Only improvements I want to cars are regenerative braking and electric propulsion assist. I have two wheels that aren't powered. A small battery pack or something used only at launch would do wonders to overcome the losses I incur when accelerating from a stop. Plus I would not mind some of it back when I am stopping to aid that starting.
Those exist. The cars are called hybrids (the Prius for instance), and they use all the tricks you listed. Except for powering the other two wheels - instead the manufacturers install a rather sophisticated power transmission that lets both gasoline and electric motor work on the same wheels.
If a hybrid works for you depends on the driving pattern. Since you wrote that stopping and starting is your mileage killer, a hybrid might beat the TDI in your case. For me, it is different: I use the suburban train for getting to work, but twice per month I drive about 150 miles overland to visit my mother. Very little stop and go there, usually I just coast at 70 mph. A hybrid would be wasted on that kind of driving.
Traditionally, Diesel engines have glow plugs for starting. That is, an electrically heated piece of metal on which the injected fuel ignites. Once the engine is warm, the compressed air from the compression stroke is hot enough that the injected fuel will auto-ignite.
I'm not sure if modern diesels still use glow plugs though. If an auto mechanic reads this, feel free to comment;-)
But that right to copy a work does *NOT* guarantee that you can take someone else's copy. It's not as if the book sitting on someone's shelf magically becomes everyone's property once copyright expires into the public domain. It would still be stealing to take it from their shelf without permission.
There is one difference: This case is about copying, not depriving the owner of the book. So it is more like taking the book to a copy shop, making copies of all pages, then returning it. Unless there is a copyright on data collections (some countries like Germany actually have this), the content of the book is in fact everyone's property.
Which $700+ CPUs? Newegg.com offers the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition for $189.99 right now, and that model is AMD's top desktop CPU right now.
It eats a bit too much energy for my taste (125W TDP), but in price/performance it is a pretty nice CPU. If Bulldozer can improve on the power consumption, my next CPU upgrade will definitely be a Bulldozer.
When I got my current PC (Athlon 64 X2) in 2007, I tried running it with W2k first. Never got it to run stable, while my older Pentium4 worked fine on W2k until it went EOL.
In hindsight, I suspect the drivers. The NVidia graphics driver in particular was no longer maintained for W2k at the time, and I had to choose between an older driver for W2k and a newer one that was only offered for XP. I tried both, and either way, the system crashed from time to time.
After a switch to XP, the same (Athlon) box is running flawlessly. For W2k, that leaves either the OS or the drivers as the culprit. W2k being bad seems unlikely, as it always worked fine with the P4.
Sounds familiar, the company I'm developing for is almost as backwards (but since this year, we're actually targeting Windows 7 instead of XP).
Guessing from my experience to the situation of GP, they will probably end up with B), at least for some time. Maybe they can get away with it, because for a computer that is not on a network a lot of security issues go away.
Virtualization for the DOS stuff may work, but that is not guaranteed. We have one DOS software left ourselves, and have tried DosBox and VirtualPC for it. Works most of the time, but not as reliable as "real" DOS. Finally, I'd be surprised if they cannot make most of the XP software work with some adjustment of the user rights.
So heavy fines are not only used on US companies, they are just more than US companies are used to. Compare the settlement in United States v. Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Settlement), where Microsoft got away with some temporary oversight against future misbehavior.
US companies doing business in Europe are exactly those where the problem of Patriot Act vs. EU Data Protection Directive arises.
A European company would not be under US jurisdiction, and could simply decline to hand over data. A US company not doing business in Europe would have to comply, but might not have the data desired by the authorities in the first place.
So the question is what the EU does in these cases. As a EU citizen, I want my government to protect my privacy. If they have to lean on US companies to achieve that, so be it.
If I dare guess, the only reason I think they can give is that the HDMI spec is supposed to ensure that unauthorized copies cannot be made, and if you are able to produce HDMI-to-anything cables you could connect your HDMI capable output device to something that can record the information.
Only in this case, it is an anything-to-HDMI cable, where the "sender" port may not have any DRM anyway. AFAIK, DVI-to-HDMI adapters never caused the sort of complaints TFA is about. So HDMI LLC has no reason at all to be worried about a breach of their precious DRM;-)
There is one area in which that slap on the wrist can be pretty expensive - the fines for anticompetitive behavior. Like the $1.4bn fine for Microsoft in 2008. I'd like to see similar fines for breaking EU data protection laws (but you may be right in suspecting that this is unlikely).
On top of that, we might have a case of Laches (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)) here. If the principle was widely used in the 1990s and they neglected enforcing the original patent until now, that is a delay of over 10 years.
Which was on the market before the patent was even filed, and as a mass market product from the world's largest CPU vendor, its features were widely reported. So it seems likely that this particular patent troll filed the patent while knowing there was prior art.
And that is exactly the point at which the EU needs to grow some balls and tell the US "your national security laws do NOT trump our data protection laws". Unfortunately, I don't think that it will happen with the current batch of EU governments.
I think it is the Safe Harbor agreement which is not worth the money it is printed on.
Mainly because I believe the EU is not serious about enforcing it. A few months ago, we had a similar discussion on/., where the topic was US access to European air traveler data. As some posters pointed out (and I could find confirmation in other media), the checks on our (European) side against excessive use simply don't work.
What is needed here is the EU getting serious, with massive fines for companies who are caught violating the agreement. If some US companies are caught between a rock and a hard place then, so be it. Sadly, I don't think it is going to happen because most European governments are way too eager to please the USA, even at the expense of their citizens' liberties.
People flock to Windows 7 because they can't get Windows XP, don't want Vista, OSX or Linux.
I think most people get Windows 7 because that is what is pre-installed on their new computer. This said, I've actually heard from some (geeky) types who bought Windows 7 to replace XP on PCs they already had. Which nobody I know did for Vista.
A default Ubuntu install contains some applications and development tools as well. Granted, Windows has stuff like Paint and Wordpad, but I think it is not quite the same.
If that is the problem, make it a switch on the ATX rear panel. Can be used without opening the case. You might have to sacrifice a USB port to make room. Still worth it. Besides, the motherboards I've seen are not that sharp and pointy. Cheap computer cases are worse, these sometimes lack deburring on the edges so you can really cut yourself;-)
Seems to me that a low-level kernel in FLASH, which can only be upgraded with a hardware key inserted (e.g., the kernel FLASH blocks can only be written when there is a physical device plugged into the system), which then supports a number of different OS images using virtual machine concept, is the way to go.
The "hardware key" bit has been used before, in the form of a simple jumper that blocks flashing of the BIOS. That was on a 1996 Intel mainboard for the Pentium I. Good enough for most situations, because a root kit cannot reach out of the hardware and move that jumper.
I still think that made sense, but obviously most mainboard vendors find even such simple measures too expensive.
Depending on jurisdiction, there may be laws that make such fine print unenforcable. In Germany, for instance, surprising and unusual clauses in "standard contracts" are always in danger of being thrown out by the courts.
So the former Skype employees might want to talk to a lawyer...
That would be the "several different parts" argument. According to TFA, AVM tried that as its second scenario, and abandoned it because it did not fly somehow. So they tried it and did not have much luck that way:-)
The lawyer for the other party might politely point this out to the court. And suggest that the court does not pay too much attention to AVMs theories, as they obviously don't know what their own position is;-)
Staying with old MS office versions because of cost baffles me. Those are really not very good (I still have MS Word 2000 on my PC at work and know about its quirks), so I guess OpenOffice might actually be an improvement there. Compatibility is a bit more of an issue, but the last time I tried, it did not look like a showstopper anymore for OpenOffice.
Vista was a special case - by all accounts Vista pre-SP1 was so bad that going from XP to Vista would have been a downgrade. Even now, those running Vista seem to desert it faster than those running XP. If you believe http://netmarketshare.com/, Windows XP went from 61.9% in Jul '10 to 52.4% in May '11. So 9.5% or about 1/6 of the users XP had in Jul '10 switched away over the last year.. At the same time, the numbers for Vista are 14.3% vs. 9.9%. So 4.4% or almost 1/3 of the users Vista had went away.
Probably correct, as the cloud provider might have lots of servers and will profit from economies of scale. But have you planned for encryption on your side? If not, Lulzsec hacking your cloud provider may end up with your confidential data becoming public;-)
You can't just take an app designed for a datacenter and naively move it to amazon and expect HA. You need to design for failure and automate the hell out of provisioning. The ideal is to either load balance across multiple providers or automate the living hell out of provisioning and backup until you can reliably get DR times in the 5 minute range.
Design for failure tolerance is always nice to have, but unless the app was designed that way in the first place, it will cost extra time and money to re-design it. I guess those who take the "easy route" to an external service provider are exactly the same people who don't want to plan and execute major changes to their software environment;-)
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Only improvements I want to cars are regenerative braking and electric propulsion assist. I have two wheels that aren't powered. A small battery pack or something used only at launch would do wonders to overcome the losses I incur when accelerating from a stop. Plus I would not mind some of it back when I am stopping to aid that starting.
Those exist. The cars are called hybrids (the Prius for instance), and they use all the tricks you listed. Except for powering the other two wheels - instead the manufacturers install a rather sophisticated power transmission that lets both gasoline and electric motor work on the same wheels.
If a hybrid works for you depends on the driving pattern. Since you wrote that stopping and starting is your mileage killer, a hybrid might beat the TDI in your case. For me, it is different:
I use the suburban train for getting to work, but twice per month I drive about 150 miles overland to visit my mother. Very little stop and go there, usually I just coast at 70 mph. A hybrid would be wasted on that kind of driving.
Traditionally, Diesel engines have glow plugs for starting. That is, an electrically heated piece of metal on which the injected fuel ignites. Once the engine is warm, the compressed air from the compression stroke is hot enough that the injected fuel will auto-ignite.
I'm not sure if modern diesels still use glow plugs though. If an auto mechanic reads this, feel free to comment ;-)
But that right to copy a work does *NOT* guarantee that you can take someone else's copy. It's not as if the book sitting on someone's shelf magically becomes everyone's property once copyright expires into the public domain. It would still be stealing to take it from their shelf without permission.
There is one difference:
This case is about copying, not depriving the owner of the book. So it is more like taking the book to a copy shop, making copies of all pages, then returning it. Unless there is a copyright on data collections (some countries like Germany actually have this), the content of the book is in fact everyone's property.
Which $700+ CPUs?
Newegg.com offers the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition for $189.99 right now, and that model is AMD's top desktop CPU right now.
It eats a bit too much energy for my taste (125W TDP), but in price/performance it is a pretty nice CPU. If Bulldozer can improve on the power consumption, my next CPU upgrade will definitely be a Bulldozer.
Probably not from Microsoft. But maybe from some third party. Currently, there is the WSUS Offline Update (http://download.wsusoffline.net/) for instance. WSUS Offline Update is a small Open Source application that will download the more important patches for you (see http://forums.wsusoffline.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=172).
So get a tool like this, let it run shortly before the cutoff date, and it will make a "collected updates" DVD for you.
When I got my current PC (Athlon 64 X2) in 2007, I tried running it with W2k first. Never got it to run stable, while my older Pentium4 worked fine on W2k until it went EOL.
In hindsight, I suspect the drivers. The NVidia graphics driver in particular was no longer maintained for W2k at the time, and I had to choose between an older driver for W2k and a newer one that was only offered for XP. I tried both, and either way, the system crashed from time to time.
After a switch to XP, the same (Athlon) box is running flawlessly. For W2k, that leaves either the OS or the drivers as the culprit. W2k being bad seems unlikely, as it always worked fine with the P4.
Sounds familiar, the company I'm developing for is almost as backwards (but since this year, we're actually targeting Windows 7 instead of XP).
Guessing from my experience to the situation of GP, they will probably end up with B), at least for some time. Maybe they can get away with it, because for a computer that is not on a network a lot of security issues go away.
Virtualization for the DOS stuff may work, but that is not guaranteed. We have one DOS software left ourselves, and have tried DosBox and VirtualPC for it. Works most of the time, but not as reliable as "real" DOS. Finally, I'd be surprised if they cannot make most of the XP software work with some adjustment of the user rights.
The EU also imposes significant fines on EU companies. For instance, 1.4 billion Euros on a cartel of auto glass makers (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/business/worldbusiness/12iht-cartel.4.17767064.html). The biggest single fine in that case was 896 million Euros, or $1.1 billion at the time, for the French glass maker Saint-Gobain.
So heavy fines are not only used on US companies, they are just more than US companies are used to. Compare the settlement in United States v. Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Settlement), where Microsoft got away with some temporary oversight against future misbehavior.
US companies doing business in Europe are exactly those where the problem of Patriot Act vs. EU Data Protection Directive arises.
A European company would not be under US jurisdiction, and could simply decline to hand over data. A US company not doing business in Europe would have to comply, but might not have the data desired by the authorities in the first place.
So the question is what the EU does in these cases. As a EU citizen, I want my government to protect my privacy. If they have to lean on US companies to achieve that, so be it.
If I dare guess, the only reason I think they can give is that the HDMI spec is supposed to ensure that unauthorized copies cannot be made, and if you are able to produce HDMI-to-anything cables you could connect your HDMI capable output device to something that can record the information.
Only in this case, it is an anything-to-HDMI cable, where the "sender" port may not have any DRM anyway. AFAIK, DVI-to-HDMI adapters never caused the sort of complaints TFA is about. ;-)
So HDMI LLC has no reason at all to be worried about a breach of their precious DRM
There is one area in which that slap on the wrist can be pretty expensive - the fines for anticompetitive behavior. Like the $1.4bn fine for Microsoft in 2008. I'd like to see similar fines for breaking EU data protection laws (but you may be right in suspecting that this is unlikely).
On top of that, we might have a case of Laches (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)) here. If the principle was widely used in the 1990s and they neglected enforcing the original patent until now, that is a delay of over 10 years.
In the comments for the linked article (http://www.conceivablytech.com/8274/business/patent-troll-goes-after-notebook-cooling), someone pointed out that downclocking to prevent overheating was already used in the Socket 775 Pentium 4.
Which was on the market before the patent was even filed, and as a mass market product from the world's largest CPU vendor, its features were widely reported. So it seems likely that this particular patent troll filed the patent while knowing there was prior art.
And that is exactly the point at which the EU needs to grow some balls and tell the US "your national security laws do NOT trump our data protection laws". Unfortunately, I don't think that it will happen with the current batch of EU governments.
I think it is the Safe Harbor agreement which is not worth the money it is printed on.
Mainly because I believe the EU is not serious about enforcing it. A few months ago, we had a similar discussion on /., where the topic was US access to European air traveler data. As some posters pointed out (and I could find confirmation in other media), the checks on our (European) side against excessive use simply don't work.
What is needed here is the EU getting serious, with massive fines for companies who are caught violating the agreement. If some US companies are caught between a rock and a hard place then, so be it. Sadly, I don't think it is going to happen because most European governments are way too eager to please the USA, even at the expense of their citizens' liberties.
People flock to Windows 7 because they can't get Windows XP, don't want Vista, OSX or Linux.
I think most people get Windows 7 because that is what is pre-installed on their new computer.
This said, I've actually heard from some (geeky) types who bought Windows 7 to replace XP on PCs they already had. Which nobody I know did for Vista.
A default Ubuntu install contains some applications and development tools as well.
Granted, Windows has stuff like Paint and Wordpad, but I think it is not quite the same.
If that is the problem, make it a switch on the ATX rear panel. Can be used without opening the case. You might have to sacrifice a USB port to make room. Still worth it. ;-)
Besides, the motherboards I've seen are not that sharp and pointy. Cheap computer cases are worse, these sometimes lack deburring on the edges so you can really cut yourself
Seems to me that a low-level kernel in FLASH, which can only be upgraded with a hardware key inserted (e.g., the kernel FLASH blocks can only be written when there is a physical device plugged into the system), which then supports a number of different OS images using virtual machine concept, is the way to go.
The "hardware key" bit has been used before, in the form of a simple jumper that blocks flashing of the BIOS. That was on a 1996 Intel mainboard for the Pentium I. Good enough for most situations, because a root kit cannot reach out of the hardware and move that jumper.
I still think that made sense, but obviously most mainboard vendors find even such simple measures too expensive.
Depending on jurisdiction, there may be laws that make such fine print unenforcable. In Germany, for instance, surprising and unusual clauses in "standard contracts" are always in danger of being thrown out by the courts.
So the former Skype employees might want to talk to a lawyer...
That would be the "several different parts" argument. According to TFA, AVM tried that as its second scenario, and abandoned it because it did not fly somehow. So they tried it and did not have much luck that way :-)
The lawyer for the other party might politely point this out to the court. And suggest that the court does not pay too much attention to AVMs theories, as they obviously don't know what their own position is ;-)
Staying with old MS office versions because of cost baffles me. Those are really not very good (I still have MS Word 2000 on my PC at work and know about its quirks), so I guess OpenOffice might actually be an improvement there. Compatibility is a bit more of an issue, but the last time I tried, it did not look like a showstopper anymore for OpenOffice.
Vista was a special case - by all accounts Vista pre-SP1 was so bad that going from XP to Vista would have been a downgrade. Even now, those running Vista seem to desert it faster than those running XP.
If you believe http://netmarketshare.com/, Windows XP went from 61.9% in Jul '10 to 52.4% in May '11. So 9.5% or about 1/6 of the users XP had in Jul '10 switched away over the last year..
At the same time, the numbers for Vista are 14.3% vs. 9.9%. So 4.4% or almost 1/3 of the users Vista had went away.
Probably correct, as the cloud provider might have lots of servers and will profit from economies of scale. But have you planned for encryption on your side? ;-)
If not, Lulzsec hacking your cloud provider may end up with your confidential data becoming public
You can't just take an app designed for a datacenter and naively move it to amazon and expect HA. You need to design for failure and automate the hell out of provisioning. The ideal is to either load balance across multiple providers or automate the living hell out of provisioning and backup until you can reliably get DR times in the 5 minute range.
Design for failure tolerance is always nice to have, but unless the app was designed that way in the first place, it will cost extra time and money to re-design it. ;-)
I guess those who take the "easy route" to an external service provider are exactly the same people who don't want to plan and execute major changes to their software environment