I hate printers, I really do, but I think I hate inkjets far more than any other design Agreed.
Inkjets (especially the cheap ones) have higher running costs than most other printer types but that isn't the worst thing about them. The worst thing about them is if you leave them unused for a while they clog up. With a HP this means new cartridges. With an epson it generally means a new printer.
Another thing i've found is that the cost of inkjet cartridges tends to go up significantly over a printers lifetime. Especially if you want the genunine ink.
Lasers on the other hand you can put in a cuboard for a long time (longest i've tried is about a year but I don't see any reason it wouldn't go on almost indefinately) and they come out printing as good as when they went in. Not sure about laser cartridges since i've never been responsible for one that needed a replacement.
Unfortunately colour laser printers are still rather expensive and bulky. Especially if you want a network port on them (i've decided that every printer I buy from now on should have a network port and support at least one out of postscript or pcl).
Nobody really knows what proportion of new machines are bought to run win7 because whether a machine is sold with XP or 7 and whether the customer immediately wipes it to load a corp image of XP or not it counts as a win7 OEM sale.
Just look at the people who disable swap space because "it makes the computer slower". There are two main mindsets to designing computer systems.
The batch processing mindset says that what matters is average performance. The real time systems mindset says that what matters is meeting your deadlines consistently.
IMO desktops are closer to the latter than the former. Tens of milliseconds on each user action won't generally be noticed, the user can't do the next operation that quickly anyway. Tens of seconds on one action WILL be noticed and quite possiblly piss the user off especially if it's unexpected even if it only happens on a very small subset of actions. Unexpected delays break the flow of thought.
Now consider an app like firefox. It has a habbit of using a LOT of memory (whether this is a leak or a design feature is a subject of many/. arguments and not one I want to get into here). It is also single threaded so if any part of the app needs something swapped in the whole app is blocked. If the OS decides to swap it out for whatever reason (e.g. some app ran away with memory usage and didn't finally fail until after it had swapped out everything or a long running batch job overnight caused the OS to swap stuff out and expand the disk cache). Then you click on it's taskbar icon and wait ages as all the memory pages it's state is spread over grind their way back into memory.
You can't trust humans to manage this optimally True but you can't really trust computers to either. Especially when the computer hasn't really been told what the human considers important or even how the data will be used.
These days with RAM being so cheap Ram is cheaper than it used to be years ago but:
1: In the best case ( DDR2 or DDR3 desktop modules) it's still about ten times more expensive per gigabyte than SSD. 2: Often the systems you have aren't the best case. Older motherboards often have hard ram limits that are lower than you would like and/or take older ram families that have a much higher cost per gigabyte than current ones. This can be alleviated by a new motherboard but that may in turn mean a new case, possiblly a new copy of windows and possiblly some other devices replaced as well. Laptop users have it even worse. You can't go above 8GB on any laptop i've seen and even 8GB is both expensive and only available on modern systems. 3: A lot of people are still stuck with the limitations of 32-bit desktop windows (For example the new data aquisition module I recently bought is refusing to work on my 64-bit windows install despite supposedly having 64-bit drivers)
He didn't say add 4GB of RAM. He said 4GB of hard drive cache.
He said "Wouldn't it be cheaper and more effective just add an additional 4 GB of memory for disk cache?"
Now the problem is how to add that memory? I see a few possibilities.
1: add it as extra main memory and let the OS use it for cache. The trouble with this approach is twofold. Firstly a lot of users are still tied to 32-bit windows and desktop editions of 32-bit windows cap out at 4GB of address space (which usually translates to somewhere arround 3.5GB of usable ram). The second is a lot of machines especially laptops can't take the extra ram and even where they can a pair (most laptops will already have both slots filled and want dual channel for best performance so replacing both modules is the only reasonable option) of 4GB laptop modules isnt' cheap (crucial says around $400 for DDR2 and $500 for DDR3)
2: add it to the storage controller. This is basically what high end raid controllers do. Not an option for laptops unless the laptop maker puts it on the motherboard. (which they are unlikely to do because of space constraints). For desktops you could drop in a raid controller that can take 4GB of cache ram but the price is insane (you'd probablly be better off just buying a 160GB SSD and putting your OS partition on it)
3: make it part of the drive. This is essentially what seagate have done here though they have chosen to use flash rather than ram (probablly because of it's non-volatility, higher density and lower cost per gigabyte). 4: add it as an extra device. Again unsuitable for laptops and likely to be a pain for desktops too. I'm not aware of any products offering this but if there were I'd expect them to be expensive.
Which is nice and all but I wonder if the costs savings of using a secondhand P4 really make up for the extra power it uses compared to a modern equivilent (on loads that can be paralellised even a bloody dual core atom beats the lower end P4s)
This seems to me like a classic case of papering over the symptoms rather than solving the underlying issue* and in doing so creating potential confusion if/when the information is passed to paople of another proffession (as might for example.by the case with these power meals, I bet the people making them aren't medical proffesionals)
*The underlying issue being people using script handwriting (and often bad script handwriting at that) to write out important abbreviations.
So far, HTML5 spec doesn't specify video codecs at all. The cuurent html 5 drafts (earlier drafts actually specified theora) indicate that they want to specify a baseline codec but they have failed to find one that was acceptable to all the major players in the browser market. H.264 was unacceptable because of the need to purchae licenses to implement it. Theora is rejected by several major players (who claim it's a submarine patent threat)
So if google can bring everyone round to VP8 I'd expect to see it made an explicit reccomendation in the spec.
IIRC though if you want to do P2P from a java applet you will have to be running as a "trusted" applet. That means a security warning every time a user loads the applet.
Many liquid fuel fires also react badly to water. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism but I think it's due the water sinking through the liquid and then vaporising and carrying the liquid with it.
More surface area tends to increase reaction rates.
Even three low end 20 inch monitors will give a much higher resolution Low end 20 inch monitors seem to be 1600x900 so with three of them you would get just over twice as many pixels as on a 1920x1080 (full HD) screen. It also seems I can get a 2048 x 1152 display for less than the three low end 20 inch monitors.
Even more insiduous is that when MS designed thier symbol font (yes I know it's a deperecated way of doing things but not everyone moves with the times) they put the micro sign at the m position. So if someone uses the symbol font to represent the micro sign and then font information is lost or the font is unavailable the micro sign will be replaced by an m.
If the poster has good karma (seems to come pretty easy unless you are a total idiot or a deliberate troll) then they post at +2 (unless they deliberately turn off karma bonus) so a +3 just means ONE person with modpoints thought the post was worthy of modding up. Hardly a high bar.
The big issue is how to make robots safe enough for people to interact with.
If humans and robots work closely together then it is almost certain that sooner or later a human will inadvertently get in a robots way. Currently due to the way most robots (and non-robot machinary for that matter) are designed for a human to get in a robots way is FAR more dangerous than a human getting in another humans way (even if that other human is holding a knife). We humans have a very powerful vision system that acts as an early warning and we have to conciously make a descision to apply more force if something pushes back against our movement. The article is about a system that effectively adds the latter property to a robots movement (this won't prevent an accidental stabbing completely but it will considerablly reduce it's severity).
Right now safety arround robots is largely handled by keeping the humans and robots as seperate as possible. When humans and robots must interact (say to pass a workpeice between them) the interaction area is kept small (e.g. a table in front of a hole in the robots gaurd) and the person is carefully trained in the expected movements of the robot. This works acceptably for industrial robots that work at fixed locations in a factory but isn't so useful in other situations.
Except that's stupid, because a robot handling a knife will be handling a knife because it will be, duh, cutting stuff. Consider a kitchen assistant (robot or human).
Sometimes they are handling the knife because they are cutting stuff but that isn't the only reason they handle it. They also have to move it from the storage location to the workspace, from the workspace to the cleaning location and from the cleaning location back to the storage location.
So a collison detection system that was disabled during actual cutting but unabled during other handling of the sharp object would be a major improvement over no such system.
Windows had (and is continuing to preserve) 2 separate tracks: Windows had two tracks (9x and NT) but the 9x track is dead (last release was ME).
Windows XP was NOT a replacement for Win2K Windows XP professional was a replacement for windows 2000 professional.
From a technical point of view there were two lines of windows, the conventional windows/9x line and the NT line.
The conventional/9x line went 3.x --> 95 --> 98 --> ME and then died out. It was replaced by XP home (which is a stripped down version of XP pro)
The NT line went from NT 3.1 --> NT 3.5 --> NT4 --> 2K -->XP --> 2K3 --> vista/2K8 --> 7/2K8R2 though XP never had a server edition and 2K3 didn't have a 32-bit desktop edition (there were a couple of 64-bit desktop editions released under the XP name but using the 2K3 codebase).
IMO the most significant thing is if you don't upgrade to SP3 you will stop getting security updates. This may be acceptable for some systems that are low risk (e.g. systems that are not connected to a network that can take incoming connections from malicious systems and that do not connect outbound to untrusted machines) but I wouldn't want to be running a system that is not getting security updates as my main OS.
The big PC game houses are also treating thier customers like shit with online activation, forced updates and in some cases even continuous checking with the mothership.
It's such a pity, I want to play the big hit games and am quite happy to pay for them but I resent being treated like a potential criminal for doing so.
My understanding from the previous article on this is that in the not too distant future (few months from now iirc) it should run out of fuel for attitude control.
Once the attitude control fails it should lose power pretty quickly.
At least playstation network works on the principle of authorised consoles. If you log into your account from a friends system and download DLC then afaict that console will be added to your authorisation list (which has a limit of five PS3s and five PSPs iirc). It's POSSIBLE to deauth consoles but afaict the option is pretty hidden and you can only do it from the console in question.
So assuming they use the standard system if you only have a few friends you can share with them but if you have more than a few and/or some replace thier consoles they can quickly run out unless you remember to deauth the console each time.
plastics for example cannot be created using corn. Afaict plastics (At least the basic ones) are mainly made from alkenes. OIL happens to be a conviniant and cheap source of these (we crack the long chain alkanes to produce slightly smaller alkanes for petrol and alkenes for plastics) but it's far from the only way to make them.
The question is not can we produce stuff at all without oil (we can) it's whether we can produce stuff in sufficiant quantities to sustain the earths current population and living standards or worse those of the near future without burning through expendable resources at breakneck speed.
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I hate printers, I really do, but I think I hate inkjets far more than any other design
Agreed.
Inkjets (especially the cheap ones) have higher running costs than most other printer types but that isn't the worst thing about them. The worst thing about them is if you leave them unused for a while they clog up. With a HP this means new cartridges. With an epson it generally means a new printer.
Another thing i've found is that the cost of inkjet cartridges tends to go up significantly over a printers lifetime. Especially if you want the genunine ink.
Lasers on the other hand you can put in a cuboard for a long time (longest i've tried is about a year but I don't see any reason it wouldn't go on almost indefinately) and they come out printing as good as when they went in. Not sure about laser cartridges since i've never been responsible for one that needed a replacement.
Unfortunately colour laser printers are still rather expensive and bulky. Especially if you want a network port on them (i've decided that every printer I buy from now on should have a network port and support at least one out of postscript or pcl).
A quick search on google shopping. shows 1GB usb sticks starting at arround $4. CDRs starting at arround 20 cents each.
You can probablly get the USB sticks cheaper by bulk buying but I still doubt they would be anywhere near as cheap as CDs.
Nobody really knows what proportion of new machines are bought to run win7 because whether a machine is sold with XP or 7 and whether the customer immediately wipes it to load a corp image of XP or not it counts as a win7 OEM sale.
Just look at the people who disable swap space because "it makes the computer slower".
There are two main mindsets to designing computer systems.
The batch processing mindset says that what matters is average performance.
The real time systems mindset says that what matters is meeting your deadlines consistently.
IMO desktops are closer to the latter than the former. Tens of milliseconds on each user action won't generally be noticed, the user can't do the next operation that quickly anyway. Tens of seconds on one action WILL be noticed and quite possiblly piss the user off especially if it's unexpected even if it only happens on a very small subset of actions. Unexpected delays break the flow of thought.
Now consider an app like firefox. It has a habbit of using a LOT of memory (whether this is a leak or a design feature is a subject of many /. arguments and not one I want to get into here). It is also single threaded so if any part of the app needs something swapped in the whole app is blocked. If the OS decides to swap it out for whatever reason (e.g. some app ran away with memory usage and didn't finally fail until after it had swapped out everything or a long running batch job overnight caused the OS to swap stuff out and expand the disk cache). Then you click on it's taskbar icon and wait ages as all the memory pages it's state is spread over grind their way back into memory.
You can't trust humans to manage this optimally
True but you can't really trust computers to either. Especially when the computer hasn't really been told what the human considers important or even how the data will be used.
These days with RAM being so cheap
Ram is cheaper than it used to be years ago but:
1: In the best case ( DDR2 or DDR3 desktop modules) it's still about ten times more expensive per gigabyte than SSD.
2: Often the systems you have aren't the best case. Older motherboards often have hard ram limits that are lower than you would like and/or take older ram families that have a much higher cost per gigabyte than current ones. This can be alleviated by a new motherboard but that may in turn mean a new case, possiblly a new copy of windows and possiblly some other devices replaced as well. Laptop users have it even worse. You can't go above 8GB on any laptop i've seen and even 8GB is both expensive and only available on modern systems.
3: A lot of people are still stuck with the limitations of 32-bit desktop windows (For example the new data aquisition module I recently bought is refusing to work on my 64-bit windows install despite supposedly having 64-bit drivers)
He didn't say add 4GB of RAM. He said 4GB of hard drive cache.
He said "Wouldn't it be cheaper and more effective just add an additional 4 GB of memory for disk cache?"
Now the problem is how to add that memory? I see a few possibilities.
1: add it as extra main memory and let the OS use it for cache. The trouble with this approach is twofold. Firstly a lot of users are still tied to 32-bit windows and desktop editions of 32-bit windows cap out at 4GB of address space (which usually translates to somewhere arround 3.5GB of usable ram). The second is a lot of machines especially laptops can't take the extra ram and even where they can a pair (most laptops will already have both slots filled and want dual channel for best performance so replacing both modules is the only reasonable option) of 4GB laptop modules isnt' cheap (crucial says around $400 for DDR2 and $500 for DDR3)
2: add it to the storage controller. This is basically what high end raid controllers do. Not an option for laptops unless the laptop maker puts it on the motherboard. (which they are unlikely to do because of space constraints). For desktops you could drop in a raid controller that can take 4GB of cache ram but the price is insane (you'd probablly be better off just buying a 160GB SSD and putting your OS partition on it)
3: make it part of the drive. This is essentially what seagate have done here though they have chosen to use flash rather than ram (probablly because of it's non-volatility, higher density and lower cost per gigabyte).
4: add it as an extra device. Again unsuitable for laptops and likely to be a pain for desktops too. I'm not aware of any products offering this but if there were I'd expect them to be expensive.
Which is nice and all but I wonder if the costs savings of using a secondhand P4 really make up for the extra power it uses compared to a modern equivilent (on loads that can be paralellised even a bloody dual core atom beats the lower end P4s)
This seems to me like a classic case of papering over the symptoms rather than solving the underlying issue* and in doing so creating potential confusion if/when the information is passed to paople of another proffession (as might for example.by the case with these power meals, I bet the people making them aren't medical proffesionals)
*The underlying issue being people using script handwriting (and often bad script handwriting at that) to write out important abbreviations.
So far, HTML5 spec doesn't specify video codecs at all.
The cuurent html 5 drafts (earlier drafts actually specified theora) indicate that they want to specify a baseline codec but they have failed to find one that was acceptable to all the major players in the browser market. H.264 was unacceptable because of the need to purchae licenses to implement it. Theora is rejected by several major players (who claim it's a submarine patent threat)
So if google can bring everyone round to VP8 I'd expect to see it made an explicit reccomendation in the spec.
Unlike with trademarks patent holders get to pick and choose their victims.
IIRC though if you want to do P2P from a java applet you will have to be running as a "trusted" applet. That means a security warning every time a user loads the applet.
Many liquid fuel fires also react badly to water. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism but I think it's due the water sinking through the liquid and then vaporising and carrying the liquid with it.
More surface area tends to increase reaction rates.
Even three low end 20 inch monitors will give a much higher resolution
Low end 20 inch monitors seem to be 1600x900 so with three of them you would get just over twice as many pixels as on a 1920x1080 (full HD) screen. It also seems I can get a 2048 x 1152 display for less than the three low end 20 inch monitors.
Even more insiduous is that when MS designed thier symbol font (yes I know it's a deperecated way of doing things but not everyone moves with the times) they put the micro sign at the m position. So if someone uses the symbol font to represent the micro sign and then font information is lost or the font is unavailable the micro sign will be replaced by an m.
If the poster has good karma (seems to come pretty easy unless you are a total idiot or a deliberate troll) then they post at +2 (unless they deliberately turn off karma bonus) so a +3 just means ONE person with modpoints thought the post was worthy of modding up. Hardly a high bar.
The big issue is how to make robots safe enough for people to interact with.
If humans and robots work closely together then it is almost certain that sooner or later a human will inadvertently get in a robots way. Currently due to the way most robots (and non-robot machinary for that matter) are designed for a human to get in a robots way is FAR more dangerous than a human getting in another humans way (even if that other human is holding a knife). We humans have a very powerful vision system that acts as an early warning and we have to conciously make a descision to apply more force if something pushes back against our movement. The article is about a system that effectively adds the latter property to a robots movement (this won't prevent an accidental stabbing completely but it will considerablly reduce it's severity).
Right now safety arround robots is largely handled by keeping the humans and robots as seperate as possible. When humans and robots must interact (say to pass a workpeice between them) the interaction area is kept small (e.g. a table in front of a hole in the robots gaurd) and the person is carefully trained in the expected movements of the robot. This works acceptably for industrial robots that work at fixed locations in a factory but isn't so useful in other situations.
Except that's stupid, because a robot handling a knife will be handling a knife because it will be, duh, cutting stuff.
Consider a kitchen assistant (robot or human).
Sometimes they are handling the knife because they are cutting stuff but that isn't the only reason they handle it. They also have to move it from the storage location to the workspace, from the workspace to the cleaning location and from the cleaning location back to the storage location.
So a collison detection system that was disabled during actual cutting but unabled during other handling of the sharp object would be a major improvement over no such system.
Windows had (and is continuing to preserve) 2 separate tracks:
Windows had two tracks (9x and NT) but the 9x track is dead (last release was ME).
Windows XP was NOT a replacement for Win2K
Windows XP professional was a replacement for windows 2000 professional.
From a technical point of view there were two lines of windows, the conventional windows/9x line and the NT line.
The conventional/9x line went 3.x --> 95 --> 98 --> ME and then died out. It was replaced by XP home (which is a stripped down version of XP pro)
The NT line went from NT 3.1 --> NT 3.5 --> NT4 --> 2K -->XP --> 2K3 --> vista/2K8 --> 7/2K8R2 though XP never had a server edition and 2K3 didn't have a 32-bit desktop edition (there were a couple of 64-bit desktop editions released under the XP name but using the 2K3 codebase).
IMO the most significant thing is if you don't upgrade to SP3 you will stop getting security updates. This may be acceptable for some systems that are low risk (e.g. systems that are not connected to a network that can take incoming connections from malicious systems and that do not connect outbound to untrusted machines) but I wouldn't want to be running a system that is not getting security updates as my main OS.
Lukilly we have vmware, IIRC they still support 9x so I'd be very surprised if they dropped support for XP any time soon.
Most games that you buy in the store require online activation these days anyway
S/Most games/Most PC games/
For all their other faults console games seem to have mostly avoided that crap so far.
The big PC game houses are also treating thier customers like shit with online activation, forced updates and in some cases even continuous checking with the mothership.
It's such a pity, I want to play the big hit games and am quite happy to pay for them but I resent being treated like a potential criminal for doing so.
My understanding from the previous article on this is that in the not too distant future (few months from now iirc) it should run out of fuel for attitude control.
Once the attitude control fails it should lose power pretty quickly.
At least playstation network works on the principle of authorised consoles. If you log into your account from a friends system and download DLC then afaict that console will be added to your authorisation list (which has a limit of five PS3s and five PSPs iirc). It's POSSIBLE to deauth consoles but afaict the option is pretty hidden and you can only do it from the console in question.
So assuming they use the standard system if you only have a few friends you can share with them but if you have more than a few and/or some replace thier consoles they can quickly run out unless you remember to deauth the console each time.
plastics for example cannot be created using corn.
Afaict plastics (At least the basic ones) are mainly made from alkenes. OIL happens to be a conviniant and cheap source of these (we crack the long chain alkanes to produce slightly smaller alkanes for petrol and alkenes for plastics) but it's far from the only way to make them.
The question is not can we produce stuff at all without oil (we can) it's whether we can produce stuff in sufficiant quantities to sustain the earths current population and living standards or worse those of the near future without burning through expendable resources at breakneck speed.