However, for a small company with 100 workstations, implementing reasonable power savings can trim $7,500 a year off utility bills. That's nothing to sneeze at On the other hand if those savings make each employee waste an extra 5 minuites a day you are wasting a complete employees worth of time and more than wiping out the savings from rebooting. If your employees are paid an average of 20K that is more than twice your saving just gone down the drain.
Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies a substantial sum. In fact, Energy Star estimates organizations can save from $25 to $75 per PC per year with PC power management Lets assume each PC has a user who is paid at least $25000 per year. We can clearly see the savings on the cost of that employee and thier PC setup caused by this are negligable.
he Forrester report does acknowledge that end-users have very little patience for downtime. However, it suggests that "potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management." Complaints or not the company is paying for any user downtime.
Which is why almost everywhere that offers flac also offers mp3 downloads as well for those who can't be bothered to do the encoding themselves in thier preffered format/bitrate.
converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss. No more that converting from the original uncompressed music to the format you want.
Which is kind of the point, the best format/bitrate combination for a portable player will vary with the player you own. So best to have a lossless copy as the source so you can get to the format/bitrate you want for your current portable player with a mimumum of loss.
Given Apple's commanding market share for portable music players, I'm surprised there hasn't been more music released in the Apple Lossless format. I guess they think lossless will mainly appeal to geeks who will be using software other than itunes and/or will have the relavent tools to covert between lossless formats.
His conceptual album 'Ghost' was released 100% digitally & DRM free with the first (out of 4) CD freely distributed. And the whole album was released under a creative commons license. So those of us who want the whole album for free can download it legally in flac form from TPB.
Isn't it obvious? mysql (the company) sells licenses to use mysql (the software) without having to follow the GPL. Afaict this is thier main revenue stream. To be able to keep doing this they need to make all contributors sign an agreement giving them the right to do this with the contributed code.
For instance, some free webmail service could rate limit new accounts to only X emails/hour The trouble is that kind of measure is largely useless if you don't limit the rate at which abusers can get new accounts. If a new account can only send 10 emails per hour and the abuser wants to send 10000 emails per hour they just need to get 1000 accounts.
So to be effective such measures need to be used in addition to measures against bots creating accounts, not instead of them.
Captchas are user unfriendly and relatively ineffective. For smaller operations they are very effective provided you have the sense to roll your own. For larger operations traditional captchas don't work so well but recaptcha which uses challanges sourced from real old books and seems to be on to a winner.
A more effective route is to require a new user to submit their postal address and a phone number. Then the service mails a post card containing a verification code to the postal address and/or calls the phone number. Google does this for AdSense publishers. More effective certainly but relatively expensive and even more user unfriendly than a captcha. Would you want to give out your address or phone number just to say post on a forum? Anyway it's not as though getting phone numbers is difficult, I know a VOIP provider where signup is free and while they ask for an address they don't do anything to verify it.
ultimately no system is perfect, it is just a matter of taking steps that provide usefull benifit (reducing the impact that abusers have) at an acceptable cost (both in terms of direct cost to the operator and inconvinance and perceived risk for users)
I am not one for draconian DRM, but the reality is that people pirate way too much. The other fact is that draconian DRM doesn't stop people pirating single player PC games and may even encourage it.
If your game is good and has strong multiplayer then you can control piracy through the online multiplayer component (think starcraft, I know plenty of people whose first copy of starcraft was a burnt copy but later bought legit copies to play online) but if your game is shit or mostly singleplayer than you have little hope stopping pirates on the PC platform.
Go in a store and look at the prices of the consoles. I CBA going to a physicial store to check but I imagine a major online store will be pretty representive (especially the UK i've picked since it is the online arm of a major high street game retailer)
game.co.uk (uk) xbox 360 (arcade with SEGA Superstars Tennis and PGR 4 bundled): £128.49 wii (with sonic unleashed and 1GB SD card bundled) : £198.49 PS3 (80GB Console with LittleBigPlanet + FIFA 09): £293.61
newegg.com (us) xbox 360 (arcade with nothing bundled): $199.99 wii (with wii play, quantum of solace, smackdown vs raw and super mario galaxy): $426.95 (they refuse to sell the wii seperately despite quoting a price of $249 for it) PS3 (with nothing bundled): $399.99
Looks to me like on both those retailers (which I believe are major retailers on thier corresponding side of the pond) the xbox 360 is cheapest, the wii in the middle and the PS3 is most expensive.
Of course that is probablly more of a sign of MS being desperate than anything to do with the actual cost of the consoles.
This is a far better system, if you don't need a pagefile. There was a time when all OSs worked this way, and some still do. Programs are "relocated" at load, using a relocation table to correct any hard-coded addresses. If everything must be relocated on load that means you cant share anything between processes. That is pretty wastefull of ram and (perhaps more importantly) cache.
Also there is the fragmentation issue, if an app wants a big block of ram under a paging based system it can get it because what looks like a contiguous block to the app doesn't have to be a contiguous block in physical memory. Under a physical address based system if there is no contiguous block of memory big enough for your request then your request will fail even if the total memory free is plenty.
(a) you can't have a pagefault, which just simplifies kernel code all around, Afaict if you want memory protection (and IMO memory protection is a VERY good thing) you would still need to use the page tables and deal with pagefaults.
Lets say every key consisted of a clear part describing what it was a key for and it's serial number. and then a digital signature. If the key is encoded in base32 and we use a sha1 hash for our signature that would give us a key arround 40 characters (assuming say an 8 bit product code and a 32 bit serial number)
Without the private key for the signature (which need never be placed on an internet connected machine) the only way to make a keygen would be to crack the public/private key encryption used which seems unlikely to me.
I imagine the issue would be not wanting shoes that compressed significantly as you put your foot down and then had cables running up your trowsers to connect to your phone.
For those occasions when you need a few minuites of extra talktime urgently a handcrank is probablly easier (and yes you CAN buy them)
I'm pretty sure that when you have an active call going on a modern phone the radio gear is the most significant power drain especailly if you are a long way from a base station (with radio power required is roughly proportional to the square of distance).
all that happens after peering is broken is that the routers are reconfigured to send traffic over their transit links instead of the peer links. In most cases you would be right but the sprint/cogent depeering was between a tier 1 and a wanabee tier 1 both of which refuse to buy transit from anyone.
So if they depeer thier customers lose connectivity to each other. It then becomes a case of who blinks first and makes concessions to get a new peering agreement.
Firstly there was no install limit or anything like that, the only thing it enforced was that each CD key could only be used for one login at a time.
Secondly it only affected play on battle.net which would go away anyway if blizzard took the servers offline. Activation extends this point of failure to single player and lan play.
Firstly not everyone has the latest and greatest PC, why go to the trouble of convincing your boss to approve an upgrade when you can just tell windows to compress files that haven't been used for a while (it'll take a while so best to set it going friday evening or so)
Secondly while hard drive space for desktops is cheap things don't look so rosy for laptops for three reasons: 1: laptop drives have a much higher cost per gig especially as you get to the high end of the range. For example dabs.com want £39.26 for a 500GB desktop drive but £98.88 for a 500GB laptop drive. 2: any upgrade is a replacement further increasing the effective cost per gig of any upgrade (particually if you coun't the time to copy data across) 3: noone makes a laptop drive over 500GB (and even those have only appeared on the market recently) this is tiny compared to a desktop where you can easilly have multiple 1.5TB drives
I think it is more accurate to say they have different hardware. IIRC the EEE 900 with 20GB of storage and the EEE 1000 with a SSD are only availible with linux.
I assume no one buys an eeePC to run Photoshop or AutoCAD. No but I do know someone who bought one to run office 2K and older PC games among other stuff.
And I know a number of people who at least considered buying one to run mplab.
BTW the windows EEEPC does come with a web browser and a copy of microsoft works so the basics are covered out of the box.
Personally I think MS will put out a windows 7 that is similar to vista, perhaps marginally faster in some tests. Standard hardware will probablly also have improved significantly between vistas release and the release of windows 7.
As the end of support for XP looms (IIRC MS intends to support XP until april 2014 or 2 years after the release of windows 7 whichever comes later) I suspect most companies will (perhaps reluctantly) upgrade to windows 7.
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All of the EEEs can run XP.
However, for a small company with 100 workstations, implementing reasonable power savings can trim $7,500 a year off utility bills. That's nothing to sneeze at
On the other hand if those savings make each employee waste an extra 5 minuites a day you are wasting a complete employees worth of time and more than wiping out the savings from rebooting. If your employees are paid an average of 20K that is more than twice your saving just gone down the drain.
Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies a substantial sum. In fact, Energy Star estimates organizations can save from $25 to $75 per PC per year with PC power management
Lets assume each PC has a user who is paid at least $25000 per year. We can clearly see the savings on the cost of that employee and thier PC setup caused by this are negligable.
he Forrester report does acknowledge that end-users have very little patience for downtime. However, it suggests that "potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management."
Complaints or not the company is paying for any user downtime.
since the albums are both released under a creative commons license that allows redistrbution here are some torrent links
Ghosts: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4061815/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_Ghosts_I-IV_%5B2008_FLAC_Lossless%5D
The slip: http://dl.nin.com/data/dl/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_The_Slip_-_Flac.torrent
Which is why almost everywhere that offers flac also offers mp3 downloads as well for those who can't be bothered to do the encoding themselves in thier preffered format/bitrate.
converting FLAC format files to another format could result in substantial sound quality loss.
No more that converting from the original uncompressed music to the format you want.
Which is kind of the point, the best format/bitrate combination for a portable player will vary with the player you own. So best to have a lossless copy as the source so you can get to the format/bitrate you want for your current portable player with a mimumum of loss.
Given Apple's commanding market share for portable music players, I'm surprised there hasn't been more music released in the Apple Lossless format.
I guess they think lossless will mainly appeal to geeks who will be using software other than itunes and/or will have the relavent tools to covert between lossless formats.
His conceptual album 'Ghost' was released 100% digitally & DRM free with the first (out of 4) CD freely distributed.
And the whole album was released under a creative commons license. So those of us who want the whole album for free can download it legally in flac form from TPB.
Isn't it obvious? mysql (the company) sells licenses to use mysql (the software) without having to follow the GPL. Afaict this is thier main revenue stream. To be able to keep doing this they need to make all contributors sign an agreement giving them the right to do this with the contributed code.
It's supposed to be supported by the Ubuntu team for 5 years
5 on the server, only 3 on the desktop and I bet they count firefox as a desktop app.
For instance, some free webmail service could rate limit new accounts to only X emails/hour
The trouble is that kind of measure is largely useless if you don't limit the rate at which abusers can get new accounts. If a new account can only send 10 emails per hour and the abuser wants to send 10000 emails per hour they just need to get 1000 accounts.
So to be effective such measures need to be used in addition to measures against bots creating accounts, not instead of them.
Captchas are user unfriendly and relatively ineffective.
For smaller operations they are very effective provided you have the sense to roll your own. For larger operations traditional captchas don't work so well but recaptcha which uses challanges sourced from real old books and seems to be on to a winner.
A more effective route is to require a new user to submit their postal address and a phone number. Then the service mails a post card containing a verification code to the postal address and/or calls the phone number. Google does this for AdSense publishers.
More effective certainly but relatively expensive and even more user unfriendly than a captcha. Would you want to give out your address or phone number just to say post on a forum? Anyway it's not as though getting phone numbers is difficult, I know a VOIP provider where signup is free and while they ask for an address they don't do anything to verify it.
ultimately no system is perfect, it is just a matter of taking steps that provide usefull benifit (reducing the impact that abusers have) at an acceptable cost (both in terms of direct cost to the operator and inconvinance and perceived risk for users)
I am not one for draconian DRM, but the reality is that people pirate way too much.
The other fact is that draconian DRM doesn't stop people pirating single player PC games and may even encourage it.
If your game is good and has strong multiplayer then you can control piracy through the online multiplayer component (think starcraft, I know plenty of people whose first copy of starcraft was a burnt copy but later bought legit copies to play online) but if your game is shit or mostly singleplayer than you have little hope stopping pirates on the PC platform.
Go in a store and look at the prices of the consoles.
I CBA going to a physicial store to check but I imagine a major online store will be pretty representive (especially the UK i've picked since it is the online arm of a major high street game retailer)
game.co.uk (uk)
xbox 360 (arcade with SEGA Superstars Tennis and PGR 4 bundled): £128.49
wii (with sonic unleashed and 1GB SD card bundled) : £198.49
PS3 (80GB Console with LittleBigPlanet + FIFA 09): £293.61
newegg.com (us)
xbox 360 (arcade with nothing bundled): $199.99
wii (with wii play, quantum of solace, smackdown vs raw and super mario galaxy): $426.95 (they refuse to sell the wii seperately despite quoting a price of $249 for it)
PS3 (with nothing bundled): $399.99
Looks to me like on both those retailers (which I believe are major retailers on thier corresponding side of the pond) the xbox 360 is cheapest, the wii in the middle and the PS3 is most expensive.
Of course that is probablly more of a sign of MS being desperate than anything to do with the actual cost of the consoles.
This is a far better system, if you don't need a pagefile. There was a time when all OSs worked this way, and some still do. Programs are "relocated" at load, using a relocation table to correct any hard-coded addresses.
If everything must be relocated on load that means you cant share anything between processes. That is pretty wastefull of ram and (perhaps more importantly) cache.
Also there is the fragmentation issue, if an app wants a big block of ram under a paging based system it can get it because what looks like a contiguous block to the app doesn't have to be a contiguous block in physical memory. Under a physical address based system if there is no contiguous block of memory big enough for your request then your request will fail even if the total memory free is plenty.
(a) you can't have a pagefault, which just simplifies kernel code all around,
Afaict if you want memory protection (and IMO memory protection is a VERY good thing) you would still need to use the page tables and deal with pagefaults.
Lets say every key consisted of a clear part describing what it was a key for and it's serial number. and then a digital signature. If the key is encoded in base32 and we use a sha1 hash for our signature that would give us a key arround 40 characters (assuming say an 8 bit product code and a 32 bit serial number)
Without the private key for the signature (which need never be placed on an internet connected machine) the only way to make a keygen would be to crack the public/private key encryption used which seems unlikely to me.
I would expect it to take MUCH longer if the key algorithm is correctly designed.
I imagine the issue would be not wanting shoes that compressed significantly as you put your foot down and then had cables running up your trowsers to connect to your phone.
For those occasions when you need a few minuites of extra talktime urgently a handcrank is probablly easier (and yes you CAN buy them)
I'm pretty sure that when you have an active call going on a modern phone the radio gear is the most significant power drain especailly if you are a long way from a base station (with radio power required is roughly proportional to the square of distance).
Saving criminals lives has always seemed to me like a strange thing for the police to be doing.
all that happens after peering is broken is that the routers are reconfigured to send traffic over their transit links instead of the peer links.
In most cases you would be right but the sprint/cogent depeering was between a tier 1 and a wanabee tier 1 both of which refuse to buy transit from anyone.
So if they depeer thier customers lose connectivity to each other. It then becomes a case of who blinks first and makes concessions to get a new peering agreement.
I wouldn't call what starcraft did activation.
Firstly there was no install limit or anything like that, the only thing it enforced was that each CD key could only be used for one login at a time.
Secondly it only affected play on battle.net which would go away anyway if blizzard took the servers offline. Activation extends this point of failure to single player and lan play.
Firstly not everyone has the latest and greatest PC, why go to the trouble of convincing your boss to approve an upgrade when you can just tell windows to compress files that haven't been used for a while (it'll take a while so best to set it going friday evening or so)
Secondly while hard drive space for desktops is cheap things don't look so rosy for laptops for three reasons:
1: laptop drives have a much higher cost per gig especially as you get to the high end of the range. For example dabs.com want £39.26 for a 500GB desktop drive but £98.88 for a 500GB laptop drive.
2: any upgrade is a replacement further increasing the effective cost per gig of any upgrade (particually if you coun't the time to copy data across)
3: noone makes a laptop drive over 500GB (and even those have only appeared on the market recently) this is tiny compared to a desktop where you can easilly have multiple 1.5TB drives
I think it is more accurate to say they have different hardware. IIRC the EEE 900 with 20GB of storage and the EEE 1000 with a SSD are only availible with linux.
I assume no one buys an eeePC to run Photoshop or AutoCAD.
No but I do know someone who bought one to run office 2K and older PC games among other stuff.
And I know a number of people who at least considered buying one to run mplab.
BTW the windows EEEPC does come with a web browser and a copy of microsoft works so the basics are covered out of the box.
Personally I think MS will put out a windows 7 that is similar to vista, perhaps marginally faster in some tests. Standard hardware will probablly also have improved significantly between vistas release and the release of windows 7.
As the end of support for XP looms (IIRC MS intends to support XP until april 2014 or 2 years after the release of windows 7 whichever comes later) I suspect most companies will (perhaps reluctantly) upgrade to windows 7.