that depends what units your reference for the speed of light in the fiber (note: speed of light in a fiber is considerablly slower than the speed of light in free space) is in.
assuming you have insurance to drive that vehicle.. Afaict third party liability cover to drive other peoples cars is a pretty common perk with fully comp packages for your own car.
Can't wrong resistance give wrong results since one have calculated on the result and what is needed using exact values? We can't achive perfection so we have to be able to deal with variation in our designs. Designers should know when to specify precision components and when something more run of the mill is ok (1% resistors is kinda on the edge, it used to be regarded as precision but manufacuring improvements have meant 1% resistors are pretty cheap nowadays).
What the parent was getting at was that swapping 1% resistors for 2% or 5% resistors in a design is a fools errand unless you are producing huge volume. You can't just blindly change tollerances you have to check whether it is appropriate in each case and that takes time. It takes a lot of 1% resistors to equal the cost of a day of engineer time.
Sure a bytecode environment can do some optimisations that a traditional compiler can't but in my experiance they are at best a little faster and at worst considerablly slower than similar code written in a native language.
In general I agree with the gp. While choice of language may in some cases make a noticable performance difference no language can make up for WTF code and even adding hardware will struggle.
Exactly, continuing your php example up to a point things are fine, you add some more webservers, split the db onto it's own box and everything hums along nicely.
Then at some point you find mysql is fully loading down the box it's on. You can put off the inevitable a little by buying a better box but soon enough you have to start thinking about how you are going to manage and/or split the db load or maybe even about wholesale migration to a better db.
and then you find the nfs server with your uploaded files on is getting overloaded.
I don't think any system will scale seamlessly, some just do a better job of it than others.
The Netherlands is quite far north you know. More north than all of the Great Lakes. Maybe so but the gulf stream means the area arround britan and it's neighbours is a lot warmer than most other places of similar lattitude. The netherlands also tends to be pretty low lying.
I live in manchester in the UK which is probbablly a bit north of the northernmost point of the netherlands and based on the weather rounf here I very much doubt there is any time of year they could reliablly run an ice rink without artificial cooling.
One thing to bear in mind is that on systems over a certain age USB keyboards can't be used to access the bios setup. I know this is the case on my 800mhz duron system and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case on many 1GHz P3 system.
A fileservers job is to have the filesharing port open to it's clients.
So if you have a good firewall and can keep all infected machines out things are fine. But how many buisnesses really manage to do a perfect job of keeping infected machines off thier network (both stopping desktops inside getting infected and stopping people bringing in machines)?
Granted, we can normally consider eBay more-or-less the definitive price guide for used stuff, Stuff they turn over significant quanities of probablly though sometimes even then thier prices can be higher than elsewhere. Lower volume stuff though fluctuates hugely on auction sites like ebay.
BTW if you are searching ebay to get an idea of prices always do a completed items search. A large proportion of bidders snipe so the value of auctions that haven't ended yet is pretty uninteresting.
why would you suddenly have the need to move the console while in use? There are two main things I can think of
1: consoles often get moved accidently when a controller cable inadvertantly gets pulled tight. 2: consoles often have ports arround the back where if a cable gets disloged it can sometimes be pretty difficult to get it back in without moving the console.
If a slight movememnt to recconect a cable or because someone pulled thier controller a smidgen too far from the console is enough to seriously damange a disk then IMO the mechanism is not fit for purpose.
And this story is only important if somebody out there has a burning need to run a 64bit Java app... in a web browser. Java code doesn't have a bitness in that sense (native code it calls into does of course but browser applets don't generally use custom native code because that requires the whole signing/permissions popups rigmarole).
The reason this is important is because it should allow java applets to work properly in the geko based browsers that ship with 64 bit linux distros. There are third party plugins already but at least the one I have tried had some issues (it was lacking support for applets to interact with javascript in the browser, supposedly someone has written a newer one that solves that but I haven't tried it myself yet).
I wonder if and when they will get arround to releasing the source for the official java plugin (last I heard they were working on it,if it has already happened please post a link).
I was saying I think googles contribution to online advertising was generally positive for users. I would much rather see relavent adverts discretely presented than have popups and large animated noisy banners in my face.
* Afaict sega had basically given up (though they were still selling old stock/refurbised units for a few more years) before MS released thier first console. * nintendo was already moving towards the "family friendly" market even before MS entered. * sony still seem to be going strong though the blu-ray gamble did cause an initial hiccup
Afaict MS never made a profit on the first gen Xbox and things aren't looking too good this time arround either. They have discounted the xbox 360 so deeply that it is now cheaper than the wii (which is technically a last gen console with a gimmiky controller and must be far cheaper to produce).
As long as most people are unwilling/unable/afraid to make "micropayments" while they browse advertising on the web is here to stay. Google showed it could be done viably in a way that was far less annoying to users than the then typical popups, popunders, huge animated noisy banners etc.
A neat feature of the pssword manager is that you can use a master password. Without a master password, a trojan horse running on your system can steal all your passwords. Ok with a master password the trojan has to wait until you enter it but presumablly you enter your master password on a fairly regular basis so it doesn't seem like it would make a huge difference to me.
A phoneline goes through a digital sampling process that like any digital sampling process is limited both in it's sample rate and in the number of bits per sample.
The theoretical maximum sybol rate and number of possible symbols of your modem are set by the sample rate and bits per sample of the telco equipment. Modems have already got very close to those theoretical maximums. Getting a little closer may be possible but we are talking marginal gains at best.
Also even if it weren't for the limits imposed by the telcos digitisation for every bit per symbol you add you HALVE the difference between types of symbol. To get 16 bits per symbol you would need an insanely good SNR.
The only way to get better performance out of a phone line is to change (or in some cases reprogram depending on the age of the equipment) the equipment at the telco end. This is what ISDN and DSL do.
If dell ships a machine with XP they buy a vista buisness or ultimate license and use it's downgrade rights theese presumbablly cost more than vista home basic licenses (just how much more only dell and MS know but on machines where dell offers both home basic and buisness the price difference is typically arround $100).
They are probablly milking a bit on theese machines as they are charging the same for vista ultimate as for vista buisness downgraded to XP pro but not as much as the article implies.
note: despite this article title this is NOT a major change, XP downgrades on most machines they are availile on still cost either the same or about $50 more than the same machine with the same vista edition un-downgraded. The real news is that they are offering downgrades on thier low end consumer machines at all.
* you avoid the need to manually install windows, drivers etc. * you can get software support from dell if you need it * If you decide to move the machine to vista you get the buisness edition not the home basic edition.
If you do not like 8.10, you can go on using 8.04 or 7.10 or even earlier. You might be surprised how many people do not upgrade their *buntus since it works for them already. You can but remember ubuntu LTS releases are only supported on the desktop for 3 years with releases every 2 years.
This means if you want to keep getting security updates you have to upgrade every two years with a one year window in which to make each upgrade.
MS has irregular release cycles but they currently say they will support each version of windows for at least 7 years after it's successor is released. Hell even microsofts service packs have longer support overlaps than ubuntu's LTS releases.
While many people do run operating systems that are no longer getting security updates it is not something I would generally reccomend especially if the user is relying on the OS supplied web browser,mail client, im client etc.
Afaict this does not reffer to a change of price on models that were previously offered with XP but the offering of XP on a range where it wasn't offered at all before.
Remember to get XP you have to pay the extra for a buisness or ultimate license (unless the machine comes with one of those editions as standard) as well as paying any extra the OEM decides to charge for doing the downgrade for you and shipping extra media.
Anyway I decided to take a look at the laptop they linked in the article to see what the real situation was.
They don't offer this machine with undowngraded vista buisness but comparing with other machines it seems the price breaks down into about $100 for the upgrade to vista buisness and about $50 for the downgrade to XP.
Is $50 a bit steep for shipping an extra dvd and loading a different hdd image? probabblly but dell have always charged over the odds for extras on low end machines to make up for the low base prices (for comparision it costs $30 extra to get a different color lid)
P.S. dells site for those machines is misleading. The buttons all say "extra $150" but when you actually go into the customisation pages for the models that ship with home premium as standard the extra cost of XP is only $120.
Personally I think the answer is that all large last mile communications providers should be made to sell wholesale connections to smaller ISPs at a reasonable rates.
It has always struck me as odd that in many areas the telcos are mandated to do this but the cablecos aren't.
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that depends what units your reference for the speed of light in the fiber (note: speed of light in a fiber is considerablly slower than the speed of light in free space) is in.
assuming you have insurance to drive that vehicle..
Afaict third party liability cover to drive other peoples cars is a pretty common perk with fully comp packages for your own car.
Can't wrong resistance give wrong results since one have calculated on the result and what is needed using exact values?
We can't achive perfection so we have to be able to deal with variation in our designs. Designers should know when to specify precision components and when something more run of the mill is ok (1% resistors is kinda on the edge, it used to be regarded as precision but manufacuring improvements have meant 1% resistors are pretty cheap nowadays).
What the parent was getting at was that swapping 1% resistors for 2% or 5% resistors in a design is a fools errand unless you are producing huge volume. You can't just blindly change tollerances you have to check whether it is appropriate in each case and that takes time. It takes a lot of 1% resistors to equal the cost of a day of engineer time.
Sure a bytecode environment can do some optimisations that a traditional compiler can't but in my experiance they are at best a little faster and at worst considerablly slower than similar code written in a native language.
In general I agree with the gp. While choice of language may in some cases make a noticable performance difference no language can make up for WTF code and even adding hardware will struggle.
Exactly, continuing your php example up to a point things are fine, you add some more webservers, split the db onto it's own box and everything hums along nicely.
Then at some point you find mysql is fully loading down the box it's on. You can put off the inevitable a little by buying a better box but soon enough you have to start thinking about how you are going to manage and/or split the db load or maybe even about wholesale migration to a better db.
and then you find the nfs server with your uploaded files on is getting overloaded.
I don't think any system will scale seamlessly, some just do a better job of it than others.
The Netherlands is quite far north you know. More north than all of the Great Lakes.
Maybe so but the gulf stream means the area arround britan and it's neighbours is a lot warmer than most other places of similar lattitude. The netherlands also tends to be pretty low lying.
I live in manchester in the UK which is probbablly a bit north of the northernmost point of the netherlands and based on the weather rounf here I very much doubt there is any time of year they could reliablly run an ice rink without artificial cooling.
kudos to the site for actually going to the trouble of building a test rig that can actaully load down PSUs in controlled increments.
One thing to bear in mind is that on systems over a certain age USB keyboards can't be used to access the bios setup. I know this is the case on my 800mhz duron system and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case on many 1GHz P3 system.
A fileservers job is to have the filesharing port open to it's clients.
So if you have a good firewall and can keep all infected machines out things are fine. But how many buisnesses really manage to do a perfect job of keeping infected machines off thier network (both stopping desktops inside getting infected and stopping people bringing in machines)?
Granted, we can normally consider eBay more-or-less the definitive price guide for used stuff,
Stuff they turn over significant quanities of probablly though sometimes even then thier prices can be higher than elsewhere. Lower volume stuff though fluctuates hugely on auction sites like ebay.
BTW if you are searching ebay to get an idea of prices always do a completed items search. A large proportion of bidders snipe so the value of auctions that haven't ended yet is pretty uninteresting.
and lots of companies and instituction have stopped automatic upgrading to IE7 because they rely on enterprise shitware that relys on IE6.
why would you suddenly have the need to move the console while in use?
There are two main things I can think of
1: consoles often get moved accidently when a controller cable inadvertantly gets pulled tight.
2: consoles often have ports arround the back where if a cable gets disloged it can sometimes be pretty difficult to get it back in without moving the console.
If a slight movememnt to recconect a cable or because someone pulled thier controller a smidgen too far from the console is enough to seriously damange a disk then IMO the mechanism is not fit for purpose.
IIRC it doesn't work with the sun java plugin because the sun java plugin is an oji plugin not a npapi plugin.
And this story is only important if somebody out there has a burning need to run a 64bit Java app... in a web browser.
Java code doesn't have a bitness in that sense (native code it calls into does of course but browser applets don't generally use custom native code because that requires the whole signing/permissions popups rigmarole).
The reason this is important is because it should allow java applets to work properly in the geko based browsers that ship with 64 bit linux distros. There are third party plugins already but at least the one I have tried had some issues (it was lacking support for applets to interact with javascript in the browser, supposedly someone has written a newer one that solves that but I haven't tried it myself yet).
I wonder if and when they will get arround to releasing the source for the official java plugin (last I heard they were working on it,if it has already happened please post a link).
did I say there was?
I was saying I think googles contribution to online advertising was generally positive for users. I would much rather see relavent adverts discretely presented than have popups and large animated noisy banners in my face.
Who exactly did they topple?
* Afaict sega had basically given up (though they were still selling old stock/refurbised units for a few more years) before MS released thier first console.
* nintendo was already moving towards the "family friendly" market even before MS entered.
* sony still seem to be going strong though the blu-ray gamble did cause an initial hiccup
Afaict MS never made a profit on the first gen Xbox and things aren't looking too good this time arround either. They have discounted the xbox 360 so deeply that it is now cheaper than the wii (which is technically a last gen console with a gimmiky controller and must be far cheaper to produce).
As long as most people are unwilling/unable/afraid to make "micropayments" while they browse advertising on the web is here to stay. Google showed it could be done viably in a way that was far less annoying to users than the then typical popups, popunders, huge animated noisy banners etc.
A neat feature of the pssword manager is that you can use a master password. Without a master password, a trojan horse running on your system can steal all your passwords.
Ok with a master password the trojan has to wait until you enter it but presumablly you enter your master password on a fairly regular basis so it doesn't seem like it would make a huge difference to me.
Can't be done.
A phoneline goes through a digital sampling process that like any digital sampling process is limited both in it's sample rate and in the number of bits per sample.
The theoretical maximum sybol rate and number of possible symbols of your modem are set by the sample rate and bits per sample of the telco equipment. Modems have already got very close to those theoretical maximums. Getting a little closer may be possible but we are talking marginal gains at best.
Also even if it weren't for the limits imposed by the telcos digitisation for every bit per symbol you add you HALVE the difference between types of symbol. To get 16 bits per symbol you would need an insanely good SNR.
The only way to get better performance out of a phone line is to change (or in some cases reprogram depending on the age of the equipment) the equipment at the telco end. This is what ISDN and DSL do.
If dell ships a machine with XP they buy a vista buisness or ultimate license and use it's downgrade rights theese presumbablly cost more than vista home basic licenses (just how much more only dell and MS know but on machines where dell offers both home basic and buisness the price difference is typically arround $100).
They are probablly milking a bit on theese machines as they are charging the same for vista ultimate as for vista buisness downgraded to XP pro but not as much as the article implies.
note: despite this article title this is NOT a major change, XP downgrades on most machines they are availile on still cost either the same or about $50 more than the same machine with the same vista edition un-downgraded. The real news is that they are offering downgrades on thier low end consumer machines at all.
Three reasons
* you avoid the need to manually install windows, drivers etc.
* you can get software support from dell if you need it
* If you decide to move the machine to vista you get the buisness edition not the home basic edition.
Easilly worth paying $11 more IMO
And MS doesn't sell XP 64 anymore
I'm pretty sure XP professional x64 edition was never sold retail.
Afaict MS is still selling system builder packs of it right now (though they plan to stop soon) and newegg still list them ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116378 ).
Also note that if you have exiting media/key for it you can downgrade from vista buisness/ultimate to windows XP professional x64 edition.
If you do not like 8.10, you can go on using 8.04 or 7.10 or even earlier. You might be surprised how many people do not upgrade their *buntus since it works for them already.
You can but remember ubuntu LTS releases are only supported on the desktop for 3 years with releases every 2 years.
This means if you want to keep getting security updates you have to upgrade every two years with a one year window in which to make each upgrade.
MS has irregular release cycles but they currently say they will support each version of windows for at least 7 years after it's successor is released. Hell even microsofts service packs have longer support overlaps than ubuntu's LTS releases.
While many people do run operating systems that are no longer getting security updates it is not something I would generally reccomend especially if the user is relying on the OS supplied web browser,mail client, im client etc.
Afaict this does not reffer to a change of price on models that were previously offered with XP but the offering of XP on a range where it wasn't offered at all before.
Remember to get XP you have to pay the extra for a buisness or ultimate license (unless the machine comes with one of those editions as standard) as well as paying any extra the OEM decides to charge for doing the downgrade for you and shipping extra media.
Anyway I decided to take a look at the laptop they linked in the article to see what the real situation was.
They don't offer this machine with undowngraded vista buisness but comparing with other machines it seems the price breaks down into about $100 for the upgrade to vista buisness and about $50 for the downgrade to XP.
Is $50 a bit steep for shipping an extra dvd and loading a different hdd image? probabblly but dell have always charged over the odds for extras on low end machines to make up for the low base prices (for comparision it costs $30 extra to get a different color lid)
P.S. dells site for those machines is misleading. The buttons all say "extra $150" but when you actually go into the customisation pages for the models that ship with home premium as standard the extra cost of XP is only $120.
Personally I think the answer is that all large last mile communications providers should be made to sell wholesale connections to smaller ISPs at a reasonable rates.
It has always struck me as odd that in many areas the telcos are mandated to do this but the cablecos aren't.