What about all those users who aren't assigned permanent IPs but just use IPs from a DHCP or PPP IP pool (e.g. almost all dialup users and a large proportion of DSL and cable users)?
Right now most ISPs let those users have public IPs. What if anything is stopping the ISPs moving those users behind ISP level NAT and reusing those blocks for more lucrative buisness/hosting customers?
It will further cement thier already near monopoly in the integrated graphics for intel based systems segment. Whether it will have much impact on the gamer graphics segment depends on how well it performs. It seems that they have more or less caught up with AMD integrated graphics but I don't think that in itself is enough to seriously impact on sales of discrete graphics cards.
Unfortunately TFA jumps straight from integrated graphics to a £130 card and uses completely different settings for the two tests. What i'd really like to see is a comparison of the integrated graphics on these things with say a 8400 GS (a £25 card).
anyone here got an 8400GS and one of the games used in TFA and prepared to run some benchmarks at the settings they used for the integrated graphics test? (yeah I know the rest of the system won't match but all i'm interested in are ballpark figures)
we will first see hosting companies upping their prices and home ISP's limiting how many IP's they give to customers. And that will come far before we're actually out of address space. That depends on what the IANA and the RIRs do. with thier policies over the next few years.
Right now IMO the sane policy for an ISP is to allocate as many IPs to customers as they can get away with, that way they can "justify" getting new IPs from the RIR. When the final squeeze comes with no new IPs availible from the RIRs the ISPs can then claw back IPs from less lucrative customers and give them to more lucrative ones.
IMO the real question is does breaking longer statements accross lines and hence breaking the structure really leave code more readable than simply having long lines for such statements? IMO it doesn't.
This is especially bad in modern languages and coding styles where names tend to be longer and often have an asccociated object (java's lack of support for properties* and the consequent requirement for typing get and an empty pairs of brackets for many of the parameters makes things even worse)
* Properties in this context are items that look to the user of the object like fields but can have code behind them to take actions on a get or set. Delphi's implementation is particularlly nice because if you wish you can map a property directly to a field for read while having it call code for write (you can also have it call code for both read and write).
You don't actually lose the MSB -- it shifts into the sign bit. But hey, what harm can that do, eh? Which is exactly what will happen if you multiply by 2 in an environment that ignores overflows (e.g. most of them)
Well it is. Sort of, there are two types of right shift, "logical shift right" and "artithmetic shift right". For division by a power of 2 on an unsigned number you want logical shift while for division by a power of 2 on a signed number you want arithmetic shift.
For unsigned numbers C does the sane thing but for signed types containing negative values the behaviour is left as implementation defined.
Many 9" netbooks were physically the same size as 10" models. Yes there was the odd 9 inch in a case sized for a 10 inch (e.g. the EEE 904HD) and there was the odd 10 inch squeeezed into a case sized for a 9 inch (e.g. the HP mini 2140) but from what i've seen the increase in screen size came with a corresponding increase in case size and usually a switch from flash to hdd (this is a double edged sword, on the plus side you get more storage and it's generally faster, on the minus side it reduces robustness).
The 9" screens usually had the same resolution (1024x600) as do the 10" screens. Indeed there was generally no improvement in screen resoloution between the 9 inch and the 10 inch models which I consider a great shame. There is the odd 10 inch machine with a better screen but you pay a huge premium for it.
There are at least a couple of machines out there now with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen (one from sony, one from HP, I think I remember seeing an article about an ASUS one but I haven't noticed it for sale yet) unfortunately they are rather expensive at the moment. Hopefully some more vendors will get in on the act and we will see lower prices on such machines.
I'd say it's more about usable pixels* than size per-se. When looked at in that light desktops and laptops are much closer together (desktops have bigger screens than laptops but they are also often viewed from further away and nearly always have much lower pixel densities than laptops.
* that is the lower of the number of pixels the screen can display or the number of pixels the user can make out given reasonable viewing distances.
but the reason netbooks sell is they are cheaper than more powerful ultraportables of the same size. What more powerfull ultraportables of the same size? all machines i've seen in the 9-10 inch size have had an atom or other low power low performance CPU, the hdds in netbooks are the same as those used in regular laptops. The main thing it seems you get by paying more is better screens and sometimes 7200 RPM HDDs (but i'm not really convinced 7200 RPM HDDs are a good idea in a portable).
Delphi is nice but they messed arround with enterprisy features without doing the basics like a converting the VCL to unicode (iirc they did this eventually with 2010 but they had already fallen by then).
They briefly tried to go back to the old model with some free and low-cost versions for non-enterprise users under the old "turbo" brand but those seem to have dissapeared again now:(
the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me. The plates are there to keep RF noise from leaving the PC case and causing the machine to fail CE/FCC testing. Making them snap-out is much cheaper than clips or screws and there is little need to ever put them back (people rarely reduce the number of drives in a machine and if they do they generally don't want to put the machine through FCC/CE testing afterwards)
Usually they don't require a chisel to remove though, maybe thier welder was set up wrong.
The passage of time censors old books more more than DRM. DRM hasn't been arround long enough to be sure but i'd bet that DRM protected digital copies end up with a FAR shorter lifespan than printed copies.
Digital allows the written word to live forever. Digital media has a relatively short lifetime as do digital devices. Without drm this is not a problem as you can just transfer the data from one device to the next. With (effective) DRM I have to find a device that is compatible (which will likely become harder and harder as the format ages) and then authorise my collection to it (which will become impossible once the central servers for the format dissapear)
Printed books are a pain to copy but it's certainly doable if you have the time and inclination and it has a much longer proven lifespan than most digital media (CD-R one of the older formats in wide use today has only existed for a couple of decades and i'm pretty sure it's dye formulations have changed since that time)
When you own a book, it's yours to read. And yours to copy exceprts from (exact rules vary by country but some is almost always allowed)
And yours to lend out to friends
And yours to resell second hand
And yours to keep in your archive until it's copyright expires (assuming that it does which in some countries it unfortunately may never do) and then produce as many copies as you wish.
DRM implemented properly isn't a bad thing Can you describe a scheme that would let me view the content on any device I like (not just those approved by the scheme vendor) and load it onto new devices even after the scheme vendor dissapears off the face of the planet while still providing some meaningful protection?
I'll take a cheap digital copy over a bulky, inconvenient physical copy that I can sell or give away any day. I just hope there are sufficiant people who don't think like you that the works we enjoy don't dissapear in a few decades.
but in that case loosing your screen saver password should be the least of your worries. Depends what else that password is used for.
The fact is most users aren't going to bother remembering a seperate password for every system they use. Password hashing means that if a system is compromised or stolen the attacker doesn't automatically get all the passwords (they may still be able to bruteforce the hash or setup a sniffer)
Without grade separation, a train at 70 MPH hits a schoolbus. Boom, kids die, news at 11. That train is NOT stopping; it's already way way too fast. Trains don't stop like sports cars. Trains take miles to stop.
At 200 MPH? Dead is dead. At normal rail speeds someone who gets stuck and fails to leave the car or otherwise ends up sitting on a crossing when a train comes is indeed dead but afaict everyone on the train is usually fine. At 200mph there is a lot more energy in the system and I REALLY wouldn't want to be the train driver.
Also road vehicles can derail trains and I'd expect higher speeds would increase the both the likelyhood of this and the time for the derailed train to come to rest thereby increasing the chance of a derailed train crashing into something else.
If you want fast and slow trains on the same line, you'll want speed-aware sensors to avoid needless delay. Speed aware sensors strike me as far more failure prone than simple fixed location sensors. What if they measure the speed wrong? what if a train accelerates after passing the first sensor of a crossing?
You just plain can't build a car in the USA without going out of buisiness. Afaict there are sufficient tariffs on car imports (unlike many other markets) to make it cheaper to build cars in the USA than to import them.
Unfortunately for the big US automakers and for Detroit the Japanese manufacturers just started building cars in other parts of the USA using non-union (or at least not so powerfully unionised) labour.
Besides cheap labor, they avoid problems with regulatory agencies regarding working conditions such as hours, lighting, pollution IMO the correct solution to this is tariffs structured so that it is no longer economically advantageous to treat your workers and the environment like shit.
But what about dual boots? either create your partitions with a tool that aligns them on 4KB boundries or use western digitals partition realignment tool.
lukilly the HDD vendors do care and hence these drives will work fine with XP (as you would know if you'd actually read the fucking article) they just require a little more care at setup time if you want them to perform well.
Wireless control often ends up in the hands of a user-space program instead of in the OS (wtf?) Yeah I can see that the mess of different wireless configuration systems would be a PITA for a support tech, for most of us it's not that big a deal though.
and updates are done through a god awful activex webpage Again not ideal but once you turn on automatic updates you can mostly forget about that.
The long term (and even short term) stability of XP these days is poor at best Maybe it's something with your particular hardware or software selection, i've generally found XP more than stable enough.
and I have no clue why everyone claims to love it. IMO an operating systems job is to handle my hardware, run my applications and otherwise stay out of my way and use as little resources as possible. XP IMO does a better job of this than vista (though I will admit that my only experiance with vista was pre-sp1). I haven't had a chance to try 7 yet.
Sidestepping your ignorance or deliberate deception on periods of typical Linux support contracts He didn't say if he was stating lengths from release or length of overlap (to me the latter is the more important figure)
Who cares if support goes out 10 years It's 10 years (5 mainstream, 5 extended) minimum from release, 7 years (2 mainstream, five extended) minimum overlap between releases and 2 years (all extended) minimum overlap if you skip a release. IIRC XP will have exceeded all of those.
if you can't buy a new hard drive that will work with the OS? These "advanced format" drives will work fine with XP, they just require a little extra effort (either using a third party paritioning tool, fitting an extra jumper to change the sector mapping or using the WD tool to realign the partitions after setup) if you want maximum performance. Besides I can still by PATA drives so I doubt these drives will be the only ones on the market any time soon.
Similarly if I go to almost any major vendor I can still get computers and computer parts that are supported with XP, some of the consumer crap isn't but virtually every buisness machine and seperately sold peice of hardware i've seen lists XP as supported.
It's articles and comments like this that give me difficulty discerning what exactly Microsoft "support" entails. For most of us the most important part of the support is continuation of security updates (though they have occasionally refused to release one that they really should have released by claiming that it's not nessacery in a default environment), I would be very uncomfortable running exposed systems (and I coun't any machine used to browse the web as exposed) on an OS that was no longer getting security updates.
There is also problem support and non-security hotfixes (free if created while in mainstream support, pay for if created during extended support) but for most of us these are fairly irrelevant.
As I alluded to above though what really matters is support from third party vendors, I can still buy the latest hardware and run XP on it with no problems, just try doing that with a comparable aged linux distro (e.g. debian woody).
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What about all those users who aren't assigned permanent IPs but just use IPs from a DHCP or PPP IP pool (e.g. almost all dialup users and a large proportion of DSL and cable users)?
Right now most ISPs let those users have public IPs. What if anything is stopping the ISPs moving those users behind ISP level NAT and reusing those blocks for more lucrative buisness/hosting customers?
It will further cement thier already near monopoly in the integrated graphics for intel based systems segment. Whether it will have much impact on the gamer graphics segment depends on how well it performs. It seems that they have more or less caught up with AMD integrated graphics but I don't think that in itself is enough to seriously impact on sales of discrete graphics cards.
Unfortunately TFA jumps straight from integrated graphics to a £130 card and uses completely different settings for the two tests. What i'd really like to see is a comparison of the integrated graphics on these things with say a 8400 GS (a £25 card).
anyone here got an 8400GS and one of the games used in TFA and prepared to run some benchmarks at the settings they used for the integrated graphics test? (yeah I know the rest of the system won't match but all i'm interested in are ballpark figures)
we will first see hosting companies upping their prices and home ISP's limiting how many IP's they give to customers. And that will come far before we're actually out of address space.
That depends on what the IANA and the RIRs do. with thier policies over the next few years.
Right now IMO the sane policy for an ISP is to allocate as many IPs to customers as they can get away with, that way they can "justify" getting new IPs from the RIR. When the final squeeze comes with no new IPs availible from the RIRs the ISPs can then claw back IPs from less lucrative customers and give them to more lucrative ones.
IMO the real question is does breaking longer statements accross lines and hence breaking the structure really leave code more readable than simply having long lines for such statements? IMO it doesn't.
This is especially bad in modern languages and coding styles where names tend to be longer and often have an asccociated object (java's lack of support for properties* and the consequent requirement for typing get and an empty pairs of brackets for many of the parameters makes things even worse)
* Properties in this context are items that look to the user of the object like fields but can have code behind them to take actions on a get or set. Delphi's implementation is particularlly nice because if you wish you can map a property directly to a field for read while having it call code for write (you can also have it call code for both read and write).
You don't actually lose the MSB -- it shifts into the sign bit. But hey, what harm can that do, eh?
Which is exactly what will happen if you multiply by 2 in an environment that ignores overflows (e.g. most of them)
Well it is.
Sort of, there are two types of right shift, "logical shift right" and "artithmetic shift right". For division by a power of 2 on an unsigned number you want logical shift while for division by a power of 2 on a signed number you want arithmetic shift.
For unsigned numbers C does the sane thing but for signed types containing negative values the behaviour is left as implementation defined.
Many 9" netbooks were physically the same size as 10" models.
Yes there was the odd 9 inch in a case sized for a 10 inch (e.g. the EEE 904HD) and there was the odd 10 inch squeeezed into a case sized for a 9 inch (e.g. the HP mini 2140) but from what i've seen the increase in screen size came with a corresponding increase in case size and usually a switch from flash to hdd (this is a double edged sword, on the plus side you get more storage and it's generally faster, on the minus side it reduces robustness).
The 9" screens usually had the same resolution (1024x600) as do the 10" screens.
Indeed there was generally no improvement in screen resoloution between the 9 inch and the 10 inch models which I consider a great shame. There is the odd 10 inch machine with a better screen but you pay a huge premium for it.
There are at least a couple of machines out there now with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen (one from sony, one from HP, I think I remember seeing an article about an ASUS one but I haven't noticed it for sale yet) unfortunately they are rather expensive at the moment. Hopefully some more vendors will get in on the act and we will see lower prices on such machines.
I'd say it's more about usable pixels* than size per-se. When looked at in that light desktops and laptops are much closer together (desktops have bigger screens than laptops but they are also often viewed from further away and nearly always have much lower pixel densities than laptops.
* that is the lower of the number of pixels the screen can display or the number of pixels the user can make out given reasonable viewing distances.
but the reason netbooks sell is they are cheaper than more powerful ultraportables of the same size.
What more powerfull ultraportables of the same size? all machines i've seen in the 9-10 inch size have had an atom or other low power low performance CPU, the hdds in netbooks are the same as those used in regular laptops. The main thing it seems you get by paying more is better screens and sometimes 7200 RPM HDDs (but i'm not really convinced 7200 RPM HDDs are a good idea in a portable).
Delphi is nice but they messed arround with enterprisy features without doing the basics like a converting the VCL to unicode (iirc they did this eventually with 2010 but they had already fallen by then).
They briefly tried to go back to the old model with some free and low-cost versions for non-enterprise users under the old "turbo" brand but those seem to have dissapeared again now :(
the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me.
The plates are there to keep RF noise from leaving the PC case and causing the machine to fail CE/FCC testing. Making them snap-out is much cheaper than clips or screws and there is little need to ever put them back (people rarely reduce the number of drives in a machine and if they do they generally don't want to put the machine through FCC/CE testing afterwards)
Usually they don't require a chisel to remove though, maybe thier welder was set up wrong.
Indeed, but they can't really do it en-masse.
In a kindle like DRM system the scheme operator could easilly revoke every copy and replace it with a new revision.
What about just using write? surely it can't be that hard to find a copy of win 3.x somewhere.
The passage of time censors old books more more than DRM.
DRM hasn't been arround long enough to be sure but i'd bet that DRM protected digital copies end up with a FAR shorter lifespan than printed copies.
Digital allows the written word to live forever.
Digital media has a relatively short lifetime as do digital devices. Without drm this is not a problem as you can just transfer the data from one device to the next. With (effective) DRM I have to find a device that is compatible (which will likely become harder and harder as the format ages) and then authorise my collection to it (which will become impossible once the central servers for the format dissapear)
Printed books are a pain to copy but it's certainly doable if you have the time and inclination and it has a much longer proven lifespan than most digital media (CD-R one of the older formats in wide use today has only existed for a couple of decades and i'm pretty sure it's dye formulations have changed since that time)
When you own a book, it's yours to read.
And yours to copy exceprts from (exact rules vary by country but some is almost always allowed)
And yours to lend out to friends
And yours to resell second hand
And yours to keep in your archive until it's copyright expires (assuming that it does which in some countries it unfortunately may never do) and then produce as many copies as you wish.
DRM implemented properly isn't a bad thing
Can you describe a scheme that would let me view the content on any device I like (not just those approved by the scheme vendor) and load it onto new devices even after the scheme vendor dissapears off the face of the planet while still providing some meaningful protection?
I'll take a cheap digital copy over a bulky, inconvenient physical copy that I can sell or give away any day.
I just hope there are sufficiant people who don't think like you that the works we enjoy don't dissapear in a few decades.
but in that case loosing your screen saver password should be the least of your worries.
Depends what else that password is used for.
The fact is most users aren't going to bother remembering a seperate password for every system they use. Password hashing means that if a system is compromised or stolen the attacker doesn't automatically get all the passwords (they may still be able to bruteforce the hash or setup a sniffer)
I'd bet the penny gets crushed beyond recontion and very little happens to the train.
Without grade separation, a train at 70 MPH hits a schoolbus. Boom, kids die, news at 11. That train is NOT stopping; it's already way way too fast. Trains don't stop like sports cars. Trains take miles to stop.
At 200 MPH? Dead is dead.
At normal rail speeds someone who gets stuck and fails to leave the car or otherwise ends up sitting on a crossing when a train comes is indeed dead but afaict everyone on the train is usually fine. At 200mph there is a lot more energy in the system and I REALLY wouldn't want to be the train driver.
Also road vehicles can derail trains and I'd expect higher speeds would increase the both the likelyhood of this and the time for the derailed train to come to rest thereby increasing the chance of a derailed train crashing into something else.
If you want fast and slow trains on the same line, you'll want speed-aware sensors to avoid needless delay.
Speed aware sensors strike me as far more failure prone than simple fixed location sensors. What if they measure the speed wrong? what if a train accelerates after passing the first sensor of a crossing?
You just plain can't build a car in the USA without going out of buisiness.
Afaict there are sufficient tariffs on car imports (unlike many other markets) to make it cheaper to build cars in the USA than to import them.
Unfortunately for the big US automakers and for Detroit the Japanese manufacturers just started building cars in other parts of the USA using non-union (or at least not so powerfully unionised) labour.
Besides cheap labor, they avoid problems with regulatory agencies regarding working conditions such as hours, lighting, pollution
IMO the correct solution to this is tariffs structured so that it is no longer economically advantageous to treat your workers and the environment like shit.
But what about dual boots?
either create your partitions with a tool that aligns them on 4KB boundries or use western digitals partition realignment tool.
lukilly the HDD vendors do care and hence these drives will work fine with XP (as you would know if you'd actually read the fucking article) they just require a little more care at setup time if you want them to perform well.
Wireless control often ends up in the hands of a user-space program instead of in the OS (wtf?)
Yeah I can see that the mess of different wireless configuration systems would be a PITA for a support tech, for most of us it's not that big a deal though.
and updates are done through a god awful activex webpage
Again not ideal but once you turn on automatic updates you can mostly forget about that.
The long term (and even short term) stability of XP these days is poor at best
Maybe it's something with your particular hardware or software selection, i've generally found XP more than stable enough.
and I have no clue why everyone claims to love it.
IMO an operating systems job is to handle my hardware, run my applications and otherwise stay out of my way and use as little resources as possible. XP IMO does a better job of this than vista (though I will admit that my only experiance with vista was pre-sp1). I haven't had a chance to try 7 yet.
Sidestepping your ignorance or deliberate deception on periods of typical Linux support contracts
He didn't say if he was stating lengths from release or length of overlap (to me the latter is the more important figure)
Who cares if support goes out 10 years
It's 10 years (5 mainstream, 5 extended) minimum from release, 7 years (2 mainstream, five extended) minimum overlap between releases and 2 years (all extended) minimum overlap if you skip a release. IIRC XP will have exceeded all of those.
if you can't buy a new hard drive that will work with the OS?
These "advanced format" drives will work fine with XP, they just require a little extra effort (either using a third party paritioning tool, fitting an extra jumper to change the sector mapping or using the WD tool to realign the partitions after setup) if you want maximum performance. Besides I can still by PATA drives so I doubt these drives will be the only ones on the market any time soon.
Similarly if I go to almost any major vendor I can still get computers and computer parts that are supported with XP, some of the consumer crap isn't but virtually every buisness machine and seperately sold peice of hardware i've seen lists XP as supported.
It's articles and comments like this that give me difficulty discerning what exactly Microsoft "support" entails.
For most of us the most important part of the support is continuation of security updates (though they have occasionally refused to release one that they really should have released by claiming that it's not nessacery in a default environment), I would be very uncomfortable running exposed systems (and I coun't any machine used to browse the web as exposed) on an OS that was no longer getting security updates.
There is also problem support and non-security hotfixes (free if created while in mainstream support, pay for if created during extended support) but for most of us these are fairly irrelevant.
As I alluded to above though what really matters is support from third party vendors, I can still buy the latest hardware and run XP on it with no problems, just try doing that with a comparable aged linux distro (e.g. debian woody).