You are mistaken. The backwards compatibility in fact goes all the way back to DOS 1.0 (before subdirectories and file handles). As evidence the original 1981 Visicalc executable still runs under XP!
Taking the taxes away and refunding them in April is only because of how idiotically taxes are done the US. In Britain they take away exactly the correct amount on each paycheck since the tax code is simple enough for the majority of people - you have income from your job and some interest income. You don't even have to do a tax return until you hit the higher tax brackets, or you have special stuff going on (eg being a landlord, owning a farm etc).
I was shocked on first working in the US and being asked by the HR department how much tax they should take out of my paycheck. Apparently "the right amount" isn't a valid answer.
Also the purchase may travel through several other states. And what happens when I am physically in Alabama (while travelling), order an item to be sent to Montana, use a company credit card based in Delaware and have a home address in California with the item shipped from Colorado manufactured by a company in Ohio, via a website located in Washington.
I'd much rather see sales taxes abolished since they complicate retail and hurt the poorest people the most (they have to spend most of their income to live and hence proportionally pay way more sales tax).
To use a car analogy, a mainframe is like a big rig truck. Sure your Toyota can go faster, but a big rig will do far better at getting 40 tons of timber from one location to another. (Ever try to move 40 tons of lumber using a Ferrari?)
In terms of hardware, there are a lot more processors in a mainframe. Each I/O channel (and there will be a lot of them) typically has its own separate processor customized for getting results without bothering the main general purpose processors. On your nearest Linux box do some networking and disk access while watching the output from vmstat 1 and looking at the in(terrupt) column. Each interrupt (except a few used for task switching time slices) is I/O devices causing the main processor to have to pay attention to them instead of getting work done. The mainframe I/O processors can do high level work such as looking for database records that match certain criteria. There will also be separate processors for networking, encryption etc.
Mainframes are managed differently. If you bought a several hundred thousand dollar big rig truck, you wouldn't leave it sitting in your driveway for weeks on end. You'd be finding as much work for it do as possible. The same applies to mainframes. The goal is to use them - get the cpu and I/O usage close to 100% since any less means you are wasting capacity. Contrast with desktops and Unix/Windows servers where beyond occasional spikes you would get nervous of high cpu and I/O consumption and buy more hardware to spread the load.
Because downtime would be expensive (remember you are trying to use 100% capacity of the mainframe so if it is down that is work going undone) the whole system has significantly more fault tolerance built in. This ranges from the software, including the ability to upgrade the operating system without a reboot, to the hardware where components and systems are duplicated, sometimes even having physically separated systems (up to a few miles) with high speed optical interconnects running in lockstep. They also have backwards compatibility that would make Intel seem an amateur.
There was an FAQ on the Steam site I can't find anymore that addressed this issue. The prices for non-Valve games are not set by Valve/Steam but by the publishers. They almost always set them to be the same or more expensive than in stores because retail stores said they won't carry physical items if there is digital distribution that undercuts them on price.
why is my damn phone a different device when I plug it into a different USB port?
That is not the fault of Windows but of the device. USB devices are supposed to include a serial number. If they do then Windows can tell it is the same device plugged in elsewhere. If not then it has to assume there could be multiple devices. A second reason is a consequence of Windows backwards compatibility. Because there is a device name space (eg COM9 for serial like devices such as phones) each one has to be plumbed appropriately. If your phone was COM7 last time then you want it to be the same this time. Sure Windows could drop backwards compatibility, but that is one of the major reasons people use it - because their programs work and keep working. (Did you know that the Visicalc binary from 1982 works just fine on XP? It dates from before DOS even supported subdirectories!)
There is a lot of interesting reading at Raymond Chen's blog including an article on this very topic as well as how important backwards compatibility is to Microsoft.
Glad I only use Windows for gaming and to update my Blackberry's software.
Twins:-)
I was paying them $240 a year for two subscriptions and am now paying them $11 for one subscription which won't be renewed when it runs out.
A car antenna cracked and they only sell replacements for exorbitant prices, so they fixed the issue by issuing a new radio (which includes antenna) and paying $80 towards installation. Their systems cancelled an account instead of noticing that a credit card expiry date had been updated to be current. They removed the station I listened to the most and explained that "customers like me" wanted that. They kept charging the wrong amount (too little) in this mess and on cancellation refunded the wrong amount (too much). This is despite pointing that out to them.
But it was most noticeable to me that they hate their customers so much they pay (presumably the lowest bidder) in another country to talk to them. (Of course that country doesn't have Sirius or XM service so the customer service reps have no experience of using the product in any way.)
Read Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis (or a more recent edition) and you can see exactly how they did all these things starting with the System/38 in the 1970s.
You don't have to have multiple address spaces. Heck even the first Linux kernels just used one huge address space with each process getting a 64MB chunk of that.
The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week has always had persistent "objects". They are named but they aren't files although if you squint hard enough you could claim they similar enough. Phantom is only 30 years late in claiming to be the first.
The advantage to using a VM is that code above the VM is insulated from changes below the VM. For example the very first System/38 program will still run today and in all that time they have gone through several generations of processors including changing from CISC to RISC and changing address sizes. You can still have C and assembler but they target a virtual environment rather than a concrete one with the OS doing the right thing at run time.
What about reports of forum threads and postings being repeatedly deleted? To me that was the worst aspect of this whole issue. And due to Seagate's slowness in responding many will assume the worst - eg deliberate hiding of the issue, hating of the customers, ignorance etc - when the actual cause appears to be overloading of the support process.
And how much effort do you think it takes to make a great text editor, compiler, kernel, windowing system etc?
The problem the PC industry has is "sharing". So called piracy is seen everywhere as well as considering the used market hostile to its interests. Open source/free software is the other way round. It is all about sharing. The more sharing that goes on, the easier it is to recruit more developers (people to improve the software via code, testing, documentation, art assets etc). That incredible army can bring about rapid improvement especially compared to a traditional development team (see cathedral and the bazaar).
The open source world also leads to better tools. Since volunteer time is precious, there is a big incentive to give them productive tools. You can see how several other commenters have been pointing at the tools and hoping for improvement and standardisation.
Things would have been better for the consumer if we'd adopted GSM at the outset like Europe...
You are conflating several things. As a radio technology, GSM isn't too bad but CDMA is a lot better especially in such a sparsely populated county. The whole SIM card thing is nice but could be done with any underlying radio technology. The FCC should have mandated interoperability of SIM cards, not of how radio stuff is done. As an analogy, it is better to legislate car emission outcomes (eg quantities of pollutants per 1000 miles driven) than how emissions are reduced (catalytic converters, injection systems etc).
I just dumped Sirius after being a subscriber for many years. The ultimate reason is that they are an exceptionally poorly run company. After hearing my tale, any shareholder should be pissed.
I had two radios with annual subscription. The first subscription is about $140 and the second about $80. For the latter the antenna on the car had cracked and stopped working. We had a Sirius Boombox and so were using the antenna from that inside the car but it didn't work too well. A replacement car antenna is sold for $40 which is as expensive as many complete kits. The electronic music channels were getting repetitive so I called up to cancel.
Sirius outsources their call center to India. (Nothing wrong with that). But it does tell you that their customers are so important to them that they pay another company in another country half way around the world the least amount of money possible in order to avoid talking to their own customers. On trying to cancel you are eventually forwarded to a US based retention team. So they gave a $10 credit. And a whole new radio. And free installation. Yes, they spent almost $200 to "fix" a broken antenna when the antenna costs a few bucks to manufacture. Oh and in reactivating that second radio, they managed to terminate the first one. I had to call to get them to turn it back on again.
The credit card they had on file for me expired in October and my subscription was due in November. They sent an email pointing that out and asking me to call to update. Instead I used their web interface. So on November 12th my radio shuts off. Their system didn't do a renewal. So I call again. They fix it and charge me the second radio amount ($80) for the first radio subscription (should have been $140) and charge me $20 activation, but give a $15 credit for that. I accept the deal even though it is ludicrous.
November 12th also happened to be the day they changed the lineup. 4 electronic music stations went to 3 with those 3 having more talking and playing more "poppy" music. Needless to say the cancelled channel is the one I listened to the most (~95% of my listening). I give them a few days and then email complaining about the music change. A snotty email comes back explaining that "people like me" wanted these changes! I had to respond that people like me would not want my main channel killed and more talking on music channels playing more music like the crap ClearChannel does.
I gave them another week to fix the music but they never did. So I called up to cancel the main radio. The CSR suggested giving me two free months in case they fix the music issue. He had no more clue than me if they would actually fix it. I said to cancel and he had to put more on hold to do the refund. A few minutes later he had done it but had refunded about $160. This was for a $140 subscription plus activation but the subscription had only been $80! I explained how he had refunded way too much, but he didn't want to fix it and said it was okay because the error was in my favor. (My best guess is that as a CSR his metrics would be time per call and least number of mistakes.)
So the net effect has been that Sirius lost one subscriber, got $5.16 for a second subscription that they paid over $200 to address a broken antenna. 100% of the time I talked to them on account issues they made mistakes. And had that first subscriber tell everyone about the crappy experience.
Why yes I do have socket 754 and 939 cpus sitting in my cupboard with one working machine still running using AM2. I buy all my computer stuff at Fry's and every time AMD introduced new sockets, Fry's pretty much dropped the older CPUs and motherboards. If you went to the wall of motherboards at Fry's all the Intel mobos used the same socket while the AMD ones had a variety. As another data point consider that the Pentium 4 and Celeron D use the same socket whereas the Athlon 64 and Sempron used different ones.
The very last AMD stuff I bought was because a motherboard failed. I couldn't get a non-AM2 replacement and so ended up having to buy a new motherboard, processor and memory. (My kernel etc was compiled for AMD so I couldn't switch to Intel then. Lesson learned and Gentoo dropped:) ) Sure I could have hunted NewEgg/eBay etc for random parts but when it is your email etc server that is dead, time is of the essence.
Anyway that is why *I* stopped using AMD. The constantly changing sockets annoyed me and created extra upgrade expenses. Intel's LGA775 has supported a far wider range of processors for far longer.
You also forgot why people like me stopped using AMD (after using them exclusively from 1995 till 2005). They kept changing the sockets which meant I couldn't upgrade my system one piece at a time any more.
In addition to lacking UMA, they also require you to get a data plan ($25 / month min, $600 for two years of contract). What I want is to have no data plan, and have the thing just do all data over Wifi. If there is no Wifi around then no data for me - I'll cope.
I would have got the OpenMoko FreeRunner but they decided to make it tripleband rather than quadband. I also believe they don't have UMA.
I'd also like to see the opposite. Even ZFS administration is ridiculously complicated if you want to add randomly sized multiple drives over time. I'd like to be able to tag directories and files and say that they must be able to survive the failure of at least N drives. Under the hood I want my drives to always be full with the filesystem making as many copies as possible of my data. When I plug in a new drive it should automatically and almost instantly fill it. Then the filesystem implementation becomes a question of what to free next to accommodate new data.
I never understood the "pay to receive" idea in the first place.
Unlike many other countries the US doesn't have separate area codes for mobile phones. Consequently you couldn't charge more for calling a cell recipient as is done in many countries. Conceptually the charges to cell users for both incoming and outgoing calls are because the conventional phone network gets the call to their area code and then the charge to them is to go from their area over radio waves to and from their phone. Obviously the cellular network doesn't work like that now but it used to.
It has traditionally been very difficult and/or expensive to change carriers. There used to be many small regional ones which were bought up into 4 large ones now plus a few small regionals. There are two different incompatible radio systems in use - GSM and CDMA. (Contrast to Europe where the EU mandated GSM only.) There are no laws requiring contract free phones or phone portability so the carriers require two year contracts with subsidised locked phones. Even if you could unlock the phone, there would be only one other carrier you could take it to because of the GSM vs CDMA incompatibility. Phone number portability (ie taking the number with you when changing carriers) was only legislated a few years ago.
The carriers compete for new customers by the headline price of however many dollars for however many minutes in the plans. The finances of a carrier are measured by average revenue per user (ARPU). In order to keep their ARPU up the carriers are very adept at nickel and diming their customers. This article is one example as are numerous surcharges and regulatory fees. Verizon Wireless even goes so far as to get their phones deliberately crippled so you have to use their nickel and diming services for things like transferring pictures. (For example the phones will have file transfer via Bluetooth disabled). Prices in general in the US are not shown inclusive of taxes and fees. Consequently customers aren't aware that their $40 for 400 minutes plans will actually end up being $60 or more per month. That gives more wiggle room for the carriers to screw their customers and trivial to add in more charges here and there everytime the ARPU needs a bump.
This is one of the reasons for the perceived popularity of the iPhone in the US. The experience was crafted by Apple not by some idiotic cellular company.
Why not just get hibernate to work well and do that?
On my machine it is quicker to do a fresh boot, login and start apps than it is to do a resume from hibernate with those same set of apps running.
From what I am able to tell the underlying causes are:
Resume kernel reruns most detection routines again, but does so slower than a regular boot. For example I have a USB TV digitizer device
that has a v4l video interface and USB audio interface. During boot it takes about a second or two between the video interface being enumerated and the
audio interface being enumerated. During resume there is often a 20 or more second delay between them. The desktop is not shown until all this enumeration
is completed.
Disk cache is not saved during hibernate. (I am using Ubuntu which uses the standard kernel hibernate. Tuxonice does save them.) A normal boot
does a readahead. The resume is slower because of the disk cache slowly getting repopulated.
Linux is chronically slow reading from swap on resume. Using vmstat the fastest rate of swapin I see is 4MB per second. My disk does 70MB/s when doing
a sequential read and random reads when doing other things are always way faster than 4MB/s. I can usually speed up my resumes by doing swapoff -a ; swapon -a (it helps having 6GB of RAM:-)
I will ONLY buy devices that use the mini-USB style connectors
So how do you feel about micro-USB (which appears to have two different styles of connector). Cell phones are starting to use it now (eg new Blackberrys). Micro is an even smaller
connector and is designed for more insertion cycles. If someone made a simple dongle that converted mini to micro I'd be happy.
I do agree with your overall sentiment. I don't have a Nokia cellphone because they use a proprietary power connector. Despite Nokia devices also having USB they won't charge over it. (Of course that is just about impossible to figure out from the manual). I also don't have a Sandisk Sansa Fuze because they use a proprietary connector even though the next model down (Clip) uses standard mini-USB.
Can somebody please explain to me what the hell a "mainframe" is
How about a car analogy? Consider them like a big truck - think 18 wheeler. Pretty much every other vehicle you can
buy is cheaper, faster and more fuel efficient. But when you have to move 40 tonnes of timber, what do you use? A Ferrari which could go at three or more times the speed
of a truck would not be able to get the lumber to the destination quicker even making multiple journeys. (And loading lumber into a Ferrari would be entertaining:)
They are also managed differently. A mainframe is an asset that is best being used. The admins try to get 100% cpu usage as well as peak usage of other resources. The goal is to not waste what you have. (Commercial trucking does the same - try to ensure the truck is always fully loaded and moving goods). By comparison Windows and Unix machines have far lighter loads on them. Admins pride themselves on how lightly loaded they are. CPU and other resources are considered cheap and plentiful.
I also have a WRT54GX. I have to reset it every two weeks or so because the wireless stops working. If I have my Wii set to do standby connections then the router has to be reset within 24 hours. I haven't had any trouble with BitTorrent but I usually only use it for a few hours at a time (basically long enough to download an Ubuntu DVD).
I would like to upgrade to a more recent device (gigabit) but if you look at all newer devices including those from other companies on Amazon you'll find people mentioning having to reset them in reviews. Consequently I figured I'll stay with the devil I know. Congratulations to the manufacturers for shooting themselves in the foot.
At http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141 the Lenovo folks detail what goes in behind the scenes with the SSDs. They even detail why the (more recent) drives they use are better than the same brand (but older technology) used in the Macbook Air.
If they can use their existing rental agreements then they will have way more content. Secondly not everyone has an ISP that provides multi megabits a second uninterrupted for however long it takes to download movies. In fact I can't even get that where I live (coastal Californian town near Silicon Valley). Lastly it would Just Work(tm).
Comparing to Netflix - they don't provide instant gratification for using physical media. For their download service, you have a limited choice, and you have to have a Windows machine hooked up to your TV. While early adopters may have that, many people don't. A physical store is nice as you get the instant gratification, but it sucks because they are limited to physical copies on hand and you have to return.
This approach is the only way I can see Blockbuster being relevant. Anything else they try will be a poor imitation of the existing competitors. And for some people such as yourself it is unlikely there is anything they could do.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention someone has to build Skynet.
You are mistaken. The backwards compatibility in fact goes all the way back to DOS 1.0 (before subdirectories and file handles). As evidence the original 1981 Visicalc executable still runs under XP!
Taking the taxes away and refunding them in April is only because of how idiotically taxes are done the US. In Britain they take away exactly the correct amount on each paycheck since the tax code is simple enough for the majority of people - you have income from your job and some interest income. You don't even have to do a tax return until you hit the higher tax brackets, or you have special stuff going on (eg being a landlord, owning a farm etc).
I was shocked on first working in the US and being asked by the HR department how much tax they should take out of my paycheck. Apparently "the right amount" isn't a valid answer.
Also the purchase may travel through several other states. And what happens when I am physically in Alabama (while travelling), order an item to be sent to Montana, use a company credit card based in Delaware and have a home address in California with the item shipped from Colorado manufactured by a company in Ohio, via a website located in Washington.
I'd much rather see sales taxes abolished since they complicate retail and hurt the poorest people the most (they have to spend most of their income to live and hence proportionally pay way more sales tax).
To use a car analogy, a mainframe is like a big rig truck. Sure your Toyota can go faster, but a big rig will do far better at getting 40 tons of timber from one location to another. (Ever try to move 40 tons of lumber using a Ferrari?)
In terms of hardware, there are a lot more processors in a mainframe. Each I/O channel (and there will be a lot of them) typically has its own separate processor customized for getting results without bothering the main general purpose processors. On your nearest Linux box do some networking and disk access while watching the output from vmstat 1 and looking at the in(terrupt) column. Each interrupt (except a few used for task switching time slices) is I/O devices causing the main processor to have to pay attention to them instead of getting work done. The mainframe I/O processors can do high level work such as looking for database records that match certain criteria. There will also be separate processors for networking, encryption etc.
Mainframes are managed differently. If you bought a several hundred thousand dollar big rig truck, you wouldn't leave it sitting in your driveway for weeks on end. You'd be finding as much work for it do as possible. The same applies to mainframes. The goal is to use them - get the cpu and I/O usage close to 100% since any less means you are wasting capacity. Contrast with desktops and Unix/Windows servers where beyond occasional spikes you would get nervous of high cpu and I/O consumption and buy more hardware to spread the load.
Because downtime would be expensive (remember you are trying to use 100% capacity of the mainframe so if it is down that is work going undone) the whole system has significantly more fault tolerance built in. This ranges from the software, including the ability to upgrade the operating system without a reboot, to the hardware where components and systems are duplicated, sometimes even having physically separated systems (up to a few miles) with high speed optical interconnects running in lockstep. They also have backwards compatibility that would make Intel seem an amateur.
There was an FAQ on the Steam site I can't find anymore that addressed this issue. The prices for non-Valve games are not set by Valve/Steam but by the publishers. They almost always set them to be the same or more expensive than in stores because retail stores said they won't carry physical items if there is digital distribution that undercuts them on price.
That is not the fault of Windows but of the device. USB devices are supposed to include a serial number. If they do then Windows can tell it is the same device plugged in elsewhere. If not then it has to assume there could be multiple devices. A second reason is a consequence of Windows backwards compatibility. Because there is a device name space (eg COM9 for serial like devices such as phones) each one has to be plumbed appropriately. If your phone was COM7 last time then you want it to be the same this time. Sure Windows could drop backwards compatibility, but that is one of the major reasons people use it - because their programs work and keep working. (Did you know that the Visicalc binary from 1982 works just fine on XP? It dates from before DOS even supported subdirectories!) There is a lot of interesting reading at Raymond Chen's blog including an article on this very topic as well as how important backwards compatibility is to Microsoft. Glad I only use Windows for gaming and to update my Blackberry's software. Twins :-)
I was paying them $240 a year for two subscriptions and am now paying them $11 for one subscription which won't be renewed when it runs out.
A car antenna cracked and they only sell replacements for exorbitant prices, so they fixed the issue by issuing a new radio (which includes antenna) and paying $80 towards installation. Their systems cancelled an account instead of noticing that a credit card expiry date had been updated to be current. They removed the station I listened to the most and explained that "customers like me" wanted that. They kept charging the wrong amount (too little) in this mess and on cancellation refunded the wrong amount (too much). This is despite pointing that out to them.
But it was most noticeable to me that they hate their customers so much they pay (presumably the lowest bidder) in another country to talk to them. (Of course that country doesn't have Sirius or XM service so the customer service reps have no experience of using the product in any way.)
Read Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis (or a more recent edition) and you can see exactly how they did all these things starting with the System/38 in the 1970s.
You don't have to have multiple address spaces. Heck even the first Linux kernels just used one huge address space with each process getting a 64MB chunk of that.
The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week has always had persistent "objects". They are named but they aren't files although if you squint hard enough you could claim they similar enough. Phantom is only 30 years late in claiming to be the first.
The advantage to using a VM is that code above the VM is insulated from changes below the VM. For example the very first System/38 program will still run today and in all that time they have gone through several generations of processors including changing from CISC to RISC and changing address sizes. You can still have C and assembler but they target a virtual environment rather than a concrete one with the OS doing the right thing at run time.
What about reports of forum threads and postings being repeatedly deleted? To me that was the worst aspect of this whole issue. And due to Seagate's slowness in responding many will assume the worst - eg deliberate hiding of the issue, hating of the customers, ignorance etc - when the actual cause appears to be overloading of the support process.
And how much effort do you think it takes to make a great text editor, compiler, kernel, windowing system etc?
The problem the PC industry has is "sharing". So called piracy is seen everywhere as well as considering the used market hostile to its interests. Open source/free software is the other way round. It is all about sharing. The more sharing that goes on, the easier it is to recruit more developers (people to improve the software via code, testing, documentation, art assets etc). That incredible army can bring about rapid improvement especially compared to a traditional development team (see cathedral and the bazaar).
The open source world also leads to better tools. Since volunteer time is precious, there is a big incentive to give them productive tools. You can see how several other commenters have been pointing at the tools and hoping for improvement and standardisation.
You are conflating several things. As a radio technology, GSM isn't too bad but CDMA is a lot better especially in such a sparsely populated county. The whole SIM card thing is nice but could be done with any underlying radio technology. The FCC should have mandated interoperability of SIM cards, not of how radio stuff is done. As an analogy, it is better to legislate car emission outcomes (eg quantities of pollutants per 1000 miles driven) than how emissions are reduced (catalytic converters, injection systems etc).
I just dumped Sirius after being a subscriber for many years. The ultimate reason is that they are an exceptionally poorly run company. After hearing my tale, any shareholder should be pissed.
I had two radios with annual subscription. The first subscription is about $140 and the second about $80. For the latter the antenna on the car had cracked and stopped working. We had a Sirius Boombox and so were using the antenna from that inside the car but it didn't work too well. A replacement car antenna is sold for $40 which is as expensive as many complete kits. The electronic music channels were getting repetitive so I called up to cancel.
Sirius outsources their call center to India. (Nothing wrong with that). But it does tell you that their customers are so important to them that they pay another company in another country half way around the world the least amount of money possible in order to avoid talking to their own customers. On trying to cancel you are eventually forwarded to a US based retention team. So they gave a $10 credit. And a whole new radio. And free installation. Yes, they spent almost $200 to "fix" a broken antenna when the antenna costs a few bucks to manufacture. Oh and in reactivating that second radio, they managed to terminate the first one. I had to call to get them to turn it back on again.
The credit card they had on file for me expired in October and my subscription was due in November. They sent an email pointing that out and asking me to call to update. Instead I used their web interface. So on November 12th my radio shuts off. Their system didn't do a renewal. So I call again. They fix it and charge me the second radio amount ($80) for the first radio subscription (should have been $140) and charge me $20 activation, but give a $15 credit for that. I accept the deal even though it is ludicrous.
November 12th also happened to be the day they changed the lineup. 4 electronic music stations went to 3 with those 3 having more talking and playing more "poppy" music. Needless to say the cancelled channel is the one I listened to the most (~95% of my listening). I give them a few days and then email complaining about the music change. A snotty email comes back explaining that "people like me" wanted these changes! I had to respond that people like me would not want my main channel killed and more talking on music channels playing more music like the crap ClearChannel does.
I gave them another week to fix the music but they never did. So I called up to cancel the main radio. The CSR suggested giving me two free months in case they fix the music issue. He had no more clue than me if they would actually fix it. I said to cancel and he had to put more on hold to do the refund. A few minutes later he had done it but had refunded about $160. This was for a $140 subscription plus activation but the subscription had only been $80! I explained how he had refunded way too much, but he didn't want to fix it and said it was okay because the error was in my favor. (My best guess is that as a CSR his metrics would be time per call and least number of mistakes.)
So the net effect has been that Sirius lost one subscriber, got $5.16 for a second subscription that they paid over $200 to address a broken antenna. 100% of the time I talked to them on account issues they made mistakes. And had that first subscriber tell everyone about the crappy experience.
Why yes I do have socket 754 and 939 cpus sitting in my cupboard with one working machine still running using AM2. I buy all my computer stuff at Fry's and every time AMD introduced new sockets, Fry's pretty much dropped the older CPUs and motherboards. If you went to the wall of motherboards at Fry's all the Intel mobos used the same socket while the AMD ones had a variety. As another data point consider that the Pentium 4 and Celeron D use the same socket whereas the Athlon 64 and Sempron used different ones.
The very last AMD stuff I bought was because a motherboard failed. I couldn't get a non-AM2 replacement and so ended up having to buy a new motherboard, processor and memory. (My kernel etc was compiled for AMD so I couldn't switch to Intel then. Lesson learned and Gentoo dropped :) ) Sure I could have hunted NewEgg/eBay etc for random parts but when it is your email etc server that is dead, time is of the essence.
Anyway that is why *I* stopped using AMD. The constantly changing sockets annoyed me and created extra upgrade expenses. Intel's LGA775 has supported a far wider range of processors for far longer.
You also forgot why people like me stopped using AMD (after using them exclusively from 1995 till 2005). They kept changing the sockets which meant I couldn't upgrade my system one piece at a time any more.
In addition to lacking UMA, they also require you to get a data plan ($25 / month min, $600 for two years of contract). What I want is to have no data plan, and have the thing just do all data over Wifi. If there is no Wifi around then no data for me - I'll cope.
I would have got the OpenMoko FreeRunner but they decided to make it tripleband rather than quadband. I also believe they don't have UMA.
I'd also like to see the opposite. Even ZFS administration is ridiculously complicated if you want to add randomly sized multiple drives over time. I'd like to be able to tag directories and files and say that they must be able to survive the failure of at least N drives. Under the hood I want my drives to always be full with the filesystem making as many copies as possible of my data. When I plug in a new drive it should automatically and almost instantly fill it. Then the filesystem implementation becomes a question of what to free next to accommodate new data.
Unlike many other countries the US doesn't have separate area codes for mobile phones. Consequently you couldn't charge more for calling a cell recipient as is done in many countries. Conceptually the charges to cell users for both incoming and outgoing calls are because the conventional phone network gets the call to their area code and then the charge to them is to go from their area over radio waves to and from their phone. Obviously the cellular network doesn't work like that now but it used to.
It has traditionally been very difficult and/or expensive to change carriers. There used to be many small regional ones which were bought up into 4 large ones now plus a few small regionals. There are two different incompatible radio systems in use - GSM and CDMA. (Contrast to Europe where the EU mandated GSM only.) There are no laws requiring contract free phones or phone portability so the carriers require two year contracts with subsidised locked phones. Even if you could unlock the phone, there would be only one other carrier you could take it to because of the GSM vs CDMA incompatibility. Phone number portability (ie taking the number with you when changing carriers) was only legislated a few years ago.
The carriers compete for new customers by the headline price of however many dollars for however many minutes in the plans. The finances of a carrier are measured by average revenue per user (ARPU). In order to keep their ARPU up the carriers are very adept at nickel and diming their customers. This article is one example as are numerous surcharges and regulatory fees. Verizon Wireless even goes so far as to get their phones deliberately crippled so you have to use their nickel and diming services for things like transferring pictures. (For example the phones will have file transfer via Bluetooth disabled). Prices in general in the US are not shown inclusive of taxes and fees. Consequently customers aren't aware that their $40 for 400 minutes plans will actually end up being $60 or more per month. That gives more wiggle room for the carriers to screw their customers and trivial to add in more charges here and there everytime the ARPU needs a bump.
This is one of the reasons for the perceived popularity of the iPhone in the US. The experience was crafted by Apple not by some idiotic cellular company.
On my machine it is quicker to do a fresh boot, login and start apps than it is to do a resume from hibernate with those same set of apps running. From what I am able to tell the underlying causes are:
Why don't you just call them up and ask? Also keep a tally of if you ever get the same answer twice. These folks did - http://www.eyelesswriter.com.
So how do you feel about micro-USB (which appears to have two different styles of connector). Cell phones are starting to use it now (eg new Blackberrys). Micro is an even smaller connector and is designed for more insertion cycles. If someone made a simple dongle that converted mini to micro I'd be happy.
I do agree with your overall sentiment. I don't have a Nokia cellphone because they use a proprietary power connector. Despite Nokia devices also having USB they won't charge over it. (Of course that is just about impossible to figure out from the manual). I also don't have a Sandisk Sansa Fuze because they use a proprietary connector even though the next model down (Clip) uses standard mini-USB.
How about a car analogy? Consider them like a big truck - think 18 wheeler. Pretty much every other vehicle you can buy is cheaper, faster and more fuel efficient. But when you have to move 40 tonnes of timber, what do you use? A Ferrari which could go at three or more times the speed of a truck would not be able to get the lumber to the destination quicker even making multiple journeys. (And loading lumber into a Ferrari would be entertaining :)
They are also managed differently. A mainframe is an asset that is best being used. The admins try to get 100% cpu usage as well as peak usage of other resources. The goal is to not waste what you have. (Commercial trucking does the same - try to ensure the truck is always fully loaded and moving goods). By comparison Windows and Unix machines have far lighter loads on them. Admins pride themselves on how lightly loaded they are. CPU and other resources are considered cheap and plentiful.
I also have a WRT54GX. I have to reset it every two weeks or so because the wireless stops working. If I have my Wii set to do standby connections then the router has to be reset within 24 hours. I haven't had any trouble with BitTorrent but I usually only use it for a few hours at a time (basically long enough to download an Ubuntu DVD).
I would like to upgrade to a more recent device (gigabit) but if you look at all newer devices including those from other companies on Amazon you'll find people mentioning having to reset them in reviews. Consequently I figured I'll stay with the devil I know. Congratulations to the manufacturers for shooting themselves in the foot.
At http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141 the Lenovo folks detail what goes in behind the scenes with the SSDs. They even detail why the (more recent) drives they use are better than the same brand (but older technology) used in the Macbook Air.
If they can use their existing rental agreements then they will have way more content. Secondly not everyone has an ISP that provides multi megabits a second uninterrupted for however long it takes to download movies. In fact I can't even get that where I live (coastal Californian town near Silicon Valley). Lastly it would Just Work(tm).
Comparing to Netflix - they don't provide instant gratification for using physical media. For their download service, you have a limited choice, and you have to have a Windows machine hooked up to your TV. While early adopters may have that, many people don't. A physical store is nice as you get the instant gratification, but it sucks because they are limited to physical copies on hand and you have to return.
This approach is the only way I can see Blockbuster being relevant. Anything else they try will be a poor imitation of the existing competitors. And for some people such as yourself it is unlikely there is anything they could do.