"Nevermind that blacks under Apartheid enjoy more rights than they do in other African countries." It's funny how the same racist schlock gets recycled every time, isn't it? The reality is that Israel is a Jewish state and non-Jews don't enjoy even basic civil rights. It's illegal to marry outside of your own "kind"*, and non-Jews can't own land (because it can constitutionally only be sold to Jews).
*=Only Orthodox Jewish weddings are legal in Israel, civil marriages (like we have in the US) are not allowed, but can be recognized if performed abroad. Non-Jews can be married by by an officiant of their religion, but non-religious and mixed-religion couples can never marry due to anti-miscegenation laws. Just like Apartheid South Africa!
Going back in history a bit (since there are very few analogous situations today), but imagine if during the 1980s the citizens of West Berlin had agreed to bring RMS there to speak at their own expense, and he made the decision to cross the Berlin Wall to speak to the supporters of the Soviet regime that had them surrounded by a wall. Now imagine an alternate history where West Berlin wasn't supported by the Western powers, the Berlin airlift never happened, and instead the West Berliners lived in horrible conditions and every month the East Germans bulldozed another West German city block to make room for houses to reward the most vehement and violent Socialists. Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea of what this must feel like to the Palestinians. You have the right to be upset when you pay to bring someone to talk to you and he uses your money to give the same benefits to your oppressors.
It's disturbing to me that RMS, a person who has dedicated his life to freedom (even if its his outspoken view of it) would be willing to speak in Israel at all. Israel is the Apartheid South Africa of our modern era; a racist state erected by European colonists in order to oppress the people of the region, to allow those colonists to live a lifestyle fueled by the sweat and blood of racial minorities that are constitutionally prohibited from enjoying the fruits of their labor (or the sweat of their brow, for the Ayn Randians out there). Just like Apartheid South Africa, support for Israel is the key issue of our time that defines whether a person is willing to stand for freedom, justice, and the rule of law, or if they will bow to the status quo and support the ongoing commission of crimes against humanity.
While one could advance the argument that merely speaking at Israeli universities doesn't support the criminal actions of the Israeli government, the situation is analogous to the sports and academic boycott of Apartheid South Africa that occurred beginning in the 1960s. In order to end the system, we need to impress upon Israel their status as a pariah state, any sign of weakened resolve emboldens the terrorists in the Israeli government (which led to Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu last week believing he could tell Obama that Israel had no plans to negotiate the end of the illegal military occupation of Palestinian territories). It would be one thing if RMS was going to be speaking specifically to anti-racist or anti-occupation elements, but I see no indication that this was the case.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft have already conducted successful orbital and reentry operations and will be performing resupply missions to the ISS this year. As you mentioned, there's also the Soyuz for crew exchange missions until the Dragon is man-rated, and both the European Space Agency and Japanese Space Agency will be operating unmanned resupply operations, in addition to the Russian Prospekt missions. The reality is that we're not suffering from any gap between our space transport needs and available capabilities, attempts to convince the American public otherwise are simply transparent cash-grabs by the military industrial complex (Boeing, Lockmart, and the other contractors that make most of their money building things that go boom), supported by Republican congressmen in love with pork.
This is the best idea, I have a Linksys WRT610Nv1 running the current DD-WRT firmware and it runs great. It has dual-simultaneous-N so you can have 802.11n networks on both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, and its routing throughput is excellent as well. You can also use its USB port as a NAS in DD-WRT and I think you can share some USB printers as well, which is cool.
The Comcast tool is showing 142GB, but my Linksys router running DD-WRT has logged less than 120,000 MB of traffic. This difference is pretty significant to me since I come close to my cap every month, given that I have DOCSIS3 service.
There's no legitimate reason for nVidia to continue to make chipsets, and that's why they're exiting the market. SLI only requires nVidia chipsets due to driver and BIOS lockouts, the Intel X58 chipset proves that Crossfire and SLI can co-exist on a platform without any nVidia hardware whatsoever. In the integrated market both AMD and Intel have compelling onboard graphics that can scale well with the addition of one or two GPUs.
Now that AMD and Intel have competitive chipset offerings and nVidia doesn't need the chipset business to keep propping up GPU sales via SLI, there's no reason for them to keep fighting for a piece of a not very profitable market. If they exit the desktop/laptop/netbook chipset market with the current generation and refocus on GPU and embedded development, that improves their financial outlook.
It seems like nVidia is in a very precarious position right now, their GTX200-series GPUs are expensive and power-hungry compared to their AMD competitors, and it looks like AMD is going to execute a die-shrink to 40nm and an architecture change to DirectX11 with their new Evergreen GPUs approximately 6-9 months before nVidia makes a similar transition. This means that for about half a year, AMD is going to have significantly faster, more energy efficient GPUs that cost a fraction of what the comparable nVidia GPUs do to manufacture. nVidia needs to not run out of money before they manage to get their GPU out and capitalize on all their R&D investments.
The computer was simply too infected to allow the Symantec software to install. This is not an abnormal occurrence. Symantec offered to have an engineer remotely access the system and clean it, which naturally costs money, since you're paying for a person's time to fix your computer, in addition to the license for the software. Symantec can't guarantee that your Windows installation isn't too badly damaged to allow their software to install, and they just offered an alternative to telling him to take the computer to be serviced. This is a non-story.
One of the subscriber plums is letting you see articles when they are queued to be published but before they appear on the live frontpage. They show up in red, with a date of "the mysterious future." Are you a subscriber with no-ads turned on for the frontpage?
Here's the thing though: Every version of windows has promised better virtual memory management, faster application load times, and better performance. To a casual observer, they seem to be doing the exact opposite.
In my experience, they've delivered on this. Even though Vista is much maligned, my experience is that it's noticeably faster than XP when running on capable hardware. This is due to the improved disk caching, prefetching, and hardware-accelerated UI. I noticed a similar improvement with Windows XP. It is definitely NOT intended that a new version of Windows run as well on the same hardware as the previous version did, so expecting that you can do an OS upgrade and get significant gains is a little unrealistic.
They could improve customer satisfaction by having more options available. Even if the other algorithms wouldn't be best for most usage scenarios, simply having options would satisfy many people. Most people wouldn't' change from the default, but those that complained about the default could see how bad it would be if it were not as good. Maybe some people complaining about it would realize that its for the best, maybe others would actually find one that was optimal for their usage.
This is actually already available. Control Panel, System, Advanced, Performance Settings. You can change scheduler and memory management modes. Further low-level options are available in the registry. You can also use third-party programs to manage these settings in real-time. I've used O&O Software's CleverCache Pro to pretty good effect on XP, though I think it only provided benefits because my usage was an edge-case that the default settings didn't cope well with. While I'm pimping O&O Software, I'll note that I love the hell out of O&O Defrag in XP and Vista.
The reason I don't want all of my RAM being used is because I know much further in advance than the computer does about when more RAM will be needed and by which specific applications. If that memory is being hoarded by unneeded crap, then my important tasks suffer.
The Windows memory manager knows far more than you do about your system's memory utilization and how to optimally allocate the available physical memory. The disk cache data can be purged without delay if that memory is needed by an application, so it's not like you have to wait for memory to be freed up before it can be used. The only case in which there can be a negative performance impact is if the system does end up paging out data an application needs, which is rather unlikely. The only way I've been able to cause a performance problem with the Windows XP memory manager was with heavy Bittorrent seeding over a period of hours, the system would see the constant disk I/O and prioritize more RAM for the disk cache. I used a third party program to modify the disk caching settings to prevent this problem. Alternatively, I could have not been seeding a hundred Linux ISOs. I haven't been able to reproduce this performance loss in Vista.
Memory exists to be used. If memory is not in use, you are wasting it. The reality is that your system will operate with higher performance if unused data is paged out of RAM to disk and the newly freed memory is used for additional disk caching. Vista's memory manager is actually reasonably smart and will only page data out to disk when it really won't be used, or you experience an actual low-memory condition.
That's certainly true, I'm not defending Apple's choice to make this a requirement. It's just that, aside from the analog portion, this really isn't anything new. When you buy DRM-encumbered media, you should expect some degree of jerking around. Which is why you shouldn't buy DRM-encumbered media:)
This is the same technology used by the non-free HDTV you get out of your cable box and on BluRay discs. There is a requirement that every device in the playback path support HDCP in order for the video to display. The key difference that makes Apple jerks are that they are not exempting analog displays from this requirement. Previously, HDCP support was only required for displaying video over a DVI or HDMI connection, any analog format wasn't affected. This is because of the image quality degradation caused by an analog signal, the key point of HDCP is preventing digital copies.
You are referring to the victim's phone company. Sure, they are (probably) not involved in the spoofed phone calls in the first place. But the phone company providing services to the scammer is. That other phone company can stop the spoofing. But it costs some money to do so because it requires some added software on each phone switch to check the caller ID info to see that it matches the phone numbers on the customer's trunk circuit. Since that other phone company and the scammer are not in a business relationship with the victim, it would take passing a law to force this to happen. They should be required to have these checks in place along with both civil and criminal penalties for failure to do so.
Unfortunately, we don't get to just make up rules about how the phone system should work. The reality is that a company with a PRI gets to send whatever Caller ID number they want, and there are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to send a number that isn't active on that trunk (such as sending a toll free number or a call-back number for an inbound call center). The solution is for the FCC to make it a crime to spoof Caller ID in order to commit a crime, but I suspect that this is already illegal.
There is no technical way to prevent Caller ID Spoofing, your phone company has no way to stop this except changing your phone number so it is no longer your number being spoofed (they can also change the name on the spoofed number after it is no longer assigned to you). The caller can send any Caller ID number they want, and the terminating carrier will do a caller name lookup on this number. The FCC is the correct agency to contact to report this, my understanding is that Caller ID spoofing in and of itself is not a crime, but it is possible for the action to be covered under fraud or other laws depending on the specifics.
There is very little Intel can do to stretch thing by another 5 degrees. It's not something that can be imposed by fiat. Intel engineers have already juggled all the variables to come up with the best performance possible. SOMETHING is going to have to give. Either the chips will have to be selected and graded for speed, lowering the overall envelope for the chips everyone else gets, or they'll have to fudge some other parameters, hoping nobody will notice, or worse yet they'll tweak some variable right to the edge of raggedness, resulting in worse reliability down the road.
In the real world, processors don't fail (barring power spikes/motherboard failures that fry them). The consideration here is much more likely to involve legal concerns about the warranty or the temperature at which thermal throttling or shutdown occur. Most likely Google and Intel were both able to confirm that the processors would not fail during their expected lifetimes in Google's datacenters even when operating continuously at this new maximum load, which is why they agreed to amend the processor specifications. I sincerely doubt these CPUs are different from others in any way other than possible the thermal protection setpoints that are pre-configured.
Except SMS uses space in the control channel which is very low bandwidth
And SMS messages are limited to 160 bytes. A typical SMS is smaller than a single frame of voice data (33 bytes for GSM). The costs per-SMS round down to zero.
This does not affect mobile-to-mobile SMS, consumers will not see any charges (unless the content provider chooses to recover costs from consumers). My understanding is that this fee will be 3 cents for every premium or standard-rated SMS sent from a shortcode to a Verizon subscriber, unless the message is from a non-profit/charity or is "Free to End-User" (whatever that means, I don't know the difference between an F2EU SMS and a standard-rated SMS).
My biggest concern is that we're not going to be able to stop this, and once Verizon adopts this policy every other carrier will as well. This has the potential to seriously affect the mobile content industry.
It would be cost-prohibitive for a phone company to maintain connections to every company they want to exchange SMS with. Instead, they select one of the several companies that maintain inter-carrier messaging networks to deliver this traffic for them. These companies include VeriSign, Syniverse, and Sybase 365. Which carriers you can exchange SMS with depends on which of these vendors your carrier has selected. In general, while they all have two-way reach to the major carriers internationally, each vendor has a different profile of smaller international carriers and countries in their portfolio.
Do you honestly believe that you or your employees are going to build a system with higher availability than Google? In the magical fantasy world we all wish we lived in, you may have the budget, skill, manpower, and infrastructure resources to do this. In the real world it is not even remotely possible. I know how much it sucks when your system is down and there's nothing you can do but wait on some status dashboard to from Red to Green. That said, we should recognize that while being frustrated at this lack of control is normal, that doesn't mean you actually could do it better. It's easy to say "this would have never happened if we were self-hosted" while never thinking about the bullets you dodged by running hosted applications.
That means you, as a single customer, are insignificant. And that shows daily when dealing with any large service provider.
The only thing that my service provider should care about is the availability of the platform. I am completely insignificant, but the only reason my hosted app would be down is if the platform is down, and that sure as hell is significant to them. The advantage of hosted applications and cloud computing is that no one needs to ever look at or touch my app, the platform is all that matters.
The end came when AMD's acquisition of ATI put Via in the same position they were in with Intel. To be fair, nVidia got stabbed in the back the same way. Both Via and nVidia had their turn as the de facto standard AMD chipset manufacturer, and the switch between them happened natrually; AMD buying ATI took it away from both of them by force. AMD's betrayal of their third-party chipset makers was galling. Not only is Via quitting, but there are rumors of nVidia doing the same thing.
AMD didn't betray anyone. Via hasn't released a chipset with any innovative features in years, the only reason they had any products were to cover the legacy (AGP) and low-end markets. Their changing market focus has been obvious. nVidia has released a number of products with very high-profile defects, such as chipsets with severe data corruption bugs, and GPUs that fail prematurely due to packaging issues. nVidia chose to gamble that keeping SLI proprietary wouldn't piss Intel off enough to deny them a Nehalem bus license, and they lost. nVidia makes chipsets for extreme gamers who want SLI, and those consumers will buy Nehalem platforms because they are the fastest. If all nVidia has left is the AMD market, they really have no reason to keep making chipsets. The fact that their chipsets have a reputation for running hot and having issues doesn't really help at all.
Why are we assuming that this is a defect in the Microsoft patch, rather than a defect in the security software? I think it's much more likely that the software firewall application (which tend to be pretty skeevy in general, see Norton Internet Security) is inappropriately blocking access than that Microsoft screwed up the patch. From my (admittedly vague) understanding of the issue, I'm guessing that the firewall software whitelists outgoing UDP requests from port 53, and the new randomized ports are being blocked, preventing DNS queries from succeeding.
I know blaming Microsoft is fun, but blaming even crappier software vendors is more fun:)
Uh... I think you'll find that taking people's money for goods and then not providing them is, in fact, fraud and not theft. Theft is taking people's property without their permission with the intention to permanently deprive them of it.
Fraud is actually just a specific type of theft. Under common law, it's called "theft by deception." In contrast to, you know, making an unlicensed copy of a song so your friend can listen to it.
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"Nevermind that blacks under Apartheid enjoy more rights than they do in other African countries." It's funny how the same racist schlock gets recycled every time, isn't it? The reality is that Israel is a Jewish state and non-Jews don't enjoy even basic civil rights. It's illegal to marry outside of your own "kind"*, and non-Jews can't own land (because it can constitutionally only be sold to Jews).
*=Only Orthodox Jewish weddings are legal in Israel, civil marriages (like we have in the US) are not allowed, but can be recognized if performed abroad. Non-Jews can be married by by an officiant of their religion, but non-religious and mixed-religion couples can never marry due to anti-miscegenation laws. Just like Apartheid South Africa!
Going back in history a bit (since there are very few analogous situations today), but imagine if during the 1980s the citizens of West Berlin had agreed to bring RMS there to speak at their own expense, and he made the decision to cross the Berlin Wall to speak to the supporters of the Soviet regime that had them surrounded by a wall. Now imagine an alternate history where West Berlin wasn't supported by the Western powers, the Berlin airlift never happened, and instead the West Berliners lived in horrible conditions and every month the East Germans bulldozed another West German city block to make room for houses to reward the most vehement and violent Socialists. Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea of what this must feel like to the Palestinians. You have the right to be upset when you pay to bring someone to talk to you and he uses your money to give the same benefits to your oppressors.
It's disturbing to me that RMS, a person who has dedicated his life to freedom (even if its his outspoken view of it) would be willing to speak in Israel at all. Israel is the Apartheid South Africa of our modern era; a racist state erected by European colonists in order to oppress the people of the region, to allow those colonists to live a lifestyle fueled by the sweat and blood of racial minorities that are constitutionally prohibited from enjoying the fruits of their labor (or the sweat of their brow, for the Ayn Randians out there). Just like Apartheid South Africa, support for Israel is the key issue of our time that defines whether a person is willing to stand for freedom, justice, and the rule of law, or if they will bow to the status quo and support the ongoing commission of crimes against humanity.
While one could advance the argument that merely speaking at Israeli universities doesn't support the criminal actions of the Israeli government, the situation is analogous to the sports and academic boycott of Apartheid South Africa that occurred beginning in the 1960s. In order to end the system, we need to impress upon Israel their status as a pariah state, any sign of weakened resolve emboldens the terrorists in the Israeli government (which led to Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu last week believing he could tell Obama that Israel had no plans to negotiate the end of the illegal military occupation of Palestinian territories). It would be one thing if RMS was going to be speaking specifically to anti-racist or anti-occupation elements, but I see no indication that this was the case.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft have already conducted successful orbital and reentry operations and will be performing resupply missions to the ISS this year. As you mentioned, there's also the Soyuz for crew exchange missions until the Dragon is man-rated, and both the European Space Agency and Japanese Space Agency will be operating unmanned resupply operations, in addition to the Russian Prospekt missions. The reality is that we're not suffering from any gap between our space transport needs and available capabilities, attempts to convince the American public otherwise are simply transparent cash-grabs by the military industrial complex (Boeing, Lockmart, and the other contractors that make most of their money building things that go boom), supported by Republican congressmen in love with pork.
This is the best idea, I have a Linksys WRT610Nv1 running the current DD-WRT firmware and it runs great. It has dual-simultaneous-N so you can have 802.11n networks on both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands, and its routing throughput is excellent as well. You can also use its USB port as a NAS in DD-WRT and I think you can share some USB printers as well, which is cool.
The Comcast tool is showing 142GB, but my Linksys router running DD-WRT has logged less than 120,000 MB of traffic. This difference is pretty significant to me since I come close to my cap every month, given that I have DOCSIS3 service.
There's no legitimate reason for nVidia to continue to make chipsets, and that's why they're exiting the market. SLI only requires nVidia chipsets due to driver and BIOS lockouts, the Intel X58 chipset proves that Crossfire and SLI can co-exist on a platform without any nVidia hardware whatsoever. In the integrated market both AMD and Intel have compelling onboard graphics that can scale well with the addition of one or two GPUs.
Now that AMD and Intel have competitive chipset offerings and nVidia doesn't need the chipset business to keep propping up GPU sales via SLI, there's no reason for them to keep fighting for a piece of a not very profitable market. If they exit the desktop/laptop/netbook chipset market with the current generation and refocus on GPU and embedded development, that improves their financial outlook.
It seems like nVidia is in a very precarious position right now, their GTX200-series GPUs are expensive and power-hungry compared to their AMD competitors, and it looks like AMD is going to execute a die-shrink to 40nm and an architecture change to DirectX11 with their new Evergreen GPUs approximately 6-9 months before nVidia makes a similar transition. This means that for about half a year, AMD is going to have significantly faster, more energy efficient GPUs that cost a fraction of what the comparable nVidia GPUs do to manufacture. nVidia needs to not run out of money before they manage to get their GPU out and capitalize on all their R&D investments.
It will automatically rickroll you with the hope that the memes cancel eachother out!
The computer was simply too infected to allow the Symantec software to install. This is not an abnormal occurrence. Symantec offered to have an engineer remotely access the system and clean it, which naturally costs money, since you're paying for a person's time to fix your computer, in addition to the license for the software. Symantec can't guarantee that your Windows installation isn't too badly damaged to allow their software to install, and they just offered an alternative to telling him to take the computer to be serviced. This is a non-story.
One of the subscriber plums is letting you see articles when they are queued to be published but before they appear on the live frontpage. They show up in red, with a date of "the mysterious future." Are you a subscriber with no-ads turned on for the frontpage?
Here's the thing though: Every version of windows has promised better virtual memory management, faster application load times, and better performance. To a casual observer, they seem to be doing the exact opposite.
In my experience, they've delivered on this. Even though Vista is much maligned, my experience is that it's noticeably faster than XP when running on capable hardware. This is due to the improved disk caching, prefetching, and hardware-accelerated UI. I noticed a similar improvement with Windows XP. It is definitely NOT intended that a new version of Windows run as well on the same hardware as the previous version did, so expecting that you can do an OS upgrade and get significant gains is a little unrealistic.
They could improve customer satisfaction by having more options available. Even if the other algorithms wouldn't be best for most usage scenarios, simply having options would satisfy many people. Most people wouldn't' change from the default, but those that complained about the default could see how bad it would be if it were not as good. Maybe some people complaining about it would realize that its for the best, maybe others would actually find one that was optimal for their usage.
This is actually already available. Control Panel, System, Advanced, Performance Settings. You can change scheduler and memory management modes. Further low-level options are available in the registry. You can also use third-party programs to manage these settings in real-time. I've used O&O Software's CleverCache Pro to pretty good effect on XP, though I think it only provided benefits because my usage was an edge-case that the default settings didn't cope well with. While I'm pimping O&O Software, I'll note that I love the hell out of O&O Defrag in XP and Vista.
The reason I don't want all of my RAM being used is because I know much further in advance than the computer does about when more RAM will be needed and by which specific applications. If that memory is being hoarded by unneeded crap, then my important tasks suffer.
The Windows memory manager knows far more than you do about your system's memory utilization and how to optimally allocate the available physical memory. The disk cache data can be purged without delay if that memory is needed by an application, so it's not like you have to wait for memory to be freed up before it can be used. The only case in which there can be a negative performance impact is if the system does end up paging out data an application needs, which is rather unlikely. The only way I've been able to cause a performance problem with the Windows XP memory manager was with heavy Bittorrent seeding over a period of hours, the system would see the constant disk I/O and prioritize more RAM for the disk cache. I used a third party program to modify the disk caching settings to prevent this problem. Alternatively, I could have not been seeding a hundred Linux ISOs. I haven't been able to reproduce this performance loss in Vista.
Memory exists to be used. If memory is not in use, you are wasting it. The reality is that your system will operate with higher performance if unused data is paged out of RAM to disk and the newly freed memory is used for additional disk caching. Vista's memory manager is actually reasonably smart and will only page data out to disk when it really won't be used, or you experience an actual low-memory condition.
That's certainly true, I'm not defending Apple's choice to make this a requirement. It's just that, aside from the analog portion, this really isn't anything new. When you buy DRM-encumbered media, you should expect some degree of jerking around. Which is why you shouldn't buy DRM-encumbered media :)
This is the same technology used by the non-free HDTV you get out of your cable box and on BluRay discs. There is a requirement that every device in the playback path support HDCP in order for the video to display. The key difference that makes Apple jerks are that they are not exempting analog displays from this requirement. Previously, HDCP support was only required for displaying video over a DVI or HDMI connection, any analog format wasn't affected. This is because of the image quality degradation caused by an analog signal, the key point of HDCP is preventing digital copies.
You are referring to the victim's phone company. Sure, they are (probably) not involved in the spoofed phone calls in the first place. But the phone company providing services to the scammer is. That other phone company can stop the spoofing. But it costs some money to do so because it requires some added software on each phone switch to check the caller ID info to see that it matches the phone numbers on the customer's trunk circuit. Since that other phone company and the scammer are not in a business relationship with the victim, it would take passing a law to force this to happen. They should be required to have these checks in place along with both civil and criminal penalties for failure to do so.
Unfortunately, we don't get to just make up rules about how the phone system should work. The reality is that a company with a PRI gets to send whatever Caller ID number they want, and there are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to send a number that isn't active on that trunk (such as sending a toll free number or a call-back number for an inbound call center). The solution is for the FCC to make it a crime to spoof Caller ID in order to commit a crime, but I suspect that this is already illegal.
There is no technical way to prevent Caller ID Spoofing, your phone company has no way to stop this except changing your phone number so it is no longer your number being spoofed (they can also change the name on the spoofed number after it is no longer assigned to you). The caller can send any Caller ID number they want, and the terminating carrier will do a caller name lookup on this number. The FCC is the correct agency to contact to report this, my understanding is that Caller ID spoofing in and of itself is not a crime, but it is possible for the action to be covered under fraud or other laws depending on the specifics.
There is very little Intel can do to stretch thing by another 5 degrees. It's not something that can be imposed by fiat. Intel engineers have already juggled all the variables to come up with the best performance possible. SOMETHING is going to have to give. Either the chips will have to be selected and graded for speed, lowering the overall envelope for the chips everyone else gets, or they'll have to fudge some other parameters, hoping nobody will notice, or worse yet they'll tweak some variable right to the edge of raggedness, resulting in worse reliability down the road.
In the real world, processors don't fail (barring power spikes/motherboard failures that fry them). The consideration here is much more likely to involve legal concerns about the warranty or the temperature at which thermal throttling or shutdown occur. Most likely Google and Intel were both able to confirm that the processors would not fail during their expected lifetimes in Google's datacenters even when operating continuously at this new maximum load, which is why they agreed to amend the processor specifications. I sincerely doubt these CPUs are different from others in any way other than possible the thermal protection setpoints that are pre-configured.
Except SMS uses space in the control channel which is very low bandwidth
And SMS messages are limited to 160 bytes. A typical SMS is smaller than a single frame of voice data (33 bytes for GSM). The costs per-SMS round down to zero.
This does not affect mobile-to-mobile SMS, consumers will not see any charges (unless the content provider chooses to recover costs from consumers). My understanding is that this fee will be 3 cents for every premium or standard-rated SMS sent from a shortcode to a Verizon subscriber, unless the message is from a non-profit/charity or is "Free to End-User" (whatever that means, I don't know the difference between an F2EU SMS and a standard-rated SMS).
My biggest concern is that we're not going to be able to stop this, and once Verizon adopts this policy every other carrier will as well. This has the potential to seriously affect the mobile content industry.
It would be cost-prohibitive for a phone company to maintain connections to every company they want to exchange SMS with. Instead, they select one of the several companies that maintain inter-carrier messaging networks to deliver this traffic for them. These companies include VeriSign, Syniverse, and Sybase 365. Which carriers you can exchange SMS with depends on which of these vendors your carrier has selected. In general, while they all have two-way reach to the major carriers internationally, each vendor has a different profile of smaller international carriers and countries in their portfolio.
Do you honestly believe that you or your employees are going to build a system with higher availability than Google? In the magical fantasy world we all wish we lived in, you may have the budget, skill, manpower, and infrastructure resources to do this. In the real world it is not even remotely possible. I know how much it sucks when your system is down and there's nothing you can do but wait on some status dashboard to from Red to Green. That said, we should recognize that while being frustrated at this lack of control is normal, that doesn't mean you actually could do it better. It's easy to say "this would have never happened if we were self-hosted" while never thinking about the bullets you dodged by running hosted applications.
That means you, as a single customer, are insignificant. And that shows daily when dealing with any large service provider.
The only thing that my service provider should care about is the availability of the platform. I am completely insignificant, but the only reason my hosted app would be down is if the platform is down, and that sure as hell is significant to them. The advantage of hosted applications and cloud computing is that no one needs to ever look at or touch my app, the platform is all that matters.
The end came when AMD's acquisition of ATI put Via in the same position they were in with Intel. To be fair, nVidia got stabbed in the back the same way. Both Via and nVidia had their turn as the de facto standard AMD chipset manufacturer, and the switch between them happened natrually; AMD buying ATI took it away from both of them by force. AMD's betrayal of their third-party chipset makers was galling. Not only is Via quitting, but there are rumors of nVidia doing the same thing.
AMD didn't betray anyone. Via hasn't released a chipset with any innovative features in years, the only reason they had any products were to cover the legacy (AGP) and low-end markets. Their changing market focus has been obvious. nVidia has released a number of products with very high-profile defects, such as chipsets with severe data corruption bugs, and GPUs that fail prematurely due to packaging issues. nVidia chose to gamble that keeping SLI proprietary wouldn't piss Intel off enough to deny them a Nehalem bus license, and they lost. nVidia makes chipsets for extreme gamers who want SLI, and those consumers will buy Nehalem platforms because they are the fastest. If all nVidia has left is the AMD market, they really have no reason to keep making chipsets. The fact that their chipsets have a reputation for running hot and having issues doesn't really help at all.
Why are we assuming that this is a defect in the Microsoft patch, rather than a defect in the security software? I think it's much more likely that the software firewall application (which tend to be pretty skeevy in general, see Norton Internet Security) is inappropriately blocking access than that Microsoft screwed up the patch. From my (admittedly vague) understanding of the issue, I'm guessing that the firewall software whitelists outgoing UDP requests from port 53, and the new randomized ports are being blocked, preventing DNS queries from succeeding. I know blaming Microsoft is fun, but blaming even crappier software vendors is more fun :)
Uh... I think you'll find that taking people's money for goods and then not providing them is, in fact, fraud and not theft. Theft is taking people's property without their permission with the intention to permanently deprive them of it.
Fraud is actually just a specific type of theft. Under common law, it's called "theft by deception." In contrast to, you know, making an unlicensed copy of a song so your friend can listen to it.