A USB A connector has a LARGE lump of plastic that gets in the way if you try and plug it in backwards. The B connector has an asymetric shell. If you are breaking USB connectors by plugging them in backwards you must be using seriously excessive force.
From those figures It seems like the various coal options (other than CO2 storage but I have serious doubts about our ability to store CO2 for the long term) all come out higher than a non plug in hybrid.
Natural gas is better (especially with combined cycle plants) but gas prices like oil prices are on the march skywards so I doubt we will see many more gas plants (especially in the USA) unless utilities are really desperate to build plents quick and I presume those that already exist will be used as little as possible..
It does get arround the immediate problem of rising gasoline prices. Fact is coal is much cheaper per unit energy than oil and afaict the US mines most of it's own coal supply whereas they are having to import ever increasing ammounts of oil. It also moves polloution out of cities and iirc big power plants have much tighter emmisions controls than motor vehircles and those controls are much easier to enforce.
The Magsafe. My co-worker actually managed to damage his HP because someone tripped on the powercord when the laptop was on his desk. magsafe has always stuck me as a bit of a half baked idea, how often is the power cord really the only thing hanging out of your laptop?
P was full of LEDs that kept on telling me "useful" information ("I'm accessing the HD right now! Thought you might want to know!") but in reality they only accomplished to distract me I'm the opposite, I find the lack of a hdd led on the macbook rather annoying. when something is taking quite a bit of time with no decent progress indication I find it very reasuring to have an indication that there is disk activity. Hard drive noise used to fulfill this requirement but modern laptop drives are too quiet.
The blunt fact is reusability did not produce the savings it's proponents said it would (indeed it probablly cost a lot more because of needlessly hauling a shitload of orbiter up on every mission) and it also prevented gradual improvements in most areas and continued manufacturability.
With a disposable craft you can refine the design much more easilly and if stuff becomes unavailible you have to deal with it then and there rather than ending up with a huge pile of stuff you have no ability to replace.
One advantage for the producers is it segements the market. By having both a basic product and a premium product the average price per unit can be raised without driving people out of the market completely.
also according to the figures I have seen if you watch a normal size TV (30 inch or less) at normal viewing distances (accross your living room which afaict in most houses is at least a couple of meters usually more) then you get into a big issue of diminishing returns.
The difference between composite (480i with various artifacts from the composite encoding/decoding) and 480p will be much more noticable than the difference between 480p and 720p which will in turn by much more noticable than the difference between 720p and 1080p.
HD makes sense if you have the money and inclination to dedicate the center of a wall of your living room to a huge HDTV. It also makes sense if you can afford the space and cost of a dedicated home cinima setup. Afaict most people don't.
I could be mistaken about the source requirement. Was it required in ubuntu repositories in the past? From a technical point of view the "source package" can contain anything and the build process can do anything (compile them, simply copy them, binary patch them whatever) with those files to produce the trees of files that become the "binary packages". The dependency scanners which sort out the shared library dependencies work on binaries anyway so they don't care whether the code is open or closed source
From a policy point of view the ubuntu repostries are divided into sections with different rules about what is allowed in.
roughly speaking
main is foss software that is officially supported restricted is non foss software that is officially supported (mainly drivers) universe is foss software that is not officially supported multiverse is non foss software that is not officially supported
AFAIK you cannot use the dependency resolution logic of apt or yum or w/e without also divulging the source code something which is never going to happen with commercial s/w. I dunno what things are like over in redhat land you can build a deb of almost anything. The "source package" does not need to contain source code and the "build process" is handled by scripts that you can tweak to do whatever actions you want.
Supposing the OS market was fractured between windows - osx - linux - pick your os, how do you propose software vendors tackle releasing software ? Do you think its going to be even conceivable to maintain several different code bases and then bugfix and maintain them individually? I would expect sensible vendors to design thier code in such a way that the majority of the code could be used on all platforms and either use a cross platform gui toolkit or abstract out the gui so it could be easilly replaced for different platforms.
Afaict if you change the sata mode in the bios to legacy then XP will usually install without needing to bother with stuff like slipstreaming or the f6 floppy.
You may lose some sata ports and things like sata hotplugging ability this way but for most machines that isn't a problem.
presumablly the way arround that is to have the actual power control circuitry in the room behind the locked door and only a dumb cardreader placed where the thief has access to it.
Also, remember that RHEL != fedora, package-set wise. RHEL ships older versions of a lot of libraries, and doesn't (well, very rarely) re-base libraries within each release, allowing ISVs to have a "known configuration" that won't change out from under them. However the vast majority of software in RHEL is under the GPL or other free software licenses. As a result there is nothing stopping third parties grabbing the rhel sources, rebuilding them and shipping them. There are several doing it to rhel afiact the best known being centos.
I think it was a combination of timing and having a rich guy giving them a lot of money without demanding quick returns (yes he hopes to make money off ubuntu eventually but afaict he isn't in it for a quick buck)
IIRC ubuntu got thier initial userbase by attracting pissed off debian users during debians longest ever release cycle. Especially as during that release cycle major advances in usability were being made upstream (X autoconfiguration for example).
What set ubuntu apart from most other debian branches (at least free ones) afaict was that the founder was willing and able to put millions of dollars into it. That means they have enough resourses to make thier own releases independently of debian and provide security updates for those releases over a reasonable support lifecycle.
but there are still people who require and/or need someone they can phone 24/7 and know that person's job is to help you. There is but getting a support contract from a vendor where it is thier job to help you rather than fob you off with minimum wage drones reading a script is going to cost more than most people are willing to pay.
In my experiance at least for non specialist applications calling vendor support is a last resort with the vast majority of problems being dealt with by friends or coworkers (all but the smallest buisnesses will have an IT helpdesk to deal with user problems).
Doesnt binary compatibility depend on the OS microcomputers of that era didn't have what we would call an OS nowadays. Nor did they have the hardware capabilities to reasonablly run them. There were typically some routines in rom but many applications ignored most or even all of them since accesing the hardware directly was faster.
Exactly, and 40 inch is a pretty big TV IMO. Afaict high twenties to low thirties is more normal at least here in the UK. On that kind of TV viewed from a few meters away you are going to be hard pressed to tell the difference between SD and 720P, let along 1080P.
Lets see, according to wikipedia there are a couple of methods of producing PTFE.
One method is to start with polythene and add do a substitution reaction substituting the hydrogen with flourine. flourine does not afaict come from oil.
as for the polythene that is made by polymerising ethene. I'm pretty sure ethene can be made from ethonol which can be obtained from plants.
oil happens to be a conviniant source of simple hydrocarbons which are one of the main ingrediants in plastics but it is far from the only source.
Yeah, sure a few parts of laptops are standardised or semi-standardised.
But there is this huge group of parts (case, motherboard, graphics*, keyboard, pointing device, monitor) that are seperate and standardised in a desktop but must be bought as a group from one manufacturer in a laptop. It is that group of parts that defines most of the vital characteristics of the laptop.
*Graphics is sometimes integrated on the motherboard in desktops but you can almost always disable the onboard graphics and use a seperate graphics card and almost anyone wanting decent graphics performance will do so.
I've bought an IBM PS/2 [wikipedia.org] keyboard back in 1994, it had never lost any key and still works like if it was still brand new. That may be but laptop keyboards have to be much thinner than desktop keyboards to keep the overall size of the machine down. This unfortunately makes them flimsier.
IMO the biggest reason for buying extended warranties is that they have access to the right parts quickly and easilly.
Certain parts on laptops (e.g. keyboards, screen cables) are manufacturer specific and have a tendancy of failing long before the expensive stuff dies. For a warranty repair this is no problem, they will almost certainly have the right part in stock. For a non warranty repair you will have to trawl the likes of ebay and when you do find a replacement it is likely to be secondhand.
Motherboards in desktops are a similar issue, if you replace the motherboard in a big brand OEM machine with a generic board then the OEM copy of windows will deactivate. You may be able to provide MS to phone activate it but it is likely to be a pain at best.
Afaict all you need to put a transaction through is the card number, other stuff helps if the transaction is challanged but afaict is not needed to put the transaction through.
All the information most online retailers ask for is either printed on the card or availible to anyone who knows or stalks the victim. The pin is only used for face to face transactions (which helps keep it secure but also means it is no help in many situations).
Also the chips aren't particularlly reliable. So at least in the uk if you fuck up the chip most stores will let you put the transaction through as swipe and sign.
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A USB A connector has a LARGE lump of plastic that gets in the way if you try and plug it in backwards. The B connector has an asymetric shell. If you are breaking USB connectors by plugging them in backwards you must be using seriously excessive force.
I would have thought on a PCI card up would be away from the card.
From those figures It seems like the various coal options (other than CO2 storage but I have serious doubts about our ability to store CO2 for the long term) all come out higher than a non plug in hybrid.
Natural gas is better (especially with combined cycle plants) but gas prices like oil prices are on the march skywards so I doubt we will see many more gas plants (especially in the USA) unless utilities are really desperate to build plents quick and I presume those that already exist will be used as little as possible..
It does get arround the immediate problem of rising gasoline prices. Fact is coal is much cheaper per unit energy than oil and afaict the US mines most of it's own coal supply whereas they are having to import ever increasing ammounts of oil. It also moves polloution out of cities and iirc big power plants have much tighter emmisions controls than motor vehircles and those controls are much easier to enforce.
It won't help with global warming though :(
The Magsafe. My co-worker actually managed to damage his HP because someone tripped on the powercord when the laptop was on his desk.
magsafe has always stuck me as a bit of a half baked idea, how often is the power cord really the only thing hanging out of your laptop?
P was full of LEDs that kept on telling me "useful" information ("I'm accessing the HD right now! Thought you might want to know!") but in reality they only accomplished to distract me
I'm the opposite, I find the lack of a hdd led on the macbook rather annoying. when something is taking quite a bit of time with no decent progress indication I find it very reasuring to have an indication that there is disk activity. Hard drive noise used to fulfill this requirement but modern laptop drives are too quiet.
how did the weight and build quality of the two machines compare?
The blunt fact is reusability did not produce the savings it's proponents said it would (indeed it probablly cost a lot more because of needlessly hauling a shitload of orbiter up on every mission) and it also prevented gradual improvements in most areas and continued manufacturability.
With a disposable craft you can refine the design much more easilly and if stuff becomes unavailible you have to deal with it then and there rather than ending up with a huge pile of stuff you have no ability to replace.
One advantage for the producers is it segements the market. By having both a basic product and a premium product the average price per unit can be raised without driving people out of the market completely.
also according to the figures I have seen if you watch a normal size TV (30 inch or less) at normal viewing distances (accross your living room which afaict in most houses is at least a couple of meters usually more) then you get into a big issue of diminishing returns.
The difference between composite (480i with various artifacts from the composite encoding/decoding) and 480p will be much more noticable than the difference between 480p and 720p which will in turn by much more noticable than the difference between 720p and 1080p.
HD makes sense if you have the money and inclination to dedicate the center of a wall of your living room to a huge HDTV. It also makes sense if you can afford the space and cost of a dedicated home cinima setup. Afaict most people don't.
I could be mistaken about the source requirement. Was it required in ubuntu repositories in the past?
From a technical point of view the "source package" can contain anything and the build process can do anything (compile them, simply copy them, binary patch them whatever) with those files to produce the trees of files that become the "binary packages". The dependency scanners which sort out the shared library dependencies work on binaries anyway so they don't care whether the code is open or closed source
From a policy point of view the ubuntu repostries are divided into sections with different rules about what is allowed in.
roughly speaking
main is foss software that is officially supported
restricted is non foss software that is officially supported (mainly drivers)
universe is foss software that is not officially supported
multiverse is non foss software that is not officially supported
AFAIK you cannot use the dependency resolution logic of apt or yum or w/e without also divulging the source code something which is never going to happen with commercial s/w.
I dunno what things are like over in redhat land you can build a deb of almost anything. The "source package" does not need to contain source code and the "build process" is handled by scripts that you can tweak to do whatever actions you want.
Supposing the OS market was fractured between windows - osx - linux - pick your os, how do you propose software vendors tackle releasing software ? Do you think its going to be even conceivable to maintain several different code bases and then bugfix and maintain them individually?
I would expect sensible vendors to design thier code in such a way that the majority of the code could be used on all platforms and either use a cross platform gui toolkit or abstract out the gui so it could be easilly replaced for different platforms.
Afaict if you change the sata mode in the bios to legacy then XP will usually install without needing to bother with stuff like slipstreaming or the f6 floppy.
You may lose some sata ports and things like sata hotplugging ability this way but for most machines that isn't a problem.
For some reason at least in firefox any non-ascii character gets screwed up.
My suspicion is that the ajax based form is submitting UTF-8 but slashcode is expecting ISO-8859-1.
presumablly the way arround that is to have the actual power control circuitry in the room behind the locked door and only a dumb cardreader placed where the thief has access to it.
Also, remember that RHEL != fedora, package-set wise. RHEL ships older versions of a lot of libraries, and doesn't (well, very rarely) re-base libraries within each release, allowing ISVs to have a "known configuration" that won't change out from under them.
However the vast majority of software in RHEL is under the GPL or other free software licenses. As a result there is nothing stopping third parties grabbing the rhel sources, rebuilding them and shipping them. There are several doing it to rhel afiact the best known being centos.
I think it was a combination of timing and having a rich guy giving them a lot of money without demanding quick returns (yes he hopes to make money off ubuntu eventually but afaict he isn't in it for a quick buck)
IIRC ubuntu got thier initial userbase by attracting pissed off debian users during debians longest ever release cycle. Especially as during that release cycle major advances in usability were being made upstream (X autoconfiguration for example).
What set ubuntu apart from most other debian branches (at least free ones) afaict was that the founder was willing and able to put millions of dollars into it. That means they have enough resourses to make thier own releases independently of debian and provide security updates for those releases over a reasonable support lifecycle.
but there are still people who require and/or need someone they can phone 24/7 and know that person's job is to help you.
There is but getting a support contract from a vendor where it is thier job to help you rather than fob you off with minimum wage drones reading a script is going to cost more than most people are willing to pay.
In my experiance at least for non specialist applications calling vendor support is a last resort with the vast majority of problems being dealt with by friends or coworkers (all but the smallest buisnesses will have an IT helpdesk to deal with user problems).
Doesnt binary compatibility depend on the OS
microcomputers of that era didn't have what we would call an OS nowadays. Nor did they have the hardware capabilities to reasonablly run them. There were typically some routines in rom but many applications ignored most or even all of them since accesing the hardware directly was faster.
Exactly, and 40 inch is a pretty big TV IMO. Afaict high twenties to low thirties is more normal at least here in the UK. On that kind of TV viewed from a few meters away you are going to be hard pressed to tell the difference between SD and 720P, let along 1080P.
Lets see, according to wikipedia there are a couple of methods of producing PTFE.
One method is to start with polythene and add do a substitution reaction substituting the hydrogen with flourine. flourine does not afaict come from oil.
as for the polythene that is made by polymerising ethene. I'm pretty sure ethene can be made from ethonol which can be obtained from plants.
oil happens to be a conviniant source of simple hydrocarbons which are one of the main ingrediants in plastics but it is far from the only source.
Yeah, sure a few parts of laptops are standardised or semi-standardised.
But there is this huge group of parts (case, motherboard, graphics*, keyboard, pointing device, monitor) that are seperate and standardised in a desktop but must be bought as a group from one manufacturer in a laptop. It is that group of parts that defines most of the vital characteristics of the laptop.
*Graphics is sometimes integrated on the motherboard in desktops but you can almost always disable the onboard graphics and use a seperate graphics card and almost anyone wanting decent graphics performance will do so.
I know the macbooks have the CPU soldered down, I suspect most other thin light laptops do as well.
a couple of milimeters of socket is significant when the whole machine is only a couple of centimeters thick.
I've bought an IBM PS/2 [wikipedia.org] keyboard back in 1994, it had never lost any key and still works like if it was still brand new.
That may be but laptop keyboards have to be much thinner than desktop keyboards to keep the overall size of the machine down. This unfortunately makes them flimsier.
IMO the biggest reason for buying extended warranties is that they have access to the right parts quickly and easilly.
Certain parts on laptops (e.g. keyboards, screen cables) are manufacturer specific and have a tendancy of failing long before the expensive stuff dies. For a warranty repair this is no problem, they will almost certainly have the right part in stock. For a non warranty repair you will have to trawl the likes of ebay and when you do find a replacement it is likely to be secondhand.
Motherboards in desktops are a similar issue, if you replace the motherboard in a big brand OEM machine with a generic board then the OEM copy of windows will deactivate. You may be able to provide MS to phone activate it but it is likely to be a pain at best.
Afaict all you need to put a transaction through is the card number, other stuff helps if the transaction is challanged but afaict is not needed to put the transaction through.
All the information most online retailers ask for is either printed on the card or availible to anyone who knows or stalks the victim. The pin is only used for face to face transactions (which helps keep it secure but also means it is no help in many situations).
Also the chips aren't particularlly reliable. So at least in the uk if you fuck up the chip most stores will let you put the transaction through as swipe and sign.