the price difference between Win7 32 and 64 bit versions is ~0 While this is true be aware that MS has artificially limited the home editions to 16GB of memory. If you want more than that you have to buy proffessional or ultimate.
On 32-bit linux these days each process can have up to 3GB of mappings (with the top 4GB of virtual address space being used for the kernel, there were some patches to allow 4GB for each process but they slowed down context switches and afaict were never widely adopted)
Physical memory wise 32-bit linux supports PAE and afaict all intel and amd chips that support x64 also support x86 with PAE. Most 32-bit linux distros offer a PAE kernel though not all select it by default (debian calls it linux-image-2.6-686-bigmem ).
64-bit kernels can also run 32-bit apps and allow them to have a full 4GB of virtual address space.
Note: the below applies to PAL, i'm not familiar with the details of NTSC but similar stuff probably applies there too.
For a color TV to receive a color picture a few things are nessacery.
1: the information has to be alternating in encoding on each line and at the right frequency, 2: the chroma signal must be strong enough 3: there must be a "colourburst" at the start of each line (outside the viewable area) to notify the TV of a colour image and to synchronise the oscillator in the chroma demodulator to the one in the chroma modulator. PAL TV uses QAM so synchronisation between the modulator and demodulator is vital for easy and unambiguous demodulation.
Writing to and retriving from film will likely destroy most of these. The data may still be there but it is going to be in a form which is FAR harder to decode (and probably impossible to decode unambiguously requiring an operator to choose between the computers interpretatinos) than the form it was in when on the video signal.
You mention the fact that pal alternates the phase on every line. IMO this is probablly among the hardest problems for those doing the recovery. This means each line has (roughly) the same color information but encoded in opposite ways.
When you are working directly off a video signal this is no problem, counting lines is easy. But when that video signal has been translated into a 2D analog image it means you are going to have to seperate the lines (which are probably bleeding together). I suspect this is a bit that still needs some manual intervention to tell the computer which interpretation is correct.
Denser memory is more expensive per byte than less dense memory. Not really, denser memory should be cheaper per byte because the higher the density the more bytes you can cram on each wafer. Plus PCs are by far the largest user of ram so they get the largest economies of scale.
Beyond a certain density though it becomes a new hotness and is expensive either because the process isn't fully worked out or because capacity can't keep up with demand.
Right now the sweet spot on cost per gigabyte seems to be 1Gb on 2Gb chips (lower case b for bits uppercase for bytes) which with standard single or dual rank configurations (quad rank is possible but IIRC has both size issues and needs to be registered to work properly and afaict intel desktop chips aren't compatible with registered memory) gives 1GB, 2GB or 4GB modules.
Well my 3 year old board with 3 DDR slots could support 32gb of memory(8x3) 8x3 is 24 not 32,
Something seems wrong with your statement. If 8 is the number of modules than i've never seen 3GB modules. If 8 is the module size then I doubt a board of that age would support them and all the boards i've seen that did support them had a lot more than 3 slots.
Did you mean to say 8 modules each 4GB in size? if so then that is more belivable but only for a server board.
Interestingly 2GB and 4GB sticks of DDR3 seem to be almost exactly the same cost per gigabyte at the moment. This would suggest to me that the chips are also about the same price prt gigabit (yes it's conventional to measure chips in gigabits and sticks in gigabytes, I think this dates to the days when an 8 bit stick would be built out of 1 bit chips).
Apple gets away with it by making its products' cases hard to open While apple has had some howlers in the past AFAICT all current macs have fairly easy to access ram (though on the laptops you have to take the bottom off which isn't difficult but does involve quite a few screws).
Hard drives OTOH seem to be rather painful on many current apple machines.
Though DDR3 has added the complication of slot ordering. Counter intuitively (it makes sense from a transmission lines POV but relatively few people understand those even among the tech savvy) you generally have to fill the FURTHEST slot from the CPU on each channel first.
And while the primary and secondry slots on each channel are usually a different color there doesn't seem to be any consistency over which slot gets which color.
The trick with OPEC is it's a cartel of countries rather than companies. This makes it very difficult to punish through foriegn legal systems.
With memory chips (not to be confused with memory modules, some of the chip manufactuers also make modules but a lot of modules are made by companies that don't make the chips) at least one of the major manufacturers (micron) is US based and many of the others are part of large electronics companies with operations all over the world.
It's almost at the point where it would be more economical to buy a new mobo and ram than it would be to add ram to a not that old board. I found this statement rather surprising so I decided to check it out using newegg prices (rounded to the nearest dollar).
AM3 boards with DDR3 seems to start at $40 while LGA775 boards with DDR3 seem to start at $45 . Of course those are bottom end boards, if you want niceities like more expansion slots or more ram slots then expect to pay quite a bit more than that.
So it seems what you say is true if all of the following hold 1: you can't use the existing ram as part of your upgraded configuration 2: you are upgrading to at least 8GB. 3: you are prepared to use a bottom of the barrel motherboard 4: you consider your time to swap the motherboard to be of zero value. 5: you already own a suitable processor (that is you are either running LGA775 or are running an AM3 processor in an AM2/2+ board)
The purpose of a company is to make profit for it's investors. That profit is returned to the investors though dividends.
Yes during periods of high growth it may make sense to not pay dividends now in the hope of paying higher ones later but a company that never intends to pay it's profits back to "investors" is getting very close to a scam IMO. Particularly if the company is set up so that the majority owners don't have control of the company.
Too many companies decide to piss money away on dubious acquisitions rather than returning profits to their owners when they run out of avenues for natural growth.
Any company that does not pay dividend and is not a new IPO is a scam. IMO this is an exaggeration. For a company that is involved in real heavy growth it makes little sense to pay dividends only to have to raise money by some other means (new share issue, bond or whatever) to continue growing.
BUT there are companies who are reaching their limit of natural growth (apple must be getting pretty close, there are only so many people willing to pay the "apple tax" and apple has raised the bar for other smart-phone vendors) and yet still not paying dividends preffering instead to squander investors money on dubious diversification ventures. MS was such a company for a long time (they are FINALLY paying dividends now but only after a number of years of decline in their stock value)
There is a place for adapting to the user (though IMO there should always be overrides). But there is also a place for a standard "electronic paper" that reliablly displays the same way everywhere. Many people assume PDF is like electronic paper but as the article shows it isn't in key ways.
Consider what happens if someone reads a document, decides they agree then takes it to another system to print and sign. There is no gaurantee that what they read matches what they printed and signed.
It depends how far you are trying to go and how good the links are.
I live near Manchester, if I was going to liverpool, york, birmingham, london, blackpool etc (london is a slightly strange case, it's much further than the other destinations on that list but it also has a very fast train line linking it to manchester), i'd take the train no question, it would probablly be just as fast all things considered.
If I was going to the southhampton area (somewhere i've been on quite a few occasions) i'd consider both options but at least so far i've always taking the train. Flying was much quicker (more than enough to make up for end effects) but departure times were very limited and prices were very high.
If I was going to paris or brussels i'd consider both options but I suspect I'd end up doing by air. Train tickets look pretty expensive and I suspect there is a good low cost air service.
If I was going any further i'd almost certainly fly. Once you add manchester-london to the time crossing london (including getting to the eurostar platforms) to london-(paris/brussels to the time crossing that city to the time to get to your destination city you are talking a seriously long journey.
And at least in the UK most trains aren't all that comfortable unless you pay first class and sometimes not even then (on shorter distance trains there is often little difference between the classes)
One big problem with rail is that many cities have multiple big stations serving different directions.
Afaict 5V is about right for charging a single lithium ion/polymer cell. Go much higher and unless you use a switched mode converter you are just wasting more power. Go much lower and you don't have enough headroom to charge it properly. Most of the phone "chargers" I saw seemed to be tending to 5V output even before the use of a USB connector came on scene.
these phones have 4 different types of charger connectors. I've only seen 2 types of charge connector on nokias in recent memory (plus there are some micro USB ones now but I haven't seen one of those in person yet). Some REALLY old stuff used much higher voltages with different connectors but that was a long time ago. Got any info on the other two?
With a simple converter cable ( http://tinyurl.com/39xhy98 [tinyurl.com] ), we don't have to replace chargers that are built in cars. Be aware that not all charger/phone combinations work with that adaptor. The new chargers are 5V. The older chargers had a "standard" variant that was 3.(something)V and a "fast" variant that was 5.(something), With my phone and the adaptor the old fast charger would work but the old standard charger wouldn't.
as peak oil is about to solve the problem. Will it?
Peaking of oil and particularly peaking of conventional oil will cause pressure to develop other sources of oil and the products we currently produce from it. Sources like tar sands, oil shale and Fischer–Tropsch (using coal or natural gas as the source).
Afaict these other sources are far worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than simply drilling for and distilling/cracking oil.
And it's not like landline phones are secure either, anyone can climb up the pole and fit a tap to your line. Provided they have the right equipment they are pretty unlikely to be noticed.
Anycast certainly has the advantage that the server should be directed to the closest server in network terms and avoids the problem of users using remote dns servers.
but it also has a few major dowsides.
* if routing changes in the middle of a connection and sends the traffic to a different server any TCP sessions in progress will be broken. In the worst case with a router flapping or doing some form of load balancing between two routes that end up at different servers this could make it impossible to complete the download.
* anycast works with IP blocks that are big enough to be respected in global internet routing (which have to be requested from a rir with justification). This makes it much harder to be flexible about what content each server hosts than with dns (which works with hostnames which are essentially free so you can quite happilly give each block of content it's own hostname).
* with anycast the descision on which server traffic ends up at is made by other peoples routers. This makes it difficult to deal with an overloaded server.
For file downloads I think the best option would be to combine dns with http redirects. The dns will send most users to the most local server straightaway and those it doesn't can be dealt with through http redirects. For web pages the cost of the http redirect probablly isn't worth it.
isn't that what the MAC address of each machine is for No Mac addresses are used to identify computers on a local network. They are not part of the packet that is routed over the internet. The internet identifies computers by IP address.
Anycast is basically a hack, you have multiple servers with the same IP address and route traffic to those servers based on where you receive it.
For a protocol like DNS this works great. Since dns is stateless and any server will give the same answer.
However with TCP based protocols the client and server establish a connection. If routing changes and sends the traffic to a different server the new server will have no knowlage of the connection and will not be able to continue it.
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the price difference between Win7 32 and 64 bit versions is ~0
While this is true be aware that MS has artificially limited the home editions to 16GB of memory. If you want more than that you have to buy proffessional or ultimate.
with the top 4GB of virtual address space
That should have said the top 1GB of virtual address space.
On 32-bit linux these days each process can have up to 3GB of mappings (with the top 4GB of virtual address space being used for the kernel, there were some patches to allow 4GB for each process but they slowed down context switches and afaict were never widely adopted)
Physical memory wise 32-bit linux supports PAE and afaict all intel and amd chips that support x64 also support x86 with PAE. Most 32-bit linux distros offer a PAE kernel though not all select it by default (debian calls it linux-image-2.6-686-bigmem ).
64-bit kernels can also run 32-bit apps and allow them to have a full 4GB of virtual address space.
Note: the below applies to PAL, i'm not familiar with the details of NTSC but similar stuff probably applies there too.
For a color TV to receive a color picture a few things are nessacery.
1: the information has to be alternating in encoding on each line and at the right frequency,
2: the chroma signal must be strong enough
3: there must be a "colourburst" at the start of each line (outside the viewable area) to notify the TV of a colour image and to synchronise the oscillator in the chroma demodulator to the one in the chroma modulator. PAL TV uses QAM so synchronisation between the modulator and demodulator is vital for easy and unambiguous demodulation.
Writing to and retriving from film will likely destroy most of these. The data may still be there but it is going to be in a form which is FAR harder to decode (and probably impossible to decode unambiguously requiring an operator to choose between the computers interpretatinos) than the form it was in when on the video signal.
You mention the fact that pal alternates the phase on every line. IMO this is probablly among the hardest problems for those doing the recovery. This means each line has (roughly) the same color information but encoded in opposite ways.
When you are working directly off a video signal this is no problem, counting lines is easy. But when that video signal has been translated into a 2D analog image it means you are going to have to seperate the lines (which are probably bleeding together). I suspect this is a bit that still needs some manual intervention to tell the computer which interpretation is correct.
Some sites don't let you choose the questions :(
Denser memory is more expensive per byte than less dense memory.
Not really, denser memory should be cheaper per byte because the higher the density the more bytes you can cram on each wafer. Plus PCs are by far the largest user of ram so they get the largest economies of scale.
Beyond a certain density though it becomes a new hotness and is expensive either because the process isn't fully worked out or because capacity can't keep up with demand.
Right now the sweet spot on cost per gigabyte seems to be 1Gb on 2Gb chips (lower case b for bits uppercase for bytes) which with standard single or dual rank configurations (quad rank is possible but IIRC has both size issues and needs to be registered to work properly and afaict intel desktop chips aren't compatible with registered memory) gives 1GB, 2GB or 4GB modules.
Well my 3 year old board with 3 DDR slots could support 32gb of memory(8x3)
8x3 is 24 not 32,
Something seems wrong with your statement. If 8 is the number of modules than i've never seen 3GB modules. If 8 is the module size then I doubt a board of that age would support them and all the boards i've seen that did support them had a lot more than 3 slots.
Did you mean to say 8 modules each 4GB in size? if so then that is more belivable but only for a server board.
Interestingly 2GB and 4GB sticks of DDR3 seem to be almost exactly the same cost per gigabyte at the moment. This would suggest to me that the chips are also about the same price prt gigabit (yes it's conventional to measure chips in gigabits and sticks in gigabytes, I think this dates to the days when an 8 bit stick would be built out of 1 bit chips).
Apple gets away with it by making its products' cases hard to open
While apple has had some howlers in the past AFAICT all current macs have fairly easy to access ram (though on the laptops you have to take the bottom off which isn't difficult but does involve quite a few screws).
Hard drives OTOH seem to be rather painful on many current apple machines.
Though DDR3 has added the complication of slot ordering. Counter intuitively (it makes sense from a transmission lines POV but relatively few people understand those even among the tech savvy) you generally have to fill the FURTHEST slot from the CPU on each channel first.
And while the primary and secondry slots on each channel are usually a different color there doesn't seem to be any consistency over which slot gets which color.
The trick with OPEC is it's a cartel of countries rather than companies. This makes it very difficult to punish through foriegn legal systems.
With memory chips (not to be confused with memory modules, some of the chip manufactuers also make modules but a lot of modules are made by companies that don't make the chips) at least one of the major manufacturers (micron) is US based and many of the others are part of large electronics companies with operations all over the world.
It's almost at the point where it would be more economical to buy a new mobo and ram than it would be to add ram to a not that old board.
I found this statement rather surprising so I decided to check it out using newegg prices (rounded to the nearest dollar).
DDR2 1GB: $13 2GB: $29 4GB: $70
DDR3 1GB: $13 2GB: $22 4GB: $43
AM3 boards with DDR3 seems to start at $40 while LGA775 boards with DDR3 seem to start at $45 . Of course those are bottom end boards, if you want niceities like more expansion slots or more ram slots then expect to pay quite a bit more than that.
So it seems what you say is true if all of the following hold
1: you can't use the existing ram as part of your upgraded configuration
2: you are upgrading to at least 8GB.
3: you are prepared to use a bottom of the barrel motherboard
4: you consider your time to swap the motherboard to be of zero value.
5: you already own a suitable processor (that is you are either running LGA775 or are running an AM3 processor in an AM2/2+ board)
The purpose of a company is to make profit for it's investors. That profit is returned to the investors though dividends.
Yes during periods of high growth it may make sense to not pay dividends now in the hope of paying higher ones later but a company that never intends to pay it's profits back to "investors" is getting very close to a scam IMO. Particularly if the company is set up so that the majority owners don't have control of the company.
Too many companies decide to piss money away on dubious acquisitions rather than returning profits to their owners when they run out of avenues for natural growth.
Any company that does not pay dividend and is not a new IPO is a scam.
IMO this is an exaggeration. For a company that is involved in real heavy growth it makes little sense to pay dividends only to have to raise money by some other means (new share issue, bond or whatever) to continue growing.
BUT there are companies who are reaching their limit of natural growth (apple must be getting pretty close, there are only so many people willing to pay the "apple tax" and apple has raised the bar for other smart-phone vendors) and yet still not paying dividends preffering instead to squander investors money on dubious diversification ventures. MS was such a company for a long time (they are FINALLY paying dividends now but only after a number of years of decline in their stock value)
There is a place for adapting to the user (though IMO there should always be overrides). But there is also a place for a standard "electronic paper" that reliablly displays the same way everywhere. Many people assume PDF is like electronic paper but as the article shows it isn't in key ways.
Consider what happens if someone reads a document, decides they agree then takes it to another system to print and sign. There is no gaurantee that what they read matches what they printed and signed.
It depends how far you are trying to go and how good the links are.
I live near Manchester, if I was going to liverpool, york, birmingham, london, blackpool etc (london is a slightly strange case, it's much further than the other destinations on that list but it also has a very fast train line linking it to manchester), i'd take the train no question, it would probablly be just as fast all things considered.
If I was going to the southhampton area (somewhere i've been on quite a few occasions) i'd consider both options but at least so far i've always taking the train. Flying was much quicker (more than enough to make up for end effects) but departure times were very limited and prices were very high.
If I was going to paris or brussels i'd consider both options but I suspect I'd end up doing by air. Train tickets look pretty expensive and I suspect there is a good low cost air service.
If I was going any further i'd almost certainly fly. Once you add manchester-london to the time crossing london (including getting to the eurostar platforms) to london-(paris/brussels to the time crossing that city to the time to get to your destination city you are talking a seriously long journey.
And at least in the UK most trains aren't all that comfortable unless you pay first class and sometimes not even then (on shorter distance trains there is often little difference between the classes)
One big problem with rail is that many cities have multiple big stations serving different directions.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/286
It is much riskier to buy
Depends on what risks you consider most important.
If you mean the risk of losing money then yes buying a house is relatively high risk but as long as you stay there the value is just numbers on paper.
On the other hand if you are renting and rents rise there is a very significant risk that you will be forced to move out of the area.
Afaict 5V is about right for charging a single lithium ion/polymer cell. Go much higher and unless you use a switched mode converter you are just wasting more power. Go much lower and you don't have enough headroom to charge it properly. Most of the phone "chargers" I saw seemed to be tending to 5V output even before the use of a USB connector came on scene.
these phones have 4 different types of charger connectors.
I've only seen 2 types of charge connector on nokias in recent memory (plus there are some micro USB ones now but I haven't seen one of those in person yet). Some REALLY old stuff used much higher voltages with different connectors but that was a long time ago. Got any info on the other two?
With a simple converter cable ( http://tinyurl.com/39xhy98 [tinyurl.com] ), we don't have to replace chargers that are built in cars.
Be aware that not all charger/phone combinations work with that adaptor. The new chargers are 5V. The older chargers had a "standard" variant that was 3.(something)V and a "fast" variant that was 5.(something), With my phone and the adaptor the old fast charger would work but the old standard charger wouldn't.
as peak oil is about to solve the problem.
Will it?
Peaking of oil and particularly peaking of conventional oil will cause pressure to develop other sources of oil and the products we currently produce from it. Sources like tar sands, oil shale and Fischer–Tropsch (using coal or natural gas as the source).
Afaict these other sources are far worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than simply drilling for and distilling/cracking oil.
And it's not like landline phones are secure either, anyone can climb up the pole and fit a tap to your line. Provided they have the right equipment they are pretty unlikely to be noticed.
Anycast certainly has the advantage that the server should be directed to the closest server in network terms and avoids the problem of users using remote dns servers.
but it also has a few major dowsides.
* if routing changes in the middle of a connection and sends the traffic to a different server any TCP sessions in progress will be broken. In the worst case with a router flapping or doing some form of load balancing between two routes that end up at different servers this could make it impossible to complete the download.
* anycast works with IP blocks that are big enough to be respected in global internet routing (which have to be requested from a rir with justification). This makes it much harder to be flexible about what content each server hosts than with dns (which works with hostnames which are essentially free so you can quite happilly give each block of content it's own hostname).
* with anycast the descision on which server traffic ends up at is made by other peoples routers. This makes it difficult to deal with an overloaded server.
For file downloads I think the best option would be to combine dns with http redirects. The dns will send most users to the most local server straightaway and those it doesn't can be dealt with through http redirects. For web pages the cost of the http redirect probablly isn't worth it.
isn't that what the MAC address of each machine is for
No Mac addresses are used to identify computers on a local network. They are not part of the packet that is routed over the internet. The internet identifies computers by IP address.
Anycast is basically a hack, you have multiple servers with the same IP address and route traffic to those servers based on where you receive it.
For a protocol like DNS this works great. Since dns is stateless and any server will give the same answer.
However with TCP based protocols the client and server establish a connection. If routing changes and sends the traffic to a different server the new server will have no knowlage of the connection and will not be able to continue it.