Holding US currency is essentially the same as giving the Federal Reserve an interest free loan It is but then holding money in your paypal account is essentially the same as giving paypal an interest free loan and many accounts at banks (particularly business current accounts) also pay negligible interest.
In addition it is nice and easy for any thief to steal. On the other hand the money at risk is limited to the ammount of cash you have on-hand. With a credit or debit card the ammount of money at risk can be much less.
Depending on your local laws you may not personally be liable for that theft but someone's got to pay for it (often the merchant that accepts the fraudulent transaction).
it takes much longer to count and hand out change than most electronic transactions hmm, given the response speed of most "chip and pin" credit card terminals i've used or the time it takes to sign a receipt and for the merchant to check that signature (badly) I somewhat doubt this. Most cashiers i've seen are pretty quick at picking change.
Overall cash isn't perfect but so far all of the alternatives like to pile on fees and hassles such that for small transactions they aren't reasonable.
all it takes is an admin who wants to do some damage, root, and a dd command to ruin that completely. One way to reduce that issue is to ensure backups are always pulled rather than pushed and that the admins for the backup servers are seperate from the amdins for the operational servers. The backup servers should ideally have just enough access to the operational servers to get the data they need.
Of course whatever backup system you chose it is difficult to stop the admins of the systems being backed up simply feeding the backup system garbage.
Having said that xservers and ssh servers/clients for windows are only really useful in a mixed windows/*nix environment...
Though even on linux I can see the value in a GUI ssh client that lets you connect and authenticate once and then open as many terminals and file transfer windows as you like without having to open another connection and reauthenticate (the ssh protocols allow this but afaict the command line clients don't support it for interface reasons)
Until multicore became common, no one cared about parallelism for mainstream applications, so language like C were he obvious choice. And even now the slowest machines your users are likely to have are single cores. This matters because for a lot of programmers the aim is to make it run acceptablly on the slowest machines thier users use.
And what about inflation? You seriously think that someone will be able to live on 80k a year in 20 years time? So you invest in something like real estate where both the capital value and the income are likely to follow inflation at least to some extent.
And of course the first thing you do is buy a house to live in yourself. Once you have no rent or mortgage to pay you can live on a relatively small ammount of money.
If the kinect is firmware updatable (I'd be surprised if it wasn't) they could push an xbox firmware update (pushed on pain of losing access to xbox live) which could in turn push a kinect firmware update (either silently or on pain of being unable to use the kinnect util you did) which rendered the kinect incompatible with third party software.
Do you have a source for that claim? my understanding was that they were made in china by a taiwanese firm using a formula that was stolen from a japanese company and messed up in the process.
Well, $2 in caps, $23 in shit I didn't really need to cover minimum orders, and $20 in "overnight" shipping ick that's expensive
Someone else has suggested digikey but since you are in texas I thought i'd point out that mouser are much closer to you and therefore probably more likely to get stuff to you quickly on standard delivery. Not sure how much the charge for shipping locally but given that thier small order charge for UK orders is only £12 I wouldn't think it's excessive.
I wonder if it would be possible to compensate people in some special kind of shares that had the voting and divided rights of normal shares but could not be transferred until after the original owner either died or went bankrupt.
the ones that we're talking about all trap to the OS for unaligned loads and stores. While modern arms can trap to the OS and the OS can fix them up that isn't the default behaviour.
This is very slow, but it's pretty slow on x86 if it spans a cache line too. IIRC kernel traps are extremely slow (for example reports i've seen say that kernel floating point emulation is 10 times slower than pure software floating point) which may be why this was never turned on by default. Is unaligned access on x86 really THAT slow?!
64-bit time doesn't require a 64-bit CPU. It would be a painful transition for an existing architecture since any time-dependent apps would need recompiling but it could be eased by allowing the OS to support both systems like was done for large file support.
I see a huge difference in 4000 arm vs 1000 x86.. someone has to manage 4 times the machines! System administrators cost money too. They do but once you've got that many machines working on the same problem you are likely to put in place a management system that allows you to manage the machines without working on each one individually.
But by the time you get to end-user applications, all of that is long gone. C and the C like bits of C++ are a very leaky abstraction.
Take unaligned accesses for example. Some architectures will just quietly fix them up. Some will terminate your app with a sigbus and some will return bogus results (with older arm chips arm did the last of these, with modern arm chips the kernel can trap it but iirc it doesn't by default).
And then there is the fun of va_list. on x86 it's a simple pointer, on other architectures it's a more comlex structure and this can cause problems if you try to use it in certain ways.
As someone who has watched debian rc bugs architecture specific failures are not at all unusual. Sometimes it is actual bugs in the toolchain, other times it's portablity issues in the user code.
For common FOSS these issues have already been largely fixed (at least to the extent that they broke something obvious) because of the work of projects like debian but if you have custom C or C++ code written by code monkeys then you have a problem.
And if your custom code is in java you potentially have a much bigger problem. There is an arm port of openjdk but it's rather immature at the moment. There is gcj too but don't expect good compatibility there.
Why? afaict there are two main reasons to finish college. One is to learn stuff, the other is to get a piece of paper to get yourself a better job.
If he wants to learn something he can easilly afford to pay people to teach it to him on his terms and given how rich he is I doubt he cares about getting jobs.
Perhaps that could be metered? It wouldn't exactly be difficult to meter the charging station. electricity meters can be picked up pretty cheap even in oneoffs and they are designed to hangle a whole house's consumption so they shouldn't have any trouble handling the load of a charging station.
I thought some of sony's portable media players and later generation aibo's also made some use of it (in the media player case for music copy protection and in the aibo case for stopping you ripping off copies of addon software).
But this is based on stuff I read in computer magazines years ago and my memory may well be flawed.
The thing with MS is they won't sell you licenses to their older products but they WILL sell you volume licenses to their newer proucts that include "downgrade rights".
So sales get chalked up as sales of the latest version whatever version the customer actually uses.
Things are even worse for normal consumers who usually don't get the option of downgrading.
country code tld's are supposed to represent sites in or at least related to that country. Misuse would be using them for sites that have nothing to do with that country.
Misusing cctlds particularly of unstable countries or ones ruled by a very different idiology to your own is a dangerous game. If the country decides they don't like your type or site or they don't like misuse in general there is little you can do about it. As someone has already pointed out registrars do nothing to explain this to their customers at the point of sale.
pertmgreen, imacs are perfectly fine for the vast majority of consumers. There are plnety of people who would be fine with a low end imac and never upgrading it. But then i'd bet most of those would also be fine with a cheap dell at around half the price.
I'd wager that most people who require more than a low end machine will also have some clue as to what they do and don't need out of a machine.
They know that their time is valuable According to wikipedia the median earnings for "persons over the age of 15 who worked with earnings in 2005" was $28,567. Thats a few years back so lets round that up to $30K. Assuming 50 weeks worked a year and 48 hours a week that works out to $12.5 per hour.
I doubt the main reason people don't upgrade is because of how they value their time. From what I can ascertain the main reason they don't perform simple upgrades is that they are scared to do so.
If you are concerned about "saving" money through the false economy of "upgrades" then that means that you consider your free time to be valueless in the equation because you enjoy assembling PCs as a hobby. In my experiance getting set up with a new machine involves
1: physically unpacking and setting up the machine 2: getting through the OEMs first boot setup process 3: removing any crap you don't want 4: installing all needed software (some of which may have licenses that are difficult to transfer) 5: copying across all relevant data (either by pulling out hard drives, setting up a network or copying the data twice once onto something external and then again off it) 6: getting all the settings back the way you like them
All of this takes FAR longer than performing a minor upgrade such as adding more ram or a second hard drive. Probablly even longer than making a new drive the primary and cloning it across.
Slashdot Mirror
can be much less.
That should have said can be much greater
Holding US currency is essentially the same as giving the Federal Reserve an interest free loan
It is but then holding money in your paypal account is essentially the same as giving paypal an interest free loan and many accounts at banks (particularly business current accounts) also pay negligible interest.
In addition it is nice and easy for any thief to steal.
On the other hand the money at risk is limited to the ammount of cash you have on-hand. With a credit or debit card the ammount of money at risk can be much less.
Depending on your local laws you may not personally be liable for that theft but someone's got to pay for it (often the merchant that accepts the fraudulent transaction).
it takes much longer to count and hand out change than most electronic transactions
hmm, given the response speed of most "chip and pin" credit card terminals i've used or the time it takes to sign a receipt and for the merchant to check that signature (badly) I somewhat doubt this. Most cashiers i've seen are pretty quick at picking change.
Overall cash isn't perfect but so far all of the alternatives like to pile on fees and hassles such that for small transactions they aren't reasonable.
all it takes is an admin who wants to do some damage, root, and a dd command to ruin that completely.
One way to reduce that issue is to ensure backups are always pulled rather than pushed and that the admins for the backup servers are seperate from the amdins for the operational servers. The backup servers should ideally have just enough access to the operational servers to get the data they need.
Of course whatever backup system you chose it is difficult to stop the admins of the systems being backed up simply feeding the backup system garbage.
Having said that xservers and ssh servers/clients for windows are only really useful in a mixed windows/*nix environment...
Though even on linux I can see the value in a GUI ssh client that lets you connect and authenticate once and then open as many terminals and file transfer windows as you like without having to open another connection and reauthenticate (the ssh protocols allow this but afaict the command line clients don't support it for interface reasons)
Until multicore became common, no one cared about parallelism for mainstream applications, so language like C were he obvious choice.
And even now the slowest machines your users are likely to have are single cores. This matters because for a lot of programmers the aim is to make it run acceptablly on the slowest machines thier users use.
And what about inflation? You seriously think that someone will be able to live on 80k a year in 20 years time?
So you invest in something like real estate where both the capital value and the income are likely to follow inflation at least to some extent.
And of course the first thing you do is buy a house to live in yourself. Once you have no rent or mortgage to pay you can live on a relatively small ammount of money.
Afaict the blood source wasn't released so any "port" would involve rewriting the game code from scratch (the engine, maps, art, etc could be kept) :(
You need to be on a comments page rather than an article page before you do it for it to work
If the kinect is firmware updatable (I'd be surprised if it wasn't) they could push an xbox firmware update (pushed on pain of losing access to xbox live) which could in turn push a kinect firmware update (either silently or on pain of being unable to use the kinnect util you did) which rendered the kinect incompatible with third party software.
Do you have a source for that claim? my understanding was that they were made in china by a taiwanese firm using a formula that was stolen from a japanese company and messed up in the process.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/leaking-capacitors-muck-up-motherboards
Well, $2 in caps, $23 in shit I didn't really need to cover minimum orders, and $20 in "overnight" shipping
ick that's expensive
Someone else has suggested digikey but since you are in texas I thought i'd point out that mouser are much closer to you and therefore probably more likely to get stuff to you quickly on standard delivery. Not sure how much the charge for shipping locally but given that thier small order charge for UK orders is only £12 I wouldn't think it's excessive.
I wonder if it would be possible to compensate people in some special kind of shares that had the voting and divided rights of normal shares but could not be transferred until after the original owner either died or went bankrupt.
the ones that we're talking about all trap to the OS for unaligned loads and stores.
While modern arms can trap to the OS and the OS can fix them up that isn't the default behaviour.
http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/index.php/XScale_alignment#Have_the_kernel_find_the_problem_for_you
This is very slow, but it's pretty slow on x86 if it spans a cache line too.
IIRC kernel traps are extremely slow (for example reports i've seen say that kernel floating point emulation is 10 times slower than pure software floating point) which may be why this was never turned on by default. Is unaligned access on x86 really THAT slow?!
64-bit time doesn't require a 64-bit CPU. It would be a painful transition for an existing architecture since any time-dependent apps would need recompiling but it could be eased by allowing the OS to support both systems like was done for large file support.
I see a huge difference in 4000 arm vs 1000 x86.. someone has to manage 4 times the machines! System administrators cost money too.
They do but once you've got that many machines working on the same problem you are likely to put in place a management system that allows you to manage the machines without working on each one individually.
But by the time you get to end-user applications, all of that is long gone.
C and the C like bits of C++ are a very leaky abstraction.
Take unaligned accesses for example. Some architectures will just quietly fix them up. Some will terminate your app with a sigbus and some will return bogus results (with older arm chips arm did the last of these, with modern arm chips the kernel can trap it but iirc it doesn't by default).
And then there is the fun of va_list. on x86 it's a simple pointer, on other architectures it's a more comlex structure and this can cause problems if you try to use it in certain ways.
As someone who has watched debian rc bugs architecture specific failures are not at all unusual. Sometimes it is actual bugs in the toolchain, other times it's portablity issues in the user code.
For common FOSS these issues have already been largely fixed (at least to the extent that they broke something obvious) because of the work of projects like debian but if you have custom C or C++ code written by code monkeys then you have a problem.
And if your custom code is in java you potentially have a much bigger problem. There is an arm port of openjdk but it's rather immature at the moment. There is gcj too but don't expect good compatibility there.
Why? afaict there are two main reasons to finish college. One is to learn stuff, the other is to get a piece of paper to get yourself a better job.
If he wants to learn something he can easilly afford to pay people to teach it to him on his terms and given how rich he is I doubt he cares about getting jobs.
Typically 2x2G sticks are cheaper than 1x4G stick, particularly when it has to be ECC memory and DDR3.
Hmm, a quick check of newegg shows the opposite
Kingston ValueRAM 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) ECC Registered w/parity Server Memory Model KVR1066D3D8R7S/2G $57.98 (including shipping)
Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Server Memory Model KVR1066D3Q8R7S/4G $105.98 (including shipping)
I would think it means any computer that accesses the internet through the university network regardless of it's ownership.
Perhaps that could be metered?
It wouldn't exactly be difficult to meter the charging station. electricity meters can be picked up pretty cheap even in oneoffs and they are designed to hangle a whole house's consumption so they shouldn't have any trouble handling the load of a charging station.
I thought some of sony's portable media players and later generation aibo's also made some use of it (in the media player case for music copy protection and in the aibo case for stopping you ripping off copies of addon software).
But this is based on stuff I read in computer magazines years ago and my memory may well be flawed.
The thing with MS is they won't sell you licenses to their older products but they WILL sell you volume licenses to their newer proucts that include "downgrade rights".
So sales get chalked up as sales of the latest version whatever version the customer actually uses.
Things are even worse for normal consumers who usually don't get the option of downgrading.
country code tld's are supposed to represent sites in or at least related to that country. Misuse would be using them for sites that have nothing to do with that country.
Misusing cctlds particularly of unstable countries or ones ruled by a very different idiology to your own is a dangerous game. If the country decides they don't like your type or site or they don't like misuse in general there is little you can do about it. As someone has already pointed out registrars do nothing to explain this to their customers at the point of sale.
Which leads to situations like this [arstechnica.com].
Or this
pertmgreen, imacs are perfectly fine for the vast majority of consumers.
There are plnety of people who would be fine with a low end imac and never upgrading it. But then i'd bet most of those would also be fine with a cheap dell at around half the price.
I'd wager that most people who require more than a low end machine will also have some clue as to what they do and don't need out of a machine.
They know that their time is valuable
According to wikipedia the median earnings for "persons over the age of 15 who worked with earnings in 2005" was $28,567. Thats a few years back so lets round that up to $30K. Assuming 50 weeks worked a year and 48 hours a week that works out to $12.5 per hour.
I doubt the main reason people don't upgrade is because of how they value their time. From what I can ascertain the main reason they don't perform simple upgrades is that they are scared to do so.
If you are concerned about "saving" money through the false economy of "upgrades" then that means that you consider your free time to be valueless in the equation because you enjoy assembling PCs as a hobby.
In my experiance getting set up with a new machine involves
1: physically unpacking and setting up the machine
2: getting through the OEMs first boot setup process
3: removing any crap you don't want
4: installing all needed software (some of which may have licenses that are difficult to transfer)
5: copying across all relevant data (either by pulling out hard drives, setting up a network or copying the data twice once onto something external and then again off it)
6: getting all the settings back the way you like them
All of this takes FAR longer than performing a minor upgrade such as adding more ram or a second hard drive. Probablly even longer than making a new drive the primary and cloning it across.