was Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu. There was also a brief flirtation with Gentoo that was simultaneous with the latter part of the SUSE phase. My first Slackware install was in 1993.
Or, for that matter, with computer servers. Just about any device that consumes electricity will heat your house as efficiently as any other; the exceptions are heat pumps, which can be more efficient because they move heat from outside to inside. Air conditioners are simply heat pumps run in reverse.
I have a small unheated room in my house that I want to keep from freezing in the winter. I move my media server there for the season. It doesn't produce enough heat to keep the room WARM but it does keep it well above freezing, and thus prevents damage to the things stored there.
I think that the US has surpassed the UK in bottled beer at the high end; cheap beers like Budweiser and Watney's Red Barrel are swill no matter where you drink them. But there are some nice bottled products coming from across the pond. The UK remains strong in draught beer; any pub worth its salt will have at least one cask-conditioned ale as well as other decent choices on tap. Your beer is warm by American standards, where the misguided fashion is to serve it at temperatures just above freezing. (Some better bars do get it right; if you're drinking at home and have to keep the beer in the fridge rather than the cellar remember to take it out for a bit before drinking.) And it's also less carbonated than American beer typically is. To be honest, I think most of our brewers go overboard with that and you Brits have it right.
If you live alone or your family only has one car, it's unlikely that an EV will suit your needs. There are too many use cases where the range is inadequate. Some people only need a car with more range a couple of times a year; they might be able to buy an EV and rent a suitable car for the rare long trips, or trade cars with a friend.
Families or other household groups with two or more cars are good candidates for EVs. They probably can't replace all their cars, but they could probably replace ONE of them. It would require more flexibility of car use than some couples have, as the primary EV driver might need to trade cars with the other member of the couple once in a while.
The "odd" sample rates of 88.2 and 176.4 are for easier downsampling to 44.1 for CD release. There was a time when that made a significant difference in final quality. Increasing computing power has made the use of high quality downsampling more feasible so it doesn't matter so much any more, but it may still make a small difference. SACD is also designed around a very high multiple of 44.1. SACD releases that have been converted to high-resolution PCM (see HDTracks.com, they have quite a few for sale) are offered at 88.1 or 176.2 sampling rather than 96 or 192 because that preserves the original recording quality as much as possible. A large percentage of the high resolution tracks being offered online were originally mastered either for SACD or DVD-Audio release; the latter are either 96 or 192 because those are the usual sample rates used on DVD-Audio, although the format also supports 88.2 and 176.4.
4% of 1.2 billion people is still a large market.
They are indeed making a lot of money.
According to TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/microsoft-sold-450-million-copies-of-windows-7/), Microsoft sold 450 million copies of Windows 7 in the two year period following its launch. That's 225 million a year. (There may have been a few residual sales of older versions as well.) The cost of a copy of Windows varies wildly depending on which version is it and how you get it; there are full retail copies, retail upgrades, Windows Anytime upgrades, System Builder copies, agreements with large OEMs, and volume licensing for corporations. The last two account for the vast majority of Windows sales.
Even if we assume a conservative $50/copy as the average price of Windows (the actual number is uncertain but likely to be higher; the price that large system manufacturers pay for Windows is not publicly disclosed), that adds up to over $11 billion a year. That would be a LOT of money for Microsoft to leave on the table. The software store would have to be incredibly profitable to make up for that loss of revenue.
Giving people the right to buy something even if the seller doesn't want to offer it is one of the basic tenets of utility regulation. For example, historically we required the phone company to offer phone service to every customer in a community they serve, and we still impose similar requirements on electric utilities. The FCC has no such requirements for cable companies but local governments often do.
Telecommunications is a business where the cost of infrastructure (both the dollar cost of putting it in and the disruption caused by installing it) is sufficiently high so that it is a natural monopoly (or at least a natural trust) business. The cost of entry is high, and therefore the number of providers available in a community will always be small; in rural and poor neighborhoods that number will be even smaller.
All telecommunication companies have certain economic interests in common that are inherent to the nature of the business, so in an unregulated market we can EXPECT them to censor content that advocates causes that are contrary to their economic interests, and services that compete with their own services. For example, if Comcast's network gets congested I fully expect that NBC.com will stream well, and ABC.com, CBS.com, FOX.com, etc. will not, because Comcast and NBC are owned by the same company - that is, unless we have regulation that forbids them from giving preferential treatment to their own web properties.
Libertarian theory is based on markets where the cost of entry is low; the key assumption is that if consumer needs are unfilled, new companies will emerge to serve them. A few economists have acknowledged that the theory breaks down in markets with a high cost of entry, and that regulation may be the lesser evil for such markets. To me it is clear that telecommunications is such a market.
A further argument in favor of regulating telecommunications companies is that they are granted special access to scarce public resources. Wired companies have the right to string cables on public easements (telephone poles that are placed on property that they do not own) and under public streets (again property they do not own). Wireless companies are using radio spectrum, which is a scarce resource that all societies regulate. In some cases they paid large sums of money in spectrum auctions, but even then the auctions had stipulations that were meant to assure that the spectrum would be used for the public good; the companies do not have unencumbered ownership of that spectrum. (Wireless companies also make significant use of wired infrastructure, which they either install themselves under these same privileges or lease from companies that have those privileges.) Requiring that they give something back in exchange for their privilege is reasonable government policy.
So far the government hasn't tried to do that with Social Security, but private companies do it all the time when they shed pension obligations and retiree health benefits when they're in Chapter 11. This amounts to making the employees and former employees take a retroactive pay cut - the value of those pensions was part of the package they agreed to when they took the job. The companies argue that "we can't meet those obligations and stay in business". Fine then, don't stay in business; liquidate the company to fund the pensions. Keeping companies operating shouldn't be sacrosanct; requiring companies to fulfill their promises to employees SHOULD be.
The unlocked Galaxy Nexus from the Google Play store fills the bill. It has pentaband HSPA+ coverage (800, 900, 1700, 1900, and 2100MHz) so it will work on every HSPA+ carrier in the world, so far as I know. No quad core, sorry, but the dual core CPU is pretty snappy and the 720p OLED display is nice.
Boost has much better data service now. Two years ago Boost was using the old Nextel IDEN network, which meant a very limited selection of phones and 2G data speeds. Current Boost phones are CDMA on the main Sprint network (they have to be, IDEN is about to be decommissioned) so you at least get Sprint 3G data speeds (not great but better than what they had before) and one Boost phone (HTC EVO Design 4G) also has WiMAX 4G in places served by the Clearwire network. The plan with 2.5GB of full-speed data service and unlimited everything else is $50/month, gradually declining to $35/month if you stay on for a year and a half.
I'm one of the curmudgeons who doesn't pin applications to the taskbar. I've never liked conflating shortcuts to launch applications with icons for running ones; I didn't like it when Mac OS X did it and I didn't like it when Windows 7 copied the idea. One of the first things I do with a copy of Windows 7 is reinstall the Quick Launch toolbar. Fortunately you can still bring it back in the preview versions of Windows 8; I haven't heard whether that it still true in the RTM version.
And Canonical with Unity. I think they've actually come closer to a UI that works for both touch and mouse than the others have, but it's still an awkward compromise.
The first pre-release of Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 only did Metro apps. Perhaps because of pressure from the developer community, Microsoft backed down and enabled development of non-Metro applications in the free version.
Amazon already has an iPad app. They could easily do an Android app with the full capabilities of the Kindle Fire; they just haven't chosen to do it yet. The Kindle line isn't about making money on hardware; it's about delivering a sales device to people and then making money on those sales. Amazon likes the idea of the Kindle because they're the only seller there, but their store is strong and will be able to sell media (as well as physical goods) on other platforms. I have no interest in a closed tablet platform like the Kindle Fire but I might be persuaded to get an Amazon Prime subscription for my Nexus 7 if they offered it.
The main danger to Amazon is that the hardware companies could choose to make it difficult or impossible for them to do so. Apple has total control over what can be offered on the App Store and could withdraw approval of the Amazon app. Microsoft appears to be planning a similar model for the Surface. Android is the one space where Amazon appears to be safe. Google can't close Android to outside developers without destroying its unique selling proposition; Android's openness to everyone is a big factor in people choosing the platform.
Barnes and Noble is in a more difficult position. They don't have as much to offer as a merchant (they're doing fine with books but they don't have the other media content that Amazon does, let alone the physical goods), so it's not clear whether they can survive on platforms that are also open to other sellers. One possible survival path for B&N would be to use their strong academic ties to become a specialist in publishing e-textbooks.
Another option for dealing with the mess of payroll taxes is to outsource payroll to a specialized provider such as ADP. That also gets you direct deposit, which many employees like. To be fair to the Quickbooks fans, Intuit also offers payroll services and they integrate easily with Quickbooks.
I don't think LeGuin can be characterized as underappreciated, especially given her popularity in lit-fic and academic circles. Two of the other names I've seen here, Philip K Dick and Samuel Delany, have also gotten huge amount of attention from "serious" readers and therefore don't qualify.
A director shouldn't be under desks on a daily basis. But he might do it to teach new hires, to fix the CEO's computer (which will contain especially sensitive data, or at least data he THINKS is sensitive, so he might prefer having a senior person work on it), or if something breaks before his staff is in for the day or after they leave.
I'm guessing it won't be nine hours, probably more like 7.5. The Hobbit is expected to be a more child-friendly film series than LoTR so I expect they targeted a shorter run length; 2.5 hours per film would be in the same neighborhood as the later films in the Harry Potter series.
More like $1.50-$2. The socket itself costs around $1.50, and there might be some added cost to the case design for including it.
Er.... road trip? I can definitely see a reason to have more than one movie on the tablet, and I would have loved to see an SD slot for that reason. I can see leaving it off the cheap version, but throwing it into the upsell 16GB tablet would have made it even more appealing.
56K modems (V.90 and V.92) depend on supporting equipment at the telco's central office, as well as requiring the ISP to have a special digital connection to the CO at their end. Basically, it works by using digital transmission from the ISP to your CO, and then analog just on your subscriber loop. The problem is that in the remote areas where people still depend on dialup, the central offices often aren't equipped for digital data. (Or at least they weren't back in the days when people were adopting 56K modems.) If you are using your modem from a phone that connects to a CO that doesn't accept digital (in which case the D/A conversion is done farther down the connection) the 56K modem has to fall back to analog-based standards (most likely V.34bis) which have a maximum data rate of 33Kbps and less over noisy lines. Disclosure: I worked for a modem company back in the 90s.
We know that women have had breasts for a long time. We even know that people have enjoyed looking at them, both from the bawdy songs of the Renaissance and from the fashions. The style that modern reenactors call "boobs on a plate" would be pointless unless breasts were a point of visual interest. We also know that supporting the breasts has been done for a while; corsets and tight bodices both perform that function. Corsets, by nipping in the waist, also serve to enhance the womanly shape; women (on average) have more contrast between waist and hip size than men do and corsets exaggerate that contrast. But that's another discussion. What we had no evidence of was any undergarment resembling a modern bra - that is, something with cups to support the breasts and shoulder straps to hold up the whole thing. Based on the evidence, we had to assume that only bodices and corsets were used to support the bosom. Now, for the first time, we have a historical example of another kind of support garment. This is certainly of interest to fashion historians and reenactors - and if you don't think that reenactors are nerds, just talk to one some time.
It's not surprising that IE9 uses the least memory for one tab. Because of its privileged place in the OS (some of the code is also used for other purposes), a lot of its code is already in memory before you even launch it, so the incremental cost of opening that first tab is reduced.
The last version of "classic" Eudora was released in 2006. Since then there has been Eudora OSE which is really a reskinned version of Thunderbird, and that project has also been dead for a couple of years. The most recent version was based on Thunderbird 3.