Or because you don't have anywhere suitable to receive packages. For example i'm not usually at my flat during the daytime and while I could possiblly receive personal packages at uni I'd be worried about them losing them. So if I want a package I generally end up getting it deliverered to my parents house which means uneless I make a special trip I won't get it until next weekend.
My experiance is that overall the big retailers are pretty competitive with online on the big products like TVs. It's the accessories and/or the extended warranties where they sting you. I know a place that is reasonablly local where I can pick up cables cheap but I have to decide if it's worth making the trip there or not VS paying the extra to pick it up more locally.
I find at least from rapid and farnell I can pick up short ethernet cables for similar prices to what it would cost for a pair of properly documented (I would not buy any RJ series connector that does not say whether it is inteded for solid or stranded cables, there is a difference between connectors for solid cable and ones for stranded cable) connectors. Add in the cost of the cable for doing it myself and the wastage from misterminations it just doesn't make sense at the shorter lengths. The only times I make my own ethernet cables is where I either need a long run or I need a very specific length (yes there are situations where 0.5m just isn't short enough to be conviniant, especailly when casing up equipment) or when I need a cable right now of a length I don't have handy.
And RJ connectors were designed to be terminated with cheap and simple tooling. Afaict HDMI connectors were simply not designed to be field terminated.
They are either price fixing or just individually deciding to rip people off.
It's a simple formula among, they are competitive on the headline prices to get people in the store then while they have them in the store they rip them off on the extras. Whether those extras be cables or extended warranties.
I have managed to find a place I can get cables at reasonable prices over the counter but since I'm not in america that probablly doesn't help you much. My only hint would be see if you can find a retailer that primerally sells online but also has a sales counter somewhere near you.
I remember last time I saw an ethernet cable with the pairs terminated in the obvious way (each pair terminated on two adjacent terminals) and not the correct way (one pair in the middle, one straddling the middle and then a pair on each side) and even with small packets the packet loss was about 75% at 100 megabit. The guy who made it was wondering why it didn't work right.
Your symptoms sound more like a crosstalk problem or a poor termination of some of the pairs then a wiring order error.
The problem is for a home/SMB user (who can't/won't pay for proffessional IT to make the descisions) the only real alternative would be to have those descisions made for you by a coporate overlord like sony, MS or apple.
Experiance from smartphones and games consoles shows that when corportate overlords make those kind of descisions they don't always have their users best interests at heart.
Applications' registry entries are stored in a separate file in the user's profile directory.
The user portion of the registry has always been a seperate file from the system portions even on 9x and i'm pretty sure that even 9x supported multiple user profiles each with their own registry file. Whether apps use HKCU or HKLM or try HKLM first and fall back to HKCU is up to the design of the original appl.
Re:The question nobody wants to ask....
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
the thing is it's not that much shorter than
abs(a-b) < eps
Is it really worth adding another trinary operator to knock about three characters off an "approximately equals" operation?
hmm, at least from the wikipedia article it doesn't appear to have the killer feature of zfs which is the ability to provide "better than raid" protection for your data though keeping both checksums and multiple copies of the data on different drives.
My understanding is that while bitcoin uses cryptography to verify who made a transaction it uses a P2P network to verify the order that transactions happened in (which is needed to stop people spending their coins twice). If that P2P network can be sufficiantly fragmented then the system would fall apart as noone would know which branch of a fork in the transaction chain was the "legitimate" one.
Assuming a pidgion can carry a micro SD card and can make one flight each way a day. 32*8/24/60/60 = 2.96 megabits per second. That already compares favourablly to longer ADSL lines.
Use a few more pigeons, make them do more flights in a day or tape more than one microsd card to them and you can quite easilly get bandwidths better than most adsl lines.
Seriously while that is a particularly egregious example this is how these stores make their money. Being price competitive with the internet in general is a losing strategy for a retailer which has much higher overheads than an online vendor (slower stock turnover, harder to control theft, higher real estate costs etc). In US states with sales tax things are even worse due to sales tax loopholes*. However if the vendors weren't price comptitive on the big ticket items that they wouldn't get any customers.
So what they do is make the headline price for the big ticket items competitive but jack up the overall transaction cost by pressuring people into buying overpriced extras such as cables and extended warranties.
Some would consider it abuse of the customers but consider that many customers also "abuse" the retailers by using their showrooms to comparison shop while making actual purchases online.
* Yes I know in many states there is a "use tax" but i've also heard that in at least some of them you have the option of paying an "estimated" value for that which makes the marginal tax on any extra out of state purchases essentiall zero.
Bingo, if you are a professional installer working in a medium-large company or doing installation work on a contract basis for many companys then you can afford equipment to properly test all your cables.
OTOH if you are the resident geek wiring things up for their own home or small buisness you probably can't justify a proper tester. Cheap testers are not going to give you the kind of reliable indication your $1K tester did.
1: Unlike the articles author I wouldn't worry too much about the initial ram beyond making sure it's at least 3GB (should be standard on most machines now) but I would worry about the max supported ram and would not buy any machine where it was less than 8GB. A releated point is to check whether windows is 32-bit or 64-bit and what the manufacturers policies are about switching from one to the other (without buying a whole new copy of windows). 2: try to get the latest generation. Generally with the way intel is doing their pricing at the moment the lastest gen offers the best bang for buck and is also likely to have the highest ram support (see point one) and is most likely to have support for future operating systems. 3: if buying a portable then the difficult to measure stuff like build quality and form factor are just as important if not more so than the headline specs.
Re:The question nobody wants to ask....
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
why couldn't it be done with a ternary operator?
It could but imo that wouldn't be all that much of an improvement over writing abs(a-b) tolerance (especially if your language makes abs an operator rather than a function).
Re:The question nobody wants to ask....
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The big problem with an approximately equals for floats operator is that it provides no way for the user to specify the acceptable margin of error. So the language designer has to guess a value that they thing is "big enough" to avoid (possibly heavily compounded) rounding errors while not being so big as to cause unwanted matches. IMO that kind of judgement call should be something consciously made by the programmer (and they should be having the releated thought of "should I really be using a floating point type here at all" not something hardcoded into the language.
Similarly for strings "approximately equals" sounds like a nice idea but it's very hard to define in a robust way. Again probablly not something that should be in the core of a langauge but something provided by a library that can give options on what exactly constitutes approximately equals.
Finally using === to signify approximately equals seems like a bad idea given that many dynamic languages are using it for something closer to "exactly equals".
The real problem is that they are gathering a load of data that was not previously gathered. "Smart" meters are the tool that let them do this. That data is legitimately useful to the utilities both to track consumption trends and to implement charging structures that more realisitically reflect the cost of electricity. However it can also reveals when people are active in the house VS when they are asleep or out. Some would consider such data far more sensitive than occasional readings of total usage, information that many homeowners would legitimately rather was not widely available.
This isn't really so much a technical problem as a social one, societies need to decide how much data it is acceptable for utilities to collect, how they may use that data and what steps they must take to protect it. The trouble is in some areas either smartmeters are getting deployed before the legislature have considered the issues or the legislature are too in the pockets of big buisness to care about the public that elected them.
It's free in the sense that you can download a fully functional copy from the developers website. You are supposed to register it after a trial period but the devs don't actually make any significant attempt to enforce that.
OTOH remember that not all of those are independent companies,the first two in your list are subsidaries of massive media conglomorates, the third appears to be independent with the fourth being part of a major financial services company.
If sony and universal decide the google threat is not just to their music operations but to their media operations as a whole then they could probablly bring a LOT more force to bear on the subject.
Ip addresses aren't a suitable replacement because there is no gaurantee of their persistance and not every system even has one. Plus they aren't really any easier to remember the phone numbers.
A user@hostname system like with email, skype and in principle* SIP could work for PC to PC calling but isn't very practical for anything involving a standalone phone with a normal phone keypad.
* in practice everyone seems to set up dialplans to use SIP with standard phone numbers and locally defined internal numbers
The worse news is that thanks to it's design it's fragile arround NAT. The even worse news is that at least in my experiance whenever you have one sided conversations or similar issues your provider will blame your NAT even though it worked fine a week ago with the same setup on your end.
Or maybe the provider I was with just sucked;)
IAX is a much more sensible design for the realities of the modern internet, servers start off by routing the call completely. The server can step out of routing the call if it wants to but the protocol is designed to verify that a direct connection is possible before stepping out. Unfortunately I think asterisk is the only implementation.
If you are laying new fiber from scratch I would agree laying plenty of spare is a good idea given that the ammount we can cram down one fiber seems to be platauing somewhat (it hasn't completely stopped increasing but I'm pretty sure that 40/100 gigabit is the first time a new speed of ethernet has been unable to run down a single fiber at release)
OTOH a lot of places will be using fiber layed years ago. Back in the days when gigabit (which can easilly run on one fiber pair) was the new hotness even four pairs probablly seemed like plenty of spare. How many cabinets actually have 10 fiber pairs running to them?
Also even if you do have the fiber do you really want to pay for twice as many optical transcievers as you need.
100Gb makes more sense overall.
100Gb makes sense if you belive that your requirements for a link will pass 40 gigabit per second BEFORE a technology comes out at a reasonable (relatively) cost that can do more than 10 gigabits/second/fiber.
If you post-charge then you have the issue of high fee percentages for those customers who didn't buy much that year. You also have all the costs of actually getting people to pay (This is especially true for anyone who relies on a third party payment gateway and hence can't easilly collect credit card details first and charge them later)
AIUI the real issue is that 40 and 100 gigabit ethernet is just a low level (and as I understand it more efficient than packet level link aggregation techniques) system for aggregating 10 gigabit links. If you want 40 gigabit you need 4 fiber pairs (or 4 wavelengths in a WDM system), if you want 100 gigabit you need 10 fiber pairs (or 10 wavelengths in a WDM system).
40G/100G is the first time in the history of ethernet that the top speed hasn't been able to be run through a single fiber transceiver. Do you really want to be using up 10 fiber pairs when 4 would be sufficient?
Internally, though, you should just use POSIX time, which is universal and mostly easy to handle
It is not possible to reliablly convert a future time from local time to universal time reliablly because you don't know what definition of local time will be in force. Therefore for all future dates (e.g. a scheduling application) you should really be storing the originally requested time and timezone (and whenever your timezone data changes you should re-run validation to check no new conflicts have been introduced). Not doing this will cause user confusion.
Also note that POSIX time has a leap second issue. It is supposed to be tied to UTC which has leap seconds but posix time has no way of representing those so you get some kind of time jump or distortion arround them. This may be important if you need to accurately and reliablly handle times iarround midnight UTC (not sure what that maps to in american local time)
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Or because you don't have anywhere suitable to receive packages. For example i'm not usually at my flat during the daytime and while I could possiblly receive personal packages at uni I'd be worried about them losing them. So if I want a package I generally end up getting it deliverered to my parents house which means uneless I make a special trip I won't get it until next weekend.
My experiance is that overall the big retailers are pretty competitive with online on the big products like TVs. It's the accessories and/or the extended warranties where they sting you. I know a place that is reasonablly local where I can pick up cables cheap but I have to decide if it's worth making the trip there or not VS paying the extra to pick it up more locally.
I find at least from rapid and farnell I can pick up short ethernet cables for similar prices to what it would cost for a pair of properly documented (I would not buy any RJ series connector that does not say whether it is inteded for solid or stranded cables, there is a difference between connectors for solid cable and ones for stranded cable) connectors. Add in the cost of the cable for doing it myself and the wastage from misterminations it just doesn't make sense at the shorter lengths. The only times I make my own ethernet cables is where I either need a long run or I need a very specific length (yes there are situations where 0.5m just isn't short enough to be conviniant, especailly when casing up equipment) or when I need a cable right now of a length I don't have handy.
And RJ connectors were designed to be terminated with cheap and simple tooling. Afaict HDMI connectors were simply not designed to be field terminated.
They are either price fixing or just individually deciding to rip people off.
It's a simple formula among, they are competitive on the headline prices to get people in the store then while they have them in the store they rip them off on the extras. Whether those extras be cables or extended warranties.
I have managed to find a place I can get cables at reasonable prices over the counter but since I'm not in america that probablly doesn't help you much. My only hint would be see if you can find a retailer that primerally sells online but also has a sales counter somewhere near you.
I remember last time I saw an ethernet cable with the pairs terminated in the obvious way (each pair terminated on two adjacent terminals) and not the correct way (one pair in the middle, one straddling the middle and then a pair on each side) and even with small packets the packet loss was about 75% at 100 megabit. The guy who made it was wondering why it didn't work right.
Your symptoms sound more like a crosstalk problem or a poor termination of some of the pairs then a wiring order error.
The problem is for a home/SMB user (who can't/won't pay for proffessional IT to make the descisions) the only real alternative would be to have those descisions made for you by a coporate overlord like sony, MS or apple.
Experiance from smartphones and games consoles shows that when corportate overlords make those kind of descisions they don't always have their users best interests at heart.
Applications' registry entries are stored in a separate file in the user's profile directory.
The user portion of the registry has always been a seperate file from the system portions even on 9x and i'm pretty sure that even 9x supported multiple user profiles each with their own registry file. Whether apps use HKCU or HKLM or try HKLM first and fall back to HKCU is up to the design of the original appl.
the thing is it's not that much shorter than
abs(a-b) < eps
Is it really worth adding another trinary operator to knock about three characters off an "approximately equals" operation?
You can easily turn it off or even change what url it requests.
If easy is defined as either finding some obscure MS documentation or searching the registry.......
hmm, at least from the wikipedia article it doesn't appear to have the killer feature of zfs which is the ability to provide "better than raid" protection for your data though keeping both checksums and multiple copies of the data on different drives.
My understanding is that while bitcoin uses cryptography to verify who made a transaction it uses a P2P network to verify the order that transactions happened in (which is needed to stop people spending their coins twice). If that P2P network can be sufficiantly fragmented then the system would fall apart as noone would know which branch of a fork in the transaction chain was the "legitimate" one.
Am I wrong?
MMM you can get micro SD cards at 32 GB per day
Assuming a pidgion can carry a micro SD card and can make one flight each way a day. 32*8/24/60/60 = 2.96 megabits per second. That already compares favourablly to longer ADSL lines.
Use a few more pigeons, make them do more flights in a day or tape more than one microsd card to them and you can quite easilly get bandwidths better than most adsl lines.
OFC the latency sucks
because some sucker will pay it :/
Seriously while that is a particularly egregious example this is how these stores make their money. Being price competitive with the internet in general is a losing strategy for a retailer which has much higher overheads than an online vendor (slower stock turnover, harder to control theft, higher real estate costs etc). In US states with sales tax things are even worse due to sales tax loopholes*. However if the vendors weren't price comptitive on the big ticket items that they wouldn't get any customers.
So what they do is make the headline price for the big ticket items competitive but jack up the overall transaction cost by pressuring people into buying overpriced extras such as cables and extended warranties.
Some would consider it abuse of the customers but consider that many customers also "abuse" the retailers by using their showrooms to comparison shop while making actual purchases online.
* Yes I know in many states there is a "use tax" but i've also heard that in at least some of them you have the option of paying an "estimated" value for that which makes the marginal tax on any extra out of state purchases essentiall zero.
But then again, I used a $1k cable tester
Bingo, if you are a professional installer working in a medium-large company or doing installation work on a contract basis for many companys then you can afford equipment to properly test all your cables.
OTOH if you are the resident geek wiring things up for their own home or small buisness you probably can't justify a proper tester. Cheap testers are not going to give you the kind of reliable indication your $1K tester did.
On computer my rules would be
1: Unlike the articles author I wouldn't worry too much about the initial ram beyond making sure it's at least 3GB (should be standard on most machines now) but I would worry about the max supported ram and would not buy any machine where it was less than 8GB. A releated point is to check whether windows is 32-bit or 64-bit and what the manufacturers policies are about switching from one to the other (without buying a whole new copy of windows).
2: try to get the latest generation. Generally with the way intel is doing their pricing at the moment the lastest gen offers the best bang for buck and is also likely to have the highest ram support (see point one) and is most likely to have support for future operating systems.
3: if buying a portable then the difficult to measure stuff like build quality and form factor are just as important if not more so than the headline specs.
why couldn't it be done with a ternary operator?
It could but imo that wouldn't be all that much of an improvement over writing abs(a-b) tolerance (especially if your language makes abs an operator rather than a function).
The big problem with an approximately equals for floats operator is that it provides no way for the user to specify the acceptable margin of error. So the language designer has to guess a value that they thing is "big enough" to avoid (possibly heavily compounded) rounding errors while not being so big as to cause unwanted matches. IMO that kind of judgement call should be something consciously made by the programmer (and they should be having the releated thought of "should I really be using a floating point type here at all" not something hardcoded into the language.
Similarly for strings "approximately equals" sounds like a nice idea but it's very hard to define in a robust way. Again probablly not something that should be in the core of a langauge but something provided by a library that can give options on what exactly constitutes approximately equals.
Finally using === to signify approximately equals seems like a bad idea given that many dynamic languages are using it for something closer to "exactly equals".
The real problem is that they are gathering a load of data that was not previously gathered. "Smart" meters are the tool that let them do this. That data is legitimately useful to the utilities both to track consumption trends and to implement charging structures that more realisitically reflect the cost of electricity. However it can also reveals when people are active in the house VS when they are asleep or out. Some would consider such data far more sensitive than occasional readings of total usage, information that many homeowners would legitimately rather was not widely available.
This isn't really so much a technical problem as a social one, societies need to decide how much data it is acceptable for utilities to collect, how they may use that data and what steps they must take to protect it. The trouble is in some areas either smartmeters are getting deployed before the legislature have considered the issues or the legislature are too in the pockets of big buisness to care about the public that elected them.
Except Winrar isn't free (in any sense).
It's free in the sense that you can download a fully functional copy from the developers website. You are supposed to register it after a trial period but the devs don't actually make any significant attempt to enforce that.
OTOH remember that not all of those are independent companies,the first two in your list are subsidaries of massive media conglomorates, the third appears to be independent with the fourth being part of a major financial services company.
If sony and universal decide the google threat is not just to their music operations but to their media operations as a whole then they could probablly bring a LOT more force to bear on the subject.
Ip addresses aren't a suitable replacement because there is no gaurantee of their persistance and not every system even has one. Plus they aren't really any easier to remember the phone numbers.
A user@hostname system like with email, skype and in principle* SIP could work for PC to PC calling but isn't very practical for anything involving a standalone phone with a normal phone keypad.
* in practice everyone seems to set up dialplans to use SIP with standard phone numbers and locally defined internal numbers
The worse news is that thanks to it's design it's fragile arround NAT. The even worse news is that at least in my experiance whenever you have one sided conversations or similar issues your provider will blame your NAT even though it worked fine a week ago with the same setup on your end.
Or maybe the provider I was with just sucked ;)
IAX is a much more sensible design for the realities of the modern internet, servers start off by routing the call completely. The server can step out of routing the call if it wants to but the protocol is designed to verify that a direct connection is possible before stepping out. Unfortunately I think asterisk is the only implementation.
If you are laying new fiber from scratch I would agree laying plenty of spare is a good idea given that the ammount we can cram down one fiber seems to be platauing somewhat (it hasn't completely stopped increasing but I'm pretty sure that 40/100 gigabit is the first time a new speed of ethernet has been unable to run down a single fiber at release)
OTOH a lot of places will be using fiber layed years ago. Back in the days when gigabit (which can easilly run on one fiber pair) was the new hotness even four pairs probablly seemed like plenty of spare. How many cabinets actually have 10 fiber pairs running to them?
Also even if you do have the fiber do you really want to pay for twice as many optical transcievers as you need.
100Gb makes more sense overall.
100Gb makes sense if you belive that your requirements for a link will pass 40 gigabit per second BEFORE a technology comes out at a reasonable (relatively) cost that can do more than 10 gigabits/second/fiber.
If you post-charge then you have the issue of high fee percentages for those customers who didn't buy much that year. You also have all the costs of actually getting people to pay (This is especially true for anyone who relies on a third party payment gateway and hence can't easilly collect credit card details first and charge them later)
AIUI the real issue is that 40 and 100 gigabit ethernet is just a low level (and as I understand it more efficient than packet level link aggregation techniques) system for aggregating 10 gigabit links. If you want 40 gigabit you need 4 fiber pairs (or 4 wavelengths in a WDM system), if you want 100 gigabit you need 10 fiber pairs (or 10 wavelengths in a WDM system).
40G/100G is the first time in the history of ethernet that the top speed hasn't been able to be run through a single fiber transceiver. Do you really want to be using up 10 fiber pairs when 4 would be sufficient?
Internally, though, you should just use POSIX time, which is universal and mostly easy to handle
It is not possible to reliablly convert a future time from local time to universal time reliablly because you don't know what definition of local time will be in force. Therefore for all future dates (e.g. a scheduling application) you should really be storing the originally requested time and timezone (and whenever your timezone data changes you should re-run validation to check no new conflicts have been introduced). Not doing this will cause user confusion.
Also note that POSIX time has a leap second issue. It is supposed to be tied to UTC which has leap seconds but posix time has no way of representing those so you get some kind of time jump or distortion arround them. This may be important if you need to accurately and reliablly handle times iarround midnight UTC (not sure what that maps to in american local time)