While what you say is true to an extent generally webapps designed to work with any browser from the start will likely continue to do so. Webapps designed arround IE6 specific features are breaking all over the place.
It has been estimated roughly that an engineering, science or maths degree from Oxford or Cambridge has a net worth of over $300000 Do you have a source for this claim? In particular I'd like to know what if any steps they are taking to control for the fact that oxbridge takes the cream of Britain's students.
Two, about those slackers, I don't know what to say. Did they cheat to get their degrees? Or did they forget a lot of what they learned due to not applying it? Some people probablly do outright cheat but I suspect a lot more are merely taking advantage of the testing system while staying within the rules.
It is often possible to get through a course with a good mark without really understanding what you are doing as long as you have a reasonable skill in applying mathematical methods and can cram a series of steps, mechanically apply them in the exam and then forget them soon after as you learn the next set.
I've done this for one or two modules but some people seem to do it for every module and are a lot better at doing it than me.
Afaict with mimo the number of seperate sources (whether those sources are multiple antennas on the same system or multiple systems) you can pick out is roughly equal to the number of antennas you have. So more antennas help a bit but unless you are going to have tens of antennas on every device you are still going to need to make some use of either FDMA, TDMA or CDMA (or more likely a combination of them).
In principle I belive you can use your antennas in a group to direct different signals to different receivers but I don't know how practical this is in reality (i'm guessing you would need some quite complex feedback to the transmitter to make it work)
MIMO buys us a bit of improvement but at best it's only linear with the number of antennas. Is doubling the number of antennas and RF circuits on our equipment every couple of years to keep up with demand really a feasible solution?
It's not that hard but if you want to do it properly (IE not have ugly wires everywhere) it's pretty time consuming and will probablly cost more than going wireless (wallports are overpriced and cat5 seems a lot more expensive than it used to be).
Worse if you live in a rented property you have to get your landlords permission or risk losing your deposit when you move out.
As you get to the end of the range noise is generally dominated by receiver noise, interference etc not by transmitter noise (which don't forget is attenuated as much as the signal)
So I would expect cranking up the power to increase range unless the transmitter gets so noisy that even a close-by receiver is having trouble.
GCJ anyone? [gnu.org] Given that there is now a usable FOSS release of java based on the sun code that is far better than any of the independent implementations I think a better choice would be just to fork that if things go sour.
Regardless of what Oracle says now, I hope they kill off MySQL as quickly as possible. MySQL is a disease, and needs to be eliminated. It is responsible for more corrupt and lost data than basically anything else in history. And it's something that Oracle doesn't need associated with them, given that Oracle's database products are basically the complete opposite of MySQL in every way. OTOH if oracle kills mysql they risk driving people to postgresql. From what I have heard postgresql is far more of a threat to the likes of oracle than mysql is.
If I was in oracles position i'd keep mysql on lifesupport while trying to make migration from mysql to oracle as easy as possible for those who outgrew it.
I'm sure I remember hearing a while back that a big american cable provider had run out of private IPs for cable boxes etc and were now using public IPs for new ones. was it comcast? If so that would be a very powerfull reason to want ipv6 support on the network before v4 addresses ran out.
IMO the most likely endgame for IPv4 is the removal of public IPs from home lusers (replacing them with ISP level NAT) to give them to more profitable buisness customers.
Continued ability to use peer-peer stuff efficiantly will be the main selling point of IPv6 to home users, of course peer to peer is something ISPs want to strongly discourage.
I really really doubt that most ISPs would dare cut a customer without v6 supporting network equipment. computers and software off from the internet at this point. Not to mention that most websites aren't available on v6.
One complication is that iirc some of the largest American cable providers have actually already run out of private v4 IPs for thier internal network and so are putting cable boxes on public IPs. If they could move the cable boxes to v6 they could reuse their v4 addresses (whether public or private) for peoples internet connections and thus avoid the need to partition thier network into mulitple addressing domains.
I realise the above is a bit silly, but seriously, there are enough/64s for everyone. There is no need for a/128, no need for a/126, no need for anything but a/64. The trouble is the ipv6 autoconfiguration mechanisms were designed arround giving each subnet a/64 so if you only have a/64 you either have to limit yourself to one subnet (e.g. no seperate subnet for a segregated wifi network) or configure all your machines manually (and in the case of XP configure them from the command line!)
there are enough/56's for everyone, hell there are enough/48s for everyone (personally I preffered the old reccomendation of giving every site a/48 because it made it clear where the site number ended and the subnets within the site began).
Unfortunately you can bet crappier ISPs will give a/64 at best and a/128 at worst.
Almost all ISPs in the UK have some limits on usage, either they are honest about it like this ISP or they have fair use limits, or throttle speeds or some protocols, or they get congestion at peak times and slow down. Or they are heavily subsidising heavy users from their light users and hoping that overall use doesn't increase or they'll be badly caught out I've just taken a look at AAISPs prices and they don't seem quite as insane as they used to be but they are still very high if you have any significant daytime usage (otoh if you are a home user and either not in the house or prepared to abstain from bandwidth heavy stuff during the daytime they are more tolerable).
If you do have significant daytime usage and want a small ISP with with honest but reasonable limits I would suggest IDNET.
If you can deal with little to no support from a big company and you live in an appropriate LLU area BE and sky probablly give you the best bang for your buck as well as in many areas giving you the highest top speeds (since in a lot of areas BTs infrastructure isn't ADSL2).
I know with my ISP that if I get any packet loss or it slows down at all at any time I can report it as a fault and they'll sort it out. The impression i've always got with the smaller ISPs like aaisp and idnet is they are at the mercy of BT, they can (and will) pester BT harder than most larger ISPs would but ultimately if BTs network in your area is badly congested your only real way out is to switch to a LLU ISP (I notice aaisp are offering a be based service now but if you can take care of yourself your probablly better just dealing with be directly).
Your Windows NT version is making you stand out the most. I'm not exactly surprised, 5.2 is little used on the desktop because there is no 32-bit desktop edition of 5.2.
en-GB is also making you stand out, although after getting Slashdotted by the US this is not surprising.;)
Further a lot of the information is stuff that is likely to change over time with the installation of browser updates, OS updates, some new apps (if they bring fonts with them)
Though apparently my user agent ( "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)" ) is unique among those tested so far:/
ofc people who "pirate" all thier games aren't making MS any money so whether you can call being popular among "pirates" a success is open to interpretation (working on the assumption that console manufacturers either make a loss or a very small profit on the consoles and make up for it on the games)
Debian has had realtively large patchsets for mozilla software for a long time for various reasons. The branding changes are just one more relatively trivial change to forward port (and don't forget that there would have been branding changes before since the combination of firefox name and free icons wasn't supported by the standard build process).
I think the Debian/Iceweasel thing was a Debian issue rather than a Mozilla issue; they could have had the Firefox name, My understanding is they could but only if they
1: took the firefox branding (which was an issue due to the fact it's not available under a free license) 2: gave mozilla veto power on patches (including security updates)
I know at one point they were considering digging in one side of the rover to get a better angle? does anyone know if they have done this and if not are they planning to
Exactly. This is the real reason we don't have flying cars: humans can't drive them. Even experienced pilots require a kilometer or more free space around the plane to be safe; close formation flying is risky and regularly results in accidents. A rush hour in a city with millions of vehicles flown by amateurs who're sending text messages at the same time would be like a warzone under heavy artillery bombardment. Be that as it may I don't think that is currently the pressing issue. Yes it would become a problem if large ammounts of the population had flying cars but frankly I don't see that happening anytime soon for other reasons.
We can already build small and powerful enough engines to make car-sized objects fly just fine We can and we call the results "helicopters" and "light aircraft"
Imo the real problem for a "flying car" is to fit with our existing infrastructure. That means it has to either be able to drive on the road, be able to land anywhere a car can park or preferablly both.
Helicopters can land in a carpark but need a bit space to be cleared which is only going to happen if it's a medical emergency or a VIP. They are also very expensive both to buy and to run/maintain.
Conventional light aircraft need a runway to land and can't be taken on the road for both regulatory and practical (wingspan) reasons.
Roadable aircraft look like a real possibility for reasonablly wealthy people making longer trips but they have been dogged by high costs (including the costs of satisfying two sets of regulators), low demand and the practical issue of how to pack the wings quickly and easilly for road running.
Jet lifted cars are likely to have even higher running and maintinance costs and be even more dangerous than helicopters.
I suspect it's because the people designing the phones don't really think about it and/or consider it a defect.
Conventional analogue phones have a lot of "feedback" (signal passing from the microphone to the earpeice) because the circuits in them that split incoming and outgoing signals are somewhere between non-existent and poor.
Digital phones (whether cell, ISDN or VOIP) don't have "feedback" unless the manufacturer explicitly adds it so many of them have none of it at all and if they do have it "artificially" the manufacturer is conservative on the ammount.
It would be interesting if they introduced a rule that mobile phones in cars were only allowed to be half duplex and with an enforced clunk when releasing the talk button.
As with everything there is a balance to be struck
On the one hand if you get too tight on the pirates some of them may run off to other vendors which in the long term could be very bad for you. On the other hand there are people out there who will pirate by default but will pay if they need to.
another complicating factor is that companies are expected to show growth not just steady income. For a long time MS tolerated piracy by home users to encourage use and used strong enforcement to persuade buisnesses to buy. But they already have most buisnesses in countries with strong copyright enforcement purchasing thier software. Therefore the only viable way for MS to grow thier market is to push users who currently pirate to become light customers.
Slashdot Mirror
While what you say is true to an extent generally webapps designed to work with any browser from the start will likely continue to do so. Webapps designed arround IE6 specific features are breaking all over the place.
It has been estimated roughly that an engineering, science or maths degree from Oxford or Cambridge has a net worth of over $300000
Do you have a source for this claim? In particular I'd like to know what if any steps they are taking to control for the fact that oxbridge takes the cream of Britain's students.
Two, about those slackers, I don't know what to say. Did they cheat to get their degrees? Or did they forget a lot of what they learned due to not applying it?
Some people probablly do outright cheat but I suspect a lot more are merely taking advantage of the testing system while staying within the rules.
It is often possible to get through a course with a good mark without really understanding what you are doing as long as you have a reasonable skill in applying mathematical methods and can cram a series of steps, mechanically apply them in the exam and then forget them soon after as you learn the next set.
I've done this for one or two modules but some people seem to do it for every module and are a lot better at doing it than me.
It's 3 letters at a time from a password.
Afaict the form of the login used for verified by visa/mastercard securecode is dependent on the bank.
Afaict with mimo the number of seperate sources (whether those sources are multiple antennas on the same system or multiple systems) you can pick out is roughly equal to the number of antennas you have. So more antennas help a bit but unless you are going to have tens of antennas on every device you are still going to need to make some use of either FDMA, TDMA or CDMA (or more likely a combination of them).
In principle I belive you can use your antennas in a group to direct different signals to different receivers but I don't know how practical this is in reality (i'm guessing you would need some quite complex feedback to the transmitter to make it work)
MIMO buys us a bit of improvement but at best it's only linear with the number of antennas. Is doubling the number of antennas and RF circuits on our equipment every couple of years to keep up with demand really a feasible solution?
It's not that hard but if you want to do it properly (IE not have ugly wires everywhere) it's pretty time consuming and will probablly cost more than going wireless (wallports are overpriced and cat5 seems a lot more expensive than it used to be).
Worse if you live in a rented property you have to get your landlords permission or risk losing your deposit when you move out.
As you get to the end of the range noise is generally dominated by receiver noise, interference etc not by transmitter noise (which don't forget is attenuated as much as the signal)
So I would expect cranking up the power to increase range unless the transmitter gets so noisy that even a close-by receiver is having trouble.
Still use it wisely and watch out for the FCC ;)
GCJ anyone? [gnu.org]
Given that there is now a usable FOSS release of java based on the sun code that is far better than any of the independent implementations I think a better choice would be just to fork that if things go sour.
Regardless of what Oracle says now, I hope they kill off MySQL as quickly as possible. MySQL is a disease, and needs to be eliminated. It is responsible for more corrupt and lost data than basically anything else in history. And it's something that Oracle doesn't need associated with them, given that Oracle's database products are basically the complete opposite of MySQL in every way.
OTOH if oracle kills mysql they risk driving people to postgresql. From what I have heard postgresql is far more of a threat to the likes of oracle than mysql is.
If I was in oracles position i'd keep mysql on lifesupport while trying to make migration from mysql to oracle as easy as possible for those who outgrew it.
I bet we will see some kind of upsizing soloution to make it easy for mysql users who have outgrown mysql to migrate to oracle.
I'm sure I remember hearing a while back that a big american cable provider had run out of private IPs for cable boxes etc and were now using public IPs for new ones. was it comcast? If so that would be a very powerfull reason to want ipv6 support on the network before v4 addresses ran out.
IMO the most likely endgame for IPv4 is the removal of public IPs from home lusers (replacing them with ISP level NAT) to give them to more profitable buisness customers.
Continued ability to use peer-peer stuff efficiantly will be the main selling point of IPv6 to home users, of course peer to peer is something ISPs want to strongly discourage.
I really really doubt that most ISPs would dare cut a customer without v6 supporting network equipment. computers and software off from the internet at this point. Not to mention that most websites aren't available on v6.
One complication is that iirc some of the largest American cable providers have actually already run out of private v4 IPs for thier internal network and so are putting cable boxes on public IPs. If they could move the cable boxes to v6 they could reuse their v4 addresses (whether public or private) for peoples internet connections and thus avoid the need to partition thier network into mulitple addressing domains.
I realise the above is a bit silly, but seriously, there are enough /64s for everyone. There is no need for a /128, no need for a /126, no need for anything but a /64. /64 so if you only have a /64 you either have to limit yourself to one subnet (e.g. no seperate subnet for a segregated wifi network) or configure all your machines manually (and in the case of XP configure them from the command line!)
The trouble is the ipv6 autoconfiguration mechanisms were designed arround giving each subnet a
there are enough /56's for everyone, hell there are enough /48s for everyone (personally I preffered the old reccomendation of giving every site a /48 because it made it clear where the site number ended and the subnets within the site began).
Unfortunately you can bet crappier ISPs will give a /64 at best and a /128 at worst.
Almost all ISPs in the UK have some limits on usage, either they are honest about it like this ISP or they have fair use limits, or throttle speeds or some protocols, or they get congestion at peak times and slow down. Or they are heavily subsidising heavy users from their light users and hoping that overall use doesn't increase or they'll be badly caught out
I've just taken a look at AAISPs prices and they don't seem quite as insane as they used to be but they are still very high if you have any significant daytime usage (otoh if you are a home user and either not in the house or prepared to abstain from bandwidth heavy stuff during the daytime they are more tolerable).
If you do have significant daytime usage and want a small ISP with with honest but reasonable limits I would suggest IDNET.
If you can deal with little to no support from a big company and you live in an appropriate LLU area BE and sky probablly give you the best bang for your buck as well as in many areas giving you the highest top speeds (since in a lot of areas BTs infrastructure isn't ADSL2).
I know with my ISP that if I get any packet loss or it slows down at all at any time I can report it as a fault and they'll sort it out.
The impression i've always got with the smaller ISPs like aaisp and idnet is they are at the mercy of BT, they can (and will) pester BT harder than most larger ISPs would but ultimately if BTs network in your area is badly congested your only real way out is to switch to a LLU ISP (I notice aaisp are offering a be based service now but if you can take care of yourself your probablly better just dealing with be directly).
Your Windows NT version is making you stand out the most.
I'm not exactly surprised, 5.2 is little used on the desktop because there is no 32-bit desktop edition of 5.2.
en-GB is also making you stand out, although after getting Slashdotted by the US this is not surprising. ;)
Further a lot of the information is stuff that is likely to change over time with the installation of browser updates, OS updates, some new apps (if they bring fonts with them)
Though apparently my user agent ( "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)" ) is unique among those tested so far :/
ofc people who "pirate" all thier games aren't making MS any money so whether you can call being popular among "pirates" a success is open to interpretation (working on the assumption that console manufacturers either make a loss or a very small profit on the consoles and make up for it on the games)
Debian has had realtively large patchsets for mozilla software for a long time for various reasons. The branding changes are just one more relatively trivial change to forward port (and don't forget that there would have been branding changes before since the combination of firefox name and free icons wasn't supported by the standard build process).
Did you actually read the mailing list threads in question?
I think the Debian/Iceweasel thing was a Debian issue rather than a Mozilla issue; they could have had the Firefox name,
My understanding is they could but only if they
1: took the firefox branding (which was an issue due to the fact it's not available under a free license)
2: gave mozilla veto power on patches (including security updates)
I know at one point they were considering digging in one side of the rover to get a better angle? does anyone know if they have done this and if not are they planning to
Exactly. This is the real reason we don't have flying cars: humans can't drive them. Even experienced pilots require a kilometer or more free space around the plane to be safe; close formation flying is risky and regularly results in accidents. A rush hour in a city with millions of vehicles flown by amateurs who're sending text messages at the same time would be like a warzone under heavy artillery bombardment.
Be that as it may I don't think that is currently the pressing issue. Yes it would become a problem if large ammounts of the population had flying cars but frankly I don't see that happening anytime soon for other reasons.
We can already build small and powerful enough engines to make car-sized objects fly just fine
We can and we call the results "helicopters" and "light aircraft"
Imo the real problem for a "flying car" is to fit with our existing infrastructure. That means it has to either be able to drive on the road, be able to land anywhere a car can park or preferablly both.
Helicopters can land in a carpark but need a bit space to be cleared which is only going to happen if it's a medical emergency or a VIP. They are also very expensive both to buy and to run/maintain.
Conventional light aircraft need a runway to land and can't be taken on the road for both regulatory and practical (wingspan) reasons.
Roadable aircraft look like a real possibility for reasonablly wealthy people making longer trips but they have been dogged by high costs (including the costs of satisfying two sets of regulators), low demand and the practical issue of how to pack the wings quickly and easilly for road running.
Jet lifted cars are likely to have even higher running and maintinance costs and be even more dangerous than helicopters.
I suspect it's because the people designing the phones don't really think about it and/or consider it a defect.
Conventional analogue phones have a lot of "feedback" (signal passing from the microphone to the earpeice) because the circuits in them that split incoming and outgoing signals are somewhere between non-existent and poor.
Digital phones (whether cell, ISDN or VOIP) don't have "feedback" unless the manufacturer explicitly adds it so many of them have none of it at all and if they do have it "artificially" the manufacturer is conservative on the ammount.
It would be interesting if they introduced a rule that mobile phones in cars were only allowed to be half duplex and with an enforced clunk when releasing the talk button.
As with everything there is a balance to be struck
On the one hand if you get too tight on the pirates some of them may run off to other vendors which in the long term could be very bad for you.
On the other hand there are people out there who will pirate by default but will pay if they need to.
another complicating factor is that companies are expected to show growth not just steady income. For a long time MS tolerated piracy by home users to encourage use and used strong enforcement to persuade buisnesses to buy. But they already have most buisnesses in countries with strong copyright enforcement purchasing thier software. Therefore the only viable way for MS to grow thier market is to push users who currently pirate to become light customers.