LCD Backlighting: Same as above--cycling power on any kind of discharge lamp dramatically reduces its life. And while LED backlighting is VERY efficient, AFAIK there are still major issues with color rendering--if there weren't, we'd be replacing regular lighting with them left and right. Actually while the weired spectral characteristics of LED lighting are a bad thing for general lighting they can be a good thing for backlighting a monitor. For a monitor you want a spectrum with peaks corresponding to the primaries you are trying to mix. The closer the three pixel components are to pure spectral colors the wider the gamut of colors your monitor can display.
When I lived in Japan, for example, Yahoo was my Internet and phone provider I'm pretty sure the service that uses the name Yahoo in japan is not part of Yahoo and is just using the name under license.
Umm with normal RS-232 serial links there is quite a lot of overhead. For every 8 data bits there is a start bit, one or two stop bits and possiblly a parity bit as well. So somewhere between a fith and a third of your baud rate is getting taken up simply by byte framing overhead.
2008 - download of 4000 megabyte game over typical 10 Mbit/s cable =~ 1 hour (math) I have a few issues with this claim.
1: most domestic connections are highly asymetric, so you can only achive that speed if either you have a lot of sources at once or if downloading from a proffesionally hosted server. 2: Throttling/shaping/congestion issues mean that current domestic connections (especially the ones with high headline rates) rarely sustain thier headline rates for very long in my experiance. 3: I would hardly call 10MBps a typical connection. Hell there are many places that still only have dialup.
The port to 64 bit was probablly quite a major change (though nowhere near as major as the changes from 3.x to NT) but that happened sometime before vista (the itanium version of XP came out in 2001 while the x64 version came out in early 2005, vista didn't come out until late 2006/early 2007)
And afaict the vast majority of vista users are not running the 64 bit version. Many people can't run it because of specialist hardware (am I the only one who thinks MS shot themselves in the foot by requiring signed drivers?)
The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade. Unfortunately that is correct:(
If you get vista buisness or ultimate OEM you get downgrade rights but afaict if you get it retail or retail upgrade you don't. So if the machine came with a home edition of vista then afaict your only legit ways to get XP are either buying a full retail copy (which iirc aren't being made any more though there are still existing copies on the market) or going through volume licenseing (or maybe a system builder pack if you are prepared to register as a system builder)
There's one, and only one, reason to do so: they moved the video drivers into user space, so if you're using a video card with flakey Windows drivers (*cough*nVidia*cough*) you won't get a bluescreen when the video drivers crash. Which means you won't lose all your work. Not entirely.
MS say
"At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected."
So it might help it might not, it depends which part of the vendors code is buggy.
The PS2 slimline made a few feature changes though they were mostly negative. It dropped support for firewire hard drive and modem addons and changed ethernet from being an addon to a standard feature. I belive it also added component video support though i'm not sure on that (I know when i tried a component cable in an old fat PS2 it didn't work)
Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor. Bullshit, at least debian supports physical address spaces over 4GB through PAE though you may have to choose the correct kernel manually though (i'm not sure about other linux distros but I would be somewhat surprised if they didn't supply a kernel with PAE enabled to support more than 4GB of addres space).
Of course any one process is limited to 3GB due to the linux virtual memory layout but the system as a whole can use much more.
Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM. Oh yes they can, having a 32 bit virtual address space in both userland apps and the kernel does not mean the physical address space can't be bigger and PC processors have supported a 36 bit physical address space for quite some time through PAE mode. Indeed XP supported this before SP2 if you manually enabled PAE mode.
Unfortunately with XP SP2 they enabled PAE by default but limited the address space to 4GB even in PAE mode. They claim this was due to driver issues (I treat this claim with some skepticism).
So if you want a supported 32 bit version of windows that supports more than 4GB of address space you have to splash out for the server edition.
What is to stop Apple signing artists directly? Nothing provided of course the artists haven't already sold thier rights to someone else. Indeed if you are unsigned and want your music on itunes there are a number of companies that will do so for a relatively small fee.
Essentially what record companies do is promote music in exchange for a LARGE cut of the money. Essentially if a band wants to be successfull they have little choice but to sign up.
iTunes could of course become a record company in it's own right and start signing and promoting artists but that would be a risky move (would the extra profit from directly signed artists outweigh potential losses from pissing off the companies that own most of the music apple currently sells).
Note that the hard limit for all 32-bit operating systems is 4GB. Only if they don't use PAE, with PAE they can go much higher. Unfortunately MS disabled address space over 4GB in all currently supported desktop versions of windows (afaict XP SP1 and earlier do support more than 4GB of address space if PAE is enabled). They claim this was due to issues with buggy drivers, cynics would say it was to push people to server editions.
Of course some chipsets don't support more than 4GB of address space regardless of whether the OS is plain 32 bit, 32 bit with PAE or 64 bit.
Windows manages to lose half a gig somewhere. The loss is caused by the fact that many perhipherals use memory address space so a 4 GB address space limit means you end up with less than 4GB of usable memory. This isn't really a windows issue per-se just a design quirk of the architecture.
Small internal combustion engines are very inefficiant and gasoline is a lot more expensive per unit energy than fuels typically used to generate electricity (coal, nuclear and natural gas). Add theese factors together and you find that even in the US (which has pretty low fuel taxes afaict) grid power is a far cheaper way to run a car than gasoline. In places like the UK the difference is huge due to our huge tax on road fuel.
10. Point 9, above is an excellent simulation of the iTMS going out of business - there would be no internet connection to iTMS, your music would continue to play. Afaict the situation would be that you could still play it on machines already authorised but not on any new machines. You would then be faced with a choice of spending a lot of time and losing quality burning and re-ripping (which only works for music afaict not some of the other stuff itunes sells), using a drm crack (legally dubious and assumes there is a crack availible for the version of itunes you are running at that time) or letting your itunes purchased media die with the last machine authorised to play it.
Also it may not have been dead when taken to the vet, afaict just as people often die in hospital it is quite common for animals to die at the vetinary clinic. Especailly with a cause of death like poisoning which may take some time to actually kill.
All modern operating systems use a page based system to map process address space to physical address space. Dedicated hardware in the CPU means that once an address is accessed once the CPU knows instantly where that page is next time.
By keeping each process in it's own address space relocation fixups on process load can be avoided (there are other soloutions to this such as position independent code but they have downsides of thier own) and program code can be shared among multiple instances of the same program. Also if part of a program binary or shared library is never used that part need never be loaded into memory in the first place.
Once you have a page based system to provide process seperation and allow processes to have thier own private addres space layout then support for swap comes pretty much for free.
Remember to set permissions on swapfiles, letting any user read them is not a good idea as they may end up containing sensitive information (e.g. passwords).
Some people have the time skill and inclination to analyse a dump themselves or the money and inclination to pay someone to do it but I would imagine for desktop and low end server systems that they are by far in the minority.
and windows swap is file based so it should be easy to increase the swap at the same time as turning on the full dump option (which iirc is disabled by default because for most people it is nothing but a big waste of time)
Linux by default uses an optimistic memory allocation policy. This means that by the time memory/swap actually runs out it is too late to return failure on memory allocations. When memory runs out on such a system the "OOM killer" will kill processes to stop the system as a whole going down. A variety of huristics are used to decide which process to kill but generally if one process is pigging out on the memory it will be the one that gets hit with the kill.
BTW linux CAN swap to files (just create a big empty file, set the permissions and then use mkswap/swapon as you would for a partition) so if you need to add extra swap you can do so without repartitioning.
If you can afford it, buy enough RAM that what you need will never exceed what you have. Using swap kills performance and if your swap ever has significant churn, it's probably worth the investment to add more RAM. However having some swap is a good idea, it means that any leaked or otherwise rarely used memory can be swapped out and the ram used for more usefull purposes like disk caching. It also gives you a buffer between using all your ram and processes starting to get killed (this may be a good or a bad thing depending on the type of server)
Some people here are saying that a CD player will attempt to play the data track as audio, and it will be random noise. I have never experienced this from data/audio CDs. Afiact there are two main ways to make a combined data/audio CD.
The first which was generally used by games that used CD audio (games gave up on using CD audio as computer hardware improved and CD space became more valuable) is to put everything in one session with the data track first and the audio tracks following. This had the advantage of compatibility with all CD rom drives but the disadvantage that many audio players would attempt to play the data track.
The second which is generally used for extra content (or occasionally DRM enforcers) on audio CDs is to put the audio in the first session and the data in a second session. This means that audio players don't see the data at all but it means the data can only be read if the drive supports multisession (all modern drives do but some early drives didn't).
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LCD Backlighting: Same as above--cycling power on any kind of discharge lamp dramatically reduces its life. And while LED backlighting is VERY efficient, AFAIK there are still major issues with color rendering--if there weren't, we'd be replacing regular lighting with them left and right.
Actually while the weired spectral characteristics of LED lighting are a bad thing for general lighting they can be a good thing for backlighting a monitor. For a monitor you want a spectrum with peaks corresponding to the primaries you are trying to mix. The closer the three pixel components are to pure spectral colors the wider the gamut of colors your monitor can display.
Afaict they are only required to give the source to the chineese government not to open it to the general public :(
You can't make more gold but you CAN print more "worth X ammount of gold" notes than you have the actual gold to cover.
When I lived in Japan, for example, Yahoo was my Internet and phone provider
I'm pretty sure the service that uses the name Yahoo in japan is not part of Yahoo and is just using the name under license.
Where on his site? I don't see a download section
Umm with normal RS-232 serial links there is quite a lot of overhead. For every 8 data bits there is a start bit, one or two stop bits and possiblly a parity bit as well. So somewhere between a fith and a third of your baud rate is getting taken up simply by byte framing overhead.
2008 - download of 4000 megabyte game over typical 10 Mbit/s cable =~ 1 hour (math)
I have a few issues with this claim.
1: most domestic connections are highly asymetric, so you can only achive that speed if either you have a lot of sources at once or if downloading from a proffesionally hosted server.
2: Throttling/shaping/congestion issues mean that current domestic connections (especially the ones with high headline rates) rarely sustain thier headline rates for very long in my experiance.
3: I would hardly call 10MBps a typical connection. Hell there are many places that still only have dialup.
The port to 64 bit was probablly quite a major change (though nowhere near as major as the changes from 3.x to NT) but that happened sometime before vista (the itanium version of XP came out in 2001 while the x64 version came out in early 2005, vista didn't come out until late 2006/early 2007)
And afaict the vast majority of vista users are not running the 64 bit version. Many people can't run it because of specialist hardware (am I the only one who thinks MS shot themselves in the foot by requiring signed drivers?)
The salesperson told me that I couldn't get XP for the upgrade price either, because to go from Vista to XP wasn't an upgrade. :(
Unfortunately that is correct
If you get vista buisness or ultimate OEM you get downgrade rights but afaict if you get it retail or retail upgrade you don't. So if the machine came with a home edition of vista then afaict your only legit ways to get XP are either buying a full retail copy (which iirc aren't being made any more though there are still existing copies on the market) or going through volume licenseing (or maybe a system builder pack if you are prepared to register as a system builder)
There's one, and only one, reason to do so: they moved the video drivers into user space, so if you're using a video card with flakey Windows drivers (*cough*nVidia*cough*) you won't get a bluescreen when the video drivers crash. Which means you won't lose all your work.
Not entirely.
MS say
"At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected."
So it might help it might not, it depends which part of the vendors code is buggy.
The PS2 slimline made a few feature changes though they were mostly negative. It dropped support for firewire hard drive and modem addons and changed ethernet from being an addon to a standard feature. I belive it also added component video support though i'm not sure on that (I know when i tried a component cable in an old fat PS2 it didn't work)
Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor.
Bullshit, at least debian supports physical address spaces over 4GB through PAE though you may have to choose the correct kernel manually though (i'm not sure about other linux distros but I would be somewhat surprised if they didn't supply a kernel with PAE enabled to support more than 4GB of addres space).
Of course any one process is limited to 3GB due to the linux virtual memory layout but the system as a whole can use much more.
Microsoft can't just turn on a magical switch that lets a 32bit OS see all 4GB of RAM.
Oh yes they can, having a 32 bit virtual address space in both userland apps and the kernel does not mean the physical address space can't be bigger and PC processors have supported a 36 bit physical address space for quite some time through PAE mode. Indeed XP supported this before SP2 if you manually enabled PAE mode.
Unfortunately with XP SP2 they enabled PAE by default but limited the address space to 4GB even in PAE mode. They claim this was due to driver issues (I treat this claim with some skepticism).
So if you want a supported 32 bit version of windows that supports more than 4GB of address space you have to splash out for the server edition.
What is to stop Apple signing artists directly?
Nothing provided of course the artists haven't already sold thier rights to someone else. Indeed if you are unsigned and want your music on itunes there are a number of companies that will do so for a relatively small fee.
Essentially what record companies do is promote music in exchange for a LARGE cut of the money. Essentially if a band wants to be successfull they have little choice but to sign up.
iTunes could of course become a record company in it's own right and start signing and promoting artists but that would be a risky move (would the extra profit from directly signed artists outweigh potential losses from pissing off the companies that own most of the music apple currently sells).
Note that the hard limit for all 32-bit operating systems is 4GB.
Only if they don't use PAE, with PAE they can go much higher. Unfortunately MS disabled address space over 4GB in all currently supported desktop versions of windows (afaict XP SP1 and earlier do support more than 4GB of address space if PAE is enabled). They claim this was due to issues with buggy drivers, cynics would say it was to push people to server editions.
Of course some chipsets don't support more than 4GB of address space regardless of whether the OS is plain 32 bit, 32 bit with PAE or 64 bit.
Windows manages to lose half a gig somewhere.
The loss is caused by the fact that many perhipherals use memory address space so a 4 GB address space limit means you end up with less than 4GB of usable memory. This isn't really a windows issue per-se just a design quirk of the architecture.
Small internal combustion engines are very inefficiant and gasoline is a lot more expensive per unit energy than fuels typically used to generate electricity (coal, nuclear and natural gas). Add theese factors together and you find that even in the US (which has pretty low fuel taxes afaict) grid power is a far cheaper way to run a car than gasoline. In places like the UK the difference is huge due to our huge tax on road fuel.
10. Point 9, above is an excellent simulation of the iTMS going out of business - there would be no internet connection to iTMS, your music would continue to play.
Afaict the situation would be that you could still play it on machines already authorised but not on any new machines. You would then be faced with a choice of spending a lot of time and losing quality burning and re-ripping (which only works for music afaict not some of the other stuff itunes sells), using a drm crack (legally dubious and assumes there is a crack availible for the version of itunes you are running at that time) or letting your itunes purchased media die with the last machine authorised to play it.
Also it may not have been dead when taken to the vet, afaict just as people often die in hospital it is quite common for animals to die at the vetinary clinic. Especailly with a cause of death like poisoning which may take some time to actually kill.
afaict there is no need to bother with a loopback device on modern linux you can just mkswap and swapon the file directly.
All modern operating systems use a page based system to map process address space to physical address space. Dedicated hardware in the CPU means that once an address is accessed once the CPU knows instantly where that page is next time.
By keeping each process in it's own address space relocation fixups on process load can be avoided (there are other soloutions to this such as position independent code but they have downsides of thier own) and program code can be shared among multiple instances of the same program. Also if part of a program binary or shared library is never used that part need never be loaded into memory in the first place.
Once you have a page based system to provide process seperation and allow processes to have thier own private addres space layout then support for swap comes pretty much for free.
Remember to set permissions on swapfiles, letting any user read them is not a good idea as they may end up containing sensitive information (e.g. passwords).
Some people have the time skill and inclination to analyse a dump themselves or the money and inclination to pay someone to do it but I would imagine for desktop and low end server systems that they are by far in the minority.
and windows swap is file based so it should be easy to increase the swap at the same time as turning on the full dump option (which iirc is disabled by default because for most people it is nothing but a big waste of time)
Linux by default uses an optimistic memory allocation policy. This means that by the time memory/swap actually runs out it is too late to return failure on memory allocations. When memory runs out on such a system the "OOM killer" will kill processes to stop the system as a whole going down. A variety of huristics are used to decide which process to kill but generally if one process is pigging out on the memory it will be the one that gets hit with the kill.
BTW linux CAN swap to files (just create a big empty file, set the permissions and then use mkswap/swapon as you would for a partition) so if you need to add extra swap you can do so without repartitioning.
If you can afford it, buy enough RAM that what you need will never exceed what you have. Using swap kills performance and if your swap ever has significant churn, it's probably worth the investment to add more RAM.
However having some swap is a good idea, it means that any leaked or otherwise rarely used memory can be swapped out and the ram used for more usefull purposes like disk caching. It also gives you a buffer between using all your ram and processes starting to get killed (this may be a good or a bad thing depending on the type of server)
Some people here are saying that a CD player will attempt to play the data track as audio, and it will be random noise. I have never experienced this from data/audio CDs.
Afiact there are two main ways to make a combined data/audio CD.
The first which was generally used by games that used CD audio (games gave up on using CD audio as computer hardware improved and CD space became more valuable) is to put everything in one session with the data track first and the audio tracks following. This had the advantage of compatibility with all CD rom drives but the disadvantage that many audio players would attempt to play the data track.
The second which is generally used for extra content (or occasionally DRM enforcers) on audio CDs is to put the audio in the first session and the data in a second session. This means that audio players don't see the data at all but it means the data can only be read if the drive supports multisession (all modern drives do but some early drives didn't).