I hate to tell you this, but the uproar from the providers is only because they can't deliver what they promise.
They get you to buy into a larger broadband service (3M, 5M, 10M heck even 50M) by saying it will go x-times faster and look, it's only $20 while their competition offers a similar product for $30 or more. Then they deliver and lo-and-behold I actually like to USE my 10M of bandwidth (uncompressed HD easily consumes 20Mbps). Well, apparently they didn't think of that and if my neighbor likes to do the same thing, we're SoL.
This wasn't an issue until recently because I was probably the only BitTorrenting (downloading Linux ISO's) geek on the block. The issue is that they now sold 50M to Joe Sixpack that bought into the sales drone scripted explanation why he should get it (hey, you will have enough bandwidth for HD content) instead of remaining with 1M. Since BBC (or other channels like Google, YouTube or soon even Joost) brings that type of content to Joe Sixpack the broadband providers will all of a sudden have to provide that promised bandwidth for more than just the geek on the block, and guess what, most of that is not even HD, it's a plan to get 320x200 compressed streaming and they're already complaining.
To put your broadband connection in perspective (yes I worked at some large ISP's). If you have DSL in a rural environment, your DSLAM's (the concentrator for your neighbourhood) most likely only has 2-8Mbit/s over copper to the ISP per 100-200 customers, in a more dense environment it might go up to 20Mbit/s over copper or fiber for the same amount of people and some even have a failover that is actively used.
If you're on cable or in cities you might or might not have more luck with the concentrator's connection, I know in some areas there are full gigabit fiber connections to the 'box-on-the-street'.
If you're in a colo's datacenter it's even worse since there you do have a contract for a minimum expected service. Until 3 years ago a colo I worked for had a single 50Mbit/s up/down to their provider while offering 100Mbit/s to approx. 1000 servers. Currently (with the surges in bandwidth use) they have 2x 2Gbps from different ISP's with BGP but their servers also tripled in that time.
Oh really? In my experience the most busy lines (as in network cabling etc.) or processes can be broken without anybody complaining for DAYS, but make sure you don't break the connection to YouTube since you will get complaints almost instantaneously.
I didn't know you had to pay for Service Packs for OS X. The combined updates from 10.4.x to 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 didn't cost me a dime and as far as restarting: hardly, most updates don't require you to restart. Most updates are also not for the system. I had updates to iPhoto, Server Admin, QuickTime, iTunes (iPhone functionality) some security updates that most likely were also for the other BSD and Linux platforms (OpenSSH, Apache, MySQL,...). It's indeed been a while since my Mac needed restarting, it also goes to sleep and comes back in a second. I have a PC with XP that hangs somewhere between awake and sleep when a VPN is still connected, no way to get it back unless I hard-reset the machine, it also takes over 5 seconds to get it awake.
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't get a full, multi-user FTP, Web, Database, Secure shell... server in your OS did you? How about that firewall of yours, yes, you still have to buy another product for that.
How much does Windows cost you? $399 every 2 or 3 years? And they still didn't get it right. I'm so glad you bought a PC.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but people still hate XP and prefer 2000 over it although I have to admit, SP2 was the ONLY somewhat stable iteration of XP coming close to 2000. Pre-SP2 was nothing but trouble both security and stability wise.
The only way that it came somewhat standard when Microsoft cut support for 2000 and computers came with XP pre-installed. It's going to be the same for Vista although I heard rumors that Microsoft is shorting out the support (they already did for developers) for XP earlier than planned.
Although Microsoft does hire some well talented people (although most of them have gone to Google et al.) the sheer size and red tape of such organizations doesn't allow a lot of invention unless it is done by a small R&D lab. They make some fine common hardware (although lacking imagination) but that again is not their main concern. The problem is that they don't listen to the end-user, rather they listen to their biggest partners which are often large corporations and governments. A lot of companies will tell you that after investigation, it seems that their biggest customers are also their biggest moneypits, that's what Microsoft doesn't understand.
No, I do not like the PC (x86) platform. IBM forced the PC platform much like Microsoft forced the Windows platform. Amiga, Commodore, Apple,... were much better back in the day (and still). When IBM came out with the PS/2's that had an internal beeper controlled by a clock and EGA/CGA screens, we had color screens, mouse pointers and full 8-bit (sometimes even 16-bit) sound and even accelerated graphics. The PC platform also had to yield because of their instruction set, while RISC (PowerPC, Alpha) was much faster with lower speed/power. We have been locked into the x86 platform since the 80's thanks to IBM, no way out until a major overhaul is done, but no-one wants to bear those costs (maybe if Microsoft opens the kernel).
I agree, Windows XP in it's current iteration is fairly good and I also wanted to see improvements to it instead of a new version, but hey, they're a commercial company, they don't care about what is good for the customer, only about their stocks.
Exactly, and that is what we want, not notice it. The iTMS did so great because it was integrated with iPod's of course but their DRM wasn't restrictive. Want a CD for the car or DVD player: just burn it, play it on your computer, play it on your iPod, play it on your AppleTV, share it with people in your household.
That's what most people want, the only restriction (and biggest complaint) was that you couldn't just use it simply on any ol' MP3 player, but is easily circumventable (and condoned and supported by Apple) with the CD-in-the-middle.
Most DRM we see however from other players in the industry is the buy-once-for-each-apparatus or buy-once-use-once (what the music industry wants) while the Apple DRM is buy-once-use-always (what the consumer wants).
The consumer, in the end, always wins, either legally or less legally (P2P). I say less legally because in many countries (not US) you can technically media-shift the same product you bought even though the source might not be the same. Means: if you buy it in a certain format (CD or online), you can download a copy of the song in another format from elsewhere.
But it's not, it's only the unhealthy lifestyle. And yes, they should demand more for people with unhealthy lifestyles. The medical systems (especially in Europe) are bogged down under the cost of those that profit of it.
In the US however, the insurances have added more to the cost, but don't take anything off for those that live healthy or don't get sick often. They are actually PROFITING grossly from the situation unlike state-supported insurance in other countries where there is just a big pot of money for everybody to profit from in case they get sick. I don't care that a company makes a good profit, but to go over people's bodies (literally) to do so and/or try to weasel out whenever they have to pay up is just wrong in my opinion.
They have to be fair, people like me that drink moderately, never get sick, don't smoke, never even broken a bone, thin, no extra cholesterol... shouldn't have to pay over $100/week for a 80/20 insurance policy unlike the people that do drugs, smoke, drink, have STD's and because of that are poor and then get help from several federal and local instances so that they get almost free 90/10 insurance.
You really think that there is any appliance that keeps a database of all IP's it has passed out through the days/months/years?
Just to give you the (raw) calculation: you would need
(IP + MAC + newspace + (2* blank space)) * available hosts in the subnet to get it in any readable format
(12+ 16 + 1 + 2) * 65534 bytes (the average subnet) would cost you 2MB of raw space.
It is possible and probable for a full-fledged server system for an ISP (and even they don't keep track of it longer than a number of days) but not for a low-power appliance with an ARM processor 512k of space and 128k RAM not to mention the time and power it costs to search and write to that database.
The way it is done, the DHCP server gets a request, they get their lease (stored in-memory) and when the lease expires without a renewal they get another IP and the lease gets deleted. The simplest way to see if a certain IP is available is just to take the last one that was dealt out and add 1 to it. In a controlled environment you should be able to see that sometimes the counter goes way back (to the beginning) if all leases are available again.
That's one of the reasons a lot of SoHo appliances has only a limited number of connections and DHCP requests and you'll also notice that most of them work better without DHCP. This is because of power and memory constraints.
The new versions seem to have a serious price drop compared to the previous ones. I mean, 20 and 24" screens (and they are nice) for 1200-2200. Sure, a white box you build yourself is going to be cheaper but this is a nicely designed system.
I've used this in an all-Mac environment. You can't beat it with anything. I have it for home now.
It's kinda like Active Directory but much more simple, open and you can integrate it with other (non-Mac) systems since it's pure LDAP (over SSL) and Kerberos. There is even a feature to integrate and manage your Windows machines without using Active Directory. Combine it with Apple Remote Desktop and Apple's Software Update Service and you can deploy whatever package or update you want within seconds (it uses multicasting to save on bandwidth, eat that Microsoft)
Having worked in a datacenter and I have even set up one, let me make it simple to you:
The cost of 1U space = ((power + people + space + loan + hardware + software) / avg. used U's by customers) * profit rate
Somebody can simply do that using an Excel sheet and the customer will know that his server costs $1000/year.
The way you propose would increase that cost with development time, read-out infrastructure and the extra support to handle those things. Next to that, the customer would get a random bill every month that they can't foresee and then you have all those customers that will complain: but my processor only uses max. 50W, you bill my server for 100W/h etc. etc.
It's much simpler to calculate it in the first place and advertise your server will cost a certain amount than saying, your rent is $100/year and a variable amount of $'s into whatever you use.
Then you never had REAL problems with.NET/IIS. I have worked for the largest hosting companies in the largest datacenters, as soon as a single.NET script has an error (either due to bad coders (Microsoft must have the worst coders) or due to problems inherit to the language) it takes the whole IIS installation down, sometimes even the whole machine. The only way to circumvent that is to use artificial limits within IIS and identify the problem. The issue that each.NET Application Pool takes about 80M to start up and usually uses 300-700M by the time it crashes is not really a help either.
If it's true that Hitler's speech was the first TV-broadcast using sattelites, I don't think the 'aliens' would like to come and pay us a visit.
Next to that, life on Earth is fairly unique. We have the exact circumstances that are necessary to have carbon-based extravagant life on any planet. We are the perfect distance from the sun, have the perfect atmosphere even the perfect combination of chemicals and gasses. Well, of course we are committing suicide by abusing this perfect balance and screwing it all up, but I doubt there are many planets that have the conditions to sustain bacteria, let alone intelligent creatures that come out on the surface to build stuff and launch themselves into space.
the origin of strange optical flashes seen on the moon's surface
Nothing for you to see here, please move along...
Apparently the moon is gaseous. And now that I exhausted all the gas and nothing to see jokes, please continue with euhm... more intelligent conversation.
Well, I don't know what the big deal is with >50" TV's these days, CRT's didn't go much larger than 20" or maybe 30". 20" screens you can pick up anywhere for $150-200, I just picked up a 37" LCD HDTV (1080i, 1600:1) for less than $600 from TigerDirect and it is really nice (although I pick up HD from the Air and not Cable), sure not a known brand, but the actual panel is identical to the Akai ones you find at RadioShack. It's got VGA, composite, HDMI, antenna/cable and component,...
I bought myself an upconverting DVD player, HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray is too expensive so I agree although cheaper players come out every day. Again, most studios use DVD as the guide to the highest "RECORDING" format, so they're not investing in 1080p cameras so HD-whatever is way overblown. The upscaling works nice but is only slightly noticeable. Also, your computer most likely doesn't output in 1080p, so who is using it?
Well, I take the time to investigate whatever I buy. Especially >$100 purchases are not something I go over lightly. You should too, especially "going" shopping, electronics salesmen don't know either but will hit you with lingo to sound smart, it's like buying a car.
Quite honestly, hooking up anything isn't too bad. The DVD->TV has a HDMI cable which carries sound and picture (1 cable). I do have a receiver so I connect the digital out of the DVD to the digital in of my receiver (or use optical if you want that) and I am ready to recieve DTS/Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
Well, hate to tell you, but everybody is under surveillance every second of the day. That comes from both governmental (phone and internet lines are all monitored although nobody actually listens to it), institutional (your boss most likely has a way of looking into looking into the logs of the proxy/firewall) and personal (your wife/girlfriend likes to know you're not cheating on them or your nosy 80-year old neighbour likes to know what's going on). If you accept that, you will also stop acting like you have to behave differently in public as in private.
Personally, I act in private the same as I would in public. I don't care very much, I don't have any curtains and I walk around in my underwear, the back of my house consists out of 1 large window for both stories (loft-style apartment) so everybody can see my bedroom and my living room. Nobody should complain since, although they can see me, they are afraid to be labeled voyeurs when I see them. It's funny to see how people act when they walk past and I have just my tiny whities on sitting in the chair working.
That also doesn't mean I value my privacy. If somebody would be systematically checking up on me like the government does, they would get punched in the face. I do provide false information for almost all non-trivial information that some institutions expect me to provide (SSN#,...) so that building and/or obtaining a profile for me is difficult to do.
Linux supports almost all filesystems that are currently available, so that shouldn't be a problem. Mac OS X is a bit more picky but as far as I know, I've used it with EXT2, EXT3, HFS, HFS+,.... ReiserFS needs a driver though, I think XFS is standard, but again, not sure. Just format your file system under Mac OS X with the "Unix" filesystem and you should be all right.
Oh, you said Windows, never mind. Use a networked file system like SMB or FTP to send things from Windows to another machine or you could use some drivers available for whatever you chose (but don't kill me if it screws up as Windows usually does)
FastTracker. Hate to tell you this, but Windows 3 wasn't 32-bits so everything we needed was by 32-bits extenders like DOS4GW which are not supported or halfly supported by XP and later. Also, if you get some of the programs to run, they lose functionality like AdLib, Gravis, MIDI, joystick, COM, LPT or SoundBlaster support as well as the RTC. There is no layer in Windows XP that catches direct calls that we used to do in DOS and translates them to virtual or real hardware.
Or maybe not. Before, NASA got a bunch of money from the government and look what they did with it: they wasted it to take some pictures of self on the moon and then noticed that it's not very healthy there, they built that monstrosity that is called Shuttle and they foremost expanded their bureaucracy to the point where A doesn't know whether B used metric or 'the olden system'. Look at the Russians, the scarcity let them build 'dumb' rockets that did their job and could then be simply dismantled, abandoned or upgraded to use some more advanced tech.
Since NASA didn't have enough money to do it themselves, they basically got together with some other people and said: we need this thing to drive around on the martian surface and do some things, we don't need it to last very long; the answer was some meccano, a circuit board, a camera and a compact flash card powered by a battery and a solar panel (who needs nucular stuff?). Surprise: off-the-shelf consumer products last longer than mil-spec overengineered devices.
1) What would be the point? Linux has much evolved since then, the kernel back then (1.2?) would probably not run nor support a lot of hardware found in computers nowadays. 2) If you have problems with the length of time between copyright and pubic domain, you should take up Mickey Mouse for that (Disney) in many countries (including but not limited to the US)
No, what made the changes with Apple/Mac so great was that they never abandoned their old user/programbase like Microsoft did a few times (and they kept within the same productline). Mac OS X up till now runs Mac OS 9 (Classic) on all PowerPC's (even on quad-core G5's which are still available)
Of course now with the switch to Intel, they decided to kill Mac OS 9 (last release is over 6 years old) once and for all, but if you want, you can still run every single application without a problem (only very specialized applications do not run in Classic mode). Try running any of your 3.11 programs on Vista or even XP (or boot a full DOS-box with 3.11 at native speed) and you'll run into a large set of problems.
Same with PowerPC->Intel; Rosetta gives the Mac users a near-native conversion of all instructions and I think that will continue for the next few cycles of Mac OS X too. As far as I know, I can't run Alpha binaries from Windows NT 4 on Windows 2000, XP or Vista
That would be an option, but very unethical. High-risk groups are a solution, but still you can't verify when and if they got infected at any particular moment.
Basically what will happen is: they vaccinate you (which is usually a low-power or dead version or piece of the virus anyway) and they let your body work on it for whatever they think is long enough (1 week, 3 months,...) then they take a blood sample, keep your blood 'alive' somehow and inject it with the virus, see what happens to the sample. If the HIV virus destroys your cells, it's not working, if your cells encapsulate and break down or kill the virus, the vaccine works. Of course, to make sure you're not autoimmune (which some people are) and it's not just a fluke they have to test on multiple persons and do multiple tests on you.
If you succeeded multiple tests and they get approval, they could inject again a low-power strain of the virus in your body (such trials are very high paid) and see if it worked as the previous trials did. You could do this with terminally-ill people to make sure you don't kill off anybody that's healthy prematurely. Yes, to them we are just cattle, mice or monkeys.
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I hate to tell you this, but the uproar from the providers is only because they can't deliver what they promise.
They get you to buy into a larger broadband service (3M, 5M, 10M heck even 50M) by saying it will go x-times faster and look, it's only $20 while their competition offers a similar product for $30 or more. Then they deliver and lo-and-behold I actually like to USE my 10M of bandwidth (uncompressed HD easily consumes 20Mbps). Well, apparently they didn't think of that and if my neighbor likes to do the same thing, we're SoL.
This wasn't an issue until recently because I was probably the only BitTorrenting (downloading Linux ISO's) geek on the block. The issue is that they now sold 50M to Joe Sixpack that bought into the sales drone scripted explanation why he should get it (hey, you will have enough bandwidth for HD content) instead of remaining with 1M. Since BBC (or other channels like Google, YouTube or soon even Joost) brings that type of content to Joe Sixpack the broadband providers will all of a sudden have to provide that promised bandwidth for more than just the geek on the block, and guess what, most of that is not even HD, it's a plan to get 320x200 compressed streaming and they're already complaining.
To put your broadband connection in perspective (yes I worked at some large ISP's). If you have DSL in a rural environment, your DSLAM's (the concentrator for your neighbourhood) most likely only has 2-8Mbit/s over copper to the ISP per 100-200 customers, in a more dense environment it might go up to 20Mbit/s over copper or fiber for the same amount of people and some even have a failover that is actively used.
If you're on cable or in cities you might or might not have more luck with the concentrator's connection, I know in some areas there are full gigabit fiber connections to the 'box-on-the-street'.
If you're in a colo's datacenter it's even worse since there you do have a contract for a minimum expected service. Until 3 years ago a colo I worked for had a single 50Mbit/s up/down to their provider while offering 100Mbit/s to approx. 1000 servers. Currently (with the surges in bandwidth use) they have 2x 2Gbps from different ISP's with BGP but their servers also tripled in that time.
Oh really? In my experience the most busy lines (as in network cabling etc.) or processes can be broken without anybody complaining for DAYS, but make sure you don't break the connection to YouTube since you will get complaints almost instantaneously.
We were looking all this time for aliens and apparently we ARE the aliens...
Now that it's all over /. I can't sell it on E-Bay anymore!
...3T meteorite, bids starting at $100...
Anyway, I heard of this shady bidding site http://localhost.localdomain/
I didn't know you had to pay for Service Packs for OS X. The combined updates from 10.4.x to 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 didn't cost me a dime and as far as restarting: hardly, most updates don't require you to restart. Most updates are also not for the system. I had updates to iPhoto, Server Admin, QuickTime, iTunes (iPhone functionality) some security updates that most likely were also for the other BSD and Linux platforms (OpenSSH, Apache, MySQL,...). It's indeed been a while since my Mac needed restarting, it also goes to sleep and comes back in a second. I have a PC with XP that hangs somewhere between awake and sleep when a VPN is still connected, no way to get it back unless I hard-reset the machine, it also takes over 5 seconds to get it awake.
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't get a full, multi-user FTP, Web, Database, Secure shell... server in your OS did you? How about that firewall of yours, yes, you still have to buy another product for that.
How much does Windows cost you? $399 every 2 or 3 years? And they still didn't get it right. I'm so glad you bought a PC.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but people still hate XP and prefer 2000 over it although I have to admit, SP2 was the ONLY somewhat stable iteration of XP coming close to 2000. Pre-SP2 was nothing but trouble both security and stability wise.
... were much better back in the day (and still). When IBM came out with the PS/2's that had an internal beeper controlled by a clock and EGA/CGA screens, we had color screens, mouse pointers and full 8-bit (sometimes even 16-bit) sound and even accelerated graphics. The PC platform also had to yield because of their instruction set, while RISC (PowerPC, Alpha) was much faster with lower speed/power. We have been locked into the x86 platform since the 80's thanks to IBM, no way out until a major overhaul is done, but no-one wants to bear those costs (maybe if Microsoft opens the kernel).
The only way that it came somewhat standard when Microsoft cut support for 2000 and computers came with XP pre-installed. It's going to be the same for Vista although I heard rumors that Microsoft is shorting out the support (they already did for developers) for XP earlier than planned.
Although Microsoft does hire some well talented people (although most of them have gone to Google et al.) the sheer size and red tape of such organizations doesn't allow a lot of invention unless it is done by a small R&D lab. They make some fine common hardware (although lacking imagination) but that again is not their main concern. The problem is that they don't listen to the end-user, rather they listen to their biggest partners which are often large corporations and governments. A lot of companies will tell you that after investigation, it seems that their biggest customers are also their biggest moneypits, that's what Microsoft doesn't understand.
No, I do not like the PC (x86) platform. IBM forced the PC platform much like Microsoft forced the Windows platform. Amiga, Commodore, Apple,
I agree, Windows XP in it's current iteration is fairly good and I also wanted to see improvements to it instead of a new version, but hey, they're a commercial company, they don't care about what is good for the customer, only about their stocks.
Exactly, and that is what we want, not notice it. The iTMS did so great because it was integrated with iPod's of course but their DRM wasn't restrictive. Want a CD for the car or DVD player: just burn it, play it on your computer, play it on your iPod, play it on your AppleTV, share it with people in your household.
That's what most people want, the only restriction (and biggest complaint) was that you couldn't just use it simply on any ol' MP3 player, but is easily circumventable (and condoned and supported by Apple) with the CD-in-the-middle.
Most DRM we see however from other players in the industry is the buy-once-for-each-apparatus or buy-once-use-once (what the music industry wants) while the Apple DRM is buy-once-use-always (what the consumer wants).
The consumer, in the end, always wins, either legally or less legally (P2P). I say less legally because in many countries (not US) you can technically media-shift the same product you bought even though the source might not be the same. Means: if you buy it in a certain format (CD or online), you can download a copy of the song in another format from elsewhere.
I didn't know they could BOTH shout thatloud.
But it's not, it's only the unhealthy lifestyle. And yes, they should demand more for people with unhealthy lifestyles. The medical systems (especially in Europe) are bogged down under the cost of those that profit of it.
... shouldn't have to pay over $100/week for a 80/20 insurance policy unlike the people that do drugs, smoke, drink, have STD's and because of that are poor and then get help from several federal and local instances so that they get almost free 90/10 insurance.
In the US however, the insurances have added more to the cost, but don't take anything off for those that live healthy or don't get sick often. They are actually PROFITING grossly from the situation unlike state-supported insurance in other countries where there is just a big pot of money for everybody to profit from in case they get sick. I don't care that a company makes a good profit, but to go over people's bodies (literally) to do so and/or try to weasel out whenever they have to pay up is just wrong in my opinion.
They have to be fair, people like me that drink moderately, never get sick, don't smoke, never even broken a bone, thin, no extra cholesterol
You really think that there is any appliance that keeps a database of all IP's it has passed out through the days/months/years?
Just to give you the (raw) calculation: you would need
(IP + MAC + newspace + (2* blank space)) * available hosts in the subnet to get it in any readable format
(12+ 16 + 1 + 2) * 65534 bytes (the average subnet) would cost you 2MB of raw space.
It is possible and probable for a full-fledged server system for an ISP (and even they don't keep track of it longer than a number of days) but not for a low-power appliance with an ARM processor 512k of space and 128k RAM not to mention the time and power it costs to search and write to that database.
The way it is done, the DHCP server gets a request, they get their lease (stored in-memory) and when the lease expires without a renewal they get another IP and the lease gets deleted. The simplest way to see if a certain IP is available is just to take the last one that was dealt out and add 1 to it. In a controlled environment you should be able to see that sometimes the counter goes way back (to the beginning) if all leases are available again.
That's one of the reasons a lot of SoHo appliances has only a limited number of connections and DHCP requests and you'll also notice that most of them work better without DHCP. This is because of power and memory constraints.
The new versions seem to have a serious price drop compared to the previous ones. I mean, 20 and 24" screens (and they are nice) for 1200-2200. Sure, a white box you build yourself is going to be cheaper but this is a nicely designed system.
I've used this in an all-Mac environment. You can't beat it with anything. I have it for home now.
It's kinda like Active Directory but much more simple, open and you can integrate it with other (non-Mac) systems since it's pure LDAP (over SSL) and Kerberos. There is even a feature to integrate and manage your Windows machines without using Active Directory. Combine it with Apple Remote Desktop and Apple's Software Update Service and you can deploy whatever package or update you want within seconds (it uses multicasting to save on bandwidth, eat that Microsoft)
Having worked in a datacenter and I have even set up one, let me make it simple to you:
The cost of 1U space = ((power + people + space + loan + hardware + software) / avg. used U's by customers) * profit rate
Somebody can simply do that using an Excel sheet and the customer will know that his server costs $1000/year.
The way you propose would increase that cost with development time, read-out infrastructure and the extra support to handle those things. Next to that, the customer would get a random bill every month that they can't foresee and then you have all those customers that will complain: but my processor only uses max. 50W, you bill my server for 100W/h etc. etc.
It's much simpler to calculate it in the first place and advertise your server will cost a certain amount than saying, your rent is $100/year and a variable amount of $'s into whatever you use.
Then you never had REAL problems with .NET/IIS. I have worked for the largest hosting companies in the largest datacenters, as soon as a single .NET script has an error (either due to bad coders (Microsoft must have the worst coders) or due to problems inherit to the language) it takes the whole IIS installation down, sometimes even the whole machine. The only way to circumvent that is to use artificial limits within IIS and identify the problem. The issue that each .NET Application Pool takes about 80M to start up and usually uses 300-700M by the time it crashes is not really a help either.
If it's true that Hitler's speech was the first TV-broadcast using sattelites, I don't think the 'aliens' would like to come and pay us a visit.
Next to that, life on Earth is fairly unique. We have the exact circumstances that are necessary to have carbon-based extravagant life on any planet. We are the perfect distance from the sun, have the perfect atmosphere even the perfect combination of chemicals and gasses. Well, of course we are committing suicide by abusing this perfect balance and screwing it all up, but I doubt there are many planets that have the conditions to sustain bacteria, let alone intelligent creatures that come out on the surface to build stuff and launch themselves into space.
the origin of strange optical flashes seen on the moon's surface
Nothing for you to see here, please move along...
Apparently the moon is gaseous. And now that I exhausted all the gas and nothing to see jokes, please continue with euhm... more intelligent conversation.
Well, I don't know what the big deal is with >50" TV's these days, CRT's didn't go much larger than 20" or maybe 30". 20" screens you can pick up anywhere for $150-200, I just picked up a 37" LCD HDTV (1080i, 1600:1) for less than $600 from TigerDirect and it is really nice (although I pick up HD from the Air and not Cable), sure not a known brand, but the actual panel is identical to the Akai ones you find at RadioShack. It's got VGA, composite, HDMI, antenna/cable and component, ...
I bought myself an upconverting DVD player, HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray is too expensive so I agree although cheaper players come out every day. Again, most studios use DVD as the guide to the highest "RECORDING" format, so they're not investing in 1080p cameras so HD-whatever is way overblown. The upscaling works nice but is only slightly noticeable. Also, your computer most likely doesn't output in 1080p, so who is using it?
Well, I take the time to investigate whatever I buy. Especially >$100 purchases are not something I go over lightly. You should too, especially "going" shopping, electronics salesmen don't know either but will hit you with lingo to sound smart, it's like buying a car.
Quite honestly, hooking up anything isn't too bad. The DVD->TV has a HDMI cable which carries sound and picture (1 cable). I do have a receiver so I connect the digital out of the DVD to the digital in of my receiver (or use optical if you want that) and I am ready to recieve DTS/Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
Well, hate to tell you, but everybody is under surveillance every second of the day. That comes from both governmental (phone and internet lines are all monitored although nobody actually listens to it), institutional (your boss most likely has a way of looking into looking into the logs of the proxy/firewall) and personal (your wife/girlfriend likes to know you're not cheating on them or your nosy 80-year old neighbour likes to know what's going on). If you accept that, you will also stop acting like you have to behave differently in public as in private.
...) so that building and/or obtaining a profile for me is difficult to do.
Personally, I act in private the same as I would in public. I don't care very much, I don't have any curtains and I walk around in my underwear, the back of my house consists out of 1 large window for both stories (loft-style apartment) so everybody can see my bedroom and my living room. Nobody should complain since, although they can see me, they are afraid to be labeled voyeurs when I see them. It's funny to see how people act when they walk past and I have just my tiny whities on sitting in the chair working.
That also doesn't mean I value my privacy. If somebody would be systematically checking up on me like the government does, they would get punched in the face. I do provide false information for almost all non-trivial information that some institutions expect me to provide (SSN#,
Keep your receipt, then dispute the transaction. The bank will have to eat it somehow.
Linux supports almost all filesystems that are currently available, so that shouldn't be a problem. Mac OS X is a bit more picky but as far as I know, I've used it with EXT2, EXT3, HFS, HFS+, .... ReiserFS needs a driver though, I think XFS is standard, but again, not sure. Just format your file system under Mac OS X with the "Unix" filesystem and you should be all right.
Oh, you said Windows, never mind. Use a networked file system like SMB or FTP to send things from Windows to another machine or you could use some drivers available for whatever you chose (but don't kill me if it screws up as Windows usually does)
FastTracker. Hate to tell you this, but Windows 3 wasn't 32-bits so everything we needed was by 32-bits extenders like DOS4GW which are not supported or halfly supported by XP and later. Also, if you get some of the programs to run, they lose functionality like AdLib, Gravis, MIDI, joystick, COM, LPT or SoundBlaster support as well as the RTC. There is no layer in Windows XP that catches direct calls that we used to do in DOS and translates them to virtual or real hardware.
Or maybe not. Before, NASA got a bunch of money from the government and look what they did with it: they wasted it to take some pictures of self on the moon and then noticed that it's not very healthy there, they built that monstrosity that is called Shuttle and they foremost expanded their bureaucracy to the point where A doesn't know whether B used metric or 'the olden system'. Look at the Russians, the scarcity let them build 'dumb' rockets that did their job and could then be simply dismantled, abandoned or upgraded to use some more advanced tech.
Since NASA didn't have enough money to do it themselves, they basically got together with some other people and said: we need this thing to drive around on the martian surface and do some things, we don't need it to last very long; the answer was some meccano, a circuit board, a camera and a compact flash card powered by a battery and a solar panel (who needs nucular stuff?). Surprise: off-the-shelf consumer products last longer than mil-spec overengineered devices.
1) What would be the point? Linux has much evolved since then, the kernel back then (1.2?) would probably not run nor support a lot of hardware found in computers nowadays.
2) If you have problems with the length of time between copyright and pubic domain, you should take up Mickey Mouse for that (Disney) in many countries (including but not limited to the US)
No, what made the changes with Apple/Mac so great was that they never abandoned their old user/programbase like Microsoft did a few times (and they kept within the same productline). Mac OS X up till now runs Mac OS 9 (Classic) on all PowerPC's (even on quad-core G5's which are still available)
Of course now with the switch to Intel, they decided to kill Mac OS 9 (last release is over 6 years old) once and for all, but if you want, you can still run every single application without a problem (only very specialized applications do not run in Classic mode). Try running any of your 3.11 programs on Vista or even XP (or boot a full DOS-box with 3.11 at native speed) and you'll run into a large set of problems.
Same with PowerPC->Intel; Rosetta gives the Mac users a near-native conversion of all instructions and I think that will continue for the next few cycles of Mac OS X too. As far as I know, I can't run Alpha binaries from Windows NT 4 on Windows 2000, XP or Vista
That would be an option, but very unethical. High-risk groups are a solution, but still you can't verify when and if they got infected at any particular moment.
...) then they take a blood sample, keep your blood 'alive' somehow and inject it with the virus, see what happens to the sample. If the HIV virus destroys your cells, it's not working, if your cells encapsulate and break down or kill the virus, the vaccine works. Of course, to make sure you're not autoimmune (which some people are) and it's not just a fluke they have to test on multiple persons and do multiple tests on you.
Basically what will happen is: they vaccinate you (which is usually a low-power or dead version or piece of the virus anyway) and they let your body work on it for whatever they think is long enough (1 week, 3 months,
If you succeeded multiple tests and they get approval, they could inject again a low-power strain of the virus in your body (such trials are very high paid) and see if it worked as the previous trials did. You could do this with terminally-ill people to make sure you don't kill off anybody that's healthy prematurely. Yes, to them we are just cattle, mice or monkeys.