If they really want to spend it on long-haul stuff, they should consider improving freight rail. It's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than long-haul trucking, but it's been losing because the government essentially hugely subsidizes the trucking industry by maintaining the highway system, while railroads have to fund maintenance of all their track themselves.
No, the federal government does not hugely subsidize the trucking industry. 58% of of highway funding comes directly from use taxes and tolls. Only 1.1% of highway funding comes from the federal government's non-highway sources. The remaning comes from local and state sources, investment income, and bonds. Source.
I have not received a new Dell without having a lot of junk installed; this includes 3 Mini 9s, a Mini 10, and a XPS410 (excluding business systems, mine have always arrived clean or blank).
In other words, you have received a new Dell without having a lot of junk installed.
Your netbook must be special; I didn't get lucky like you. Oh wait, neither did my wife or daughter, they also got XP infested with Dell Support, 800 Search Assistant, Dell WebChat, etc. You should visit mydellmini.com. There are forums for Mini 9 users where people share tips and tricks. The Windows forum is the busiest because MicroDell XP is soo awesome. I think a lot of those people got the same version I got.
I did not buy a Dell netbook. I never said I did. I have used Dell systems that did not shipped with additional software in the default image, however.
Interesting that you find Linux systems unacceptable because they do not provide a built-in encryption solution but you use a third party tool to get that functionality in XP.
No - Linux distributions do have built in block device encryption; it's in the kernel. It's typically not easy to set up,except in Fedora, which I had hardware issues with. TrueCrypt for Windows is easy to set up.
As far as reinstalling XP; anyone that has ever owned a Dell will tell you to toss the crapware infested restore disk when you open the box.
But this is not the case with every system or even every Dell system. It is definitely not the case with my netbook.
No matter how you do it, getting XP ready for business sucks unless you have a tailored image to restore.
Bullshit. My netbook shipped with Windows XP Home SP3, the drivers, and the software to generate a recovery DVD.
The MS license that accompanies Dell Mini 9s is $50 (the linux Mini 9 is $50 cheaper). I started with Windows and ended up with Ubuntu Linux. I disagree with the idea that Windows XP may be more suitable for a netbook than Linux. Try installing XP, setting up your hardware, load a few applications, and then load office. It will take a fair amount of your day. Then do the same with Ubuntu (a common choice for netbooks). I spent an hour and everything worked: hibernate, wireless, compiz for fancy window effects, and even printing to a wireless printer. If you haven't tried Linux in a while, then you should revisit soon. You will find installation, maintenance, security, and usability are all better than XP.
My netbook shipped with Windows XP. If I need to reinstall and don't want to use the recovery media for some reason, the drivers are all provided on a CD. Office 2007 takes less than 10 minutes to install from a USB drive.
I considered installing Ubuntu, but it doesn't support full-disk encryption (from the GUI installer) - it's only possible if you use the text-mode installer or mess around with the command line. This is much more difficult than installing TrueCrypt for Windows. Yes, I could spend a fair amount of my day getting full disk encryption to work, and I even tried the text-mode installer CD... but it failed.
The only distribution I'm aware of that sets up full-disk encryption from the GUI installer is Fedora, and it installed without issue - but the X server shipped in Fedora 10 performs poorly with Intel graphics. Yes, I could spend a fair amount of my day getting X working properly...
I ended up installing Vista and TrueCrypt. I spent less time doing that than I did messing around with Linux...
There are no longer any Linux netbooks for sale at physical retail stores where I live (USA). No, it's not that they're out of stock frequently (as some Windows models are); they are no longer kept in stock.
Target is the only retailer that even lists Linux models on their website; they used to sell the 7" Eee PC in stores. Now they sell Windows models in-store & advertise them, as do all the other retail stores that sell computers.
But Microsoft did an Apple a while back, sort of. The Windows NT-line (Windows NT/2K/XP/Vista) broke backward compatibility with the Windows 3.x/9x/ME line, but only to a degree. Some hardware and software work, but others do not.
Well, not really. Microsoft developed sufficient code to run DOS and 16-bit Windows API applications on 32-bit Windows in a small VM; this has been a part of every 32-bit version of Windows.
The driver models & kernel implementations definitely changed. WDM drivers can be targeted to run on 98se, Me, and NT5 and later.
Win32 has been supported since the early nineties and has yet to be deprecated as a whole. New API calls have been added and old ones are deprecated as necessary. The 64-bit version of the Win32 API doesn't really introduce anything new; it's the same API, but for 64-bit applications.
If an application making only Win32 calls fails to work on the latest version of NT, there is a good chance it was not written correctly in the first place. Most applications in Windows should not make a Native API call in any situation - even if functions (like GDI) are implemented in the kernel, they should be called using the standard Win32 API.
Compare to Apple, who had to rework the Toolbox API into Carbon and run pre-Carbon apps in a VM running the full Classic Mac OS. Toolbox apps had to be "Carbonized".
But it sort of makes sense to pay a little more for a 5 year warrantee. If something happens 3-4 years down the road, you can get a replacement drive. Even if that drive is outdated when compared with what is currently selling. We are paying for a longer warrantee and paying for the manufacture to keep on making that model drive.
In 2006 I bought five 320 GB drives for $100 each. Today, a 320 GB drive costs $50. Assume I could have paid $25 extra for a 5 year warranty instead of a 3 year warranty (this is the difference in price between WD "Green" 3 year warranty drives and WD "Black" 5 year warranty drives).
For paying for a longer warranty to be a sound decision, three of the drives have to fail during the last two years.
Will that happen? Maybe. Is it likely that three or more drives will fail during those last two years of the warranty? If it is, perhaps I'm better of replacing them anyway - between spending time dealing with failures, waiting for the replacements, and paying to handle the RMA, buying brand new drives that are less likely to fail sounds cheaper - especially if additional capacity is needed. (Last I checked, WD doesn't pay for return shipping anymore and Seagate actually charges extra for advance replacement.)
The reason you couldn't get on the internet with 5 bars of 3G is probably because you didn't have an EDGE signal. Try it yourself, turn EDGE off and even with 5 bars of 3G you cannot get on the internet at all. I don't know if it uses EDGE for authentication or something but it's pretty stupid to require both in order to be able to get out to the internet.
EDGE is an extension of GPRS (which is an extension of GSM) that provides higher performance packet data on GSM (in this context, the air interface).
The data traffic - inlcuding authentication - travels over either GSM/EDGE or WCDMA until it is handed off from one to the other.
You do not "need" both GSM and WCDMA coverage at the same time to use data. Many devices can be set to use WCDMA only.
In what way is.NET tied to IE? WPF doesn't use Trident at all, and that's the only thing I can really think of that might be in.NET that could be tenuously tied to IE. So what am I missing?
The only thing that might be tied to IE is some of the JavaScript client-side code (like form validation), and this has nothing to do with.NET itself - just what's included in ASP.NET out of the box. But the client-side JavaScript has been compatible with other browsers since ASP.NET 2.0 (2005).
Back when ASP.NET's client side code was only compatible with IE, ASP.NET didn't send any of the incompatible JavaScript to non-IE browsers - so pages still worked, jut without all the fancy features JavaScript provides.
Are you kidding? When is the last time you used OpenOffice.org? If the version number was earlier than 2.4.0, I might agree with you; but OOo is at 3.0.1 now and it's quite good and fully integrated as a replacement for all MS Office -- the only thing it doesn't do well are Excel macros and that's for a reason: they're broken and easily replaced.
Many users find OpenOffice.org to be sufficient, but there are still many features that are only in Office. I consider them to be worth the cost.
As for database apps, with Office you have Access, which is fine for very small databases, but more than a few thousand records you need to look at SQL anyway
The JET database engine used by Access supports SQL, as does Access itself. If you use Access, you're using SQL. Don't confuse the Access application with the database engine it uses by default. Access can use external databases with the appropriate ODBC driver - including MySQL, if you're a masochist.
which if you recall is a standard array of functionality (designed on purpose), so MySQL can do the job pretty well as MS' SQL Server, and sometimes better.
Oh, come on. There are open source relational database engines that are many times better than MySQL - like PostgreSQL.
But no RDBMS on its own is a replacement for Access, which is essentially an application development platform.
What MS Office drawing app are you referring to? Would that be Paint? Paint is a POS, and even MS knows that (they really ought to replace it with Paint.NET)
Visio?
OpenOffice.org Draw is a poor substitute. If I used it often enough, I'd get Visio.
Perhaps I am the exception to the rule but every machine I have ever used (and I've used a bunch) boots faster than it comes out of hibernation.
Do you use full disk encryption?
I use TrueCrypt on one system and waking from hibernate takes twice as long as booting up. A few hypotheses:
a regular boot results in the kernel & boot device drivers being loaded using slow boot loader code, and then a faster decryption driver is used for loading the bulk of the system - whereas hibernate could use that slower code to load the entire hibernate image
resuming from hibernate could load (for whatever reason) a full 2 GB memory image, whereas a full boot might load less data
This little bug is nothing compared to all the crap we've had to go through with MS Office security issues.
MS Office is not the only offline office suite. No desktop application (including MS Office) I've used has shared my documents with other people on the Internet without my permission.
The demarcation of storage and RAM is a legacy constraint forced by hardware limitations. Ubiquitous 64-bit and SSD will blur and eventually totally eliminate this separation.
Bullshit. The difference between flash storage and RAM is hardly a legacy constraint; the hardware limitations are very significant.
Flash devices are many orders of magniture slower than DRAM. Flash devices have very limited write cycles, whereas DRAM does not. Flash devices operate on large (erase) block sizes - starting at 64KB. This is many orders of magnitude higher than RAM, which is addressed by the byte. The erase block size is also much larger than the 512 byte sectors used in hard drives. Note that most consumer flash-based devices present themselves as block devices with 512 byte sectors.
On flash, data can be initially written in chunks much smaller than the erase block size, but once written, an entire erase block must be erased at the same time.
It can be useful for data on secondary storage to be accessible as if it were in memory. Modern operating systems already provide this functionality - see mmap(2). However, the usefulness of exposing a large slow block device's entire address space is limited unless a high-performance application actually randomly uses all that data - and if that's the case the frequent page faults caused by the lack of DRAM for caching would result in lower performance than just using standard read/write operations.
From what I can find, that device has 196 MB RAM and 1 GB of onboard storage (this is in addition to the 128 MB of flash for the OS and the microSD slot).
This is different than having 1 GB of byte-addressable DRAM.
Because Acid3 only tests a small part of CSS compliance. Giving fanboys pretty number to shout about should not be a priority. Also, please don't reply to posts that you are actually not replying to. Replying to the first post is obvious attention seeking.
Acid3 doesn't "only" test a small part of CSS compliance. It tests things that a purely standards compliant browser would not implement. For one, CSS3 is largely still in development. Acid3 also tests non-standard features like Data URIs.
You could say the same about ASP.NET, yet it's used by huge enterprises.
Have you used.NET or Java? Quite a bit of code runs in the CLR/JVM, incluing things like text processing / XML libraries and many database drivers. For code only using.NET or Java (no native calls), buffer overflows are simply nonexistent, unless there's a problem in the CLR/JVM. Many applications only use native calls for network communication, through the (very frequently used) system libraries.
I mean is PHP really the only language where you need to sanitize database inputs?
PHP and classic ASP are the only languages I've used that did not provide a convenient method for parameterized queries. (I no longer use either - classic ASP is dead and I avoid PHP.)
In Java or.NET, it's much easier to use paramaterized queries & has been for quite some time - it is common practice.
With Vista rating the entire computer based on the lowest score of a number of tests, and one of those tests being 3D performance, Intel were forced to up their game. Granted, Vista tanked, but probably not clearly before Intel made this decision (can't be bothered checking that though). Presumably Windows 7 does the same, and certainly OS X and now Linux need 3D, too.
The two most recent Intel GPUs available at Vista's release was fully Aero capable - the 945G(M) and 965G(M). Even the 945GSE (low-pwer) chipset in my netbook is good enough for Aero at the resolution of the built-in screen.
The 945GM started shipping in January 2006 alongside the Core Duo and the 965GM in September or October 2006 IIRC.
IIRC, even through 2007 (at the time of Vista's release), laptops were being sold with the older Aero-incompatible 915GM (GMA 900) chipset and single-core Pentium M or Celeron M CPUs.
Does she watch YouTube? I saw a demo of a program that runs some fancy filters using the GPU on low quality YouTube like video, and spits out something that looks pretty good. It was something that couldn't be done in real time on a CPU but a mid to low range GPU could do.
The latest Intel IGPs have improved video processing. However, I don't think Flash video (incl. YouTube) ever goes through that video output path... in my experience, saved FLV files played back in a standalone player & scaled look better.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the federal government does not hugely subsidize the trucking industry. 58% of of highway funding comes directly from use taxes and tolls. Only 1.1% of highway funding comes from the federal government's non-highway sources. The remaning comes from local and state sources, investment income, and bonds.
Source.
In a sense, RHEL4 is not old. Update 7 came out in July 2008 and includes Firefox 3. According to Red Hat's support schedule, RHEL4 left "Production 1" phase just two weeks ago, meaning it will no longer recieve "Software Enhancements".
Red Hat has the resources to make the latest things things work on their distribution without replacing everything. And Firefox 3 didn't work easily in RHEL 4 until Red Hat provided support...
In other words, you have received a new Dell without having a lot of junk installed.
I did not buy a Dell netbook. I never said I did. I have used Dell systems that did not shipped with additional software in the default image, however.
No - Linux distributions do have built in block device encryption; it's in the kernel. It's typically not easy to set up,except in Fedora, which I had hardware issues with. TrueCrypt for Windows is easy to set up.
But this is not the case with every system or even every Dell system. It is definitely not the case with my netbook.
Bullshit. My netbook shipped with Windows XP Home SP3, the drivers, and the software to generate a recovery DVD.
My netbook shipped with Windows XP. If I need to reinstall and don't want to use the recovery media for some reason, the drivers are all provided on a CD. Office 2007 takes less than 10 minutes to install from a USB drive.
I considered installing Ubuntu, but it doesn't support full-disk encryption (from the GUI installer) - it's only possible if you use the text-mode installer or mess around with the command line. This is much more difficult than installing TrueCrypt for Windows. Yes, I could spend a fair amount of my day getting full disk encryption to work, and I even tried the text-mode installer CD... but it failed.
The only distribution I'm aware of that sets up full-disk encryption from the GUI installer is Fedora, and it installed without issue - but the X server shipped in Fedora 10 performs poorly with Intel graphics. Yes, I could spend a fair amount of my day getting X working properly...
I ended up installing Vista and TrueCrypt. I spent less time doing that than I did messing around with Linux...
And where were the retailers you talked to?
There are no longer any Linux netbooks for sale at physical retail stores where I live (USA). No, it's not that they're out of stock frequently (as some Windows models are); they are no longer kept in stock.
Target is the only retailer that even lists Linux models on their website; they used to sell the 7" Eee PC in stores. Now they sell Windows models in-store & advertise them, as do all the other retail stores that sell computers.
Well, not really. Microsoft developed sufficient code to run DOS and 16-bit Windows API applications on 32-bit Windows in a small VM; this has been a part of every 32-bit version of Windows.
The driver models & kernel implementations definitely changed. WDM drivers can be targeted to run on 98se, Me, and NT5 and later.
Win32 has been supported since the early nineties and has yet to be deprecated as a whole. New API calls have been added and old ones are deprecated as necessary. The 64-bit version of the Win32 API doesn't really introduce anything new; it's the same API, but for 64-bit applications.
If an application making only Win32 calls fails to work on the latest version of NT, there is a good chance it was not written correctly in the first place. Most applications in Windows should not make a Native API call in any situation - even if functions (like GDI) are implemented in the kernel, they should be called using the standard Win32 API.
Compare to Apple, who had to rework the Toolbox API into Carbon and run pre-Carbon apps in a VM running the full Classic Mac OS. Toolbox apps had to be "Carbonized".
In 2006 I bought five 320 GB drives for $100 each. Today, a 320 GB drive costs $50. Assume I could have paid $25 extra for a 5 year warranty instead of a 3 year warranty (this is the difference in price between WD "Green" 3 year warranty drives and WD "Black" 5 year warranty drives).
For paying for a longer warranty to be a sound decision, three of the drives have to fail during the last two years.
Will that happen? Maybe. Is it likely that three or more drives will fail during those last two years of the warranty? If it is, perhaps I'm better of replacing them anyway - between spending time dealing with failures, waiting for the replacements, and paying to handle the RMA, buying brand new drives that are less likely to fail sounds cheaper - especially if additional capacity is needed.
(Last I checked, WD doesn't pay for return shipping anymore and Seagate actually charges extra for advance replacement.)
Never tried Safari. I use Opera on Windows and OS X and Slashdot renders quickly & without issues.. except on the last Opera 10 build I tried.
Digg comment threads used to result in very high CPU consumption in in Opera, however.
on my iPhone, going to Slashdot locks up the browser temporarily while it renders. It also sometimes fails to render properly.
EDGE is an extension of GPRS (which is an extension of GSM) that provides higher performance packet data on GSM (in this context, the air interface).
The data traffic - inlcuding authentication - travels over either GSM/EDGE or WCDMA until it is handed off from one to the other.
You do not "need" both GSM and WCDMA coverage at the same time to use data. Many devices can be set to use WCDMA only.
That illustrates nothing. Firefox 3 and IE 8 are not the same program and use different amounts of memory regardless.
Apparently you've never heard of shared memory...
The only thing that might be tied to IE is some of the JavaScript client-side code (like form validation), and this has nothing to do with .NET itself - just what's included in ASP.NET out of the box. But the client-side JavaScript has been compatible with other browsers since ASP.NET 2.0 (2005).
Back when ASP.NET's client side code was only compatible with IE, ASP.NET didn't send any of the incompatible JavaScript to non-IE browsers - so pages still worked, jut without all the fancy features JavaScript provides.
Many users find OpenOffice.org to be sufficient, but there are still many features that are only in Office. I consider them to be worth the cost.
The JET database engine used by Access supports SQL, as does Access itself. If you use Access, you're using SQL.
Don't confuse the Access application with the database engine it uses by default. Access can use external databases with the appropriate ODBC driver - including MySQL, if you're a masochist.
Oh, come on. There are open source relational database engines that are many times better than MySQL - like PostgreSQL.
But no RDBMS on its own is a replacement for Access, which is essentially an application development platform.
Visio?
OpenOffice.org Draw is a poor substitute. If I used it often enough, I'd get Visio.
Do you use full disk encryption?
I use TrueCrypt on one system and waking from hibernate takes twice as long as booting up. A few hypotheses:
MS Office is not the only offline office suite. No desktop application (including MS Office) I've used has shared my documents with other people on the Internet without my permission.
Bullshit. The difference between flash storage and RAM is hardly a legacy constraint; the hardware limitations are very significant.
Flash devices are many orders of magniture slower than DRAM. Flash devices have very limited write cycles, whereas DRAM does not. Flash devices operate on large (erase) block sizes - starting at 64KB. This is many orders of magnitude higher than RAM, which is addressed by the byte. The erase block size is also much larger than the 512 byte sectors used in hard drives. Note that most consumer flash-based devices present themselves as block devices with 512 byte sectors.
On flash, data can be initially written in chunks much smaller than the erase block size, but once written, an entire erase block must be erased at the same time.
It can be useful for data on secondary storage to be accessible as if it were in memory. Modern operating systems already provide this functionality - see mmap(2). However, the usefulness of exposing a large slow block device's entire address space is limited unless a high-performance application actually randomly uses all that data - and if that's the case the frequent page faults caused by the lack of DRAM for caching would result in lower performance than just using standard read/write operations.
From what I can find, that device has 196 MB RAM and 1 GB of onboard storage (this is in addition to the 128 MB of flash for the OS and the microSD slot).
This is different than having 1 GB of byte-addressable DRAM.
Acid3 doesn't "only" test a small part of CSS compliance. It tests things that a purely standards compliant browser would not implement. For one, CSS3 is largely still in development. Acid3 also tests non-standard features like Data URIs.
Have you used .NET or Java? Quite a bit of code runs in the CLR/JVM, incluing things like text processing / XML libraries and many database drivers. For code only using .NET or Java (no native calls), buffer overflows are simply nonexistent, unless there's a problem in the CLR/JVM. Many applications only use native calls for network communication, through the (very frequently used) system libraries.
PHP and classic ASP are the only languages I've used that did not provide a convenient method for parameterized queries. (I no longer use either - classic ASP is dead and I avoid PHP.)
In Java or .NET, it's much easier to use paramaterized queries & has been for quite some time - it is common practice.
The two most recent Intel GPUs available at Vista's release was fully Aero capable - the 945G(M) and 965G(M). Even the 945GSE (low-pwer) chipset in my netbook is good enough for Aero at the resolution of the built-in screen.
The 945GM started shipping in January 2006 alongside the Core Duo and the 965GM in September or October 2006 IIRC.
IIRC, even through 2007 (at the time of Vista's release), laptops were being sold with the older Aero-incompatible 915GM (GMA 900) chipset and single-core Pentium M or Celeron M CPUs.
The latest Intel IGPs have improved video processing. However, I don't think Flash video (incl. YouTube) ever goes through that video output path... in my experience, saved FLV files played back in a standalone player & scaled look better.