Pull the LCD data cable out and you'll see it fade
Not quite: most monitors will display a [pick your color, usually a shade of black] screen for a few seconds upon detecting loss of sync before powering down to standby, thereby clearing whatever happened to be displayed within 20ms of the VGA/DVI/HDMI/whatever cable plug being pulled.
If you really want to see Active-Matrix TFT persistence, you would fare better with yanking the power plug out of the wall socket and shining a very bright light on the LCD. Under these circumstances, the last painted screen sometimes remains distinguishable for 2-3 seconds after the power went out... with backlight, this could be a second or two longer.
Did you consider an Xbox 360 with Forza 2 and the VGA cable?
I'm not touching the X360 with a 10' pole any time soon - everyone I know who got one had to endure one or more rings of death... one of them is on his seventh X360 but is still on his first PS3 even though he uses his PS3 nearly 10X as much.
I'm not much of a gamer anymore - the next older console I had before my PS2 is a SNES. On the PS2, I probably cummulated well over 1500h of GT3+GT4... probably more than I have spent on all other games I have played (except for Dynasty Warriors 5 - a rather repetitive time killer a friend lent me) over the last five or so years combined.
Just for the record, I'm not too much of a Forza fanboy. I bought my original PS1 for GT2 and I bought my PS2 for GT3 and 4. I'll very likely buy a PS3 in order to play GT5, but probably not until the price drops significantly
For the record, I am not a GT5 nutcase to the point of buying a PS3 a year in advance: I co-own my PS3 and related hardware with two mostly Wii/PC-gaming friends. One of us will eventually buy the others' shares or sell his own for a devaluation-adjusted amount when PS3s become more affordable. I have the PS3 whenever neither of them needs it since I have the smallest share and am the most available of the three to handle borrowing/returning. We could do the same with X360 but none of us wants to touch one until the RRoD becomes a piece of long-forgotten history regardless of the console's price.
Right now, I own 25% of a PS3, have it 50% of the time but rarely have a reason to turn it on:)
In other words, you've bought hook, line, and sinker into the 1080p sales pitch.
I wanted one of the 30" monsters as a new primary desktop monitor but none has component/s-video/composite inputs so I settled for the next best thing that had them and made it my secondary computer monitor. In terms of Power-on-Hours, I use it as a secondary display about 70% of the time, with most of the remainder going to my PS2 and Gran Turismo 4 in 1080i. Movies and TV combined currently account for less than 10%. Next year, the PS3's share will increase to 20-40% thanks to Gran Turismo 5.
There might not be that much material in 1080i/p but I do not care too much since it only accounts for a tiny slice of what I use my 1080p for. In time, movie studios will start (re-)releasing their titles in 1080p and I do not plan to start buying movies until then - I stopped buying DVDs when the HD format war appeared on the horizon and I always intended to surf the the format war's waves on rentals until all is settled.
Very few sources are 1080i/p-only. Every HD-capable set top box I've ever seen can switch its ouput mode and will do better upscaling/deinterlacing/downscaling than all but the most expensive TVs. By your definition, you're still not getting "true HD" on a 1080p set because the 720p HD resolution has to be manipulated
But only 1080-lines display can display 1080i/p streams without rescaling and losing details. As for the definition of "True HD", for me it is 1080i/p stream displayed on a device capable of displaying all 1080 lines with no scaling in-between... anything less but still higher than SD I consider as enhanced definition.
Creating a whole new model with more inputs, different image quality, etc is not cost effective. 6 or 7 years ago, removing the HD tuner could save $200-300. Now you're lucky if it saves $100. Removing the SD tuner essentially costs nothing. It's nice to have the option to buy a monitor instead of full TV, but you can't really expect the monitor to be completely different from the TV it's based on.
Having more inputs only requires putting the IO on a separate IO PCB, the rest of the TV can remain the same with the TV firmware needing only minor UI tweaks - put an analog front-end like Analog Devices' ADV7403 (I have seen its beefier 1080p HDMI-capable equivalent over a year ago but they seem to have hidden it) on a PCB with a bunch of connectors, all you need afterwards is a connector to feed the digitized image data and recovered clock to the common platform. Display quality can be altered by component selection on said IO board and the input processing DSP may also reside on it. This is not much different than manufacturers currently offering multiple visually identical models where the only differences are the LCD panel, LCD panel controller IC, user interface and model numbers. As for the relative savings of ditching tuners, today's mid-range HDTV sets cost $2000 while they used to be over $6000 6-7 years ago so we are still talking about 5% overall.
There is no such thing as a 1080i panel (although there are 1080i CRTs and possibly projection TVs). There are 1280x720, 1366x768, and 1920x1080 panels. Since 1080i is one of the ATSC standard resolutions, and there is a lot of older HD hardware that will not scale/deinterlace 1080i signals to 720p, nearly all of these displays will have deinterlacing/scaling capability for 1080i support.
Technically, it would not be impossible to build 1080i LCDs... it is a simple matter of having a different scanline ordering in the LCD panel controller. The point was that all current x720/x768 sets will deinterlace and downscale 1080i to 720p since they lack the line count necessary for straight deinterlaced output.
A TV without any sort of tuner is usually called a monitor.
Exactly. And I'd gladly trade the RF bits for a combination of reduced price, extra IO connectivity, improved image quality and longer warranty.
Now that there's 42" 1080p panels available, some people must be sitting 3 feet away from the panel, or they're being oversold.
Even if one cannot clearly identify individual pixels, the 1080p image will still feel sharper than the 720p one. With motion video, this will indeed be barely - if at all - noticeable. For static text and slow-paced computer-generated graphics, things are different so we get 1200p on 24" and 1600p on 30" LCD monitors. Indeed, people do sit about 3' in front of these.
In the case of computer-generated graphics, you are much more likely to notice aliasing artifacts on a 720p display even if you sit near the minimum distance at which myhometheater claims people cannot tell 720p and 1080p apart for a given screen size - human vision is sensitive to stuff that sticks out, 1080p reduces the amount of said stuff that could become annoying visual distractions.
Given a sufficient distance, people would also be mostly unable to tell SD from UHD on a 100' screen even though UHD has 100X SD's resolution.
The "Full-HD 1080p" crap is just that -- crap. HD is defined as 720p, 1080i, and 1080p (and 1080p isn't actually in the HD standard anyway)
You still need a panel with 1080 lines to display true 1080i but AFAIK, all 1080i panels use 720p downscaling so the only way to have full 1080 resolution is to deinterlace to 1080p either at the source or within the set.
Every HDTV for the past 2+ years has come with a CableCard slot.
That must be why exactly NONE of the Sony/Toshiba/Sharp/LG/Samsung 40-46" 1080p LCD models I have looked at so far over the last year or so do not have it.
So just how are HDTVs useless without an external cable box?
Nobody I know with and HDTV bothers with the one (Radio-Canada), possibly two HD OTA channels available in my area... they either bought it for gaming or to hook up with their cable or satellite service. So their HDTV tuners pretty much only add unnecessary cost and power drain.
Most TVs still have SD tuners simply because it costs next to nothing to add, but you can even buy sets without that if you look around.
Selling TVs that do not have TV tuners would almost certainly constitute false advertising so they are not going to be called TVs - in Canada, a TV is defined as a video display device with tuning capability. As with CableCard above, exactly NONE of the (TV) sets I have looked at so far fail to feature at least NTSC+ATSC tuners.
There must be some models somewhere that feature CableCard or no tuners since BestBuy and FutureShop bothered to include a product spec-sheet entry in feature tables but they appear to be spread thinly - with exactly NONE being currently listed on FS... though data entry errors are known to happen.
The guarantee is that every 5 years, you need to spend 10 grand on another entertainment setup.
Isn't that fun?
For those who wait and watch early adopters, reading about them bitching about it is entertaining.
There is also the matter of brochures selling anything above 480p as HDTV (how many people have bought 1368x768 displays thinking they were getting full HD capability?) and the later drum-up of Full-HD 1080p TVs.
Since nearly no digital TVs come with CableCard slot, even people with shiny new FullHD TVs won't be able to have digital cable service without an external tuner box. Those dragging old CRTs or other implements of analog TV into the next decades will not feel lonely for many more years to come. Since digital TVs are currently useless (as a TV) without an external digital cable box, I'd vote for dropping tuners and selling large-area computer-entertainment/living-room display units instead of TVs - save $100 on redundant/unnecessary/unwanted RF bits (NTSC+ATSC+QAM tuners) and associated licenses/certifications/whatever.
More control is more expensive to enforce and creates more technical issues, both of which cost money and pathetically fail at preventing minimally determined pirates from pirating. Everybody loses.
I would have liked to see online music stores try to enforce stricter and more intrusive DRM schemes: I hoped to see a day where DRM schemes fouled up and caused massive outrage so even the tamest customers would become very aware and extremely critical of any DRM. But with many online music shops jumping off the DRM train, it seems judgment day has been postponed.
Running cat5 through existing walls, floors, ceiling, etc. might be annoying but it is (usually and thankfully) a one-time job. For fixed appliances like sales terminals, being wired should be a non-issue since said appliances are usually also wired for power... unless the clubs you do business with get remodeled every couple of weeks - in which case I would expect the behavior to subside as funds dry up.
Also, even if most of the business is carried out wirelessly with mobile terminals, the wireless access points are usually wired together anyway to provide redundancy, improved bandwidth, cover dead spots and avoid consuming what little spectrum is available with uplink traffic.
Indeed, even the most hardcore wireless enthusiasts are going to remain at least partly wired for several more years to come - no wireless link can beat wired on availability and reliability.
Security is one reason I prefer wired over wireless... and since most of my networked equipment stays put in one room, extra cables are non-issue.
The other reason is reliability: I can count on my 100BaseTX network delivering 7-9MB/s with very little chance of external influences causing my link to either slow down or die. With wireless, I am at the mercy of nearby interference sources including cordless phones, electrical appliances, various gadgets and other wireless networking equipment, any of which can cause the link to do a number of undesirable things from retraining to going down.
There are two reasons I got WiFi: 1) my previous router was dying and 2) I got a laptop. I only use WiFi with the laptop but whenever I do large transfers, I still hook it up to Ethernet since it is ~5X as fast and never goes down. 802.11g is good enough for internet access and moderate file copying with my two laptops so I most likely won't be bothering with 802.11n until my 802.11g router either dies or becomes a broadband bottleneck.
BTW, it is possible to eavesdrop on Ethernet without touching the cables by capturing EMI from the UTP cables - there was a proof of concept for this some years ago where they managed to reconstruct a B&W image from a VGA cable by placing the receiver antenna ~1m from the cable using commodity components. That's pretty far from monitoring from a van parked a few houses down the road but it certainly proves the feasibility.
I would opt for minimalist protection: just enough to be able to count active licenses so the users would know when their license limit has been reached.
Since the software is intended to be used in project management, I'd hate to have to fight a flaky copy-protection scheme to access critical project details while deadlines fly by. If such business-critical software had a WGA-esque outage that cost my company $100k in delays and wasted time, there is a good likelihood that lawyers would be summoned to seek some sort of relief and guarantees that this will never happen again from the software provider.
HDDs are usually user-upgradable and since cracked hinge covers are not software-related, the HDD is irrelevant to the issue therefore it would be perfectly reasonable to claim the HDD was not included to avoid unnecessarily risking the theft of confidential information or destruction of personal data by service technicians.
But Quebec strives to do everything differently to piss off the rest of Canada... we're the black sheep. I am reminded of the fact whenever I read "Offer valid in the USA and Canada except in Quebec."
One big problem with that is it scares international tech companies. Many have left, more are leaving and several scrapped their Qc plans thanks to threats from the OLF and law 101. Thanks to this, almost all major corporations have relocated their Qc/Montreal R&D centers to other provinces or made up some reason to shut them down, Motorola being one of the fresher examples - complying with OLF/101 is annoying, adds unnecessary operating costs and unwanted uncertainty.
The oil taken from the plants comes from photosynthesized water + CO2. If you dump the processing leftovers back onto the the field, the minerals and other elements go back where they came from to help the cycle continue.
If you look at dandelion, this stuff grows out of cracks in concrete blocks, solid rock and other bare surfaces where nearly nothing else is able to grow. These things use their roots mostly for water storage. Weeds tend to grow anywhere whether you want them to or not - they only need minimal grip to stay put, some water and that's pretty much it - that makes them extremely low-maintenance crops.
I read some really interesting facts about cell phones interference with medical equipment some months ago.
Some researchers tested a variety of monitoring equipment against a number of cell phones from various vintages and common wireless communication gear used by hospital personnel. What was their conclusion? At a range of at least 10m, none of the cell phones had any effect on the medical equipment but regular "certified" gear actually caused a few irregularities. At a range of 1m, analog phones and some of digital ones did cause measurable interference but they were still only about a fifth as bad as the certified stuff. Kinda unexpected.
The reality is that most medical instrumentation is mostly sensitive to sub-kHz-class signals. Worrying about sub-watt phones in the GHz+ range in a Hz-range application is a little pointless when there are 100kW+ FM radio and multi-MW TV broadcast antennas in the area.
If you already have software to log key presses, adding onfocus and mouse click logging to assist reassembly of the correct sequences should be (or become) an obvious next step.
If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
Seems like Gutmann himself says his method is only relevant for old encoding technologies like RLL and MFM... and he also says he does not know of any organization being known to be capable of completely recovering data after simple overwriting even today - in 2006. Sounds like anything beyond 2-3 random passes is already entering overkill territory.
Do your unused minutes carry over to the next month? Does it include call-waiting, call forwarding, voice messaging, GPRS, text and roaming?
While my $10 prepaid plan is only 30 minutes, the unused part does carry over to the next month and I have all the services. My carrier also has $15 unlimited night&weekend and $20 unlimited incoming plans if I needed them. In all cases, unused package time carries over.
If you want fancy phones not offered by your carrier, Nokia has a few retail stores in NA where you can get whatever you want and with GSM networks, the service provider never has to hear about it or approve it.
My current cell service provider offers free phones of comparable value to the sign-up model with each contract renewal - 1 year for low-end phone, 2 years for mid-range and 3 years for high-end. Open by-the-month contracts cost between $5 and $10 extra per month and you get neither subsidized phones nor free upgrades.
As for termination fees, they would have to abolish subsidized phones first since the termination fees (at least those my provider charges) are mostly meant to cover the subsidized part of the phones. (Last time I read one of their contracts, it was $20 per remaining contract month or $200, whichever is least - sounds fair enough to me.)
Since I do not use my cell phone much, I am sticking to prepaid: $10/month and I get all the services including extended network as a freebie... the same extras (CallerID, call-waiting, voice-mail, etc.) on my land-line would cost over $15/month. The cheapest cell contract with the same services (excluding extended network) would cost almost $40/month. The "trade-off" is I get 30 cummulative minutes/month instead of 150 use-'em-or-lose-'em minutes/month... can't say I feel like I'm losing anything since I can buy up to 200 minutes with the same $40 ($20/100min refills) if necessary.
Seen from the big company angle, "minor" patents are simply change and arsenal to negotiate cross-licenses in case of patent litigation. For a small company, a patent of similar scope could represent a major and highly valuable core asset. In case of infringement, this change could mean that the court should set damages as a compromise between what the patents are worth to their owners and what they are worth in the infringing product.
In the case of FAT on Linux, FAT is only a tiny and optional component of the Linux kernel. FAT is also worth next to nothing to Microsoft - FAT infringement lawsuits could probably be dismissed by pointing out that M$ has not enforced it for the first 10+ years of past infringement by countless parties. Since FAT is a minor optional component of little value to both parties, its value in such an hypothetical case with the new rule is practically nonexistent.
In the case of FAT on digital cameras, FAT is the only FS supported by the camera and is therefore of significant value to camera makers. Assuming such lawsuits do not get drop on the grounds of extended past willful failure to enforce (as is the case for submarine patents), damages here could be substantial but limited by FAT's relative/apparent current worth to Microsoft.
If you include the heat from rectifiers, inverters and batteries, you are talking online-UPS. In that case, the power-factor should be a non-issue if your online-UPS' rectifier front-end is properly balanced and PFC'd - most current models perform at 99+% out-of-the-box. During normal operation, most of the power goes right through from rectifiers to inverters with nearly no loss in the batteries other than floating charge and ~5% AC ripple from the tri-phase full-wave rectifiers. On top of that, rectifiers and inverters in the 10+kW range are at least 95% efficient with 97% being more typical. I guesstimate that a datacenter's power distribution is 85-90% efficient under normal operating conditions.
Considering these extra losses does change the balance but I do not think it would do as badly as to drop below 5:1.
One of the funniest eras was the year that followed the P4's introduction. At the time, the 1.6GHz P4 was competing against the 1.3GHz P3T and ~1.3GHz Athlons... and it got ridiculed. It was not until the 2GHz Northwoods that the P4 gained a clear lead over the older P3T. After that, the P4's clocked ramped up explosively, leaving the Athlon and P3 in the dust performance-wise for a year or so until the P4 crashed into the 3.6-3.8GHz brick wall, with Intel unexpectedly stalled for over a year thanks to Prescott's spectacular failure to scale beyond Northwood-class clocks. Half-way through this, Athlon64 came along and dominated most benchmarks... until Intel finally replied with C2D over a year later.
The P4 saga was a rather odd and funny story, the rest is typical see-saw motion.
It is far less than twice the savings unless you have a woefully inefficient air conditioner.
Since ACs usually have COPs better than 9, the AC would use less than 25W to offset the heat generation of a 200W system. So the savings from not having the extra heat to pump out in the first place far outweighs (>8:1) the cooling costs themselves.
As far as datacenters and server/render/etc. farms are concerned though, lower-power and faster units only means they can pack more units per rack and more racks per room in their current buildings without upgrading their power distribution and cooling systems.
The original Advanced-Memory-Buffer-based FBDIMMs might be going away next year but Intel has not given up on off-chip memory bridges since they announced plans for AMB2. Instead of having the AMB2 chip on-DIMM, it will be either on multi-DIMM AMB2 risers or on the motherboard.
BTW, AMD also announced plans for off-chip AMB2-like memory bridges with multiple multi-gigabit serial lanes... they called it G3MX: G3 (socket) Memory eXtender.
So, while FBDIMMs may be going away soon, the idea of using external bridges to dump the RAM further away from the CPUs/chipset using serial interfaces is gaining traction - at least in the server space.
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I'm not touching the X360 with a 10' pole any time soon - everyone I know who got one had to endure one or more rings of death... one of them is on his seventh X360 but is still on his first PS3 even though he uses his PS3 nearly 10X as much.
I'm not much of a gamer anymore - the next older console I had before my PS2 is a SNES. On the PS2, I probably cummulated well over 1500h of GT3+GT4... probably more than I have spent on all other games I have played (except for Dynasty Warriors 5 - a rather repetitive time killer a friend lent me) over the last five or so years combined.
For the record, I am not a GT5 nutcase to the point of buying a PS3 a year in advance: I co-own my PS3 and related hardware with two mostly Wii/PC-gaming friends. One of us will eventually buy the others' shares or sell his own for a devaluation-adjusted amount when PS3s become more affordable. I have the PS3 whenever neither of them needs it since I have the smallest share and am the most available of the three to handle borrowing/returning. We could do the same with X360 but none of us wants to touch one until the RRoD becomes a piece of long-forgotten history regardless of the console's price.
Right now, I own 25% of a PS3, have it 50% of the time but rarely have a reason to turn it on
Technically, it would not be impossible to build 1080i LCDs... it is a simple matter of having a different scanline ordering in the LCD panel controller. The point was that all current x720/x768 sets will deinterlace and downscale 1080i to 720p since they lack the line count necessary for straight deinterlaced output.
Exactly. And I'd gladly trade the RF bits for a combination of reduced price, extra IO connectivity, improved image quality and longer warranty.
Even if one cannot clearly identify individual pixels, the 1080p image will still feel sharper than the 720p one. With motion video, this will indeed be barely - if at all - noticeable. For static text and slow-paced computer-generated graphics, things are different so we get 1200p on 24" and 1600p on 30" LCD monitors. Indeed, people do sit about 3' in front of these.
In the case of computer-generated graphics, you are much more likely to notice aliasing artifacts on a 720p display even if you sit near the minimum distance at which myhometheater claims people cannot tell 720p and 1080p apart for a given screen size - human vision is sensitive to stuff that sticks out, 1080p reduces the amount of said stuff that could become annoying visual distractions.
Given a sufficient distance, people would also be mostly unable to tell SD from UHD on a 100' screen even though UHD has 100X SD's resolution.
You still need a panel with 1080 lines to display true 1080i but AFAIK, all 1080i panels use 720p downscaling so the only way to have full 1080 resolution is to deinterlace to 1080p either at the source or within the set.
That must be why exactly NONE of the Sony/Toshiba/Sharp/LG/Samsung 40-46" 1080p LCD models I have looked at so far over the last year or so do not have it.
Nobody I know with and HDTV bothers with the one (Radio-Canada), possibly two HD OTA channels available in my area... they either bought it for gaming or to hook up with their cable or satellite service. So their HDTV tuners pretty much only add unnecessary cost and power drain.
Selling TVs that do not have TV tuners would almost certainly constitute false advertising so they are not going to be called TVs - in Canada, a TV is defined as a video display device with tuning capability. As with CableCard above, exactly NONE of the (TV) sets I have looked at so far fail to feature at least NTSC+ATSC tuners.
There must be some models somewhere that feature CableCard or no tuners since BestBuy and FutureShop bothered to include a product spec-sheet entry in feature tables but they appear to be spread thinly - with exactly NONE being currently listed on FS... though data entry errors are known to happen.
For those who wait and watch early adopters, reading about them bitching about it is entertaining.
There is also the matter of brochures selling anything above 480p as HDTV (how many people have bought 1368x768 displays thinking they were getting full HD capability?) and the later drum-up of Full-HD 1080p TVs.
Since nearly no digital TVs come with CableCard slot, even people with shiny new FullHD TVs won't be able to have digital cable service without an external tuner box. Those dragging old CRTs or other implements of analog TV into the next decades will not feel lonely for many more years to come. Since digital TVs are currently useless (as a TV) without an external digital cable box, I'd vote for dropping tuners and selling large-area computer-entertainment/living-room display units instead of TVs - save $100 on redundant/unnecessary/unwanted RF bits (NTSC+ATSC+QAM tuners) and associated licenses/certifications/whatever.
More control is more expensive to enforce and creates more technical issues, both of which cost money and pathetically fail at preventing minimally determined pirates from pirating. Everybody loses.
I would have liked to see online music stores try to enforce stricter and more intrusive DRM schemes: I hoped to see a day where DRM schemes fouled up and caused massive outrage so even the tamest customers would become very aware and extremely critical of any DRM. But with many online music shops jumping off the DRM train, it seems judgment day has been postponed.
Running cat5 through existing walls, floors, ceiling, etc. might be annoying but it is (usually and thankfully) a one-time job. For fixed appliances like sales terminals, being wired should be a non-issue since said appliances are usually also wired for power... unless the clubs you do business with get remodeled every couple of weeks - in which case I would expect the behavior to subside as funds dry up.
Also, even if most of the business is carried out wirelessly with mobile terminals, the wireless access points are usually wired together anyway to provide redundancy, improved bandwidth, cover dead spots and avoid consuming what little spectrum is available with uplink traffic.
Indeed, even the most hardcore wireless enthusiasts are going to remain at least partly wired for several more years to come - no wireless link can beat wired on availability and reliability.
Security is one reason I prefer wired over wireless... and since most of my networked equipment stays put in one room, extra cables are non-issue.
The other reason is reliability: I can count on my 100BaseTX network delivering 7-9MB/s with very little chance of external influences causing my link to either slow down or die. With wireless, I am at the mercy of nearby interference sources including cordless phones, electrical appliances, various gadgets and other wireless networking equipment, any of which can cause the link to do a number of undesirable things from retraining to going down.
There are two reasons I got WiFi: 1) my previous router was dying and 2) I got a laptop. I only use WiFi with the laptop but whenever I do large transfers, I still hook it up to Ethernet since it is ~5X as fast and never goes down. 802.11g is good enough for internet access and moderate file copying with my two laptops so I most likely won't be bothering with 802.11n until my 802.11g router either dies or becomes a broadband bottleneck.
BTW, it is possible to eavesdrop on Ethernet without touching the cables by capturing EMI from the UTP cables - there was a proof of concept for this some years ago where they managed to reconstruct a B&W image from a VGA cable by placing the receiver antenna ~1m from the cable using commodity components. That's pretty far from monitoring from a van parked a few houses down the road but it certainly proves the feasibility.
I would opt for minimalist protection: just enough to be able to count active licenses so the users would know when their license limit has been reached.
Since the software is intended to be used in project management, I'd hate to have to fight a flaky copy-protection scheme to access critical project details while deadlines fly by. If such business-critical software had a WGA-esque outage that cost my company $100k in delays and wasted time, there is a good likelihood that lawyers would be summoned to seek some sort of relief and guarantees that this will never happen again from the software provider.
Maybe, maybe not.
HDDs are usually user-upgradable and since cracked hinge covers are not software-related, the HDD is irrelevant to the issue therefore it would be perfectly reasonable to claim the HDD was not included to avoid unnecessarily risking the theft of confidential information or destruction of personal data by service technicians.
But Quebec strives to do everything differently to piss off the rest of Canada... we're the black sheep. I am reminded of the fact whenever I read "Offer valid in the USA and Canada except in Quebec."
One big problem with that is it scares international tech companies. Many have left, more are leaving and several scrapped their Qc plans thanks to threats from the OLF and law 101. Thanks to this, almost all major corporations have relocated their Qc/Montreal R&D centers to other provinces or made up some reason to shut them down, Motorola being one of the fresher examples - complying with OLF/101 is annoying, adds unnecessary operating costs and unwanted uncertainty.
The oil taken from the plants comes from photosynthesized water + CO2. If you dump the processing leftovers back onto the the field, the minerals and other elements go back where they came from to help the cycle continue.
If you look at dandelion, this stuff grows out of cracks in concrete blocks, solid rock and other bare surfaces where nearly nothing else is able to grow. These things use their roots mostly for water storage. Weeds tend to grow anywhere whether you want them to or not - they only need minimal grip to stay put, some water and that's pretty much it - that makes them extremely low-maintenance crops.
I read some really interesting facts about cell phones interference with medical equipment some months ago.
Some researchers tested a variety of monitoring equipment against a number of cell phones from various vintages and common wireless communication gear used by hospital personnel. What was their conclusion? At a range of at least 10m, none of the cell phones had any effect on the medical equipment but regular "certified" gear actually caused a few irregularities. At a range of 1m, analog phones and some of digital ones did cause measurable interference but they were still only about a fifth as bad as the certified stuff. Kinda unexpected.
The reality is that most medical instrumentation is mostly sensitive to sub-kHz-class signals. Worrying about sub-watt phones in the GHz+ range in a Hz-range application is a little pointless when there are 100kW+ FM radio and multi-MW TV broadcast antennas in the area.
If you already have software to log key presses, adding onfocus and mouse click logging to assist reassembly of the correct sequences should be (or become) an obvious next step.
If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now.
Seems like Gutmann himself says his method is only relevant for old encoding technologies like RLL and MFM... and he also says he does not know of any organization being known to be capable of completely recovering data after simple overwriting even today - in 2006. Sounds like anything beyond 2-3 random passes is already entering overkill territory.
Do your unused minutes carry over to the next month? Does it include call-waiting, call forwarding, voice messaging, GPRS, text and roaming?
While my $10 prepaid plan is only 30 minutes, the unused part does carry over to the next month and I have all the services. My carrier also has $15 unlimited night&weekend and $20 unlimited incoming plans if I needed them. In all cases, unused package time carries over.
If you want fancy phones not offered by your carrier, Nokia has a few retail stores in NA where you can get whatever you want and with GSM networks, the service provider never has to hear about it or approve it.
My current cell service provider offers free phones of comparable value to the sign-up model with each contract renewal - 1 year for low-end phone, 2 years for mid-range and 3 years for high-end. Open by-the-month contracts cost between $5 and $10 extra per month and you get neither subsidized phones nor free upgrades.
As for termination fees, they would have to abolish subsidized phones first since the termination fees (at least those my provider charges) are mostly meant to cover the subsidized part of the phones. (Last time I read one of their contracts, it was $20 per remaining contract month or $200, whichever is least - sounds fair enough to me.)
Since I do not use my cell phone much, I am sticking to prepaid: $10/month and I get all the services including extended network as a freebie... the same extras (CallerID, call-waiting, voice-mail, etc.) on my land-line would cost over $15/month. The cheapest cell contract with the same services (excluding extended network) would cost almost $40/month. The "trade-off" is I get 30 cummulative minutes/month instead of 150 use-'em-or-lose-'em minutes/month... can't say I feel like I'm losing anything since I can buy up to 200 minutes with the same $40 ($20/100min refills) if necessary.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Seen from the big company angle, "minor" patents are simply change and arsenal to negotiate cross-licenses in case of patent litigation. For a small company, a patent of similar scope could represent a major and highly valuable core asset. In case of infringement, this change could mean that the court should set damages as a compromise between what the patents are worth to their owners and what they are worth in the infringing product.
In the case of FAT on Linux, FAT is only a tiny and optional component of the Linux kernel. FAT is also worth next to nothing to Microsoft - FAT infringement lawsuits could probably be dismissed by pointing out that M$ has not enforced it for the first 10+ years of past infringement by countless parties. Since FAT is a minor optional component of little value to both parties, its value in such an hypothetical case with the new rule is practically nonexistent.
In the case of FAT on digital cameras, FAT is the only FS supported by the camera and is therefore of significant value to camera makers. Assuming such lawsuits do not get drop on the grounds of extended past willful failure to enforce (as is the case for submarine patents), damages here could be substantial but limited by FAT's relative/apparent current worth to Microsoft.
If you include the heat from rectifiers, inverters and batteries, you are talking online-UPS. In that case, the power-factor should be a non-issue if your online-UPS' rectifier front-end is properly balanced and PFC'd - most current models perform at 99+% out-of-the-box. During normal operation, most of the power goes right through from rectifiers to inverters with nearly no loss in the batteries other than floating charge and ~5% AC ripple from the tri-phase full-wave rectifiers. On top of that, rectifiers and inverters in the 10+kW range are at least 95% efficient with 97% being more typical. I guesstimate that a datacenter's power distribution is 85-90% efficient under normal operating conditions.
Considering these extra losses does change the balance but I do not think it would do as badly as to drop below 5:1.
One of the funniest eras was the year that followed the P4's introduction. At the time, the 1.6GHz P4 was competing against the 1.3GHz P3T and ~1.3GHz Athlons... and it got ridiculed. It was not until the 2GHz Northwoods that the P4 gained a clear lead over the older P3T. After that, the P4's clocked ramped up explosively, leaving the Athlon and P3 in the dust performance-wise for a year or so until the P4 crashed into the 3.6-3.8GHz brick wall, with Intel unexpectedly stalled for over a year thanks to Prescott's spectacular failure to scale beyond Northwood-class clocks. Half-way through this, Athlon64 came along and dominated most benchmarks... until Intel finally replied with C2D over a year later.
The P4 saga was a rather odd and funny story, the rest is typical see-saw motion.
It is far less than twice the savings unless you have a woefully inefficient air conditioner.
Since ACs usually have COPs better than 9, the AC would use less than 25W to offset the heat generation of a 200W system. So the savings from not having the extra heat to pump out in the first place far outweighs (>8:1) the cooling costs themselves.
As far as datacenters and server/render/etc. farms are concerned though, lower-power and faster units only means they can pack more units per rack and more racks per room in their current buildings without upgrading their power distribution and cooling systems.
The original Advanced-Memory-Buffer-based FBDIMMs might be going away next year but Intel has not given up on off-chip memory bridges since they announced plans for AMB2. Instead of having the AMB2 chip on-DIMM, it will be either on multi-DIMM AMB2 risers or on the motherboard.
BTW, AMD also announced plans for off-chip AMB2-like memory bridges with multiple multi-gigabit serial lanes... they called it G3MX: G3 (socket) Memory eXtender.
So, while FBDIMMs may be going away soon, the idea of using external bridges to dump the RAM further away from the CPUs/chipset using serial interfaces is gaining traction - at least in the server space.