As a UK citizen, I wouldn't exactly call our internet access options stellar; although there are a great many ISPs, the vast majority of them all use the old BT network for both last mile and backbone routing. These are built out by BT OpenReach that then sells them on to resellers. Good news is that the wholesale price is set low (and with a lot of government oversight) so that OpenReach can't sell to BT's ISP businesses at a different cost than they sell to everyone else. However, the bad news is that the OpenReach infrastructure is quite outdated in a lot of ways (e.g. the new "21st Century Network" dubbed 21CN doesn't even have a provision for IPv6) and much of the copper is old and crappy; many places outside of major metropolitan centres are so far from their exchange/DSLAM that they're basically limited by the laws of physics to ADSL at http://www.xilo.net/adsl_broadband/#pro...but even here you're still restricted to mostly the BT and a couple of other networks. My favourite ISP, Zen, for example only have an LLU network available in Rochdale.
I don't even follow the ISP game that closely, just closely enough to get good-enough internet without having to give BT any money. It's possible I might just be moaning about first-world problems, blah blah. The US might look at some european ISPs with envy (your prices *do* seem high and I'll never understand the preponderance of cable internet bundled with TV, but then I'm Onion guy who doesn't watch TV), but then everyone else I know just looks at places like Stockholm with eyes greener than that grass on the other side of the fence:)
Anyone from Sweden or similar Awesomepipesville care to comment? Is your telecoms infrastructure still mostly built/owned by a (state-overseen?) incumbent and rented out to your different ISPs as per the UK or do the different ISP lay all their own stuff?
How else are you going to operate the server with your touchscreen KVM/tablet if it doesn't have a touchscreen-friendly UI?
Added bonus is that we'll now be able to use autocorrect for all those pesky command-line things that unbellyfeel computers still insist on using (at least until they integrated into an app silo anyway, and then removed). That will finally open the door to speech-operated commands which'll dispense with the need to have supposedly "trained" server operators eating into your OP-EX.
Computer - export the data please DATA EXPORTED Computer - format the data please DATA FORMATTED Computer - send the formatted data into the reporting engine please DATA REPORTED Computer - take actions based on the report please RHCE'S DOWNSIZED
All you oldthink dinosaurs need to get with the program.
They foisted curved tabs on thunderbird users some time ago. It's possible to correct it with themes, but as I couldn't find any themes that were basically "default theme but without ugly rounded tabs" and there's no about:config option for it, I had to resort to editing the userchrome.css file - something that I'm now probably going to have to do on all my FF installations too.
Whilst I agree with you (having sweated blood over fixing corrupted MySQL tables more times than I'd care to mention), and wish there was more support for more robust databases, it seems most of the world hasn't caught up with this idea yet.
Not only do most webhosts only support/provide MySQL (IIRC due to Postgres and others not having quota support), but there's a vast swathe of projects out there that don't have support for anything other than MySQL. Heck, I was looking into upgrading my home install of Gallery only to find out that support for Postgres (or even SQLite) was dropped completely: http://codex.galleryproject.org/Gallery3:Requirements
Sadly, for a bewildering array of software it's MySQL or nothing. It's partly this monoculture that has, IMHO, contributed to much of the animosity against MySQL, since users are unable to even contemplate trying out something else.
Not a problem! When hydrogen sulphide reaches about 100ppm, you can't smell it any more, and if the concentration gets any higher you soon stop caring about it:)
And here's me wishing I hadn't been given my mod points over the April 1st weekend so I could have used them on a worthwhile post like this. I'll be raising a glass of that single malt this evening, and probably starting to re-read Use of Weapons again just to re-iterate your points about his worldview.
I'm not a huge reader by any means, but I've still read a boatload of sci-fi, and whilst there are dozens of books that have cooked up convincing,,evocative, even enviable, realities, Banks' are the only ones where I've genuinely felt like the author is already living in it.
Sorry, you're wrong. We removed the Model M's from our vending machines because when the keyboard dropped into the out-tray, it broke the vending machine in half and then dented the floor.:)
Just as a counterpoint, the same subject matter was covered recently in the darkly satirical technocentric series "Black Mirror" in the UK, most especially in "The Entire History of You". Definitely worth a watch if you enjoyed Strange Days.
Personally, I think ritual recording of memories is a terrible idea; most of us can already remember the good stuff pretty well, and not forgetting the bad stuff would be... well, pretty bloody traumatic.
What is this, the 1980's? A modern CSI Enhance Button can zoom into the perps DNA helix merely from a reflection in a hub cap and extract a portrait of their entire family.
Not directly related, but the XKCD "What If" scenario on just changing the rotation of the earth enough to avoid having leap-seconds would require 50,000 4m diameter rocky asteroids hitting the earth every second.
Back-of-a-fag-packet calculations that every nuclear and non-nuclear explosion in the history of civilisation wouldn't give enough oomph to move us more than a few km away from the sun (although that didn't stop anyone making films about it). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054790/
....that seems to exist solely to either attempt to coin a phrase, or just blindly continue the meme of prepending "bro" to everything.
Coding has, sadly, always been "testosterone fuelled" simply by having so many more men in the profession than women for the majority of its history, despite the fact that the vast majority of nerds, geeks and just plain computery types are far and away from what I'd see as a "bro" (although as a recalcitrant Brit I might not fully grok the term, is a "bro") I've not yet met any programmer (or indeed any slightly competent professional) that hasn't overindulged in various psychoactive substances at some point in time
The article seems to base it's findings on having watched The Social Network, and seems to think that because a college undergraduate and his mates became hojillionaires after a few beers (yup, it was totally that simple) that this is why software quality is going down the pan. Stupid privacy issues aside, I was under the impression that facebook had a fairly good track record on actual server security because it already had put a large emphasis on engineering standards; even if they don't, they wouldn't be the first company that started out as some frenzied and possibly coding session and later put on a professional hat and cleaned up its act. I wonder if Larry and Sergey had a beer fridge at Stanford?
The real reason "quality software" is apparently seen to be disappearing is because a) software engineering as a "methodical, engineering-heavy discipline" is both difficult and expensive, not to mention seen as boring by many, so many companies and individuals will skimp and b) because barriers to entry are so low and there's so much *more* software out there now (including just as much good, if not great stuff), it could conceivably give the impression that "good software" is drowning in a sea of mediocrity.
AH, but if you break the license, are you still a "a lawful user"?
Yes. The whole point of statute, and the ensuing statutory rights, is that the rights they confer upon you can't be negated by a license, EULA, or even a contract signed in blood. The UK has a fairly good history of customer-friendly policies in this regard, frequently to the annoyance of foreign companies.
It gets a bit more nebulous as you describe the "rented device and service" scenario, but I don't believe that's been tested in the UK courts yet. There's certainly a lot of people who've hardhacked things like their Sky+ boxes to do things like add extra storage and migrating recordings off the box are common, and so far there's been no legal repercussions TTBOMK.
Glad someone brought this up! I was in Germany one NYE and, being a Brit, I was hussled in front of the TV to watch this, and everyone in the room was utterly shocked I'd never even hard of it; as far as I'm aware this custom is almost completely unheard of in the UK. As far as I can make out from Wikipedia, this sketch was broadcast in Germany in 1963 and became a cult hit almost instantly, whilst it's been forgotten about over here - no broadcasts in the UK in 30yrs apparently.
Classic little sketch, and a fantastic excuse for multiple chin-chins:)
This. In my, admittedly limited, hardware building experience intel boards are not only very open source friendly, but come with the best documentation and least-flaky BIOSes. And of course their SATA controllers and NICs are class leaders.
And that's even with my beloved M1015 HBA's, which I've had problems with on some older AMD boards (almost certainly down to poor testing on LSI's side).
I've not done any testing of features like suspend/hibernate since these are targeting "low power always on", and the onboard graphics don't quite match up to 23.97fps at times*. My only regret about choosing the "server" S1200KP board for my NAS is that it doesn't come with mSATA or eSATA ports.
In the mITX arena, almost everyone else seems to use the ubiquitous (and ubiquitously crap) Realtek chips, so it's worth buying Intel for that reason alone. Recently Asus have made a point of using Intel NICs in their higher-end mATX and ATX boards but for small linux builds intel is the only game in town. My two pence.
* If you're really set on a good HTPC experience with e.g. linux+XBMC I would still recommend an ASRock Vision 3D with an nVidia card in it. They're ludicrously overpriced but tiny and silent and the SB models at least work perfectly with linux.
Can we get some links from the Daily Mail please? As a UK citizen I don't think there's enough reactionary nonsense from the Daily Fail posted on slashdot as journalistic fact!
I'm sure some editors will be able to spin this as proof that the UK is somehow living in a mish-mash between 1984 and Mad Max.
On a more serious note, I'm amazed that our government would do something so sensible (especially in denying the "storage tax") merely 15 years too late, and since our governments of the last decade appear to be living out of the back pockets of the financial and entertainment industries, I'm wondering what other copyright reforms will be riding on the back of this. Call my cynical (or maybe reading too much sensationalist nonsense), but whenever I've seen a move for the better regarding copyright in the other first-world countries, it's always come with a whole shedload of "...just one more thing!" provisos, such as blank media taxes and three-strikes rules. Perhaps those will come up in the next few days and be buried over christmas...
Much like everyone else says, they were designed more for simplicity than anything else, and extremely low power consumption was an unintended side effect. Of course they were going for low power so they could use the cheap housings as mentioned above, but the frugal amounts it did actually eat were unintentional.
There was an article on The Register some months ago on ARM development history (can't seem to find it now), and if it's to be believed they were investigating a series of mysterious crashes in the prototype ARM CPU, and in debugging they found the power on their dev kit wasn't actually connected to the chip - it was running entirely on leakage current and if there weren't enough 1's going into the chip to provide current, it wouldn't have enough power to run.
Obviously this is great news for open source, and especially awesome for the RPi project and all associated hobbyists... I'm just amazed that Broadcom, a company with a long-renowned disdain for revealing the specs on anything, had anything to do with this. Does anyone have more information on how this process came about? Reading the blurb I see that the videocore firmware is still closed, but operationally I don't think that's much of an issue.
Apologies if it's in the video, I cannae watch it at work cap'n! But I'll offer a tentative thank-you to Broadcom and props to the RPi team for what was probably an awful lot of arm-twisting!
What creativity in this case could possibly be profited from? Is the publisher actually going to lose money from a small portion of 40 year old book making it into the public domain?
Of course you don't see the loss in earnings since you're not using DMCA maths.
Let's say the copyrighted text was 250kB in size and each copy was worth $0.00001 to Pearson. Almost every computer these days has a gigabit ethernet port on it, therefore each computer is capable of downloading 520,000 copies a day. Everyone with a computer will also have a smartphone, probably capable of downloading about 100,000 copies a day. So let's say 600,000 copies a day. Each of those downloads will leave copies in the cache of the webserver, and along each router hop until it reaches the destination, so we're now looking at, say, 25x600,000 copies a day - 15 million copies. And don't forget this is only per-person. Multiply that by the 7 billion people on the planet, plus the fact that everyone who downloaded it is likely yo give a copy to at least one other friend, and we arrive at a staggering 210,000,000,000,000,000 downloads a day, which will cost Pearson $2trillion in profits a day, or $800trillion per year once you consider compound interest.
Factor in trickle-down economics and you'll see that Pearson is actually going to turn each and every one of us into multi-millionaires and thus save the planet! Don't you feel ashamed?
I'm probably condsidered the ideal candidate for buying an ultrabook in most marketing focus groups or whatever (youngish professional, knows IT, eye for good design, good job, disposable income, needs to use windows for at least some of my work and pleasure) and when I first saw the press releases of Intel wanting to do the "windows laptop" right, I felt a glimmer of hope; a year ago the wintel laptop situation was dire; nothing but 1366x768 glossy TN panels, laptops were getting bigger and bigger (the 11-12" form factor I loved so much appeared to have vanished completely), battery life was either stagnant if you paid through the nose, or diminishing if you bought consumer level.
Let's rewind a bit and see how we got here. Back in 2009, I bought my second personal laptop (my first was a 14" HP I bought from work), a cheap-as-chips ultraportable Acer 1810TZ, riding high on the netbook wave. Shitty TN screen, mediocre build quality, but tiny, weighed absolutely nothing, perfectly adequate CPU/GPU for almost everything apart from number crunching and games, and got me 7 hours of web browsing on a single charge. Got to rely on the exceptional battery life, took it with me everywhere and soon fitted it with a 160GB Intel SSD which I had left over from another build, it utterly flew and I was getting 8 hours of web browsing out of it.
Three years later and the CULV processor is beginning to drag its heels and the 4GB of memory is starting to become a limitation, and firing up more than one VM would drag the system to a crawl. Brilliant, says I, thinking I can get one of these new spiffy premium-grade laptops which'll have all the swanky features that have been so lacking elsewhere.
But no. The smallest ultrabook (or approaching it) I could find was the Lenovo X220 at a shade over 12". Nice screen with an IPS upgrade (although still average resolution), decent battery life. But after trying one out... utterly, utterly terrible, unusable touchpad with no physical buttons. Mouse button chording was no longer possible (I grew up on three-button mice), and right-clicking and drag-dropping went from second nature to a crapshoot. Unacceptable.
Let's try Toshiba, I've always rated their business laptops and they've always put good emphasis on battery life. Bought the missus an R830 to replace her Acer clunker; feather light magnesium alloy chassis, nice-ish screen (although 1366x768 on a 13" is still ugly to my eyes), really nice machine for her needs. Their smallest ultrabook was the Z830 (and now the Z930) - same meh resolution, mushy keyboard, but still good battery life and Tosh are still seemingly one of the only manufacturers putting physical buttons on their touchpad as well as including an ethernet port. But no user-replaceable battery and I'm not entirely satisfied with a 13" screen. So I keep looking.
Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP all kept coming up short for one or more of the above reasons - although mostly the eternal prevalence of these interminable no-button touchpads. Hell, it's even mentioned in the reviews that the touchpads are "temperamental" but "we didn't think it was much of an issue"... how can the pointing device on a laptop not be an issue?! Half of the ultrabooks available don't even pass the 6hr battery mark.
I've eventually settled on the HP Elitebook 2170p, an 11" business laptop but not an ultrabook because it's slightly thicker than my 1810TZ. The cost was ludicrous, especially for a still-crappy 1366x768, but at least it's on a (thankfully matte) 11" so I can only see the pixels if I'm close to it (does anyone even make 1440x900 panels in 11"? Don't think I've ever seen one). But the small increase in thickness doesn't affect it's portability, for me at least, one jot and the six-cell battery gets me 9.5hrs of webbage, replacing that and other components is a doddle (HP charge an arm and a leg for upgrades, as does everyone I guess, so it's fitted with aftermarket memory and SSD). Added bonuses include a WWAN module and a clit mouse, a really nice backlit keyb
Slashdot Mirror
As a UK citizen, I wouldn't exactly call our internet access options stellar; although there are a great many ISPs, the vast majority of them all use the old BT network for both last mile and backbone routing. These are built out by BT OpenReach that then sells them on to resellers. Good news is that the wholesale price is set low (and with a lot of government oversight) so that OpenReach can't sell to BT's ISP businesses at a different cost than they sell to everyone else. However, the bad news is that the OpenReach infrastructure is quite outdated in a lot of ways (e.g. the new "21st Century Network" dubbed 21CN doesn't even have a provision for IPv6) and much of the copper is old and crappy; many places outside of major metropolitan centres are so far from their exchange/DSLAM that they're basically limited by the laws of physics to ADSL at http://www.xilo.net/adsl_broadband/#pro ...but even here you're still restricted to mostly the BT and a couple of other networks. My favourite ISP, Zen, for example only have an LLU network available in Rochdale.
I don't even follow the ISP game that closely, just closely enough to get good-enough internet without having to give BT any money. It's possible I might just be moaning about first-world problems, blah blah. The US might look at some european ISPs with envy (your prices *do* seem high and I'll never understand the preponderance of cable internet bundled with TV, but then I'm Onion guy who doesn't watch TV), but then everyone else I know just looks at places like Stockholm with eyes greener than that grass on the other side of the fence :)
Anyone from Sweden or similar Awesomepipesville care to comment? Is your telecoms infrastructure still mostly built/owned by a (state-overseen?) incumbent and rented out to your different ISPs as per the UK or do the different ISP lay all their own stuff?
How else are you going to operate the server with your touchscreen KVM/tablet if it doesn't have a touchscreen-friendly UI?
Added bonus is that we'll now be able to use autocorrect for all those pesky command-line things that unbellyfeel computers still insist on using (at least until they integrated into an app silo anyway, and then removed). That will finally open the door to speech-operated commands which'll dispense with the need to have supposedly "trained" server operators eating into your OP-EX.
Computer - export the data please
DATA EXPORTED
Computer - format the data please
DATA FORMATTED
Computer - send the formatted data into the reporting engine please
DATA REPORTED
Computer - take actions based on the report please
RHCE'S DOWNSIZED
All you oldthink dinosaurs need to get with the program.
They foisted curved tabs on thunderbird users some time ago. It's possible to correct it with themes, but as I couldn't find any themes that were basically "default theme but without ugly rounded tabs" and there's no about:config option for it, I had to resort to editing the userchrome.css file - something that I'm now probably going to have to do on all my FF installations too.
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2110991&postcount=5
Surely exile to Ceti Alpha V is more fitting?
This witty riposte is not currently available in your region.
Sorry about that.
Whilst I agree with you (having sweated blood over fixing corrupted MySQL tables more times than I'd care to mention), and wish there was more support for more robust databases, it seems most of the world hasn't caught up with this idea yet.
Not only do most webhosts only support/provide MySQL (IIRC due to Postgres and others not having quota support), but there's a vast swathe of projects out there that don't have support for anything other than MySQL. Heck, I was looking into upgrading my home install of Gallery only to find out that support for Postgres (or even SQLite) was dropped completely:
http://codex.galleryproject.org/Gallery3:Requirements
A similarly disheartening thread from Piwigo can be read here:
http://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=18008
Sadly, for a bewildering array of software it's MySQL or nothing. It's partly this monoculture that has, IMHO, contributed to much of the animosity against MySQL, since users are unable to even contemplate trying out something else.
£0.02
Not a problem! When hydrogen sulphide reaches about 100ppm, you can't smell it any more, and if the concentration gets any higher you soon stop caring about it :)
And here's me wishing I hadn't been given my mod points over the April 1st weekend so I could have used them on a worthwhile post like this. I'll be raising a glass of that single malt this evening, and probably starting to re-read Use of Weapons again just to re-iterate your points about his worldview.
I'm not a huge reader by any means, but I've still read a boatload of sci-fi, and whilst there are dozens of books that have cooked up convincing, ,evocative, even enviable, realities, Banks' are the only ones where I've genuinely felt like the author is already living in it.
Sorry, you're wrong. We removed the Model M's from our vending machines because when the keyboard dropped into the out-tray, it broke the vending machine in half and then dented the floor. :)
Just as a counterpoint, the same subject matter was covered recently in the darkly satirical technocentric series "Black Mirror" in the UK, most especially in "The Entire History of You". Definitely worth a watch if you enjoyed Strange Days.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/BlackMirror
Personally, I think ritual recording of memories is a terrible idea; most of us can already remember the good stuff pretty well, and not forgetting the bad stuff would be... well, pretty bloody traumatic.
Wrestling is broadcast from a parallel universe where it's actually considered worthwhile entertainment?
Hell, look at all the wrestlers with goatees.
What is this, the 1980's? A modern CSI Enhance Button can zoom into the perps DNA helix merely from a reflection in a hub cap and extract a portrait of their entire family.
Not directly related, but the XKCD "What If" scenario on just changing the rotation of the earth enough to avoid having leap-seconds would require 50,000 4m diameter rocky asteroids hitting the earth every second.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/
Back-of-a-fag-packet calculations that every nuclear and non-nuclear explosion in the history of civilisation wouldn't give enough oomph to move us more than a few km away from the sun (although that didn't stop anyone making films about it). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054790/
....that seems to exist solely to either attempt to coin a phrase, or just blindly continue the meme of prepending "bro" to everything.
Coding has, sadly, always been "testosterone fuelled" simply by having so many more men in the profession than women for the majority of its history, despite the fact that the vast majority of nerds, geeks and just plain computery types are far and away from what I'd see as a "bro" (although as a recalcitrant Brit I might not fully grok the term, is a "bro")
I've not yet met any programmer (or indeed any slightly competent professional) that hasn't overindulged in various psychoactive substances at some point in time
The article seems to base it's findings on having watched The Social Network, and seems to think that because a college undergraduate and his mates became hojillionaires after a few beers (yup, it was totally that simple) that this is why software quality is going down the pan. Stupid privacy issues aside, I was under the impression that facebook had a fairly good track record on actual server security because it already had put a large emphasis on engineering standards; even if they don't, they wouldn't be the first company that started out as some frenzied and possibly coding session and later put on a professional hat and cleaned up its act. I wonder if Larry and Sergey had a beer fridge at Stanford?
The real reason "quality software" is apparently seen to be disappearing is because a) software engineering as a "methodical, engineering-heavy discipline" is both difficult and expensive, not to mention seen as boring by many, so many companies and individuals will skimp and b) because barriers to entry are so low and there's so much *more* software out there now (including just as much good, if not great stuff), it could conceivably give the impression that "good software" is drowning in a sea of mediocrity.
My 2p.
Yes. The whole point of statute, and the ensuing statutory rights, is that the rights they confer upon you can't be negated by a license, EULA, or even a contract signed in blood. The UK has a fairly good history of customer-friendly policies in this regard, frequently to the annoyance of foreign companies.
http://whatconsumer.co.uk/what-are-my-statutory-rights/
It gets a bit more nebulous as you describe the "rented device and service" scenario, but I don't believe that's been tested in the UK courts yet. There's certainly a lot of people who've hardhacked things like their Sky+ boxes to do things like add extra storage and migrating recordings off the box are common, and so far there's been no legal repercussions TTBOMK.
Glad someone brought this up! I was in Germany one NYE and, being a Brit, I was hussled in front of the TV to watch this, and everyone in the room was utterly shocked I'd never even hard of it; as far as I'm aware this custom is almost completely unheard of in the UK. As far as I can make out from Wikipedia, this sketch was broadcast in Germany in 1963 and became a cult hit almost instantly, whilst it's been forgotten about over here - no broadcasts in the UK in 30yrs apparently.
Classic little sketch, and a fantastic excuse for multiple chin-chins :)
This. In my, admittedly limited, hardware building experience intel boards are not only very open source friendly, but come with the best documentation and least-flaky BIOSes. And of course their SATA controllers and NICs are class leaders.
I've built a few NAS/NAS + HTPC mITX units using two of Intel's newer boards, running either debian stable or testing, and found both of these to be excellently supported OotB:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dh77df.html.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/server-motherboards/server-board-s1200kp.html
And that's even with my beloved M1015 HBA's, which I've had problems with on some older AMD boards (almost certainly down to poor testing on LSI's side).
I've not done any testing of features like suspend/hibernate since these are targeting "low power always on", and the onboard graphics don't quite match up to 23.97fps at times*. My only regret about choosing the "server" S1200KP board for my NAS is that it doesn't come with mSATA or eSATA ports.
In the mITX arena, almost everyone else seems to use the ubiquitous (and ubiquitously crap) Realtek chips, so it's worth buying Intel for that reason alone. Recently Asus have made a point of using Intel NICs in their higher-end mATX and ATX boards but for small linux builds intel is the only game in town. My two pence.
* If you're really set on a good HTPC experience with e.g. linux+XBMC I would still recommend an ASRock Vision 3D with an nVidia card in it. They're ludicrously overpriced but tiny and silent and the SB models at least work perfectly with linux.
What makes you think those windows aren't made of inch-thick transparent aluminium? People inside will have a whale of a time, even in a storm.
Can we get some links from the Daily Mail please? As a UK citizen I don't think there's enough reactionary nonsense from the Daily Fail posted on slashdot as journalistic fact!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2251617/Video-mash-ups-song-parodies-legalised-just-long-funny.html
I'm sure some editors will be able to spin this as proof that the UK is somehow living in a mish-mash between 1984 and Mad Max.
On a more serious note, I'm amazed that our government would do something so sensible (especially in denying the "storage tax") merely 15 years too late, and since our governments of the last decade appear to be living out of the back pockets of the financial and entertainment industries, I'm wondering what other copyright reforms will be riding on the back of this. Call my cynical (or maybe reading too much sensationalist nonsense), but whenever I've seen a move for the better regarding copyright in the other first-world countries, it's always come with a whole shedload of "...just one more thing!" provisos, such as blank media taxes and three-strikes rules. Perhaps those will come up in the next few days and be buried over christmas...
It's a shame there isn't enough power left in the RTG for Pioneer to take a picture of the fast-approaching reset button.
http://pbfcomics.com/111/
Much like everyone else says, they were designed more for simplicity than anything else, and extremely low power consumption was an unintended side effect. Of course they were going for low power so they could use the cheap housings as mentioned above, but the frugal amounts it did actually eat were unintentional.
There was an article on The Register some months ago on ARM development history (can't seem to find it now), and if it's to be believed they were investigating a series of mysterious crashes in the prototype ARM CPU, and in debugging they found the power on their dev kit wasn't actually connected to the chip - it was running entirely on leakage current and if there weren't enough 1's going into the chip to provide current, it wouldn't have enough power to run.
Many thanks, I'd skipped straight to the RPi page and missed the now glaringly obvious transcript button.
Obviously this is great news for open source, and especially awesome for the RPi project and all associated hobbyists... I'm just amazed that Broadcom, a company with a long-renowned disdain for revealing the specs on anything, had anything to do with this. Does anyone have more information on how this process came about? Reading the blurb I see that the videocore firmware is still closed, but operationally I don't think that's much of an issue.
Apologies if it's in the video, I cannae watch it at work cap'n! But I'll offer a tentative thank-you to Broadcom and props to the RPi team for what was probably an awful lot of arm-twisting!
Of course you don't see the loss in earnings since you're not using DMCA maths.
Let's say the copyrighted text was 250kB in size and each copy was worth $0.00001 to Pearson.
Almost every computer these days has a gigabit ethernet port on it, therefore each computer is capable of downloading 520,000 copies a day.
Everyone with a computer will also have a smartphone, probably capable of downloading about 100,000 copies a day.
So let's say 600,000 copies a day. Each of those downloads will leave copies in the cache of the webserver, and along each router hop until it reaches the destination, so we're now looking at, say, 25x600,000 copies a day - 15 million copies.
And don't forget this is only per-person. Multiply that by the 7 billion people on the planet, plus the fact that everyone who downloaded it is likely yo give a copy to at least one other friend, and we arrive at a staggering 210,000,000,000,000,000 downloads a day, which will cost Pearson $2trillion in profits a day, or $800trillion per year once you consider compound interest.
Factor in trickle-down economics and you'll see that Pearson is actually going to turn each and every one of us into multi-millionaires and thus save the planet! Don't you feel ashamed?
I'm probably condsidered the ideal candidate for buying an ultrabook in most marketing focus groups or whatever (youngish professional, knows IT, eye for good design, good job, disposable income, needs to use windows for at least some of my work and pleasure) and when I first saw the press releases of Intel wanting to do the "windows laptop" right, I felt a glimmer of hope; a year ago the wintel laptop situation was dire; nothing but 1366x768 glossy TN panels, laptops were getting bigger and bigger (the 11-12" form factor I loved so much appeared to have vanished completely), battery life was either stagnant if you paid through the nose, or diminishing if you bought consumer level.
Let's rewind a bit and see how we got here. Back in 2009, I bought my second personal laptop (my first was a 14" HP I bought from work), a cheap-as-chips ultraportable Acer 1810TZ, riding high on the netbook wave. Shitty TN screen, mediocre build quality, but tiny, weighed absolutely nothing, perfectly adequate CPU/GPU for almost everything apart from number crunching and games, and got me 7 hours of web browsing on a single charge. Got to rely on the exceptional battery life, took it with me everywhere and soon fitted it with a 160GB Intel SSD which I had left over from another build, it utterly flew and I was getting 8 hours of web browsing out of it.
Three years later and the CULV processor is beginning to drag its heels and the 4GB of memory is starting to become a limitation, and firing up more than one VM would drag the system to a crawl. Brilliant, says I, thinking I can get one of these new spiffy premium-grade laptops which'll have all the swanky features that have been so lacking elsewhere.
But no. The smallest ultrabook (or approaching it) I could find was the Lenovo X220 at a shade over 12". Nice screen with an IPS upgrade (although still average resolution), decent battery life. But after trying one out... utterly, utterly terrible, unusable touchpad with no physical buttons. Mouse button chording was no longer possible (I grew up on three-button mice), and right-clicking and drag-dropping went from second nature to a crapshoot. Unacceptable.
Let's try Toshiba, I've always rated their business laptops and they've always put good emphasis on battery life. Bought the missus an R830 to replace her Acer clunker; feather light magnesium alloy chassis, nice-ish screen (although 1366x768 on a 13" is still ugly to my eyes), really nice machine for her needs. Their smallest ultrabook was the Z830 (and now the Z930) - same meh resolution, mushy keyboard, but still good battery life and Tosh are still seemingly one of the only manufacturers putting physical buttons on their touchpad as well as including an ethernet port. But no user-replaceable battery and I'm not entirely satisfied with a 13" screen. So I keep looking.
Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP all kept coming up short for one or more of the above reasons - although mostly the eternal prevalence of these interminable no-button touchpads. Hell, it's even mentioned in the reviews that the touchpads are "temperamental" but "we didn't think it was much of an issue"... how can the pointing device on a laptop not be an issue?! Half of the ultrabooks available don't even pass the 6hr battery mark.
I've eventually settled on the HP Elitebook 2170p, an 11" business laptop but not an ultrabook because it's slightly thicker than my 1810TZ. The cost was ludicrous, especially for a still-crappy 1366x768, but at least it's on a (thankfully matte) 11" so I can only see the pixels if I'm close to it (does anyone even make 1440x900 panels in 11"? Don't think I've ever seen one). But the small increase in thickness doesn't affect it's portability, for me at least, one jot and the six-cell battery gets me 9.5hrs of webbage, replacing that and other components is a doddle (HP charge an arm and a leg for upgrades, as does everyone I guess, so it's fitted with aftermarket memory and SSD). Added bonuses include a WWAN module and a clit mouse, a really nice backlit keyb