Your old P166 laptop didn't browse a web that was rich in JavaScript applications like today.
Actually, my old P166 laptop still does a pretty good job of surfing the web if I install an ancient OS and browser on it (e.g. Win98). Of course, it's horribly insecure using it like this and Windows has the usability of pig shit so it isn't something I particularly feel like using.
The memory usage you're seeing from applications is mostly things like caching, which is a good thing. Unused memory is wasted memory.
Caching is good. Caching so much that half your applications end up in swap is bad.
And you use the latest Ubuntu release on your iPhone so you need it to support touch screen? If not then your post seems to have absolutely no relevance to this thread.
Yeah, but that's all behind the scenes stuff - it isn't something that most users will be able to point to and say "that does X Y and Z and is worth the bloat". Whereas stuff like Compiz they can turn on and see the shinyness and understand what Compiz does for them.
Things like being able to plug a USB hard drive in, and have it autodetected and ready to mount, is directly the result of udev.
For what it's worth, being able to plug in a USB mass storage device and have it automount largely worked before udev (it was handled by Gnome's magicdev stuff). udev unifies a lot of different devices into the same API though.
Also, udev isn't slow. I've used it on incredibly weak hardware. Trust me, it's not the bottleneck.
I've not played with udev that much (although I do consider it a complete pain in the arse to configure in the cases where it doesn't Just Work). However, the udev startup time is quite a noticable chunk of the boot time on ancient hardware (150MHz pentium type stuff). Once it's running it probably doesn't add too much though.
PulseAudio, you might have a point -- at least in that the user-visible improvement isn't there yet, unless your soundcard is too weak to handle multiple audio streams -- I know I configure everything to just use ALSA.
For me, Pulse Audio is a bit of a waste of time - I'm not interested in being able to have a volume control per application so the only thing it does for me is channel mixing in software... which is a shame since I get channel mixing in hardware if I'm not running this "improvement"... Oh, and it breaks a crap-load of applications (although this is getting better), and it requires me to hack the config manually to get the surround channels working (which work perfectly without Pulse).
But it will come. Like Vista -- having a volume knob per-app would be very useful.
Doesn't strike me as that useful I'm afraid - I tend not to want to listen to music at the same time as watching a DVD at the same time as editing audio. It's just another thing I have to check when an application is playing silence instead of audio...
Interestingly, I see absolutely no bluetooth icon on my Kubuntu 8.10 machine (can't risk upgrading yet), until I turn it on (via the hardware switch).
I have no bluetooth icon on my bluetoothless Fedora machine either. The daemons are still all running though.
Second, there's still Python. And I don't know about you, but I'd much rather most of my system be written in Python than in C. Just by virtue of the respective languages, less code to do the same things means less bugs, garbage collection means fewer memory leaks and fewer segfaults, and really no sane possibility of buffer overruns...
There are certainly advantages to interpretted languages (the main one being the ease with which you can tweak the code to correct bugs without having to recompile). However, I choose the language I use based on what is the right thing for the job. Python is a great language for prototyping, but I don't consider Python code to really be suitable for most production systems for two simple reasons: no compile-time typechecking and no requirement to declare variables before use. So sure, you won't get segfaults in Python, you get the code bombing out at run-time because you tried to access an object's attribute that didn't exist (maybe because you typoed the attribute name, or you managed to pass in the wrong data type to a function, or you typoed a variable name so it instantiated a new variable instead of changing the value in an existing one). I also dispute the idea that you can't have memory leaks in Python - you can have memory leaks when you accidentally leave references to objects lying around (and with multiple references to the s
The only thing that's reall changed in the last 10 years is that the tools have changed in appearance. Some are more snazzy, and some are less snazzy but more automated. However the basics are pretty much the same as well as the expected level of concurrency.
Yeah, I've got to say that I find it pretty depressing to find the base OS being more resource hungry every time I upgrade. There is some increase in priddyness, such as Compiz Fusion, but I'm sure a lot of the bloat is behind the scenes stuff such as HAL, UDEV, PulseAudio, etc. To the end user they don't offer a really noticeable advantage and they do add to the bloat.
A quick look down my process list (Fedora 11) shows top bulky processes are:
* FireFox with a resident size of 184MB
* Xorg with a resident size of 125MB
* Lots of Gnome bits and pieces totalling maybe 100MB
* Nautilus with a resident size of 33MB
So you're looking at a fairly significant memory consumption just to surf the web - this is something that my old P166 laptop could do with 64MB of RAM around 1998 (and it was faster at it then than my 2GB Athlon XP 2100+ is now!)
There are a whole load of processes running and socking up memory that just don't need to be there too - the PC Card daemon (this is a desktop machine with no PC Card slots), the Bluetooth daemons (this machine has no bluetooth interface), gpm, gnome-power-monitor (why do I need this on a desktop machine?), etc. Sure, these processes do useful stuff in certain situations, but there's absolutely no need for them to be running all the time. Take Nautilus, for example - I never actually use it, but Gnome wants it to be running all the time just in case.
And yes, I know I could spend hours tuning my system, but my point is that I shouldn't have to - there's no need for modern systems to have all this bloat running all the time, it's just there because it is easier to be lazy and tell people to get better hardware than write efficient systems.
There's also a trend towards using much less efficient languages - for example, a lot of stuff is now written in Python and Java. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no sane reason to use a system like Java with the overhead of a VM when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them.
and at the same time it have almost no support for touchscreens (yes they work, no you can't do anything useful, as you have not a writing tool)
Why do you need a touchscreen? Unless you're building a public information kiosk (which isn't likely to need an onscreen keyboard anyway) or installing on a tablet PC, touchscreens aren't a lot of use. Yeah, so Microsoft's marketting arm are making a big deal about how well Windows 7 supports touch screen, but anyone who has used one knows it isn't really a feasible input method for a desktop unless you feel like your arms cramping up after half an hour of use.
Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition.
I guess we'll all need to go back to using telnet, http and ftp to exchange data securely then, since using ssh, and ssl can't possibly make things more secure since they are way more complex...
There are good reasons for using virtualization, but improving overall system security isn't one of them.
Patently untrue - there are a lot of security advantages from segregating services. Sure, the chances of each service getting compromised are unchanged, but the point is that the damage that compromise can do is generally much more limited. You'll always have exploits - the point of security is to reduce the number of possible exploits. In this example, virtualisation will have reduced the number of known ways of a compromised service affecting another service to approximately one (and only on certain hardware).
There wil be segmented gaps , as a stepper motor or other motor has only a finite resolution. example 3600 steps per revolution of the motors shaft or.1 degrees per step
You can double the resolution of a stepper motor by making half-steps (energising 2 coils at once will cause it to stop half way between the 2 steps). You can also greatly increase the resolution by PWMing the energised coils - between these 2 methods, using 256 PWM levels your 0.1 degree resolution motor now has a resolution of 0.0002 degrees. Want a higher resolution? Just increase the number of PWM levels you use.
Yes, it's still digital and therefore still has discrete steps, but between the flexibility of the apparatus, the texture of the paper, the viscosity of the ink, etc. once you get to a small enough resolution it's going to be indistinguishable on the final output.
I apologise, you are correct technically. But when you buy a TV, you have to register your address, so that TV licencing can follow up with reminder letters and phone calls.
It is interesting to note that there has recently been a public consultation on the methods used to collect the licence fee, and the results showed that the public generally feels that the licence fee collection is far too heavy-handed. It will be interesting to see if anything changes as a result of the consultation.
If you try to claim that you aren't using your TV to watch broadcast TV, they won't believe you (I can see why...) and will continue to harass you.
My understanding is that if you officially inform them that you don't receive broadcast TV then they will send round someone to check and then stop harassing you. I've got no first hand experience of this, however, since on the occasions when I didn't have a TV I didn't inform them since I take the attitude that I shouldn't *need* to inform anyone that I'm not breaking the law (when was the last time you phoned up the police to tell them you haven't committed a murder?) They go through a cycle of sending increasingly threatening letters and then send round the "enforcement officer", who I refused entry to my property.
The TV licensing officers have no legal right to enter your property without a warrant and they can only get a warrant if they already have some evidence that you are breaking the law. They rely on people foolishly inviting them in.
At least they've stopped sending libellous letters these days (at one point they took to sending me letters with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed across the outside of the envelope. If I'd had the time and money I would've sued them for libel as I blatantly wasn't breaking the law since I had no TV.)
And one point I forgot to include in my original post is that you can't buy a TV just to watch ITV / Channel 4 / Five - in this case you have to pay for a BBC licence fee.
Well, it isn't a "BBC subscription fee", it is a "TV licence fee" - you need to pay it to watch any broadcast TV and a large proportion (but not all) of the money collected goes to fund the BBC.
For the record, I broadly support the idea of the licence fee, although I disagree with the collection methods and think the whole system could do with being redesigned. IMHO, the licence fee serves the purpose of allowing TV programmes to be produced without having to bow to the commercial pressures. This allows programmes to be made which appeal to minorities, rather than always pushing for higher viewing figures for everything. The changes I think would be beneficial are: 1. Abolish the concept of a licence tied to receiving broadcast TV and just charge a fee to every household (possibly as part of the council tax system) - increasingly the licence fee is going on non-TV services, and it doesn't really seem fair to have TV watchers subsidising services that don't require a licence such as the radio channels, the BBC website, iPlayer, etc. This would also remove the need to harass innocent people, and the associated cost. 2. Avoid using the licence fee to fund really popular programmes that would do just as well on a commercial channel. This could best be served by splitting the BBC channels into a number (maybe 2?) of licence-funded channels and a number of commercial channels. The licence fee would still allow them to produce minority programming and take big risks on cutting edge programming on the licence funded channels, but if a programme becomes really successful it can be "sold" to the commercial arm and the proceeds of the sale can be ploughed back into the licence funded channels. This kind of re-investment would reduce the amount that would need to be charged for a licence fee.
Schemes like Phorm exist because they are opt-out.
What Phorm is doing is almost certainly illegal - you can't lawfully intercept communications without consent from all involved parties. By making it opt-out, you're not even getting explicit consent from one of the parties (the ISP's customer) - even if it were opt-in, you're not getting consent from the website that you're snooping the connection to, or any of the users of that website that may have posted (potentially private) content on it.
But you do have to pay a licence fee simply for owning a TV, even if it is only used to connect to a console, computer, DVD player etc and you don't want to watch the BBC channels.
Please stop spreading misinformation - everything you have just stated is completely incorrect. You need a TV licence in order to watch broadcast TV (this includes streams over the internet which are simulcast with broadcast TV, but does not include streams which are not simulcast). You do not require a licence if you do not receive broadcast TV, no matter whether or not you own a TV - i.e. you don't need a licence in order to watch DVDs, use your computer, etc.
Whether or not you agree with the TV licence, spreading misinformation doesn't exactly help your argument.
It would also make a good goofy syfy movie where the bodyless organs go around and commit crimes. It would get away with it because nobody would be able to identify it (lack of facial features).
I can't help but think that the bodyless organs might stand out a bit in a police lineup, owing to having no body... facial features or not.
Simple: Your prepaid phone will work only as long as it has a connection with a carrier that has a roaming contract with yours. Many, if not most, prepaids don't work internationally unless you register them (often for a fee)
This is certainly untrue for prepay phones in the UK - you haven't had to ask for roaming for years, they Just Work when you take them to other countries these days. I'd be pretty surprised if the same wasn't true for the majority of GSM carriers in other countries.
because international calls are hard to charge on prepaids (at least, where receiving one is charged to your account).
AFAIK, this problem has long since been solved by the CAMEL SS7 protocol.
The need for 64bit is rare? It's 2009 my good man, how the hell is the need for 64bit rare?
I think you need to question why you actually need 64 bit. There may be reasons why 64 bit is desirable, but I'm going to agree with the GP that it is rarely mandatory. The main things you get from x86_64 are a few more registers and a bigger address space.
The registers are nice because they can make things marginally faster, but you can certainly do without them. Depending on what you're doing, the benefits of more registers might be offset by the larger code size anyway.
The more important bit is the increased address space, which is only of use if you need to let a single process access more than maybe around 3.5GB of virtual memory. I'd argue that this is still a fairly rare requirement - remember, we're talking about a *single process* needing that much memory, you can quite happily address over 4GB of RAM without running in 64 bit mode so long as it isn't all going to one process.
Also, how many netbooks do you know of that ship with that much RAM? I don't really see a lot of benefit in using 64 bit processors in netbooks at the moment, especially since power consumption is so important in that formfactor - 64 bit processors have more transistors, they are going to use more power than a 32 bit device that's been manufactured with the same process. Not to mention the extra cache and RAM you need to power to accommodate the larger code sizes.
Maybe you could explain your reasoning why you don't consider it "acceptable in the slightest"?
A mandatory 64bit OS with 32bit emulation through a VM would be far smarter than damn well releasing two different copies.
Why do you want to emulate IA32 when all the x86_64 processors can run IA32 code natively? You don't need an IA32 kernel in order to run IA32 userland code...
You seem stuck on the issue of "hypocrisy." Let me help you out: nuclear disarmament is impossible, because there is no way any one nation can be absolutely assured that all other nations are simultaneously dismantling their stockpiles. To dismantle your own missiles and assume another nation was good to their word and actually taking their missiles apart would be insanity.
This is exactly my point. The US (and all the other nuclear nations) feel that they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves just in case one of the other nuclear nations decide to attack, even though none of the nuclear nations have been especially aggressive against each other for quite some time.
In light of this, why wouldn't the non-nuclear nations want to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves against attacks from these same nations. Especially since some of these nations are actively being aggressive? If you look at it this way, many of the non-nuclear nations are in greater need of a nuclear defence than the nuclear nations because they actually have nuclear aggressors *now* rather than "possibly, at some point in the future".
If you claim that nuclear disarmament is impossible because of the "threat" of other nuclear nations then you must also accept that stopping nuclear proliferation is impossible because of this same threat, unless the nuclear nations conquer the non-nuclear ones first.
Super idea. Lets all give up nukes, and go back to the days when war between major powers is again thinkable.
And slaughter millions upon millions in the process.
If you think nuclear weapons are so good, why shouldn't everyone have them?
Besides, I don't think nuclear weapons make a war unthinkable - you're going to slaughter millions upon millions with or without nukes if you start a world war, it makes very little difference.
At the moment, there's nothing stopping nuclear nations warring with the non-nuclear nations (and the likes of Iraq has proved that they are happy to do that) - why wouldn't a non-nuclear nation want nukes when faced with this? There are only 2 ways you're going to convince other nations that they don't need nukes:
1. Disarm yourself so that you are no longer capable of oppressing them, so they don't feel the need to be able to defend themselves from you. 2. Conquer them.
The US has shown that their preferred option is (2). Unfortunately, when you start conquering other nations, the ones who are left suddenly realise that they *really* do need to be able to defend themselves.
As for the use of nuclear weapons, all it took was once for the whole world to realize we should avoid such a situation at all costs.
Once? You know that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities on 2 separate occasions don't you?
You're describing events that took place nearly a century ago and attempting to draw some sort of rational parallel to modern military tactics. That's insane at face value.
Not really - I'm pointing out that the US really has no business telling people they can't have nuclear weapons whilst they are continuing to arm themselves with these weapons. If the US was really interested in peace rather than control, they would disarm themselves - then other nations might actually listen. At the moment it is more of a "do as I say, not do as I do" situation with the added threat that they will invade _unless_ you have the means to defend yourself (i.e. long range WMDs). Do you actually think the US would've invaded Iraq if Iraq had the means to nuke key US cities in response?
Like I told another poster, if you honestly believe North Korea represents a better life for you and your family I'll gladly buy you a one way plane ticket to the capital.
I never said that it represented a "better life" for me. I do, however, think that the US is extremely hypocritical to be telling people they shouldn't have nuclear weapons - you can't expect people to believe they don't need them when the US clearly believes that they still do and continue to invade other countries whenever they feel like it.
Right, the US is running around making sweeping genocidal threats.
Nope, no one ever said anything about making genocidal threats. Your post said "What's important now is determining the likelihood that an aggressive nation bent on insane policy will use nuclear weapons on their neighbors... oh, wait, that seems to describe North Korea". To which I replied that the US can also be described as being an aggressive nation bent on insane policy. As for the likelihood that the US will use nuclear weapons on their neighbours, I make no comment other than to point out that the US is the only nation in history to drop nuclear weapons on civilian population centres and is still constructing nuclear weapons for themselves at the same time as telling everyone else they can't have them.
It seems like you're suggesting that it's unfair that we have nukes and they don't. I suggest you go downtown, give an angry crazy homeless man one loaded gun and you keep another.
Of a more sensible thing to do would be to go down town and talk with the crazy homeless man without any guns.
IMHO the West really has no business telling the rest of the world that they can't have nukes while the West still has them - this doesn't mean that we should give everyone nukes, it means we should damned well disarm to put everyone on an equal footing.
One problem I have with the study's premise is that we don't yet know that much about how memory works in humans, much less how it works in crustaceans.
So causing pain (e.g. torture, etc) is ok if the recipient can't remember it after the event?
If you already have SIP infrastructure there are loads of companies competing for your business in SIP to POTS bridging
That's assuming the point of this is to bridge to the PSTN. Allowing SIP users to call Skype users (without going via the PSTN) would be beneficial for their customers. They don't make money from calls they aren't bridging to the PSTN, but retaining their customers means more people who might make use of the bridge.
Skype doesn't offer particularly good value for money
Nor do many very successful businesses - Skype have a big name for themselves, and this makes them the first choice for a lot of people who are too lazy to shop around for a good deal.
I often hear it commented that Skype is "easier" than SIP - this has very little to do with the protocol, and everything to do with the fact that the user doesn't have to exercise their brain and make a choice about which service provider to use. The sad thing is that when Skype give them a really sucky service (because they try to work around broken networks, with varying success, rather than forcing the user to fix it) the users conclude that "VoIP sucks", rather than "Skype sucks", and don't even bother looking at the alternatives.
its one advantage over SIP providers is that it is trivial to use from behind a NAT or a firewall, something that doesn't apply to a company that already has SIP deployed internally.
SIP is actually quite trivial to deploy through a stateful firewall and most NATs so long as *all* your calls are going through the NAT. STUN does, for the most part, tend to work reasonably. It isn't 100% reliable (as the STUN RFC admits), but it's pretty good and if it works for you once, it'll probably work for you every time. On the other hand, in cases where SIP won't work, Skype will do crazy stuff like silently tunnelling your voice over HTTP instead of making you fix your terminally broken network - this frequently leads to a crappy service with no real indication to the user that they could fix their network to make it better.
I'm with entanet. They only do IPv6 as part of a trial, which is currently shut due to the 21CN upgrade
I'm also with Enta and I've been chasing them about the ipv6 trial for the past couple of weeks. They claim the trial is still running and that they've received my email, but they haven't actually done anything with it yet.
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Your old P166 laptop didn't browse a web that was rich in JavaScript applications like today.
Actually, my old P166 laptop still does a pretty good job of surfing the web if I install an ancient OS and browser on it (e.g. Win98). Of course, it's horribly insecure using it like this and Windows has the usability of pig shit so it isn't something I particularly feel like using.
The memory usage you're seeing from applications is mostly things like caching, which is a good thing. Unused memory is wasted memory.
Caching is good. Caching so much that half your applications end up in swap is bad.
I use my iPhone regularly.
And you use the latest Ubuntu release on your iPhone so you need it to support touch screen? If not then your post seems to have absolutely no relevance to this thread.
HAL and UDEV make devices work better and easier.
Yeah, but that's all behind the scenes stuff - it isn't something that most users will be able to point to and say "that does X Y and Z and is worth the bloat". Whereas stuff like Compiz they can turn on and see the shinyness and understand what Compiz does for them.
Things like being able to plug a USB hard drive in, and have it autodetected and ready to mount, is directly the result of udev.
For what it's worth, being able to plug in a USB mass storage device and have it automount largely worked before udev (it was handled by Gnome's magicdev stuff). udev unifies a lot of different devices into the same API though.
Also, udev isn't slow. I've used it on incredibly weak hardware. Trust me, it's not the bottleneck.
I've not played with udev that much (although I do consider it a complete pain in the arse to configure in the cases where it doesn't Just Work). However, the udev startup time is quite a noticable chunk of the boot time on ancient hardware (150MHz pentium type stuff). Once it's running it probably doesn't add too much though.
PulseAudio, you might have a point -- at least in that the user-visible improvement isn't there yet, unless your soundcard is too weak to handle multiple audio streams -- I know I configure everything to just use ALSA.
For me, Pulse Audio is a bit of a waste of time - I'm not interested in being able to have a volume control per application so the only thing it does for me is channel mixing in software... which is a shame since I get channel mixing in hardware if I'm not running this "improvement"... Oh, and it breaks a crap-load of applications (although this is getting better), and it requires me to hack the config manually to get the surround channels working (which work perfectly without Pulse).
But it will come. Like Vista -- having a volume knob per-app would be very useful.
Doesn't strike me as that useful I'm afraid - I tend not to want to listen to music at the same time as watching a DVD at the same time as editing audio. It's just another thing I have to check when an application is playing silence instead of audio...
Interestingly, I see absolutely no bluetooth icon on my Kubuntu 8.10 machine (can't risk upgrading yet), until I turn it on (via the hardware switch).
I have no bluetooth icon on my bluetoothless Fedora machine either. The daemons are still all running though.
Second, there's still Python. And I don't know about you, but I'd much rather most of my system be written in Python than in C. Just by virtue of the respective languages, less code to do the same things means less bugs, garbage collection means fewer memory leaks and fewer segfaults, and really no sane possibility of buffer overruns...
There are certainly advantages to interpretted languages (the main one being the ease with which you can tweak the code to correct bugs without having to recompile). However, I choose the language I use based on what is the right thing for the job. Python is a great language for prototyping, but I don't consider Python code to really be suitable for most production systems for two simple reasons: no compile-time typechecking and no requirement to declare variables before use. So sure, you won't get segfaults in Python, you get the code bombing out at run-time because you tried to access an object's attribute that didn't exist (maybe because you typoed the attribute name, or you managed to pass in the wrong data type to a function, or you typoed a variable name so it instantiated a new variable instead of changing the value in an existing one). I also dispute the idea that you can't have memory leaks in Python - you can have memory leaks when you accidentally leave references to objects lying around (and with multiple references to the s
How much of that is your video RAM?
Hmm.. good question. It's a 128MB nVidia FX5200, so the "resident size" certainly doesn't include the entire video RAM.
The only thing that's reall changed in the last 10 years
is that the tools have changed in appearance. Some are
more snazzy, and some are less snazzy but more automated.
However the basics are pretty much the same as well as
the expected level of concurrency.
Yeah, I've got to say that I find it pretty depressing to find the base OS being more resource hungry every time I upgrade. There is some increase in priddyness, such as Compiz Fusion, but I'm sure a lot of the bloat is behind the scenes stuff such as HAL, UDEV, PulseAudio, etc. To the end user they don't offer a really noticeable advantage and they do add to the bloat.
A quick look down my process list (Fedora 11) shows top bulky processes are:
* FireFox with a resident size of 184MB
* Xorg with a resident size of 125MB
* Lots of Gnome bits and pieces totalling maybe 100MB
* Nautilus with a resident size of 33MB
So you're looking at a fairly significant memory consumption just to surf the web - this is something that my old P166 laptop could do with 64MB of RAM around 1998 (and it was faster at it then than my 2GB Athlon XP 2100+ is now!)
There are a whole load of processes running and socking up memory that just don't need to be there too - the PC Card daemon (this is a desktop machine with no PC Card slots), the Bluetooth daemons (this machine has no bluetooth interface), gpm, gnome-power-monitor (why do I need this on a desktop machine?), etc. Sure, these processes do useful stuff in certain situations, but there's absolutely no need for them to be running all the time. Take Nautilus, for example - I never actually use it, but Gnome wants it to be running all the time just in case.
And yes, I know I could spend hours tuning my system, but my point is that I shouldn't have to - there's no need for modern systems to have all this bloat running all the time, it's just there because it is easier to be lazy and tell people to get better hardware than write efficient systems.
There's also a trend towards using much less efficient languages - for example, a lot of stuff is now written in Python and Java. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no sane reason to use a system like Java with the overhead of a VM when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them.
and at the same time it have almost no support for touchscreens (yes they work, no you can't do anything useful, as you have not a writing tool)
Why do you need a touchscreen? Unless you're building a public information kiosk (which isn't likely to need an onscreen keyboard anyway) or installing on a tablet PC, touchscreens aren't a lot of use. Yeah, so Microsoft's marketting arm are making a big deal about how well Windows 7 supports touch screen, but anyone who has used one knows it isn't really a feasible input method for a desktop unless you feel like your arms cramping up after half an hour of use.
Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition.
I guess we'll all need to go back to using telnet, http and ftp to exchange data securely then, since using ssh, and ssl can't possibly make things more secure since they are way more complex...
There are good reasons for using virtualization, but improving overall system security isn't one of them.
Patently untrue - there are a lot of security advantages from segregating services. Sure, the chances of each service getting compromised are unchanged, but the point is that the damage that compromise can do is generally much more limited. You'll always have exploits - the point of security is to reduce the number of possible exploits. In this example, virtualisation will have reduced the number of known ways of a compromised service affecting another service to approximately one (and only on certain hardware).
No one wants your longpenis machine.
I have an inbox full of spam that says otherwise
There wil be segmented gaps , as a stepper motor or other motor has only a finite resolution. .1 degrees per step
example 3600 steps per revolution of the motors shaft or
You can double the resolution of a stepper motor by making half-steps (energising 2 coils at once will cause it to stop half way between the 2 steps). You can also greatly increase the resolution by PWMing the energised coils - between these 2 methods, using 256 PWM levels your 0.1 degree resolution motor now has a resolution of 0.0002 degrees. Want a higher resolution? Just increase the number of PWM levels you use.
Yes, it's still digital and therefore still has discrete steps, but between the flexibility of the apparatus, the texture of the paper, the viscosity of the ink, etc. once you get to a small enough resolution it's going to be indistinguishable on the final output.
I apologise, you are correct technically. But when you buy a TV, you have to register your address, so that TV licencing can follow up with reminder letters and phone calls.
It is interesting to note that there has recently been a public consultation on the methods used to collect the licence fee, and the results showed that the public generally feels that the licence fee collection is far too heavy-handed. It will be interesting to see if anything changes as a result of the consultation.
If you try to claim that you aren't using your TV to watch broadcast TV, they won't believe you (I can see why...) and will continue to harass you.
My understanding is that if you officially inform them that you don't receive broadcast TV then they will send round someone to check and then stop harassing you. I've got no first hand experience of this, however, since on the occasions when I didn't have a TV I didn't inform them since I take the attitude that I shouldn't *need* to inform anyone that I'm not breaking the law (when was the last time you phoned up the police to tell them you haven't committed a murder?) They go through a cycle of sending increasingly threatening letters and then send round the "enforcement officer", who I refused entry to my property.
The TV licensing officers have no legal right to enter your property without a warrant and they can only get a warrant if they already have some evidence that you are breaking the law. They rely on people foolishly inviting them in.
At least they've stopped sending libellous letters these days (at one point they took to sending me letters with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed across the outside of the envelope. If I'd had the time and money I would've sued them for libel as I blatantly wasn't breaking the law since I had no TV.)
And one point I forgot to include in my original post is that you can't buy a TV just to watch ITV / Channel 4 / Five - in this case you have to pay for a BBC licence fee.
Well, it isn't a "BBC subscription fee", it is a "TV licence fee" - you need to pay it to watch any broadcast TV and a large proportion (but not all) of the money collected goes to fund the BBC.
For the record, I broadly support the idea of the licence fee, although I disagree with the collection methods and think the whole system could do with being redesigned. IMHO, the licence fee serves the purpose of allowing TV programmes to be produced without having to bow to the commercial pressures. This allows programmes to be made which appeal to minorities, rather than always pushing for higher viewing figures for everything. The changes I think would be beneficial are:
1. Abolish the concept of a licence tied to receiving broadcast TV and just charge a fee to every household (possibly as part of the council tax system) - increasingly the licence fee is going on non-TV services, and it doesn't really seem fair to have TV watchers subsidising services that don't require a licence such as the radio channels, the BBC website, iPlayer, etc. This would also remove the need to harass innocent people, and the associated cost.
2. Avoid using the licence fee to fund really popular programmes that would do just as well on a commercial channel. This could best be served by splitting the BBC channels into a number (maybe 2?) of licence-funded channels and a number of commercial channels. The licence fee would still allow them to produce minority programming and take big risks on cutting edge programming on the licence funded channels, but if a programme becomes really successful it can be "sold" to the commercial arm and the proceeds of the sale can be ploughed back into the licence funded channels. This kind of re-investment would reduce the amount that would need to be charged for a licence fee.
Schemes like Phorm exist because they are opt-out.
What Phorm is doing is almost certainly illegal - you can't lawfully intercept communications without consent from all involved parties. By making it opt-out, you're not even getting explicit consent from one of the parties (the ISP's customer) - even if it were opt-in, you're not getting consent from the website that you're snooping the connection to, or any of the users of that website that may have posted (potentially private) content on it.
But you do have to pay a licence fee simply for owning a TV, even if it is only used to connect to a console, computer, DVD player etc and you don't want to watch the BBC channels.
Please stop spreading misinformation - everything you have just stated is completely incorrect. You need a TV licence in order to watch broadcast TV (this includes streams over the internet which are simulcast with broadcast TV, but does not include streams which are not simulcast). You do not require a licence if you do not receive broadcast TV, no matter whether or not you own a TV - i.e. you don't need a licence in order to watch DVDs, use your computer, etc.
Whether or not you agree with the TV licence, spreading misinformation doesn't exactly help your argument.
It would also make a good goofy syfy movie where the bodyless organs go around and commit crimes. It would get away with it because nobody would be able to identify it (lack of facial features).
I can't help but think that the bodyless organs might stand out a bit in a police lineup, owing to having no body... facial features or not.
Simple: Your prepaid phone will work only as long as it has a connection with a carrier that has a roaming contract with yours. Many, if not most, prepaids don't work internationally unless you register them (often for a fee)
This is certainly untrue for prepay phones in the UK - you haven't had to ask for roaming for years, they Just Work when you take them to other countries these days. I'd be pretty surprised if the same wasn't true for the majority of GSM carriers in other countries.
because international calls are hard to charge on prepaids (at least, where receiving one is charged to your account).
AFAIK, this problem has long since been solved by the CAMEL SS7 protocol.
The need for 64bit is rare? It's 2009 my good man, how the hell is the need for 64bit rare?
I think you need to question why you actually need 64 bit. There may be reasons why 64 bit is desirable, but I'm going to agree with the GP that it is rarely mandatory. The main things you get from x86_64 are a few more registers and a bigger address space.
The registers are nice because they can make things marginally faster, but you can certainly do without them. Depending on what you're doing, the benefits of more registers might be offset by the larger code size anyway.
The more important bit is the increased address space, which is only of use if you need to let a single process access more than maybe around 3.5GB of virtual memory. I'd argue that this is still a fairly rare requirement - remember, we're talking about a *single process* needing that much memory, you can quite happily address over 4GB of RAM without running in 64 bit mode so long as it isn't all going to one process.
Also, how many netbooks do you know of that ship with that much RAM? I don't really see a lot of benefit in using 64 bit processors in netbooks at the moment, especially since power consumption is so important in that formfactor - 64 bit processors have more transistors, they are going to use more power than a 32 bit device that's been manufactured with the same process. Not to mention the extra cache and RAM you need to power to accommodate the larger code sizes.
Maybe you could explain your reasoning why you don't consider it "acceptable in the slightest"?
A mandatory 64bit OS with 32bit emulation through a VM would be far smarter than damn well releasing two different copies.
Why do you want to emulate IA32 when all the x86_64 processors can run IA32 code natively? You don't need an IA32 kernel in order to run IA32 userland code...
You seem stuck on the issue of "hypocrisy." Let me help you out: nuclear disarmament is impossible, because there is no way any one nation can be absolutely assured that all other nations are simultaneously dismantling their stockpiles. To dismantle your own missiles and assume another nation was good to their word and actually taking their missiles apart would be insanity.
This is exactly my point. The US (and all the other nuclear nations) feel that they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves just in case one of the other nuclear nations decide to attack, even though none of the nuclear nations have been especially aggressive against each other for quite some time.
In light of this, why wouldn't the non-nuclear nations want to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves against attacks from these same nations. Especially since some of these nations are actively being aggressive? If you look at it this way, many of the non-nuclear nations are in greater need of a nuclear defence than the nuclear nations because they actually have nuclear aggressors *now* rather than "possibly, at some point in the future".
If you claim that nuclear disarmament is impossible because of the "threat" of other nuclear nations then you must also accept that stopping nuclear proliferation is impossible because of this same threat, unless the nuclear nations conquer the non-nuclear ones first.
Super idea. Lets all give up nukes, and go back to the days when war between major powers is again thinkable.
And slaughter millions upon millions in the process.
If you think nuclear weapons are so good, why shouldn't everyone have them?
Besides, I don't think nuclear weapons make a war unthinkable - you're going to slaughter millions upon millions with or without nukes if you start a world war, it makes very little difference.
At the moment, there's nothing stopping nuclear nations warring with the non-nuclear nations (and the likes of Iraq has proved that they are happy to do that) - why wouldn't a non-nuclear nation want nukes when faced with this? There are only 2 ways you're going to convince other nations that they don't need nukes:
1. Disarm yourself so that you are no longer capable of oppressing them, so they don't feel the need to be able to defend themselves from you.
2. Conquer them.
The US has shown that their preferred option is (2). Unfortunately, when you start conquering other nations, the ones who are left suddenly realise that they *really* do need to be able to defend themselves.
As for the use of nuclear weapons, all it took was once for the whole world to realize we should avoid such a situation at all costs.
Once? You know that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities on 2 separate occasions don't you?
You're describing events that took place nearly a century ago and attempting to draw some sort of rational parallel to modern military tactics. That's insane at face value.
Not really - I'm pointing out that the US really has no business telling people they can't have nuclear weapons whilst they are continuing to arm themselves with these weapons. If the US was really interested in peace rather than control, they would disarm themselves - then other nations might actually listen. At the moment it is more of a "do as I say, not do as I do" situation with the added threat that they will invade _unless_ you have the means to defend yourself (i.e. long range WMDs). Do you actually think the US would've invaded Iraq if Iraq had the means to nuke key US cities in response?
Like I told another poster, if you honestly believe North Korea represents a better life for you and your family I'll gladly buy you a one way plane ticket to the capital.
I never said that it represented a "better life" for me. I do, however, think that the US is extremely hypocritical to be telling people they shouldn't have nuclear weapons - you can't expect people to believe they don't need them when the US clearly believes that they still do and continue to invade other countries whenever they feel like it.
Right, the US is running around making sweeping genocidal threats.
Nope, no one ever said anything about making genocidal threats. Your post said "What's important now is determining the likelihood that an aggressive nation bent on insane policy will use nuclear weapons on their neighbors... oh, wait, that seems to describe North Korea". To which I replied that the US can also be described as being an aggressive nation bent on insane policy. As for the likelihood that the US will use nuclear weapons on their neighbours, I make no comment other than to point out that the US is the only nation in history to drop nuclear weapons on civilian population centres and is still constructing nuclear weapons for themselves at the same time as telling everyone else they can't have them.
It seems like you're suggesting that it's unfair that we have nukes and they don't. I suggest you go downtown, give an angry crazy homeless man one loaded gun and you keep another.
Of a more sensible thing to do would be to go down town and talk with the crazy homeless man without any guns.
IMHO the West really has no business telling the rest of the world that they can't have nukes while the West still has them - this doesn't mean that we should give everyone nukes, it means we should damned well disarm to put everyone on an equal footing.
an aggressive nation bent on insane policy ... oh, wait, that seems to describe North Korea.
And the US...
One problem I have with the study's premise is that we don't yet know that much about how memory works in humans, much less how it works in crustaceans.
So causing pain (e.g. torture, etc) is ok if the recipient can't remember it after the event?
If you already have SIP infrastructure there are loads of companies competing for your business in SIP to POTS bridging
That's assuming the point of this is to bridge to the PSTN. Allowing SIP users to call Skype users (without going via the PSTN) would be beneficial for their customers. They don't make money from calls they aren't bridging to the PSTN, but retaining their customers means more people who might make use of the bridge.
Skype doesn't offer particularly good value for money
Nor do many very successful businesses - Skype have a big name for themselves, and this makes them the first choice for a lot of people who are too lazy to shop around for a good deal.
I often hear it commented that Skype is "easier" than SIP - this has very little to do with the protocol, and everything to do with the fact that the user doesn't have to exercise their brain and make a choice about which service provider to use. The sad thing is that when Skype give them a really sucky service (because they try to work around broken networks, with varying success, rather than forcing the user to fix it) the users conclude that "VoIP sucks", rather than "Skype sucks", and don't even bother looking at the alternatives.
its one advantage over SIP providers is that it is trivial to use from behind a NAT or a firewall, something that doesn't apply to a company that already has SIP deployed internally.
SIP is actually quite trivial to deploy through a stateful firewall and most NATs so long as *all* your calls are going through the NAT. STUN does, for the most part, tend to work reasonably. It isn't 100% reliable (as the STUN RFC admits), but it's pretty good and if it works for you once, it'll probably work for you every time. On the other hand, in cases where SIP won't work, Skype will do crazy stuff like silently tunnelling your voice over HTTP instead of making you fix your terminally broken network - this frequently leads to a crappy service with no real indication to the user that they could fix their network to make it better.
I'm with entanet. They only do IPv6 as part of a trial, which is currently shut due to the 21CN upgrade
I'm also with Enta and I've been chasing them about the ipv6 trial for the past couple of weeks. They claim the trial is still running and that they've received my email, but they haven't actually done anything with it yet.