Abandoning computer labs would require convincing the suppliers of all the software used for teaching/projects to let students install it on thier personal machines.
I get the distinct impression that would be very difficult at least for the department i'm in (EEE at the university of manchester in the UK). Also student laptop ownership/use seems lower over here than in the USA.
Establish colonies where? The moon and mars are more inhospitable than even the most inhospitable places on earth and people don't live in those places without a huge ammount of external support.
Also remember that most people (rich or otherwise) depend on societies structures for the continued existance of thier wealth. Money in the bank lasts only as long as thier isn't hyperinflation or bank failures that the government refuses to (or can't) bail out. Real estate and everything on it only lasts as long as there is a viable governemnt to enforce property rights. "IP" only lasts as long as there is a governemnt that enforces it. Shares only last as long as there is a governement to stop the companies employees taking the companies wealth and running.
Some flash drives draw so much power from USB that they basically require a dedicated port. Others will work on a hub.
The pic and keyboard together will probablly draw well under 100ma, particularlly if you reduce the pics core clock (for a volume control you don't really need the core clock running at 48MHz)
You may not even need a custom driver, it's pretty easy to find hid keyboard examples for the pic. So you could probablly emulate the extended scancodes of an existing keyboard for your volume control
It is but remember a "standard outlet" is most likely on a shared circuit into which the monitor and other perhipherals will most likely also be plugged.
Also remember PC PSUs aren't perfectly efficiant.
Add those two together and I would think any PSU over 1KW used in a country that uses american style wiring (european wiring tends to allow more power per circuit) would need very carefull consideration.
The important thing is that anyone or anything that links your "real persona" and your "anonymous persona" is a potential threat to your anonymity both through things they willingly or mistakenly do and through things they could be coerced or forced into doing.
It's all too easy to put lots of thought into making it bloody hard to trace your connection but then link your "anonymous persona" to your "real persona" through common friends, accidently logging into a site using the wrong account for the connection you are using, forgetting to flush cookies (and any similar tracing objects) when moving between your "nonanoymous connection" and your "anonymous connection" and so on.
I would take the Microsoft comfort keyboard that I have now and add a USB hub to it for a mouse...........and I would add a volume knob Neither of those mods sound particularlly difficult;)
3) A big company have more patents in their portfolio to play with. A small company may try to sue a big company for 1 patent but the big company can overrun the small company with counter sue with 5-7 patents of their own. And this is WHY we have "patent trolls". Only a firm that has no products of thier own can really win in a patent lawsuit against a megacorp.
and in the Orders table once per order. I'd disagree on this one, it seems to me like it would be a good idea to record the customers name and address (probablly both billing and shipping) at the time of an order even if they later change the details on thier account.
the thing that always puzzled me about berkerlydb is it's incessent format breakage requiring dumps and restores.
On a database server at least data upgrading can be handled centrally but on a file based DB where datafiles can be scattered anywhere a lack of a stable data format seems like a fatal flaw.
The only use case can see is if you own a mp3 player with large storage that doesn't support playback of a proper lossless format.
With this you can keep and listen to the files on your mp3 player while also being able to decode them losslessly when you plug that player into a computer.
also given the filesize stats in the article it appears they aren't just bundling together a lossy and lossless format but actually making the lossless format build on the lossy format (either that or they have a lossless format that is considerablly better than flac).
Regardless of your moral stance on the issue the fact remains that for a nontrivial sized buisness (more than a handfull of employees) pirating software from the big vendors is risky. It just takes one disgrutles employee to rat on you and if it doesn't look like you have been spending enough on licensing it's got a good chance of being audit time.
Not that there is anything wrong with using the same key on a load of computers if it's a volume license key that is legitimately yours. IIRC MS even lets you use your VLK to reinstall machines licensed under OEM or retail licenses (though there are some nagging restrictions on the details that you will need to check on if you use this route)
I was under the impression that at least in the US once it got beyond a certain dollar value (set small enough that pirating an officefull of MS software would be well over the threshold) it was considered "commercial infringement" and hence criminal regardless of whether you actually sell copies.
The trouble with the shuttle IMO was it stopped incremental improvement and modernisation. It also makes it very very hard to increase fleet size or replace lost craft down the line.
Because the ruskies have to make a new soyuz each time they keep the ability to make them going AND they can make incremental improvements easilly because each flight is with a newly made craft.
Dunno about the IT industry but in electronics we end up using both metric and imperial, often on the same board. DIL and SOIC are imperial but almost all the smaller stuff is metric. Connectors may be either (or occasionally a pitch that doesn't come out as a round number in either system:( )
you're saying that planes mostly crash when they meet the ground? Well all crashes involve the ground (or the water) at some point sure but the question then becomes why they meet the ground (or the water).
Sometimes the pilot is deliberately interacting with the ground (takeoff and landing) but something goes wrong in the interaction
Sometimes the pilot doesn't realise the ground is there (say due to a navigation error or instrument) and therefore hits it even though they still have control over the aircraft.
Sometimes something goes wrong in flight that renders the plane unable to recover sufficiantly to land safely (what is sufficiant recovery to land safely depends to a huge extent on where the incident happened).
A parachute would only help in the last of theese cases (and probablly only a subset of those, a 747 parachuting down in an urban setting would probablly do quite some damage to both itself and what it landed on). The GP is asserting that such cases are a minority of accidents.
It partly depends on how far away it is from earth when we discover it.
If we can get it when it's at the same distance as the moon we only need to divert it about one degree. At larger distances even smaller diversions are needed.
If going for a bomb though it seems the best option would be to try and blow a chunk off the side.
As well as the issue as to whether it is moral to set the BSA goons on a company the other problem I see with doing that is if your colleages have friends in the buisness and guesses that you are the rat it could make getting your next job much harder.
Thing is it's not just server big iron that is going up in core count. My brother recently got a moderately priced (about £450 inc vat and delivery so not rock bottom end but not hugely expensive either) dell vostro 420 desktop and it came with a quad core processor as standard.
Right now low end desktops have 1 or 2 cores, midrange desktops have 2 or 4 cores, and high end workstations have 4 or 8 cores. I expect in the next couple of years all those figures will double.
Some things are a bit painful due to the limited screen size One thing I find can be painfull (from experiance using my brothers EEE 900) is that certain applications assume the screen will be at least 1024x768 since before the netbook craze 1024x768 had been the minimum common resoloution for years. So on a 1024x600 netbook you get dialogs that just don't fit on the screen.
Unfortunately there have been very few netbooks with a 768 pixel high screen and those that there have been have had other issues (like shitty processors). Hopefully HP will be fixing this hole in the market soon though.
According to wikipedia the ability to have "previous versions" was introduced in server 2003 (XP can view previous versions on remote servers but it can't handle them locally)
Asus put first linux then windows XP on the EEEPC (the machine that everyone cloned starting the "netbook" craze). Afaict the reason they went for XP was because users wanted windows and given the specs vista was not a reasonable choice.
The special netbook licenses (early XP eeepcs had an ordinary XP home license sticker) came later when MS had to choose between letting the netbook vendors keep shipping XP and losing the netbook market to linux. Afaict MS keeps big brand OEM pricing secret so claims that they are cheaper are difficult to prove either way.
99.9% of the things that make Windows suck were caused by programmers writing Windows applications that broke some important rules and caused the system to be less secure or less stable. This seems to be one of the big differences between linux systems and windows systems.
Linux users generally get the majority of thier software from distribution operated repositries. Software that doesn't follow the rules is fixed to do so before being uploaded to the repositries.
Windows users get thier software direct from the company that created it (or a company acting as publisher for them) with noone doing any checking that it follows the rules.
(other than M$ having to update licensing I suppose, since they usually license for 4 cores max now on "normal" windows versions.) MS limit windows processor support based on the number of "processor units" not the number of cores.
1 processor unit for home, 2 for proffessional (buisness/enterprise/ultimate if you are using vista) 4 for server standard, 8 for server enterprise and even more (I don't remember the exact number) for server datacenter (note: the names of the server editions vary slightly from release to release but it's usually pretty obvious which maps to which).
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Abandoning computer labs would require convincing the suppliers of all the software used for teaching/projects to let students install it on thier personal machines.
I get the distinct impression that would be very difficult at least for the department i'm in (EEE at the university of manchester in the UK). Also student laptop ownership/use seems lower over here than in the USA.
Establish colonies where? The moon and mars are more inhospitable than even the most inhospitable places on earth and people don't live in those places without a huge ammount of external support.
Also remember that most people (rich or otherwise) depend on societies structures for the continued existance of thier wealth. Money in the bank lasts only as long as thier isn't hyperinflation or bank failures that the government refuses to (or can't) bail out. Real estate and everything on it only lasts as long as there is a viable governemnt to enforce property rights. "IP" only lasts as long as there is a governemnt that enforces it. Shares only last as long as there is a governement to stop the companies employees taking the companies wealth and running.
Some flash drives draw so much power from USB that they basically require a dedicated port. Others will work on a hub.
The pic and keyboard together will probablly draw well under 100ma, particularlly if you reduce the pics core clock (for a volume control you don't really need the core clock running at 48MHz)
You may not even need a custom driver, it's pretty easy to find hid keyboard examples for the pic. So you could probablly emulate the extended scancodes of an existing keyboard for your volume control
It is but remember a "standard outlet" is most likely on a shared circuit into which the monitor and other perhipherals will most likely also be plugged.
Also remember PC PSUs aren't perfectly efficiant.
Add those two together and I would think any PSU over 1KW used in a country that uses american style wiring (european wiring tends to allow more power per circuit) would need very carefull consideration.
The important thing is that anyone or anything that links your "real persona" and your "anonymous persona" is a potential threat to your anonymity both through things they willingly or mistakenly do and through things they could be coerced or forced into doing.
It's all too easy to put lots of thought into making it bloody hard to trace your connection but then link your "anonymous persona" to your "real persona" through common friends, accidently logging into a site using the wrong account for the connection you are using, forgetting to flush cookies (and any similar tracing objects) when moving between your "nonanoymous connection" and your "anonymous connection" and so on.
I would take the Microsoft comfort keyboard that I have now and add a USB hub to it for a mouse...........and I would add a volume knob ;)
Neither of those mods sound particularlly difficult
3) A big company have more patents in their portfolio to play with. A small company may try to sue a big company for 1 patent but the big company can overrun the small company with counter sue with 5-7 patents of their own.
And this is WHY we have "patent trolls". Only a firm that has no products of thier own can really win in a patent lawsuit against a megacorp.
and in the Orders table once per order.
I'd disagree on this one, it seems to me like it would be a good idea to record the customers name and address (probablly both billing and shipping) at the time of an order even if they later change the details on thier account.
the thing that always puzzled me about berkerlydb is it's incessent format breakage requiring dumps and restores.
On a database server at least data upgrading can be handled centrally but on a file based DB where datafiles can be scattered anywhere a lack of a stable data format seems like a fatal flaw.
The only use case can see is if you own a mp3 player with large storage that doesn't support playback of a proper lossless format.
With this you can keep and listen to the files on your mp3 player while also being able to decode them losslessly when you plug that player into a computer.
also given the filesize stats in the article it appears they aren't just bundling together a lossy and lossless format but actually making the lossless format build on the lossy format (either that or they have a lossless format that is considerablly better than flac).
IIRC the authors were smart enough to use digital signatures to protect against that.
Regardless of your moral stance on the issue the fact remains that for a nontrivial sized buisness (more than a handfull of employees) pirating software from the big vendors is risky. It just takes one disgrutles employee to rat on you and if it doesn't look like you have been spending enough on licensing it's got a good chance of being audit time.
Not that there is anything wrong with using the same key on a load of computers if it's a volume license key that is legitimately yours. IIRC MS even lets you use your VLK to reinstall machines licensed under OEM or retail licenses (though there are some nagging restrictions on the details that you will need to check on if you use this route)
I was under the impression that at least in the US once it got beyond a certain dollar value (set small enough that pirating an officefull of MS software would be well over the threshold) it was considered "commercial infringement" and hence criminal regardless of whether you actually sell copies.
The trouble with the shuttle IMO was it stopped incremental improvement and modernisation. It also makes it very very hard to increase fleet size or replace lost craft down the line.
Because the ruskies have to make a new soyuz each time they keep the ability to make them going AND they can make incremental improvements easilly because each flight is with a newly made craft.
Dunno about the IT industry but in electronics we end up using both metric and imperial, often on the same board. DIL and SOIC are imperial but almost all the smaller stuff is metric. Connectors may be either (or occasionally a pitch that doesn't come out as a round number in either system :( )
you're saying that planes mostly crash when they meet the ground?
Well all crashes involve the ground (or the water) at some point sure but the question then becomes why they meet the ground (or the water).
Sometimes the pilot is deliberately interacting with the ground (takeoff and landing) but something goes wrong in the interaction
Sometimes the pilot doesn't realise the ground is there (say due to a navigation error or instrument) and therefore hits it even though they still have control over the aircraft.
Sometimes something goes wrong in flight that renders the plane unable to recover sufficiantly to land safely (what is sufficiant recovery to land safely depends to a huge extent on where the incident happened).
A parachute would only help in the last of theese cases (and probablly only a subset of those, a 747 parachuting down in an urban setting would probablly do quite some damage to both itself and what it landed on). The GP is asserting that such cases are a minority of accidents.
It partly depends on how far away it is from earth when we discover it.
If we can get it when it's at the same distance as the moon we only need to divert it about one degree. At larger distances even smaller diversions are needed.
If going for a bomb though it seems the best option would be to try and blow a chunk off the side.
As well as the issue as to whether it is moral to set the BSA goons on a company the other problem I see with doing that is if your colleages have friends in the buisness and guesses that you are the rat it could make getting your next job much harder.
Thing is it's not just server big iron that is going up in core count. My brother recently got a moderately priced (about £450 inc vat and delivery so not rock bottom end but not hugely expensive either) dell vostro 420 desktop and it came with a quad core processor as standard.
Right now low end desktops have 1 or 2 cores, midrange desktops have 2 or 4 cores, and high end workstations have 4 or 8 cores. I expect in the next couple of years all those figures will double.
Some things are a bit painful due to the limited screen size
One thing I find can be painfull (from experiance using my brothers EEE 900) is that certain applications assume the screen will be at least 1024x768 since before the netbook craze 1024x768 had been the minimum common resoloution for years. So on a 1024x600 netbook you get dialogs that just don't fit on the screen.
Unfortunately there have been very few netbooks with a 768 pixel high screen and those that there have been have had other issues (like shitty processors). Hopefully HP will be fixing this hole in the market soon though.
According to wikipedia the ability to have "previous versions" was introduced in server 2003 (XP can view previous versions on remote servers but it can't handle them locally)
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Asus put first linux then windows XP on the EEEPC (the machine that everyone cloned starting the "netbook" craze). Afaict the reason they went for XP was because users wanted windows and given the specs vista was not a reasonable choice.
The special netbook licenses (early XP eeepcs had an ordinary XP home license sticker) came later when MS had to choose between letting the netbook vendors keep shipping XP and losing the netbook market to linux. Afaict MS keeps big brand OEM pricing secret so claims that they are cheaper are difficult to prove either way.
99.9% of the things that make Windows suck were caused by programmers writing Windows applications that broke some important rules and caused the system to be less secure or less stable.
This seems to be one of the big differences between linux systems and windows systems.
Linux users generally get the majority of thier software from distribution operated repositries. Software that doesn't follow the rules is fixed to do so before being uploaded to the repositries.
Windows users get thier software direct from the company that created it (or a company acting as publisher for them) with noone doing any checking that it follows the rules.
(other than M$ having to update licensing I suppose, since they usually license for 4 cores max now on "normal" windows versions.)
MS limit windows processor support based on the number of "processor units" not the number of cores.
1 processor unit for home, 2 for proffessional (buisness/enterprise/ultimate if you are using vista) 4 for server standard, 8 for server enterprise and even more (I don't remember the exact number) for server datacenter (note: the names of the server editions vary slightly from release to release but it's usually pretty obvious which maps to which).