Those numbers are probably something to do with the fact that an average tennager's iPod at that time was an 8GB iPod Nano.
In other words, the music collection grows to fill the space available for it.
I very much doubt that most people would want sacrifice about 95% of their available space as measured in minutes to get a slightly better audio quality.
I am sitting here writing a slashdot comment, which is being spell-checked in the background. I am listening to an mp3. I have some torrents downloading in the background, and my email client periodically checks for new mail, checks it for spam & viruses and notifies me about it as appropriate. I also have an instant messaging client open and connected to a few IM networks.
Multiple CPU cores help, but there is a limit to what extent they can be used.
But where does virtualisation come in to this? Other than creating more work for the processor.
Office 2008 is much better than 2007 for basic stuff. Only problem is that it doesn't support VBA macros at all. You have to use Applescript for macros, and they don't work in Windows versions of Office.
For that reason I still have Office 2004 for when I get files with macros.
Most photos are never printed out. They are shared by email, or using various photo sharing websites.
The maximum resolution monitor you are likely to find outside a graphic design or CAD studio is 1920x1200, which is about 2.3 megapixels, so unless you start cropping and enlarging your photos, that is all you need from a camera, and even if you do crop and enlarge, there is still a limit to how many pixels you can benefit from.
A 4'x6' print out at 300dpi is 1800x1200, about 2.2 megapixels. At 600dpi it is 8.6 megapixels. You probably won't notice the difference.
An A4 print at 300dpi is about 8.7 megapixels. I don't know the precise dimensions of US Letter paper. They are slightly shorter and fatter than A4, but overall, about the same.
Clearly, if you want to print out an A0 sized poster at 4800dpi, and have it so it looks like you are looking out a window, you are going to need a lot more pixels than at present (about 35.6 gigapixels), but most people have enough pixels for what they are doing with them, but could benefit from better quality pixels.
You get more mercury from the extra coal required to power an incandescent bulb than you do from a CFL bulb.
My local borough council provides facilities for recycling CFL bulbs so the mercury doesn't get released into the environment, and I believe a lot of other councils do that as well.
I think it will be another few years before LEDs are ready to replace CFLs.
VOIP is actively encouraged by the authorities, however there is very little reason to use it as PSTN is so cheap, and more reliable.
Most people use cellphones for voice calls, as they are cheaper / more convenient than land lines. One of the mobile networks provides facilities for you to use Skype over their network, but it doesn't work as well as a standard UMTS voice call.
I think VOIP is popular in some countries because they have an arbitrage situation where data is cheaper than voice. There is no real reason why this should be the case, and in a free market, you should expect voice traffic to fall to the same price as data traffic, and VOIP to disappear.
Some 500GB 2.5" USB drives should handle your movie collection, or at least give you more storage than a full sized laptop.
The other problem though is that the Atom is roughly similar in speed to the Pentium 3 so it might not be fast enough to decode the video in real time. It will handle DVD decoding - that requires a Pentium 2 class machine probably not the various codecs that allow you to fit a movie in a 700MB file.
But for most other things, we managed fine with Pentium 3s in 2000, and the netbooks have a lot more RAM than machines from that era.
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Nobody uses Netscape 6 these days. They never did, as it was a pretty useless browser. But lots of people still use ie6.
If you were running 32bit Vista at home, you would realise that it can't even cope with more than 4GB of RAM.
VMWare Server with a sufficient number of virtual machines running at the same time.
You could even make a beowulf cluster of them.
In England, there is the possibility of being declared a "vexatious litigant", which severely restricts your ability to bring lawsuits.
Is there an equivalent in the US, and if so, how close are the RIAA to being placed on the list?
Those numbers are probably something to do with the fact that an average tennager's iPod at that time was an 8GB iPod Nano.
In other words, the music collection grows to fill the space available for it.
I very much doubt that most people would want sacrifice about 95% of their available space as measured in minutes to get a slightly better audio quality.
But as most mp3 players support either Apple Lossless or WMA Lossless, aren't you better off using one of those formats?
In any case, the BSA has about as much power to enter your premises as a door-to-door salesman.
Virtualisation is mostly a buzzword.
I am sitting here writing a slashdot comment, which is being spell-checked in the background. I am listening to an mp3. I have some torrents downloading in the background, and my email client periodically checks for new mail, checks it for spam & viruses and notifies me about it as appropriate. I also have an instant messaging client open and connected to a few IM networks.
Multiple CPU cores help, but there is a limit to what extent they can be used.
But where does virtualisation come in to this? Other than creating more work for the processor.
Kontact/KMail could certainly use multi-threading when it is searching through the 100 or so new mails for the 2 or 3 that aren't spam.
I think the complaint is about the compilers, not the operating systems.
Linux may well be very capable of powering vast beowulf clusters of multi-core machines, but how good is gcc at compiling software for them?
All of Apples current line-up of laptops now come with Nvidia graphics, including the white MacBook.
Office 2008 is much better than 2007 for basic stuff. Only problem is that it doesn't support VBA macros at all. You have to use Applescript for macros, and they don't work in Windows versions of Office.
For that reason I still have Office 2004 for when I get files with macros.
There are a lot more accidents on windy mountain roads than on motorways.
Or Amstrad, but that's going back quite a few years now.
Most photos are never printed out. They are shared by email, or using various photo sharing websites.
The maximum resolution monitor you are likely to find outside a graphic design or CAD studio is 1920x1200, which is about 2.3 megapixels, so unless you start cropping and enlarging your photos, that is all you need from a camera, and even if you do crop and enlarge, there is still a limit to how many pixels you can benefit from.
A 4'x6' print out at 300dpi is 1800x1200, about 2.2 megapixels. At 600dpi it is 8.6 megapixels. You probably won't notice the difference.
An A4 print at 300dpi is about 8.7 megapixels. I don't know the precise dimensions of US Letter paper. They are slightly shorter and fatter than A4, but overall, about the same.
Clearly, if you want to print out an A0 sized poster at 4800dpi, and have it so it looks like you are looking out a window, you are going to need a lot more pixels than at present (about 35.6 gigapixels), but most people have enough pixels for what they are doing with them, but could benefit from better quality pixels.
In Britain we converted coal to gas up until about 50 years ago when we discovered a gas field in the North Sea.
You get more mercury from the extra coal required to power an incandescent bulb than you do from a CFL bulb.
My local borough council provides facilities for recycling CFL bulbs so the mercury doesn't get released into the environment, and I believe a lot of other councils do that as well.
I think it will be another few years before LEDs are ready to replace CFLs.
It is because there is this credit crunch thingy going on which is making it almost impossible for people to borrow money.
Companies that don't need to borrow money to survive are at an advantage over those that do.
They are.
I still browse with images turned off if I am on a slow GSM connection.
That's hibernation, where the entire contents of RAM are copied to disk, and copied back when you switch on again.
The other option is Standby.
So you haven't applied Tuesday's security updates yet? I suggest you do so as soon as possible. It will require a reboot.
VOIP is actively encouraged by the authorities, however there is very little reason to use it as PSTN is so cheap, and more reliable.
Most people use cellphones for voice calls, as they are cheaper / more convenient than land lines. One of the mobile networks provides facilities for you to use Skype over their network, but it doesn't work as well as a standard UMTS voice call.
I think VOIP is popular in some countries because they have an arbitrage situation where data is cheaper than voice. There is no real reason why this should be the case, and in a free market, you should expect voice traffic to fall to the same price as data traffic, and VOIP to disappear.
Yes, most of them even come pre-installed with Linux.
Some 500GB 2.5" USB drives should handle your movie collection, or at least give you more storage than a full sized laptop.
The other problem though is that the Atom is roughly similar in speed to the Pentium 3 so it might not be fast enough to decode the video in real time. It will handle DVD decoding - that requires a Pentium 2 class machine probably not the various codecs that allow you to fit a movie in a 700MB file.
But for most other things, we managed fine with Pentium 3s in 2000, and the netbooks have a lot more RAM than machines from that era.
As it is patch Tuesday, I'm running Windows update on my machines at the moment. It gives you things like
Security Update for Windows Vista KB960225, and a link to the Knowledge Base article should you want to read about what it does.