One thing I have found being in an electrical engineering department at a uni is that almost all electroinc waste (unwanted components, bits of wire etc) much of it with tin-lead solder on ends up in the ordinary littler bins. I think the same applies to most electronics hobbyists.
I think at least in the UK swipe and sign vs chip and pin is orthogonal to credit vs debit.
Not so long ago all card transactions (regardless of whether they were credit or debit) in stores in the UK were swipe and sign and nowadays virtually all transactions are chip and pin (stores can still process cards using the old swipe and sign method but they don't want to because it's riskier for them).
Whenever I have something reasonably complex in mind to do in Windows (let us say... some kind of manipulation of PDF files), Do you know any good free tools for removing the owner password from PDF files and allowing you to use them in any way you want?
I am aware you can sometimes do it by converting to other formats and back but in my experiance that at best gives you a low quality copy and at worst a completely fucked document.
If you are buying a desktop from a whitebox vendor it is certainly possible to get a machine with no OS. Hell until recently some would sell you machines with pirate windows preinstalled (and some probablly still will)
However there are a couple of problems with using whitebox vendors in my experiance.
Firstly cheap whiteboxes are made cheap by buliding them out of whatever happens to be cheapest that week and a thrown together. This means that at least in my experiance cheap whiteboxes are far less reliable than cheap machines from big brands like dell.
Secondly laptops don't tend to be made by the local whitebox vendors. There are some importers who will import them without an OS but they are the exception not the rule and afaict they tend to be at the lower end of the market.
Besides, last time I checked, there's no such thing as a removable magnetic media which can store 4.7GB of data, or worse the 36GB that BD-R stores. There is, it's called the IOMEGA REV. But it is stupidly expensive. Optical media is not particularlly reliable but it's so bloody cheap that you can get arround that by keeping multiple copies.
afaict what you want to do with scratches is fill them with something that has a similar refractive index to the scratched material. I guess the wax probablly has a much closer refractive index to the plastic than air does.
Unfortunately in currently supported 32 bit versions of desktop editions of windows (XP SP2, XP SP3 and vista) MS has limited the address space to 4GB (which gives 3.somethingGB of ram since ram is not the only consumer of address space) even when PAE is enabled.
They claim they did this due to driver compatibility issues, whether that is the truth or whether it was deliberate crippling to push people to server editions we will probablly never know.
still there is a hell of a lot of specialist and internal software that is windows only. It only takes one windows only app to keep someone on windows.
What matters as much if not more than the cost of ownership is the benefit from ownership! Unfortunately that is even harder to calculate than the "TCO"
There are plenty of sites that work fine in IE but not in firefox. Mostly intranet sites but a few internet sites as well. The annoying thing is most of them could probablly be fixed relatively easilly but the authors just don't care.
Hell plenty of places can't even upgrade to IE7 because of such sites.
Oh yes, Microsoft eee with a product that generates virtually no profit and has better competitors. A single one, Opera, even lives on selling its alternative. Nah they live on selling browsers for non-pc platforms (either direct to users or to the developers of the platform). A few years back they decided the revenue they got from thier PC version was worth less to them than the web developer mindshare they would get from giving it away.
That they don't open source IE is plain ideological stupidity. ROFL, there are lots of IE specific intranet websites and it is microsofts interest to make it as difficult as possible to use them on anything other than windows.
The real problem is that my machine can only accept so much RAM. And that fact that I don't think i've seen any laptops recently with more than two slots and 4GB sodimms are f*cking expensive (at least they seem to be here in the uk, US prices seem to have gone down recently so maybe there is hope that they will become reasonablly priced here too in the not too distant future) and difficult to obtain.
And the fact that 32 bit desktop editions of current versions of windows simply do not support more than 3.something (the something varying depending on the other hardware in the machine) gigabytes of ram.
and many hardware and software vendors either do not support 64 bit windows or do so only partially (for example you can't use altera paralell port dongles under 64 bit windows, nor can you swap them for USB dongles anymore. So your only option is to move to mac locked or licenseserver which can be a PITA). and afaict you can't run the netware client on 64 bit windows either.
The thing is if sony lets linux apps access the GPU they will have essentially let people sell games for the PS3 without giving sony a cut.
Since afaict sony takes a loss on the PS3 itself and tries to make up for that with thier cuts of game revenue I don't see them allowing linux based competition to liensed games anytime soon.
Then their teen goes on the Internet and downloads a patch, without the parent's knowledge or consent, that unlocks some stuff which in effect turns the 'M' rated game into an 'AO' But lack of AO content in the original game data files is hardly a barrier to someone creating a patch to trun the game into an AO rated one. Hell there are some games that will even auto-download third party content when you connect to servers for online play (and yes I have seen game maps with porn running in them while doing this)
The whole case is a waste of time and money and I hope that the case is thrown out and the lawyers who brought it get left with nothing for thier efforts.
Complaining about it now is the height of hypocrisy, as everyone except the plaintiffs is fully aware. How do you know they aren't aware of it? Wouldn't an equally rational explation be that they are simply psycopaths who care only about the legal fees they thought they would get as part of the settlement.
Standard lead free solder does indeed have a higher melting point than standard tin-lead solder (though there are lead based solders with higher melting points availible, indeed solders for high temperature kit are one of the exceptions from ROHS).
But that is rather irrelevent. Assuming the kind of slow heat up that a fault tends to give you are going to run into other distructive issues long before you reach the solders melting point.
The bigger problem with overheating is that stuff warps (since overheating is generally not even). That puts stress on the joints. Lead free solder is much more brittle and so tends to crack much sooner.
As a forieigner I would imagine the safest thing to do would be to VPN back to your employer. It wouldn't look suspicious because loads of people do that to access rescources on thier companies networks and it would keep all your traffic secure.
Afaict sun is going through a difficult transition. Thier traditional buisness was selling unix boxes but those have been increasingly pushed out of the market by cheaper wintel, lintel and mactel systems.
From the presentations they gave during the opensourcing of java it looks like they are hoping that by opensourcing thier products they can keep them relavent and therefore give themselves more chances to sell support and licenses to use the software in ways not allowed by the OSS licenses. Whether this will work for them remains to be seen.
But that doesn't mean that they will open everything. If a product is leading it's market (I would expect a company like sun to have at least the odd project that does) then opensourcing it would be stupid. Equally if a product has few users it may not be worth the work of opensourcing it. Opensourcing a long time propietry product is not easy because there will very often be code that they don't have the right to opensource. That means that either code must be rewritten or upstream vendors must be renegotiated with.
Even physical "critical parts" can be produced locally rapidly by emailing a file and using a 3D computer controlled machining device. Sure if the part is nothing more than a shaped lump of homogenous material.
I think you would have great trouble getting a say a multilayer PCB fabricated and populated in less than a day though (and that is assuming you can source the parts locally).
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One thing I have found being in an electrical engineering department at a uni is that almost all electroinc waste (unwanted components, bits of wire etc) much of it with tin-lead solder on ends up in the ordinary littler bins. I think the same applies to most electronics hobbyists.
I think at least in the UK swipe and sign vs chip and pin is orthogonal to credit vs debit.
Not so long ago all card transactions (regardless of whether they were credit or debit) in stores in the UK were swipe and sign and nowadays virtually all transactions are chip and pin (stores can still process cards using the old swipe and sign method but they don't want to because it's riskier for them).
will the software work with a USB floppy drive?
Whenever I have something reasonably complex in mind to do in Windows (let us say... some kind of manipulation of PDF files),
Do you know any good free tools for removing the owner password from PDF files and allowing you to use them in any way you want?
I am aware you can sometimes do it by converting to other formats and back but in my experiance that at best gives you a low quality copy and at worst a completely fucked document.
IIRC in the USA most SUVs are legally light trucks.
I'm also in the uk.
If you are buying a desktop from a whitebox vendor it is certainly possible to get a machine with no OS. Hell until recently some would sell you machines with pirate windows preinstalled (and some probablly still will)
However there are a couple of problems with using whitebox vendors in my experiance.
Firstly cheap whiteboxes are made cheap by buliding them out of whatever happens to be cheapest that week and a thrown together. This means that at least in my experiance cheap whiteboxes are far less reliable than cheap machines from big brands like dell.
Secondly laptops don't tend to be made by the local whitebox vendors. There are some importers who will import them without an OS but they are the exception not the rule and afaict they tend to be at the lower end of the market.
Besides, last time I checked, there's no such thing as a removable magnetic media which can store 4.7GB of data, or worse the 36GB that BD-R stores.
There is, it's called the IOMEGA REV. But it is stupidly expensive. Optical media is not particularlly reliable but it's so bloody cheap that you can get arround that by keeping multiple copies.
afaict what you want to do with scratches is fill them with something that has a similar refractive index to the scratched material. I guess the wax probablly has a much closer refractive index to the plastic than air does.
Unfortunately in currently supported 32 bit versions of desktop editions of windows (XP SP2, XP SP3 and vista) MS has limited the address space to 4GB (which gives 3.somethingGB of ram since ram is not the only consumer of address space) even when PAE is enabled.
They claim they did this due to driver compatibility issues, whether that is the truth or whether it was deliberate crippling to push people to server editions we will probablly never know.
still there is a hell of a lot of specialist and internal software that is windows only. It only takes one windows only app to keep someone on windows.
TCO is still only looking at one side.
What matters as much if not more than the cost of ownership is the benefit from ownership! Unfortunately that is even harder to calculate than the "TCO"
There are plenty of sites that work fine in IE but not in firefox. Mostly intranet sites but a few internet sites as well. The annoying thing is most of them could probablly be fixed relatively easilly but the authors just don't care.
Hell plenty of places can't even upgrade to IE7 because of such sites.
Oh yes, Microsoft eee with a product that generates virtually no profit and has better competitors. A single one, Opera, even lives on selling its alternative.
Nah they live on selling browsers for non-pc platforms (either direct to users or to the developers of the platform). A few years back they decided the revenue they got from thier PC version was worth less to them than the web developer mindshare they would get from giving it away.
That they don't open source IE is plain ideological stupidity.
ROFL, there are lots of IE specific intranet websites and it is microsofts interest to make it as difficult as possible to use them on anything other than windows.
From what I heared at least initially asus supplied instructions for installing windows and a CD full of windows drivers with the linux based EEE.
I dunno if this has changed since they started selling them with windows.
Will browsers even make a ssl connection without any certificates at all?
The real problem is that my machine can only accept so much RAM.
And that fact that I don't think i've seen any laptops recently with more than two slots and 4GB sodimms are f*cking expensive (at least they seem to be here in the uk, US prices seem to have gone down recently so maybe there is hope that they will become reasonablly priced here too in the not too distant future) and difficult to obtain.
And the fact that 32 bit desktop editions of current versions of windows simply do not support more than 3.something (the something varying depending on the other hardware in the machine) gigabytes of ram.
and many hardware and software vendors either do not support 64 bit windows or do so only partially (for example you can't use altera paralell port dongles under 64 bit windows, nor can you swap them for USB dongles anymore. So your only option is to move to mac locked or licenseserver which can be a PITA). and afaict you can't run the netware client on 64 bit windows either.
The thing is if sony lets linux apps access the GPU they will have essentially let people sell games for the PS3 without giving sony a cut.
Since afaict sony takes a loss on the PS3 itself and tries to make up for that with thier cuts of game revenue I don't see them allowing linux based competition to liensed games anytime soon.
It's authenticamd FFS
Then their teen goes on the Internet and downloads a patch, without the parent's knowledge or consent, that unlocks some stuff which in effect turns the 'M' rated game into an 'AO'
But lack of AO content in the original game data files is hardly a barrier to someone creating a patch to trun the game into an AO rated one. Hell there are some games that will even auto-download third party content when you connect to servers for online play (and yes I have seen game maps with porn running in them while doing this)
The whole case is a waste of time and money and I hope that the case is thrown out and the lawyers who brought it get left with nothing for thier efforts.
Complaining about it now is the height of hypocrisy, as everyone except the plaintiffs is fully aware.
How do you know they aren't aware of it? Wouldn't an equally rational explation be that they are simply psycopaths who care only about the legal fees they thought they would get as part of the settlement.
Standard lead free solder does indeed have a higher melting point than standard tin-lead solder (though there are lead based solders with higher melting points availible, indeed solders for high temperature kit are one of the exceptions from ROHS).
But that is rather irrelevent. Assuming the kind of slow heat up that a fault tends to give you are going to run into other distructive issues long before you reach the solders melting point.
The bigger problem with overheating is that stuff warps (since overheating is generally not even). That puts stress on the joints. Lead free solder is much more brittle and so tends to crack much sooner.
Yeah, a few critial areas get exemptions, everyone else gets lower reliability products (= replaced and most likely landfilled sooner)
As a forieigner I would imagine the safest thing to do would be to VPN back to your employer. It wouldn't look suspicious because loads of people do that to access rescources on thier companies networks and it would keep all your traffic secure.
Afaict sun is going through a difficult transition. Thier traditional buisness was selling unix boxes but those have been increasingly pushed out of the market by cheaper wintel, lintel and mactel systems.
From the presentations they gave during the opensourcing of java it looks like they are hoping that by opensourcing thier products they can keep them relavent and therefore give themselves more chances to sell support and licenses to use the software in ways not allowed by the OSS licenses. Whether this will work for them remains to be seen.
But that doesn't mean that they will open everything. If a product is leading it's market (I would expect a company like sun to have at least the odd project that does) then opensourcing it would be stupid. Equally if a product has few users it may not be worth the work of opensourcing it. Opensourcing a long time propietry product is not easy because there will very often be code that they don't have the right to opensource. That means that either code must be rewritten or upstream vendors must be renegotiated with.
Even physical "critical parts" can be produced locally rapidly by emailing a file and using a 3D computer controlled machining device.
Sure if the part is nothing more than a shaped lump of homogenous material.
I think you would have great trouble getting a say a multilayer PCB fabricated and populated in less than a day though (and that is assuming you can source the parts locally).