I don't know exactly what you had in mind but it seems very science fiction-y to me and would have to account for things like: what if one (or multiple) launches fail for some or another reason and wouldn't you need more and more energy (in an infinite loop - eventually depleting all resources) over time or else the structure comes tumbling down. Space elevators are based on the idea that gravity will sustain the structure (although we need very thin, very strong, very light cable and we can (currently) only pick two)
They should, my company is trying to save money by dialing the heat down to 65 in the offices but on the other end, one of the IT departments spent a lot of money on a license for a syslog server. Not kidding, the company sold them a virtual appliance with a configured syslog-ng daemon and they are paying a license based on the events/minute.
The company I work at spends literally millions in closed source licenses for all types of crap that can be easily done using open source alternatives. Sometimes I wonder if there is nobody that actually checks what other software there is available on the market that would fulfill their needs.
- I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else. - Or else what - Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are.
(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.
NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.
Apparently they have C&D'd Slashdot as well since it's acting flakey today and yesterday.
This is another reason why we want/need an open design to many of our gadgets. We're relying too much on them but only one big corporation has full control over them. Same goes for Google Docs. If Google decides to pull the plug on any of their systems, you lose.
You'll need to have a Mac OS X Server with Open Directory (LDAP + Kerberos) to either replace or augment whatever directory system you currently have. Apple Remote Desktop is a great timesaver, get to know it, it's very powerful. Workgroup Manager and this guide http://www.connect.spps.org/sites/38f534c3-3e8e-4fef-97e3-37342aa65865/uploads/tandtleo.pdf will save you a lot of time trying to set up desktop environments for your users. You can literally have all settings hands-off pre-configured for all your Mac's.
For deployment, you can use DeployStudio, it's great, it's free, it will deploy Windows (PC) machines and Mac's with all types of operating systems, it has workflows and scripts. For image creation/updates you can use InstaDMG, again another great, free tool for deploying Mac's. With Mac's (unlike Windows) you only have to keep 1 image and you can deploy it on any machine.
There are other paid and free tools but with the above you can at least get started.
The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use. If a contractor changes their tools from eg. DeWalt to Ridgid (or whatever cheap/underpowered manufacturer you can find at Home Depot and Lowe's) because the salesman took them out to lunch and went golfing with them then the contracting business won't last very long since the thing will keep breaking every day/week or so. Eventually the people working will either walk out before the business is bankrupt or the boss will change back to the original brands.
The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure how well something new (or old) is doing. And thanks to Microsoft, people have gotten used to servers restarting and people being unable to work for computer-related issues for minutes or even hours. It also depends on your admins. A good admin will hardly have to restart a server while a rookie will always do it since that's for him the easiest way to restart a particular service. Also, a lot of products that are good are expensive and a lot of products that are bad can be kept together somewhat by a good admin. The boss-man doesn't really care whether the whole system is teetering on a small string, as long as it works somewhat they will be happy. Software usually works initially and under certain specifications it will always work but it will become unstable over time or under specific conditions and then the admin will get the blame. With the advances in remote capabilities and the ubiquity of the Internet it's like a contractor always having a technician available with all backup tools and spare parts available in less than 5 minutes. If that were the case, the contractor might not worry about having tools break in the middle of work, they just give it to the technician that will be able to fix it.
Off course the sh*t always hits the fan later on and it's usually when the decision makers have moved on or put themselves out of blame by a (or a series of) good quarterly report. Usually it's when the technician (to use the contractor example) is on vacation on a cruise for 2 weeks (that's a really great excuse/vacation if you're an always-on-call admin) or he has been hit by a bus.
You know they found a solution for that. It's called scientific or exponential notation. And once you learn it, it's quite simple - you just add the specified number of zero's or move the comma the correct number of times.
You obviously don't work at a hospital. It would be very unpractical to provide 2 machines to every person, 1 for web access and 1 for hospital records. The issue is that this person ran spyware that she received. Virus scanners won't help, the only thing that could help is that she shouldn't have admin privileges (which is kinda impossible with some hospital software on Windows) or she shouldn't be running on the Windows platform (Mac or Linux can be more granular when running programs as an Administrator).
I worked at several computer stores back then and it was the exact opposite actually. Windows 95 would not run very well on a 486 unless you had at least 16MB RAM (where 4 and 8 was the standard back then) especially if you started adding more applications or device drivers. Some 486 processors (IBM's Blue Lightning) actually had issues because they were based on the 386's with added instructions and would BSOD no matter what. A Pentium did actually much better.
OS/2 Warp 4 had some wonderful applications and did very well on both 386 and 486, never crashed (it was more stable than most workstation UNIX back then) and could run Windows' 16-bit programs. The great thing is that IBM kept support around for a long, long time so many banks were running it in their offices even until very recently.
That's indeed the problem with the cheapest one. It's also the problem with the cheapest CFL's (aside from the dim light and flicker). I recently bought Philips' 3W & 6W LED's and they are awesome, have great light (very similar to halogens for my recessed lighting actually - no blueish light) and have a 20y warranty.
The issue with the cheapest LED's is that they aren't cooled enough or they don't have the really high-powered LED's in them making them unsuitable for just about anything. The bad/no cooling makes them fail really quickly because even though they are very low power (6W) they still generate plenty of heat which is usually not being mechanically removed. Heat and silicon don't really mix all that well (try your CPU without a cooling fin).
a) If kids don't get enough exercise but only what they do in school, that's the parents' problem and maybe the parents' need to be looked after. In Europe, we had only 4 hours of gym class per week and later 2 hours of gym and none of the kids in my school were morbidly obese. We had some fat kids but they weren't keeling over from the exercises they were to do, instead they were coached on how to do better and how to reduce their body weight. I do have a legitimate disability and the program got adjusted for what I could do. b) If kids are not doing/not able to do the required activities in gym class then there is either an issue with the attitude of the kid, an issue with the exercises or gym teacher (asking too much of the kids) or an issue that needs reviewed by the family's or the school's physician. Back in the day, we had a score on our report cards and if we were unwilling to do the required exercises we would get bad grades and a note from the teacher. If it got out of hand, the parents would be called. You could also fail your year if you had consistently bad grades in gym and in high school we had gym exams where you were supposed to do certain things you learned throughout the year. It looks kinda bad if somebody fails their year due to gym so we made sure we got through. c) The issue with the parent here is that this device records the data and then saves it away on a computer somewhere. First of all, I don't see the need for this unless you have somebody with a legitimate problem where the doctor (state, school or family) prescribes that a personal heart monitor should be used for all exercise (again, morbidly obese or heart disorders). Although right now, this might seem benign since it's only a school but we're in a society were everything is connected and information wants to be free. If that data is not erased very soon, that data will eventually leak and cause all types of problems later on. Knowing the current state of IT in Education (I work in Education as an IT worker mind you) this is not a tin-foil hat scenario but something that happens every day. Even if it's not being used by insurance companies, there are always the HR people that will against official policy investigate this, find it and calculate the chance that you will die sooner than the other applicant or if your son/daughter runs for political office, it will be found and used against them. d) I also see an issue here where the school might not even be allowed to record/save this information since they are (most likely) not a HIPAA-covered entity, don't have the HIPAA requirements to store this data effectively and release/destroy it accordingly. The heart rate of a person over time IS medical data after all and with it come a lot of strings attached. Privacy is being taken very seriously by some government agencies (other agencies off course are there to destroy it) so knowing how rabid they are when something like this gets leaked might warn the school that they shouldn't do this in the first place.
The amazing thing is that nobody ever tried it or at least never succeeded. The US is apparently not that hated in the world since nobody ever does anything. We have hundreds of reports on how easy it would be to disable this or take that out of service. All it takes to black out the USA are some well placed charges or for somebody to hit a few poles hard enough but nobody does it. All we got was some measly hijacked plane (which has been done since the 70's) in a few buildings.
Microsoft does release non-tested patches sometimes. They're called hotfixes in MS jargon and you have to call Microsoft Support to receive them. They are said to be unstable and after you install one, that part of your system might no longer be eligible for support. I had to do it several times back in the day when I was working with their latest SharePoint product (which is by the way not very stable).
I ended up doing iframes into a LAMP backend because after you modify a list to look the way you want it to be with FrontPage, the list will no matter what break for no good reason and Microsoft Support will tell you after a few days on the phone with the engineers that built it that modifying a SharePoint site with FrontPage voids the warranty and thus the support on the whole system.
You are probably not in the 'low-cost' market because you have more than 1 computer. I work at a University and I have an extended family that's financially not so well off (although much of that is due to their own decisions). Netbooks are being sold massively to people who would previously have to save up for a full laptop. A lot of those are college students that can't or don't want to afford a better machine. Of course, now 1 year further they are reaping what they have sown with a Windows XP computer that isn't even powerful enough to run antivirus and takes hours to complete updates.
I would never want a netbook. Give me a full fledged 12" laptop if it needs to be portable or 15-17 for a desktop replacement.
Since it obviously involves some type of key server to check against there are several ways from the very simple to very sophisticated. There are also several problems with it:
1) If the DRM permits on failure then that would be the simplest way to hack it, just block the server or specific queries to servers. If the DRM disallows on failure then a lot of people would be affected when a DDoS or a firewall/router 'problem' blocks the server somewhere upstream. This can off course be mitigated slightly by only disallowing after a certain time period, but that would require the keys to be stored either locally in the media file or locally in the media player. Both issues are simple to solve.
2) If the DRM uses a very central key server (hosted by the RIAA) that keeps track of all the 'stolen' keys then just distributing and submitting a rainbow table (easily accomplished through a botnet) of keys would be enough. If only few hold access to the key server, then there has to be some type of mechanism that finds and blocks the 'stolen' keys (where stolen is defined according to their dictionary, not the Standard English one, we would say copied to a public place). That mechanism will be very simple to either avoid (like blocking/allowing Google Bots) or mislead. Manually would be too time intensive and thus not work either.
3) If the central keys are held by the media sellers (eg. iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft) then it only takes a media seller to go out of business to have millions of files disappear. Also if the system has to be upgraded it will be very much fun to watch a) all systems synchronize their updates without downtime and b) maintain backwards compatibility. The option to 'hack' it in 2 is still valid especially when said sellers are big enough (Amazon and iTunes come to mind)
As with so many schemes for DRM it will not work and it will piss off the customers usually sooner than later. It will not be implemented and it will not be compatible with millions of devices/users out there. It is dead before it was even started. DRM does not work. It's akin to somebody making a perfect copy of your car (and/or license plate) and then driving off with the copy, you won't care, you won't know and/or you'll get in trouble for the other persons actions while you were the one that legitimately bought the car or applied for the license plate.
Well, insurance is usually a group coverage. I can afford homeowner insurance at $40/month but if my house burns down I can't get the 150k+ to rebuild it. Since I don't think I'll live 300 years without my house burning down to a crisp, I'll take the coverage but most houses will last that long if not longer (as you can see in Europe where many (residential) houses are older than 400 years).
Dyld's (Dynamic Loader) have existed before Snow Leopard. They are extensively used in all Mac OS X versions since they are at the base of the system. They also appear in BSD and Linux under slightly different names. This just explains how they found out a way to do caching and preloading better than previously. It's like Microsoft finding out a way to automagically load all necessary dll's and correctly find out the dll amongst several different versions of the same dll for a program and preload them before the program even needs them. It does so correctly and consistently every time, they just sped it up now. I don't know if Windows DLL's even do versioning but from what I remember (latest experience was last week in XP) if one program writes over the other programs dll, you're shafted (I'm looking at you Aladdin USB/DRM Keys).
There are several ways you can do this. Since you want to get in the BIOS on boot time as well, this gets trickier than just a serial console.
1) Re-attach a cheap video card (PCI will do) 2) Use a networked KVM (internal or external). I have had really good experiences with the eRIC KVM switches from Raritan but there are several available, even an open source one (okvm.sf.net). There are also some external ones that are great although they are usually geared at connecting multiple machines. So depending on your future plans, you can get either. 3) Get/have a server motherboard with IPMI (most recent (2-5 yo) rackmountable servers do have these)
The thing is we gave the carriers $200B a long time ago for cheap broadband services decades ago so 18B sounds like a drop in the bucket (10% of the money they collectively stole) especially since there aren't that many major carriers anymore - we got 4 now - so they should at least invest $50B not counting the interest on that amount and the overcharging of the promised monthly fees by 3 or 4 times.
Never owned an X-Box I see. I don't own an X-Box either but against my advice my brother-in-law did and he has had nothing but trouble with it. He had it in and out of service for 5 months, this is his fourth X-Box in less than 2 years (warranty) and now it's eating his disks. The disks are not under warranty. Too bad he can't make a backup copy of them.
The N800 can play video just fine too (of course not too high of a resolution but 640x480 plays fine) - it's just the Flash that eats up all the CPU cycles when browsing. As I said, the iPhone could probably support Flash but it would just cripple the browsing experience like it did with mine on the N800. Flash is a resource hog on any platform - it's just that you don't notice when your dual-core eats 50% of a core since you got the other half available. Single core and slower/older systems (try a Via CPU at 1GHz or a PowerPC G4) are crippled when running the latest Flash (9 & 10).
I have a N800 which is basically an N900 without the GSM radio (as far as I can see from the specs). It doesn't have a pull-out keyboard either but I never saw the need for one. Either way I wouldn't wish the Flash 9 support on anyone. As a matter of fact I have removed the package (apt based!) from the system because the Flash stuff simply doesn't work. I know why Apple decided not to have Flash support, it simply does not work well on these low-power systems. Even on a somewhat older full-featured computer (4-5 years old) Flash doesn't run good.
Well, eventually it does work on the Nokia but it locks up the system for 1-5 minutes while it's trying to load something (try BBC and don't even talk about YouTube). Skype I don't see the need for, it has SIP support which is much better.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know exactly what you had in mind but it seems very science fiction-y to me and would have to account for things like: what if one (or multiple) launches fail for some or another reason and wouldn't you need more and more energy (in an infinite loop - eventually depleting all resources) over time or else the structure comes tumbling down. Space elevators are based on the idea that gravity will sustain the structure (although we need very thin, very strong, very light cable and we can (currently) only pick two)
They should, my company is trying to save money by dialing the heat down to 65 in the offices but on the other end, one of the IT departments spent a lot of money on a license for a syslog server. Not kidding, the company sold them a virtual appliance with a configured syslog-ng daemon and they are paying a license based on the events/minute.
The company I work at spends literally millions in closed source licenses for all types of crap that can be easily done using open source alternatives. Sometimes I wonder if there is nobody that actually checks what other software there is available on the market that would fulfill their needs.
- I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else.
- Or else what
- Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are.
(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.
NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.
Apparently they have C&D'd Slashdot as well since it's acting flakey today and yesterday.
This is another reason why we want/need an open design to many of our gadgets. We're relying too much on them but only one big corporation has full control over them. Same goes for Google Docs. If Google decides to pull the plug on any of their systems, you lose.
You'll need to have a Mac OS X Server with Open Directory (LDAP + Kerberos) to either replace or augment whatever directory system you currently have. Apple Remote Desktop is a great timesaver, get to know it, it's very powerful. Workgroup Manager and this guide http://www.connect.spps.org/sites/38f534c3-3e8e-4fef-97e3-37342aa65865/uploads/tandtleo.pdf will save you a lot of time trying to set up desktop environments for your users. You can literally have all settings hands-off pre-configured for all your Mac's.
For deployment, you can use DeployStudio, it's great, it's free, it will deploy Windows (PC) machines and Mac's with all types of operating systems, it has workflows and scripts.
For image creation/updates you can use InstaDMG, again another great, free tool for deploying Mac's. With Mac's (unlike Windows) you only have to keep 1 image and you can deploy it on any machine.
There are other paid and free tools but with the above you can at least get started.
The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use. If a contractor changes their tools from eg. DeWalt to Ridgid (or whatever cheap/underpowered manufacturer you can find at Home Depot and Lowe's) because the salesman took them out to lunch and went golfing with them then the contracting business won't last very long since the thing will keep breaking every day/week or so. Eventually the people working will either walk out before the business is bankrupt or the boss will change back to the original brands.
The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure how well something new (or old) is doing. And thanks to Microsoft, people have gotten used to servers restarting and people being unable to work for computer-related issues for minutes or even hours. It also depends on your admins. A good admin will hardly have to restart a server while a rookie will always do it since that's for him the easiest way to restart a particular service. Also, a lot of products that are good are expensive and a lot of products that are bad can be kept together somewhat by a good admin. The boss-man doesn't really care whether the whole system is teetering on a small string, as long as it works somewhat they will be happy. Software usually works initially and under certain specifications it will always work but it will become unstable over time or under specific conditions and then the admin will get the blame. With the advances in remote capabilities and the ubiquity of the Internet it's like a contractor always having a technician available with all backup tools and spare parts available in less than 5 minutes. If that were the case, the contractor might not worry about having tools break in the middle of work, they just give it to the technician that will be able to fix it.
Off course the sh*t always hits the fan later on and it's usually when the decision makers have moved on or put themselves out of blame by a (or a series of) good quarterly report. Usually it's when the technician (to use the contractor example) is on vacation on a cruise for 2 weeks (that's a really great excuse/vacation if you're an always-on-call admin) or he has been hit by a bus.
You know they found a solution for that. It's called scientific or exponential notation. And once you learn it, it's quite simple - you just add the specified number of zero's or move the comma the correct number of times.
You obviously don't work at a hospital. It would be very unpractical to provide 2 machines to every person, 1 for web access and 1 for hospital records. The issue is that this person ran spyware that she received. Virus scanners won't help, the only thing that could help is that she shouldn't have admin privileges (which is kinda impossible with some hospital software on Windows) or she shouldn't be running on the Windows platform (Mac or Linux can be more granular when running programs as an Administrator).
I worked at several computer stores back then and it was the exact opposite actually. Windows 95 would not run very well on a 486 unless you had at least 16MB RAM (where 4 and 8 was the standard back then) especially if you started adding more applications or device drivers. Some 486 processors (IBM's Blue Lightning) actually had issues because they were based on the 386's with added instructions and would BSOD no matter what. A Pentium did actually much better.
OS/2 Warp 4 had some wonderful applications and did very well on both 386 and 486, never crashed (it was more stable than most workstation UNIX back then) and could run Windows' 16-bit programs. The great thing is that IBM kept support around for a long, long time so many banks were running it in their offices even until very recently.
That's indeed the problem with the cheapest one. It's also the problem with the cheapest CFL's (aside from the dim light and flicker). I recently bought Philips' 3W & 6W LED's and they are awesome, have great light (very similar to halogens for my recessed lighting actually - no blueish light) and have a 20y warranty.
The issue with the cheapest LED's is that they aren't cooled enough or they don't have the really high-powered LED's in them making them unsuitable for just about anything. The bad/no cooling makes them fail really quickly because even though they are very low power (6W) they still generate plenty of heat which is usually not being mechanically removed. Heat and silicon don't really mix all that well (try your CPU without a cooling fin).
There are several issues with that:
a) If kids don't get enough exercise but only what they do in school, that's the parents' problem and maybe the parents' need to be looked after. In Europe, we had only 4 hours of gym class per week and later 2 hours of gym and none of the kids in my school were morbidly obese. We had some fat kids but they weren't keeling over from the exercises they were to do, instead they were coached on how to do better and how to reduce their body weight. I do have a legitimate disability and the program got adjusted for what I could do.
b) If kids are not doing/not able to do the required activities in gym class then there is either an issue with the attitude of the kid, an issue with the exercises or gym teacher (asking too much of the kids) or an issue that needs reviewed by the family's or the school's physician. Back in the day, we had a score on our report cards and if we were unwilling to do the required exercises we would get bad grades and a note from the teacher. If it got out of hand, the parents would be called. You could also fail your year if you had consistently bad grades in gym and in high school we had gym exams where you were supposed to do certain things you learned throughout the year. It looks kinda bad if somebody fails their year due to gym so we made sure we got through.
c) The issue with the parent here is that this device records the data and then saves it away on a computer somewhere. First of all, I don't see the need for this unless you have somebody with a legitimate problem where the doctor (state, school or family) prescribes that a personal heart monitor should be used for all exercise (again, morbidly obese or heart disorders). Although right now, this might seem benign since it's only a school but we're in a society were everything is connected and information wants to be free. If that data is not erased very soon, that data will eventually leak and cause all types of problems later on. Knowing the current state of IT in Education (I work in Education as an IT worker mind you) this is not a tin-foil hat scenario but something that happens every day. Even if it's not being used by insurance companies, there are always the HR people that will against official policy investigate this, find it and calculate the chance that you will die sooner than the other applicant or if your son/daughter runs for political office, it will be found and used against them.
d) I also see an issue here where the school might not even be allowed to record/save this information since they are (most likely) not a HIPAA-covered entity, don't have the HIPAA requirements to store this data effectively and release/destroy it accordingly. The heart rate of a person over time IS medical data after all and with it come a lot of strings attached. Privacy is being taken very seriously by some government agencies (other agencies off course are there to destroy it) so knowing how rabid they are when something like this gets leaked might warn the school that they shouldn't do this in the first place.
The amazing thing is that nobody ever tried it or at least never succeeded. The US is apparently not that hated in the world since nobody ever does anything. We have hundreds of reports on how easy it would be to disable this or take that out of service. All it takes to black out the USA are some well placed charges or for somebody to hit a few poles hard enough but nobody does it. All we got was some measly hijacked plane (which has been done since the 70's) in a few buildings.
Microsoft does release non-tested patches sometimes. They're called hotfixes in MS jargon and you have to call Microsoft Support to receive them. They are said to be unstable and after you install one, that part of your system might no longer be eligible for support. I had to do it several times back in the day when I was working with their latest SharePoint product (which is by the way not very stable).
I ended up doing iframes into a LAMP backend because after you modify a list to look the way you want it to be with FrontPage, the list will no matter what break for no good reason and Microsoft Support will tell you after a few days on the phone with the engineers that built it that modifying a SharePoint site with FrontPage voids the warranty and thus the support on the whole system.
You are probably not in the 'low-cost' market because you have more than 1 computer. I work at a University and I have an extended family that's financially not so well off (although much of that is due to their own decisions). Netbooks are being sold massively to people who would previously have to save up for a full laptop. A lot of those are college students that can't or don't want to afford a better machine. Of course, now 1 year further they are reaping what they have sown with a Windows XP computer that isn't even powerful enough to run antivirus and takes hours to complete updates.
I would never want a netbook. Give me a full fledged 12" laptop if it needs to be portable or 15-17 for a desktop replacement.
Since it obviously involves some type of key server to check against there are several ways from the very simple to very sophisticated. There are also several problems with it:
1) If the DRM permits on failure then that would be the simplest way to hack it, just block the server or specific queries to servers. If the DRM disallows on failure then a lot of people would be affected when a DDoS or a firewall/router 'problem' blocks the server somewhere upstream. This can off course be mitigated slightly by only disallowing after a certain time period, but that would require the keys to be stored either locally in the media file or locally in the media player. Both issues are simple to solve.
2) If the DRM uses a very central key server (hosted by the RIAA) that keeps track of all the 'stolen' keys then just distributing and submitting a rainbow table (easily accomplished through a botnet) of keys would be enough. If only few hold access to the key server, then there has to be some type of mechanism that finds and blocks the 'stolen' keys (where stolen is defined according to their dictionary, not the Standard English one, we would say copied to a public place). That mechanism will be very simple to either avoid (like blocking/allowing Google Bots) or mislead. Manually would be too time intensive and thus not work either.
3) If the central keys are held by the media sellers (eg. iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft) then it only takes a media seller to go out of business to have millions of files disappear. Also if the system has to be upgraded it will be very much fun to watch a) all systems synchronize their updates without downtime and b) maintain backwards compatibility. The option to 'hack' it in 2 is still valid especially when said sellers are big enough (Amazon and iTunes come to mind)
As with so many schemes for DRM it will not work and it will piss off the customers usually sooner than later. It will not be implemented and it will not be compatible with millions of devices/users out there. It is dead before it was even started. DRM does not work. It's akin to somebody making a perfect copy of your car (and/or license plate) and then driving off with the copy, you won't care, you won't know and/or you'll get in trouble for the other persons actions while you were the one that legitimately bought the car or applied for the license plate.
Well, insurance is usually a group coverage. I can afford homeowner insurance at $40/month but if my house burns down I can't get the 150k+ to rebuild it. Since I don't think I'll live 300 years without my house burning down to a crisp, I'll take the coverage but most houses will last that long if not longer (as you can see in Europe where many (residential) houses are older than 400 years).
Dyld's (Dynamic Loader) have existed before Snow Leopard. They are extensively used in all Mac OS X versions since they are at the base of the system. They also appear in BSD and Linux under slightly different names. This just explains how they found out a way to do caching and preloading better than previously. It's like Microsoft finding out a way to automagically load all necessary dll's and correctly find out the dll amongst several different versions of the same dll for a program and preload them before the program even needs them. It does so correctly and consistently every time, they just sped it up now. I don't know if Windows DLL's even do versioning but from what I remember (latest experience was last week in XP) if one program writes over the other programs dll, you're shafted (I'm looking at you Aladdin USB/DRM Keys).
There are several ways you can do this. Since you want to get in the BIOS on boot time as well, this gets trickier than just a serial console.
1) Re-attach a cheap video card (PCI will do)
2) Use a networked KVM (internal or external). I have had really good experiences with the eRIC KVM switches from Raritan but there are several available, even an open source one (okvm.sf.net). There are also some external ones that are great although they are usually geared at connecting multiple machines. So depending on your future plans, you can get either.
3) Get/have a server motherboard with IPMI (most recent (2-5 yo) rackmountable servers do have these)
I have an electric car you insensitive clod, all I need is some grease for the bearings and smoke to make the electronics work
The thing is we gave the carriers $200B a long time ago for cheap broadband services decades ago so 18B sounds like a drop in the bucket (10% of the money they collectively stole) especially since there aren't that many major carriers anymore - we got 4 now - so they should at least invest $50B not counting the interest on that amount and the overcharging of the promised monthly fees by 3 or 4 times.
I don't know but I'm pretty sure there will be a first AND second Starbucks in that area whenever the observatory gets built.
Never owned an X-Box I see. I don't own an X-Box either but against my advice my brother-in-law did and he has had nothing but trouble with it. He had it in and out of service for 5 months, this is his fourth X-Box in less than 2 years (warranty) and now it's eating his disks. The disks are not under warranty. Too bad he can't make a backup copy of them.
The N800 can play video just fine too (of course not too high of a resolution but 640x480 plays fine) - it's just the Flash that eats up all the CPU cycles when browsing. As I said, the iPhone could probably support Flash but it would just cripple the browsing experience like it did with mine on the N800. Flash is a resource hog on any platform - it's just that you don't notice when your dual-core eats 50% of a core since you got the other half available. Single core and slower/older systems (try a Via CPU at 1GHz or a PowerPC G4) are crippled when running the latest Flash (9 & 10).
I have a N800 which is basically an N900 without the GSM radio (as far as I can see from the specs). It doesn't have a pull-out keyboard either but I never saw the need for one. Either way I wouldn't wish the Flash 9 support on anyone. As a matter of fact I have removed the package (apt based!) from the system because the Flash stuff simply doesn't work. I know why Apple decided not to have Flash support, it simply does not work well on these low-power systems. Even on a somewhat older full-featured computer (4-5 years old) Flash doesn't run good.
Well, eventually it does work on the Nokia but it locks up the system for 1-5 minutes while it's trying to load something (try BBC and don't even talk about YouTube). Skype I don't see the need for, it has SIP support which is much better.