This is a myth often repeated. I'm going to simply point to a google search that will net many informative results. You'll find numerous calculations which all come to similar conclusions: solar panels have an "energy payback" of a few months to a few years
What a bunch of BS. Unless your talking about a remote site without grid power nearby there is just no way you're going to see a payback for a solar power system on the order of months. Even a few years is really stretching things except for very large values of "a few". I'm not saying solar electric isn't a good alternative but these kinds of exaggerations really don't help the cause.
But there were a LOT of people running Windows 98/ME. For them, Windows XP was a huge, meaningful upgrade. They all went with WinXP, either as an upgrade, or as part of a new hardware purchase.
Most of the people I knew with Win98 didn't upgrade to XP because their hardware just wasn't up to the task and those who did mostly wished they hadn't bothered for the same reason. I did however know a fair number who waited until XP was released to buy new machines and that's not something I've seen much of with Vista.
Rather than having content providers or faceless "ratings groups" rating the content wouldn't it be better to let the users of the system provide their own ratings? I could imagine a browser plugin that allowed users to rate sites in a way similar to the way/. moderation works. It seems like such a system would automatically result in ratings that reflected "community standards" although in this case the community would be made up of "people who run blocking software on their computers".
You might want to actually read the Dell page linked to in the summary. The vast majority of the posted comments go out of their way to say that they don't really care what distro Dell uses but instead want Linux friendly hardware with open source drivers so they can install whatever they like. Sure most posters have a prefered distro but it's really not that big of a deal for most of us.
One advantage Linux would have re support is that Dell could supply a customized Knoppix (or similar) bootable CD complete with Dell diagnostics and support tools. Doing the same with Windows using something like UBCD for Win would probably require additional payments to MS assuming they would allow it at all.
DHCP servers do keep a list of what MAC addresses are associated with what IP addresses and many keep logs as well. Home routers don't normally keep this information beyond a reboot but the information can certainly be there for much longer than a few minutes.
Also, although you are right about MAC addresses not being unique, in practice conflicts are pretty rare. While it's unlikely that anyone could start with a MAC address and trace it back to an individual if someone were already under suspicion then I think matching their MAC with one from some router log would be pretty strong evidence.
On systems I've spec'ed recently, I can manually de-configure *all of that garbage* except the AOL trial. There's NO F'ing way AOL pays Dell enough to cover the cost of Vista Home Premium.
Well, the last time I did that I STILL ended up with at least half a dozen pieces of random trialware on the machines when they arrived. I don't know how much large OEMs pay for Vista but with XP the conventional wisdom was that they were paying somewhere between $30 - $60. I don't think it's inconceivable that all that trialware pays for at least a large part of the cost of Windows and maybe all of it.
My understanding of the situation so far is basically as follows:
Some people posted on Ideastorm that they'd like Dell to offer Linux pre-installed. Dell responded that they wern't quite ready to go that far yet but they would work toward making sure their hardware was Linux compatable so people could buy Dell with some confidence that it will work with their whatever flavor of Linux they want.
One of the things that bugged me last time this report was on/. was that 2 of the three sources reported that memory was replaced after 20% or more of their system failures. That seems pretty odd because in my experience memory hardly ever just goes bad. Sure sometimes it's bad right out of the box which is why I test every module that I buy but once it's installed and test memory tends to keep working just about forever. If that number is off then I wonder how seriously I should take their other numbers.
Are they going to be testing these inflatable structures with pellet guns? Or perhaps more accurately high power riffles?
I'd expect that even traditional materials like aluminum would be vulnerable to micro-meteorites if made small/thin enough for transport to the moon. Also, for more perminant installations they could build what amounts to a Lunar Igloo out of Moon dust/dirt for protection and just use the inflatable as a sort of bladder to keep the air in.
The strategy seems to be to give away the program and then nag the user to purchase an update subscription and then completely break the users machine if they try to uninstall.
But hardware should be patentable - it is a real physical devise, and provided it does something novel and non-obvious, the R&D investment should be protected. In the rare case that individuals independently discover something - tough luck if you didn't think of it first - that is the way it works.
Well, you say that but you're not actually supporting it with any reason why it should be that way.
The conventional wisdom is that giving a temporary monopoly to an inventor encourages them to invent more and publish those inventions rather than keeping them secret. I have no doubt that it works like that in the beginning of a patent system but at some point the mass of existing patents actually discourages some inventors either out of fear that they will accidentally infringe on some other patent or out of knowledge that they are going to have to license hundreds of other patents in order to even get to the new bit. I think that it may be inevitible that any patent system eventually swings past the equilibrium point and starts going back the other way with more resources being spent on either fighting or gaming the system and fewer resources being left over to actually invent. I don't know exactly where that point is but we'll know it when we start seeing the patent office swamped with technically worthless patent applications that appear to have no purpose other than to serve as a sort of land mine to keep competitors from actually doing anything. Another sign will be when we start seeing entire companies that exist only to collect patents and sue people and companies that actually create stuff. When that starts to happen we'll know the patent system is broken and is now doing more harm than good.
So, is the argument that we shouldn't be able to rent a film using our computer.....
I wouldn't use the word "shouldn't", it's just that technology is rapidly making that model impractical. We're aproaching a time when we will be able (from a pure technical perspective) to access any information ever produced whenever and wherever we want. That sort of conveinence is incredibly addicting, just ask anyone who's ever owned a DVR. I've had a Mythtv box for at least 4 years now and there's no way I'm ever going back to being locked into the networks schedule. Likewise, I sometimes rent a movie only to have something come up and I can't actually watch it for a few days. Right now, I just make a copy and watch it when it's convienent. I hardly watch the same movie more than once or twice, even ones I own so the rental store isn't losing anything. If they managed to actually make the DRM on DVDs effective all it would do is discourage me from renting at all. Consumers want more flexability in when/where/how they enjoy their entertainment, not less and fighting that is like fighting gravity, you can win for a while but eventually you always lose. If anything DRM actually hurts the studios because of the increased costs both in dollars and in hastle factor to their customers who do, legally or not, have the option of downloading unrestricted media from Pirate Bay etc. Regular consumers simply arn't going to put up with a service where the movies only work half the time or where their movie only works on their "authorized" tv in the living room but not on the tv in the bedroom where they actually intended to watch it. God help them if they start pulling the keys for existing cracked players in such a way that renting movie X causes movie Y that you purchased 6 months ago to stop working. If the studios want to survive they are going to have to make their products more convienent, more reliable, and at a cost that is low enough that most people prefer it to dealing with the warez scene. DRM is exactly the opposite of this.
or is it just a complaint that they use a poorly implemented Microsoft DRM that isn't compatible across platforms.
This case was worse than that because half the media didn't even work on Windows. Still, I've been dealing with copy protection schemes for 15+ years and I have yet to ever see one that didn't cause more problems for legitimate customers than for criminals.
When I bought a desktop computer for an unsophisticated family member, I also purchased and installed a drive cooler - a special fan that blows directly on the drive electronics.
There was a period where I tried using these kinds of coolers for the machines I built. Unfortunately I found that one of the few things less reliable than a hard drive is a cheap HD cooler. Not only do the fans tend to fail but most are designed in such a way that if it does fail the "cooler" ends up acting as insolation and/or blocking proper air flow and actually making things worse.
If your drives are consistantly failing in less than a year then there is something else at work beyond just your choice of HD brand. Maybe you have a bad PSU or very poor cooling around the drives etc.
It's too much of a PITA to worry about qualifying all that different hardware with all the different distros....
I can't speak for anyone else but if I were buying a computer with Linux pre-installed it would just be as a sort of guarantee that there are Linux drivers available for the hardware. For that purpose it really doesn't matter what distro they choose.
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Most of the folks running such old software are also running equally (or nearly so) old hardware so they really don't need to get new drivers.
Re-reading his post I think you may be right. I was certainly talking about economic payback, not energy payback.
This is a myth often repeated. I'm going to simply point to a google search that will net many informative results. You'll find numerous calculations which all come to similar conclusions: solar panels have an "energy payback" of a few months to a few years
What a bunch of BS. Unless your talking about a remote site without grid power nearby there is just no way you're going to see a payback for a solar power system on the order of months. Even a few years is really stretching things except for very large values of "a few". I'm not saying solar electric isn't a good alternative but these kinds of exaggerations really don't help the cause.
But there were a LOT of people running Windows 98/ME. For them, Windows XP was a huge, meaningful upgrade. They all went with WinXP, either as an upgrade, or as part of a new hardware purchase.
Most of the people I knew with Win98 didn't upgrade to XP because their hardware just wasn't up to the task and those who did mostly wished they hadn't bothered for the same reason. I did however know a fair number who waited until XP was released to buy new machines and that's not something I've seen much of with Vista.
Personally, I don't like the idea of a religious nut with a button labeled Destroy The World on his desk.
Me neither but we voted him in and we're just going to have to do better in the next election.
Rather than having content providers or faceless "ratings groups" rating the content wouldn't it be better to let the users of the system provide their own ratings? I could imagine a browser plugin that allowed users to rate sites in a way similar to the way /. moderation works. It seems like such a system would automatically result in ratings that reflected "community standards" although in this case the community would be made up of "people who run blocking software on their computers".
You might want to actually read the Dell page linked to in the summary. The vast majority of the posted comments go out of their way to say that they don't really care what distro Dell uses but instead want Linux friendly hardware with open source drivers so they can install whatever they like. Sure most posters have a prefered distro but it's really not that big of a deal for most of us.
One advantage Linux would have re support is that Dell could supply a customized Knoppix (or similar) bootable CD complete with Dell diagnostics and support tools. Doing the same with Windows using something like UBCD for Win would probably require additional payments to MS assuming they would allow it at all.
DHCP servers do keep a list of what MAC addresses are associated with what IP addresses and many keep logs as well. Home routers don't normally keep this information beyond a reboot but the information can certainly be there for much longer than a few minutes.
Also, although you are right about MAC addresses not being unique, in practice conflicts are pretty rare. While it's unlikely that anyone could start with a MAC address and trace it back to an individual if someone were already under suspicion then I think matching their MAC with one from some router log would be pretty strong evidence.
So where's the Basic interpreter?
On systems I've spec'ed recently, I can manually de-configure *all of that garbage* except the AOL trial. There's NO F'ing way AOL pays Dell enough to cover the cost of Vista Home Premium.
Well, the last time I did that I STILL ended up with at least half a dozen pieces of random trialware on the machines when they arrived. I don't know how much large OEMs pay for Vista but with XP the conventional wisdom was that they were paying somewhere between $30 - $60. I don't think it's inconceivable that all that trialware pays for at least a large part of the cost of Windows and maybe all of it.
My understanding of the situation so far is basically as follows:
Some people posted on Ideastorm that they'd like Dell to offer Linux pre-installed. Dell responded that they wern't quite ready to go that far yet but they would work toward making sure their hardware was Linux compatable so people could buy Dell with some confidence that it will work with their whatever flavor of Linux they want.
What exactly is wrong with that?
Outsourcing mail makes sense
In a University? It sounds like a huge waste of bandwidth to me.
One of the things that bugged me last time this report was on /. was that 2 of the three sources reported that memory was replaced after 20% or more of their system failures. That seems pretty odd because in my experience memory hardly ever just goes bad. Sure sometimes it's bad right out of the box which is why I test every module that I buy but once it's installed and test memory tends to keep working just about forever. If that number is off then I wonder how seriously I should take their other numbers.
Unfortunately the data was skewed by one large web site that reported it's results multiple times.
I'm sure I'm not the only /.er who's never heard of moonquakes before. Very interesting.
Are they going to be testing these inflatable structures with pellet guns? Or perhaps more accurately high power riffles?
I'd expect that even traditional materials like aluminum would be vulnerable to micro-meteorites if made small/thin enough for transport to the moon. Also, for more perminant installations they could build what amounts to a Lunar Igloo out of Moon dust/dirt for protection and just use the inflatable as a sort of bladder to keep the air in.
The strategy seems to be to give away the program and then nag the user to purchase an update subscription and then completely break the users machine if they try to uninstall.
But hardware should be patentable - it is a real physical devise, and provided it does something novel and non-obvious, the R&D investment should be protected. In the rare case that individuals independently discover something - tough luck if you didn't think of it first - that is the way it works.
Well, you say that but you're not actually supporting it with any reason why it should be that way.
The conventional wisdom is that giving a temporary monopoly to an inventor encourages them to invent more and publish those inventions rather than keeping them secret. I have no doubt that it works like that in the beginning of a patent system but at some point the mass of existing patents actually discourages some inventors either out of fear that they will accidentally infringe on some other patent or out of knowledge that they are going to have to license hundreds of other patents in order to even get to the new bit. I think that it may be inevitible that any patent system eventually swings past the equilibrium point and starts going back the other way with more resources being spent on either fighting or gaming the system and fewer resources being left over to actually invent. I don't know exactly where that point is but we'll know it when we start seeing the patent office swamped with technically worthless patent applications that appear to have no purpose other than to serve as a sort of land mine to keep competitors from actually doing anything. Another sign will be when we start seeing entire companies that exist only to collect patents and sue people and companies that actually create stuff. When that starts to happen we'll know the patent system is broken and is now doing more harm than good.
So, is the argument that we shouldn't be able to rent a film using our computer.....
I wouldn't use the word "shouldn't", it's just that technology is rapidly making that model impractical. We're aproaching a time when we will be able (from a pure technical perspective) to access any information ever produced whenever and wherever we want. That sort of conveinence is incredibly addicting, just ask anyone who's ever owned a DVR. I've had a Mythtv box for at least 4 years now and there's no way I'm ever going back to being locked into the networks schedule. Likewise, I sometimes rent a movie only to have something come up and I can't actually watch it for a few days. Right now, I just make a copy and watch it when it's convienent. I hardly watch the same movie more than once or twice, even ones I own so the rental store isn't losing anything. If they managed to actually make the DRM on DVDs effective all it would do is discourage me from renting at all. Consumers want more flexability in when/where/how they enjoy their entertainment, not less and fighting that is like fighting gravity, you can win for a while but eventually you always lose. If anything DRM actually hurts the studios because of the increased costs both in dollars and in hastle factor to their customers who do, legally or not, have the option of downloading unrestricted media from Pirate Bay etc. Regular consumers simply arn't going to put up with a service where the movies only work half the time or where their movie only works on their "authorized" tv in the living room but not on the tv in the bedroom where they actually intended to watch it. God help them if they start pulling the keys for existing cracked players in such a way that renting movie X causes movie Y that you purchased 6 months ago to stop working. If the studios want to survive they are going to have to make their products more convienent, more reliable, and at a cost that is low enough that most people prefer it to dealing with the warez scene. DRM is exactly the opposite of this.
or is it just a complaint that they use a poorly implemented Microsoft DRM that isn't compatible across platforms.
This case was worse than that because half the media didn't even work on Windows. Still, I've been dealing with copy protection schemes for 15+ years and I have yet to ever see one that didn't cause more problems for legitimate customers than for criminals.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Google paper claims that temperature has no effect on the failure rate.
You might want to read it yourself because that's not what it said.
When I bought a desktop computer for an unsophisticated family member, I also purchased and installed a drive cooler - a special fan that blows directly on the drive electronics.
There was a period where I tried using these kinds of coolers for the machines I built. Unfortunately I found that one of the few things less reliable than a hard drive is a cheap HD cooler. Not only do the fans tend to fail but most are designed in such a way that if it does fail the "cooler" ends up acting as insolation and/or blocking proper air flow and actually making things worse.
If your drives are consistantly failing in less than a year then there is something else at work beyond just your choice of HD brand. Maybe you have a bad PSU or very poor cooling around the drives etc.
It's too much of a PITA to worry about qualifying all that different hardware with all the different distros....
I can't speak for anyone else but if I were buying a computer with Linux pre-installed it would just be as a sort of guarantee that there are Linux drivers available for the hardware. For that purpose it really doesn't matter what distro they choose.
"This computer processes the image information and wirelessly transmits it to a tiny electronic receiver implanted in the wearer's head."
:)
What could possibly go wrong