Although I agree it sucks paying more than other countries, I'd imagine the largest reason wireless providers in the US costs more in comparison to the rest of the world is because of the exponential higher cost associated with deploying the infrastructure due to the physical size of the US. Of course, there's probably other more devious things going on that also attribute to the higher costs, but it's not all attributed to evil wheelings and dealings.
But providers often don't cover sparsely populated areas, even when they are licensed to do so. They might cover only the major highways in the area, or provide just enough coverage to meet any licensing requirements.
The carriers with the best rural coverage might cost more - but is this because their costs are actually higher, or because their customers are willing to pay more for better service? Verizon has a distinct advantage over the other carriers in the USA, as they have more 800 MHz licenses than the others - so they can build less towers to provide usable service in rural areas.
Keep Cheques. Get rid of Cash. Nothing erks me more that "cash only" establishments. If you are too cheap to buy a card reader than you should take my cheque.
There is some risk involved in taking a check. Assuming the piece of paper is in fact legitimate, one has no way of knowing if the account has enough funds or if the account is even open. There is much less risk when using cash or electronic payments.
Plus, retailers that want to reduce the risk of fraud will require customers to present valid government issued photo identification when paying with a check - and this is very time consuming for cashiers to verify. It is especially annoying when people use checks in the express checkout lane.
Isn't the point of netbooks to be small and light? 12" screens start to defeat that; I wouldn't doubt that most netbook purchasers prefer 10" screens (of course, any smaller than that and the keyboard gets pretty cramped). If you're going to get a 12" machine, you might as well make the jump to a full notebook...
Netbooks seem heavy compared to high end (=expensive) lightweight laptops. The Dell Latitude E4200 has a 12" diagonal screen, a faster GPU, and a dual core CPU, and yet it weighs 2.2 lbs - as much as the lighter 10" netbooks, all which have much slower hardware.
If it only offered broadcast, then no one would have paid for it.
Sure they would. Ever seen "CATV" used to refer to cable television? It originally meant "community antenna television", and this is where cable TV started - providing OTA broadcast television over a cable. From Wikipedia:
in areas where over-the-air reception was limited by distance from tranmitters or mountainous terrain, large "community antennas" were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes.
Or maybe not. It seems that Microsoft licenses its design guidelines too so that someone can implement their own ribbon according to Microsoft's own design requirements. Still, MS doesn't have any patents on the concepts of a ribbon.
But any such restriction are limited to Microsoft's implementation - Microsoft doesn't seem to have any patents on the ribbon (yet). Why would OpenOffice.org (which is not a Win32-exclusive application) use Microsoft's UI tools?
If the program uses a known API for encrypted communication and is linked dynamically, one could simply provide a shared library/DLL that copies the unencrypted messages... the API implementation used doesn't even have to be open source, as one could just write an intermediary library that implements all the functions of the original and copies the data before calling the original library.
If the program dynamically links to an open-source library for encryption, or runs on Wine, you can just modify the implementation.
The selection may vary depending on the location... I didn't pay a whole lot of attention or spend a whole lot of time in the store, but I think the Radio Shack in my local mall has a more consumer electronics-oriented selection than the Radio Shack in a plaza across the street.
How can you compare xserver(a sold product) to googles server farms that are completely in house
Using hosted Google services is an alternative to running similar applications on a local server. For example, there's no need to have a local email/calendaring server if you use Gmail and Google Calendar. In this example, it's really OS X Server that could be conflicting with Google's services.
But the more relevant conflict is between Apple's MobileMe and Google's collection of (free) web apps.
The $600 dongle? What are you talking about? The original iPods required Firewire 400. By version 3.0 (2003) it could sync using USB or Firewire. The first Mac mini (2005) had both USB and Firewire. But by that time Firewire was being phased out. So I have no idea what you mean by a $600 dongle.
He means an Apple Macintosh computer, and the cheapest model (the Mac Mini) is about $600 new, unless you have a student discount.
It's much higher in the cellphone market. Can't remember when I last saw a non-smartphone that wasn't some brand of Nokia.
Not all Nokia phones run Symbian. Nokia's worldwide marketshare last quarter was 38%, down from 40% a year ago. Meanwhile, Samsung and LG are growing in marketshare.
is far more threatening than an iPhone attack, given that around 50% of cellphones use Symbian
Symbian's marketshare is much lower in the United States. Also, Symbian's almost-50% marketshare is in the smartphone market, not in the overall cellphone market.
If that Blackberry is just sitting there, even asking for a passcode, is it still receiving and storing data?
Yes. But the BlackBerry doesn't store the encryption key in-the-clear like the iPhone 3G S does, and you can't run arbitrary code on a BlackBerry just by plugging it in to a PC.
Maybe a Blackberry has a hardened mode, where it goes inert when you lock it, where it won't receive data because it has forgotten the key to its own storage.
In fact, it does. BlackBerries even have an option to not encrypt the address book so you can have names appear on caller ID while the device is locked.
Either way, if you only have to enter a 4-digit number to get in, then even if the device slows down accepting PINs after a while
No; the BlackBerry (or even the iPhone!) would be configured to wipe the device after a few invalid password attempts. My (corporate managed) BlackBerry wipes the device after 10 invalid password attempts, and my password is longer than 4 characters (and includes non-digits.)
In this case, the hacker not only had the iPhone in his physical possession, but it was not Remote Wiped, so he also had the keys in his possession. How is it at all surprising that he was able to get in?
Because if that same hacker had a Blackberry in his possession with encryption enabled, he would not be able to get in.
It certainly sounds like a software limitation to me... It's a limitation of the software implementation.
It is both a hardware and software issue. See here and here. The multi-display implementation used by the driver is limited by the hardware's maximum supported framebuffer size for 3D rendering, which is 2048x2048 on the 945GM.
I didn't say X was hardware (and in fact I mentioned X.org, not X.) I apologize for being unclear. I meant to say that the hardware limitation only affects the X.org Intel driver because of the way this driver works; the Windows and OS X drivers are implemented in such a way that prevents this issue.
-1 For not understanding jimicus / pretending you were right
I understood what he meant, and once again, I apologize for being unclear.
Are you aware that those two sentences contradict each other?
It is a hardware limitation specific to the way the X.org driver is implemented; the Intel X.org driver only uses one framebuffer for both displays, and the 3D hardware on this GPU supports framebuffers of 2048x2048 or smaller.
Windows and OS X avoid this by using two separate framebuffers.
In the case of some Intel GPUs (like the three and a half year old 945GM, which is found in most netbooks today), 3D is limited to a 2048x2048 total framebuffer shared between all monitors - so if your two displays won't fit in a 2048x2048 space, you can't use any 3D acceleration. So if you want to use, say, 1280x800 and 1280x1024, you can't have 3D (or a composited desktop) in Linux. This is apparently a hardware limitation.
The Windows Vista/7 Aero driver has no such limitation, and I don't think the OS X driver does either.
With low-powered handsets, it's not economically feasible to cover sparsely populated areas. With high powered devices and well-placed antennas, a large area can be covered with less infrastructure than a network that otherwise serves typical handsets.
Plus, regular GSM is limited in distance - it won't work more than 20 miles away from the base station. CDMA and WCDMA do not have this limitation.
Remember DHCP? MS came with that as an extension of bootp and with an RFC too. Surely a fortunate bug somewhere -that never was fixed- causing WfW not to comply, resulting in MS DHCP servers.
Remember NetBIOS over TCP? Where a clear algorithm was defined to map NetBIOS names to DNS. Not too unfortunately, in WfW the algorithm wasn't implemented causing incompatibilities between OS/2 and WfW, and making a transition from NetBIOS over NetBEUI a bigger pain than it should have been.
There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.
Do you have any examples from the past 5 years? Anything from the past 15 years?
Direct broadcast satellite television services are not two-way. In the USA, receivers with legitimate subscriptions only communicate with the provider via telephone or the Internet. You don't even need to have the receiver connected to a phone line to use the service, at least for DirecTV.
I would say not, but when one drive fails you should replace all of them. For a home array, expect one drive to fail every few years. I had a disk in RAID-1 array fail last year. It was a 40GB disk which cost around £100 new. For the same price, I can buy two 500GB+ disks now.
That's wasteful when you're using more than two drives.
It's not a question of performance, it's a question of the difference between a linear access and a seek. The time for a seek is 4ms+. If a drive can read 50MB/s then a linear access is around 10 microseconds. If your one disk is doing a linear access while the other is doing a seek then you are limited by the time of the seek (for RAID-1 writes and RAID-5 reads and writes). If you have to seek after every block, your maximum throughput is 125KB/s. If you do a linear read, your throughput is 50MB/s. If your drives have different geometries, you double the number of seeks you are needing, dramatically reducing your throughput.
You are making theoretical calculations. How does this affect real-world usage? (Note: I mix drive models and notice no significant difference in performance.)
I think the point the OP is trying to make is that with two different drives, for every task you attempt you're going to get worst-case performance every time.
You may have noticed that some hard drives are marketed as being designed for RAID use. These work slightly differently to most consumer disks. Typically, a small region of a disk is hidden. If the disk discovers a bad sector then it will use one from the hidden region to replace it, so every write to the bad sector goes to one of the spare ones instead. This is very bad for RAID, because two drives writing to the same sector may be writing to two different physical locations (if one is remapped), with the same problems I outlined above.
All modern disks remap sectors as necessary. The main difference between consumer and RAID drives is the timeout for error correction.
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But providers often don't cover sparsely populated areas, even when they are licensed to do so. They might cover only the major highways in the area, or provide just enough coverage to meet any licensing requirements.
The carriers with the best rural coverage might cost more - but is this because their costs are actually higher, or because their customers are willing to pay more for better service? Verizon has a distinct advantage over the other carriers in the USA, as they have more 800 MHz licenses than the others - so they can build less towers to provide usable service in rural areas.
There is some risk involved in taking a check. Assuming the piece of paper is in fact legitimate, one has no way of knowing if the account has enough funds or if the account is even open. There is much less risk when using cash or electronic payments.
Plus, retailers that want to reduce the risk of fraud will require customers to present valid government issued photo identification when paying with a check - and this is very time consuming for cashiers to verify. It is especially annoying when people use checks in the express checkout lane.
I've carried expensive laptops for years and haven't lost or broken one yet. Perhaps not everyone is as careless as you?
Netbooks seem heavy compared to high end (=expensive) lightweight laptops. The Dell Latitude E4200 has a 12" diagonal screen, a faster GPU, and a dual core CPU, and yet it weighs 2.2 lbs - as much as the lighter 10" netbooks, all which have much slower hardware.
Unfortunately, it's 5-8x as expensive.
Sure they would. Ever seen "CATV" used to refer to cable television? It originally meant "community antenna television", and this is where cable TV started - providing OTA broadcast television over a cable. From Wikipedia:
Or maybe not. It seems that Microsoft licenses its design guidelines too so that someone can implement their own ribbon according to Microsoft's own design requirements. Still, MS doesn't have any patents on the concepts of a ribbon.
But any such restriction are limited to Microsoft's implementation - Microsoft doesn't seem to have any patents on the ribbon (yet). Why would OpenOffice.org (which is not a Win32-exclusive application) use Microsoft's UI tools?
If the program uses a known API for encrypted communication and is linked dynamically, one could simply provide a shared library/DLL that copies the unencrypted messages... the API implementation used doesn't even have to be open source, as one could just write an intermediary library that implements all the functions of the original and copies the data before calling the original library.
If the program dynamically links to an open-source library for encryption, or runs on Wine, you can just modify the implementation.
The selection may vary depending on the location... I didn't pay a whole lot of attention or spend a whole lot of time in the store, but I think the Radio Shack in my local mall has a more consumer electronics-oriented selection than the Radio Shack in a plaza across the street.
Using hosted Google services is an alternative to running similar applications on a local server. For example, there's no need to have a local email/calendaring server if you use Gmail and Google Calendar. In this example, it's really OS X Server that could be conflicting with Google's services.
But the more relevant conflict is between Apple's MobileMe and Google's collection of (free) web apps.
He means an Apple Macintosh computer, and the cheapest model (the Mac Mini) is about $600 new, unless you have a student discount.
Not all Nokia phones run Symbian. Nokia's worldwide marketshare last quarter was 38%, down from 40% a year ago. Meanwhile, Samsung and LG are growing in marketshare.
And Nokia isn't very successful in the USA.
Symbian's marketshare is much lower in the United States. Also, Symbian's almost-50% marketshare is in the smartphone market, not in the overall cellphone market.
Yes. But the BlackBerry doesn't store the encryption key in-the-clear like the iPhone 3G S does, and you can't run arbitrary code on a BlackBerry just by plugging it in to a PC.
In fact, it does. BlackBerries even have an option to not encrypt the address book so you can have names appear on caller ID while the device is locked.
No; the BlackBerry (or even the iPhone!) would be configured to wipe the device after a few invalid password attempts. My (corporate managed) BlackBerry wipes the device after 10 invalid password attempts, and my password is longer than 4 characters (and includes non-digits.)
Because if that same hacker had a Blackberry in his possession with encryption enabled, he would not be able to get in.
It is both a hardware and software issue. See here and here. The multi-display implementation used by the driver is limited by the hardware's maximum supported framebuffer size for 3D rendering, which is 2048x2048 on the 945GM.
I apologize; 1280x800 and 1280x1024 will work, but only if the screens are arranged on top of each other.
I didn't say X was hardware (and in fact I mentioned X.org, not X.) I apologize for being unclear. I meant to say that the hardware limitation only affects the X.org Intel driver because of the way this driver works; the Windows and OS X drivers are implemented in such a way that prevents this issue.
I understood what he meant, and once again, I apologize for being unclear.
It is a hardware limitation specific to the way the X.org driver is implemented; the Intel X.org driver only uses one framebuffer for both displays, and the 3D hardware on this GPU supports framebuffers of 2048x2048 or smaller.
Windows and OS X avoid this by using two separate framebuffers.
In the case of some Intel GPUs (like the three and a half year old 945GM, which is found in most netbooks today), 3D is limited to a 2048x2048 total framebuffer shared between all monitors - so if your two displays won't fit in a 2048x2048 space, you can't use any 3D acceleration. So if you want to use, say, 1280x800 and 1280x1024, you can't have 3D (or a composited desktop) in Linux. This is apparently a hardware limitation.
The Windows Vista/7 Aero driver has no such limitation, and I don't think the OS X driver does either.
With low-powered handsets, it's not economically feasible to cover sparsely populated areas. With high powered devices and well-placed antennas, a large area can be covered with less infrastructure than a network that otherwise serves typical handsets.
Plus, regular GSM is limited in distance - it won't work more than 20 miles away from the base station. CDMA and WCDMA do not have this limitation.
Do you have any examples from the past 5 years? Anything from the past 15 years?
Direct broadcast satellite television services are not two-way. In the USA, receivers with legitimate subscriptions only communicate with the provider via telephone or the Internet. You don't even need to have the receiver connected to a phone line to use the service, at least for DirecTV.
That's wasteful when you're using more than two drives.
You are making theoretical calculations. How does this affect real-world usage? (Note: I mix drive models and notice no significant difference in performance.)
Who argued otherwise?
All modern disks remap sectors as necessary. The main difference between consumer and RAID drives is the timeout for error correction.