At the end of the day we might see more bands (NIN RADIOHEAD) move towards a distribution model that puts them in control. This movement can only help everybody except the sleezy middle men that have been dictating trends and prices for decades. The fact that people have created there own distribution model and it's working better then the old one shows the futility in the now obsolete model of the past. The fact that some bands who have managed to go through the system and come out the other side (something very few bands manage to stay relevent long enough to do) have started selling direct proves very little. It's nothing new either, the beatles set up thier own record company for instance.
What you name a place has NOTHING to do with the law behind it. You can't be convicted based on what you called something, unless the name itself is somehow illegal. I don't know the specifics of sweedish law but under many laws in many countries intent is an important factor.
The operators of the pirate bay have through thier words and actions (one of which but far from the only one being the naming of the site) made it clear that thier intent is to support "pirates".
it's like arresting people because they had a discussion about drugs, or told someone not to go to a particularly drug-ridden part of town late at night No it's like arresting people for running database of drug dealers so people can more easilly source the drugs they want.
This is nothing new. Mail order used to be a PITA, you had to either get a catalog in advance (slow and sometimes chargable) or try and figure out what you needed from talking to the company on the phone. Then you had to submit your order either by phone (time consuming and error prone) or by mail (slow). New items could only be added at fixed points in the year since catalogs couldn't be reprinted too often. With all the downsides of mail order the fact they had an effective tax advantage was probablly no big deal.
Now you can search accross loads of suppliers easilly using price comparision websites. Online catalogs can be updated (for both price and items) on a real time basis. Suddenly for certain categories of item at least shopping online is MORE conviniant than going to the shop. Companies like amazon and newegg have reached huge size and brought huge economies of scale to the process. Is it so unreasonable to put them on a level playing field tax wise with retail?
All the cyrix chips i've ever seen were socket 7 devices with heatsinks/fans to match
IIRC the P4 was the chip that introduced the concept of heatsink mountings that were seperate from the socket to support it's HUGE heatsink requirements.
If you erect 20 5 megawatt [metaefficient.com] wind turbines a month in one year you'll add 1.2 gigawatts of capacity in a year. Afaict wind turbines are rated by thier output under ideal wind conditions. which is MUCH higher than thier output under average wind conditions.
Also relying on wind puts your grid at the mercy of whether the wind blows or not.
Sure when the production environment is a few grand or even a few tens of grand worth of server hardware building a test system that exactly mirrors the production one is reasonable.
Now consider a situation where building a complete copy of the production environment would be unreasonablly expensive so you build a scale model or a simulation model, test your code and it works.
Then you take your code to the full scale system and start having issues that you can't reproduce on the model (because no model is perfect). What are you supposed to do then other than use the real system as a debug environment.
Of course if they really want to properly gouge their consumers for all their worth, they'd also introduce some price discrimination... they already have.
Why they chose to use a lead-free solder process is beyond me. They don't have a choice for consoles sold in europe, for those sold in the US they could use lead based solder but it's probablly easier logistically to use lead free everywhere.
Yes lead free solder is inferior but the whole computer industry is using it and most of the stuff is a hell of a lot more reliable than the xbox 360.
umm over here in the uk right now (prices from game.co.uk and rounded to the nearest pound) the xbox 360 ranges from £130-£210 depending on model, the PS3 is £300 and the wii is £179
The base model xbox 360 has been cheaper than the wii over here for some time afaict.
This has got to be the Ford Pinto of consoles. I can't believe people are still spending their hard-earned cash on such a badly designed piece of go-se. The thing is that the alternatives have thier problems too, the wii doesn't do HD and is generally targetting at kids/casual gamers. The PS3 is nice (I have one) but it's FAR more expensive than the xbox 360 (looking at game.co.uk one of the major retailers over here the base model 360 is less than half the price of the base model PS3)
So for the gamer who wants up to date 3D games like GTA4 and doesn't care about media center type features or any of the PS3 exclusive games the 360 looks pretty attractive.
Most likely the record companies agreements with apple and/or the artist didn't allow international online distribution (either because they didn't think of it or because the artist was hoping to get record agreements elsewhere) so apples hands were tied.
did you try to contact the artist and express your displeasure?
mythbusters concluded it was possible to talk someone through landing an airliner (they successfully had someone talk jamie and adam through a landing in a simulator with the person doing the talking through using only the info that would be availible to ATC)but could find no evidence of it ever being done and thought it unlikely it ever would be since airliners have two pilots.
This was not an airliner but a much smaller executive plane (13 passenger capacity according to wikipedia) which explains why there was not a copilot. Also the person who took over WAS was a qualified pilot for smaller planes. Presumablly it's a lot easier to talk a pilot through landing a larger aircraft than it is to talk a layman through landing one.
It absolutely makes no sense to talk about running on XP SP0 as a selling point when almost nobody uses XP SP0. But there are probablly quite a few still running XP SP2 and probablly will be for a few years yet.
I know plenty of people have been burned by issues when installing a service pack (for example the issue where an image made on intel but deployed on amd dies after SP3 install or older versions of nero stopping working after SP2 install)
More to the point service packs generally don't add anything significant to the API so there seems little point in dropping compatibility with versions that don't have them applied.
Why rewrite math code written in a native compiled language (aka fast) and probablly pretty well debugged over the years? rewriting it in python like you suggest sounds like it would just waste a lot of time to end up with a most likely slower and buggier result.
Your comment actually reinforces the parent post. Manufacturers are more likely to support new hardware on older windows versions than old hardware on newer windows versions so it pays to stick on an old version of windows for a while.
You can use 2003,which is much closer to XP, and supports more than 4GB ram in the 32bit version buying server licenses for desktops is going to get expensive pretty fast. Also IIRC a lot of drivers don't get on with 32 bit systems with more than 4GB of physical address space.
and has a 64bit version too Which is from a driver perspective no better or worse than "XP proffessional x64 edition". (despite the name XP proffessional x64 edition is actually based on server 2003 to the extent it even uses the same updates)
XP is old and MS is trying to obsolete it and since they have the monopoly on spreading Windows, companies will have no choice. Your speculation doesn't fit with microsofts past and current behaviour. MS volume licenses generally include pretty generous downgrade rights (IIRC with current volume licenses it's down to windows 95)
Just because something is in a contract doesn't nessacerally mean it will hold up in court. Also don't forget the horrible thing about being a multinational is that you can get sued anywhere you do buisness, not just in your home country.
But even ignoring potential legal angles I still think disabling XP would be a suicidal thing to do. MS would much rather you were running an obsolete version of windows or even a pirate copy of windows than running and encouraging support for an alternate OS.
And when 7 comes out I bet OEM copies won't come with downgrade rights to XP so MS will be laughing all the way to the bank as people have to buy an OEM copy of 7 and then a volume license "upgrade" to get the downgrade rights.
Actually, Windows XP will stop being supported TOMORROW!!!! No windows XP will move from mainstream support to extended support tomorrow. That means that your free "support incidents" from your retail copies will no longer be valid and if you want non-security hotfixes released after XP goes into extended support (which I bet most people won't need) you will have to pay through the nose for them.
Keep that in mind, when you wonder why Dell won't give you AHCI or network drivers for your system to run XP with in a few months.. If dell stops providing XP drivers in the near future they will lose all the buisness from corps/institutions who are still on XP. That seems like a suicidal move to me.
I suspect eventually we will be forced to migrate but I don't see it happening in the near future.
The first two are the same date written in different formats (the UK puts the day first, the US puts the month first). I'm not sure what china normally do but it looks to me like the same date there too.
As I understand it sun was pulled between two conflicting forces. On the one hand with MS pushing.net they wanted java to be a first class citizen on linux. Otoh they wanted to keep control over java.
Being a first class citizen on linux basically requires being FOSS. If not your package will most likely be either excluded altogether or shunted off to some "non-free" repositry which is not enabled by default and likely has lower standards of maintinance.
After much dithering a couple of years ago they finally announced they were definately going to make java FOSS and over the following years gradually did so. This meant but it also meant giving up some control.
In my experience, capital letters don't matter to a web browser In my experience, capital letters don't matter to a web browser. That's more on the local side of the web server if you have a case-sensitive file system. The web browser just sends the path you typed to the web server in the same case you type it. If your webserver has a case sensitive filesystem (e.g. you are on standard LAMP hosting) and you don't take special measures then a user forgetting to type the capitals will result in a not found error.
I've found it much easier to just avoid caps in urls (and other filenames for that matter) completely. That way your urls are simpler for users to type and you won't have problems when moving between case sensitive and case insensitive hostings.
Off the top of my heave i've come up with the following guidelines for nice URLs (not everything has to have a nice url, just pages people are likely to want to write down/read over the phone/memorise ). Do people here agree or disagree with them?
1: avoid using meaningless identifiers to reduce the length. While www.mysite.com/page123 is shorter than www.mysite.com/personal/electronics/pic it is much harder to remember. 2: avoid repitition e.g. use Chapter-1/1-5.xml Chapter-1/chap-1-5.xml 3: avoid unnessacerally long words (e.g. use maths not mathematics). maybe even consider using abriviations. 3: avoid crap that is meaninless to the user. E.g. www.mysite.com/wiki/pagename is far preferable to www.mysite.com/wiki/index.php/pagename which in turn is preferable to www.mysite.com/wiki/index.php?title=pagename 4: avoid capitals or at the very least provide an alias with them downcased. 5: minimise the ammount of different symbols in the url, especially try to avoid symbols which require shift or are unfamiliar to non-geeks (the underscore is both!) 6: if you must use meaningless identifiers (it is pretty hard to avoid them with things like forums and bugtrackers) make them base 10 numbers. Going to base, 16, 32 or 64 will save you a little length but will make your url much harder for most people to remember.
GIF and even PNG are surprisingly compact and if only 256 shades of gray are needed, the GIF is usually the way to go for size. In my experiance png nearly always beats gif in a fair (same colordepth on both and no extranuous metadata) comparison.
Don't make the mistake of comparing truecolor png with indexed color gif and neglecting the existance of indexed color and greyscale png.
To me png seems like the best choice for lossless master images, it has suppor for truecolor, better compression than gif and the common variants of tiff and very wide software support. It is also a relatively simple format (avoiding a mess like tiff where many tools can only read a subset of the format).
Slashdot Mirror
At the end of the day we might see more bands (NIN RADIOHEAD) move towards a distribution model that puts them in control. This movement can only help everybody except the sleezy middle men that have been dictating trends and prices for decades. The fact that people have created there own distribution model and it's working better then the old one shows the futility in the now obsolete model of the past.
The fact that some bands who have managed to go through the system and come out the other side (something very few bands manage to stay relevent long enough to do) have started selling direct proves very little. It's nothing new either, the beatles set up thier own record company for instance.
how much does your system actually draw? have you ever measured it?
What you name a place has NOTHING to do with the law behind it. You can't be convicted based on what you called something, unless the name itself is somehow illegal.
I don't know the specifics of sweedish law but under many laws in many countries intent is an important factor.
The operators of the pirate bay have through thier words and actions (one of which but far from the only one being the naming of the site) made it clear that thier intent is to support "pirates".
it's like arresting people because they had a discussion about drugs, or told someone not to go to a particularly drug-ridden part of town late at night
No it's like arresting people for running database of drug dealers so people can more easilly source the drugs they want.
This is nothing new.
Mail order used to be a PITA, you had to either get a catalog in advance (slow and sometimes chargable) or try and figure out what you needed from talking to the company on the phone. Then you had to submit your order either by phone (time consuming and error prone) or by mail (slow). New items could only be added at fixed points in the year since catalogs couldn't be reprinted too often. With all the downsides of mail order the fact they had an effective tax advantage was probablly no big deal.
Now you can search accross loads of suppliers easilly using price comparision websites. Online catalogs can be updated (for both price and items) on a real time basis. Suddenly for certain categories of item at least shopping online is MORE conviniant than going to the shop. Companies like amazon and newegg have reached huge size and brought huge economies of scale to the process. Is it so unreasonable to put them on a level playing field tax wise with retail?
All the cyrix chips i've ever seen were socket 7 devices with heatsinks/fans to match
IIRC the P4 was the chip that introduced the concept of heatsink mountings that were seperate from the socket to support it's HUGE heatsink requirements.
If you erect 20 5 megawatt [metaefficient.com] wind turbines a month in one year you'll add 1.2 gigawatts of capacity in a year.
Afaict wind turbines are rated by thier output under ideal wind conditions. which is MUCH higher than thier output under average wind conditions.
Also relying on wind puts your grid at the mercy of whether the wind blows or not.
Sure when the production environment is a few grand or even a few tens of grand worth of server hardware building a test system that exactly mirrors the production one is reasonable.
Now consider a situation where building a complete copy of the production environment would be unreasonablly expensive so you build a scale model or a simulation model, test your code and it works.
Then you take your code to the full scale system and start having issues that you can't reproduce on the model (because no model is perfect). What are you supposed to do then other than use the real system as a debug environment.
Of course if they really want to properly gouge their consumers for all their worth, they'd also introduce some price discrimination...
they already have.
Why they chose to use a lead-free solder process is beyond me.
They don't have a choice for consoles sold in europe, for those sold in the US they could use lead based solder but it's probablly easier logistically to use lead free everywhere.
Yes lead free solder is inferior but the whole computer industry is using it and most of the stuff is a hell of a lot more reliable than the xbox 360.
umm over here in the uk right now (prices from game.co.uk and rounded to the nearest pound) the xbox 360 ranges from £130-£210 depending on model, the PS3 is £300 and the wii is £179
The base model xbox 360 has been cheaper than the wii over here for some time afaict.
This has got to be the Ford Pinto of consoles. I can't believe people are still spending their hard-earned cash on such a badly designed piece of go-se.
The thing is that the alternatives have thier problems too, the wii doesn't do HD and is generally targetting at kids/casual gamers. The PS3 is nice (I have one) but it's FAR more expensive than the xbox 360 (looking at game.co.uk one of the major retailers over here the base model 360 is less than half the price of the base model PS3)
So for the gamer who wants up to date 3D games like GTA4 and doesn't care about media center type features or any of the PS3 exclusive games the 360 looks pretty attractive.
Afaict when you get really big (like google) you no longer buy most of your bandwidth, you get it free or nearly free through peering arrangements.
Most likely the record companies agreements with apple and/or the artist didn't allow international online distribution (either because they didn't think of it or because the artist was hoping to get record agreements elsewhere) so apples hands were tied.
did you try to contact the artist and express your displeasure?
mythbusters concluded it was possible to talk someone through landing an airliner (they successfully had someone talk jamie and adam through a landing in a simulator with the person doing the talking through using only the info that would be availible to ATC)but could find no evidence of it ever being done and thought it unlikely it ever would be since airliners have two pilots.
There is a better article on this emergency at http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/apr/14/conn-pilot-part-team-helps-passenger-land-plane-sa/ .
This was not an airliner but a much smaller executive plane (13 passenger capacity according to wikipedia) which explains why there was not a copilot. Also the person who took over WAS was a qualified pilot for smaller planes. Presumablly it's a lot easier to talk a pilot through landing a larger aircraft than it is to talk a layman through landing one.
It absolutely makes no sense to talk about running on XP SP0 as a selling point when almost nobody uses XP SP0.
But there are probablly quite a few still running XP SP2 and probablly will be for a few years yet.
I know plenty of people have been burned by issues when installing a service pack (for example the issue where an image made on intel but deployed on amd dies after SP3 install or older versions of nero stopping working after SP2 install)
More to the point service packs generally don't add anything significant to the API so there seems little point in dropping compatibility with versions that don't have them applied.
Why rewrite math code written in a native compiled language (aka fast) and probablly pretty well debugged over the years? rewriting it in python like you suggest sounds like it would just waste a lot of time to end up with a most likely slower and buggier result.
Your comment actually reinforces the parent post. Manufacturers are more likely to support new hardware on older windows versions than old hardware on newer windows versions so it pays to stick on an old version of windows for a while.
You can use 2003,which is much closer to XP, and supports more than 4GB ram in the 32bit version
buying server licenses for desktops is going to get expensive pretty fast. Also IIRC a lot of drivers don't get on with 32 bit systems with more than 4GB of physical address space.
and has a 64bit version too
Which is from a driver perspective no better or worse than "XP proffessional x64 edition". (despite the name XP proffessional x64 edition is actually based on server 2003 to the extent it even uses the same updates)
XP is old and MS is trying to obsolete it and since they have the monopoly on spreading Windows, companies will have no choice.
Your speculation doesn't fit with microsofts past and current behaviour. MS volume licenses generally include pretty generous downgrade rights (IIRC with current volume licenses it's down to windows 95)
Just because something is in a contract doesn't nessacerally mean it will hold up in court. Also don't forget the horrible thing about being a multinational is that you can get sued anywhere you do buisness, not just in your home country.
But even ignoring potential legal angles I still think disabling XP would be a suicidal thing to do. MS would much rather you were running an obsolete version of windows or even a pirate copy of windows than running and encouraging support for an alternate OS.
And when 7 comes out I bet OEM copies won't come with downgrade rights to XP so MS will be laughing all the way to the bank as people have to buy an OEM copy of 7 and then a volume license "upgrade" to get the downgrade rights.
Actually, Windows XP will stop being supported TOMORROW!!!!
No windows XP will move from mainstream support to extended support tomorrow. That means that your free "support incidents" from your retail copies will no longer be valid and if you want non-security hotfixes released after XP goes into extended support (which I bet most people won't need) you will have to pay through the nose for them.
Keep that in mind, when you wonder why Dell won't give you AHCI or network drivers for your system to run XP with in a few months..
If dell stops providing XP drivers in the near future they will lose all the buisness from corps/institutions who are still on XP. That seems like a suicidal move to me.
I suspect eventually we will be forced to migrate but I don't see it happening in the near future.
The first two are the same date written in different formats (the UK puts the day first, the US puts the month first). I'm not sure what china normally do but it looks to me like the same date there too.
They did that for many years.
As I understand it sun was pulled between two conflicting forces. On the one hand with MS pushing .net they wanted java to be a first class citizen on linux. Otoh they wanted to keep control over java.
Being a first class citizen on linux basically requires being FOSS. If not your package will most likely be either excluded altogether or shunted off to some "non-free" repositry which is not enabled by default and likely has lower standards of maintinance.
After much dithering a couple of years ago they finally announced they were definately going to make java FOSS and over the following years gradually did so. This meant but it also meant giving up some control.
In my experience, capital letters don't matter to a web browser
In my experience, capital letters don't matter to a web browser. That's more on the local side of the web server if you have a case-sensitive file system.
The web browser just sends the path you typed to the web server in the same case you type it. If your webserver has a case sensitive filesystem (e.g. you are on standard LAMP hosting) and you don't take special measures then a user forgetting to type the capitals will result in a not found error.
I've found it much easier to just avoid caps in urls (and other filenames for that matter) completely. That way your urls are simpler for users to type and you won't have problems when moving between case sensitive and case insensitive hostings.
Off the top of my heave i've come up with the following guidelines for nice URLs (not everything has to have a nice url, just pages people are likely to want to write down/read over the phone/memorise ). Do people here agree or disagree with them?
1: avoid using meaningless identifiers to reduce the length. While www.mysite.com/page123 is shorter than www.mysite.com/personal/electronics/pic it is much harder to remember.
2: avoid repitition e.g. use Chapter-1/1-5.xml Chapter-1/chap-1-5.xml
3: avoid unnessacerally long words (e.g. use maths not mathematics). maybe even
consider using abriviations.
3: avoid crap that is meaninless to the user. E.g. www.mysite.com/wiki/pagename is far preferable to www.mysite.com/wiki/index.php/pagename which in turn is preferable to www.mysite.com/wiki/index.php?title=pagename
4: avoid capitals or at the very least provide an alias with them downcased.
5: minimise the ammount of different symbols in the url, especially try to avoid symbols which require shift or are unfamiliar to non-geeks (the underscore is both!)
6: if you must use meaningless identifiers (it is pretty hard to avoid them with things like forums and bugtrackers) make them base 10 numbers. Going to base, 16, 32 or 64 will save you a little length but will make your url much harder for most people to remember.
GIF and even PNG are surprisingly compact and if only 256 shades of gray are needed, the GIF is usually the way to go for size.
In my experiance png nearly always beats gif in a fair (same colordepth on both and no extranuous metadata) comparison.
Don't make the mistake of comparing truecolor png with indexed color gif and neglecting the existance of indexed color and greyscale png.
To me png seems like the best choice for lossless master images, it has suppor for truecolor, better compression than gif and the common variants of tiff and very wide software support. It is also a relatively simple format (avoiding a mess like tiff where many tools can only read a subset of the format).