If you really hate MS so much why are you running Windows in the first place to get upset about it? Install Ubuntu or buy a Mac and shut up.
Instead of their recent tendency of messing with my browser so they can get search revenue, why do they not fix their Windows boot loader so it will not overwrite my Grub menu? The exact problem is that MS plays favorites and interoperates only when it can profit from OSS installs.
PS: It's not unheard of to have Windows updates be interactive. WGA and the Malicious removal tools actively ask you to read EULAs before they continue. This tech can be used if they must mess with programs not directly created by them. The FF move is underhanded, but I'll admit that it's little known the Windows EULA forces the licensee to wave away any rights to deleting files from your PC and the like, without your consent.
The problem is these add-ons aren't installed with user privileges, but admin privileges. How would you have Mozilla fix this?
Easy! FF needed these same admin privileges to be installed at some point; programs routinely ask for elevation, and FF is just trying to play 'usermode' too much, without a general picture of general systems management. Put the now-standard API call that "elevates" my rights to do sys admin tasks in Windows, and presto.
By magically circumventing the permissions system in Windows?
If a virus can "magically circumvent permissions", to root a Windows machine just because the writers learn the Windows API better, then a legal program ain't trying hard enough. After all, the Windows API does allow for elevation in two ways that I know of. 1) Ask the user for a PW per change 2) Or, register a daemon at install time that runs without limitations, like Firewalls and Antispyware programs do.
In an inexact analogy, Kanji is an assembly language system with thousands of opcodes (~50,000); it's added to your tool-belt as you master the other 2 shortalphabets.
The alphabets lacking Kanji are only about 50 symbols each. By the time you hit first grade and Kanjis begin to be instructed (at a pace of ONLY a few per year,) kids have already mastered these basic 100 symbols.
While it is true that Anime is as big a time sink as watching hour-long live action on Hulu, you can benefit from children's anime (like Fairy Tail and Mahoujin Guru Guru) and blind rerunning where you try to make out words and grammar patterns without relying on the subtitles. Speech in kid's shows is always clearer, and written signs have plenty of non-kanji writings.
Eventually you'll find too many vectors to tackle, from college grammar books (pick one with plenty of Hiragana learning on it), a small physical dictionaries, western alphabet-based translators offline or online.
At some point of your trying vectors in parallel and listening to the language, many symbols and expressions start to show patterns and meanings beyond "it's too complicated to explain this untranslatable greeting in chapter 1 but essential to expose you to it." Have fun!
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP?
If anything, Windows Seven is new. Outside the corporate world the possibility of OS piracy is a lot more attractive to households. Households will be less tied by legacy reasons than corporations. If a kid down the block gets this new OS and your own kid likes what he sees over there, you're much closer to end up with it by the "cool kid on the block" factor. Vista's bad word-of-mouth was like an easy whore's: everyone on your block will curse you messing with her. Uncoolness defeated newness for Vista.
Eventually as new machines will have nothing but W7, and since there's no unclean stigma, other household buyers will begin to send you incompatible stuff and realize you're the probably the "last kid on the block" still on XP. The peer pressure will mount up, and though we know luddites running Windows 98 still exist, most people will just fork over the money and kill the software and hardware upgrade birds with one stone... and continue to be "cool."
Eventually, general consensus becomes that workplaces are "backwards" if our homes all have the "cool" Windows version and our businesses lack it. US Colleges upgrade because they don't want to seem behind the times, losing prospective students who want modern education and computing facilities. In other sectors, vice-presidents notice how old or "uncool" their work OS is compared to this Windows 7 they have on their new personal computers at home. They use plenty of excuses to pull their weight and demand their single desktop upgraded ahead of the pack. At some point IT is asked to make the organization match the VP's technology. Maybe IT heads were waiting for this edict all along because they have tested the new versions at home, legally or not. The company-wide upgrade goes through, pains and all.
Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.
Give me a washing machine, where there's only 2 or 3 knobs, and I'll assume stuff will never change. Computers, though, act like dynamic control panels so that every program can create its own experience and change it between versions. Move anything around and people assume their machine broke, and not that it was tweaked.
People tend to memorize the exact steps necessary to complete a task, including the appearance and location of buttons.
Well, this is how humans are taught to learn since preschool. We can memorize first, and analyze later, only there's never any drive to learn why things work / fail the moment you finish school.
The number of knobs and dials a physical control panel would need to emulate a modern word processor is huge. That said, I still hate GUI changes.
GUI designers love moving the damn things around to force training expenses upon us that ultimately help their own software companies. The designers are at fault for not balancing changes with usability, and assuming that mankind magically wipes the slate clean for every software release.
1. Find out you have cancer (or any other patented illness) 2. Sue patent owner. It's their "product" after all. 3. Profit!!!
Mod parent up! Bio-research companies would be shaking in their boots if this could be done.
Sometime in the last century, the crucial 1st step, called "observation" in the Scientific Method became just another greed-based megacorp business.
We can't "look," so we can't hypothesize, experiment, make conclusions and test the hypotheses... because someone else is allowed to own the genes that we all share. So why the hell can we not sue, then?
With Opera there's been Site Preferences for this for ages so I can get IPlayer and Youtube OK, and have the Enable Plugins Button on the status bar so I can toggle it on if required.
I understand, but turning flash off completely or whitelisting a complete page linking to tons of ad sites isn't very good.
BUT... I think you mean that site preferences blocks specific 3rd-party domains, so I'll install Opera on Ye Old Clunker and update my opinion of it. Thanks
Re:OK, so extensions...
on
Safari 5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you don't like the adverts on a site, don't go to the site. Just spare the couple of KB, and get the site you admittedly appreciate some revenue to offset the bandwidth costs they incur to give you the information you want.
Sadly, this was OK 10 years ago. These days, websites have 1-3 flash ads with unoptimized animations. The result is that my laptop heats up and performance degrades considerably even when I'm not watching the ad.
All my local OS's block a few like ads.doubleclick.net, clk.atdmt.com, qksrv.net and ads.x10.com.
Call me when you can point to an offending element in a webpage, and have the right-click menu say 'Put this domain in my hosts file'.
That is an awesome goal. Flash ads don't include source info like pictures, so you can't right-click. You actually have to view the HTML hoping to find the offending hyperlink to swf content other than your one desired flash video on the page.
Unfortunately, hostfiles blocks cause people to ask me why their browser is "broken." Out of IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox, only Safari gracefully hides the annoying "This page cannot be displayed [etc etc etc]" lines that replace every would-be advert blocked by my hostfile.
Re:Apparently it's even faster than Chrome 5
on
Safari 5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Man I love this relentless focus on browser speed over the past few years. If it keeps up for a little longer, I might even be able to browse Slashdot.
On a related note, to speed and compatibility, what about the acid test? My Windows Safari 4 scored 100, but about 5 tests are slow: 26 40 43 65 69. The last one completes after 102 attempts on my machine, which I hope is better now.
Mind you, this is a Dell single core XP SP2 machine, but Safari's engine should produce faster but scalable results. PS: Click on the "A" in acid3 to get the detailed result window. PPS: Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 got a 97/100 on the same machine, with twice as many slow tests as Safari 4, but only 47 attempts at test #69
Because drug cartels don't just sell drugs. They are well connected to illegal weapons trades and the corrupt government and military so that they can remain protected and functional.
A company doesn't care that the US consumes the product. They'll worry that the soil where their product is made is full of people powerful enough to raid their installations, at a cost in revenue to the US. A country without deep rooted and strong para-military groups and drug cartels will have a better chance of protecting the company investments in production lines that must run daily far away from the US.
Chrome does have adblocking now. Does it not work for you?
But the GP and I have a different belief:
If Chrome supported a proper adblocking solution, I'd never need another browser. And yes, I know they had an Adblock extension, but it still renders ads in the background. I want to stop the ads from being downloaded or rendered at all.
It seems your post contradicts our belief about the state of chrome adblocking. I have Chrome and Safari ready to mess around with --could you please give us the non-incomplete adblocking link?
It no longer makes sense to have WiFi-only apps now that AT&T has metered data usage. AT&T should actually *want* you to use videoconferencing and tethering, because they will make more money off of it.
Wrong. It is a misconception that millions of data-addicted old customers will suddenly pay for overage charges. Only AT&T's NEW contracts include the fees, so money won't be until iPhone 4 buyers enter their market in the next few weeks.
AT&T's exclusive carriership of the iPhone is ending soon. What will happen to AT&T when Verizon and others are allowed to share iPhone's carrier rights? The new fees are aimed at prepping business models and per-capita cashflow to offset their expected headcount loses.
In South America, we'd have to re-learn how to copy with a the "devil we don't know"
I meant to say "re-learn how to cope witht he devil we don't know" above. I meant how a different culture would be creative in their corruption efforts in ways that are different. The military and police tends help cover stuff up, and gray markets there will probably be worse than in China because conviction and death penalties are not very well feared in lat-Am.
Back on South America as a potential labor pool - China has 1.3 Billion people. India, which the same thing is happening to(and they're perhaps a bit further along), is 1.1 Billion. Wikipedia places the population of South America at around 385 Million, and it's quite a bit more developed than China, on average. Africa is right around a Billion, making it perhaps a better choice, but it's still got issues with stability.
South America's pool of 385 Million potential jobs will be significantly lower after US companies choose the best 1 or 2 out of just its dozen countries. Think China, India, and The Phillipines and how little away from these US investors have strayed. Plus, in Latin America, we hurt one country and many other physically close and relevant countries nearby will get mad at the US. If it's in Asia or Africa, we barely know country names besides the first-world countries. In South America, we'd have to re-learn how to copy with a the "devil we don't know" through government corruption / or 3rd shift gray market production line issues. At least we already know how it's done in China.
South Am. as a whole is a difficult package to choose from: one actively anti-US dictator with access to oil wells, one infamous drug exporting country, and anti-government armed forces in various countries that love taking hostages and threatening election candidates. Did I even mention moving away from Asia to our own continent means spending on *new* manufactoring instruction materials for workers dabbing in Spanish, Portuguese and smaller local indigenous tongues?
Apologies on the sucky grammar on my parent post. I also couldn't hyperlink properly to slashdot's sinkhole story --or whatever they're calling the process that eats the limestone ground from underneath poorly chosen sites.
it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell
We also have the Centralia mine fire, going since 1961 in Pennsylvania, US (39 years.)
With the possibility of more of this stuff happening (see the Guatemalan sinkholes trying to swallow buildings into huge underground caverns), I'm beginning to see a problem. If something happens in your town but I can't leave relocate for financial reasons, like the bad economy plaging us and how hard it is to find cheap housing or sell/buy another house, there could be a "calculated risk but I must live here anyway" trend as our environment breaks down all around.
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
Hey, isn't 10 years the deadline we heard a month ago, where the US government plans to move broadband minimums to 100Mbps?
I have a bad feeling about current capping trends and these forced bandwidth increases. Don't get me wrong, I know grandmothers who only read e-mails and maybe follow a youtube link.
The problem will be every media provider upping their stream minimum to HD or Blueray resolutions in the next ten years, without an appropriate cap re-evaluation on the billing side of the equation. Grandma won't know just how fast her new 100MB pipe is chugging along against her non-increasing cap.
No, no. Cache is orders of magnitude more expensive than RAM, and that is why we get very little. Since around 2007, the standard increased from 512K to 2MB - 6MB. I don't think you could cram even the annoyingly sneaky 256MB that Intel's graphic units steal from your RAM for video tasks and still have room for both functions.
This brings me to another point: Graphics "cache" must be more than 10MB video for even simple apps like Google Earth (specs are hard to find... here 16MB is the min.) Besides, CPU cache could not be upgraded yearly by just adding extra "RAM." The article's graphic even says they're still connected to System Memory, and I saw no mention of cache sizes... I suspect off-chip RAM access is their solution, just like Intel's.
Laugh all you want, but if AMD were actually solving the problem of cheaply adding 512MB to today's puny cache, in an already crammed multicore CPU, it would be fixing an entirely different problem for the industry. Yet, we're only talking about a graphics design and performance improvement in this story.
That said, intel integrated stuff sucks, and this model will at least improve AMD's competitive chances and save me in power costs.
Year 2010/11 tablets will be the new "netbook," but manufacturers are doing it all wrong. Seeing how nobody wants to use the iPad formula for size and lack of Windows OS, and the prices don't present any temptation to would-be netbook byers, the industry has again misunderstood what we needed.
iPad- lack of flash, and strict market with proprietary Apple software needed to transfer files. Mainstream windows users aren't impressed while power users await for flash alternatives. Price is $500+
Kno's "tablet" is too huge and heavy (5.5 pounds, mum on the extra battery weight) to be practical.
Archos 9 is not even advertised properly or present at important Best-buy type stores in New York city. The Bing link also shows the price around $475. Windows 7 "Starter" is not something I want as a portable OS, and an $80 upgrade to "Home Premium" to "unlock" features. I'll pass on Windows tablets --they probably $$$uck at natively opening office docs too.
The Dell Streak is also in the $500 range and is too damn small to promote book reading or movie watching.
I always hoped that the Apple premium would translate to inevitable competition with a slew of Dell tablets costing $200-$300. I guess the US economy killed that idea because everyone wants in on the new "Android-sy" $500 price ranges. The bad part is that contract-less android phones cost just as much as this new breed of full tablets.
Users in this "emerging" market of tablets and e-readers want alternatives here and now, but long term portability goes first or second in our decisions (we already have laptops and desktops.).. Kno is NOT something that can attract first time tablet buyers, because it is too niche-y due to lack of portability. The original 10 Commandment stone tablets were meant to be huge dual tablets... probably emulated well by this Kno waving it as a threat over web 2.0 pagans' heads. I'll pass on the tablets this year and get and save a bunch of cash with some rave review netbook.
Slashdot Mirror
That "Deco" style case is lovely... My wife would even allow that in the living room, methinks :-)
But would she allow the Manga Doll case there? ;)
Maybe changing the Doll to look like a french maid girl?
If you really hate MS so much why are you running Windows in the first place to get upset about it? Install Ubuntu
or buy a Mac and shut up.
Instead of their recent tendency of messing with my browser so they can get search revenue, why do they not fix their Windows boot loader so it will not overwrite my Grub menu? The exact problem is that MS plays favorites and interoperates only when it can profit from OSS installs.
PS: It's not unheard of to have Windows updates be interactive. WGA and the Malicious removal tools actively ask you to read EULAs before they continue. This tech can be used if they must mess with programs not directly created by them. The FF move is underhanded, but I'll admit that it's little known the Windows EULA forces the licensee to wave away any rights to deleting files from your PC and the like, without your consent.
The problem is these add-ons aren't installed with user privileges, but admin privileges. How would you have Mozilla fix this?
Easy! FF needed these same admin privileges to be installed at some point; programs routinely ask for elevation, and FF is just trying to play 'usermode' too much, without a general picture of general systems management. Put the now-standard API call that "elevates" my rights to do sys admin tasks in Windows, and presto.
By magically circumventing the permissions system in Windows?
If a virus can "magically circumvent permissions", to root a Windows machine just because the writers learn the Windows API better, then a legal program ain't trying hard enough. After all, the Windows API does allow for elevation in two ways that I know of. 1) Ask the user for a PW per change 2) Or, register a daemon at install time that runs without limitations, like Firewalls and Antispyware programs do.
In an inexact analogy, Kanji is an assembly language system with thousands of opcodes (~50,000); it's added to your tool-belt as you master the other 2 short alphabets.
The alphabets lacking Kanji are only about 50 symbols each. By the time you hit first grade and Kanjis begin to be instructed (at a pace of ONLY a few per year,) kids have already mastered these basic 100 symbols.
While it is true that Anime is as big a time sink as watching hour-long live action on Hulu, you can benefit from children's anime (like Fairy Tail and Mahoujin Guru Guru) and blind rerunning where you try to make out words and grammar patterns without relying on the subtitles. Speech in kid's shows is always clearer, and written signs have plenty of non-kanji writings.
You can look for an American language learning show called "Let's Learn Japanese" (Public television) on Youtube, try flashcards Anki (PC flashcard system) and play Slime Forest for fun recall speed of Kana and Kanjis.
Eventually you'll find too many vectors to tackle, from college grammar books (pick one with plenty of Hiragana learning on it), a small physical dictionaries, western alphabet-based translators offline or online.
At some point of your trying vectors in parallel and listening to the language, many symbols and expressions start to show patterns and meanings beyond "it's too complicated to explain this untranslatable greeting in chapter 1 but essential to expose you to it." Have fun!
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP?
If anything, Windows Seven is new. Outside the corporate world the possibility of OS piracy is a lot more attractive to households. Households will be less tied by legacy reasons than corporations. If a kid down the block gets this new OS and your own kid likes what he sees over there, you're much closer to end up with it by the "cool kid on the block" factor. Vista's bad word-of-mouth was like an easy whore's: everyone on your block will curse you messing with her. Uncoolness defeated newness for Vista.
Eventually as new machines will have nothing but W7, and since there's no unclean stigma, other household buyers will begin to send you incompatible stuff and realize you're the probably the "last kid on the block" still on XP. The peer pressure will mount up, and though we know luddites running Windows 98 still exist, most people will just fork over the money and kill the software and hardware upgrade birds with one stone... and continue to be "cool."
Eventually, general consensus becomes that workplaces are "backwards" if our homes all have the "cool" Windows version and our businesses lack it. US Colleges upgrade because they don't want to seem behind the times, losing prospective students who want modern education and computing facilities. In other sectors, vice-presidents notice how old or "uncool" their work OS is compared to this Windows 7 they have on their new personal computers at home. They use plenty of excuses to pull their weight and demand their single desktop upgraded ahead of the pack. At some point IT is asked to make the organization match the VP's technology. Maybe IT heads were waiting for this edict all along because they have tested the new versions at home, legally or not. The company-wide upgrade goes through, pains and all.
Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.
Give me a washing machine, where there's only 2 or 3 knobs, and I'll assume stuff will never change. Computers, though, act like dynamic control panels so that every program can create its own experience and change it between versions. Move anything around and people assume their machine broke, and not that it was tweaked.
People tend to memorize the exact steps necessary to complete a task, including the appearance and location of buttons.
Well, this is how humans are taught to learn since preschool. We can memorize first, and analyze later, only there's never any drive to learn why things work / fail the moment you finish school.
The number of knobs and dials a physical control panel would need to emulate a modern word processor is huge. That said, I still hate GUI changes.
GUI designers love moving the damn things around to force training expenses upon us that ultimately help their own software companies. The designers are at fault for not balancing changes with usability, and assuming that mankind magically wipes the slate clean for every software release.
My idea is rather:
1. Find out you have cancer (or any other patented illness)
2. Sue patent owner. It's their "product" after all.
3. Profit!!!
Mod parent up! Bio-research companies would be shaking in their boots if this could be done.
Sometime in the last century, the crucial 1st step, called "observation" in the Scientific Method became just another greed-based megacorp business.
We can't "look," so we can't hypothesize, experiment, make conclusions and test the hypotheses... because someone else is allowed to own the genes that we all share. So why the hell can we not sue, then?
Hey, that's brilliant!
Finally, a good use for my locally idling webserver.
Thanks, armanox!
With Opera there's been Site Preferences for this for ages so I can get IPlayer and Youtube OK, and have the Enable Plugins Button on the status bar so I can toggle it on if required.
I understand, but turning flash off completely or whitelisting a complete page linking to tons of ad sites isn't very good.
BUT... I think you mean that site preferences blocks specific 3rd-party domains, so I'll install Opera on Ye Old Clunker and update my opinion of it. Thanks
If you don't like the adverts on a site, don't go to the site. Just spare the couple of KB, and get the site you admittedly appreciate some revenue to offset the bandwidth costs they incur to give you the information you want.
Sadly, this was OK 10 years ago. These days, websites have 1-3 flash ads with unoptimized animations. The result is that my laptop heats up and performance degrades considerably even when I'm not watching the ad.
All my local OS's block a few like ads.doubleclick.net, clk.atdmt.com, qksrv.net and ads.x10.com.
Call me when you can point to an offending element in a webpage, and have the right-click menu say 'Put this domain in my hosts file'.
That is an awesome goal. Flash ads don't include source info like pictures, so you can't right-click. You actually have to view the HTML hoping to find the offending hyperlink to swf content other than your one desired flash video on the page.
Unfortunately, hostfiles blocks cause people to ask me why their browser is "broken." Out of IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox, only Safari gracefully hides the annoying "This page cannot be displayed [etc etc etc]" lines that replace every would-be advert blocked by my hostfile.
Man I love this relentless focus on browser speed over the past few years. If it keeps up for a little longer, I might even be able to browse Slashdot.
On a related note, to speed and compatibility, what about the acid test? My Windows Safari 4 scored 100, but about 5 tests are slow: 26 40 43 65 69. The last one completes after 102 attempts on my machine, which I hope is better now.
Mind you, this is a Dell single core XP SP2 machine, but Safari's engine should produce faster but scalable results.
PS: Click on the "A" in acid3 to get the detailed result window.
PPS: Firefox 3.7 alpha 5 got a 97/100 on the same machine, with twice as many slow tests as Safari 4, but only 47 attempts at test #69
A company doesn't care that the US consumes the product
Meant to say "A US company doesn't MORALLY care that the US consumes the DRUGS (from the same country where it builds its products.)"
Because drug cartels don't just sell drugs. They are well connected to illegal weapons trades and the corrupt government and military so that they can remain protected and functional.
A company doesn't care that the US consumes the product. They'll worry that the soil where their product is made is full of people powerful enough to raid their installations, at a cost in revenue to the US. A country without deep rooted and strong para-military groups and drug cartels will have a better chance of protecting the company investments in production lines that must run daily far away from the US.
Parent quote:
Chrome does have adblocking now. Does it not work for you?
But the GP and I have a different belief:
If Chrome supported a proper adblocking solution, I'd never need another browser. And yes, I know they had an Adblock extension, but it still renders ads in the background. I want to stop the ads from being downloaded or rendered at all.
It seems your post contradicts our belief about the state of chrome adblocking.
I have Chrome and Safari ready to mess around with --could you please give us the non-incomplete adblocking link?
Thanks
--vlueboy
It no longer makes sense to have WiFi-only apps now that AT&T has metered data usage. AT&T should actually *want* you to use videoconferencing and tethering, because they will make more money off of it.
Wrong. It is a misconception that millions of data-addicted old customers will suddenly pay for overage charges. Only AT&T's NEW contracts include the fees, so money won't be until iPhone 4 buyers enter their market in the next few weeks.
AT&T's exclusive carriership of the iPhone is ending soon. What will happen to AT&T when Verizon and others are allowed to share iPhone's carrier rights? The new fees are aimed at prepping business models and per-capita cashflow to offset their expected headcount loses.
So wait, you mean its impossible to post an article and then have people post continuing updates in the thread? The mind reels.
Go easy, man. Usually the complaint about Slashdot is that its news stories are days old. Give us time to adapt!
We have just experienced a failed slashcode test. ;)
Slashdot 3.0 will be able to post dupes prior to an event's conclusion
In South America, we'd have to re-learn how to copy with a the "devil we don't know"
I meant to say "re-learn how to cope witht he devil we don't know" above. I meant how a different culture would be creative in their corruption efforts in ways that are different. The military and police tends help cover stuff up, and gray markets there will probably be worse than in China because conviction and death penalties are not very well feared in lat-Am.
Back on South America as a potential labor pool - China has 1.3 Billion people. India, which the same thing is happening to(and they're perhaps a bit further along), is 1.1 Billion. Wikipedia places the population of South America at around 385 Million, and it's quite a bit more developed than China, on average. Africa is right around a Billion, making it perhaps a better choice, but it's still got issues with stability.
South America's pool of 385 Million potential jobs will be significantly lower after US companies choose the best 1 or 2 out of just its dozen countries. Think China, India, and The Phillipines and how little away from these US investors have strayed. Plus, in Latin America, we hurt one country and many other physically close and relevant countries nearby will get mad at the US. If it's in Asia or Africa, we barely know country names besides the first-world countries. In South America, we'd have to re-learn how to copy with a the "devil we don't know" through government corruption / or 3rd shift gray market production line issues. At least we already know how it's done in China.
South Am. as a whole is a difficult package to choose from: one actively anti-US dictator with access to oil wells, one infamous drug exporting country, and anti-government armed forces in various countries that love taking hostages and threatening election candidates. Did I even mention moving away from Asia to our own continent means spending on *new* manufactoring instruction materials for workers dabbing in Spanish, Portuguese and smaller local indigenous tongues?
Apologies on the sucky grammar on my parent post. I also couldn't hyperlink properly to slashdot's sinkhole story --or whatever they're calling the process that eats the limestone ground from underneath poorly chosen sites.
it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell
We also have the Centralia mine fire, going since 1961 in Pennsylvania, US (39 years.)
With the possibility of more of this stuff happening (see the Guatemalan sinkholes trying to swallow buildings into huge underground caverns), I'm beginning to see a problem. If something happens in your town but I can't leave relocate for financial reasons, like the bad economy plaging us and how hard it is to find cheap housing or sell/buy another house, there could be a "calculated risk but I must live here anyway" trend as our environment breaks down all around.
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
Hey, isn't 10 years the deadline we heard a month ago, where the US government plans to move broadband minimums to 100Mbps?
I have a bad feeling about current capping trends and these forced bandwidth increases. Don't get me wrong, I know grandmothers who only read e-mails and maybe follow a youtube link.
The problem will be every media provider upping their stream minimum to HD or Blueray resolutions in the next ten years, without an appropriate cap re-evaluation on the billing side of the equation. Grandma won't know just how fast her new 100MB pipe is chugging along against her non-increasing cap.
I can watch unlimited Television for free (broadcast networks of course).
Aaaand... without the constant buffering, or even compression-related visual artifacts you get on streams or even crappy cable TV.
No, no. Cache is orders of magnitude more expensive than RAM, and that is why we get very little. Since around 2007, the standard increased from 512K to 2MB - 6MB. I don't think you could cram even the annoyingly sneaky 256MB that Intel's graphic units steal from your RAM for video tasks and still have room for both functions.
This brings me to another point: Graphics "cache" must be more than 10MB video for even simple apps like Google Earth (specs are hard to find... here 16MB is the min.) Besides, CPU cache could not be upgraded yearly by just adding extra "RAM." The article's graphic even says they're still connected to System Memory, and I saw no mention of cache sizes... I suspect off-chip RAM access is their solution, just like Intel's.
Laugh all you want, but if AMD were actually solving the problem of cheaply adding 512MB to today's puny cache, in an already crammed multicore CPU, it would be fixing an entirely different problem for the industry. Yet, we're only talking about a graphics design and performance improvement in this story.
That said, intel integrated stuff sucks, and this model will at least improve AMD's competitive chances and save me in power costs.
Year 2010/11 tablets will be the new "netbook," but manufacturers are doing it all wrong. Seeing how nobody wants to use the iPad formula for size and lack of Windows OS, and the prices don't present any temptation to would-be netbook byers, the industry has again misunderstood what we needed.
I always hoped that the Apple premium would translate to inevitable competition with a slew of Dell tablets costing $200-$300. I guess the US economy killed that idea because everyone wants in on the new "Android-sy" $500 price ranges. The bad part is that contract-less android phones cost just as much as this new breed of full tablets.
Users in this "emerging" market of tablets and e-readers want alternatives here and now, but long term portability goes first or second in our decisions (we already have laptops and desktops.).. Kno is NOT something that can attract first time tablet buyers, because it is too niche-y due to lack of portability. The original 10 Commandment stone tablets were meant to be huge dual tablets ... probably emulated well by this Kno waving it as a threat over web 2.0 pagans' heads. I'll pass on the tablets this year and get and save a bunch of cash with some rave review netbook.