That's true in America maybe, but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from) Sure there are a lot of ISPs, but the vast majority of them are using BT wholesale ADSL.
Your real choices in the UK boil down to. If you are lucky you get all of theese choices. If you are unlucky you may only BT wholesale ADSL or maybe even only get virgin media cable (I don't think there are many areas where you can get virgin media cable and not get BT wholesale adsl anymore though)
* virgin media cable, not bad speeds but no choice of ISP and the one ISP there is isn't brilliant in a number of regards. * BT wholesale adsl, reasonable service from BT but the pricing stucture for the backhaul links mean you end up with either traffic caps, horrible congestion/traffic shaping or very high prices. Choose your poison. * LLU adsl, if you are lucky enough to live in the area of one of the couple of decent LLU this is brilliant but a large proportion of the population don't. Further complicating matters is that one of the decent LLU providers (sky) forces you to take thier TV service as well.
Keep in mind, most ISPs only pay the big bucks for their internet connectivity. I wouldn't say most ISPs, I know moderate sized ISPs using BT wholesales services in the UK pay far more to BT than they pay for thier connections to the internet.
For a moderate to large ISP internet bandwidth is not all that expensive. I have heared of ISPs dropping thier web proxies because after doing the sums they realised the bandwidth savings weren't enough to cover the cost of running the proxies.
The system designer doesn't know what I'll use the port for in advance so doesn't it make sense to design for a higher speed even if it isn't needed? And for computer ports they do. The port is wired off a chip that was already fabricated using a fast process and placed on a board that already had internal copper planes for impedance control and components mounted on both sides so it's no big deal.
For the devices however the lower speed modes of USB are a godsend. Having clocks running at hundreds of megahertz causes all sorts of issues (probablly requiring multilayer PCBs possiblly with components on both sides to get decent decoupling performance) that drive up price and is totally unessacery in a keyboard or mouse. It also drives up the cable requirements which is especially bad for devices like mice where a long flexible cable is important.
By the way, bittorrent is made for the sole purpose of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. If it was then they did a pretty lousy job. Using bittorrent means your ip address is publically associated with the content you are downloading.
Why bother using firewire hacking when it is much simpler to do a hard reset and load a bootable CD? Two main reasons
1: you want to recover something that is in ram (e.g. the encryption key for full disk encryption) and not on disk and the bios clears the memory on reboot (this is quite common in systems with ecc ram) 2: the bios is set not to boot from CD and gaining physical access to the innards, popping the battery, and then rebooting off a livecd without getting caught would be much harder than just plugging in what looks like an ordinary external hard drive.
The big problem with using firewire for everything is it lacks the lower speed modes that USB has. That means that every perhipheral has to have chips capable of handling a 400 megabit per second interface even if it doesn't need anywhere near that ammount of bandwidth.
several reasons 1: at least early in firewires life there were some fairly significant licensing fees, dunno if that is still the case. 2: Firewire is intrinsiclly a higher spec and more expensive interface. A good example of this is the power provision, firewire can carry much more but the higher voltage makes using it more awkward for devices. 3: Firewire has become something of a niche product, the more niche a product is the less people the upfront costs are spread over. 4: in the case of motherboard support the major chipset manufacturers integrate USB support so the only significan cost to fitting USB is the connectors. For firewire a seperate controller chip is needed.
unless you compare to those Mars rovers that just keep going and going looking at nasa's site there don't seem to have been any updates on the rovers for about a fortnight (prior to that the updates seem to have been approximately weekly), I wonder if that is a bad sign.
There's good reason for the system to work like it does, and to have civil and criminal components to a given case. The major fault I see is statutory damages which are set at a level that will financially ruin the defendent for what is a relatively minor offense.
I'm fine with preponderance of evidence for actual damanges but I don't belive it is any more ethical to financially ruin someone with statutory damages under such standards of evidence than it would be to imprision them under such standards of evidence.
Just how does the performance of this thing compare to the old celeron based model? is it faster or are they sacrificing even more performance to impvove battery life.
You mean, sort of like how MacFUSE [google.com] enables tons of FUSE filesystems, including NTFS, to be used with your Macintosh? Old news. I tried this and failed, the version of macfuse I installed didn't seem to work with the version of ntfs-3g for the mac I could find and I could find no way to downgrade macfuse.
I then tried installing ntfs-3g and macfuse from fink, that worked fine for the command line but wouldn't behave in the finder (I got weired permissions errors even though my user could work with the volume fine from the command line)
Malfunctioning USB devices can't hose the USB controller as PS/2 devices do At least on windows i've seen the complete USB subsystem fall over after repeated hotplugs. If repeated hotplugs can do it I suspect a malfunctioning device can easilly.
Plus, how does a font used in the OS menus even remotely interfere with whatever design projects you've got going on? most applications use fonts installed on the system by default. This causes problems if people sharing documents have fonts with the same name but different contents.
Indeed that is why gitmo exists and that is why many people think it is wrong. Gitmo is (or at least was before this decision and probablly still is de-facto now) a place ruled by the US military where the prisoners have no rights,
They haven't been getting either the rights of POWs, the rights of normal american prisoners or the rights of normal cuban prisoners. They have just been detained indefinately without trial.
When you are looking for a fairly rare item and/or one that was never really sold in your country ebay has two big advantages
1: ebay is massive, this means that the chance of someone on the system having the item is pretty damn high. 2: ebay/paypal is pretty friendly to international transactions. I can use my british ebay/paypal account to bid on auctions anywhere in the world with no hassle (sometimes I do have to contact the seller to ask for postage rates but a lot of the time sellers post a list that covers postage to the uk upfront).
does anyone know of any other places that offer this?
MS is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they really don't want to drive any more users to alternatives. On the other hand the stock market demands growth not just stability and the only way microsoft can significantly grow it's market is to reduce piracy.
Alas, the great joy did not last long, as the wicked Firebird Database Server users started to complain. The amusing thing is the firebird database server had also previously been called phoenix.
By the way, the other day I was wondering what the point is in releasing your software as freeware, rather than as open source. I can see the point of _selling_ closed source software (you make money), and I can see the point of releasing as open source (you get a lot of mind share and free contributions), but when you release as freeware, you get neither advantage. So why do it? A fast lightweight browser for wintel, lintel and mac (both intel based and powerpc based) has little commercial value. Those platforms are so fast that use of a more bloated browser isn't too much of an issue.
On the other hand on mobile platforms a fast lightweight browser is very valuable and people (sometimes device manufacturers sometimes end users) are quite prepared to pay for it. This is operas primary revenue stream
By giving away the desktop browser as closed source they can gain web developer mindshare without impacting on thier real market.
If they were to realease the source under anything remotely resembling a free software license other people would quickly port it themselves and operas main revenue stream would probablly dry up or at least severely reduce.
true, but afaict very few legitimate calls will be made that way. So you only accept calls from your provider who in turn only accepts calls from either the PSTN (where it costs money to make calls) or from trusted peers.
2) Obvious headset use Afaict while headsets used to be mostly restricted to call centers with the rise of voip a lot of softphone users are also using them.
I don't see it happening because most voip systems are much more closed than the email system. The reason we have so much trouble with email spam is because we accept mail from machines that we have no trust relationship with.
People could get arround the existing telemarketing laws by calling from outside the country. They in general don't because of the cost. I imagine a similar thing with happen with SPIT, no voip provider will want to directly interconnect with SPIT friendly providers forcing SPIT friendly providers to pay POTs rates.
A PC can't really just CALL a Voip line... The softphone, even for the very small percentage of people who use them as opposed to most people on VOIP havoing a hardware device, is a proprietary program, and on the back end is interfacing with an authentication system. Some random virus is not going to be able to interface with Vonage to make calls that way... Indeed, voip is generally not an open system like email is (even though it sometimes runs over open protocols). For calls to pass from one operator to another there needs to be either a specific agreement or the calls need to pass through the conventional chargeable phone network. I would guess that spit friendly providers will find it difficult to form agreements with other providers.
Businesses using VOIP use PRI or BRI trunks and traditionsal call networks to place person to person calls (except intra/inter office over secure systems). Some do, others particularlly smaller ones can't resist the low cost of internet based voip.
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That's true in America maybe, but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from)
Sure there are a lot of ISPs, but the vast majority of them are using BT wholesale ADSL.
Your real choices in the UK boil down to. If you are lucky you get all of theese choices. If you are unlucky you may only BT wholesale ADSL or maybe even only get virgin media cable (I don't think there are many areas where you can get virgin media cable and not get BT wholesale adsl anymore though)
* virgin media cable, not bad speeds but no choice of ISP and the one ISP there is isn't brilliant in a number of regards.
* BT wholesale adsl, reasonable service from BT but the pricing stucture for the backhaul links mean you end up with either traffic caps, horrible congestion/traffic shaping or very high prices. Choose your poison.
* LLU adsl, if you are lucky enough to live in the area of one of the couple of decent LLU this is brilliant but a large proportion of the population don't. Further complicating matters is that one of the decent LLU providers (sky) forces you to take thier TV service as well.
Keep in mind, most ISPs only pay the big bucks for their internet connectivity.
I wouldn't say most ISPs, I know moderate sized ISPs using BT wholesales services in the UK pay far more to BT than they pay for thier connections to the internet.
For a moderate to large ISP internet bandwidth is not all that expensive. I have heared of ISPs dropping thier web proxies because after doing the sums they realised the bandwidth savings weren't enough to cover the cost of running the proxies.
The system designer doesn't know what I'll use the port for in advance so doesn't it make sense to design for a higher speed even if it isn't needed?
And for computer ports they do. The port is wired off a chip that was already fabricated using a fast process and placed on a board that already had internal copper planes for impedance control and components mounted on both sides so it's no big deal.
For the devices however the lower speed modes of USB are a godsend. Having clocks running at hundreds of megahertz causes all sorts of issues (probablly requiring multilayer PCBs possiblly with components on both sides to get decent decoupling performance) that drive up price and is totally unessacery in a keyboard or mouse. It also drives up the cable requirements which is especially bad for devices like mice where a long flexible cable is important.
By the way, bittorrent is made for the sole purpose of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.
If it was then they did a pretty lousy job. Using bittorrent means your ip address is publically associated with the content you are downloading.
hardly, a google search for firewire sata drive enclosure turned up at least one device that fitted the bill.
I'm not the GP but I also belive that high speed USB is cheap crap for the following reasons.
the fact that despite the higher headline speed USB 2 cannot keep up with firewire in sustained data transfer tests.
The fact that during heavy data transfer the CPU is loaded far more heavilly with USB than with firewire.
The fact that the power supply is barely adequate for a laptop hard drive and nowhere near sufficiant for a desktop hard drive.
Why bother using firewire hacking when it is much simpler to do a hard reset and load a bootable CD?
Two main reasons
1: you want to recover something that is in ram (e.g. the encryption key for full disk encryption) and not on disk and the bios clears the memory on reboot (this is quite common in systems with ecc ram)
2: the bios is set not to boot from CD and gaining physical access to the innards, popping the battery, and then rebooting off a livecd without getting caught would be much harder than just plugging in what looks like an ordinary external hard drive.
The big problem with using firewire for everything is it lacks the lower speed modes that USB has. That means that every perhipheral has to have chips capable of handling a 400 megabit per second interface even if it doesn't need anywhere near that ammount of bandwidth.
several reasons
1: at least early in firewires life there were some fairly significant licensing fees, dunno if that is still the case.
2: Firewire is intrinsiclly a higher spec and more expensive interface. A good example of this is the power provision, firewire can carry much more but the higher voltage makes using it more awkward for devices.
3: Firewire has become something of a niche product, the more niche a product is the less people the upfront costs are spread over.
4: in the case of motherboard support the major chipset manufacturers integrate USB support so the only significan cost to fitting USB is the connectors. For firewire a seperate controller chip is needed.
unless you compare to those Mars rovers that just keep going and going
looking at nasa's site there don't seem to have been any updates on the rovers for about a fortnight (prior to that the updates seem to have been approximately weekly), I wonder if that is a bad sign.
There's good reason for the system to work like it does, and to have civil and criminal components to a given case.
The major fault I see is statutory damages which are set at a level that will financially ruin the defendent for what is a relatively minor offense.
I'm fine with preponderance of evidence for actual damanges but I don't belive it is any more ethical to financially ruin someone with statutory damages under such standards of evidence than it would be to imprision them under such standards of evidence.
Just how does the performance of this thing compare to the old celeron based model? is it faster or are they sacrificing even more performance to impvove battery life.
You mean, sort of like how MacFUSE [google.com] enables tons of FUSE filesystems, including NTFS, to be used with your Macintosh? Old news.
I tried this and failed, the version of macfuse I installed didn't seem to work with the version of ntfs-3g for the mac I could find and I could find no way to downgrade macfuse.
I then tried installing ntfs-3g and macfuse from fink, that worked fine for the command line but wouldn't behave in the finder (I got weired permissions errors even though my user could work with the volume fine from the command line)
Have things improved since my experiance?
Malfunctioning USB devices can't hose the USB controller as PS/2 devices do
At least on windows i've seen the complete USB subsystem fall over after repeated hotplugs. If repeated hotplugs can do it I suspect a malfunctioning device can easilly.
Plus, how does a font used in the OS menus even remotely interfere with whatever design projects you've got going on?
most applications use fonts installed on the system by default. This causes problems if people sharing documents have fonts with the same name but different contents.
Indeed that is why gitmo exists and that is why many people think it is wrong. Gitmo is (or at least was before this decision and probablly still is de-facto now) a place ruled by the US military where the prisoners have no rights,
They haven't been getting either the rights of POWs, the rights of normal american prisoners or the rights of normal cuban prisoners. They have just been detained indefinately without trial.
When you are looking for a fairly rare item and/or one that was never really sold in your country ebay has two big advantages
1: ebay is massive, this means that the chance of someone on the system having the item is pretty damn high.
2: ebay/paypal is pretty friendly to international transactions. I can use my british ebay/paypal account to bid on auctions anywhere in the world with no hassle (sometimes I do have to contact the seller to ask for postage rates but a lot of the time sellers post a list that covers postage to the uk upfront).
does anyone know of any other places that offer this?
MS is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they really don't want to drive any more users to alternatives. On the other hand the stock market demands growth not just stability and the only way microsoft can significantly grow it's market is to reduce piracy.
Alas, the great joy did not last long, as the wicked Firebird Database Server users started to complain.
The amusing thing is the firebird database server had also previously been called phoenix.
By the way, the other day I was wondering what the point is in releasing your software as freeware, rather than as open source. I can see the point of _selling_ closed source software (you make money), and I can see the point of releasing as open source (you get a lot of mind share and free contributions), but when you release as freeware, you get neither advantage. So why do it?
A fast lightweight browser for wintel, lintel and mac (both intel based and powerpc based) has little commercial value. Those platforms are so fast that use of a more bloated browser isn't too much of an issue.
On the other hand on mobile platforms a fast lightweight browser is very valuable and people (sometimes device manufacturers sometimes end users) are quite prepared to pay for it. This is operas primary revenue stream
By giving away the desktop browser as closed source they can gain web developer mindshare without impacting on thier real market.
If they were to realease the source under anything remotely resembling a free software license other people would quickly port it themselves and operas main revenue stream would probablly dry up or at least severely reduce.
but that's with about 15 tabs open, spread between various windows.
15 is a pretty small number of tabs, I reckon I get over 100 sometimes.
true, but afaict very few legitimate calls will be made that way. So you only accept calls from your provider who in turn only accepts calls from either the PSTN (where it costs money to make calls) or from trusted peers.
2) Obvious headset use
Afaict while headsets used to be mostly restricted to call centers with the rise of voip a lot of softphone users are also using them.
I don't see it happening because most voip systems are much more closed than the email system. The reason we have so much trouble with email spam is because we accept mail from machines that we have no trust relationship with.
People could get arround the existing telemarketing laws by calling from outside the country. They in general don't because of the cost. I imagine a similar thing with happen with SPIT, no voip provider will want to directly interconnect with SPIT friendly providers forcing SPIT friendly providers to pay POTs rates.
A PC can't really just CALL a Voip line... The softphone, even for the very small percentage of people who use them as opposed to most people on VOIP havoing a hardware device, is a proprietary program, and on the back end is interfacing with an authentication system. Some random virus is not going to be able to interface with Vonage to make calls that way...
Indeed, voip is generally not an open system like email is (even though it sometimes runs over open protocols). For calls to pass from one operator to another there needs to be either a specific agreement or the calls need to pass through the conventional chargeable phone network. I would guess that spit friendly providers will find it difficult to form agreements with other providers.
Businesses using VOIP use PRI or BRI trunks and traditionsal call networks to place person to person calls (except intra/inter office over secure systems).
Some do, others particularlly smaller ones can't resist the low cost of internet based voip.