[quote]slap them on your computer with an HDMI connector, and have a giant monitor for your computer[/quote] I can see the attraction for things like presentations and gaming but as a general desktop monitor it's IMO pretty pointless to go over 22 inch or so unless you also increase the resoloution beyond 1920x1080. TVs are pretty much all 1920x1080 the only screens much beyond that are very expensive high end monitors.
No isn't a "market" at all at least not in the conventional sense, MS destroyed that when they decided to give away internet explorer. There is competition but only between entities that for whatever reason can afford to give their browser away for free. Yes IE was better than the alternatives for a while but we will never know how much of that was down to incompetence at the competitors and how much was down to MS cutting off their competitors air supply and thereby forcing them to scramble for alternative revenue streams.
Thankfully there are now multiple entities out there that can afford to give decent* browsers away for free. The Mozilla project (an opensource project which afaict at least intially was largely voulenteer driven though now they get a substantial amount of money from google) finally managed to sort out the mess of source that netscape dumped and make a decent browser. Some time later apple took the kde guys stuff and enhanced and popularised it and then google took apples stuff and further enhanced and popularised it. Opera also gave up on collecting the few crumbs they could get from desktop users and made their desktop browser free for the benefit of their embedded offerings.
* decent is of course relative, IE6 is regarded as shit now but afaict it compared favourably to other browsers arround at the time of it's release.
hmm, when I got to alienwares US website it seems to offer two 17 inch base models at $1799 and $1999 . Maxing stuff out can easilly take the price over $4K.
As best I can tell, you can get USB connectors that will fill exactly the same board holes as eSATAp connectors, just not making contact with the SATA signal lines
Of course how much that helps depends on which ports they chose to use for internal functionality and which for the eSATAp port.
To send an instrument to mars you have to make your instruments tough enough to survive going to mars and have a VERY high chance of working. That means they will likely be a long way from state of the art at the time the mission is planned and even further behind by the time they actually make it to mars. Then a few years later when you want readings from newer better equipment you have to start from scratch.
With a sample return mission you can analyse with the latest equipment and provided you bring back a sufficiant quantity you can keep analysing for many years with new equipment.
Best of all, Debian is specifically designed to allow upgrading-in-place, which is where Ubuntu has been more rocky. Afaict that is a symptom of ubuntu allowing far less time for QA (debian spends as long in freeze as ubuntu spends on a whole release cycle) not any fundamental design difference (after all ubuntu is based on debian).
MS stages the release of their service packs. IIRC some special partners get it first, then MSDN and technet subscribers get it. Then it goes on the download center and finally it goes on windows update. I think within windows update the release is gradual too though i'm not sure on that.
Theoretically this would allow them to pull a service pack before most users get their hands on it but i've never heard of that actually happening (though IIRC windows update DOES check some preconditions before handing out service packs). At the very least it means their support has a chance to figure out what the common problems are before the end lusers get their hands on it.
AIUI while itanium was a failure on the desktop and windows/linux server intel was successful in pulling a number of vendors (HP being the best known in the west) into using it for their unix and/or mainframe systems and sales for that purpose provide Intel with enough revenue to justify keeping it alive.
Well there are really two choices for desktop CPUs, AMD and Intel.
AMDs next gen of CPUs (bulldozer) will apparently not work in existing boards. Sandy bridge is pretty much ruled out (unless you are a masochist) by the recall. So whichever side of the fence you go for right now you will most likely be buying into a dying socket.
I think your calendar software simply scheduled the events for the specified number of seconds in the future,
And therin lies the problem, the user didn't ask it to schedule it for a specified number of seconds in the future, they asked (implicitly) for it to be scheduled at a given local time. The programmer assumed incorrectly that he could reliablly convert a future time from local time to UTC.
To solve this "problem" the program would need to retroactively alter existing timestamps when tzdata changed
That would be one way to do it but it seems like a broken one to me. The correct fix would be to save both a locale and a time when setting an alarm (and if the two ends of a conference call are being scheduled by the same system it should enforce that both are scheduled in the same locale). Since in most places the common case would be scheduling somethign in your local time that should be the default. Conversion to UTC should only be done for comparison purposes and any conversions should be redone and conflicts rechecked if/when the timezone data changes.
It's not rocket science to do right but because most large and economically significant countries have relatively stable timezone data it often gets dealt with improperly, particually when moving data between systems.
The big area where apple has been a pain is display connectors. In the last decade they have used the following
VGA: standard DVI: standard ADC: apple proprietary version of DVI that carried power and USB as well as the digital signals Mini VGA: apple proprietary Mini DVI: apple proprietary Micro DVI: apple propietary Mini Displayport: initially apple proprietary but later standardised
Using 7 different display connectors in one decade seems rather excessive to me. Only time will tell whether they stick with mini displayport or continue to jump arround all over the place.
Firewire has also become a bit of a mess connector wise though that is only partiatlly apples fault. There wasn't much they could do to stop sony introducing the small unpowered connector but i'm pretty sure they could have made the 800 connector backwards compatible like they USB guys did when they introduced USB 3.
While IIRC they did refuse to license some interfaces to nvidia that was IMO a side issue. You wouldn't want to hang a GPU off DMI anyway and mobile chips don't have QPI.
With the laptop and mainstream desktop i series chips Intel got rid of the northbridge and moved it's functionality into the CPU package (with the top end i series stuff intel moved the memory controller into the CPU but kept the fast IO on a separate chip). This essentially reduced the graphics choices to either use what is built into the CPU (if any, not all i series chips have integrated graphics) or use a discrete PCIe graphics solution with it's own memory (which adds cost, size and power consuption).
AS I understand it (unfortunately finding good comparative benchmarks seems very hard) with sandy bridge the graphics integrated in the CPU have finally caught up with what nvidia integrates in their chipsets for core 2 processors.
Not all of the 9xx extreme chips are 6-core and not all the 6-core 9xx chips are extreme.
As for the xeons there are 8-core ones in the 75xx line but the entire line has very low clockspeeds compared to the 56xx line which cancel out the extra two cores so afaict the only reason to buy it is a requirement for more than two sockets or insane ammounts of ram.
which is almost nothing more than word processing and internet meh, you probablly wouldn't want to video edit on one (though people used to do so on less) and you won't run the latest 3D games but to say they are capable of "almost nothing more than word processing and internet" is dramatically understating their capabilities.
The main problem with most netbooks IMO is the screen resolution. I was really really disappointed when the 10 inch machines came out and the screen resolution was no better than the 9 inch ones and in particular was still below the 1024x768 that many app developers assume as a minimum. 12 inch netbooks don't appeal either since I can get a proper laptop with a C2D that is about the same size. I did eventually manage to get a 10 inch machine with a decent screen resolution but it was far from cheap.
Generally DRM seems to be defined as a system designed to let a user view content under certain conditions but limits what the user can do with that content. Clearly to let the user view the content the software must have the information (including any appropriate keys) needed to decrypt the content. However it must not let the user get that information or they could feed it into another program which would decrypt the content and let them do whatever they like with it.
This is why DRM is fundamentally incompatible with truely open standards. If someone has the information needed to write a player they also have the information needed to write a DRM stripper.
There is no law preventing mozilla buying a H.264 license and using it in official builds of firefox.
The problem is that afaict there is no way of getting a license that would also apply to third party derivitives of firefox so for firefox to support h.264 they would have to screw the community that supports them.
For low end laptops the priorities are cost and "headline specs" (aka what the salesman uses to sell the machine). The premium lines add less obvious specs like size, weight, appearance, robustness etc to the list of important things.
Ease of teardown and interchangability of components are somwhere a long way down the list.
The response to an individual call may not be but the availiable resources are. At a high level someone will have to decide what resources to spend the money available for search and rescue on. Someone else will have to decide how best to deploy those resources to the calls that are coming in at any moment.
If you know where the mayday is then you just send a lifeboat and/or helicopter straight there. I doubt these drones will change that.
The problem is when you have a report of someone missing and/or a mayday from someone who is unable to provide their own location. You then have to search a potentially huge area to try and find them. Afaict there simply aren't the resources (at least here in the UK) to dispatch more than one or two search and rescue helicopters to an incident. If drones are cheaper than helicopters that means you can put more eyes (alibiet robotic ones) in the sky and hopefully get a position fix faster.
Bingo which is IMO the scariest thing about DRM. The prospect of the general purpose computer being gradually replaced by locked down boxes that answer to their corporate masters not their users. I hope this is a battle we will win but fear it is one we will lose.
The real issue here is that DRM and truly open standards are fundamentally incompatible. What that means is that if DRM is implemented for HTML5 video either FOSS browsers will be locked out or the DRM will be exceedingly weak (see PDF protection for an example of a scheme that falls into the latter category)/
GIF had a patent which definitely covered encoding. Unisys claimed it also covered decoding, others claimed it didn't, I don't think that claim was ever tested in court.
Baseline JPEG was intended to be patent free (JPEG also had an arithmetic coding option that gave slightly better results than huffman coding but it had known patent issues and so was not made part of the baseline standard), there were unfortunately a few dubious patents which popped just before they expired (it seems the patent holders were making a last ditch attempt to get some revenue out of dubious patents).
With the way the patent system works it's practically impossible to say for sure whether something violates a patent you can only say whether it is a known problem or not.
IIRC the CRC hashes are only designed to protect against accidental changes while secure hashes are designed to protect against both accidental and malicious changes. This makes them more suited to distributed systems where not every participant is trustworthy.
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[quote]slap them on your computer with an HDMI connector, and have a giant monitor for your computer[/quote]
I can see the attraction for things like presentations and gaming but as a general desktop monitor it's IMO pretty pointless to go over 22 inch or so unless you also increase the resoloution beyond 1920x1080. TVs are pretty much all 1920x1080 the only screens much beyond that are very expensive high end monitors.
No isn't a "market" at all at least not in the conventional sense, MS destroyed that when they decided to give away internet explorer. There is competition but only between entities that for whatever reason can afford to give their browser away for free. Yes IE was better than the alternatives for a while but we will never know how much of that was down to incompetence at the competitors and how much was down to MS cutting off their competitors air supply and thereby forcing them to scramble for alternative revenue streams.
Thankfully there are now multiple entities out there that can afford to give decent* browsers away for free. The Mozilla project (an opensource project which afaict at least intially was largely voulenteer driven though now they get a substantial amount of money from google) finally managed to sort out the mess of source that netscape dumped and make a decent browser. Some time later apple took the kde guys stuff and enhanced and popularised it and then google took apples stuff and further enhanced and popularised it. Opera also gave up on collecting the few crumbs they could get from desktop users and made their desktop browser free for the benefit of their embedded offerings.
* decent is of course relative, IE6 is regarded as shit now but afaict it compared favourably to other browsers arround at the time of it's release.
hmm, when I got to alienwares US website it seems to offer two 17 inch base models at $1799 and $1999 . Maxing stuff out can easilly take the price over $4K.
As best I can tell, you can get USB connectors that will fill exactly the same board holes as eSATAp connectors, just not making contact with the SATA signal lines
Of course how much that helps depends on which ports they chose to use for internal functionality and which for the eSATAp port.
To send an instrument to mars you have to make your instruments tough enough to survive going to mars and have a VERY high chance of working. That means they will likely be a long way from state of the art at the time the mission is planned and even further behind by the time they actually make it to mars. Then a few years later when you want readings from newer better equipment you have to start from scratch.
With a sample return mission you can analyse with the latest equipment and provided you bring back a sufficiant quantity you can keep analysing for many years with new equipment.
Best of all, Debian is specifically designed to allow upgrading-in-place, which is where Ubuntu has been more rocky.
Afaict that is a symptom of ubuntu allowing far less time for QA (debian spends as long in freeze as ubuntu spends on a whole release cycle) not any fundamental design difference (after all ubuntu is based on debian).
MS stages the release of their service packs. IIRC some special partners get it first, then MSDN and technet subscribers get it. Then it goes on the download center and finally it goes on windows update. I think within windows update the release is gradual too though i'm not sure on that.
Theoretically this would allow them to pull a service pack before most users get their hands on it but i've never heard of that actually happening (though IIRC windows update DOES check some preconditions before handing out service packs). At the very least it means their support has a chance to figure out what the common problems are before the end lusers get their hands on it.
IIRC /. does use UTF-8 but the list of allowed characters is far more restricted than it needs to be because the /. admins suck.
AIUI while itanium was a failure on the desktop and windows/linux server intel was successful in pulling a number of vendors (HP being the best known in the west) into using it for their unix and/or mainframe systems and sales for that purpose provide Intel with enough revenue to justify keeping it alive.
Well there are really two choices for desktop CPUs, AMD and Intel.
AMDs next gen of CPUs (bulldozer) will apparently not work in existing boards. Sandy bridge is pretty much ruled out (unless you are a masochist) by the recall. So whichever side of the fence you go for right now you will most likely be buying into a dying socket.
I think your calendar software simply scheduled the events for the specified number of seconds in the future,
And therin lies the problem, the user didn't ask it to schedule it for a specified number of seconds in the future, they asked (implicitly) for it to be scheduled at a given local time. The programmer assumed incorrectly that he could reliablly convert a future time from local time to UTC.
To solve this "problem" the program would need to retroactively alter existing timestamps when tzdata changed
That would be one way to do it but it seems like a broken one to me. The correct fix would be to save both a locale and a time when setting an alarm (and if the two ends of a conference call are being scheduled by the same system it should enforce that both are scheduled in the same locale). Since in most places the common case would be scheduling somethign in your local time that should be the default. Conversion to UTC should only be done for comparison purposes and any conversions should be redone and conflicts rechecked if/when the timezone data changes.
It's not rocket science to do right but because most large and economically significant countries have relatively stable timezone data it often gets dealt with improperly, particually when moving data between systems.
You will because unlike with electricians it is rather hard for a coder to kill themselves...
The big area where apple has been a pain is display connectors. In the last decade they have used the following
VGA: standard
DVI: standard
ADC: apple proprietary version of DVI that carried power and USB as well as the digital signals
Mini VGA: apple proprietary
Mini DVI: apple proprietary
Micro DVI: apple propietary
Mini Displayport: initially apple proprietary but later standardised
Using 7 different display connectors in one decade seems rather excessive to me. Only time will tell whether they stick with mini displayport or continue to jump arround all over the place.
Firewire has also become a bit of a mess connector wise though that is only partiatlly apples fault. There wasn't much they could do to stop sony introducing the small unpowered connector but i'm pretty sure they could have made the 800 connector backwards compatible like they USB guys did when they introduced USB 3.
While IIRC they did refuse to license some interfaces to nvidia that was IMO a side issue. You wouldn't want to hang a GPU off DMI anyway and mobile chips don't have QPI.
With the laptop and mainstream desktop i series chips Intel got rid of the northbridge and moved it's functionality into the CPU package (with the top end i series stuff intel moved the memory controller into the CPU but kept the fast IO on a separate chip). This essentially reduced the graphics choices to either use what is built into the CPU (if any, not all i series chips have integrated graphics) or use a discrete PCIe graphics solution with it's own memory (which adds cost, size and power consuption).
AS I understand it (unfortunately finding good comparative benchmarks seems very hard) with sandy bridge the graphics integrated in the CPU have finally caught up with what nvidia integrates in their chipsets for core 2 processors.
Not all of the 9xx extreme chips are 6-core and not all the 6-core 9xx chips are extreme.
As for the xeons there are 8-core ones in the 75xx line but the entire line has very low clockspeeds compared to the 56xx line which cancel out the extra two cores so afaict the only reason to buy it is a requirement for more than two sockets or insane ammounts of ram.
which is almost nothing more than word processing and internet
meh, you probablly wouldn't want to video edit on one (though people used to do so on less) and you won't run the latest 3D games but to say they are capable of "almost nothing more than word processing and internet" is dramatically understating their capabilities.
The main problem with most netbooks IMO is the screen resolution. I was really really disappointed when the 10 inch machines came out and the screen resolution was no better than the 9 inch ones and in particular was still below the 1024x768 that many app developers assume as a minimum. 12 inch netbooks don't appeal either since I can get a proper laptop with a C2D that is about the same size. I did eventually manage to get a 10 inch machine with a decent screen resolution but it was far from cheap.
The encryption used for e-mail is a form of DRM
Seems you have a funny definition of DRM.
Generally DRM seems to be defined as a system designed to let a user view content under certain conditions but limits what the user can do with that content. Clearly to let the user view the content the software must have the information (including any appropriate keys) needed to decrypt the content. However it must not let the user get that information or they could feed it into another program which would decrypt the content and let them do whatever they like with it.
This is why DRM is fundamentally incompatible with truely open standards. If someone has the information needed to write a player they also have the information needed to write a DRM stripper.
There is no law preventing mozilla buying a H.264 license and using it in official builds of firefox.
The problem is that afaict there is no way of getting a license that would also apply to third party derivitives of firefox so for firefox to support h.264 they would have to screw the community that supports them.
For low end laptops the priorities are cost and "headline specs" (aka what the salesman uses to sell the machine). The premium lines add less obvious specs like size, weight, appearance, robustness etc to the list of important things.
Ease of teardown and interchangability of components are somwhere a long way down the list.
The response to an individual call may not be but the availiable resources are. At a high level someone will have to decide what resources to spend the money available for search and rescue on. Someone else will have to decide how best to deploy those resources to the calls that are coming in at any moment.
If you know where the mayday is then you just send a lifeboat and/or helicopter straight there. I doubt these drones will change that.
The problem is when you have a report of someone missing and/or a mayday from someone who is unable to provide their own location. You then have to search a potentially huge area to try and find them. Afaict there simply aren't the resources (at least here in the UK) to dispatch more than one or two search and rescue helicopters to an incident. If drones are cheaper than helicopters that means you can put more eyes (alibiet robotic ones) in the sky and hopefully get a position fix faster.
Bingo which is IMO the scariest thing about DRM. The prospect of the general purpose computer being gradually replaced by locked down boxes that answer to their corporate masters not their users. I hope this is a battle we will win but fear it is one we will lose.
The real issue here is that DRM and truly open standards are fundamentally incompatible. What that means is that if DRM is implemented for HTML5 video either FOSS browsers will be locked out or the DRM will be exceedingly weak (see PDF protection for an example of a scheme that falls into the latter category)/
GIF had a patent which definitely covered encoding. Unisys claimed it also covered decoding, others claimed it didn't, I don't think that claim was ever tested in court.
Baseline JPEG was intended to be patent free (JPEG also had an arithmetic coding option that gave slightly better results than huffman coding but it had known patent issues and so was not made part of the baseline standard), there were unfortunately a few dubious patents which popped just before they expired (it seems the patent holders were making a last ditch attempt to get some revenue out of dubious patents).
With the way the patent system works it's practically impossible to say for sure whether something violates a patent you can only say whether it is a known problem or not.
IIRC the CRC hashes are only designed to protect against accidental changes while secure hashes are designed to protect against both accidental and malicious changes. This makes them more suited to distributed systems where not every participant is trustworthy.