Can I distribute a bunch a paper leaflets and print on them:
"By reading this document, you agree to the following terms...."
Sure, I can print it, but it will have absolutely zero legal force behind it.
I suppose the real problem is that the standard for legally agreeing to something via the internet is still not established. The court may deicde that posting an agreement online is not sufficient to prove that anyone who has that document is bound by the terms. They may decide that a company like microsoft needs to produce records of who agreed to what version of the document on what date. (And since IP addresses don't really prove who was sitting at the computer at the time, they may not be considered sufficient.) If they cannot produce these, default copyright law applies.
Not to mention that most common hardware is documented and widely understood as to how it works (x86 architecture for example) and any discrepancies would be easy to notice...
I don't think you understand the situation. I can design a chip that looks EXACTLY like a normal keyboard controller. The only way you can make it behave otherwise is to feed it a 1024 bit secret key. That is NOT easy to notice. There is simply no way you're going to catch that unless you depackage the chip and examine it under a microscope.
Contract with proprietary software where it's exact functionality is not completely understood and often subject to change.
This not less true with hardware it is more true. All the information you need to duplicate a given piece of software is right there on that disk. You can make an exact copy virtually instantly, inspect it with free (or almost free) tools, and KNOW INSTANTLY IF THE CHECKSUM FOR YOUR LASTEST BATCH OF PC'S DOESN'T MATCH THAT ON FILE.
There are no checksums for chips. They are black boxes. You can NEVER completely trust them unless you open the box, and opening the box is destructive, expensive and takes many orders of magnitude more resources. This is why the concept of an electronic voting machine is just plain stupid.
Both the Chinese and US government have access to such equipment...
The both have access, but they have to play the odds. Unlike software, they simply can't to a 100% inspection because they would have no PCs left to actually use. (Let alone the astronomical cost.) This means they are forced to take a sampling of the hardware and examine it. If bugged chips where randomly distributed (as in the case of a white box vendor), then the odds of the inspection team getting one is going to be better than if the "enemy" knows which PCs are going where. (If I sell 1 million chips to companies in the US but I don't know where they're ending up, I have to bug a lot more of them to have a chacge of one actually reaching its target.)
Universal admitted no wrongdoing when they agreed to the settlement.
And they settled becuase they did nothing wrong?
What it comes down to is that large corporations can commit crimes that would carry signifcant jail terms for an individual, but get off virtually free and clear as a corporation.
As for piracy, existence in a dictionary does not mean that the term is not a politically motivated mischaracterization. I'm sure you could dig up plenty of 300 year old racial slurs, but that doesn't mean they are the right way to refer to the groups they describe.
The price-fixing settlement is not what you think it was.
It's JUST what I think it is, a company breaking the law and getting off with a slap on the wrist.
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive.
It's more like requiring someone to know how to change a tire, check their fluids, change their oil, and do a basic safety inspection.
He's not saying everyone should be able to design a Pentium.
At some level he's right too. Too many people on the road have no idea how a car works or what to do when the unexpected happens. Not knowing that the light on your dash that says "Brake" indicates the presence of a dangerous situation is just plain negligent. Same thing with bald tires, blown light bulbs, unadjusted mirrors, etc.
I only halfway agree with him though. A person should understand the key parts and what they do, just like with a car, a stove, whatever. They don't need to be able to build one, but they need to understand the difference between RAM and a hard disk. Too many people think that they can somehow not teach these concepts. It leaves to people with a fundamentally crippled understanding of what they're using. There are certain basic concepts that you simply have to know or you don't know what you're doing.
Well I'm the next guy and I say your not that liberal.
First off, copyright infringement is neither stealing nor piracy.
I think the RIAA is stealing from us as much as we from them but unfortunately their stealing is legal, and in any case two wrongs don't make a right. That's not saying that I disapprove of piracy, just that if people get caught its not like they can make a case that what they're doing doesn't deserve punishment.
This logic is retarded. Basically your opinion is:
It's illegal, therefore they deserve to be punished, regardless of whether what they did was morally wrong, but the big guys can do whatever they want. (Price fixing is NOT legal BTW, nor are Sony's recent acts of computer crime.) That view is ANYTHING but liberal. You're about as conservative as they come buddy. You haven't said a single liberal thing here.
You're literally saying, "Go against the establishment and you don't deserve my sympathy."
Here's a question for you:
How many homes were raided when they found out that the RIAA was illegally price fixing? How many people went to jail?
However it raises an interesting point, it's much easier to hide back doors in software
No it's not. Any Joe Blow can examine software. Hardware requires specialized equipment that only a very small fraction of the people on this planet have access to.
Tools to examine software are widely availible and pretty much free. The facilities to depackage ICs and examine them are VERY expensive. How many people do you know that have a clean room or an electron microscope?
True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly.
This is why you want to be more than just a white box manufacturer.
Lenovo, can look and see that the check is coming from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc. Generic white box manufacturers can't do that. They just ship a million units to Dell.
There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.
We did it during the cold war with Xerox and photocopiers. It's silly to think that a regime like China's would not even consider it.
I could design a keyboard that is indistinguishable from a normal keyboard, but that logs the last 10,000 keystrokes. I could even design it to "fail" when certain key phrases were typed, requiring it to be sent back to the factory for replacement. The only way you could find out is to depackage the chips and examine them under a microscope.
There a nasty leap of logic between your two paragraphs.
It's not really much of a leap:
Apple screwed up, therefore they don't want people to know about it.
Seems downright obvious to me.
Sure they COULD be stupid and go sending their lawyers after someone for no good reason, but that makes a lot less sense. I suppose if you can only think in cliches, the proper one would be "call a spade a spade." The motivation is obvious. We can't see inside anyone's head to get 100% proof, but that does not mean that motivation for Apple's actions is not obvious.
This documentation is clearly emabassing and makes them look like amateurs. Professionals with experience simply would not make this type of mistake. This isn't a typo, it's an obvious misunderstanding of the purpose and application of thermal grease.
Thermal grease is meant to fill surface irregularities, NOT to form a solid layer between two parts. Adding more than is necessary will quickly create a worse situation than if you hadn't used grease at all.
Nobody cares about you making copies of something you already own for personal use or private exhibition.
Not true. If I make ten copies of a Beatles album, even for my own personal use, I'm am breaking the law.
but don't try to cast it as a privacy issue when it isn't.
It IS a privacy issue. The gov't sticks its nose into the affairs of consenting private parties. Just because you're not used to thinking about it that way does not mean that laws which regulate actions we take on our own, in private do not affect our privacy.
If it's the first, I (and most here) would agree; if it's the second, you need to do a reality check.
Maybe you need to chill.
Just because things are the way they are today, doesn't mean they have to be. Works of art were produced before copyright and they would continue to be produced afterwards.
People seem to have this crazy idea that no books would get written if copyright were to suddenly disappear. It's just not true.
Maybe you'd have less ghost-written autobiographies, but things like Newton's Principia Mathematica were not written to make a quick buck.
Think a little bit more, there is a real issue here, especially ethically. Copyright restricts what consenting parties do behind closed doors. Free societies should try to aviod such restrictions in all but the most extreme cases.
Then there's even an arguable benefit to society because, even if there were less books written, you would be able to afford to own more of them.
I'm not saying this viewpoint is the only correct one, but thinking that someone is a nutcase for not liking a law that hasn't existed for most of human civilization and has many points against it is what's really going off the deep end. Everyone who does not agree with you is not crazy.
Electricity would be cheaper if plants could be kept running at a constant level all day and night.
The question is: How much cheaper?
Cheap enough to offset the cost of production and disposal for all the batteries we would need to buy?
Somehow I doubt it.
I would be more interested in something like a natural gas powered generator. This way I have a choice between two energy sources and their assosciated costs.
People forget that batteries only last a few years and are not trivial to replace OR dispose of.
We have shown that the power input required is in the microwatts, but you can get milliwatts of cooling
I think it's important to point out that this is a meaningless statement. Cooling is not about creating heat flow, that happens naturally, cooling is about lowering resistance to heat transfer.
Even in the case where you assume the milliwatts of cooling is an improvement over what load could normally be sufficiently cooled, it's not meaningful without knowing the original power dissipation. An improvement of 10 mW with a normal heat load of 100 W is worthless, but it's a big deal if you were only dissipating 10 mW beforehand.
So, no, it doesn't scream "artificial constraint". That doesn't mean it isn't there, but that rationale alone doesn't float the boat.
You're missing the point.
My argument is that having a 20% is not anything even close to proof that your competitors aren't doing anything illegal.
Brand marketing, color schemes and whatever else you want to throw at me fall under the portion of my previous post etc.
What it comes down to is that 20% marketshare does not prove that the other guy isn't forcing people into illegal agreements, period. That was the comment and it's dead wrong.
The article says AMD has 20% market share, not 50%. Oops. Still, the fact that AMD was able to wrest 20% of the market away from Intel seems to imply that Intel doesn't have monopoly power, and whatever power Intel has is steadily eroding. I don't think an antitrust suit is justified.
Think a little bit man!
What if AMD's chips were better than Intel's in every conceivable aspect (price, preformance, power dissipation, etc) and they can only manage a 20% market share? Doesn't that scream that's there's an artificial constraint placed on the market somehow?
I'm not necessarily saying this is the case, but stating that someone reached a 20% market share therefore their competitors couldn't possibly be doing anything illegal is just silly.
He was re-elected. So say of George W. Bush what you like but if he is a moron what the hell does that make the majority of americans who elected him.
IMO, Bush was NEVER elected by a majority of Americans, but there is not sufficient evidence to prove that he was.
Bush played with the old boy network and the electoral college to get into office by rigging elections. He had help from his brother in Floida and help from Diebold in other states, possibly Traid as well.
It's really sad that you feel that way because that attitude goes against the very foundation by which GNU/Linux was founded. It takes a community of people with a common goal to make an Open Source project successful. Refusing to point people in the right direction and insulting them in the process is irresponsible and elitist.
I disagree. Telling someone to read the manual is definately not refusing to point someone in the right direction. What I'm saying goes right along with F/OSS ideology.
It's not about refusing to help. Quite often the guy saying RTFM, is the same guy who wrote the manual or FAQ in question. They WANT to help but the sheer volume of people who can't be bothered to read the FAQ is choking the bandwidth of the system. They can reply to questions they've already answered 100 times or they can do work that actually advances the project.
As for being insulted, if you see me eating a slice of pizza and ask me for it are you going to be insulted when I tell you to get your own damn slice? Maybe, but you were being self-centered and rude. Community standards dictate that you will make some reasonable attempt to solve the problem yourself. If you choose to violate those standards, what right do you think you have to be treated well by the community?
The elitism comment is just wrong. If I have a problem, I check the manual. Telling someone else to do the same thing when they clearly haven't is not elitist. If anything it's treating them as an equal.... expecting them to be able to read the same document you did and get to the same point you are.
Elitism would be saying, "There's a manual, but you couldn't understand it."
Some of this discussion reminds me of a choice nugget from "Acts of Gord":
<ring>
"Gamer's Edge."
"Yes, I'm stuck in Tomb Raider 2."
"I'm sorry, we don't give advice for games over the phone."
"You have to! It's the law!"
"What?"
"When you sell someone a game, you have to help them with it!"
"Oh really."
"The law says so!"
"If you are so smart, then why are you stuck?"
"You just have to help me."
"Uhm, no. When a car lot sells you a car, do they have to teach you how to drive and how to find your way around Vancouver?"
"uhmm"
"Exactly."
The point?
That random guy on the internet doesn't owe you anything, don't act like he does.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people, but some of those display exactly the attitude in the example above.
When people who are new to a discussion group or IRC channel ask a simple (to the experienced) question and receive a RTFM response, they can be quite offended by the apparent harsh reaction.
So in order to avoid this "harsh" reaction, maybe they'll RTFM next time!
Maybe they'll realize that they are asking for help from a person whose time is valuable, and by not showing any effort on their part before approaching him with a question they are actually insulting him.
That, IMO, is a barrier to people migrating to Linux (or any other OS for that matter).
Not paying for help AND refusing to teach yourself is a barrier to getting ANYTHING done. Nobody's going to to drop what they're doing and teach you all you need to be a plumber/carpenter/auto mechanic for free.
Work at it, or spend money, but don't expect someone else to do every little thing for you without compensation. That's being a jerk.
I might be marked down because of this. But what I see day to day in the IRC, very few new people do these very simple things. This is why we go off on them, they dont even try to find the answer on there own.
This is one big thing I like about Gentoo.
Until recently there was no installer. The meant that if you wound up on the Gentoo support forums you could either read and follow directions yourself or knew someone who did.
A lot of the reason people get upset is beacuse others bite off more than they can chew and expect someone else to do the majority of the work for them.
It's like rebuilding a car and asking people to spoonfeed you every step of the process, every blot torque, etc. Eventually someone is going to say: Read the fucking manual!"
It is simply not right to expect someone who is providing you with free support to do everything for you.
On the other hand, that's exactly how America was 200 years ago. We undercut everyone with cheap, crappy goods thanks to our abundant workforce and raw supplies, and we built quality goods much later.
I'd like to see some support for that argument. What sort of cheap, junky trinkets were we shipping out 200 years ago?
It certainly wasn't DVD players.
I really have to wonder where on earth you got this idea, 200 years ago 75% of America's exports were agricultural.
Japan might have been the example you were looking for, but Japan's gov't was and is signficantly different than China's. One might even suggest that China is in the same boat that Russia was was in 30 years ago. Sure, the wall fell, but how many Russian cars do you see rolling around the streets of the US?
My point is, it should not be treated as a forgone conclusion that China will eventually start producing product on a par with the rest of the world. I'm reminded of an Onion article: " India's Top Physicists Develop Plan To Get The Hell Out Of India." The point is, it's perfectly conceivable that China could remain a cheap forced labor camp for the rest of the world indefinately. Hopefully, that won't be the case, but it is possible.
Maybe instead of "thinking" about the issue you should have checked out the company site where they have a video of ice being removed from an airfoil in a wind tunnel.
That seemed like a fairly conclusive demonstration of the practicality of this process for that purpose.
Looks like you completely missed his point.
OBVIOUSLY it *could* work, the question is does it make sense to do it this way?
If, for example, in that video they have to use as much power just to de-ice the wing as it would take to get the wing to typical flying velocity, then it simply isn't worthwhile.
Here's another example:
Theoretically, I *could* switch to an electric heater in my car so that I have instant heat when I get in. In reality, the amount of power required to do thisand the wa in which it is generated makes it uneconomical.
CR takes an approach that is valuable to the very largest number of people possible.
No, it's more than that.
It's not an issue of what the average joe is looking for, it's an issue of what matters about a product.
Take the subject of this article, RAM. The person doing the review should be familiar with different types of RAM, key specs, test procedures, worst-case operating conditions, etc. The average Joe really just wants something that is going to work well for him, he is relying on CR to decide what that is.
It is *unbelivably* difficult to get information that can be trusted when you have whole industries built around not just feeding misleading information to the consumer, a la advertising and marketing, but around figuring out how to mislead the people that feed information to consumers.
Not really. You do this thing called TESTING. It's what CR claims to do. Problem is their tests don't always test what's important about a product. They may have a nice table showing how many buttons the remotes for five different DVD players have, but they won't bother to get real test equipment and measure the device's actual ability to reproduce audio and video signals.
SMM runs at permission levels beyond ring0, think of it as ring-1.
So does anything that can load before your kernel. (Like a boot sector virus.)
Now imagine just how many people have root access to their virtual server at a hosting company and how many other users are running on the same physical hardware secure in the belief that their customer information is safe. But is it?
This isn't really different than a boot sector. If you have root on a VIRTUAL server, you shouldn't have access to this or to the boot sector on the real filesystem.
The action in third world countries seems to be in adding features to cell phones, not trimming down PCs. A cell phone is inherently useful; you can make calls. Adding on extra features doesn't run the manufacturing cost up all that much. The niche Negroponte sees will probably be filled by some cell phone based product that looks like a Blackberry or a Game Boy or a Palm Pilot.
As someone who has owned a:
Palm Treo 650
Sharp Zaurus
Psion Revo
Apple Newton
+others
I can confidently say that a PDA simply does not work for the same things as a laptop.
The user interface is just SOOO much more efficient on a laptop. It's the compination of a bigger screen, a human-sized keyboard, and less comprimses to make it tiny. Let's put it this way, you can sit down in front of a laptop and do work for eight hours. You simply can't get close to the same amount of work done with something like a Treo, Zaurus, etc. It's not that you can't run the software, it's the amount of panning (constant), the awkward keyboard, the tiny touch-screen, the crappy or non-existent speakers, lack of interface for a printer.....
Put it this way, how many times would you have had to scroll down to get to this comment?
The tiny size of cellphones and PDAs does not come free.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a little bigger than that.
...."
What consitutes a legal agreement?
Can I distribute a bunch a paper leaflets and print on them:
"By reading this document, you agree to the following terms
Sure, I can print it, but it will have absolutely zero legal force behind it.
I suppose the real problem is that the standard for legally agreeing to something via the internet is still not established. The court may deicde that posting an agreement online is not sufficient to prove that anyone who has that document is bound by the terms. They may decide that a company like microsoft needs to produce records of who agreed to what version of the document on what date. (And since IP addresses don't really prove who was sitting at the computer at the time, they may not be considered sufficient.) If they cannot produce these, default copyright law applies.
Not to mention that most common hardware is documented and widely understood as to how it works (x86 architecture for example) and any discrepancies would be easy to notice...
I don't think you understand the situation. I can design a chip that looks EXACTLY like a normal keyboard controller. The only way you can make it behave otherwise is to feed it a 1024 bit secret key. That is NOT easy to notice. There is simply no way you're going to catch that unless you depackage the chip and examine it under a microscope.
Contract with proprietary software where it's exact functionality is not completely understood and often subject to change.
This not less true with hardware it is more true. All the information you need to duplicate a given piece of software is right there on that disk. You can make an exact copy virtually instantly, inspect it with free (or almost free) tools, and KNOW INSTANTLY IF THE CHECKSUM FOR YOUR LASTEST BATCH OF PC'S DOESN'T MATCH THAT ON FILE.
There are no checksums for chips. They are black boxes. You can NEVER completely trust them unless you open the box, and opening the box is destructive, expensive and takes many orders of magnitude more resources. This is why the concept of an electronic voting machine is just plain stupid.
Both the Chinese and US government have access to such equipment...
The both have access, but they have to play the odds. Unlike software, they simply can't to a 100% inspection because they would have no PCs left to actually use. (Let alone the astronomical cost.) This means they are forced to take a sampling of the hardware and examine it. If bugged chips where randomly distributed (as in the case of a white box vendor), then the odds of the inspection team getting one is going to be better than if the "enemy" knows which PCs are going where. (If I sell 1 million chips to companies in the US but I don't know where they're ending up, I have to bug a lot more of them to have a chacge of one actually reaching its target.)
Universal admitted no wrongdoing when they agreed to the settlement.
And they settled becuase they did nothing wrong?
What it comes down to is that large corporations can commit crimes that would carry signifcant jail terms for an individual, but get off virtually free and clear as a corporation.
As for piracy, existence in a dictionary does not mean that the term is not a politically motivated mischaracterization. I'm sure you could dig up plenty of 300 year old racial slurs, but that doesn't mean they are the right way to refer to the groups they describe.
The price-fixing settlement is not what you think it was.
It's JUST what I think it is, a company breaking the law and getting off with a slap on the wrist.
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive.
It's more like requiring someone to know how to change a tire, check their fluids, change their oil, and do a basic safety inspection.
He's not saying everyone should be able to design a Pentium.
At some level he's right too. Too many people on the road have no idea how a car works or what to do when the unexpected happens. Not knowing that the light on your dash that says "Brake" indicates the presence of a dangerous situation is just plain negligent. Same thing with bald tires, blown light bulbs, unadjusted mirrors, etc.
I only halfway agree with him though. A person should understand the key parts and what they do, just like with a car, a stove, whatever. They don't need to be able to build one, but they need to understand the difference between RAM and a hard disk. Too many people think that they can somehow not teach these concepts. It leaves to people with a fundamentally crippled understanding of what they're using. There are certain basic concepts that you simply have to know or you don't know what you're doing.
I'm as liberal as the next guy,
Well I'm the next guy and I say your not that liberal.
First off, copyright infringement is neither stealing nor piracy.
I think the RIAA is stealing from us as much as we from them but unfortunately their stealing is legal, and in any case two wrongs don't make a right. That's not saying that I disapprove of piracy, just that if people get caught its not like they can make a case that what they're doing doesn't deserve punishment.
This logic is retarded. Basically your opinion is:
It's illegal, therefore they deserve to be punished, regardless of whether what they did was morally wrong, but the big guys can do whatever they want. (Price fixing is NOT legal BTW, nor are Sony's recent acts of computer crime.) That view is ANYTHING but liberal. You're about as conservative as they come buddy. You haven't said a single liberal thing here.
You're literally saying, "Go against the establishment and you don't deserve my sympathy."
Here's a question for you:
How many homes were raided when they found out that the RIAA was illegally price fixing? How many people went to jail?
However it raises an interesting point, it's much easier to hide back doors in software
No it's not. Any Joe Blow can examine software. Hardware requires specialized equipment that only a very small fraction of the people on this planet have access to.
Tools to examine software are widely availible and pretty much free. The facilities to depackage ICs and examine them are VERY expensive. How many people do you know that have a clean room or an electron microscope?
True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly.
This is why you want to be more than just a white box manufacturer.
Lenovo, can look and see that the check is coming from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc. Generic white box manufacturers can't do that. They just ship a million units to Dell.
There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.
We did it during the cold war with Xerox and photocopiers. It's silly to think that a regime like China's would not even consider it.
I could design a keyboard that is indistinguishable from a normal keyboard, but that logs the last 10,000 keystrokes. I could even design it to "fail" when certain key phrases were typed, requiring it to be sent back to the factory for replacement. The only way you could find out is to depackage the chips and examine them under a microscope.
There a nasty leap of logic between your two paragraphs.
It's not really much of a leap:
Apple screwed up, therefore they don't want people to know about it.
Seems downright obvious to me.
Sure they COULD be stupid and go sending their lawyers after someone for no good reason, but that makes a lot less sense. I suppose if you can only think in cliches, the proper one would be "call a spade a spade." The motivation is obvious. We can't see inside anyone's head to get 100% proof, but that does not mean that motivation for Apple's actions is not obvious.
This documentation is clearly emabassing and makes them look like amateurs. Professionals with experience simply would not make this type of mistake. This isn't a typo, it's an obvious misunderstanding of the purpose and application of thermal grease.
Thermal grease is meant to fill surface irregularities, NOT to form a solid layer between two parts. Adding more than is necessary will quickly create a worse situation than if you hadn't used grease at all.
Nobody cares about you making copies of something you already own for personal use or private exhibition.
Not true. If I make ten copies of a Beatles album, even for my own personal use, I'm am breaking the law.
but don't try to cast it as a privacy issue when it isn't.
It IS a privacy issue. The gov't sticks its nose into the affairs of consenting private parties. Just because you're not used to thinking about it that way does not mean that laws which regulate actions we take on our own, in private do not affect our privacy.
If it's the first, I (and most here) would agree; if it's the second, you need to do a reality check.
Maybe you need to chill.
Just because things are the way they are today, doesn't mean they have to be. Works of art were produced before copyright and they would continue to be produced afterwards.
People seem to have this crazy idea that no books would get written if copyright were to suddenly disappear. It's just not true.
Maybe you'd have less ghost-written autobiographies, but things like Newton's Principia Mathematica were not written to make a quick buck.
Think a little bit more, there is a real issue here, especially ethically. Copyright restricts what consenting parties do behind closed doors. Free societies should try to aviod such restrictions in all but the most extreme cases.
Then there's even an arguable benefit to society because, even if there were less books written, you would be able to afford to own more of them.
I'm not saying this viewpoint is the only correct one, but thinking that someone is a nutcase for not liking a law that hasn't existed for most of human civilization and has many points against it is what's really going off the deep end. Everyone who does not agree with you is not crazy.
Electricity would be cheaper if plants could be kept running at a constant level all day and night.
The question is:
How much cheaper?
Cheap enough to offset the cost of production and disposal for all the batteries we would need to buy?
Somehow I doubt it.
I would be more interested in something like a natural gas powered generator. This way I have a choice between two energy sources and their assosciated costs.
People forget that batteries only last a few years and are not trivial to replace OR dispose of.
We have shown that the power input required is in the microwatts, but you can get milliwatts of cooling
I think it's important to point out that this is a meaningless statement. Cooling is not about creating heat flow, that happens naturally, cooling is about lowering resistance to heat transfer.
Even in the case where you assume the milliwatts of cooling is an improvement over what load could normally be sufficiently cooled, it's not meaningful without knowing the original power dissipation. An improvement of 10 mW with a normal heat load of 100 W is worthless, but it's a big deal if you were only dissipating 10 mW beforehand.
So, no, it doesn't scream "artificial constraint". That doesn't mean it isn't there, but that rationale alone doesn't float the boat.
You're missing the point.
My argument is that having a 20% is not anything even close to proof that your competitors aren't doing anything illegal.
Brand marketing, color schemes and whatever else you want to throw at me fall under the portion of my previous post etc.
What it comes down to is that 20% marketshare does not prove that the other guy isn't forcing people into illegal agreements, period. That was the comment and it's dead wrong.
The article says AMD has 20% market share, not 50%. Oops. Still, the fact that AMD was able to wrest 20% of the market away from Intel seems to imply that Intel doesn't have monopoly power, and whatever power Intel has is steadily eroding. I don't think an antitrust suit is justified.
Think a little bit man!
What if AMD's chips were better than Intel's in every conceivable aspect (price, preformance, power dissipation, etc) and they can only manage a 20% market share? Doesn't that scream that's there's an artificial constraint placed on the market somehow?
I'm not necessarily saying this is the case, but stating that someone reached a 20% market share therefore their competitors couldn't possibly be doing anything illegal is just silly.
He was re-elected. So say of George W. Bush what you like but if he is a moron what the hell does that make the majority of americans who elected him.
IMO, Bush was NEVER elected by a majority of Americans, but there is not sufficient evidence to prove that he was.
Bush played with the old boy network and the electoral college to get into office by rigging elections. He had help from his brother in Floida and help from Diebold in other states, possibly Traid as well.
I disagree. Telling someone to read the manual is definately not refusing to point someone in the right direction. What I'm saying goes right along with F/OSS ideology.
It's not about refusing to help. Quite often the guy saying RTFM, is the same guy who wrote the manual or FAQ in question. They WANT to help but the sheer volume of people who can't be bothered to read the FAQ is choking the bandwidth of the system. They can reply to questions they've already answered 100 times or they can do work that actually advances the project.
As for being insulted, if you see me eating a slice of pizza and ask me for it are you going to be insulted when I tell you to get your own damn slice? Maybe, but you were being self-centered and rude. Community standards dictate that you will make some reasonable attempt to solve the problem yourself. If you choose to violate those standards, what right do you think you have to be treated well by the community?
The elitism comment is just wrong. If I have a problem, I check the manual. Telling someone else to do the same thing when they clearly haven't is not elitist. If anything it's treating them as an equal.... expecting them to be able to read the same document you did and get to the same point you are.
Elitism would be saying, "There's a manual, but you couldn't understand it."
Some of this discussion reminds me of a choice nugget from "Acts of Gord":
The point?
That random guy on the internet doesn't owe you anything, don't act like he does.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people, but some of those display exactly the attitude in the example above.
When people who are new to a discussion group or IRC channel ask a simple (to the experienced) question and receive a RTFM response, they can be quite offended by the apparent harsh reaction.
So in order to avoid this "harsh" reaction, maybe they'll RTFM next time!
Maybe they'll realize that they are asking for help from a person whose time is valuable, and by not showing any effort on their part before approaching him with a question they are actually insulting him.
That, IMO, is a barrier to people migrating to Linux (or any other OS for that matter).
Not paying for help AND refusing to teach yourself is a barrier to getting ANYTHING done. Nobody's going to to drop what they're doing and teach you all you need to be a plumber/carpenter/auto mechanic for free.
Work at it, or spend money, but don't expect someone else to do every little thing for you without compensation. That's being a jerk.
I might be marked down because of this.
But what I see day to day in the IRC, very few new people do these very simple things.
This is why we go off on them, they dont even try to find the answer on there own.
This is one big thing I like about Gentoo.
Until recently there was no installer. The meant that if you wound up on the Gentoo support forums you could either read and follow directions yourself or knew someone who did.
A lot of the reason people get upset is beacuse others bite off more than they can chew and expect someone else to do the majority of the work for them.
It's like rebuilding a car and asking people to spoonfeed you every step of the process, every blot torque, etc. Eventually someone is going to say: Read the fucking manual!"
It is simply not right to expect someone who is providing you with free support to do everything for you.
On the other hand, that's exactly how America was 200 years ago. We undercut everyone with cheap, crappy goods thanks to our abundant workforce and raw supplies, and we built quality goods much later.
I'd like to see some support for that argument. What sort of cheap, junky trinkets were we shipping out 200 years ago?
It certainly wasn't DVD players.
I really have to wonder where on earth you got this idea, 200 years ago 75% of America's exports were agricultural.
Japan might have been the example you were looking for, but Japan's gov't was and is signficantly different than China's. One might even suggest that China is in the same boat that Russia was was in 30 years ago. Sure, the wall fell, but how many Russian cars do you see rolling around the streets of the US?
My point is, it should not be treated as a forgone conclusion that China will eventually start producing product on a par with the rest of the world. I'm reminded of an Onion article: " India's Top Physicists Develop Plan To Get The Hell Out Of India."
The point is, it's perfectly conceivable that China could remain a cheap forced labor camp for the rest of the world indefinately. Hopefully, that won't be the case, but it is possible.
Maybe instead of "thinking" about the issue you should have checked out the company site where they have a video of ice being removed from an airfoil in a wind tunnel. That seemed like a fairly conclusive demonstration of the practicality of this process for that purpose.
Looks like you completely missed his point.
OBVIOUSLY it *could* work, the question is does it make sense to do it this way?
If, for example, in that video they have to use as much power just to de-ice the wing as it would take to get the wing to typical flying velocity, then it simply isn't worthwhile.
Here's another example:
Theoretically, I *could* switch to an electric heater in my car so that I have instant heat when I get in. In reality, the amount of power required to do thisand the wa in which it is generated makes it uneconomical.
CR takes an approach that is valuable to the very largest number of people possible.
No, it's more than that.
It's not an issue of what the average joe is looking for, it's an issue of what matters about a product.
Take the subject of this article, RAM. The person doing the review should be familiar with different types of RAM, key specs, test procedures, worst-case operating conditions, etc. The average Joe really just wants something that is going to work well for him, he is relying on CR to decide what that is.
It is *unbelivably* difficult to get information that can be trusted when you have whole industries built around not just feeding misleading information to the consumer, a la advertising and marketing, but around figuring out how to mislead the people that feed information to consumers.
Not really. You do this thing called TESTING. It's what CR claims to do. Problem is their tests don't always test what's important about a product. They may have a nice table showing how many buttons the remotes for five different DVD players have, but they won't bother to get real test equipment and measure the device's actual ability to reproduce audio and video signals.
Think fast! What's your F22/F35 pilot going to do? Die.
:)
Actually, it will launch a special purpose UAV called a missile
SMM runs at permission levels beyond ring0, think of it as ring-1.
So does anything that can load before your kernel. (Like a boot sector virus.)
Now imagine just how many people have root access to their virtual server at a hosting company and how many other users are running on the same physical hardware secure in the belief that their customer information is safe. But is it?
This isn't really different than a boot sector. If you have root on a VIRTUAL server, you shouldn't have access to this or to the boot sector on the real filesystem.
But you don't have to wind the crank as often.
That's not really a function of the size.
A cheap laptop does not need the power hungry full-time backlit screen and whirling hard disk that your typical Dell has.
As someone who has owned a:
I can confidently say that a PDA simply does not work for the same things as a laptop.
The user interface is just SOOO much more efficient on a laptop. It's the compination of a bigger screen, a human-sized keyboard, and less comprimses to make it tiny. Let's put it this way, you can sit down in front of a laptop and do work for eight hours. You simply can't get close to the same amount of work done with something like a Treo, Zaurus, etc. It's not that you can't run the software, it's the amount of panning (constant), the awkward keyboard, the tiny touch-screen, the crappy or non-existent speakers, lack of interface for a printer.....
Put it this way, how many times would you have had to scroll down to get to this comment?
The tiny size of cellphones and PDAs does not come free.