Maybe their method for review/censor is over-simplistic or just plain inconsistent. But their choice of what they sell is just that... their choice. As is your choice yours on where and what to buy. And if it wasn't for the abomination known as drm this would be a much smaller problem.
But as it is if you want to buy a peice for your device you often have little choice but to buy it from the manufacturer of the device under their terms. Then if you want to view it on another device (including a replacement device when yours dies) you have to rely on their goodwill to allow that. Some systems even allow content to be removed remotely from existing devices.
This puts the vendor of the device and content in a far more powerful position than the seller of a physical book.
Sometimes you can find legal drm free sources but afaict that is still the exception not the rule.
A government-run company eliminates the profit motive Not nessacerally, sometimes governemnts do push for these kinds of things to make a profit which they then use to fund other things but that is largely beside the point.
Without competition the easiest thing to do is to keep everything more or less the same and maybe crank up prices a bit if you think the market will bear it and/or to make up for inflation. Not do radical thinks like realise the cost structure of phone networks has changed and that unmetered plans make the most sense in an era when the cost of connecting a call is minimal.
ensures everyone has service including those too poor to pay the bill. Afaict government telco monopolies in most places have never done this.
You should never drive faster than your ability to stop Your ability to stop in WHAT distance?
It is always going to take some nonzero time for you to realise something is amiss and operate the brake. Then more time for the car itself to come to a stop. Given a nonzero speed this means you will have moved a nonzero distance.
What that means is that no matter what your speed there is a window of space in front of you which someone can jump into and there is nothing you can do about it, reducing your speed will make this window smaller but even at say 10mph it's still pretty big. I guess you could slow to a crawl every time you go past a predestrian on the sidewalk but that seems unreasonable to me.
Another soloution is to plug the important equipment in using something so obviously different from a normal plug and socket that the cleaner doesn't even think to unplug it. Something like an IEC 60309 connector or so.
Or just have power hardwired into the rack and a lock on the rack door.
First off, 'Top' gear ahte all small practical and electric cars. I don't think they hate electric cars per-se. When they looked at the tesla roadster for example they bitched about battery life and price but were otherwise pretty positive.
You are right though that they are a mixture of fast car show and comedy and not someone I would trust to review a "regular" car honestly.
You do realise that America gets twice as much oil from Canada as from Saudi, right? Completely irrelevent.
OIL is a fungible commodity so whose oil ends up where matters little what matters is net imports and exports from the world market.
According to wikipedia (who apparently get their information from the US governemnt...) the USA has net imports of 12,220 thousand barrels per day.
Afiact the major oil exporters in america are Venezuela, mexico and canada. Even if the USA forced all of them to sell all their net oil exports to the US at below market value they would STILL have to purchase huge ammounts of oil on the world market.
Though when considering a large scale move of vehicles from petrol/diesel to electricity what matters is not where the electricity we use now comes from but where they plan to get the extra electricity from. Is france still pro building of nuclear plants or do they prefer gas or even coal?
My understanding is that every PS3 game is signed with those keys. Therefore, invalidating them through a firmware update would mean that every PS3 game to date will no longer work. Couldn't they invalidate the keys and then ship a whitelist to keep existing games running?
You think C++ is more concise than Java? When comparing like elements of the language Java and C++ are about equal on verbosity. Indeed java borrowed much of it's syntax from C++.
However C++ has features (most notablly operator overloading* but that isn't the only one) java doesn't which allow certain types of code to be made far more compact.
Also a programming environment is not made up of a language alone. Your coding conventions and the interface conventions of libraries you use make a huge difference to the verbosity of code.
*And yes I know operator overloading is a love-hate thing. My personal opinion is that it is a tool that has it's place but is often misused.
Indeed, you can keep selling a product without support or patches for future OS releases, but in practice few people are willing to pay for that. Sure you might not sell very many but those stuck with the software and in need of more licenses will be very glad they could get them. Is having a list of licenses that you will sell to anyone who asks but won't market in any way really that expensive?
Why do we tolerate a software industry that locks customers into products and then leaves them high and dry when a companies priorities change or the get bought out? (the answer of course is because one side has much higher bargaining power in negotiations).
In the last few years those things have been very distinct P4 to core was a huge increase in performance per clock but that was some time ago and afaict increases since then have been more evoloutionary than revoloutionary.
I stand by my statement that the improvement in the last 3 years is closer to 2x that 4x at least for CPUs that are available at anything like a sane price, The hex cores push that to 3x but only if you have a heavily multi-threaded workload and nearly $1000 to drop on the CPU alone.
While processing power doubles every 18 months That may have been the case at one point but it hasn't been true recently.
I bought the 13 inch macbook i'm typing this on over 3 years ago. It has a 2.16GHz C2D. When I look at laptops now I still see dual core chips at 2.GHz. Occasionally a quad core is seen but the clock speed (with all four cores running) is only arround that of my macbook (slightly over if you count turbo and buy the extreme edition).
Over in desktop land a similar thing is true, by mid 2007 we had 2.67 GHz C2Qs. Now we have 3. GHz i7 quads and hexes.
There has been improvement in the last 3 years but afaict it's closer to 2x than 4x.
The OS does abstract the hardware to some extent but in almost all cases the application code still runs directly on the CPU (with the CPU running in an "unprivileged" mode so the user code can't just do what it likes).
It IS possible to add CPU emulation to an OS, indeed it's been done at least three times I can think of in operating systems from major vendors. However it carries a significant performance penalty.
The performance penalty is tolerable if your new architecture is faster anyway and you don't care too much about power (e.g. when apple went from m68k to PPC and from PPC to x86 and when NT was ported to alpha) but I'd expect it to be a problem for running existing windows software on arm. I very much doubt an arm running x86 code in emulation will be competitive on either performance per watt or overall performance witha true x86 chip.
1: floating point is a mess. Afaict this isn't as bad as it used to be but still general perpose linux distros like debian are using softfloat for wide compatibility. 2: Cross compiling is a PITA because lots of software has build processes that aren't designed for it, compiling under emulators is SLOW. This makes having fast boxes with lots of ram and the SAME architecture as your target very desirable. High end arm boxes are both expensive and still lacking in power compared to x86 stuff. 3: Most OSS is nowhere near as highly tested on arm as on x86. 4: Even if using an open platform there may be a desire to run some propeitry software be it flash (yes there are arm versions of flash but afaict they aren't freely available which raises issues with the long term supportability of the device) or something running under wine.
Another big issue would be battery life. Afaict the batteries in phones are speced out on the assumption that the phone will spend most of it's time on "standby" with only low levels of communication (enough to allow the phone and network to track each other but not much more).
My ISP (AAISP) actively encourage IPv4 address exhaustion AFAICT. It's really not in ISPs interests to conserve IPs at this point. The more IPs they can get out of the RIRs now the more IPs they will have to reuse for more lucrative customers later.
Really badly written programs. Or just old programs.
Afaict windows didn't have getaddrinfo until XP (unless you count the version in the IPV6 technology preview for 2K). It's predecessor gethostbyname only supports IPV4. MS does offer a wrapper to help with this but afaict that only helps if you are coding with MSVC[++] (I ended up writing my own wrappers for fpc/delphi, not too hard but definitely extra effort)
Further it seems while windows has wsaasyncgethostbyname there is no wsaasyncgetaddrinfo. So if you want to do a v6 capable name lookup without blocking the rest of your app you have to do it on another thread.
P.S. yes I HAVE implemented code (in delphi style pascal) directly on the low level apis that supported both v4 and v6 and async lookups (by using a thread) and supported older operating systems (by using getprocaddress and my own "v4onlygetaddrinfo" if the getprocaddress fails). I wouldn't exactly call it trivial though.
ISP level nat sucks but I don't think we have a lot of choice.
IPv4 IPs will become a scarce resource and as such will get reallocated from less lucrative customers to more lucrative ones. Whether that allocation will only happen within ISPs or whether it will be allowed to happen between ISPs is unclear at the moment but it is pretty sure to happen.
Those who aren't profitable enough to give a public V4 IP will still need to reach IPV4 only servers and/or use IPV4 only applications (remember apps both client and server have to support v6, not just the OS) for the forseeable future. ISP level NAT is the only way to deliver that.
They did actually specify theora initially but they removed that in later drafts when apple and nokia refused to implement it. H.264 has patent problems which make it unusable for a standard which is supposed to be freely implementable. If google can convince the other major browser vendors to accept webm then I think it's likely the w3c will codify it's use as the baseline codec in the standard (remember HTML5 is STILL a draft standard).
You seem to think the w3c has more power than they actually do. They can't actually force vendors to implement anything.
Slashdot Mirror
"peice for"
That should have said peice of media for.
Maybe their method for review/censor is over-simplistic or just plain inconsistent. But their choice of what they sell is just that ... their choice. As is your choice yours on where and what to buy.
And if it wasn't for the abomination known as drm this would be a much smaller problem.
But as it is if you want to buy a peice for your device you often have little choice but to buy it from the manufacturer of the device under their terms. Then if you want to view it on another device (including a replacement device when yours dies) you have to rely on their goodwill to allow that. Some systems even allow content to be removed remotely from existing devices.
This puts the vendor of the device and content in a far more powerful position than the seller of a physical book.
Sometimes you can find legal drm free sources but afaict that is still the exception not the rule.
A government-run company eliminates the profit motive
Not nessacerally, sometimes governemnts do push for these kinds of things to make a profit which they then use to fund other things but that is largely beside the point.
Without competition the easiest thing to do is to keep everything more or less the same and maybe crank up prices a bit if you think the market will bear it and/or to make up for inflation. Not do radical thinks like realise the cost structure of phone networks has changed and that unmetered plans make the most sense in an era when the cost of connecting a call is minimal.
ensures everyone has service including those too poor to pay the bill.
Afaict government telco monopolies in most places have never done this.
You should never drive faster than your ability to stop
Your ability to stop in WHAT distance?
It is always going to take some nonzero time for you to realise something is amiss and operate the brake. Then more time for the car itself to come to a stop. Given a nonzero speed this means you will have moved a nonzero distance.
What that means is that no matter what your speed there is a window of space in front of you which someone can jump into and there is nothing you can do about it, reducing your speed will make this window smaller but even at say 10mph it's still pretty big. I guess you could slow to a crawl every time you go past a predestrian on the sidewalk but that seems unreasonable to me.
Another soloution is to plug the important equipment in using something so obviously different from a normal plug and socket that the cleaner doesn't even think to unplug it. Something like an IEC 60309 connector or so.
Or just have power hardwired into the rack and a lock on the rack door.
First off, 'Top' gear ahte all small practical and electric cars.
I don't think they hate electric cars per-se. When they looked at the tesla roadster for example they bitched about battery life and price but were otherwise pretty positive.
You are right though that they are a mixture of fast car show and comedy and not someone I would trust to review a "regular" car honestly.
You do realise that America gets twice as much oil from Canada as from Saudi, right?
Completely irrelevent.
OIL is a fungible commodity so whose oil ends up where matters little what matters is net imports and exports from the world market.
According to wikipedia (who apparently get their information from the US governemnt...) the USA has net imports of 12,220 thousand barrels per day.
Afiact the major oil exporters in america are Venezuela, mexico and canada. Even if the USA forced all of them to sell all their net oil exports to the US at below market value they would STILL have to purchase huge ammounts of oil on the world market.
Though when considering a large scale move of vehicles from petrol/diesel to electricity what matters is not where the electricity we use now comes from but where they plan to get the extra electricity from. Is france still pro building of nuclear plants or do they prefer gas or even coal?
My understanding is that every PS3 game is signed with those keys. Therefore, invalidating them through a firmware update would mean that every PS3 game to date will no longer work.
Couldn't they invalidate the keys and then ship a whitelist to keep existing games running?
The GPL is based on the presense of a copyright law but there is no specific reference to US copyright law.
Copyright treaties such as the berne convention require signatory countries to respect the copyright on foriegn works.
Of course just because a requirement exists doesn't mean it will be followed or enforced.
You think C++ is more concise than Java?
When comparing like elements of the language Java and C++ are about equal on verbosity. Indeed java borrowed much of it's syntax from C++.
However C++ has features (most notablly operator overloading* but that isn't the only one) java doesn't which allow certain types of code to be made far more compact.
Also a programming environment is not made up of a language alone. Your coding conventions and the interface conventions of libraries you use make a huge difference to the verbosity of code.
*And yes I know operator overloading is a love-hate thing. My personal opinion is that it is a tool that has it's place but is often misused.
Indeed, you can keep selling a product without support or patches for future OS releases, but in practice few people are willing to pay for that.
Sure you might not sell very many but those stuck with the software and in need of more licenses will be very glad they could get them. Is having a list of licenses that you will sell to anyone who asks but won't market in any way really that expensive?
Why do we tolerate a software industry that locks customers into products and then leaves them high and dry when a companies priorities change or the get bought out? (the answer of course is because one side has much higher bargaining power in negotiations).
In the last few years those things have been very distinct
P4 to core was a huge increase in performance per clock but that was some time ago and afaict increases since then have been more evoloutionary than revoloutionary.
I stand by my statement that the improvement in the last 3 years is closer to 2x that 4x at least for CPUs that are available at anything like a sane price, The hex cores push that to 3x but only if you have a heavily multi-threaded workload and nearly $1000 to drop on the CPU alone.
See for example an anadtech bench comparison of a Q6600 to an i7-950 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=100
grr /. ate my angle brackets and everything inside them.
"2." should have been "2.(something)" and "3." should have been "3.(low number)" (using ordinary brackets this time so /. doesn't eat them again)
While processing power doubles every 18 months
That may have been the case at one point but it hasn't been true recently.
I bought the 13 inch macbook i'm typing this on over 3 years ago. It has a 2.16GHz C2D. When I look at laptops now I still see dual core chips at 2.GHz. Occasionally a quad core is seen but the clock speed (with all four cores running) is only arround that of my macbook (slightly over if you count turbo and buy the extreme edition).
Over in desktop land a similar thing is true, by mid 2007 we had 2.67 GHz C2Qs. Now we have 3. GHz i7 quads and hexes.
There has been improvement in the last 3 years but afaict it's closer to 2x than 4x.
interestingly the owner of sucks.com doesn't seem to be using it for anything (whois doesn't even list any nameservers for the domain)
The OS does abstract the hardware to some extent but in almost all cases the application code still runs directly on the CPU (with the CPU running in an "unprivileged" mode so the user code can't just do what it likes).
It IS possible to add CPU emulation to an OS, indeed it's been done at least three times I can think of in operating systems from major vendors. However it carries a significant performance penalty.
The performance penalty is tolerable if your new architecture is faster anyway and you don't care too much about power (e.g. when apple went from m68k to PPC and from PPC to x86 and when NT was ported to alpha) but I'd expect it to be a problem for running existing windows software on arm. I very much doubt an arm running x86 code in emulation will be competitive on either performance per watt or overall performance witha true x86 chip.
The problem then is how do you build a track a couple of hundred miles in the air....
ARM's no worse in any way for open-source
BS
1: floating point is a mess. Afaict this isn't as bad as it used to be but still general perpose linux distros like debian are using softfloat for wide compatibility.
2: Cross compiling is a PITA because lots of software has build processes that aren't designed for it, compiling under emulators is SLOW. This makes having fast boxes with lots of ram and the SAME architecture as your target very desirable. High end arm boxes are both expensive and still lacking in power compared to x86 stuff.
3: Most OSS is nowhere near as highly tested on arm as on x86.
4: Even if using an open platform there may be a desire to run some propeitry software be it flash (yes there are arm versions of flash but afaict they aren't freely available which raises issues with the long term supportability of the device) or something running under wine.
Another big issue would be battery life. Afaict the batteries in phones are speced out on the assumption that the phone will spend most of it's time on "standby" with only low levels of communication (enough to allow the phone and network to track each other but not much more).
My ISP (AAISP) actively encourage IPv4 address exhaustion AFAICT.
It's really not in ISPs interests to conserve IPs at this point. The more IPs they can get out of the RIRs now the more IPs they will have to reuse for more lucrative customers later.
Really badly written programs.
Or just old programs.
Afaict windows didn't have getaddrinfo until XP (unless you count the version in the IPV6 technology preview for 2K). It's predecessor gethostbyname only supports IPV4. MS does offer a wrapper to help with this but afaict that only helps if you are coding with MSVC[++] (I ended up writing my own wrappers for fpc/delphi, not too hard but definitely extra effort)
Further it seems while windows has wsaasyncgethostbyname there is no wsaasyncgetaddrinfo. So if you want to do a v6 capable name lookup without blocking the rest of your app you have to do it on another thread.
P.S. yes I HAVE implemented code (in delphi style pascal) directly on the low level apis that supported both v4 and v6 and async lookups (by using a thread) and supported older operating systems (by using getprocaddress and my own "v4onlygetaddrinfo" if the getprocaddress fails). I wouldn't exactly call it trivial though.
ISP level nat sucks but I don't think we have a lot of choice.
IPv4 IPs will become a scarce resource and as such will get reallocated from less lucrative customers to more lucrative ones. Whether that allocation will only happen within ISPs or whether it will be allowed to happen between ISPs is unclear at the moment but it is pretty sure to happen.
Those who aren't profitable enough to give a public V4 IP will still need to reach IPV4 only servers and/or use IPV4 only applications (remember apps both client and server have to support v6, not just the OS) for the forseeable future. ISP level NAT is the only way to deliver that.
They did actually specify theora initially but they removed that in later drafts when apple and nokia refused to implement it. H.264 has patent problems which make it unusable for a standard which is supposed to be freely implementable. If google can convince the other major browser vendors to accept webm then I think it's likely the w3c will codify it's use as the baseline codec in the standard (remember HTML5 is STILL a draft standard).
You seem to think the w3c has more power than they actually do. They can't actually force vendors to implement anything.
There is also yahoo answers which seems to be one of the bigger sites of it's type.