craptops I don't see going SSD for a long time. ordinary decent laptops I see offering SSD as an option but I don't see it being popular in the near future.
Ultraportables on the other hand are already going ssd in many cases. Tiny hard drives tend to have terrible performance and a 2.5 inch 9.5mm high drive is pretty big for an ultraportable (though some ultraportables do use them).
They can certainly update the updater if it is set to check for updates but not install them until prompted. They could probablly use that mechanism to force updates to other stuff too.
I don't think they can force updates if automatic updates are completely turned off.
But while they probablly could force down windows genunine advantage by a number of mechanisms (use the system for updating the updater, hide it in with another update) I doubt they will. MS has a tightrope to walk, on the one hand they want to drive people from pirate MS software to legit MS software. On the other hand they don't want to drive people to non-MS software.
Besides MS has known for ages that users can refuse WGA, it even makes descisions about what updates to give them if they do refuse it. If they wanted to play hardball I would expect them to have done so by now.
one big issue for many schools/colleges/universities is that they are locked in to MS subscription deals the price of which is not based on the number of machines with the software installed but on some other factor (I'm not sure exactly what).
What this means is they have to:
1:keep paying thier MS subscription or 2: spend a large ammount of money both on buying MS licenses for machines that can't be moved away from MS software and doing a load of auditing to make sure that machines that are supposed to be moved off MS software really are moved off it.
not surprisingly administrators go with the first option
and of course once the place has a site license people are going to use the MS software everywhere because it is free to them.
Failing that, you can still buy PCI to ISA bridges Where from?
The only ones I have seen have required you to write your own drivers. Trouble is with PC architecture all read/writes to unknown locations get sent to the motherboard ISA or LPC bridge which makes adding an extra PCI-ISA bridge somewhat problematic.
Everything is moving to fiber optic Is it really? there have been fiber versions of ethernet arround for a long time but I have never seen them used for connections to end machines. Even 10 gigabit ethernet has copper versions.
and hubs which can be used to interconnect 10base2 and modern twisted pair ethernet are still floating arround in pretty large numbers afaict (and a quick google reveals some sites still claiming to sell them new).
I guess the question is how close will the threat of frequent blackouts have to come before the politicans decide that keeping the lights on is more important to thier continues presense in office than keeping the nimbys happy.
Actually, I don't know of anything that you could use at the scale needed. Huge banks of very big SCRs
HVDC links are real both as back to back converter systems for linking unsynchronised grids and as systems with a transmission line in the middle.
Afaict there are two main advantages to HVDC.
1: the only current is the actual power flow, with AC the inductance and capacitance while not themselves causing loss do cause current flow that doesn't carry usefull power. Resistance of the cable means that more current implies more loss. This is especially significant with underground or undersea cables 2: With AC the peak/rms ratio is about 1.4, with DC the peak/rms ratio is 1. That means you can get a higher RMS voltage on a given size of insulators. A higher RMS voltage means less current is needed to deliver the required power.
The downsides are that the converter stations are expensive and there are some stability issues (normal generators are very good for stability.
There is no reason a coal plant can't be designed to vary it's output (after all practically everything ran on coal at one stage including stuff like locomotives and ships which required hugely varying output) and afaict most of them can to some extent. The reason coal plants are used for base load is that they are expensive to build but cheap to run (nuclear is even more extreme in that direction, it is also somewhat harder to vary the output).
The reason gas plants are used for supplemental power is that they have a low capital cost but a high running cost.
But your general point is right, renewables other than dam based hydro (which comes with it's own built in storage) will need some kind of storage infrastructure to support them if they are ever going to make more than a token contribution to the electricity supply.
Indeed and not just intel and amd either but cyrix and IDT as well. Then intel moved to slot 1 which iirc involved some propietry stuff that stopped anyone else using it. The competitors stayed on socket 7 for a while then AMD moved to slot A and the others either died out or moved to processors soldered directly to the motherboard.
The problem is to put the ammount of text needed to convey the information on this disk in a form that can be read by the unadided human eye and is more durable thank ink on paper takes up a lot of space and costs a lot of money to produce.
My understanding is that this disk is not so much intended to help the people in the dark age as to help the people who come after the dark age when tech starts to recover.
For example, any electronic device contains lead Not anymore, the eurocrats saw to it that most electronic devices no longer contian lead (it's easier to design a product to satisfy the eurocrats and sell if everywhere than to use different processes for products aimed at different markets)
The difference as I see it is what the language makes easy for you to do and what the language makes difficult for you to do. If the easy operations are also the ones that perform well you will get code that performs well.
Java encourages you to make lots of short lived objects. Since java has no concept of reference parameters or structures returning more than one primitive from a function requires you to use a object on the heap (or use static fields but that opens up it's own can of worms most notablly thread safety). Using a persistant object is one soloution but it also complicates the code a lot so generally people make throwaway objects.
In C and C++ on the other hand you can just return that data through pointers or references to either individual objects on the stack or pointers to objects on the stack whereas creating short lived heap objects is a pain.
or we just missed ME, at the time I bought whitebox machines and our local cheap whitebox vendor kept shipping 98 for a long time. Or we went upmarket and got 2K.
Remember back then there were a lot of releases in a relatively small timeframe. If you bought a new PC every few years it was quite easy to just end up missing a release.
MS also needs to convince people to buy new PCs with vista. With the economic downturn and the bad rumours (some well founded, others exaggerated) about vista flying arround I suspect many people will just choose not to buy at all for a while.
They don't make a 13.3" Macbook Pro. I want 4GB of RAM in a laptop, not the 2.5GB limit of the regular Macbook. Current models of the regular macbook do support 4GB of ram. They even offer it as an option when you order.
In that light, I'm okay with X years or life + Y years, so long as X and Y do not change. Imo life + Y years is likely to encourage murder unless Y is exceedingly high (which it is at the moment).
A simple fixed term seems like by far the fairest system.
What nationality were theese girls? (or at least what nationality did they appear to be)
I'm studying electronic systems engineering at manchester in the uk and there are plenty of girls studying in the department but very very few of them appear to be european. Most of them seem to be either chineese, indian, muslim or african. I presume they go back to thier home countries when they finish studying (many of them are probablly under contracts with thier governemtn obliging them to go back home for a set number of years after graduation)
The legal system does indeed work on innocent until proven guilty but in most cases I don't belive private citizens are under any obligation to do so (and even where they are it is very hard to prove why someone was not considered).
IIRC in the USA it is even possible to be cleared of a crime but sucessfully sued for damages resulting from that crime because of the lower standard of evidence in civil court.
The guy whose PSU caught fire was carrying a spare. What does that tell you about his previous experience with PSU's? It tells me he was probablly buying PSUs that were both undersized and cheap chineese shit.
However, their functional lifetime may be significantly lower than projected, either due to natural disasters or the onset of Armageddon. or just the fact that it is new tech that can't have had it's lifetime properly characterised yet.
accelerated aging tests will give a rough approximation but IMO they are no substitute for real data from the field.
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Afaict with SSDs the performance is pretty much constant no matter what the read order. With HDDs sequential reads are much faster than random reads.
So SSDs lose in continuous throughput tests.
craptops I don't see going SSD for a long time.
ordinary decent laptops I see offering SSD as an option but I don't see it being popular in the near future.
Ultraportables on the other hand are already going ssd in many cases. Tiny hard drives tend to have terrible performance and a 2.5 inch 9.5mm high drive is pretty big for an ultraportable (though some ultraportables do use them).
They can certainly update the updater if it is set to check for updates but not install them until prompted. They could probablly use that mechanism to force updates to other stuff too.
I don't think they can force updates if automatic updates are completely turned off.
But while they probablly could force down windows genunine advantage by a number of mechanisms (use the system for updating the updater, hide it in with another update) I doubt they will. MS has a tightrope to walk, on the one hand they want to drive people from pirate MS software to legit MS software. On the other hand they don't want to drive people to non-MS software.
Besides MS has known for ages that users can refuse WGA, it even makes descisions about what updates to give them if they do refuse it. If they wanted to play hardball I would expect them to have done so by now.
one big issue for many schools/colleges/universities is that they are locked in to MS subscription deals the price of which is not based on the number of machines with the software installed but on some other factor (I'm not sure exactly what).
What this means is they have to:
1:keep paying thier MS subscription or
2: spend a large ammount of money both on buying MS licenses for machines that can't be moved away from MS software and doing a load of auditing to make sure that machines that are supposed to be moved off MS software really are moved off it.
not surprisingly administrators go with the first option
and of course once the place has a site license people are going to use the MS software everywhere because it is free to them.
Failing that, you can still buy PCI to ISA bridges
Where from?
The only ones I have seen have required you to write your own drivers. Trouble is with PC architecture all read/writes to unknown locations get sent to the motherboard ISA or LPC bridge which makes adding an extra PCI-ISA bridge somewhat problematic.
Everything is moving to fiber optic
Is it really? there have been fiber versions of ethernet arround for a long time but I have never seen them used for connections to end machines. Even 10 gigabit ethernet has copper versions.
and hubs which can be used to interconnect 10base2 and modern twisted pair ethernet are still floating arround in pretty large numbers afaict (and a quick google reveals some sites still claiming to sell them new).
the trouble with magnetic tape is that afaict no one standard has become dominant and remained dominant for a long time.
Compare that to CD and DVD which have been arround a long time and extremely common such that they are unlikely to go away any time soon.
I guess the question is how close will the threat of frequent blackouts have to come before the politicans decide that keeping the lights on is more important to thier continues presense in office than keeping the nimbys happy.
Actually, I don't know of anything that you could use at the scale needed.
Huge banks of very big SCRs
HVDC links are real both as back to back converter systems for linking unsynchronised grids and as systems with a transmission line in the middle.
Afaict there are two main advantages to HVDC.
1: the only current is the actual power flow, with AC the inductance and capacitance while not themselves causing loss do cause current flow that doesn't carry usefull power. Resistance of the cable means that more current implies more loss. This is especially significant with underground or undersea cables
2: With AC the peak/rms ratio is about 1.4, with DC the peak/rms ratio is 1. That means you can get a higher RMS voltage on a given size of insulators. A higher RMS voltage means less current is needed to deliver the required power.
The downsides are that the converter stations are expensive and there are some stability issues (normal generators are very good for stability.
There is no reason a coal plant can't be designed to vary it's output (after all practically everything ran on coal at one stage including stuff like locomotives and ships which required hugely varying output) and afaict most of them can to some extent. The reason coal plants are used for base load is that they are expensive to build but cheap to run (nuclear is even more extreme in that direction, it is also somewhat harder to vary the output).
The reason gas plants are used for supplemental power is that they have a low capital cost but a high running cost.
But your general point is right, renewables other than dam based hydro (which comes with it's own built in storage) will need some kind of storage infrastructure to support them if they are ever going to make more than a token contribution to the electricity supply.
what about via's epia boards?
I doubt it, that would put a 10ft by 10ft room (which isn't exactly a big room) at 10 million dollars.
Indeed and not just intel and amd either but cyrix and IDT as well. Then intel moved to slot 1 which iirc involved some propietry stuff that stopped anyone else using it. The competitors stayed on socket 7 for a while then AMD moved to slot A and the others either died out or moved to processors soldered directly to the motherboard.
The problem is to put the ammount of text needed to convey the information on this disk in a form that can be read by the unadided human eye and is more durable thank ink on paper takes up a lot of space and costs a lot of money to produce.
My understanding is that this disk is not so much intended to help the people in the dark age as to help the people who come after the dark age when tech starts to recover.
For example, any electronic device contains lead
Not anymore, the eurocrats saw to it that most electronic devices no longer contian lead (it's easier to design a product to satisfy the eurocrats and sell if everywhere than to use different processes for products aimed at different markets)
also the version in the cache google uses to show users seems to quite often be out of sync with the data in the search database.
The difference as I see it is what the language makes easy for you to do and what the language makes difficult for you to do. If the easy operations are also the ones that perform well you will get code that performs well.
Java encourages you to make lots of short lived objects. Since java has no concept of reference parameters or structures returning more than one primitive from a function requires you to use a object on the heap (or use static fields but that opens up it's own can of worms most notablly thread safety). Using a persistant object is one soloution but it also complicates the code a lot so generally people make throwaway objects.
In C and C++ on the other hand you can just return that data through pointers or references to either individual objects on the stack or pointers to objects on the stack whereas creating short lived heap objects is a pain.
or we just missed ME, at the time I bought whitebox machines and our local cheap whitebox vendor kept shipping 98 for a long time. Or we went upmarket and got 2K.
Remember back then there were a lot of releases in a relatively small timeframe. If you bought a new PC every few years it was quite easy to just end up missing a release.
MS also needs to convince people to buy new PCs with vista. With the economic downturn and the bad rumours (some well founded, others exaggerated) about vista flying arround I suspect many people will just choose not to buy at all for a while.
They don't make a 13.3" Macbook Pro. I want 4GB of RAM in a laptop, not the 2.5GB limit of the regular Macbook.
Current models of the regular macbook do support 4GB of ram. They even offer it as an option when you order.
In that light, I'm okay with X years or life + Y years, so long as X and Y do not change.
Imo life + Y years is likely to encourage murder unless Y is exceedingly high (which it is at the moment).
A simple fixed term seems like by far the fairest system.
What nationality were theese girls? (or at least what nationality did they appear to be)
I'm studying electronic systems engineering at manchester in the uk and there are plenty of girls studying in the department but very very few of them appear to be european. Most of them seem to be either chineese, indian, muslim or african. I presume they go back to thier home countries when they finish studying (many of them are probablly under contracts with thier governemtn obliging them to go back home for a set number of years after graduation)
The legal system does indeed work on innocent until proven guilty but in most cases I don't belive private citizens are under any obligation to do so (and even where they are it is very hard to prove why someone was not considered).
IIRC in the USA it is even possible to be cleared of a crime but sucessfully sued for damages resulting from that crime because of the lower standard of evidence in civil court.
The guy whose PSU caught fire was carrying a spare. What does that tell you about his previous experience with PSU's?
It tells me he was probablly buying PSUs that were both undersized and cheap chineese shit.
However, their functional lifetime may be significantly lower than projected, either due to natural disasters or the onset of Armageddon.
or just the fact that it is new tech that can't have had it's lifetime properly characterised yet.
accelerated aging tests will give a rough approximation but IMO they are no substitute for real data from the field.