Any reasonablly major (own AS) ISP will get at least a/32 from the RIR.
IIRC current reccomendation is to give out something smaller than a/48 bit bigger than a/64 to small customers allowing for a small number of subnets all using autoconfiguration.
I'm not aware of any IPV6 ISP that gives out less than a/64 . Most seem to give out either a/48 or a/64 .
Of course IPV6 is too niche for the moment for the customer screwers to have got interested.
Apparently the linux kernel devs have point blank refused to implement V6 NAT. Since a large proportion of home routers are linux based these are unlikely to support it either........
Games like starcraft designed to run on 9x AND NT4 generally worked fine on 2K and XP too. The problem was all the DOS games. Dos games like the various build engine games were still pretty common at that time afaict (quake WAS later ported to windows but not everyone had the internet in those days).
There were also problems with some win16 software that broke the rules and didn't work on the NT line though I think that issue was going away by the time 2K came out.
There was an interesting discussion on grounding GbE here: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/2_2.htm That article appears to be about 1000baseCX (a largely dead standard that used a special balanced individually shielded twisted pair cable) not 1000baseT (the dominant form of gigabit ethernet).
I would think if there was a monitor handy there would probablly also be a keyboard and mouse handy.
Given that how about something like the ASUS EEE box or the mac mini (depending on your budget and performance needs) and if some of your clients haven't moved into the world of USB get a USB to PS2 adaptor.
Do you have a source for that claim? wikipedia (not the best source but generally more trustworthy than random posts on/.) claims they stopped 100m above the lake deliberately to prevent contamination.
Well the dimmer is decreasing both the "real power" (average transferred to the load) and the "apparent power" (RMS voltage * RMS current) though you are decreasing the real power by more than the apparent power (so the power factor would be decreasing since power factor is real power/apparent power).
I'm not sure why you think having a low power factor means you aren't saving any real electrity though. Power factor correction is a normal pracice.
The harmonic currents can be a bitch for power companies though. Particularlly the third harmonic since that causes neutral currents to sum in a three phase with neutral system.
While resistive dimmers were used at one stage in the theatre industry I don't think they were ever used in homes. If they were you would notice it because of the heat output.
All modern dimmers (both domestic and theatrical) for incandescent lighting are phase cutters. That is they reduce the average power to the filiment by only allowing current through for part of the waveform. This means very little power is dissipated in the dimmer.
The issue with efficiancy when dimming incandescents is as the GP says that light output goes down far quicker than power disipation.
Of course none of this has any relavence to dimming TVs since those use totally different technologies for producing light.
and it will run Ubuntu. Is there an official statement from anyone that they will provide security updates and new releases for it? or will it be some vendor specific rebuild of ubuntu that will never see an update.
Ordinary laptops got larger as bigger higher resoloution screens became availible at reasonable prices (they were getting thinner but thickness is IMO the least important dimension on a laptop).
When you look at an ordinary 486/early pentium era laptop it's area (looking from the top) is generally much closer to something like the EEE 1000 than to a current ordinary laptop.
There were a couple of ultraportable lines, for example the libretto from toshiba and the smaller sony vaio models but they were pretty expensive.
The combination of cheap and ultraportable just didn't seem to occour to anyone until the OLPC came along. The Asus EEE and Intel classmate followed with cheap ultraportables that were slightly less unconventional and then when ASUS's machine took off a load of other vendors followed.
They only come with XP home, so their usefulness is somewhat limited in an Active Directory environmen Assuming you have some form of MS volume license agreement you might want to look into how much it would cost to upgrade them to pro under it.
While a 17 inch laptop is not something you want to cart arround with you all the time or use in a cramped coach class airplane seat that doesn't make it useless.
I don't think you would have any trouble using it in a site office on a large construction site or in first class on one of britans intercity train services (I dunno enough about planes or american trains to comment on whether you could use it in first class there). Then when you move to the next site you can transport it far more easilly than a desktop.
Also even if it does spend most of it's time on one desk it's still a big space saver. Desktop flat panels with a high pixel density just don't seem to be availible (my check of two major UK vendors and one major US vendor for 1920x1200 monitors found loads of 24 inch, ONE 22 inch and nothing smaller than that).
And it's not as though people like architects and structural engineers on a constuction site wear much protective gear. Generally just a hardhat, steel toe cap boots and in some cases a hi-vis vest and/or body harness but nothing that would get in the way of computer usage.
Afaict it's pretty much impossible to avoid products made with lead free solder and/or lead free component finishes. Few manufacturers want to produce products that can't legally be sold in the EU (yeah, I know there are some exceptions but often the same motherboards and expansion cards get used in servers and top end desktops so the sensible thing from the manufacturers perspective is to make them ROHS compliant).
I shoot weddings on a 5D Mk II, and I use 4 8GB Extreme III cards, and an Epson "Multimedia Viewer" (portable HDD with screen and CF slot, that allows you to very quickly transfer from CF to HDD so you can re-use the card). That sounds like a risky strategy to me, if that portable HDD fails you will probablly have lost most of the photos from the event.
You could similarly say "watches shouldn't need batteries". Most people still buy electric watches though. The hassle and cost of having to take you watch to have it's battery replaced occasionally is outweighed by the advantage of not having to wind your watch all the time.
and the e-ink based ebook readers have very long battery life, enough that you can easilly do several days of pretty heavy reading between charges. Is having to plug in every few days really less conviniant that carrying round a stack of books/magazines/datasheets and/or swapping different ones in and out of your bag every day. It's not like a laptop where you generally have to charge it after a few hours of use.
What the heck do you use PCI cards for these days anyway? Mainly secondry network cards and storage controllers. I would also probablly use them if I ever did a setup with more than two monitors or two monitors on a motherboard with no AGP or PCIe slots.
what functionality can be provided by a PCI(e) card that can't also be provided via USB or Firewire? Yeah, theese functions can technically be done over USB, but that means lower performance, higher prices and more mess on the desk.
The average person doesn't care about expandability. I wonder how what proportion of "normal" people have a "geek" friend/colleague/family member they go to for advice on computer matters rather than just buying blindly.
Sadly I don't think an ordinary desktop mac will happen in the near future since it would take away many mac users excuse for getting thier boss to buy them a mac pro.
Seems I was wrong (or possiblly only semi-wrong), the mini-displayport connector is not in the current displayport spec but apparently will be in the next version.
I could not find any clear info on if it was introduced by apple and then submitted to whoever is standising displayport or if it originated elsewhere.
There seem to be a lot of geeks who like apples software (personally I preffer linux but I can see the attraction) and would like to be able to buy an ordinary desktop that can run it. Apple however does not sell an ordinary desktop.
Some of them build hackintoshish's because of that but the lack of support and the fact you are violating the EULA would probablly put a lot of people off doing that in any environment other than thier own home.
So for the user that doesn't want a laptop it comes down to a choice between
* mac mini, awkward to open, no expansion room (all upgrades must be replacements rather than additions). Made of laptop parts and relatively low end ones at that (the fastest CPU speed availible in a mini matches the slowest CPU speed availible in a macbook). * imac, midrange desktop specs and parts crammed into the back of a monitor. Also awkward to open. No expansion room (all upgrades must be replacements rather than additions). Graphics upgrades requires weird cards that are almost unobtainable. * mac pro: a bulky and expensive workstation (though undoutablly nice if you actually need 8 cores and/or a shitload of ram) * xserve: IMO the nicest machine in the range but even more expensive than the mac pro
That's a good point, if I know that the battery can be replaced, I have no problem with the new system, but I can't buy it if I don't know for sure... Once the machine is on the open market someone will almost certainly rip it appart and get us details on how easilly each of the internal components is to replace.
Getting hold of the replacement battery may be more of an issue but I would be very surprised if apple didn't sell them somehow (though possiblly only to approved service centers) and if there is sufficiant demand I would expect third parties to offer replacement batteries as well.
There is no such thing as lossless analog to digital conversion. True but there is also no such thing as lossess analog recording so digitisation is often the lesser of two evils there. In any case for the vast majority of modern music the "master" will be digital.
256 Kbps lossy might still be better than lossless if the source material is better. It might (though I personally doubt it) be better if the playback system was capable of handling better than CD sample rates.
In reality the vast majority of sound playback equipment is only CD quality. Given that the signal paths would be (assuming the master is a 24/96 uncompressed source)
The second path is clearly less lossy than the first.
Also the fact is that lossless copies at "better than CD" sample rates aren't an availible option for most music. The choice is either CD quality if you buy the CD or a lossy encoding of CD quality music if you buy online,
Slashdot Mirror
Any reasonablly major (own AS) ISP will get at least a /32 from the RIR.
IIRC current reccomendation is to give out something smaller than a /48 bit bigger than a /64 to small customers allowing for a small number of subnets all using autoconfiguration.
I'm not aware of any IPV6 ISP that gives out less than a /64 . Most seem to give out either a /48 or a /64 .
Of course IPV6 is too niche for the moment for the customer screwers to have got interested.
Apparently the linux kernel devs have point blank refused to implement V6 NAT. Since a large proportion of home routers are linux based these are unlikely to support it either........
Games like starcraft designed to run on 9x AND NT4 generally worked fine on 2K and XP too. The problem was all the DOS games. Dos games like the various build engine games were still pretty common at that time afaict (quake WAS later ported to windows but not everyone had the internet in those days).
There were also problems with some win16 software that broke the rules and didn't work on the NT line though I think that issue was going away by the time 2K came out.
There was an interesting discussion on grounding GbE here: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/2_2.htm
That article appears to be about 1000baseCX (a largely dead standard that used a special balanced individually shielded twisted pair cable) not 1000baseT (the dominant form of gigabit ethernet).
I would think if there was a monitor handy there would probablly also be a keyboard and mouse handy.
Given that how about something like the ASUS EEE box or the mac mini (depending on your budget and performance needs) and if some of your clients haven't moved into the world of USB get a USB to PS2 adaptor.
And now you have it what do you think of it? and what kind of applications do you use it for?
Do you have a source for that claim? wikipedia (not the best source but generally more trustworthy than random posts on /.) claims they stopped 100m above the lake deliberately to prevent contamination.
They certainly can do it, it just costs them money to do and therefore they charge the customer for it.
Well the dimmer is decreasing both the "real power" (average transferred to the load) and the "apparent power" (RMS voltage * RMS current) though you are decreasing the real power by more than the apparent power (so the power factor would be decreasing since power factor is real power/apparent power).
I'm not sure why you think having a low power factor means you aren't saving any real electrity though. Power factor correction is a normal pracice.
The harmonic currents can be a bitch for power companies though. Particularlly the third harmonic since that causes neutral currents to sum in a three phase with neutral system.
While resistive dimmers were used at one stage in the theatre industry I don't think they were ever used in homes. If they were you would notice it because of the heat output.
All modern dimmers (both domestic and theatrical) for incandescent lighting are phase cutters. That is they reduce the average power to the filiment by only allowing current through for part of the waveform. This means very little power is dissipated in the dimmer.
The issue with efficiancy when dimming incandescents is as the GP says that light output goes down far quicker than power disipation.
Of course none of this has any relavence to dimming TVs since those use totally different technologies for producing light.
and it will run Ubuntu.
Is there an official statement from anyone that they will provide security updates and new releases for it? or will it be some vendor specific rebuild of ubuntu that will never see an update.
Ordinary laptops got larger as bigger higher resoloution screens became availible at reasonable prices (they were getting thinner but thickness is IMO the least important dimension on a laptop).
When you look at an ordinary 486/early pentium era laptop it's area (looking from the top) is generally much closer to something like the EEE 1000 than to a current ordinary laptop.
There were a couple of ultraportable lines, for example the libretto from toshiba and the smaller sony vaio models but they were pretty expensive.
The combination of cheap and ultraportable just didn't seem to occour to anyone until the OLPC came along. The Asus EEE and Intel classmate followed with cheap ultraportables that were slightly less unconventional and then when ASUS's machine took off a load of other vendors followed.
They only come with XP home, so their usefulness is somewhat limited in an Active Directory environmen
Assuming you have some form of MS volume license agreement you might want to look into how much it would cost to upgrade them to pro under it.
While a 17 inch laptop is not something you want to cart arround with you all the time or use in a cramped coach class airplane seat that doesn't make it useless.
I don't think you would have any trouble using it in a site office on a large construction site or in first class on one of britans intercity train services (I dunno enough about planes or american trains to comment on whether you could use it in first class there). Then when you move to the next site you can transport it far more easilly than a desktop.
Also even if it does spend most of it's time on one desk it's still a big space saver. Desktop flat panels with a high pixel density just don't seem to be availible (my check of two major UK vendors and one major US vendor for 1920x1200 monitors found loads of 24 inch, ONE 22 inch and nothing smaller than that).
And it's not as though people like architects and structural engineers on a constuction site wear much protective gear. Generally just a hardhat, steel toe cap boots and in some cases a hi-vis vest and/or body harness but nothing that would get in the way of computer usage.
Afaict it's pretty much impossible to avoid products made with lead free solder and/or lead free component finishes. Few manufacturers want to produce products that can't legally be sold in the EU (yeah, I know there are some exceptions but often the same motherboards and expansion cards get used in servers and top end desktops so the sensible thing from the manufacturers perspective is to make them ROHS compliant).
It seems the MP3 patent situation is a mess with various patents claimed to cover mp3 some of which don't expire until 2017.
I shoot weddings on a 5D Mk II, and I use 4 8GB Extreme III cards, and an Epson "Multimedia Viewer" (portable HDD with screen and CF slot, that allows you to very quickly transfer from CF to HDD so you can re-use the card).
That sounds like a risky strategy to me, if that portable HDD fails you will probablly have lost most of the photos from the event.
You could similarly say "watches shouldn't need batteries". Most people still buy electric watches though. The hassle and cost of having to take you watch to have it's battery replaced occasionally is outweighed by the advantage of not having to wind your watch all the time.
and the e-ink based ebook readers have very long battery life, enough that you can easilly do several days of pretty heavy reading between charges. Is having to plug in every few days really less conviniant that carrying round a stack of books/magazines/datasheets and/or swapping different ones in and out of your bag every day. It's not like a laptop where you generally have to charge it after a few hours of use.
What the heck do you use PCI cards for these days anyway?
Mainly secondry network cards and storage controllers. I would also probablly use them if I ever did a setup with more than two monitors or two monitors on a motherboard with no AGP or PCIe slots.
what functionality can be provided by a PCI(e) card that can't also be provided via USB or Firewire?
Yeah, theese functions can technically be done over USB, but that means lower performance, higher prices and more mess on the desk.
The average person doesn't care about expandability.
I wonder how what proportion of "normal" people have a "geek" friend/colleague/family member they go to for advice on computer matters rather than just buying blindly.
Sadly I don't think an ordinary desktop mac will happen in the near future since it would take away many mac users excuse for getting thier boss to buy them a mac pro.
Seems I was wrong (or possiblly only semi-wrong), the mini-displayport connector is not in the current displayport spec but apparently will be in the next version.
I could not find any clear info on if it was introduced by apple and then submitted to whoever is standising displayport or if it originated elsewhere.
That seems to be an advantage of rectangular cells rather than an advantage of making the battery non-removable
There seem to be a lot of geeks who like apples software (personally I preffer linux but I can see the attraction) and would like to be able to buy an ordinary desktop that can run it. Apple however does not sell an ordinary desktop.
Some of them build hackintoshish's because of that but the lack of support and the fact you are violating the EULA would probablly put a lot of people off doing that in any environment other than thier own home.
So for the user that doesn't want a laptop it comes down to a choice between
* mac mini, awkward to open, no expansion room (all upgrades must be replacements rather than additions). Made of laptop parts and relatively low end ones at that (the fastest CPU speed availible in a mini matches the slowest CPU speed availible in a macbook).
* imac, midrange desktop specs and parts crammed into the back of a monitor. Also awkward to open. No expansion room (all upgrades must be replacements rather than additions). Graphics upgrades requires weird cards that are almost unobtainable.
* mac pro: a bulky and expensive workstation (though undoutablly nice if you actually need 8 cores and/or a shitload of ram)
* xserve: IMO the nicest machine in the range but even more expensive than the mac pro
That's a good point, if I know that the battery can be replaced, I have no problem with the new system, but I can't buy it if I don't know for sure...
Once the machine is on the open market someone will almost certainly rip it appart and get us details on how easilly each of the internal components is to replace.
Getting hold of the replacement battery may be more of an issue but I would be very surprised if apple didn't sell them somehow (though possiblly only to approved service centers) and if there is sufficiant demand I would expect third parties to offer replacement batteries as well.
Displayport isn't propietry but afaict mini displayport (displayport signaling but with a different connector) is.
There is no such thing as lossless analog to digital conversion.
True but there is also no such thing as lossess analog recording so digitisation is often the lesser of two evils there. In any case for the vast majority of modern music the "master" will be digital.
256 Kbps lossy might still be better than lossless if the source material is better.
It might (though I personally doubt it) be better if the playback system was capable of handling better than CD sample rates.
In reality the vast majority of sound playback equipment is only CD quality. Given that the signal paths would be (assuming the master is a 24/96 uncompressed source)
master->lossy encoding->decoding->downconversion->output
master->downconversion->lossless encoding->decoding->output
The second path is clearly less lossy than the first.
Also the fact is that lossless copies at "better than CD" sample rates aren't an availible option for most music. The choice is either CD quality if you buy the CD or a lossy encoding of CD quality music if you buy online,