don't know about settings but home folders can be synced using rsync Not really
rsync basically checks for differences (using cryptographic hash functions to avoid sending all the data over the wire) between a master copy and a slave copy. Then it modifies the slave copy to match the master copy. Hence it is suitable for situations where all modifications are performed on one master copy and then replicated to one or more slave copies.
syncing homedirs is a bit trickier because you have a number of copies being edited, potentially at the same time. The changes to each copy need to be determined (which is likely to require keeping a "base version" for each copy that is being edited) and then merged into the master copy. If there are conflicts (which is likely) then there needs to be a method for helping users resolve those conflicts (ideally with some smarts about what the files mean). There is also the issue of what to do with files that are still open (and therefore potentially inconsistent) come upload time.
This is a large part of what a vcs like subversion does and indeed you could use a vcs for this but keeping every version of every file can get pretty expensive in terms of disk space so a tool disigned for the job may be preferable.
This is because everything will be a service. Turbo tax has already converted their main application into a service and it works very well. It's only a matter of time before others follow suit. That may work for a some niches but I doubt it will work in general. I just don't see HD gaming as a service as being economically feasible as a service. Nor do I see many businesses being prepared to put up with their documents being stored on systems outside their control.
And for movies and music it will be even harder for the suppliers to keep control since the product is a stream of output to deliver to the users eyes/ears.
That is the traditional standard for void calls, 8 bits per sample (though the sampling scale isn't linear giving a wider dynamic range), 8KHz sampling rate, no compression (phone network digitisation came before data compression of realtime voice was considered cost effective)
My experience is it works fine for single column text or for selecting individual words but at least acrobat reader doesn't have any clue about what is and isn't part of the same block of text (e.g. it will select over into the second column of a two column page before selecting stuff in the next row of the current column)
The thing is even netbooks are shipping with 1GB of ram as standard now and afaict the only reason they aren't shipping with 2GB is microsofts rules getting for "XP home ULCPC".
On the other hand, you can get to pretty much anywhere on the planet within 50ms with a cable. (In theory, disregarding delay at routing, and non-direct routes.) Lets assume that light in a fiber travels at 2x10^8 m/s (light travels slower in fiber than in free space though i'm not sure how much slower offhand), according to wikipedia the earths cicumfrence is about 4x10^7 m, so halfway round the world would be 2x10^7 m.
so to get halfway arround the world would take about 100ms minimum, the round trip time (the mopst common means of measuring latency in the IT field) will be double that figure (e.g. 200ms minium).
Still much better than satelite though, a link via geostationary sattelite will add a minimum of about 400ms to the round trip time and in practice it may be much worse depending on how media access control is handled. Non geostationary satalites can avoid this but they have other problems.
but unfortunately like MS Word, the commercial vendor-sold document creation tool (Adobe Acrobat) generates unstable and unreliable content that interacts very badly with other tools Can you be more specific as to what problems you have had using files from acrobat in other tools?
And "IRQL Not less or equal" is a generic message that basically means that the driver tried to do something that it isn't allowed What it actually means is that the driver tried to do something while at two high an IRQL. That something may be trying to take the wrong sort of lock or trying to access memory that is paged out among other things.
There isn't really any comparable error in usermode because usermode doesn't have any concept comparable to IRQL.
All that is actually going on here is that icann is allowing use of IDN (which is already in use at lower levels of the heirachy) in the root. The standards for IDN already specify exactly how the names are encoded.
I don't think it's a big deal for TLDs since afaict those are created manually anyway.
For lower level domains (which are already using IDN) it's a bigger issue, firefox resorted to using a whitelist to get arround irresponsible registrars.
But it's not compatible with URLs that contain xn--, intended to show as xn--. But how many of those were there? and afaict it's not xn-- anywhere just xn-- at the start of a part of a DNS name.
1. Games: Don't run on these small systems anyway. The latest and greatest don't but there are a lot of older games that run just fine on netbooks and are a lot better than most flash crap.
2. "My very specific app": = lack of being informed about Wine, Wine works sometimes but it's a hit and miss thing (some stuff works fine, some stuff sorta works,) either way this won't be helpful for arm linux devices anyway unless someone integrates wine with an emulator (and even if they do I expect it to be dog slow)
and the great alternatives that exist for Linux Sometimes there are great alternatives, sometimes there are alternatives but they are much crappier, sometimes there isn't really any alternative.
The screen is too small for most general purpose computing. On the very early netbooks and the bottom end ones today I'd agree with you.
But 1024x600 (the most common on netbooks at the moment) while a little annoying sometimes (mainly due to app developers who assumed 1024x786 as a minimum) is sufficiant for most stuff and 1366x768 (rare on netbooks at the moment but looks like it going to become more common) is marginally better than the 1280x800 of most low end regular notebooks.
Well, it's 40% faster over the bus 40% faster in this test, unfortunately hothardware didn't benchmark the bare drive but looking at thier SATA results (based on a different and probablly higher end drive) I suspect the drive was the bottleneck in this USB3 test.
USB3 also tweaks up the power a little so there should now be enough to reliably run a laptop hard drive off bus power (with 2.0 it's hit and miss)
Now even Apple is dropping Firewire from their most popular models. Do you have a source for that claim or are you just guessing as to what apples most popular models are?
note: the web browser for the original DS and DS lite used an extra ram pack in the GBA cart slot (there are two variants of the rampack, one that looks like a GBA cart and a smaller one designed to sit flush in a DS lite).
Which netbook did you buy? there is a huge ammount of difference between the first eeepcs (which were crap, a 7 inch screen in a case big enough for a 9 inch, hardly any storage and really crappy processor), the 9 inch flash based machines (better but the storage was still an issue) and the 10 inch HDD based machines.
Afaict there are two groups who want "netbooks" (I hate that term, it implies that the machines are far more crippled than they actually are) with somewhat different requirements.
One is the group that wants a mobile internet terminal. Most smartphones have screens that are just too small for comfortable web browsing while the 1024x600 of a typical netbook is reasonably comfortable since it is as wide as 1024x768 (which is the resolution most web designers assume as a minimum).
The other is those who want an ultra-portable laptop but couldn't reasonably afford one. Before the netbook craze started the vast majority of notebooks were 15 inch with the odd 12 or 13 inch and hardly anything smaller than that (and what there was that was smaller was pretty expensive for what you got). Now thanks to the netbook craze I got an ultraportable with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen, a 160GB hard drive, a 1.66 GHz atom processor and a gig of ram (upgradable to two with no tools required) for less than £450 inc VAT and delivery. If I was prepared to put up with a crappy screen and a 1.6GHz processor I could get one for under £200.
don't know about settings but home folders can be synced using rsync
Not really
rsync basically checks for differences (using cryptographic hash functions to avoid sending all the data over the wire) between a master copy and a slave copy. Then it modifies the slave copy to match the master copy. Hence it is suitable for situations where all modifications are performed on one master copy and then replicated to one or more slave copies.
syncing homedirs is a bit trickier because you have a number of copies being edited, potentially at the same time. The changes to each copy need to be determined (which is likely to require keeping a "base version" for each copy that is being edited) and then merged into the master copy. If there are conflicts (which is likely) then there needs to be a method for helping users resolve those conflicts (ideally with some smarts about what the files mean). There is also the issue of what to do with files that are still open (and therefore potentially inconsistent) come upload time.
This is a large part of what a vcs like subversion does and indeed you could use a vcs for this but keeping every version of every file can get pretty expensive in terms of disk space so a tool disigned for the job may be preferable.
This is because everything will be a service. Turbo tax has already converted their main application into a service and it works very well. It's only a matter of time before others follow suit.
That may work for a some niches but I doubt it will work in general. I just don't see HD gaming as a service as being economically feasible as a service. Nor do I see many businesses being prepared to put up with their documents being stored on systems outside their control.
And for movies and music it will be even harder for the suppliers to keep control since the product is a stream of output to deliver to the users eyes/ears.
That is the traditional standard for void calls, 8 bits per sample (though the sampling scale isn't linear giving a wider dynamic range), 8KHz sampling rate, no compression (phone network digitisation came before data compression of realtime voice was considered cost effective)
My experience is it works fine for single column text or for selecting individual words but at least acrobat reader doesn't have any clue about what is and isn't part of the same block of text (e.g. it will select over into the second column of a two column page before selecting stuff in the next row of the current column)
The thing is even netbooks are shipping with 1GB of ram as standard now and afaict the only reason they aren't shipping with 2GB is microsofts rules getting for "XP home ULCPC".
Usually it's a setting in the bios
On the other hand, you can get to pretty much anywhere on the planet within 50ms with a cable. (In theory, disregarding delay at routing, and non-direct routes.)
Lets assume that light in a fiber travels at 2x10^8 m/s (light travels slower in fiber than in free space though i'm not sure how much slower offhand), according to wikipedia the earths cicumfrence is about 4x10^7 m, so halfway round the world would be 2x10^7 m.
so to get halfway arround the world would take about 100ms minimum, the round trip time (the mopst common means of measuring latency in the IT field) will be double that figure (e.g. 200ms minium).
Still much better than satelite though, a link via geostationary sattelite will add a minimum of about 400ms to the round trip time and in practice it may be much worse depending on how media access control is handled. Non geostationary satalites can avoid this but they have other problems.
other than wii sports resort (which comes with the motionplus bundled) are there any games that actually need the motionplus?
That is not really a format issue though, in any format that supports images I can insert an image containing text.
but unfortunately like MS Word, the commercial vendor-sold document creation tool (Adobe Acrobat) generates unstable and unreliable content that interacts very badly with other tools
Can you be more specific as to what problems you have had using files from acrobat in other tools?
And "IRQL Not less or equal" is a generic message that basically means that the driver tried to do something that it isn't allowed
What it actually means is that the driver tried to do something while at two high an IRQL. That something may be trying to take the wrong sort of lock or trying to access memory that is paged out among other things.
There isn't really any comparable error in usermode because usermode doesn't have any concept comparable to IRQL.
LOL
TFA is badly written and factually inaccurate.
All that is actually going on here is that icann is allowing use of IDN (which is already in use at lower levels of the heirachy) in the root. The standards for IDN already specify exactly how the names are encoded.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490
It's already been in use for the rest of the domain name under certain TLDs for some time.
I don't think it's a big deal for TLDs since afaict those are created manually anyway.
For lower level domains (which are already using IDN) it's a bigger issue, firefox resorted to using a whitelist to get arround irresponsible registrars.
But it's not compatible with URLs that contain xn--, intended to show as xn--.
But how many of those were there? and afaict it's not xn-- anywhere just xn-- at the start of a part of a DNS name.
1. Games: Don't run on these small systems anyway.
The latest and greatest don't but there are a lot of older games that run just fine on netbooks and are a lot better than most flash crap.
2. "My very specific app": = lack of being informed about Wine,
Wine works sometimes but it's a hit and miss thing (some stuff works fine, some stuff sorta works,) either way this won't be helpful for arm linux devices anyway unless someone integrates wine with an emulator (and even if they do I expect it to be dog slow)
and the great alternatives that exist for Linux
Sometimes there are great alternatives, sometimes there are alternatives but they are much crappier, sometimes there isn't really any alternative.
The screen is too small for most general purpose computing.
On the very early netbooks and the bottom end ones today I'd agree with you.
But 1024x600 (the most common on netbooks at the moment) while a little annoying sometimes (mainly due to app developers who assumed 1024x786 as a minimum) is sufficiant for most stuff and 1366x768 (rare on netbooks at the moment but looks like it going to become more common) is marginally better than the 1280x800 of most low end regular notebooks.
Well, it's 40% faster over the bus
40% faster in this test, unfortunately hothardware didn't benchmark the bare drive but looking at thier SATA results (based on a different and probablly higher end drive) I suspect the drive was the bottleneck in this USB3 test.
USB3 also tweaks up the power a little so there should now be enough to reliably run a laptop hard drive off bus power (with 2.0 it's hit and miss)
Do desktop and server Macs still have firewire?
Yes and so do all three sizes of macbook pro (13, 15 and 17 inch), hell even the mac mini has it!
Now even Apple is dropping Firewire from their most popular models.
Do you have a source for that claim or are you just guessing as to what apples most popular models are?
I just think it's a pity that afaict they didn't use the same drive for the USB2 vs USB3 test and the SATA 3GB vs SATA 6GB tests.
It's almost a given that USB 3 will be much faster than USB 2. What I'd like to know is how USB 3 compares to esata.
note: the web browser for the original DS and DS lite used an extra ram pack in the GBA cart slot (there are two variants of the rampack, one that looks like a GBA cart and a smaller one designed to sit flush in a DS lite).
Which netbook did you buy? there is a huge ammount of difference between the first eeepcs (which were crap, a 7 inch screen in a case big enough for a 9 inch, hardly any storage and really crappy processor), the 9 inch flash based machines (better but the storage was still an issue) and the 10 inch HDD based machines.
Afaict there are two groups who want "netbooks" (I hate that term, it implies that the machines are far more crippled than they actually are) with somewhat different requirements.
One is the group that wants a mobile internet terminal. Most smartphones have screens that are just too small for comfortable web browsing while the 1024x600 of a typical netbook is reasonably comfortable since it is as wide as 1024x768 (which is the resolution most web designers assume as a minimum).
The other is those who want an ultra-portable laptop but couldn't reasonably afford one. Before the netbook craze started the vast majority of notebooks were 15 inch with the odd 12 or 13 inch and hardly anything smaller than that (and what there was that was smaller was pretty expensive for what you got). Now thanks to the netbook craze I got an ultraportable with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen, a 160GB hard drive, a 1.66 GHz atom processor and a gig of ram (upgradable to two with no tools required) for less than £450 inc VAT and delivery. If I was prepared to put up with a crappy screen and a 1.6GHz processor I could get one for under £200.