"Sadly, all those taxes are not specifically used to invest in better energy sources or infrastructure, but are mainly integrated into the general budget."
All too common government problem. It's the same reason the U.S. patent system is so b0rked. The USPTO brings in a LOT of money, but it goes into a general government budget pool that the USPTO has to fight for a share of, and their contribution to that pool tends not to be taken into account.
It's amazing how fast things can change. Back in August or so when I was vehicle shopping, there were no Priuses on any lots - they were backordered heavily.
99% of all now-dead lifeforms on this planet consumed oxygen for the majority of their lifetime. It is clearly a toxic substance that must be controlled!
Yes, the x86 architecture is aging in "inferior" in its original design to a more "pure" architecture like PowerPC.
But in the end the realities of economics prevail - the original x86 architecture is old, but it has had billions of dollars per year pumped into live support, so most of the architectural flaws have had workarounds. (esp. with the advent of x86-64).
The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC ever since Apple ditched them (note that of the two major manufacturers of general-purpose PPC processors, PASemi was bought by Apple who promptly killed off the PPC product lines, and Freescale posted significant losses last year I believe. PPC still has a solid niche in "special purpose" CPUs such as for gaming consoles and NAS systems, but for general purpose computing it is dying.
Note that the two existing airframes have *civilian* variants, and the EH101 airframe has a number of foreign variants, including one semi-civilian customer (Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgustaWestland_AW101
You provided the link yourself. Read the news articles - the announcement for each beta release has a detailed ChangeLog, and as of today, every "Detailed ChangeLog" entry I see on that page has an X.org changes section.
Depends on your output resolution, and how good your monitor is at scaling - Often monitors have crap scaling capability, and so need the (much higher quality) hardware scaling of the video card. There's no way you're driving a 1920x1080 native display without some serious CPU (regardless of input content) unless the video card does scaling (in which case the output resolution doesn't matter, CPU usage is all about the source resolution). Every video card made for the past decade (at least) has built-in hardware scaling at a minimum.
The OP links to GeeXboX while talking about framebuffer video, but GeeXboX is pretty clear about the fact that they use X and not framebuffer. Nearly every news item refers to updates to their X.org configuration.
What about the Eee 1000HA had hardware driver support issues?
The Intel Atom restricts the platform enough that there's very little hardware variance between units. WiFi and card readers are about the only thing that varies. I know the Atheros WiFi chipset used in the Aspire One series has some issues with "out of the box" Ubuntu support, but if you connect once via wired Ethernet you can apt-get a package that includes drivers that work. See the ath5k entry in the release notes - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810
The only hardware issues I've had with my Acer Aspire One and vanilla Ubuntu were: 1) The above wifi issue 2) Kubuntu's initial Bluetooth issues, this was resolved in the latest round of KDE updates. (This was with a third-party BT dongle, and KDE Bluetooth support was entirely broken on all systems with recent kernels.) 3) Um... I think that's it?
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC. But Apple hyped their systems based on that one single meaningless-for-most-people benchmark. (As opposed to AMD's speed rating system which for the Athlon XPs was based on a suite of benchmarks and their average comparison to a similarly clocked P4, which was typically pretty accurate.)
Here, how is Apple magically eliminating network latency and providing infinite network bandwidth with browser changes? For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
Um, how is that relevant? MS isn't using those minis to run an internet service of any sort, they're using them for brute force automated testing of a desktop application that was specifically designed to run on desktop-class Macs.
Unlike a tanker, an oil rig (especially a nonoperational/abandoned one) is unlikely to contain significant amounts of oil. All oil would be removed from the rig prior to abandonment - it makes no sense to just abandon a valuable commodity on a structure.
As Hulu has moved to RTMPE (shutting down rtmpdump), I have moved back to Mininova.
My HTPC in the living room simply isn't fast enough for Hulu because their player is so broken, despite being able to easily play back rtmpdumped FLVs of Hulu content with SMPlayer.
Here's some critical thinking - How would someone who committed domestic abuse against their spouse still have custody of the children? There's something seriously wrong if the case you state for an abuse victim to call their abuser is ever valid. Someone who abused their spouse should NEVER have custody of their children.
I would guess that victims of domestic violence would NOT be calling their abusers but would potentially be receiving threatening/harassing calls from their abusers.
"Actually it's worse than that, there are wallwarts that supply 5V (often at 1000mA or more) to a USB connection but don't have a USB host. Devices that refuse to charge before enumeration won't work with those either." Most wallwarts have some way of signaling a dumb charger. For Mini-USB, the "de facto" standard used by Motorola, Blackberry, HTC, TomTom, and others is to ground a pin on the plug that is normally N/C.
Just fine when connected to a "dumb charger" that did NOT have the extra pin on the miniUSB plug grounded to signify a dumb charger?
Nearly all HTC devices use the same "de facto" dumb charger signaling standard as Motorola/Blackberry, as I said in my previous post. It is also the same charging scheme used by TomTom and Holux for their GPS units.
The problem is that there is no way to charge phones in a standard way with USB.
USB dictates that a device is only permitted to draw 100 mA unless it has negotiated a connection with a host AND that host has given it permission to draw more.
As a result, any device that charges from USB must either: a) Limit itself to 100 mA or less (not going to happen) b) Limit itself to only charging when it enumerates with a PC (see the "special driver" scenario, although there are admittedly better ways to do this - behave as a "standard" device for which all modern OSes have drivers, but still this is a very restrictive approach as it doesn't allow for "dumb chargers".) c) Have some sort of method to signify the presence of a "dumb charger" to the device. THIS IS NOT COVERED BY ANY CURRENT USB SPECIFICATION. As a result it is at best covered by "de facto" standards. For example, mini-USB connectors have an additional pin not found in normal USB connectors. (Why, I do not know, I'm guessing "future growth" for later USB revisions). It is defined as "not connected" in standard USB, but it's a "de facto" standard (adopted by Motorola, Blackberry, HTC, Holux, and quite a few others) to signify a "dumb charger" by grounding this pin. (Unfortunately, most devices will fail to operate as a data device when this pin is grounded.)
Sadly, Apple does it in a different manner with weird resistances and voltages.
Unfortunately there's no way to standardize this without somehow incorporating it into USB 3.0. I sort of recall that this might have actually been taken into account for USB 3.0, but if not, it's too late for the EU - USB 4.0 is a looooooooong way away.
There is no way in hell Stern brought that many subscribers into Sirius.
There may have been that many new subscribers after he was brought on, but how many of those came because he was on Sirius? Probably a tiny percentage.
I was an XM subscriber and not Sirius, so I wasn't familiar with their pricing scheme - was Howard "premium" content like O&A were on XM? In that case, how many people actually signed up for that "premium" addon?
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"Sadly, all those taxes are not specifically used to invest in better energy sources or infrastructure, but are mainly integrated into the general budget."
All too common government problem. It's the same reason the U.S. patent system is so b0rked. The USPTO brings in a LOT of money, but it goes into a general government budget pool that the USPTO has to fight for a share of, and their contribution to that pool tends not to be taken into account.
It's amazing how fast things can change. Back in August or so when I was vehicle shopping, there were no Priuses on any lots - they were backordered heavily.
Boycott oxygen!
99% of all now-dead lifeforms on this planet consumed oxygen for the majority of their lifetime. It is clearly a toxic substance that must be controlled!
Argh, missed a typo in preview - "life support" not "live support"
My opinion:
Yes, the x86 architecture is aging in "inferior" in its original design to a more "pure" architecture like PowerPC.
But in the end the realities of economics prevail - the original x86 architecture is old, but it has had billions of dollars per year pumped into live support, so most of the architectural flaws have had workarounds. (esp. with the advent of x86-64).
The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC ever since Apple ditched them (note that of the two major manufacturers of general-purpose PPC processors, PASemi was bought by Apple who promptly killed off the PPC product lines, and Freescale posted significant losses last year I believe. PPC still has a solid niche in "special purpose" CPUs such as for gaming consoles and NAS systems, but for general purpose computing it is dying.
The article doesn't even mention WHICH Marine One variant the blueprints were of - The under-development VH-71, or one of the existing VH-3 or VH-60?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_One
Note that the two existing airframes have *civilian* variants, and the EH101 airframe has a number of foreign variants, including one semi-civilian customer (Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgustaWestland_AW101
Which supports Silverlight 1.0 or 1.1 - Basically all sites (including Netflix) use 2.0 now. Also, I don't believe Moonlight supports DRM yet.
You provided the link yourself. Read the news articles - the announcement for each beta release has a detailed ChangeLog, and as of today, every "Detailed ChangeLog" entry I see on that page has an X.org changes section.
Depends on your output resolution, and how good your monitor is at scaling - Often monitors have crap scaling capability, and so need the (much higher quality) hardware scaling of the video card. There's no way you're driving a 1920x1080 native display without some serious CPU (regardless of input content) unless the video card does scaling (in which case the output resolution doesn't matter, CPU usage is all about the source resolution). Every video card made for the past decade (at least) has built-in hardware scaling at a minimum.
An additional note:
The OP links to GeeXboX while talking about framebuffer video, but GeeXboX is pretty clear about the fact that they use X and not framebuffer. Nearly every news item refers to updates to their X.org configuration.
Framebuffer? Are you insane?
Last I checked, there were no framebuffer implementations that had support for video acceleration - not even hardware scaling.
Essentially a showstopper for video playback, especially high definition content.
What about the Eee 1000HA had hardware driver support issues?
The Intel Atom restricts the platform enough that there's very little hardware variance between units. WiFi and card readers are about the only thing that varies. I know the Atheros WiFi chipset used in the Aspire One series has some issues with "out of the box" Ubuntu support, but if you connect once via wired Ethernet you can apt-get a package that includes drivers that work. See the ath5k entry in the release notes - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810
The only hardware issues I've had with my Acer Aspire One and vanilla Ubuntu were:
1) The above wifi issue
2) Kubuntu's initial Bluetooth issues, this was resolved in the latest round of KDE updates. (This was with a third-party BT dongle, and KDE Bluetooth support was entirely broken on all systems with recent kernels.)
3) Um... I think that's it?
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC. But Apple hyped their systems based on that one single meaningless-for-most-people benchmark. (As opposed to AMD's speed rating system which for the Athlon XPs was based on a suite of benchmarks and their average comparison to a similarly clocked P4, which was typically pretty accurate.)
Here, how is Apple magically eliminating network latency and providing infinite network bandwidth with browser changes? For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
Um, how is that relevant? MS isn't using those minis to run an internet service of any sort, they're using them for brute force automated testing of a desktop application that was specifically designed to run on desktop-class Macs.
Unlike a tanker, an oil rig (especially a nonoperational/abandoned one) is unlikely to contain significant amounts of oil. All oil would be removed from the rig prior to abandonment - it makes no sense to just abandon a valuable commodity on a structure.
Or Mininova.
As Hulu has moved to RTMPE (shutting down rtmpdump), I have moved back to Mininova.
My HTPC in the living room simply isn't fast enough for Hulu because their player is so broken, despite being able to easily play back rtmpdumped FLVs of Hulu content with SMPlayer.
Here's some critical thinking - How would someone who committed domestic abuse against their spouse still have custody of the children? There's something seriously wrong if the case you state for an abuse victim to call their abuser is ever valid. Someone who abused their spouse should NEVER have custody of their children.
Real-world throughput of 50% of the signaling rate is about the best you're ever going to see, so that looks right to me.
I would guess that victims of domestic violence would NOT be calling their abusers but would potentially be receiving threatening/harassing calls from their abusers.
Why wouldn't they be rejoicing about this?
"Actually it's worse than that, there are wallwarts that supply 5V (often at 1000mA or more) to a USB connection but don't have a USB host. Devices that refuse to charge before enumeration won't work with those either."
Most wallwarts have some way of signaling a dumb charger. For Mini-USB, the "de facto" standard used by Motorola, Blackberry, HTC, TomTom, and others is to ground a pin on the plug that is normally N/C.
Clarify. Just fine when connected to a PC?
Just fine when connected to a "dumb charger" that did NOT have the extra pin on the miniUSB plug grounded to signify a dumb charger?
Nearly all HTC devices use the same "de facto" dumb charger signaling standard as Motorola/Blackberry, as I said in my previous post. It is also the same charging scheme used by TomTom and Holux for their GPS units.
Then that cooling pad violates the USB specification.
The problem is that there is no way to charge phones in a standard way with USB.
USB dictates that a device is only permitted to draw 100 mA unless it has negotiated a connection with a host AND that host has given it permission to draw more.
As a result, any device that charges from USB must either:
a) Limit itself to 100 mA or less (not going to happen)
b) Limit itself to only charging when it enumerates with a PC (see the "special driver" scenario, although there are admittedly better ways to do this - behave as a "standard" device for which all modern OSes have drivers, but still this is a very restrictive approach as it doesn't allow for "dumb chargers".)
c) Have some sort of method to signify the presence of a "dumb charger" to the device. THIS IS NOT COVERED BY ANY CURRENT USB SPECIFICATION. As a result it is at best covered by "de facto" standards. For example, mini-USB connectors have an additional pin not found in normal USB connectors. (Why, I do not know, I'm guessing "future growth" for later USB revisions). It is defined as "not connected" in standard USB, but it's a "de facto" standard (adopted by Motorola, Blackberry, HTC, Holux, and quite a few others) to signify a "dumb charger" by grounding this pin. (Unfortunately, most devices will fail to operate as a data device when this pin is grounded.)
Sadly, Apple does it in a different manner with weird resistances and voltages.
Unfortunately there's no way to standardize this without somehow incorporating it into USB 3.0. I sort of recall that this might have actually been taken into account for USB 3.0, but if not, it's too late for the EU - USB 4.0 is a looooooooong way away.
If the enemy knows where you are during your peacetime submarine operations, they can make predictions as to how you might behave during wartime.
There is no way in hell Stern brought that many subscribers into Sirius.
There may have been that many new subscribers after he was brought on, but how many of those came because he was on Sirius? Probably a tiny percentage.
I was an XM subscriber and not Sirius, so I wasn't familiar with their pricing scheme - was Howard "premium" content like O&A were on XM? In that case, how many people actually signed up for that "premium" addon?