there are some very basic phones available intended for old folks. Often they have things like big buttons and big displays too. e.g. http://www.doro.com/global/businessunit/dorocare/Product?c=11900&p=330GSM (that one doesn't do the US bands unfortunately but I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar devices that did)
For the most part though if you still have decent vision I'd suggest just getting a basic nokia and ignoring any features you aren't interested in.
Opera don't sell thier desktop browser anymore either so they don't directly make any financial gains from having more desktop users.
IMO both apple and opera have a strong interest in "anything except IE" for the simple reason that opera/chrome/firefox/safari are all far closer to each other in behaviour than they are to IE. More users off IE should make web developers more standards friendly which in turn will benefit the non-pc browsers that opera sell and apple bundle.
Yeae. and pretty much any time some propritary software package is terminated, it is almost certainly available for sale to someone else so it can be taken over if its worth it to someone. Bullshit
Buying out a propietry requires a substantial chunk of cash up front. So it's only an option if one of the following applies. 1: you are big enough to buy it out 2: you can convince another company that it's worth thier while to buy it out, take it over and sell you licences. 3: you can get enough of the community together to buy it out.
And even if you can get the money together the owner still has to be willing to sell. They may not be especially if they consider killing the project to be a strategic move.
Copying the code of an opensource project and setting up repositries OTOH is so cheap that anyone can do it. Minimal maintenance (accepting bugfixes, dealing with new OS releases etc) is some work but should be managable by a few interested users working together.
I don't think it's the brand that brings people to mysql. You can't just drop in replace one DB with another in most cases.
IMO there are a few reasons people use mysql 1: it's free (as long as you don't try to link it into a commercial app) 2: it's included with almost every linux distro and linux based webhosting package 3: nearly all webapps are built to work with it.
IMO the most sensible thing to do would be to stagnate but not kill mysql while at the same time using code from mysql to build a mysql compatible interface to oracle and a tool for migrating data from mysql to oracle.
Then they can push that as a soloution for those who have outgrown mysql.
IMO if oracle kills mysql the users are far more likely to migrate to either a mysql fork or another FOSS database than they are to a light edition of oracle.
IIRC google designs arround the "losing an individual server is no big deal" principle.
You can see this in the design of the machine pictured. Non-redundant power supply with local batteries means the chance of losing an individual node to power problems is probablly a bit higher than normal but the chance of losing a whole load at once is probablly lower.
This contrasts sharply with the more traditional model where it only takes a few servers in the wrong places to go down together and you have MAJOR problems.
The connectors on that power supply look the same as EPS12V connectors to me. I've seen motherboards that use 12V only power for sale before (e.g. the intel S5500WB12V which seems to use a setup very similar to the one in that picture with two EPS12v style connectors and a seperate control wire with thinner cores). It does clear up the wiring vs having all those wires for legacy rails.
The custom PSU seems to be part of supporting their system of batteries with the boards rather than large centralised UPS systems. They also seem to be using an open frame design for better cooling.
I'd guess the google labels on the chips are to deter theft. If you bulk buy I doubt a different label costs much.
Note also that in between free peering and transit you have "paid peering". This can be useful to a company that exchanges a lot of traffic with a particular ISP but isn't large enough to get free peering from them.
I suspect that companies like google have a fair bit of paid peering in thier internet connection portfolio.
Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon? Yeah and each person spent about a day on the moon followed by a few days travelling back to earth in a spaceship that was undoubtedly somewhat contaminated with moondust.
Oh and there were less than 20 of them in total by my count.
Same for security updates. On a system with centralised update management (e.g. most Linux distributions) I would agree with you less code duplication makes security updates easier. For this reason you will find the likes of debian making substantial effort to make software build with the system copies of libraries rather than it's own embedded copies.
On windows OTOH most people won't update software unless it comes with it's own system for nagging them to do so, it is free to do so and they can see an obvious reason for doing so (Sometimes they won't do it even then).
IMO exposed components shipped as part of firefox have a FAR greater chance of getting security updates in a tiny manner than exposed components installed by some install and forget codec pack.
Even ignoring the political side of things i'm really not sure exposing every crappy codec a user happens to have installed (of which even on linux some of which may have been installed outside of the repositry system) to malicious websites is such a good idea.
BTW debian provide full DVD sets of their main repositry that can be used with apt.
there aren't any CD images of contrib or non-free but if you download them with debmirror I think everything in contrib and non-free for an architecture will fit on one dvd.
I think ubuntu do a dvd of main too but unlike debian ubuntu have a fairly small main section and I don't think they do any media of universe.
BTW the CPU reviewed here is a single socket device though there is a dual socket version (which afaict is even more expensive).
If you want more than two sockets you either have to wait for the 8-core chips with more QPI links supposed to be released soon or make do with core 2 generation stuff.
Normally I would agree with you, the top models traditionally tend to carry an insane markup and yet only a modest increase in performance.
The complication here is that for the right workloads going to 6-core brings a large leap in performance over four core. The non-extreme single socket versions of this chip aren't coming out until Q3 2010 and while afaict you can use a dual socket capable version in a single socket setup it doesn't make much sense to do so.
Actually there is quite a bit of information in that part number if you know how to read it. I agree they could be less cryptic though
i3/i5/i7 seem to be intels indication of the target market. i3 is economy, i5 is mainstream and i7 is high performance.
The first digit of the number is the series. In general higher series are better in some respect than lower series.
The final pair of digits indicates where in that series it is, the higher the better.
The x says it's an "extreme edition" which means you get an unlocked multiplier, generally the extreme editions are also the fastest chips in thier family.
Unfortunately intel then go and screw up thier own scheme by putting the new hex core processor in the same series as it's quad core predescessors.
Maybe it would be hard to target a specific company that way but what is stopping someone just buying stolen laptops from addicts and searching them for information of potential value?
They would obviously get some with no valuable information on them but I'd bet enough would have valuable information to make the endevour worthwhile.
Where are you getting those figures from, the ones I can find on teslas site ( http://www.teslamotors.com/electric/charging.php ) say that a 240V 20A hookup with thier larger portable cable gives a 19 hour charge time.
To get 3.5 hours you need to use the home connector station which charges 240V 70A. EEK!
I find it dissapointing that other than changing which plug adaptor is used on the large portable cable or using a different cable there doesn't seem to be a way to select a lower charge current. Nor is there any easy way to make the charger stop when other heavy loads are in use in the house.
Oh and the charge connections are expensive ranging from $600 for the most basic slow charge cable to $2000 for the 70A home station! According to their website only the slow charge cable is included.
At least in europe we already have a standard set of tough industrial mains connectors ranging from 16A single phase to 125A three phase (I think there may be a 250A version too). 63A 230V/400V three phase gives a total of 43KW.
In general you DON'T want just one connector because you DON'T want people connecting incompatible stuff together.
1: car battery packs are pretty valuable. Would I want a service station replacing my brand new battery pack with one that may be on it's last legs? the only way it could be even somewhat acceptable is if all the battery packs were owned by a central company who gauranteed to replace any that dropped below a certain level as part of the service. Of course than that company would probablly want to charge extra if you wanted to charge the battery packs at home.
2: the battery packs would have to be a standard size and shape and loaded/unloaded in a standardised way. This combined with the large size of the pack would put huge restrictions on the designs of cars that used them.
One thing I wonder about with this new line is that afaict unlike the trans-siberian which afaict goes direct from russia to china. So western europeans wanting to go to china on that route would need a visa for china, russia and possiblly some country in eastern europe (not sure what their policies on travel for europeans are)
This new line will go through a load of countries so IMO if it's going to be practical it needs a system to ensure that passengers can transit the line without getting huge numbers of visas.
The music industry seems to have got it and realised that selling a product that's as good as what the pirates offer isn't such a bad idea after all.
The movie industry OTOH seems to still be trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Witness the way blu-ray has far more competently designed protection than DVD and the fact that they are going to ban new player designs and then later any new players from having HD analog outputs and they have the ability to bar movies from playing in HD over unprotected channels on older players.
It's not just games, when you buy win 7 home premium that disk contains all the "content" of win 7 ultimate.
What MS do with windows is in some ways even worse. You can unlock the extra content for a while without paying upfront but if you do you have to either pay for it after the grace period is up or do a complete reinstall since there is no way to downgrade editions.
The problem is the big game development studios have pushed headlong towards more detailed graphics as the main way of selling each new generation of games.
As this has happened development costs have gone through the roof. That means that the number of companies that can afford to bankroll such a game and have the marketing clout to make a profit out of it is small. Those companies are of course trying to recover their investments.
I wonder how the track width across different countries is going to work. Actually track gauge is pretty standardised. Western Europe, china and the US are all dominated by "standard gauge" (4ft8.5in). Eastern Europe seems to be a mixture of standard gauge and Russian gauge
Given that both china and western europe use standard gauge I would expect this line to be standard gauge and any countries using something else will either just have to live with the new line being a different gauge from everything else or have their section of the new line laid in double gauge (however double gauge track increases costs significantly).
If I remember correctly, that was a similar problem when connecting the UK to Europe. That was a loading gauge (the maximum dimensions of the train to safely traverse the line) issue. Normal European trains are too big to traverse British lines but the smaller Eurostar trains can run fine on both.
As shown by the Eurostar case loading gauge is less of an issue. You can design trains to run on the smallest loading gauge they will encounter and/or build new lines to the largest loading gauge of trains they will encounter.
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there are some very basic phones available intended for old folks. Often they have things like big buttons and big displays too. e.g. http://www.doro.com/global/businessunit/dorocare/Product?c=11900&p=330GSM (that one doesn't do the US bands unfortunately but I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar devices that did)
For the most part though if you still have decent vision I'd suggest just getting a basic nokia and ignoring any features you aren't interested in.
Opera don't sell thier desktop browser anymore either so they don't directly make any financial gains from having more desktop users.
IMO both apple and opera have a strong interest in "anything except IE" for the simple reason that opera/chrome/firefox/safari are all far closer to each other in behaviour than they are to IE. More users off IE should make web developers more standards friendly which in turn will benefit the non-pc browsers that opera sell and apple bundle.
Yeae. and pretty much any time some propritary software package is terminated, it is almost certainly available for sale to someone else so it can be taken over if its worth it to someone.
Bullshit
Buying out a propietry requires a substantial chunk of cash up front. So it's only an option if one of the following applies.
1: you are big enough to buy it out
2: you can convince another company that it's worth thier while to buy it out, take it over and sell you licences.
3: you can get enough of the community together to buy it out.
And even if you can get the money together the owner still has to be willing to sell. They may not be especially if they consider killing the project to be a strategic move.
Copying the code of an opensource project and setting up repositries OTOH is so cheap that anyone can do it. Minimal maintenance (accepting bugfixes, dealing with new OS releases etc) is some work but should be managable by a few interested users working together.
I don't think it's the brand that brings people to mysql. You can't just drop in replace one DB with another in most cases.
IMO there are a few reasons people use mysql
1: it's free (as long as you don't try to link it into a commercial app)
2: it's included with almost every linux distro and linux based webhosting package
3: nearly all webapps are built to work with it.
IMO the most sensible thing to do would be to stagnate but not kill mysql while at the same time using code from mysql to build a mysql compatible interface to oracle and a tool for migrating data from mysql to oracle.
Then they can push that as a soloution for those who have outgrown mysql.
IMO if oracle kills mysql the users are far more likely to migrate to either a mysql fork or another FOSS database than they are to a light edition of oracle.
The wii does not have a near monopoly of the game console market.
IIRC google designs arround the "losing an individual server is no big deal" principle.
You can see this in the design of the machine pictured. Non-redundant power supply with local batteries means the chance of losing an individual node to power problems is probablly a bit higher than normal but the chance of losing a whole load at once is probablly lower.
This contrasts sharply with the more traditional model where it only takes a few servers in the wrong places to go down together and you have MAJOR problems.
The connectors on that power supply look the same as EPS12V connectors to me. I've seen motherboards that use 12V only power for sale before (e.g. the intel S5500WB12V which seems to use a setup very similar to the one in that picture with two EPS12v style connectors and a seperate control wire with thinner cores). It does clear up the wiring vs having all those wires for legacy rails.
The custom PSU seems to be part of supporting their system of batteries with the boards rather than large centralised UPS systems. They also seem to be using an open frame design for better cooling.
I'd guess the google labels on the chips are to deter theft. If you bulk buy I doubt a different label costs much.
Note also that in between free peering and transit you have "paid peering". This can be useful to a company that exchanges a lot of traffic with a particular ISP but isn't large enough to get free peering from them.
I suspect that companies like google have a fair bit of paid peering in thier internet connection portfolio.
Wait... haven't we already sent people to the moon?
Yeah and each person spent about a day on the moon followed by a few days travelling back to earth in a spaceship that was undoubtedly somewhat contaminated with moondust.
Oh and there were less than 20 of them in total by my count.
Same for security updates.
On a system with centralised update management (e.g. most Linux distributions) I would agree with you less code duplication makes security updates easier. For this reason you will find the likes of debian making substantial effort to make software build with the system copies of libraries rather than it's own embedded copies.
On windows OTOH most people won't update software unless it comes with it's own system for nagging them to do so, it is free to do so and they can see an obvious reason for doing so (Sometimes they won't do it even then).
IMO exposed components shipped as part of firefox have a FAR greater chance of getting security updates in a tiny manner than exposed components installed by some install and forget codec pack.
Even ignoring the political side of things i'm really not sure exposing every crappy codec a user happens to have installed (of which even on linux some of which may have been installed outside of the repositry system) to malicious websites is such a good idea.
BTW debian provide full DVD sets of their main repositry that can be used with apt.
there aren't any CD images of contrib or non-free but if you download them with debmirror I think everything in contrib and non-free for an architecture will fit on one dvd.
I think ubuntu do a dvd of main too but unlike debian ubuntu have a fairly small main section and I don't think they do any media of universe.
well, bigger numbers are better.
Not nessacerally. According to tom's hardware an 870 outperforms a 920.
BTW the CPU reviewed here is a single socket device though there is a dual socket version (which afaict is even more expensive).
If you want more than two sockets you either have to wait for the 8-core chips with more QPI links supposed to be released soon or make do with core 2 generation stuff.
Normally I would agree with you, the top models traditionally tend to carry an insane markup and yet only a modest increase in performance.
The complication here is that for the right workloads going to 6-core brings a large leap in performance over four core. The non-extreme single socket versions of this chip aren't coming out until Q3 2010 and while afaict you can use a dual socket capable version in a single socket setup it doesn't make much sense to do so.
Actually there is quite a bit of information in that part number if you know how to read it. I agree they could be less cryptic though
i3/i5/i7 seem to be intels indication of the target market. i3 is economy, i5 is mainstream and i7 is high performance.
The first digit of the number is the series. In general higher series are better in some respect than lower series.
The final pair of digits indicates where in that series it is, the higher the better.
The x says it's an "extreme edition" which means you get an unlocked multiplier, generally the extreme editions are also the fastest chips in thier family.
Unfortunately intel then go and screw up thier own scheme by putting the new hex core processor in the same series as it's quad core predescessors.
Maybe it would be hard to target a specific company that way but what is stopping someone just buying stolen laptops from addicts and searching them for information of potential value?
They would obviously get some with no valuable information on them but I'd bet enough would have valuable information to make the endevour worthwhile.
Where are you getting those figures from, the ones I can find on teslas site ( http://www.teslamotors.com/electric/charging.php ) say that a 240V 20A hookup with thier larger portable cable gives a 19 hour charge time.
To get 3.5 hours you need to use the home connector station which charges 240V 70A. EEK!
I find it dissapointing that other than changing which plug adaptor is used on the large portable cable or using a different cable there doesn't seem to be a way to select a lower charge current. Nor is there any easy way to make the charger stop when other heavy loads are in use in the house.
Oh and the charge connections are expensive ranging from $600 for the most basic slow charge cable to $2000 for the 70A home station! According to their website only the slow charge cable is included.
At least in europe we already have a standard set of tough industrial mains connectors ranging from 16A single phase to 125A three phase (I think there may be a 250A version too). 63A 230V/400V three phase gives a total of 43KW.
In general you DON'T want just one connector because you DON'T want people connecting incompatible stuff together.
I see at least two big problems with that idea.
1: car battery packs are pretty valuable. Would I want a service station replacing my brand new battery pack with one that may be on it's last legs? the only way it could be even somewhat acceptable is if all the battery packs were owned by a central company who gauranteed to replace any that dropped below a certain level as part of the service. Of course than that company would probablly want to charge extra if you wanted to charge the battery packs at home.
2: the battery packs would have to be a standard size and shape and loaded/unloaded in a standardised way. This combined with the large size of the pack would put huge restrictions on the designs of cars that used them.
One thing I wonder about with this new line is that afaict unlike the trans-siberian which afaict goes direct from russia to china. So western europeans wanting to go to china on that route would need a visa for china, russia and possiblly some country in eastern europe (not sure what their policies on travel for europeans are)
This new line will go through a load of countries so IMO if it's going to be practical it needs a system to ensure that passengers can transit the line without getting huge numbers of visas.
The music industry seems to have got it and realised that selling a product that's as good as what the pirates offer isn't such a bad idea after all.
The movie industry OTOH seems to still be trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Witness the way blu-ray has far more competently designed protection than DVD and the fact that they are going to ban new player designs and then later any new players from having HD analog outputs and they have the ability to bar movies from playing in HD over unprotected channels on older players.
It's not just games, when you buy win 7 home premium that disk contains all the "content" of win 7 ultimate.
What MS do with windows is in some ways even worse. You can unlock the extra content for a while without paying upfront but if you do you have to either pay for it after the grace period is up or do a complete reinstall since there is no way to downgrade editions.
The problem is the big game development studios have pushed headlong towards more detailed graphics as the main way of selling each new generation of games.
As this has happened development costs have gone through the roof. That means that the number of companies that can afford to bankroll such a game and have the marketing clout to make a profit out of it is small. Those companies are of course trying to recover their investments.
IMO if china is sensible they will design this line in such a way that a mixture of train speeds can be readily accomodated.
I wonder how the track width across different countries is going to work.
Actually track gauge is pretty standardised. Western Europe, china and the US are all dominated by "standard gauge" (4ft8.5in). Eastern Europe seems to be a mixture of standard gauge and Russian gauge
Given that both china and western europe use standard gauge I would expect this line to be standard gauge and any countries using something else will either just have to live with the new line being a different gauge from everything else or have their section of the new line laid in double gauge (however double gauge track increases costs significantly).
If I remember correctly, that was a similar problem when connecting the UK to Europe.
That was a loading gauge (the maximum dimensions of the train to safely traverse the line) issue. Normal European trains are too big to traverse British lines but the smaller Eurostar trains can run fine on both.
As shown by the Eurostar case loading gauge is less of an issue. You can design trains to run on the smallest loading gauge they will encounter and/or build new lines to the largest loading gauge of trains they will encounter.