It would be nice if the real world worked a little like The Twelve Kingdom's: leaders who lose their way or abuse their power and fail to correct themselves before it is too late die. No half-ass trials, no appeals, no goofing around... a sort of "fail-safe" for when people fail to take matters in their own hands or when power is so tightly controlled by authorities that people are practically powerless.
I have 4ohm speakers and 25' cables to both of them. For 50' of #22 copper (hot+return), I would get nearly 1ohm of resistance - that would be 20% of my amp's power wasted in the cables. Does #22 still sound like a good idea now? Last time I heard, the standard in the professional audio industry was to select cables for ~1% power loss.
While this may not pose a safety issue, it is a signal quality and loss-of-power one: having to turn the volume further up to compensate wire loss to achieve the same listening level means more unnecessary and easily avoidable THD+N from the amplifier. There are other parameters like skin effect and inductance that come into play as wire runs get longer and frequencies go up but these should be generally negligible compared to line-induced power loss and its indirect effect on the amplifier.
My primary reason for selecting larger cables is to reduce power loss, not safety... but larger cables have other benefits, however marginal they may be.
With a tube amp, you get tube-like output as a freebie.
With DSP, you can get pretty much whatever you want as long as you are able to model it or obtain FIR response profiles for whatever amplifier or other effect you wish to duplicate.
Since we are dealing with hardcore audio freaks here, these guy will say they prefer all-analog audio processing unless the digital components operate at 1GSPS/32bits or something. Personally, I see absolutely no need to go beyond 96kHz/20bits.
As for TFA's cables, I am personally very happy with my generic #12 cables. I wish speaker kits either came with half-decent #14 cables or no cables at all instead of shipping with crappy #22-or-worse junk.
BTW, there are $500 OFC power cables too... and I am really impressed that Monster&all get away with claiming improved picture/sound quality, sharpness, etc. with their ludicrously expensive DIGITAL/OPTICAL cables since digital data either gets through intact or gets garbled-in-transit and becomes unusable... digital is an all or nothing proposition, better cables only improves your chances of joining and remaining in the 'all' group.
A few of my friends used to attend HiFi freaks conferences and usually came back with numerous anecdotes and long lists of suspicious claims, let's just say audiophile-class stuff is a subject of great controversy and playing devils' advocate while taking apart most of the claims was a considerable source of entertainment throughout our undergrad years.
The purpose of the cage is to keep the radiation in.
Not necessarily: they can also be used to keep radiation out. If you have sensitive electronics located close to high-power EMI/RFI sources, you might want to put your sensitive equipment in a faraday cage to block as much of the electrical noise as possible. The metal case around most RF tuners may keep the RF component's radiation inside the enclosure but more importantly, it also stops most noise from the rest of the system from polluting the microvolt-scale RF signals within the tuner.
Faraday cages work both ways, it all depends on the application. For microwave ovens, you definitely want to confine the radiation source for both safety and efficiency reasons. For sensitive electronics like RF tuners and medical equipment, you usually want to keep external radiation sources out to prevent malfunctions and improve SNR.
I liked how things worked in the P3's days... the brand gives you the architecture (P3), the MHz gives you a general performance figure and suffixes tell you what extras the chip supports... I liked my P3-650E and my P3-1066EB, though I kind of wish I had held off a year longer to get a P3-1200T or P3-1200S instead.
Cryptic numeric product codes do pretty much the same thing in a slightly more compact format. What is really annoying is when more than one feature affect a given digit in the product code and when features are dropped rather than added... you end up with xxx5 models that have extra features over the xxx0 models and xxx2 models that lack some of the xxx5/xxx0 features, making the whole CPU selection process needlessly unintuitive.
With the suffix/prefix system, longer model numbers meant more features, just need to make sure those you want are in there.
They already have such a "test", it is called PRIOR ART.
The only problem with prior art is that the patent offices are pretty slow and often do half-assed jobs at evaluating prior art when people point it out. The proposed USA patent reform is supposed to make it easier to invalidate patents by submitting prior art to reduce the amount of patent trolls.
If he keeps filing non-case cases, he'll get more reprimands and if he persists to the point of actually become considered a nuisance by too many judges, I guess he could eventually get disbarred for repeatedly filing frivolous and potentially anticonstitutional cases. Should such a fortunate event occur, he could still file suits but would need to convince some other lawyer to risk his name on the case... so we'd be far less likely to see any more of his cases reach the courts.
Jack is video gaming's Doc Mailloux... they claim to operate from higher moral grounds but the world would be far better off without them.
$10/kWh is never going to happen - at least not without causing (or as a consequence of) severe inflation: boiling 1L of water from 15C requires 85 * 4.17 * 1000 = 354kJ... it takes roughly 0.1kWh to boil 1L of water, that would be $1 at that hypothetical rate. Take a shower with a minimalist ~20L worth of hot water from a ~50C tank (barely enough to wet and rinse) and that's $10 a pop... basic hygiene should not be allowed to become a luxury item. Having $2000/month power bills during winter would also be a major problem since that would leave me nearly no cash after paying the rent. Unless landlords of this $10/kWh future include hybrid power, heating and hot water in the rent, many people would be simply unable to afford electric power and unable to deploy their own solar plant.
Having solar cells at ~$1/W might be nice but people also need to keep in mind the need for a suitable line-interactive inverter before this solar power can be dumped on the network. These network-synchronous inverters, power-point trackers, batteries, the usually mandatory automatic service disconnect switch and miscellaneous other bits can easily add more than $1000 to the install cost. A complete off-grid setup capable of providing enough peak power for a typical home/apartment (say, simultaneously operating the stove, clothes drier, water heater and HVAC) would cost quite a bit so completely off-grid operation is impractical... and all this stuff, batteries in particular, requires maintenance or periodic replacement.
I have been doing the same thing ever since I got a cell phone nearly 10 years ago... pretty much all services included (a ~$20/month freebie), no unnecessary network fees, no nonsense. In the early years, $10 used to be good for two months at a time.
Since I use it mostly to be reachable for job interviews and to locate my friends when we go out and lose sight of each other or got confused about the actual meeting place, I rarely use it more than 10-15 minutes per month.
I have a 17GB Maxtor drive from that era, the sustained throughput on it is closer to 12MB/s. On the 5.7GB drive I had before that, this figure was closer to 7MB/s. My current HDDs are all over the 40-70MB/s range... so sustained throughput has not increased a whole lot over the last 10 years - it roughly doubles every 4-5 years. Yes, that is quite slow progress compared to most other PC technologies.
For flash, I think I would prefer that they work on endurance before they start pushing speeds - faster flash technologies have been known to wear out considerably faster than the slower ones. The fastest flash cards are known to show reliability issues even under 1k rewrites while low-speed cards often have endurances beyond 100k. Progress in SSD performance will be in large part dictated by the cells' endurance at the faster speeds.
As far as external RAID enclosures are concerned, I would be far more interested in seeing some of these for eSATA... not the N-drives with N-links to a PCIe RAID card but one where the RAID controller resides in the external box and has a single 3Gbps/NCQ eSATA link to the host PC. Such a thing could be done with a single Virtex-5 LXT FPGA and some DRAM/SRAM.
No. Novell licensed its Unix to SCO, and offered SCO a 5% handling charge on collecting Novell's royalties. What's the difference, you ask? The difference is that such money from the licenses that SCO hold is Novell's in equity, not as a creditor. Novell are like the people who leased SCO a photocopier: it's their's, and they can take it without reference to other creditors.
If you steal a car and then go bankrupt, your creditors can't fight over who gets the car: it's not yours, so it's not an asset in bankruptcy, and it goes to whoever holds title. Same here.
Slightly different words, same story... you make it sound like you oppose my point of view and interpretation even though your own sounds exactly like mine.
According to filings, SCO has a $7.5M outstanding debt and about $15M in cash or other assets.
However, SCO is also illegally holding onto ~$36M of Novell's Unix licensing loyalties.
The one who will get first dibs on SCO will be Novell since that ~$36M is Novell's capital (not a debt/credit) which SCO is trying to convert (fraud) into its own... a detail which SCO apparently conveniently failed to mention to the bankruptcy judge in the first hearing.
Novell licensed its Unix to SCO and asked for a ~95% royalty on sales. SCO sold Unix licenses but never gave any of the money back to Novell. Novell is suing to get this capital back. SCO does not want to be curbed right away so it now attempts to stall by filing for bankruptcy. Tomorrow, Novell, IBM, RedHat and others will surely point out the many faults in Monday's SCO declarations and the judge will very likely order the Novell vs SCO counterclaims suit to proceed in order to establish how much capital SCO owes Novell since settling capital disputes preempts negotiating debts.
By the time chapter 11 proceedings are completed - presumably after Novell is awarded about $20M - SCO will be ripe for chapter 7.
Even though they state the limit up here in canada, they don't always enforce it.:)
Those that do not are likely to suddenly come out of nowhere and start kicking users off their networks once their backbone links start choking and cause service degradation for "normal" users. Since the limits are stated up-front, going well beyond the limits while it looks like a bandwidth buffet is like living on borrowed time.
There are months when we go over a TB of up/down traffic easily.
A group of four 20-something years old is not exactly representative a typical residential unit and is not, in general, the target group for those 100GB/month service packages!
I have two friends who are also sort of trying to download the internet... their "slow" months are around 300GB. Given that they have full-time jobs and other hobbies, I seriously question where they find time to watch all the stuff they download. More likely than not, it ends up in a dark corner of some HDD or randomly misplaced DVDs, never to be seen or thought of ever again. Even at 30-40GB/month, there is already a fair amount of stuff I download but end up not watching/using/whatever... and by the time I want to watch/whatever it, I forget that I already had it so I end up downloading it again.
If you check out Sympatico, their High-Speed Plus service has also been capped to 100GB/month while their regular $40/month (with phone and 2-years contract) HS is capped to a more reasonable (compared to Videotron's) 60GB/month - still looks bit expensive next to the $30 100GB/month DSLs.
As for which DSL to try, I was thinking TekSavvy... if I am to believe reports on canadianisp.com, it looks like it may be one of the more dependable alternatives currently available. If I read Colba's offer correctly, they have unlimited 24Mbps service and this will translate into potentially incredible download speed when you are lucky enough that nobody else on Colba is downloading anything or crappy speeds when Colba's backbone is more evenly loaded. If enough Videotron Extremers and Sympatico Plusers jump on Colba's allegedly unlimited 24Mbps service, things are going to get ugly over there. To avoid this highly likely scenario, I'd rather go with an ISP that states realistic sustainable limits up-front since they are far less likely to get hit by Extremers/Plusers exodus.
IMO, 100GB/month would be a fair limit for $30-40/month low-latency/priority-traffic service - the effective backbone bandwidth cost for this is less than $2 so offering anything less is excessively greedy. I consider myself as a moderate/mild downloader and I routinely download 25-35GB/month total from multiple locations to stay safely within the 20/10 caps and "improve" the subscriber base average. Comcast/Videotron/Sympatico/whatever crying over "abuse" at ~200GB/month on their $60-80 service treads on the pathetic side of the scale... their premium service costs twice as much as the DSLs' 100GB/month service so it would be only fair that premium service provided at least 200GB/month given that fixed costs remain generally unchanged therefore most of the surcharge ends up as pure profit... minus ~$1 in extra effective backbone traffic cost.
Just for fun, I called Videotron the other day to ask if they had any plans to increase caps before my contract ended. When I pointed out that Sympatico offered twice the caps for the same price and that there were ~40 DSL providers offering 100GB/month for $30, the Videotron rep went ballistic repeating over and over that this was impossible and that if it was true they'd know about it. Seems like Videotron ordered its PR bunnies to do an in-denial dance... they do not want people to find out that there are cheaper, nearly just as fast alternatives that offer more than triple the usage caps.
Here, we have Unlimited* service all over the place too... but if you read the ToS and package description to find what the "*" means somewhere in the page footer, it is clearly stated that Unlimited does not necessarily means what you may have tought it did...
(* unlimited refers to network connection time.)
For low-power battery-operated equipment, solar can open interesting possibilities since the application already contains a battery and charge controller... all that's needed is exposed surface area and you can, even if you fail to go completely unplugged, at least extend your battery life by a significant amount: a cell-phone on standby draws less than 10mA, which is within the realm of what a cell-sized solar panel could provide at the required ~4V.
Dunno for your original comment... it kind of made it seem like improving battery/solar cell technology was trivial. If you look at progress curves, battery energy density and solar cell efficiency have not been doubling every 18 months... the progress is more on the scale of single-digit percentile points each year between major breakthroughs, trailing a very long way behind display and chip technologies. Power-conversion technology has been there for years, we need batteries and solar panels to catch up.
If Moore's "law" started applying to battery energy density and solar cell efficiency tomorrow, most of our energy problems would solve themselves over the next three years!
My current ISP recently announced a 100GB/month cap on its version of Extreme service. At ~3MB per MP3 and 30k songs/month, Comcast's vague limit also falls in the 100GB ballpark... that's the same limit as the vast majority of service offers in my area.
When one of my friends who was on said Extreme service got pissed off about paying ~$80/month for unlimited and getting suddenly capped to 100GB, I looked around to check out what sorts of alternatives were available in my area - something I had not done in years. From what I have seen, there are dozens of DSL resellers who are offering a choice between 100GB/month low-latency or unlimited low-priority traffic for only $30/month at 5000/800 speeds. (Well, with DSL, mileage may vary - even more so with third-party service that may be routed through auxiliary networks between the DSLAM and global internet.)
Since my current service contract costs $40/month for only 30GB/month, I will soon start sampling DSL service in my area until my contract expires - the ridiculously low limits make the extra speed seem superfluous... I have about four months left to pick my new ISP and there are about 40 (mostly ADSL) to choose from.
I am guessing Canada must have a law/rule requiring ISPs to declare limits since all ISPs I have seen do state the limits somewhere on their product pages... though sometimes they are a little obfuscated such as being written in an expandable page section that is collapsed by default made to look like a simple paragraph separator line until you pay close attention to it and notice the '+' sign at one end. I suppose this means the law/rule, if any, omitted to state how visible/accessible data on those limits must be.
My current ISP might be too expensive for the ridiculous limits it has on my package but at least I have always known what the limits were... if I were a Comcast customer, I would go for a class-action suit to force full disclosure of this mysterious limit and the methods behind it - customers should not have to guess what the ToS are no matter what lame excuse Comcast may have.
Consumer-grade panels are less than 20% efficient, an average PC with an average monitor and some gadgets attached use about 150W, at ~12h/day, this is about 1.5kWh/day. There is usable sunlight less than 8h/day so the solar array needs to provide at least 600W during that period under worst-case lighting conditions to enable fully off-the-grid operation and this requires at least five square meters of said consumer-grade panels. With much of the usage occuring outside usable illumination hours, the battery needs to store about 1kWh. At this point, you have to take your pick between an inexpensive 40kg set of SLA batteries, a more expensive 30kg NiMH set or a very expensive and potentially spontaneously-combusting 20kg lithium-polymer one.
The weight is a function of battery technology, the size is a function of solar panel efficiency. All are improving in many ways but these technological advancements are incremental, slow and expensive. For the time being, I would settle for replacing the 7.2Ah batteries in my BX1000 UPS by external 100Ah ones (~2kWh reserve), strapping an alternator to a stationary exercise bicycle and pedal for a while every couple of hours... much less expensive, more portable (try packing and re-deploying a 1kW array) and available nearly whenever/wherever I am.
Because the cost per watt of solar energy is currently pretty high, solar makes little sense as anything other than a statement. When solar panels will be available under $100/kW in the ~20% efficient grades, solar will become much more interesting - at least for people who live close enough to the equator to be spared crazy frosty winter ice storms.
any time you are using a torrent, you are uploading, not just when you're completed the download.
Given that I used to maintain my own BT client and eMule mod, I 'kind' of know that.
IMO though, uploading is a protocol requirement for downloading since download speeds usually suck otherwise. Once the download is done though, continued sharing/seeding can directly translate into facilitating copyright infringement and distribution.
From the link in digitrev's post...
Exclusive right of making available provided for by World Intellectual Property Organization Performances and Phonograms Treaty but Treaty not yet implemented by Canada
So it is very much only a matter of time until the gray area becomes blacker.
But that being said, there is a limited amount of bandwidth and all the channels we expect to have take up a lot of space. HD is even worse, it eats up bandwidth and processing equipment.
Bandwidth is not really a problem for HDTV: from what I read, most current HDDVD and BluRay titles are encoded at less than 10Mbps total. Since a DOCSIS modem can pull over 40Mbps from a single 6MHz NTSC channel bandwidth, a digital cable box should be able to squeeze at least three very good quality HD channels in the same bandwidth as one analog channel. With about 900MHz worth of usable downstream bandwidth on coax, there is room for up to 450 high-quality HD channels. Of course, about half of that spectrum is used by analog channels, SD/ED digital channels and cable-modems so there should still be room for 150-200 HQ-HD channels.
As for the processing equipment, the heavy-lifting is at the source where initial encoding is done and at the head-end if there is transcoding to be done. The rest is standard fare digital broadcast over an HFC network just like it is for all other digital cable broadcasts. Since head-ends already have quite a bit of equipment dedicated to each channel they support on their networks, having an extra transcoding/scaling unit in loops that require it is (usually) a minor hurdle.
I'd rather wait and buy the season box set that's mine to keep indefinitely for less than half that much a few months later: $5 x 24 eps/season = $120 while box sets often retail for less than $50.
With our 8-12Mbps Comcast Internet (not oversold in our neighborhood, yet)
If you knew the insides and outs of bandwidth oversubscription, you would know there is no such thing as non-oversubscribed bandwidth. Congestion between your modem and the head-end is easily cleared by reallocating upstream/downstream channels within your HFC node. If Comcast does a proper load-balancing job, you should never (or very rarely) notice any bottlenecks between you and Comcast's servers. At the higher network tiers, bandwidth is more closely tied to static physical links and it is when these links start struggling that ISPs start kicking (ab-)users off their networks and rejig their ToS - it is the simplest* and most cost-effective* way of maintaining the illusion of non-oversubscription for the rest of the user base.
(* assuming the ISP does not get class-actioned or other legal troubles over the legality of changing the ToS for existing subscribers on an on-going service contract.)
While it is legal to download, distribution (upload) still isn't, therefore leaving finished torrents of infringing material continue uploading once the download is complete would be a liability.
The point is that it isn't worth it, for the vast majority of people, to buy this technology if they're upgrading their computers right now.
The vast majority of people use mainstream systems built with mainstream components. DDR3 is still quite early on its ramp-up and about one year away from becoming mainstream technology - most dramurais are waiting for DDR3 support on AMD's side before pushing volumes.
The currently ridiculously large premiums combined with marginal performance gains (3-4X the price, 5-10% more performance) make it a no-brainer that DDR3 is not going to be worth it for most of us until it reaches price parity with DDR2 in the given performance segment of interest. The price-performance balance (or lack thereof) makes the question practically rhetorical.
Pretty much all new memory technologies have been historically ridiculously overpriced for the first many months following their initial introduction.
It takes a while for people to adopt new memory technologies because they do not want to pay the full introductory price. It takes a while for manufacturers to ramp up production because they do not want to end up with excessive inventory caused by slow initial uptake. It takes a while for new technologies to become mainstream but it will happen in due time as it gains traction on both consumer and manufacturer sides so the market can find its equilibrium.
Short-term (now), DDR3's main advantage is lower operating voltage and power. Medium-term (late 2008), DDR3 will enable migration of low-cost systems from DDR2-667 to DDR3-1066. Long-term, DDR3 will enable penny-pinchers to wait until DDR4 becomes mainstream and overclockers to brag about their DDR3's lower latency compared to bleeding-edge DDR4... the exact same story we had on the way from DDR to DDR2.
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It would be nice if the real world worked a little like The Twelve Kingdom's: leaders who lose their way or abuse their power and fail to correct themselves before it is too late die. No half-ass trials, no appeals, no goofing around... a sort of "fail-safe" for when people fail to take matters in their own hands or when power is so tightly controlled by authorities that people are practically powerless.
I have 4ohm speakers and 25' cables to both of them. For 50' of #22 copper (hot+return), I would get nearly 1ohm of resistance - that would be 20% of my amp's power wasted in the cables. Does #22 still sound like a good idea now? Last time I heard, the standard in the professional audio industry was to select cables for ~1% power loss.
While this may not pose a safety issue, it is a signal quality and loss-of-power one: having to turn the volume further up to compensate wire loss to achieve the same listening level means more unnecessary and easily avoidable THD+N from the amplifier. There are other parameters like skin effect and inductance that come into play as wire runs get longer and frequencies go up but these should be generally negligible compared to line-induced power loss and its indirect effect on the amplifier.
My primary reason for selecting larger cables is to reduce power loss, not safety... but larger cables have other benefits, however marginal they may be.
With a tube amp, you get tube-like output as a freebie.
With DSP, you can get pretty much whatever you want as long as you are able to model it or obtain FIR response profiles for whatever amplifier or other effect you wish to duplicate.
Since we are dealing with hardcore audio freaks here, these guy will say they prefer all-analog audio processing unless the digital components operate at 1GSPS/32bits or something. Personally, I see absolutely no need to go beyond 96kHz/20bits.
As for TFA's cables, I am personally very happy with my generic #12 cables. I wish speaker kits either came with half-decent #14 cables or no cables at all instead of shipping with crappy #22-or-worse junk.
BTW, there are $500 OFC power cables too... and I am really impressed that Monster&all get away with claiming improved picture/sound quality, sharpness, etc. with their ludicrously expensive DIGITAL/OPTICAL cables since digital data either gets through intact or gets garbled-in-transit and becomes unusable... digital is an all or nothing proposition, better cables only improves your chances of joining and remaining in the 'all' group.
A few of my friends used to attend HiFi freaks conferences and usually came back with numerous anecdotes and long lists of suspicious claims, let's just say audiophile-class stuff is a subject of great controversy and playing devils' advocate while taking apart most of the claims was a considerable source of entertainment throughout our undergrad years.
Not necessarily: they can also be used to keep radiation out. If you have sensitive electronics located close to high-power EMI/RFI sources, you might want to put your sensitive equipment in a faraday cage to block as much of the electrical noise as possible. The metal case around most RF tuners may keep the RF component's radiation inside the enclosure but more importantly, it also stops most noise from the rest of the system from polluting the microvolt-scale RF signals within the tuner.
Faraday cages work both ways, it all depends on the application. For microwave ovens, you definitely want to confine the radiation source for both safety and efficiency reasons. For sensitive electronics like RF tuners and medical equipment, you usually want to keep external radiation sources out to prevent malfunctions and improve SNR.
I liked how things worked in the P3's days... the brand gives you the architecture (P3), the MHz gives you a general performance figure and suffixes tell you what extras the chip supports... I liked my P3-650E and my P3-1066EB, though I kind of wish I had held off a year longer to get a P3-1200T or P3-1200S instead.
Cryptic numeric product codes do pretty much the same thing in a slightly more compact format. What is really annoying is when more than one feature affect a given digit in the product code and when features are dropped rather than added... you end up with xxx5 models that have extra features over the xxx0 models and xxx2 models that lack some of the xxx5/xxx0 features, making the whole CPU selection process needlessly unintuitive.
With the suffix/prefix system, longer model numbers meant more features, just need to make sure those you want are in there.
They already have such a "test", it is called PRIOR ART.
The only problem with prior art is that the patent offices are pretty slow and often do half-assed jobs at evaluating prior art when people point it out. The proposed USA patent reform is supposed to make it easier to invalidate patents by submitting prior art to reduce the amount of patent trolls.
If he keeps filing non-case cases, he'll get more reprimands and if he persists to the point of actually become considered a nuisance by too many judges, I guess he could eventually get disbarred for repeatedly filing frivolous and potentially anticonstitutional cases. Should such a fortunate event occur, he could still file suits but would need to convince some other lawyer to risk his name on the case... so we'd be far less likely to see any more of his cases reach the courts.
Jack is video gaming's Doc Mailloux... they claim to operate from higher moral grounds but the world would be far better off without them.
$10/kWh is never going to happen - at least not without causing (or as a consequence of) severe inflation: boiling 1L of water from 15C requires 85 * 4.17 * 1000 = 354kJ... it takes roughly 0.1kWh to boil 1L of water, that would be $1 at that hypothetical rate. Take a shower with a minimalist ~20L worth of hot water from a ~50C tank (barely enough to wet and rinse) and that's $10 a pop... basic hygiene should not be allowed to become a luxury item. Having $2000/month power bills during winter would also be a major problem since that would leave me nearly no cash after paying the rent. Unless landlords of this $10/kWh future include hybrid power, heating and hot water in the rent, many people would be simply unable to afford electric power and unable to deploy their own solar plant.
Having solar cells at ~$1/W might be nice but people also need to keep in mind the need for a suitable line-interactive inverter before this solar power can be dumped on the network. These network-synchronous inverters, power-point trackers, batteries, the usually mandatory automatic service disconnect switch and miscellaneous other bits can easily add more than $1000 to the install cost. A complete off-grid setup capable of providing enough peak power for a typical home/apartment (say, simultaneously operating the stove, clothes drier, water heater and HVAC) would cost quite a bit so completely off-grid operation is impractical... and all this stuff, batteries in particular, requires maintenance or periodic replacement.
I have been doing the same thing ever since I got a cell phone nearly 10 years ago... pretty much all services included (a ~$20/month freebie), no unnecessary network fees, no nonsense. In the early years, $10 used to be good for two months at a time.
Since I use it mostly to be reachable for job interviews and to locate my friends when we go out and lose sight of each other or got confused about the actual meeting place, I rarely use it more than 10-15 minutes per month.
I have a 17GB Maxtor drive from that era, the sustained throughput on it is closer to 12MB/s. On the 5.7GB drive I had before that, this figure was closer to 7MB/s. My current HDDs are all over the 40-70MB/s range... so sustained throughput has not increased a whole lot over the last 10 years - it roughly doubles every 4-5 years. Yes, that is quite slow progress compared to most other PC technologies.
For flash, I think I would prefer that they work on endurance before they start pushing speeds - faster flash technologies have been known to wear out considerably faster than the slower ones. The fastest flash cards are known to show reliability issues even under 1k rewrites while low-speed cards often have endurances beyond 100k. Progress in SSD performance will be in large part dictated by the cells' endurance at the faster speeds.
As far as external RAID enclosures are concerned, I would be far more interested in seeing some of these for eSATA... not the N-drives with N-links to a PCIe RAID card but one where the RAID controller resides in the external box and has a single 3Gbps/NCQ eSATA link to the host PC. Such a thing could be done with a single Virtex-5 LXT FPGA and some DRAM/SRAM.
The important thing is...
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070812
Slightly different words, same story... you make it sound like you oppose my point of view and interpretation even though your own sounds exactly like mine.
According to filings, SCO has a $7.5M outstanding debt and about $15M in cash or other assets.
However, SCO is also illegally holding onto ~$36M of Novell's Unix licensing loyalties.
The one who will get first dibs on SCO will be Novell since that ~$36M is Novell's capital (not a debt/credit) which SCO is trying to convert (fraud) into its own... a detail which SCO apparently conveniently failed to mention to the bankruptcy judge in the first hearing.
Novell licensed its Unix to SCO and asked for a ~95% royalty on sales. SCO sold Unix licenses but never gave any of the money back to Novell. Novell is suing to get this capital back. SCO does not want to be curbed right away so it now attempts to stall by filing for bankruptcy. Tomorrow, Novell, IBM, RedHat and others will surely point out the many faults in Monday's SCO declarations and the judge will very likely order the Novell vs SCO counterclaims suit to proceed in order to establish how much capital SCO owes Novell since settling capital disputes preempts negotiating debts.
By the time chapter 11 proceedings are completed - presumably after Novell is awarded about $20M - SCO will be ripe for chapter 7.
Those that do not are likely to suddenly come out of nowhere and start kicking users off their networks once their backbone links start choking and cause service degradation for "normal" users. Since the limits are stated up-front, going well beyond the limits while it looks like a bandwidth buffet is like living on borrowed time.
A group of four 20-something years old is not exactly representative a typical residential unit and is not, in general, the target group for those 100GB/month service packages!
I have two friends who are also sort of trying to download the internet... their "slow" months are around 300GB. Given that they have full-time jobs and other hobbies, I seriously question where they find time to watch all the stuff they download. More likely than not, it ends up in a dark corner of some HDD or randomly misplaced DVDs, never to be seen or thought of ever again. Even at 30-40GB/month, there is already a fair amount of stuff I download but end up not watching/using/whatever... and by the time I want to watch/whatever it, I forget that I already had it so I end up downloading it again.
Right on the mark.
If you check out Sympatico, their High-Speed Plus service has also been capped to 100GB/month while their regular $40/month (with phone and 2-years contract) HS is capped to a more reasonable (compared to Videotron's) 60GB/month - still looks bit expensive next to the $30 100GB/month DSLs.
As for which DSL to try, I was thinking TekSavvy... if I am to believe reports on canadianisp.com, it looks like it may be one of the more dependable alternatives currently available. If I read Colba's offer correctly, they have unlimited 24Mbps service and this will translate into potentially incredible download speed when you are lucky enough that nobody else on Colba is downloading anything or crappy speeds when Colba's backbone is more evenly loaded. If enough Videotron Extremers and Sympatico Plusers jump on Colba's allegedly unlimited 24Mbps service, things are going to get ugly over there. To avoid this highly likely scenario, I'd rather go with an ISP that states realistic sustainable limits up-front since they are far less likely to get hit by Extremers/Plusers exodus.
IMO, 100GB/month would be a fair limit for $30-40/month low-latency/priority-traffic service - the effective backbone bandwidth cost for this is less than $2 so offering anything less is excessively greedy. I consider myself as a moderate/mild downloader and I routinely download 25-35GB/month total from multiple locations to stay safely within the 20/10 caps and "improve" the subscriber base average. Comcast/Videotron/Sympatico/whatever crying over "abuse" at ~200GB/month on their $60-80 service treads on the pathetic side of the scale... their premium service costs twice as much as the DSLs' 100GB/month service so it would be only fair that premium service provided at least 200GB/month given that fixed costs remain generally unchanged therefore most of the surcharge ends up as pure profit... minus ~$1 in extra effective backbone traffic cost.
Just for fun, I called Videotron the other day to ask if they had any plans to increase caps before my contract ended. When I pointed out that Sympatico offered twice the caps for the same price and that there were ~40 DSL providers offering 100GB/month for $30, the Videotron rep went ballistic repeating over and over that this was impossible and that if it was true they'd know about it. Seems like Videotron ordered its PR bunnies to do an in-denial dance... they do not want people to find out that there are cheaper, nearly just as fast alternatives that offer more than triple the usage caps.
For low-power battery-operated equipment, solar can open interesting possibilities since the application already contains a battery and charge controller... all that's needed is exposed surface area and you can, even if you fail to go completely unplugged, at least extend your battery life by a significant amount: a cell-phone on standby draws less than 10mA, which is within the realm of what a cell-sized solar panel could provide at the required ~4V.
Dunno for your original comment... it kind of made it seem like improving battery/solar cell technology was trivial. If you look at progress curves, battery energy density and solar cell efficiency have not been doubling every 18 months... the progress is more on the scale of single-digit percentile points each year between major breakthroughs, trailing a very long way behind display and chip technologies. Power-conversion technology has been there for years, we need batteries and solar panels to catch up.
If Moore's "law" started applying to battery energy density and solar cell efficiency tomorrow, most of our energy problems would solve themselves over the next three years!
My current ISP recently announced a 100GB/month cap on its version of Extreme service. At ~3MB per MP3 and 30k songs/month, Comcast's vague limit also falls in the 100GB ballpark... that's the same limit as the vast majority of service offers in my area.
When one of my friends who was on said Extreme service got pissed off about paying ~$80/month for unlimited and getting suddenly capped to 100GB, I looked around to check out what sorts of alternatives were available in my area - something I had not done in years. From what I have seen, there are dozens of DSL resellers who are offering a choice between 100GB/month low-latency or unlimited low-priority traffic for only $30/month at 5000/800 speeds. (Well, with DSL, mileage may vary - even more so with third-party service that may be routed through auxiliary networks between the DSLAM and global internet.)
Since my current service contract costs $40/month for only 30GB/month, I will soon start sampling DSL service in my area until my contract expires - the ridiculously low limits make the extra speed seem superfluous... I have about four months left to pick my new ISP and there are about 40 (mostly ADSL) to choose from.
I am guessing Canada must have a law/rule requiring ISPs to declare limits since all ISPs I have seen do state the limits somewhere on their product pages... though sometimes they are a little obfuscated such as being written in an expandable page section that is collapsed by default made to look like a simple paragraph separator line until you pay close attention to it and notice the '+' sign at one end. I suppose this means the law/rule, if any, omitted to state how visible/accessible data on those limits must be.
My current ISP might be too expensive for the ridiculous limits it has on my package but at least I have always known what the limits were... if I were a Comcast customer, I would go for a class-action suit to force full disclosure of this mysterious limit and the methods behind it - customers should not have to guess what the ToS are no matter what lame excuse Comcast may have.
Not quite sure how this would be possible.
Consumer-grade panels are less than 20% efficient, an average PC with an average monitor and some gadgets attached use about 150W, at ~12h/day, this is about 1.5kWh/day. There is usable sunlight less than 8h/day so the solar array needs to provide at least 600W during that period under worst-case lighting conditions to enable fully off-the-grid operation and this requires at least five square meters of said consumer-grade panels. With much of the usage occuring outside usable illumination hours, the battery needs to store about 1kWh. At this point, you have to take your pick between an inexpensive 40kg set of SLA batteries, a more expensive 30kg NiMH set or a very expensive and potentially spontaneously-combusting 20kg lithium-polymer one.
The weight is a function of battery technology, the size is a function of solar panel efficiency. All are improving in many ways but these technological advancements are incremental, slow and expensive. For the time being, I would settle for replacing the 7.2Ah batteries in my BX1000 UPS by external 100Ah ones (~2kWh reserve), strapping an alternator to a stationary exercise bicycle and pedal for a while every couple of hours... much less expensive, more portable (try packing and re-deploying a 1kW array) and available nearly whenever/wherever I am.
Because the cost per watt of solar energy is currently pretty high, solar makes little sense as anything other than a statement. When solar panels will be available under $100/kW in the ~20% efficient grades, solar will become much more interesting - at least for people who live close enough to the equator to be spared crazy frosty winter ice storms.
Given that I used to maintain my own BT client and eMule mod, I 'kind' of know that.
IMO though, uploading is a protocol requirement for downloading since download speeds usually suck otherwise. Once the download is done though, continued sharing/seeding can directly translate into facilitating copyright infringement and distribution.
From the link in digitrev's post...
So it is very much only a matter of time until the gray area becomes blacker.
Bandwidth is not really a problem for HDTV: from what I read, most current HDDVD and BluRay titles are encoded at less than 10Mbps total. Since a DOCSIS modem can pull over 40Mbps from a single 6MHz NTSC channel bandwidth, a digital cable box should be able to squeeze at least three very good quality HD channels in the same bandwidth as one analog channel. With about 900MHz worth of usable downstream bandwidth on coax, there is room for up to 450 high-quality HD channels. Of course, about half of that spectrum is used by analog channels, SD/ED digital channels and cable-modems so there should still be room for 150-200 HQ-HD channels.
As for the processing equipment, the heavy-lifting is at the source where initial encoding is done and at the head-end if there is transcoding to be done. The rest is standard fare digital broadcast over an HFC network just like it is for all other digital cable broadcasts. Since head-ends already have quite a bit of equipment dedicated to each channel they support on their networks, having an extra transcoding/scaling unit in loops that require it is (usually) a minor hurdle.
I'd rather wait and buy the season box set that's mine to keep indefinitely for less than half that much a few months later: $5 x 24 eps/season = $120 while box sets often retail for less than $50.
If you knew the insides and outs of bandwidth oversubscription, you would know there is no such thing as non-oversubscribed bandwidth. Congestion between your modem and the head-end is easily cleared by reallocating upstream/downstream channels within your HFC node. If Comcast does a proper load-balancing job, you should never (or very rarely) notice any bottlenecks between you and Comcast's servers. At the higher network tiers, bandwidth is more closely tied to static physical links and it is when these links start struggling that ISPs start kicking (ab-)users off their networks and rejig their ToS - it is the simplest* and most cost-effective* way of maintaining the illusion of non-oversubscription for the rest of the user base.
(* assuming the ISP does not get class-actioned or other legal troubles over the legality of changing the ToS for existing subscribers on an on-going service contract.)
While it is legal to download, distribution (upload) still isn't, therefore leaving finished torrents of infringing material continue uploading once the download is complete would be a liability.
The vast majority of people use mainstream systems built with mainstream components. DDR3 is still quite early on its ramp-up and about one year away from becoming mainstream technology - most dramurais are waiting for DDR3 support on AMD's side before pushing volumes.
The currently ridiculously large premiums combined with marginal performance gains (3-4X the price, 5-10% more performance) make it a no-brainer that DDR3 is not going to be worth it for most of us until it reaches price parity with DDR2 in the given performance segment of interest. The price-performance balance (or lack thereof) makes the question practically rhetorical.
Pretty much all new memory technologies have been historically ridiculously overpriced for the first many months following their initial introduction.
It takes a while for people to adopt new memory technologies because they do not want to pay the full introductory price. It takes a while for manufacturers to ramp up production because they do not want to end up with excessive inventory caused by slow initial uptake. It takes a while for new technologies to become mainstream but it will happen in due time as it gains traction on both consumer and manufacturer sides so the market can find its equilibrium.
Short-term (now), DDR3's main advantage is lower operating voltage and power. Medium-term (late 2008), DDR3 will enable migration of low-cost systems from DDR2-667 to DDR3-1066. Long-term, DDR3 will enable penny-pinchers to wait until DDR4 becomes mainstream and overclockers to brag about their DDR3's lower latency compared to bleeding-edge DDR4... the exact same story we had on the way from DDR to DDR2.