Tin whiskers I've never seen. You wouldn't without a microscope. You would most likely just see an unexplained failure or if you actually started debugging the electronics maybe an unexplained short that went away after a bit of cleaning.
IANAL but afaict when you send something through the post or courior to europe the importer is considered to be the recipiant. So you the sender won't get in trouble for sending it but the recipiant might depending on the conditions of the import.
ROHS covers manufacturing and importing on a commercial basis so individuals should be ok to buy from outside the EU. I think there are also exceptions for research use etc. but if a company ordered a load of your product they could get in trouble for doing so especially if they started reselling it.
assembled with a ATX power supply scrounged years ago in a tower case that originally housed an 80286/12 about 1985 or so I call bullshit, any power supply of that age would not be an ATX unit. IIRC ATX was introduced at arround the same time as the pentium 2.
The solder itself is still easilly availible and I would imagine it would remain so. The rohs exempt high reliability market is almost certainly more than enough to support it.
I'm saying that modern 3D game development has much higher (sufficiantly high that few developers are likely to be able to pay them out of thier own pocket) upfront costs than music production. Someone has to take the risk of paying that upfront cost in the hope that the game can be sold profitablly. With many games it is the publisher who does this.
Law enforcement only has to get lucky once to put a criminal in prison. The criminal has to get lucky every single time to stay free. Sooner or later a serial criminal is almost certain to screw something up either through complacency or just plain bad luck.
No but you do need an ongoing subscription to play online and afaict modding is not generally possible.
Also last I checked while some consoles support keyboards and mice few console games can use them. Great if you like gamepads, not so great if you don't.
IMO games (at least the immersive 3D variety) have far more in common with movies than with music.
An immersive 3D game typically contains a huge ammount of art, models and levels. As the graphics capabilities of our machines (both PCs and consoles) increase so does the ammount of work required to produce graphics that meet peoples expectations. Look at the length of the credits for a modern 3D game sometime.
This is very different from music which generally only requires a few people and a few grands worth of kit (sometimes not even that).
Interestingly, many of these places also have the highest crime rates. Coincidence? I don't think so. I would imagine the worst places for gun crime would be places where guns are outlawed or heavilly restricted but are easilly availible to those willing to break the law.
What if anything is there to stop someone buying a gun in arizona and taking it to one of the big anti-gun cities? not much I would imagine.
Single images are the very reason Vista is attractive to businesses because it's a hardware independent image based installation. XP required custom boot drivers for each platform. There were some tricks required to make XP images that could be deployed to a wide variety of hardware but it is certainly possible.
It's not even that slow in our environment so I'm wondering why business users would be so afraid of it. There are a few reasons
A lot of companies use either in-house applications or specialist applications for thier specialism. In house and specialist applications are very often pretty shitty. People tollerate them because there isn't much choice and the alternatives are often equally badly written. Sometimes specialist hardware with custom drivers get involved too. Such apps are very likely to have issues with a new windows release.
A lot of buisnesses like to keep a single image. With the recent economic downturn many places are trying to put off luxuries like new hardware and windows upgrade licenses for as long as possible.
It is a fact that vista is slower than XP on the same hardware, and most people don't see any compelling advantage to it. Why upgrade to something that is slower unless it offers some killer advantage.
Finally it was traditional to skip every other windows release in many companies. XP's long life meant that almost everyone upgraded to it which may well mean that a large proportion of big companies will skip vista.
On debian the reccomended procedure for going from one release to the next. On the plus side because they explain what you are doing the likelyhood of getting into an unrecoverable problem.
On ubuntu if everything works it's great but I hear a lot of reports of failed upgrades (this may be just down to ubunutus popularity though).
Also you are generally strongly pushed into (if not forced into) upgrading everything at once. For some people that may be diffcult.
The machine comes with a vista buisness or ultimate license but XP pro is installed. Media or recovery partitions (i'm not sure which dell is using nowadays) are provided for both versions. MS has explicitly allowed the big-brand OEMs (the ones who use bios locked versions rather than only activated versions) to do this.
It's kind of a sneaky arrangement. MS gets to book the machine as a vista sale. MS gets a buisness or ultimate license fee rather than a home license fee. But the customer still gets XP.
When I checked dells UK small buisness site recently it seemed they had already switched over to the downgrade rights based system. It was a free option on some models I looked at and a slight extra charge (£10) on others.
Prior to this switch the XP pro and vista buisness options were the same price.
Dell seems to have stopped offering any home editions of windows on their buisness machines with vista buisness now being the default option. I don't know if this has been accompanied by a rise in the base prices.
Vista buisness OEM comes with downgrade rights to XP pro and you can use your volume license media (surely you must have used volume licenses at some point and therefore been provided with volume license media) to excercise them so it shouldn't be a problem for you to license new machines. Several of the big OEMs still sell machines that they support with XP so that shouldn't be an issue either.
Security update support for XP will run out eventually but that isn't an imminent problem (still over half a decade left and MS may well extend it).
So you are still on the upgrade treadmill. Its not as forced as windows If you care about security updates and support for newer applications software the linux upgrade treadmill is far worse than the windows one.
There are two sides to "support", problem support and security update support.
Problem support can be provided by third parties, especially with an open source system like linux.
Security update support basically means someone has to monitor all the software in the distribution for secrity issues and then work out how to backport those fixes. While it would certainly be possible to do this for an indvidual customer I suspect few could afford it.
Of course not everyone cares about security updates. If the machines exposure can be kept to a minimum you may be able to live without them but for many users they are particularlly important.
iirc XP home is crippled in a number of ways. The ones that spring to mind are. * it can't join a domain * the file permissions and file sharing permissions sytems are crippled * I don't think it can be a remote desktop server (but i'm pretty sure it can be a remote desktop client)
I don't see any of theese as showstoppers for an ultraportable.
BTW you will still be able to get XP pro though vista buisness or ultimate downgrade rights and the big brand OEMs are now allowed to supply downgrade media and even ship systems pre-downgraded.
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Tin whiskers I've never seen.
You wouldn't without a microscope. You would most likely just see an unexplained failure or if you actually started debugging the electronics maybe an unexplained short that went away after a bit of cleaning.
IANAL but afaict when you send something through the post or courior to europe the importer is considered to be the recipiant. So you the sender won't get in trouble for sending it but the recipiant might depending on the conditions of the import.
ROHS covers manufacturing and importing on a commercial basis so individuals should be ok to buy from outside the EU. I think there are also exceptions for research use etc. but if a company ordered a load of your product they could get in trouble for doing so especially if they started reselling it.
It takes *very little* current to short a FET gate
Your sentace makes no sense.
Yes a gate that is floating will take very little current to bring it to a different level. But gates should not just be left floating.
Still it could cause a problem, especially with newer kit that doesn't have much current drive capability.
assembled with a ATX power supply scrounged years ago in a tower case that originally housed an 80286/12 about 1985 or so
I call bullshit, any power supply of that age would not be an ATX unit. IIRC ATX was introduced at arround the same time as the pentium 2.
from what I can gather even if the parts have a lead free finish lead solder is still a better choice for reliability.
The solder itself is still easilly availible and I would imagine it would remain so. The rohs exempt high reliability market is almost certainly more than enough to support it.
I'm saying that modern 3D game development has much higher (sufficiantly high that few developers are likely to be able to pay them out of thier own pocket) upfront costs than music production. Someone has to take the risk of paying that upfront cost in the hope that the game can be sold profitablly. With many games it is the publisher who does this.
indeed.
Law enforcement only has to get lucky once to put a criminal in prison. The criminal has to get lucky every single time to stay free. Sooner or later a serial criminal is almost certain to screw something up either through complacency or just plain bad luck.
No but you do need an ongoing subscription to play online and afaict modding is not generally possible.
Also last I checked while some consoles support keyboards and mice few console games can use them. Great if you like gamepads, not so great if you don't.
I'm not convinced.
IMO games (at least the immersive 3D variety) have far more in common with movies than with music.
An immersive 3D game typically contains a huge ammount of art, models and levels. As the graphics capabilities of our machines (both PCs and consoles) increase so does the ammount of work required to produce graphics that meet peoples expectations. Look at the length of the credits for a modern 3D game sometime.
This is very different from music which generally only requires a few people and a few grands worth of kit (sometimes not even that).
got any reccomendations of such tools?
microsofts minimum requirements for VS2005 say it should run on an EEE 900 series. How usable it will be is a different matter of course.
Interestingly, many of these places also have the highest crime rates. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I would imagine the worst places for gun crime would be places where guns are outlawed or heavilly restricted but are easilly availible to those willing to break the law.
What if anything is there to stop someone buying a gun in arizona and taking it to one of the big anti-gun cities? not much I would imagine.
Single images are the very reason Vista is attractive to businesses because it's a hardware independent image based installation. XP required custom boot drivers for each platform.
There were some tricks required to make XP images that could be deployed to a wide variety of hardware but it is certainly possible.
where did you get this information? XP home supports dual core just fine (from SP1 forward IIRC).
It's not even that slow in our environment so I'm wondering why business users would be so afraid of it.
There are a few reasons
A lot of companies use either in-house applications or specialist applications for thier specialism. In house and specialist applications are very often pretty shitty. People tollerate them because there isn't much choice and the alternatives are often equally badly written. Sometimes specialist hardware with custom drivers get involved too. Such apps are very likely to have issues with a new windows release.
A lot of buisnesses like to keep a single image. With the recent economic downturn many places are trying to put off luxuries like new hardware and windows upgrade licenses for as long as possible.
It is a fact that vista is slower than XP on the same hardware, and most people don't see any compelling advantage to it. Why upgrade to something that is slower unless it offers some killer advantage.
Finally it was traditional to skip every other windows release in many companies. XP's long life meant that almost everyone upgraded to it which may well mean that a large proportion of big companies will skip vista.
The cost of Vista itself bars it from UMPC market.
I thought MS charged about the same for XP home and vista home basic.
On debian the reccomended procedure for going from one release to the next. On the plus side because they explain what you are doing the likelyhood of getting into an unrecoverable problem.
On ubuntu if everything works it's great but I hear a lot of reports of failed upgrades (this may be just down to ubunutus popularity though).
Also you are generally strongly pushed into (if not forced into) upgrading everything at once. For some people that may be diffcult.
The machine comes with a vista buisness or ultimate license but XP pro is installed. Media or recovery partitions (i'm not sure which dell is using nowadays) are provided for both versions. MS has explicitly allowed the big-brand OEMs (the ones who use bios locked versions rather than only activated versions) to do this.
It's kind of a sneaky arrangement. MS gets to book the machine as a vista sale. MS gets a buisness or ultimate license fee rather than a home license fee. But the customer still gets XP.
When I checked dells UK small buisness site recently it seemed they had already switched over to the downgrade rights based system. It was a free option on some models I looked at and a slight extra charge (£10) on others.
Prior to this switch the XP pro and vista buisness options were the same price.
Dell seems to have stopped offering any home editions of windows on their buisness machines with vista buisness now being the default option. I don't know if this has been accompanied by a rise in the base prices.
Vista buisness OEM comes with downgrade rights to XP pro and you can use your volume license media (surely you must have used volume licenses at some point and therefore been provided with volume license media) to excercise them so it shouldn't be a problem for you to license new machines. Several of the big OEMs still sell machines that they support with XP so that shouldn't be an issue either.
Security update support for XP will run out eventually but that isn't an imminent problem (still over half a decade left and MS may well extend it).
So you are still on the upgrade treadmill. Its not as forced as windows
If you care about security updates and support for newer applications software the linux upgrade treadmill is far worse than the windows one.
There are two sides to "support", problem support and security update support.
Problem support can be provided by third parties, especially with an open source system like linux.
Security update support basically means someone has to monitor all the software in the distribution for secrity issues and then work out how to backport those fixes. While it would certainly be possible to do this for an indvidual customer I suspect few could afford it.
Of course not everyone cares about security updates. If the machines exposure can be kept to a minimum you may be able to live without them but for many users they are particularlly important.
iirc XP home is crippled in a number of ways. The ones that spring to mind are.
* it can't join a domain
* the file permissions and file sharing permissions sytems are crippled
* I don't think it can be a remote desktop server (but i'm pretty sure it can be a remote desktop client)
I don't see any of theese as showstoppers for an ultraportable.
BTW you will still be able to get XP pro though vista buisness or ultimate downgrade rights and the big brand OEMs are now allowed to supply downgrade media and even ship systems pre-downgraded.
1.5 terabytes per day is just under 20 megabytes per second. That is 160 megabits per second. Even fios won't be handling that.
And a domestic/small buisness grade package almost certainly wouldn't let you saturate your pipe 24/7 anyway.