But then the phone wouldn't require the use of a proprietary interface app, thus making smartphones look like a good idea. It's obvious why Apple youldn't do that.
I wouldn't call the P4 a serious increase in capabilities - Netburst was pretty awful. There was a reason they completely dropped Netburst and went back to P6 when they designed the Core architecture. Netburst-based processors were faster than the P3 line, but not quite as capable of delivering performance.
The problem is that we don't have any hard data. Unfortunately, putting women to the ultimate load test (using a crane to bend them until they snap) apparently is illegal, so we may never know which women are the most flexible.
Oh, you were talking about that other kind of flexibility. My bad.
They should build the whole plane out of carbon. Then when someone tries to ram a building all you get is a loud BOING and... the plane bouncing off into a random direction, repeatedly bouncing off the ground, filling the entire town with terror...
"Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner."
..............
Wow. Just, wow. I don't even know how to respond to that.
You don't see the problem? Okay, let's think through a little scenario here.
Someone steals your iPod. Because of the owner tags, they now have your e-mail address and name. Using Google and Google Maps, they locate your home and plan on breaking in. However, since your last name is Schroeder, which sounds German, they will assume that as a German you are automatically dangerous, so they'll get some guns to shoot back in case you charge at them with a rifle. Now, there's the issue of the German Shepherd - it doesn't have the name for no reason; the assumption that an armed and dangerous German has an equally dangerous guard dog as well is not far-fetched. So they need some fast guns to keep the fast-moving combat-trained canine in check. However, in order to pay for the MAC-10s the gangsters have to indebt themselves to the local mob, which means that now they're desperate. It is worth it, of course, since someone like you who can afford to express his taste with an iPod will obviously have a home full of high-quality A/V equipment and various expensive pieces of art. On the other hand, someone with possessions as prized as yours will invest in state-of-the-art security, possibly including armed and trained security personnel. As some puny machine pistols won't help them in this case and it was you who started this arms race when you gave those overzealous rent-a-cops guns and let them play cowboy on your property it's time to bring out the big guns just to pay you a lesson. So they also go to the Russian mob and acquire some Soviet-era RPG-29s, AK-47s and a T-72 main battle tank, hoping they can breach your defenses before you get to launch that V2 your father hid in the back yard in the 1940s. Just in case, they will also try to bring a General Electric M134 Minigun.
What started as a simple iPod theft has escalated into a full-scale war just because Apple had to tag your music with your name and you think everything's handy-dandy? I wouldn't want to live in your neighbourhood - the smoking, charred remains of it.
It really depends on the hardware. I used to bring my old Microsoft MN700 (hey, I only needed it for one room and it was cheap) to a certain semi-annual event where some of the denizens of a web forum occupy a youth center for a week. Due to the center's thick walls, connectivity was restricted to the one room I set the device up in.
Later the Microsoft AP had died due to a failed reflashing attempt and I switched to a Siemens Gigaset SE505. Suddenly we had connectivity in the surrounding rooms and even beyond, the signal penetrating two walls instead of zero as before. All just because of a different AP.
Maybe you should look into APs which are more resistant to interference and/or run an external antenna.
End-user. But the question isn't whether there will be some kind of support for every major platform but whether there will be first-party support for each.
Well, I do know that Google paid for a reimplementation. Of course, the VP6 was reimplemented as well. Anyhow, both codecs can easily be spoiled for the rest of the world. Microsoft might decide to not distribute the specs to their next implementation of VMW, just as On2 will probably keep VP7 proprietary.
By the way, in this instance it's less hate for Microsoft but more hate for half-assed "cross-platform" products that end up working on exactly one platform for all the wrong reasons. Such reasons would be weird dependencies (the product requires support for a codec/protocol that can't be legally reverse-engineered, for example due to patent issues), stupid implementations ("Oh yeah, we tweaked Ruby a bit and now it does everything via DirectX. What, it doesn't run on Linux? Sorry, we're going to stick to using AxtiveX for our cross-platform product.") or developer complacency ("We could support Solaris just by compiling for it without any source changes. We just don't want to support another OS.").
Microsoft isn't the only company who can screw up cross-platform compatibility, but they do have a history of using one product to promote another and in the "browser plugin that delivers rich multimedia content to everyone" market you need to run flawlessly everywhere. Flash currently does this (although Flash 8 was a bit of a dark age), so Microsoft has to be at least as good as that, without any additional hassles such as dependencies on semilegal third-party implementations of their stuff. Otherwise they won't have the neccessary edge against Flash to take over its market share. Of course they can ignore other platforms, but then they have ActiveX with a new coat of paint and I think they know that.
If Microsoft manages to outdo Adobe everywhere I'll be impressed. If they manage to become the dominant player in the interactive web media market I'm going to use Silverlight. But if they don't I won't. Simple as that. They chose to enter a market where interoperability is key so I think I can demand interoperability with at least the most common platforms (Win/x86, Win/AMD64, Linux/x86, Linux/AMD64, OS X/x86, OS X/AMD64).
I'm not a codec developer; I mainly work with tool vendors incorporting our SDKs and content publishing companies delivering in Windows Media.
Okay, that explains why you speak Marketingese. You first need to hook 'em before you give 'em support.;)
As for other platforms, we've been distributing Flip4Mac for a while as a Mac OS X solution for WMV playback. That's based on our Porting Kit, which is a C++ source code implementation of Windows Media that can be licensed by anyone wishing to build a player.
The important question here is whether Microsoft will continue supporting it (and why you chose to distribute it via a second company). Currently it looks so, which is good, of course. However, making a potential Silverlight/Mac dependant on software distributed by a third party is somewhat unergonomic. Of course, you could bundle.
I don't know why Google would need to reverse engineer WMV3. WMV3==VC-1 Simple/Main profile, which are SMPTE standards, including full reference source code. Good luck finding that with VP6!
Well, there is WMVA. While it may be deprecated that doesn't mean all files using it have disappeared. Also, without being able to demux ASF files it's pointless to be able to interpret the video codec used - for all matters and purposes ASF support is part of proper WMV support.
(By the way, I did forget to write one thing: Google didn't reverse engineer it itself, they paid for it via Summer of Code. The resulting implementation went into FFmpeg and from there into VLC. By the way, I do prefer VLC's handling of WMV over that of QuickTime, but I generally prefer VLC, so...)
As was already pointed out, Silverlight is trimmed-down.NET. Unfortunately one of the parts they trimmed was the bigger-than operator; it's silently mapped to == now.
On the contrary, it reassures its integrity. Slashdot doesn't censor its users, period. There was only one occasion on which Slashot had to delete a comment and that was because Scientology threatened to slap them with a DMCA lawsuit after someone posted the OT III text. Slashdot might be lacking in some regards, but has got its principles.
...unless you happen to not run Windows, of course. While Windows Media has been shipping for years, I don't really think you have an official distribution of the latest codec for Linux and MacOS - unlike Adobe, who offer Flash 9 for all major platforms. After all, if you want to compete with Flash you have to offer all dependencies from one source; telling users to use Google's reverse engineered code (ie. FFMpeg's WMV3 functionality) doesn't quite cut it unless you can guarantee that FFmpeg is 100.00% compatible. Given that you even have Silverlight for all three major platforms, that is.
This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.
(By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!)
When I talked about Tianmen Square I was doing so in the "media reporting about stuff" context. Tanks went against protesters and the result was massively bad PR. China might have gotten away tih it relatively unscathed, but Germany can't. The point is that even if Germany could suppress the blockade (with tear gas; the soldiers wouldn't dare firing bullets into the crowd) the result would be even more unrest and the rest of the world asking what the hell's up. Note the German is extremely dependent on exports; looking like a bunch of fascists is economically undesirable.
Of course, the Million Man March is a good equivalent for the action as a whole; my proposal just has a bit more loss of social order in the nation's capital. Again, Tianmen Square serves just as an equivalent for why once the capital is under blocade the government has already lost.
Disclaimer: I am an American, however, I was forced to take European history. Are people in Europe ever required to take American history?
Depends. If you have English as an important course (until recently because you picked it as a major course, now because you have picked the linguistic profile) you will do a bit of American history there, probably along with an examination of the Bill of Rights. It also usually appears in history class and politics class also often tends to concern itself with certain aspects of American history, especially the ones concerning international conflicts.
It's possible to go over the American civil war three times during school but it's also possible to only encounter it once, shortly. It really depends. (This applies to Gymnasium students. Of course, people whose secondary education happens in a Realschule or Hauptschule have much smaller chances of doing any in-depth stuff, but that applies to any topic. Ask Wikipedia about the German system of education for more information.)
Generally, we don't have as many different courses than you have, having stuff like trigonometry, statistics and algebra all rolled into one math course. It's less flexible, but you can expect everyone to know most of the basics when he's done.
Gather one million people and march into your country's capital, demanding that the government refuses to implement the directive (leaving the EU if need be). Blockade downtown until they comply. Point out that you outnumber the police. If you do manage to get one million people to openly revolt you have essentially won - your point is across and they can't get you out without siccing their army on you, at which point the media will ensure that it's Tianmen Square all over.
Unfortunately, one million people are HARD to rally.
Well, the fact that you get a free debit card with every bank account over here makes CCs much less attractive. Plus (AFAICT) we have more of an aversion to debt than you do.
You need to do some history. We tried Hitler, it didn't work. We tried killing the Jews, it didn't work. We tried Subways, it didn't work. Hell, we even came up with SuSE and Uwe Boll. Nothing worked so far and currently we Germans don't have a destruction-of-mankind plan going on.
I mean, really, you could've just subscribed to worlddestruction@german-empire-of-doom.com, then you'd know.
What, staying on topic on Slashdot? You must be new here. *g*
Actually, the perception about bank transfers and CCs seems to be exactly swapped between us - a bank transfer can always be challenged, without having to deal with a foreign-based multinational corporation. Besides, if they can charge your bank account 5000 bucks for nothing they can also do so with your CC.
Yes, CCs and debit cards are functionally nearly equivalent, but over here debit cards are essentialy free and limit you to the overdraft your bank allows you, while CCs tend to cost a lot just to maintain - which probably fully explains their lacking popularity.
As for being in debt without a CC - yeah, that happens over here, too. It's not exactly an epidemic but it does occasionally make the news. Teenagers with overblown mobiles seem to have a knack for spending 500% of their monthly income on ringtones, plus there's people with plain bad luck and/or spending habits. CCs just make it easy to build up a huge debt fast by spending without immediately seeing how much you have spent in total.
(By the way, I do have a CC - it was offered as part of a free bank account to students. I got it for the sole reason of interacting with non-PayPal-using foreign stores and will terminate it as soon as I get my diploma. I will probably never use it, but hey - I got 25 bucks when I signed up there plus the vague chance of some day buying something cool over the internet.
In retrospect, twenty-five bucks are not much money for my personal data...)
Bank transfer (works pretty much everywhere) or PayPal. In Germany we're currently establiching giropay, which is essentially what PayPal-in-debit-mode does, just without PayPal. CCs are only needed when buying from overseas. As for debit cards: Yeah, pretty much everyone has a debit card - Electronic Cash cards come for free with pretty much any bank account, save those for small children. They have the advantages of being much cheaper than CCs and also keeping you from overspending much. Debt sucks, much more so than not being able to buy everything you might want.
Once online payments via Maestro become more prevalent I expect CCs to become even more irrelevant in Europe.
By the way, I wasn't arguing against your point, just making an observation about CCs.
A duplexing laser of decent quality for under 180 Eurobucks-equivalent? Sweet. Does it play nice with CUPS? Also, would you recommend it for someone who uses it only occasionally, with only two spikes of notable activity per year?
Also, what model are you talking about? It's easier to read up on the specs when you know how the thing is called.
Slashdot Mirror
But then the phone wouldn't require the use of a proprietary interface app, thus making smartphones look like a good idea. It's obvious why Apple youldn't do that.
While Intel did reach higher clock speeds with Netburst, I don't think they couldn't have done the same with P6 - after all, they did.
I will grant you the Hyperthreading point, though. That did come first on Netburst.
I wouldn't call the P4 a serious increase in capabilities - Netburst was pretty awful. There was a reason they completely dropped Netburst and went back to P6 when they designed the Core architecture. Netburst-based processors were faster than the P3 line, but not quite as capable of delivering performance.
We also need Star Wars Kid and the Dramatic Look Prairie Dog. Those things should be mandated for aircraft stess tests.
The problem is that we don't have any hard data. Unfortunately, putting women to the ultimate load test (using a crane to bend them until they snap) apparently is illegal, so we may never know which women are the most flexible.
Oh, you were talking about that other kind of flexibility. My bad.
They should build the whole plane out of carbon. Then when someone tries to ram a building all you get is a loud BOING and... the plane bouncing off into a random direction, repeatedly bouncing off the ground, filling the entire town with terror...
On second thought, they should not.
"Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner."
..............
Wow. Just, wow. I don't even know how to respond to that.
You don't see the problem? Okay, let's think through a little scenario here.
Someone steals your iPod. Because of the owner tags, they now have your e-mail address and name. Using Google and Google Maps, they locate your home and plan on breaking in. However, since your last name is Schroeder, which sounds German, they will assume that as a German you are automatically dangerous, so they'll get some guns to shoot back in case you charge at them with a rifle. Now, there's the issue of the German Shepherd - it doesn't have the name for no reason; the assumption that an armed and dangerous German has an equally dangerous guard dog as well is not far-fetched. So they need some fast guns to keep the fast-moving combat-trained canine in check. However, in order to pay for the MAC-10s the gangsters have to indebt themselves to the local mob, which means that now they're desperate. It is worth it, of course, since someone like you who can afford to express his taste with an iPod will obviously have a home full of high-quality A/V equipment and various expensive pieces of art. On the other hand, someone with possessions as prized as yours will invest in state-of-the-art security, possibly including armed and trained security personnel. As some puny machine pistols won't help them in this case and it was you who started this arms race when you gave those overzealous rent-a-cops guns and let them play cowboy on your property it's time to bring out the big guns just to pay you a lesson. So they also go to the Russian mob and acquire some Soviet-era RPG-29s, AK-47s and a T-72 main battle tank, hoping they can breach your defenses before you get to launch that V2 your father hid in the back yard in the 1940s. Just in case, they will also try to bring a General Electric M134 Minigun.
What started as a simple iPod theft has escalated into a full-scale war just because Apple had to tag your music with your name and you think everything's handy-dandy? I wouldn't want to live in your neighbourhood - the smoking, charred remains of it.
Escalation: It's not just for privileges.
So if I go into AI, what will I become? "The angsty brat that will later become Darth Vader"? Thanks, but no.
It really depends on the hardware. I used to bring my old Microsoft MN700 (hey, I only needed it for one room and it was cheap) to a certain semi-annual event where some of the denizens of a web forum occupy a youth center for a week. Due to the center's thick walls, connectivity was restricted to the one room I set the device up in.
Later the Microsoft AP had died due to a failed reflashing attempt and I switched to a Siemens Gigaset SE505. Suddenly we had connectivity in the surrounding rooms and even beyond, the signal penetrating two walls instead of zero as before. All just because of a different AP.
Maybe you should look into APs which are more resistant to interference and/or run an external antenna.
Of course MAC's computers only have a small user base, namely MAC. By the way, who is this MAC? Should I know him?
End-user. But the question isn't whether there will be some kind of support for every major platform but whether there will be first-party support for each.
Well, I do know that Google paid for a reimplementation. Of course, the VP6 was reimplemented as well. Anyhow, both codecs can easily be spoiled for the rest of the world. Microsoft might decide to not distribute the specs to their next implementation of VMW, just as On2 will probably keep VP7 proprietary.
By the way, in this instance it's less hate for Microsoft but more hate for half-assed "cross-platform" products that end up working on exactly one platform for all the wrong reasons. Such reasons would be weird dependencies (the product requires support for a codec/protocol that can't be legally reverse-engineered, for example due to patent issues), stupid implementations ("Oh yeah, we tweaked Ruby a bit and now it does everything via DirectX. What, it doesn't run on Linux? Sorry, we're going to stick to using AxtiveX for our cross-platform product.") or developer complacency ("We could support Solaris just by compiling for it without any source changes. We just don't want to support another OS.").
Microsoft isn't the only company who can screw up cross-platform compatibility, but they do have a history of using one product to promote another and in the "browser plugin that delivers rich multimedia content to everyone" market you need to run flawlessly everywhere. Flash currently does this (although Flash 8 was a bit of a dark age), so Microsoft has to be at least as good as that, without any additional hassles such as dependencies on semilegal third-party implementations of their stuff. Otherwise they won't have the neccessary edge against Flash to take over its market share. Of course they can ignore other platforms, but then they have ActiveX with a new coat of paint and I think they know that.
If Microsoft manages to outdo Adobe everywhere I'll be impressed. If they manage to become the dominant player in the interactive web media market I'm going to use Silverlight. But if they don't I won't. Simple as that. They chose to enter a market where interoperability is key so I think I can demand interoperability with at least the most common platforms (Win/x86, Win/AMD64, Linux/x86, Linux/AMD64, OS X/x86, OS X/AMD64).
I'm not a codec developer; I mainly work with tool vendors incorporting our SDKs and content publishing companies delivering in Windows Media.
;)
Okay, that explains why you speak Marketingese. You first need to hook 'em before you give 'em support.
As for other platforms, we've been distributing Flip4Mac for a while as a Mac OS X solution for WMV playback. That's based on our Porting Kit, which is a C++ source code implementation of Windows Media that can be licensed by anyone wishing to build a player.
The important question here is whether Microsoft will continue supporting it (and why you chose to distribute it via a second company). Currently it looks so, which is good, of course. However, making a potential Silverlight/Mac dependant on software distributed by a third party is somewhat unergonomic. Of course, you could bundle.
I don't know why Google would need to reverse engineer WMV3. WMV3==VC-1 Simple/Main profile, which are SMPTE standards, including full reference source code. Good luck finding that with VP6!
Well, there is WMVA. While it may be deprecated that doesn't mean all files using it have disappeared. Also, without being able to demux ASF files it's pointless to be able to interpret the video codec used - for all matters and purposes ASF support is part of proper WMV support.
(By the way, I did forget to write one thing: Google didn't reverse engineer it itself, they paid for it via Summer of Code. The resulting implementation went into FFmpeg and from there into VLC. By the way, I do prefer VLC's handling of WMV over that of QuickTime, but I generally prefer VLC, so...)
As was already pointed out, Silverlight is trimmed-down .NET. Unfortunately one of the parts they trimmed was the bigger-than operator; it's silently mapped to == now.
On the contrary, it reassures its integrity. Slashdot doesn't censor its users, period. There was only one occasion on which Slashot had to delete a comment and that was because Scientology threatened to slap them with a DMCA lawsuit after someone posted the OT III text. Slashdot might be lacking in some regards, but has got its principles.
*stops feeding the troll*
...unless you happen to not run Windows, of course. While Windows Media has been shipping for years, I don't really think you have an official distribution of the latest codec for Linux and MacOS - unlike Adobe, who offer Flash 9 for all major platforms. After all, if you want to compete with Flash you have to offer all dependencies from one source; telling users to use Google's reverse engineered code (ie. FFMpeg's WMV3 functionality) doesn't quite cut it unless you can guarantee that FFmpeg is 100.00% compatible. Given that you even have Silverlight for all three major platforms, that is.
This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.
(By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!)
When I talked about Tianmen Square I was doing so in the "media reporting about stuff" context. Tanks went against protesters and the result was massively bad PR. China might have gotten away tih it relatively unscathed, but Germany can't. The point is that even if Germany could suppress the blockade (with tear gas; the soldiers wouldn't dare firing bullets into the crowd) the result would be even more unrest and the rest of the world asking what the hell's up. Note the German is extremely dependent on exports; looking like a bunch of fascists is economically undesirable.
Of course, the Million Man March is a good equivalent for the action as a whole; my proposal just has a bit more loss of social order in the nation's capital. Again, Tianmen Square serves just as an equivalent for why once the capital is under blocade the government has already lost.
Thank you for providing us with this vital information. I will push for an EU-wide ban on blankets immediately.
Sincerely,
Wolfgang Schäuble
Secretary of the Interior
Germany
Disclaimer: I am an American, however, I was forced to take European history. Are people in Europe ever required to take American history?
Depends. If you have English as an important course (until recently because you picked it as a major course, now because you have picked the linguistic profile) you will do a bit of American history there, probably along with an examination of the Bill of Rights. It also usually appears in history class and politics class also often tends to concern itself with certain aspects of American history, especially the ones concerning international conflicts.
It's possible to go over the American civil war three times during school but it's also possible to only encounter it once, shortly. It really depends. (This applies to Gymnasium students. Of course, people whose secondary education happens in a Realschule or Hauptschule have much smaller chances of doing any in-depth stuff, but that applies to any topic. Ask Wikipedia about the German system of education for more information.)
Generally, we don't have as many different courses than you have, having stuff like trigonometry, statistics and algebra all rolled into one math course. It's less flexible, but you can expect everyone to know most of the basics when he's done.
Gather one million people and march into your country's capital, demanding that the government refuses to implement the directive (leaving the EU if need be). Blockade downtown until they comply. Point out that you outnumber the police. If you do manage to get one million people to openly revolt you have essentially won - your point is across and they can't get you out without siccing their army on you, at which point the media will ensure that it's Tianmen Square all over.
Unfortunately, one million people are HARD to rally.
Well, the fact that you get a free debit card with every bank account over here makes CCs much less attractive. Plus (AFAICT) we have more of an aversion to debt than you do.
You need to do some history. We tried Hitler, it didn't work. We tried killing the Jews, it didn't work. We tried Subways, it didn't work. Hell, we even came up with SuSE and Uwe Boll. Nothing worked so far and currently we Germans don't have a destruction-of-mankind plan going on.
I mean, really, you could've just subscribed to worlddestruction@german-empire-of-doom.com, then you'd know.
What, staying on topic on Slashdot? You must be new here. *g*
Actually, the perception about bank transfers and CCs seems to be exactly swapped between us - a bank transfer can always be challenged, without having to deal with a foreign-based multinational corporation. Besides, if they can charge your bank account 5000 bucks for nothing they can also do so with your CC.
Yes, CCs and debit cards are functionally nearly equivalent, but over here debit cards are essentialy free and limit you to the overdraft your bank allows you, while CCs tend to cost a lot just to maintain - which probably fully explains their lacking popularity.
As for being in debt without a CC - yeah, that happens over here, too. It's not exactly an epidemic but it does occasionally make the news. Teenagers with overblown mobiles seem to have a knack for spending 500% of their monthly income on ringtones, plus there's people with plain bad luck and/or spending habits. CCs just make it easy to build up a huge debt fast by spending without immediately seeing how much you have spent in total.
(By the way, I do have a CC - it was offered as part of a free bank account to students. I got it for the sole reason of interacting with non-PayPal-using foreign stores and will terminate it as soon as I get my diploma. I will probably never use it, but hey - I got 25 bucks when I signed up there plus the vague chance of some day buying something cool over the internet.
In retrospect, twenty-five bucks are not much money for my personal data...)
Bank transfer (works pretty much everywhere) or PayPal. In Germany we're currently establiching giropay, which is essentially what PayPal-in-debit-mode does, just without PayPal. CCs are only needed when buying from overseas. As for debit cards: Yeah, pretty much everyone has a debit card - Electronic Cash cards come for free with pretty much any bank account, save those for small children. They have the advantages of being much cheaper than CCs and also keeping you from overspending much. Debt sucks, much more so than not being able to buy everything you might want.
Once online payments via Maestro become more prevalent I expect CCs to become even more irrelevant in Europe.
By the way, I wasn't arguing against your point, just making an observation about CCs.
A duplexing laser of decent quality for under 180 Eurobucks-equivalent? Sweet. Does it play nice with CUPS? Also, would you recommend it for someone who uses it only occasionally, with only two spikes of notable activity per year?
Also, what model are you talking about? It's easier to read up on the specs when you know how the thing is called.