Most retail stores put your information into their database when you make a purchase.
The first time you purchase from a company you'll usually be asked your name, address, and phone number before making the purchase no matter how you're paying.
With one strange exception, I only recall being required to provide an address as a condition of a retail purchase when applying for a service (like credit) or making a transaction that wasn't completed in its entirety at the checkout counter.
One (failed) computer store treated a laptop purchase as a business purchase order because the laptop wasn't listed properly in their point of sale system...
As for ZIP codes - I imagine stores use this to better know their customers. They can use this information to make future decisions on marketing and store expansion.
If they are asking for your ZIP code while making a credit transaction, it's possible they are using this as a factor in credit card authorization.
Many retailers ask for your phone number in some stores at some times for some transactions. This doesn't mean that they do it at all stores at all times for all transactions.
I noticed that a local Best Buy seemed to ask for phone numbers before the store moved to another location.
AFAIK Best Buy does use phone numbers to credit purchases for their rewards program if they do not have the rewards card present.
I can't find the coax cable to plug my 15 year old network card into. What makes you think people want their vintage hardware supported on their main OS they use for work and play everday? Why can't OSX deal with all the commodity hardware that is out there. Anybody can write a driver for OSX and did you know, the Xcode Development Environment is FREE as opposed to M$DN.
Xcode is free, but not anyone can write any driver from OS X. For example, the API for writing AirPort-compatible wireless drivers is not available. Third-party wireless drivers are really Ethernet drivers with their own configuration tools. The development kits for writing Windows software (be it regular applications or drivers) are all available online from Microsoft without paying them anything; no MSDN subscription or Visual Studio licenses required.
Vista doesn't include telnet. What a piece of crap!! Telnet is the easiest way imaginable to see if a certain port is open, I use it all the time for that.
It's already been mentioned that Vista includes telnet as an option. A simple search on Google would have shown you how to install the telnet client.
I'm talking about my AMD Athlon XP 2600+. Which doesn't even have SSE3. Vista runs great on it (with 4GB of Ram). I would love to see you get OSX running smoothly on it. How about my Geforce 6600GT? How about my dell wireless keyboard? How about my onboard 7.1 audio?
Your computer is old. If you had SSE3, you might be able to run OS X:
OS X already has a GeForce driver compatible with the 6600GT
OS X already supports USB and Bluetooth keyboards and mice
OS X already has AC97 and HD Audio support
I would like to see OSX run on my tablet PC.
OS X supports USB tablets; the USB bus is commonly used to connect digitizers in tablet PCs.
A vast amount of instability comes from shoddy drivers. Apple is picky in what drivers are allowed into its walled garden. You start letting in the riffraff and you get Vista's release video card instability snafus x100.
Vista's release video card instability? Perhaps ATI and/or nVidia's drivers were unstable, but I used Intel integrated graphics (with Aero) at Vista's release with no stabilitiy issues.
OS X isn't immune from driver issues in its current state. I have an ATI GPU (HD 2600) in a Mac from August 2007 and I've seen kernel panics caused by the graphics driver as recently as 10.5.4 and graphics corruption in 10.5.5.
Modern desktop systems don't have a whole lot of variation, either. They use a chipset (nVidia, Intel, or AMD) with a CPU (Intel or AMD) and GPU (nVidia, Intel, or AMD/ATI). Lots of functionality is integrated into the chipset; a few drivers would cover power management and graphics for a wide variety of sysetms. Audio is often HD Audio, so one base driver can handle the basic needs of many different codecs. USB, Bluetooth, FireWire, and even SATA (AHCI) all have a common interface that results in one driver supporting hardware from any vendor.
It seems that modern systems vary more in the built-in network chip or wireless card they use. And this seems to be one of the major struggles in getting OS X working on third-party hardware; the interface to write wireless drivers in OS X isn't open, so any third-party wireless drivers must be implemented as Ethernet devices and reimplement wireless configuration & security themselves (much like wireless drivers on Windows 2000 and XP before SP1.)
I would imagine that trying to run OSX on non-64-bit hardware would be a recipe for disappointment.
It wouldn't be. The OS X kernel isn't even 64-bit yet; it's 32-bit with the ability to run 64-bit processes. Snow Leopard will have the first 64-bit kernel.
Did you read my post? I noted that some games aren't always predictable and have maps where players can go anywhere. I also noted that a caching NFS client and a shell script can't have the best information to make useful predictions on what should expire from the cache or what should be preloaded next.
ptrace() it, and depending on what address you're in, start streaming in new data.
And you've now left the realm of a simple shell script preloading files for a caching NFS client, which was my point to begin with. I'm not sure how you'd be able to determine the state of the game based solely on the currently executing address, unless the game had a separate set of code for each part of the game.
This is a problem that is relevant and has been for some time. Consoles have a certain speed & latency when loading data (from the CD/DVD/BD-ROM) and a certain amount of memory. Have you ever played a console game with long load times, or maybe one that constantly reads from the disc as you play? The problem with streaming games over the Internet isn't so different.
Most games don't use the same data every time they are played. The data that is used consistently throughout the game would probably be cached on the local drive after it's first downloaded.
How can a shell script (which would run separately from a game) know what area the player will go to next (in an open ended game)? How can a NFS client know which files will be used later in the game (such as the files for the outdoor map after the player has entered a large building)? How can a NFS client know which files will never be used again during this game (such as a building that the player destroys and could never enter)? How can a shell script predict that a player will probably go to a certain place after starting a certain mission and know to preload the cutscenes for this mission?
Linux fails, because the overhead of running ubuntu gets COMBINED with the overhead of running FireFox of Epiphany or whatever, whereas windows overhead already includes IE.
Nonsense. Windows overhead doesn't "include" IE; the shell uses the IE rendering engine. If you run Firefox in Linux, you've got one copy of the Firefox rendering engine loaded and you're using that copy of it in Firefox. If you run IE, you've got one copy of rendering engine loaded and both the shell (explorer.exe) and Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) use it.
The only potential advantage here is that the rendering engine might already be in physical memory when you start IE.
I suppose you could possibly "waste" some memory in the Linux scenario if the UI had loaded a HTML rendering engine other than the one your browser used. But it would just get paged out if you ran out of memory...
The graphics chip was the weakest integrated chip that, according to the manufacturer, supported Aero. In reality, no doubt, the Intel chip pushes work onto the CPU because we know what happens when a manufacturer claims that the hardware is just able to support a feature. Hell, even their website phrases the compatibility in weasly terms.
The article mentions that the laptop uses the PM965, which is the GPU-less mobile chipset - they probably mean GM965. The GM965 isn't the weakest Intel GPU than can run Aero, either. Aero runs on the Intel 945-series GPUs and above. The 915 series has specific hardware limitations that prevent it from running Aero.
Aero on integrated graphics does use a lot of memory bandwidth. I've seen degraded Aero framerates on Intel GPUs using single channel memory.
The chip itself can't "push any work onto the CPU". The driver could, but there is no evidence of the Intel graphics driver using significantly higher CPU than than competitors' drivers while running Aero. At any rate, there shouldn't be a significant hit in CPU time or memory transfers when nothing is changing on the screen..
Sometimes, we stop using old hardware for a reason. With modern virtualization software, using old PCs for servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. One could use ten P3 systems @ 700 W avg. use total or two Core 2 systems running virtualization software at 300 W. avg. The Core 2 systems would be faster, more reliable, easier to manage, more capable... and possibly cheaper.
Today Linux's USB support is vastly superior to any Windows, performance was and so on.
What are the major deficincies in the Windows USB stack?
Linux doesn't require dodgy third-party drivers.
Neither does Windows. But they are quite useful if you have an nVidia or ATI GPU on either operating system.
Recent ALSA HD Audio drivers don't work out of the box on my system: the device is recognized, but I hear nothing. I had better luck using OSS (not part of any standard distribution) and RHEL 5 (which uses an old version of ALSA): both work through the speakers, but the headphone jack does nothing. Windows's built-in HD Audio drivers also work through the speakers only.
We have the best built-in full disk encryption, built-in virtualization, and there's SELinux, which is much better than what Windows has to offer.
But Linux distributions aren't competing with Windows alone. They are competiting with Windows and third-party software. And Linux distributions often need third-party software to be fully useful. (I, for one, enjoy 3D acceleration and MP3 playback capability.)
Certain Linux distributions might have the best built-in full disk encryption. But then again, among modern desktop operating systems, only certain versions of Vista and certain recent Linux distributions have built-in full disk encryption. Third-party Windows FDE implementations are available, including open-source TrueCrypt.
The best open-source desktop virtualization software is VirtualBox. Any Linux distribution including VirutalBox thus automatically has the best built-in desktop virtualization. (Note that Windows and OS X do not include built-in desktop virtualization). But the same application is available for OS X and Windows. Still, VirtualBox is lacking some useful features in comparison to products from VMware and Parallels.
I am puzzled as to why SELinux matters on a desktop system.
Soo, hm yeah, there is this applications thing, or the lack thereof. Really? Most apps now run in a browser window. And what is the situation today, in the browser war? Internet Explorer 8 BETA sucks as much, compared to modern browsers, as early, crashy Mozilla sucked compared to IE 5. And here at the office today, someone had to watch a video sent by the communications dept. Windows couldn't play it. They ended up downloading VLC with Firefox, and it worked great.
"Most apps run in a browser window?" There are many web applications out there, yet I find myself using real applications when they are available.
VLC? Most Linux distributions won't even ship a MP3 decoder! You need third party software to effectively support the popular audio & video formats on any recent desktop OS.
So the realtek driver doesn't show up as an "airport" device; but as some other sort of connection. Does anybody know if this is just realtek being realtek(that is to say, painfully mediocre and not really adequate), or is "airportness" like CD-Burning support, something that is confined to Apple-shipping hardware by design?
According to this page last updated in 2007, the driver that provides a common API for wireless devices appears to be poorly documented and closed source.
Ralink's USB wireless driver doesn't show up as AirPort device either. It reminds me of wifi in the pre-Windows XP SP1/SP2 days; there was no standard API for wireless device management, so wireless devices were implemented as Ethernet devices with vendor-specific setup utilities.
Produce any evidence that the 'MySQL guys' faked benchmark results, produce a comparison benchmark of MySQL versus a 'commercial' database.
Results could be flawed without being faked or even intentionally misleading. For example, one database engine might be doing additional integrity or validity checks that another isn't.
In one application I tested, MySQL was very fast for inserts - but it also accepted invalid data that Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL rejected.
It's important to note that MySQL does have GUI tools. It seems like phpMyAdmin is one of the more popular ones. Back when I actually wanted to use MySQL, it was the only useful open source one I could find. It was convenient when running a standalone MySQL server at a remote location connected via a relatively slow link. But on a LAN, I'd much prefer a real application.
I like MS's SQL Server management tools. The 2005 tools were a bit of a disappointment at first when compared to the 2000 ones; they were rewritten in.NET and were noticeably slower on the hardware I was using at the time. But the rewritten tools had a better interface and more features.
I recently used Oracle's SQL Developer for the first time. It's written in Java and works fairly well (although it does use Swing). It's comparable in features to SQL Server's management tools.
When trying to figure things out on my own, I found MySQL and SQL Server to be easier to use than Oracle or PostgreSQL. Having worked with MySQL and SQL Server first, I could be biased.
PostgreSQL's pg_hba.conf was a source of confusion at first. And the Oracle TNS/SID thing seemed confusing in comparison to the server:port+username+password+database required to connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server.
Of course, you only need to learn how to configure & connect to a database once.
The dev kit is $0, and a signing key/registration is $100. So the barrier to entry is very VERY low.
The dev kit only runs on Intel systems running OS X. Other systems also have free development kits that run on a greater variety of systems, and they don't even require you to pay any money to the smartphone vendor to get permission to run your own code on your own phone. Nor do they prohibit you from using third-party compilers, interpreters, etc.
And since other vendors don't exclusively control the software distribution method for their devices, you can write whatever you want without fear of it being rejected.
The iPhone is only a godsend if you want to do what Apple wants you to do.
It's a good point, but I don't think that's how things would actually work. Meth would be technically legal, but you wouldn't be able to pick it up at Walgreens. If it has any positive use (which I doubt) it would be available only by prescription and only through special order. It wouldn't be mass-produced by pharmaceutical companies like marijuana and other drugs would be.
False. Two minutes of research would have produced some useful facts. Methamphetamine is legal with prescription (in the United States, it's in Schedule II along with methylphenidate and amphetamine, commonly marketed as Ritalin and Adderall.) I don't know if any pharmacies stock it, but it is definitely available via prescription and through special order.
Methamphetamine isn't prescribed very often, but its less powerful cousins (amphetamine and methylphenidate) are stocked at pharmacies and prescribed to millions. And some of those legitimate prescriptions are diverted - sometimes for recreational, sometimes to enhance performance.
Gas tax? That's supposed to go into road construction and maintanance. Where it really goes, well, talk to your friendly politicians and maybe they'll tell you where it really goes. Or maybe not. Did you contribute massive sums to their reelection campaign?
To be fair, nearly 60% of highway funding comes directly from fees & taxes paid by road users. Compare this to the ~34% of public transportation operating costs funded by passenger fares. This is a case where it's *easy* to directly charge the appropriate costs to those who use public transportation, since users already pay the operator who provides the service.
Registration & fuel tax money might not go to where each user uses the roads the most - one might register a vehicle or purchase fuel in a different area than where it is driven the most.
PgSQL is not the only, nor necessarily the best open source choice. There are DB2, Firebird, Ingres, and dozens more. Some of them have mature implementations of the features new to 5.1.
DB2 isn't open source. They do have a limited free-to-use version (like Oracle and SQL Server), although DB2 has no connection or storage limits.
MySQL is a very valid choice also, for a variety of reasons that you may not have considered. Or are you saying Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, Slashdot, SABRE, Wikipedia, YouTube are all stupid?
Windows 95 and Macintosh System 7 were valid choices at some point. Was this ever the case with MySQL?
I only use it for stupid things that do not matter at home, like my MythTV, never ever on anything that could be called "production."
I wish applications like that would stop using MySQL (and server-based databases in general), but I don't think there's a good alternative that isn't written in Java that supports multiple simultaneous connections. I like the approach used by the Java embedded H2 database engine with its automatic server mode - you can open the database like a file, but the first client to connect to the database will start up an embedded server and create a lock file that instructs any other clients to connect to the server running on the first client. If the first client closes the database while there are other clients connected, one of the others will take over.
Well, that 945G might run Aero, but probably not well.
Why are you commenting if you haven't used it? Aero runs well enough for regular use on the 945GM; last time I used it (two years ago) the framerate was lower with single-channel memory, but not so much that it was an annoyance. Plus, those who would notice that kind of thing are likely to have two DIMMs installed.
Except the integrated graphics on a bunch of 'Vista Capable' laptops DON'T do DirectX10 or Aero... but if a patch to Vista (or Windows 7) will get Aero working on directX10 on the CPU... a buttload of PCs that CAN'T currently do Aero, now CAN.
How many "Vista Capable" laptops aren't Aero-compatible? The Intel 945GM chipset runs Aero, and it began shipping in January 2006 (a year before Vista came out.) Any Intel Mac meets the hardware requirements to run Aero.
I suppose there could have been some 915GM laptops sold with Vista, or perhaps laptops with the 945GM that had less than 1024MB of RAM.
You're also stuck with 1.5 if you want to use SWT, the graphics toolkit behind Eclipse and some Java-based GUI applications. SWT uses native graphics libraries, and the current version uses Carbon. And since Carbon is 32-bit only, SWT has to be ported to use 64-bit Cocoa.
On the other hand, it's not like Apple has to provide the latest JVM/JDK and I'm not aware of any reason why someone else (even Sun) couldn't release one.
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With one strange exception, I only recall being required to provide an address as a condition of a retail purchase when applying for a service (like credit) or making a transaction that wasn't completed in its entirety at the checkout counter.
One (failed) computer store treated a laptop purchase as a business purchase order because the laptop wasn't listed properly in their point of sale system...
As for ZIP codes - I imagine stores use this to better know their customers. They can use this information to make future decisions on marketing and store expansion.
If they are asking for your ZIP code while making a credit transaction, it's possible they are using this as a factor in credit card authorization.
Many retailers ask for your phone number in some stores at some times for some transactions. This doesn't mean that they do it at all stores at all times for all transactions.
I noticed that a local Best Buy seemed to ask for phone numbers before the store moved to another location.
AFAIK Best Buy does use phone numbers to credit purchases for their rewards program if they do not have the rewards card present.
D-VHS can hold 50 GB on a DF-480 500 m tape - equivalent to T-240, for 4/8/12 hours on NTSC SP/LP/EP. D-VHS did apparently use higher quality tapes, though.
Still, 50 GB is the capability of a dual layer Blu-ray disk.
Xcode is free, but not anyone can write any driver from OS X. For example, the API for writing AirPort-compatible wireless drivers is not available. Third-party wireless drivers are really Ethernet drivers with their own configuration tools.
The development kits for writing Windows software (be it regular applications or drivers) are all available online from Microsoft without paying them anything; no MSDN subscription or Visual Studio licenses required.
It's already been mentioned that Vista includes telnet as an option. A simple search on Google would have shown you how to install the telnet client.
Your computer is old. If you had SSE3, you might be able to run OS X:
OS X supports USB tablets; the USB bus is commonly used to connect digitizers in tablet PCs.
Vista's release video card instability? Perhaps ATI and/or nVidia's drivers were unstable, but I used Intel integrated graphics (with Aero) at Vista's release with no stabilitiy issues.
OS X isn't immune from driver issues in its current state. I have an ATI GPU (HD 2600) in a Mac from August 2007 and I've seen kernel panics caused by the graphics driver as recently as 10.5.4 and graphics corruption in 10.5.5.
Modern desktop systems don't have a whole lot of variation, either. They use a chipset (nVidia, Intel, or AMD) with a CPU (Intel or AMD) and GPU (nVidia, Intel, or AMD/ATI). Lots of functionality is integrated into the chipset; a few drivers would cover power management and graphics for a wide variety of sysetms. Audio is often HD Audio, so one base driver can handle the basic needs of many different codecs. USB, Bluetooth, FireWire, and even SATA (AHCI) all have a common interface that results in one driver supporting hardware from any vendor.
It seems that modern systems vary more in the built-in network chip or wireless card they use. And this seems to be one of the major struggles in getting OS X working on third-party hardware; the interface to write wireless drivers in OS X isn't open, so any third-party wireless drivers must be implemented as Ethernet devices and reimplement wireless configuration & security themselves (much like wireless drivers on Windows 2000 and XP before SP1.)
It wouldn't be. The OS X kernel isn't even 64-bit yet; it's 32-bit with the ability to run 64-bit processes. Snow Leopard will have the first 64-bit kernel.
Did you read my post? I noted that some games aren't always predictable and have maps where players can go anywhere. I also noted that a caching NFS client and a shell script can't have the best information to make useful predictions on what should expire from the cache or what should be preloaded next.
And you've now left the realm of a simple shell script preloading files for a caching NFS client, which was my point to begin with. I'm not sure how you'd be able to determine the state of the game based solely on the currently executing address, unless the game had a separate set of code for each part of the game.
This is a problem that is relevant and has been for some time. Consoles have a certain speed & latency when loading data (from the CD/DVD/BD-ROM) and a certain amount of memory. Have you ever played a console game with long load times, or maybe one that constantly reads from the disc as you play? The problem with streaming games over the Internet isn't so different.
Most games don't use the same data every time they are played. The data that is used consistently throughout the game would probably be cached on the local drive after it's first downloaded.
How can a shell script (which would run separately from a game) know what area the player will go to next (in an open ended game)? How can a NFS client know which files will be used later in the game (such as the files for the outdoor map after the player has entered a large building)? How can a NFS client know which files will never be used again during this game (such as a building that the player destroys and could never enter)? How can a shell script predict that a player will probably go to a certain place after starting a certain mission and know to preload the cutscenes for this mission?
Because an NFS client knows exactly what file will be read next before it's opened, right?
Nonsense. Windows overhead doesn't "include" IE; the shell uses the IE rendering engine. If you run Firefox in Linux, you've got one copy of the Firefox rendering engine loaded and you're using that copy of it in Firefox. If you run IE, you've got one copy of rendering engine loaded and both the shell (explorer.exe) and Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) use it.
The only potential advantage here is that the rendering engine might already be in physical memory when you start IE.
I suppose you could possibly "waste" some memory in the Linux scenario if the UI had loaded a HTML rendering engine other than the one your browser used. But it would just get paged out if you ran out of memory...
The article mentions that the laptop uses the PM965, which is the GPU-less mobile chipset - they probably mean GM965. The GM965 isn't the weakest Intel GPU than can run Aero, either. Aero runs on the Intel 945-series GPUs and above. The 915 series has specific hardware limitations that prevent it from running Aero.
Aero on integrated graphics does use a lot of memory bandwidth. I've seen degraded Aero framerates on Intel GPUs using single channel memory.
The chip itself can't "push any work onto the CPU". The driver could, but there is no evidence of the Intel graphics driver using significantly higher CPU than than competitors' drivers while running Aero. At any rate, there shouldn't be a significant hit in CPU time or memory transfers when nothing is changing on the screen..
Sometimes, we stop using old hardware for a reason. With modern virtualization software, using old PCs for servers doesn't make a whole lot of sense. One could use ten P3 systems @ 700 W avg. use total or two Core 2 systems running virtualization software at 300 W. avg. The Core 2 systems would be faster, more reliable, easier to manage, more capable... and possibly cheaper.
What are the major deficincies in the Windows USB stack?
Neither does Windows. But they are quite useful if you have an nVidia or ATI GPU on either operating system.
Recent ALSA HD Audio drivers don't work out of the box on my system: the device is recognized, but I hear nothing. I had better luck using OSS (not part of any standard distribution) and RHEL 5 (which uses an old version of ALSA): both work through the speakers, but the headphone jack does nothing. Windows's built-in HD Audio drivers also work through the speakers only.
But Linux distributions aren't competing with Windows alone. They are competiting with Windows and third-party software. And Linux distributions often need third-party software to be fully useful. (I, for one, enjoy 3D acceleration and MP3 playback capability.)
Certain Linux distributions might have the best built-in full disk encryption. But then again, among modern desktop operating systems, only certain versions of Vista and certain recent Linux distributions have built-in full disk encryption. Third-party Windows FDE implementations are available, including open-source TrueCrypt.
The best open-source desktop virtualization software is VirtualBox. Any Linux distribution including VirutalBox thus automatically has the best built-in desktop virtualization. (Note that Windows and OS X do not include built-in desktop virtualization). But the same application is available for OS X and Windows. Still, VirtualBox is lacking some useful features in comparison to products from VMware and Parallels.
I am puzzled as to why SELinux matters on a desktop system.
"Most apps run in a browser window?" There are many web applications out there, yet I find myself using real applications when they are available.
VLC? Most Linux distributions won't even ship a MP3 decoder! You need third party software to effectively support the popular audio & video formats on any recent desktop OS.
According to this page last updated in 2007, the driver that provides a common API for wireless devices appears to be poorly documented and closed source.
Ralink's USB wireless driver doesn't show up as AirPort device either. It reminds me of wifi in the pre-Windows XP SP1/SP2 days; there was no standard API for wireless device management, so wireless devices were implemented as Ethernet devices with vendor-specific setup utilities.
Results could be flawed without being faked or even intentionally misleading. For example, one database engine might be doing additional integrity or validity checks that another isn't.
In one application I tested, MySQL was very fast for inserts - but it also accepted invalid data that Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL rejected.
It's important to note that MySQL does have GUI tools. It seems like phpMyAdmin is one of the more popular ones. Back when I actually wanted to use MySQL, it was the only useful open source one I could find. It was convenient when running a standalone MySQL server at a remote location connected via a relatively slow link. But on a LAN, I'd much prefer a real application.
I like MS's SQL Server management tools. The 2005 tools were a bit of a disappointment at first when compared to the 2000 ones; they were rewritten in .NET and were noticeably slower on the hardware I was using at the time. But the rewritten tools had a better interface and more features.
I recently used Oracle's SQL Developer for the first time. It's written in Java and works fairly well (although it does use Swing). It's comparable in features to SQL Server's management tools.
When trying to figure things out on my own, I found MySQL and SQL Server to be easier to use than Oracle or PostgreSQL. Having worked with MySQL and SQL Server first, I could be biased.
PostgreSQL's pg_hba.conf was a source of confusion at first. And the Oracle TNS/SID thing seemed confusing in comparison to the server:port+username+password+database required to connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server.
Of course, you only need to learn how to configure & connect to a database once.
The dev kit only runs on Intel systems running OS X. Other systems also have free development kits that run on a greater variety of systems, and they don't even require you to pay any money to the smartphone vendor to get permission to run your own code on your own phone. Nor do they prohibit you from using third-party compilers, interpreters, etc.
And since other vendors don't exclusively control the software distribution method for their devices, you can write whatever you want without fear of it being rejected.
The iPhone is only a godsend if you want to do what Apple wants you to do.
False. Two minutes of research would have produced some useful facts. Methamphetamine is legal with prescription (in the United States, it's in Schedule II along with methylphenidate and amphetamine, commonly marketed as Ritalin and Adderall.) I don't know if any pharmacies stock it, but it is definitely available via prescription and through special order.
Methamphetamine isn't prescribed very often, but its less powerful cousins (amphetamine and methylphenidate) are stocked at pharmacies and prescribed to millions. And some of those legitimate prescriptions are diverted - sometimes for recreational, sometimes to enhance performance.
To be fair, nearly 60% of highway funding comes directly from fees & taxes paid by road users. Compare this to the ~34% of public transportation operating costs funded by passenger fares. This is a case where it's *easy* to directly charge the appropriate costs to those who use public transportation, since users already pay the operator who provides the service.
Registration & fuel tax money might not go to where each user uses the roads the most - one might register a vehicle or purchase fuel in a different area than where it is driven the most.
DB2 isn't open source. They do have a limited free-to-use version (like Oracle and SQL Server), although DB2 has no connection or storage limits.
Windows 95 and Macintosh System 7 were valid choices at some point. Was this ever the case with MySQL?
I wish applications like that would stop using MySQL (and server-based databases in general), but I don't think there's a good alternative that isn't written in Java that supports multiple simultaneous connections. I like the approach used by the Java embedded H2 database engine with its automatic server mode - you can open the database like a file, but the first client to connect to the database will start up an embedded server and create a lock file that instructs any other clients to connect to the server running on the first client. If the first client closes the database while there are other clients connected, one of the others will take over.
Why are you commenting if you haven't used it? Aero runs well enough for regular use on the 945GM; last time I used it (two years ago) the framerate was lower with single-channel memory, but not so much that it was an annoyance. Plus, those who would notice that kind of thing are likely to have two DIMMs installed.
Aero does not require DirectX 10; it only needs DirectX 9 with the right features, enough memory, and a suitable driver.
How many "Vista Capable" laptops aren't Aero-compatible? The Intel 945GM chipset runs Aero, and it began shipping in January 2006 (a year before Vista came out.) Any Intel Mac meets the hardware requirements to run Aero.
I suppose there could have been some 915GM laptops sold with Vista, or perhaps laptops with the 945GM that had less than 1024MB of RAM.
You're also stuck with 1.5 if you want to use SWT, the graphics toolkit behind Eclipse and some Java-based GUI applications. SWT uses native graphics libraries, and the current version uses Carbon. And since Carbon is 32-bit only, SWT has to be ported to use 64-bit Cocoa.
On the other hand, it's not like Apple has to provide the latest JVM/JDK and I'm not aware of any reason why someone else (even Sun) couldn't release one.