I've personally found wired optical mice to be a huge improvement over ball mice, ball mice at least in my experiance gunked up quite frequently (though not as often as old laptop trackballs, they were horrible for gunking up).
Wireless mice on the other hand i've found to be nothing but a pain in the arse.
The only thing we've lost is a FireWire 400 port, so against USB 2.0 we haven't lost speed. Afaict while USB2 has a higher headline speed than firewire 400 it performs worse in practice both in terms of bulk bandwidth and perhaps more importantly in terms of real-time performance.
Firewire 400 and firewire 800 are indeed compatible with the right cable.
The new style macbook pro has an 800 port but not a 400 port (so you need a new cable). The new style macbook doesn't have a firewire port at all (so you're SOL)
The old plastic case macbook didn't need special tools to get the hard drive out (it did need a small torx driver to demount it from it's caddy but you don't have to do that to connect to it and recover data). From the disasembly pictures i've seen the new metal case macbook is also easy to get the hard drive out of.
And then it says for more details I should look at the terms of service. When I go there and search for uptime my browser finds no results.
For a SLA to have teeth it needs to have significant penalties for failing to provide the agreed level of service. Of course you are very unlikely get that kind of SLA at the price google are charging.
Hell, there are already a lot of ISP's that NAT their customers, so they have to give out fewer "real" IP's That behaviour has always struck me as a little strange. It would seem to make more sense to me to get as many IP addresses as possible now so they can be reallocated to more lucrative customers later when the new allocations run out.
NAT requires more CPU power than just firewalling. It also makes it very hard to trace the source machine when your ISP sends you a complaint. Finally some protocols just plain don't get on with NAT.
Also there are mergers. Generally when companies merge they want to allow cross connections between thier networks as they merge services. If the two networks have IP conflicts with each other that can be a big problem.
Everybody will start switching once sites they need to access go v6-only. But the site operators are by and large trying to get as many visitors as possible. So they are unlikely to go V6 only for a VERY long time.
Websites will stay hosted on IPV4 even if it means forcing end users behind ISP level NAT to recover thier IPs.
If I was an ISP right now my aim would be to get as many IPV4 IPs as I possiblly could and have contingency plans in place to force end users behind nat and recover thier IPs when they did run out.
The number of organisations with more than the 16 million devices that can be addressed by 10.* is probablly pretty small and most large organisations preffer to keep the number of machines exposed to the open internet to a minimum anyway.
Most public internet services are likely to be availible on IPV4 addresses for a long time, there are a lot of domestic users who can be forced behind nat if the ISP needs the addresses for higher paying histing customers.
Apples approach to display connectors seems to be to change them at the drop of a hat. Worse thier adaptors to DVI are afaict digital only so a lot of people will need two apple propietry adaptors for one laptop.
It seems to me that the key flaw is that the prevailing wage rule is very hard to enforce.
If there is a real shortage then the prevailing wage should be high. It would follow that IMO the sensible thing to do would be to set a minimum salery for such imigrants. Also don't tie them down, the system should be designed so they can move between employers easilly.
They sold some processors that got wrong (iirc they were only lower accuracy than expected not completely wrong) results in certain corner cases of floating point divide. Eventually intel agreed to replace the processors for anyone who wanted them to though few took them up on the offer. Those who wanted to replace them coupld easilly do so.
Theese graphics chips are a totally different kettle of fish, they are failing completely and when they do afaict they are often soldered to laptop motherboards. That means the user is at the mercy of thier laptop vendor regarding getting a replacement.
There are USB 3G adaptors? Yep and at least here in the uk they are what all the major networks that offer 3G are pushing for users who want to use the internet on thier laptops while on the move.
Personally if it's not fully integrated I think I would preffer a phone that allows connection using bluetooth to a dongle sticking out of my laptop.
Afaict one of the the main (if not the main) functions of the display port on laptops is connect to projectors in confrence rooms and similar locations. Afaict theese systems are still nearly always VGA (I suspect this is partly because moving DVI long distances can get expensive and partly because most laptops have VGA ports not DVI ports).
Add that to the fact that DVI is a lot bulkier than VGA and it is understandable why laptop manufacturers stick with VGA.
Also a lot of bottom end flat panels still seem to be VGA only whereas monitors with DVI but not VGA seem to be pretty rare.
Gigabit ethernet still isn't on most computers you buy from anywhere else. I just took a quick look at the first model from each of dell UKs ranges
laptops
inspiron: no gigabit studio: gigabit xps: no gigabit alienware: gigabit xps gaming: no gigabit vostro: no gigabit lattiude: gigabit precision mobile: doesn't seem to say but i'd be very surprised if it didn't have gigabit
and the desktops inspiron: no gigabit studio: no gigabit xps: gigabit alienware: dual gigabit! xps gaming: gigabit vostro: no gigabit optiplex: gigabit precision: gigabit
so it seems there is little ryme or reason to which dells have it but I certainly wouldn't say that most don't. This actually surprised me because other than my brothers EEE every new PC i've seen recently had gigabit onboard.
I checked my macbooks warranty and I didn't see anything in there about upgrades voiding it though obviously the upgrade components won't be covered.
They even included instructions for changing the ram in the user manual!
note: beware that the hard drive replacement instructions on apples site are incomplete, they tell you how to get the caddy out of the mac, what they don't tell you is that you need a small torx driver to get thr drive off the caddy.
Yet they aren't doing the same this time round with the 32 bit to 64 bit transition. Thier current 64 bit OS requires signed 64 bit drivers which basically means if you need to use any unusual hardware (say my mplab ICD2) you are stuck on 32 bit for the forseeable future. They also made the default install location for 32 bit apps on 64 bit windows one that contains brackets breaking some apps.
If you ran a win16 application then the entire system dropped down to cooperative multitasking and your 32bit apps were just along for the klunky ride. Afiact the 32 bit apps were preemptively multitasked with each other. A 32 bit app hanging would not bring the system down regardless of if 16 bit apps were doing.
The problem was a lot of the system relied on the 16 bit side so if a 16 bit app hung the whole gui hung:(
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I've personally found wired optical mice to be a huge improvement over ball mice, ball mice at least in my experiance gunked up quite frequently (though not as often as old laptop trackballs, they were horrible for gunking up).
Wireless mice on the other hand i've found to be nothing but a pain in the arse.
Macs never had RS-232.
I guess that depends whether you consider the xserve to be a mac......
They had RS-422.
Though according to wikipedia it was a RS-232 compatible variant of it whatever that means
BTW RS-232 and RS-422 are pretty easy to convert between if needed. Indeed RS-422 is often used to extend RS-232 links.
The only thing we've lost is a FireWire 400 port, so against USB 2.0 we haven't lost speed.
Afaict while USB2 has a higher headline speed than firewire 400 it performs worse in practice both in terms of bulk bandwidth and perhaps more importantly in terms of real-time performance.
Firewire 400 and firewire 800 are indeed compatible with the right cable.
The new style macbook pro has an 800 port but not a 400 port (so you need a new cable). The new style macbook doesn't have a firewire port at all (so you're SOL)
The old plastic case macbook didn't need special tools to get the hard drive out (it did need a small torx driver to demount it from it's caddy but you don't have to do that to connect to it and recover data). From the disasembly pictures i've seen the new metal case macbook is also easy to get the hard drive out of.
And then it says for more details I should look at the terms of service. When I go there and search for uptime my browser finds no results.
For a SLA to have teeth it needs to have significant penalties for failing to provide the agreed level of service. Of course you are very unlikely get that kind of SLA at the price google are charging.
It looks like apple aren't using plain displayport though but A variant of thier own called "mini displayport"
According to TFA this is also affecting paying customers.
A few people may get bullied into V6 by thier customers or supplies but I don't think it will be a significant affect on the net as a whole.
Hell, there are already a lot of ISP's that NAT their customers, so they have to give out fewer "real" IP's
That behaviour has always struck me as a little strange. It would seem to make more sense to me to get as many IP addresses as possible now so they can be reallocated to more lucrative customers later when the new allocations run out.
NAT requires more CPU power than just firewalling. It also makes it very hard to trace the source machine when your ISP sends you a complaint. Finally some protocols just plain don't get on with NAT.
Also there are mergers. Generally when companies merge they want to allow cross connections between thier networks as they merge services. If the two networks have IP conflicts with each other that can be a big problem.
Everybody will start switching once sites they need to access go v6-only.
But the site operators are by and large trying to get as many visitors as possible. So they are unlikely to go V6 only for a VERY long time.
Websites will stay hosted on IPV4 even if it means forcing end users behind ISP level NAT to recover thier IPs.
If I was an ISP right now my aim would be to get as many IPV4 IPs as I possiblly could and have contingency plans in place to force end users behind nat and recover thier IPs when they did run out.
The number of organisations with more than the 16 million devices that can be addressed by 10.* is probablly pretty small and most large organisations preffer to keep the number of machines exposed to the open internet to a minimum anyway.
Most public internet services are likely to be availible on IPV4 addresses for a long time, there are a lot of domestic users who can be forced behind nat if the ISP needs the addresses for higher paying histing customers.
It doesn't look to me like the keyboard has changed significantly. It still seems to be plastic keys sticking up through a grid in the case.
Apples approach to display connectors seems to be to change them at the drop of a hat. Worse thier adaptors to DVI are afaict digital only so a lot of people will need two apple propietry adaptors for one laptop.
It seems to me that the key flaw is that the prevailing wage rule is very hard to enforce.
If there is a real shortage then the prevailing wage should be high. It would follow that IMO the sensible thing to do would be to set a minimum salery for such imigrants. Also don't tie them down, the system should be designed so they can move between employers easilly.
They sold some processors that got wrong (iirc they were only lower accuracy than expected not completely wrong) results in certain corner cases of floating point divide. Eventually intel agreed to replace the processors for anyone who wanted them to though few took them up on the offer. Those who wanted to replace them coupld easilly do so.
Theese graphics chips are a totally different kettle of fish, they are failing completely and when they do afaict they are often soldered to laptop motherboards. That means the user is at the mercy of thier laptop vendor regarding getting a replacement.
There are USB 3G adaptors?
Yep and at least here in the uk they are what all the major networks that offer 3G are pushing for users who want to use the internet on thier laptops while on the move.
Personally if it's not fully integrated I think I would preffer a phone that allows connection using bluetooth to a dongle sticking out of my laptop.
Afaict one of the the main (if not the main) functions of the display port on laptops is connect to projectors in confrence rooms and similar locations. Afaict theese systems are still nearly always VGA (I suspect this is partly because moving DVI long distances can get expensive and partly because most laptops have VGA ports not DVI ports).
Add that to the fact that DVI is a lot bulkier than VGA and it is understandable why laptop manufacturers stick with VGA.
Also a lot of bottom end flat panels still seem to be VGA only whereas monitors with DVI but not VGA seem to be pretty rare.
Gigabit ethernet still isn't on most computers you buy from anywhere else.
I just took a quick look at the first model from each of dell UKs ranges
laptops
inspiron: no gigabit
studio: gigabit
xps: no gigabit
alienware: gigabit
xps gaming: no gigabit
vostro: no gigabit
lattiude: gigabit
precision mobile: doesn't seem to say but i'd be very surprised if it didn't have gigabit
and the desktops
inspiron: no gigabit
studio: no gigabit
xps: gigabit
alienware: dual gigabit!
xps gaming: gigabit
vostro: no gigabit
optiplex: gigabit
precision: gigabit
so it seems there is little ryme or reason to which dells have it but I certainly wouldn't say that most don't. This actually surprised me because other than my brothers EEE every new PC i've seen recently had gigabit onboard.
I checked my macbooks warranty and I didn't see anything in there about upgrades voiding it though obviously the upgrade components won't be covered.
They even included instructions for changing the ram in the user manual!
note: beware that the hard drive replacement instructions on apples site are incomplete, they tell you how to get the caddy out of the mac, what they don't tell you is that you need a small torx driver to get thr drive off the caddy.
I would think it's more likely that they just added 1 to vistas internal version number (which is 6.0)
Yet they aren't doing the same this time round with the 32 bit to 64 bit transition. Thier current 64 bit OS requires signed 64 bit drivers which basically means if you need to use any unusual hardware (say my mplab ICD2) you are stuck on 32 bit for the forseeable future. They also made the default install location for 32 bit apps on 64 bit windows one that contains brackets breaking some apps.
If you ran a win16 application then the entire system dropped down to cooperative multitasking and your 32bit apps were just along for the klunky ride.
Afiact the 32 bit apps were preemptively multitasked with each other. A 32 bit app hanging would not bring the system down regardless of if 16 bit apps were doing.
The problem was a lot of the system relied on the 16 bit side so if a 16 bit app hung the whole gui hung :(
Do you have a source that it is both 1: reporting version 6.1 now and 2: will still be reporting 6.1 by the time it is released.