Bluetooth is very complicated compared to other options, which content themselves basically with providing a serial port. This complexity and licensing costs add significantly to devices.
Yeah, near as I can see the $50 option only works if you have a low-profile PCI card, which most are not. For external they seem to start around $400.
The chips we've actually built a product on are about US$15 in moderate quantities, from PLX. Possibly might get down to US$5 for large orders (e.g 100k). They are also all BGA chips, which requires higher tech assembly and PCBs.
So going back to the original point; no, it's not really cheap to adapt PCI cards to PCI Express slots. Especially for end-users.
BUt obviously, out of the thousands of things that could go wrong it was silly to claim the landing gear as the only thing that needed manual control. They just wanted to fly spacecraft...
This is technically understandable, but creating confusion is not smart when fighting a battle on this scale. What appeals to geeks will just have people wondering why they want to call two different things the same thing.
The answer is simple: the people writing Linux don't care about a "year of Linux on the desktop". They care about doing the stuff that matters to them. Which isn't testing and fixing 10,000 existing drivers.
Nobody is really that serious about putting the hard yards into to making the whole Linux package compete with Windows. Many developers think that making old drivers or apps work is silly and a waste of time. That's their prerogative of course, as free contributors.
For this reason, I see no reason why Linux will get significantly more market share of the desktop than it has now.
Yes, in the same way even the programmers of the 80's didn't usually build their own computer out of ICs, let alone build the logic out of discrete transistors... and very few people ever made their own transistors:)
The only thing that concerns me about this is, the pool of people working on those lower levels becomes ever smaller to the point where there can't be much diversity, so you get (e.g.) the Intel, AMD and ARM CPU teams doing 99% of the CPU design in the world and they can't talk to each other...
I left Firefox for Chrome because they are no longer user-focussed. Despite their millions of Google dollars, they choose to fritter time and money away on playing with things that don't really matter while leaving their most important products (Firefox, Thunderbird) largely unattended.
To me, those millions should go to funding developers to fix all the nasty problems and design issues that free contributors don't want to work on, NOT to playing with cool new tech that free contributors would love to play with and will do anyway.
Specifically, they are still much slower to startup, the awesome bar is still slow and clunky, there are still basic bugs that aren't fixed (not crashing ones, but things like printing fixed position pages). Chrome also uses screen space more efficiently, which matters to me on a netbook.
Interesting, it looks like the USAF is finally getting free of the shuttle boondoggle they got caught up in. Also interesting, it seems like they still want return from orbit capabilities (which vastly complicated the shuttle in many ways). More rationally they are making it unmanned instead of shackling it with people. Unfortunately being purely military we will hear a lot less about it's real capabilities....
To answer this question, it's best to understand some of how the webhosting world works. There are many tiers of them.
At the bottom, where it sounds like you want to be, are the aggressive, overselling bulk hosters. They make only basic efforts to keep things running, offer little or no support, but if you know what you're doing you'll get good value... until something goes wrong or you reach their invisible limits. These guys are really cheap but the chances are you will have problems or have to change away some time. Example: bluehost, dreamhost etc. They tend to have boom-bust cycles.
Next up is the semi-professional companies. For more money than most individuals would want to pay (like US$50-100 per month) they make a serious effort to provide a good service, will offer some personal support, and overall have a professional operation. Example: servint, other VPS providers.
Above that are the serious hosters, like rackspace, who provide a full service with dedicated servers. Most people and small companies won't justify this unless they are doing transactions or webb apps. You pay appropriately.
The point is, at the bottom, there is no sensible reason to choose between the budget hosting services. Whatever they say in their marketing, they are trying to offer a rock-bottom service with no support and limited capabilities; taking a punt that most customers won't use the claimed abilities.
Ah you are right.. except that Amazon music store isn't accessible to me (outside the US). Keep waiting for that:( so basically for me the only decent music store is iTunes. Thanks for the thoughts.
No the requirements were to use the iTunes store, seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream. If something else can do this, rock on.
If you use iTunes for play music, there are plenty of alternatives.
Not if you want to use the iTunes store, and know that it will seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream.
If you have an iPhone or Touch, maybe you're right, I don't know what the status of those is.
Which is millions of users, hardly something insignificant to ignore.
Of course if you aleady have one, it's probably already synced to your primary machine, in which case it's not an issue.
What primary machine?
Any FPS on a 10" screen would suck.
Of course. Nobody would want to do that. Instead, they would use their game console for that.
Do people really purchase netbooks to carry around and play old games available on Steam? Seems unlikely. I see them playing Flash games.
Bingo. The vast majority of games are console games, and casual games of various lightweight flavours, most commonly flash games on Facebook, or on the general web, or on mobile phones. PC FPS and "old games available on Steam" are niches. So excluding them is hardly a problem.
I do use an XP Netbook, and I do find that I use less software on it than I did on my old desktop; e.g. webmail. But I still use my Windows software, some that I had already, such as iTunes, graphics programs, Nokia PC Suite, etc. So being Windows is still a significant benefit.
We had this debate at my work, and the conclusion I came to was that neither tabs nor spaces usefully allowed changing the tab-size. The reason is that code is often indented, not in whole tabs:
if ( AThing )
MyFunction( parameter1,
parameter2 );
Making this appear correct with a varying tab size requires using tabs to indent for block level, but spaces to indent for formatting. This is very tedious, but might be managable, except that the editors we mostly use (VS6 at the time) are not clever enough to remember that combination of indenting for the next line. So not only do you have to remember "tab space space space space space space" but you ALSO have to go back and delete the "tab tab tab tab space" that the IDE added for the next line, and instead type "space space space space space" again... I tried it briefly, and it did work; but it was pretty maddening. I would be a bit surprised if there were many editors out there that were smart enough to copy the indenting in terms of combined tabs and spaces...
Anyway, I accepted that we would use tabs to finish the useless argument, but we also agreed on a fixed tab size, so it was completely pointless either way;)
Fortunately, Jaycar is picking up the slack and taking all that business off them nicely. Dick Smith themselves don't seem to care and even once told me to go to Jaycar instead.
Thats a hard challenge for any batteries. The cycle lifetime of LiIon is too short, so they would die inside a year. The high temperature also greatly reduces battery lifetime.
Such problems are solved industrially by maintained deep-cycle flood lead-acid batteries (like in your car, but maintained more carefully) or by more heavy duty things like molten sulphur batteries or flywheels.
NiCad or NiMH might do at a pinch, they can last a few thousand cycles best case.... they are also cheaper than LiIon...
If that were true, most "competent websites" would not accept Flash ads which are very distracting and demanding of CPU; nor would they put large amounts of ads on pages with minimal content. The reality is that they try and push as much advertising as they can get away with, which turns out to be quite a lot because people will tolerate a lot of crap to read free content. But let's not pretend they are happy about it.
One interesting geek trip is to the Isle of Wight, where on one coast (the Needles) the British rocket testing facility lived for a while. There's also old and new artillery batteries there.
I have not yet figured out how actual bug reports get past customer support reps and get fixed. Maybe, consumer bug reports are effectively ignored and only business accounts with strong account managers get stuff fixed.
I know what you mean, but I suspect it won't make much difference. Most of us find new sites either by a search engine, which is only going to look for sites with content in the language we are using to search (and mostly ignoring the domain name), or by a link from somewhere, in which case it won't matter at all. The only case that would matter is where links are printed so that you have to type them out again (or occasionally, the moronic designers who put them in graphic images).
Slashdot Mirror
Same for me.
So I've gone back to the old comments system (again)... without the javascriptiness it seems fine.
Nope. 50dBm, not 50%. Vastly different things.
Bluetooth is very complicated compared to other options, which content themselves basically with providing a serial port. This complexity and licensing costs add significantly to devices.
Yeah, near as I can see the $50 option only works if you have a low-profile PCI card, which most are not. For external they seem to start around $400.
The chips we've actually built a product on are about US$15 in moderate quantities, from PLX. Possibly might get down to US$5 for large orders (e.g 100k). They are also all BGA chips, which requires higher tech assembly and PCBs.
So going back to the original point; no, it's not really cheap to adapt PCI cards to PCI Express slots. Especially for end-users.
Where are these $50 cards, or these $5 chips?
The ones I know of cost around US$1000 and US$20 respectively.
BUt obviously, out of the thousands of things that could go wrong it was silly to claim the landing gear as the only thing that needed manual control.
They just wanted to fly spacecraft...
This is technically understandable, but creating confusion is not smart when fighting a battle on this scale. What appeals to geeks will just have people wondering why they want to call two different things the same thing.
The answer is simple: the people writing Linux don't care about a "year of Linux on the desktop". They care about doing the stuff that matters to them. Which isn't testing and fixing 10,000 existing drivers.
Nobody is really that serious about putting the hard yards into to making the whole Linux package compete with Windows. Many developers think that making old drivers or apps work is silly and a waste of time. That's their prerogative of course, as free contributors.
For this reason, I see no reason why Linux will get significantly more market share of the desktop than it has now.
Yes, in the same way even the programmers of the 80's didn't usually build their own computer out of ICs, let alone build the logic out of discrete transistors... and very few people ever made their own transistors :)
The only thing that concerns me about this is, the pool of people working on those lower levels becomes ever smaller to the point where there can't be much diversity, so you get (e.g.) the Intel, AMD and ARM CPU teams doing 99% of the CPU design in the world and they can't talk to each other...
I left Firefox for Chrome because they are no longer user-focussed. Despite their millions of Google dollars, they choose to fritter time and money away on playing with things that don't really matter while leaving their most important products (Firefox, Thunderbird) largely unattended.
To me, those millions should go to funding developers to fix all the nasty problems and design issues that free contributors don't want to work on, NOT to playing with cool new tech that free contributors would love to play with and will do anyway.
Specifically, they are still much slower to startup, the awesome bar is still slow and clunky, there are still basic bugs that aren't fixed (not crashing ones, but things like printing fixed position pages). Chrome also uses screen space more efficiently, which matters to me on a netbook.
Interesting, it looks like the USAF is finally getting free of the shuttle boondoggle they got caught up in. Also interesting, it seems like they still want return from orbit capabilities (which vastly complicated the shuttle in many ways).
More rationally they are making it unmanned instead of shackling it with people.
Unfortunately being purely military we will hear a lot less about it's real capabilities....
To answer this question, it's best to understand some of how the webhosting world works. There are many tiers of them.
At the bottom, where it sounds like you want to be, are the aggressive, overselling bulk hosters. They make only basic efforts to keep things running, offer little or no support, but if you know what you're doing you'll get good value... until something goes wrong or you reach their invisible limits.
These guys are really cheap but the chances are you will have problems or have to change away some time. Example: bluehost, dreamhost etc. They tend to have boom-bust cycles.
Next up is the semi-professional companies. For more money than most individuals would want to pay (like US$50-100 per month) they make a serious effort to provide a good service, will offer some personal support, and overall have a professional operation. Example: servint, other VPS providers.
Above that are the serious hosters, like rackspace, who provide a full service with dedicated servers. Most people and small companies won't justify this unless they are doing transactions or webb apps. You pay appropriately.
The point is, at the bottom, there is no sensible reason to choose between the budget hosting services. Whatever they say in their marketing, they are trying to offer a rock-bottom service with no support and limited capabilities; taking a punt that most customers won't use the claimed abilities.
Ah you are right .. except that Amazon music store isn't accessible to me (outside the US). Keep waiting for that :( so basically for me the only decent music store is iTunes.
Thanks for the thoughts.
No the requirements were to use the iTunes store, seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream. If something else can do this, rock on.
If you use iTunes for play music, there are plenty of alternatives.
Not if you want to use the iTunes store, and know that it will seamlessly work with all the variations of iPods, and get the benefits of being in the mainstream.
If you have an iPhone or Touch, maybe you're right, I don't know what the status of those is.
Which is millions of users, hardly something insignificant to ignore.
Of course if you aleady have one, it's probably already synced to your primary machine, in which case it's not an issue.
What primary machine?
Any FPS on a 10" screen would suck.
Of course. Nobody would want to do that. Instead, they would use their game console for that.
Do people really purchase netbooks to carry around and play old games available on Steam? Seems unlikely. I see them playing Flash games.
Bingo. The vast majority of games are console games, and casual games of various lightweight flavours, most commonly flash games on Facebook, or on the general web, or on mobile phones. PC FPS and "old games available on Steam" are niches. So excluding them is hardly a problem.
I do use an XP Netbook, and I do find that I use less software on it than I did on my old desktop; e.g. webmail. But I still use my Windows software, some that I had already, such as iTunes, graphics programs, Nokia PC Suite, etc. So being Windows is still a significant benefit.
We had this debate at my work, and the conclusion I came to was that neither tabs nor spaces usefully allowed changing the tab-size. The reason is that code is often indented, not in whole tabs:
if ( AThing )
MyFunction( parameter1,
parameter2 );
Making this appear correct with a varying tab size requires using tabs to indent for block level, but spaces to indent for formatting. This is very tedious, but might be managable, except that the editors we mostly use (VS6 at the time) are not clever enough to remember that combination of indenting for the next line. So not only do you have to remember "tab space space space space space space" but you ALSO have to go back and delete the "tab tab tab tab space" that the IDE added for the next line, and instead type "space space space space space" again ...
I tried it briefly, and it did work; but it was pretty maddening.
I would be a bit surprised if there were many editors out there that were smart enough to copy the indenting in terms of combined tabs and spaces...
Anyway, I accepted that we would use tabs to finish the useless argument, but we also agreed on a fixed tab size, so it was completely pointless either way ;)
A huge new market? More like a small but significant niche.
Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?
Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...
Fortunately, Jaycar is picking up the slack and taking all that business off them nicely. Dick Smith themselves don't seem to care and even once told me to go to Jaycar instead.
Thats a hard challenge for any batteries. The cycle lifetime of LiIon is too short, so they would die inside a year. The high temperature also greatly reduces battery lifetime.
Such problems are solved industrially by maintained deep-cycle flood lead-acid batteries (like in your car, but maintained more carefully) or by more heavy duty things like molten sulphur batteries or flywheels.
NiCad or NiMH might do at a pinch, they can last a few thousand cycles best case.... they are also cheaper than LiIon...
If that were true, most "competent websites" would not accept Flash ads which are very distracting and demanding of CPU; nor would they put large amounts of ads on pages with minimal content.
The reality is that they try and push as much advertising as they can get away with, which turns out to be quite a lot because people will tolerate a lot of crap to read free content. But let's not pretend they are happy about it.
One interesting geek trip is to the Isle of Wight, where on one coast (the Needles) the British rocket testing facility lived for a while. There's also old and new artillery batteries there.
I have not yet figured out how actual bug reports get past customer support reps and get fixed. Maybe, consumer bug reports are effectively ignored and only business accounts with strong account managers get stuff fixed.
I know what you mean, but I suspect it won't make much difference.
Most of us find new sites either by a search engine, which is only going to look for sites with content in the language we are using to search (and mostly ignoring the domain name), or by a link from somewhere, in which case it won't matter at all. The only case that would matter is where links are printed so that you have to type them out again (or occasionally, the moronic designers who put them in graphic images).
Simply run task manager, and choose View - Select Columns. Then check Thread Count. You'll now be able to see how many threads each process has.