ok so your repackager can monitor an installer and turn it into an MSI, that is great for making your apps easier to deploy in a corp environment but I don't see how it helps with backup. If you have the original installer you can just back that up, the main reason someone would want to back up an application off thier computer is because they no longer have the installer.
The problem with trying to back up an application that is already installed is it can be near impossible to work out which of the files on your system may be used by the app. Maybe you can get that info from the uninstall data but my guess is that data does not dependably list everything the app needs (e.g. there are some updates to windows components that app installers are allowed to install but should never remove)
wikipedia claims the triple point of water is 611.73 pascals which would put it just below martian surface pressure, so liquid water should be able to exist albiet in a pretty narrow temperature band.
Water doesn't sublime. It does if the pressure is low enough, I think on mars there would be a liquid phase though it would be much much narrower than on earth such that it would be almost too narrow to notice.
Thing is that under a BGA you need a grid of vias and if you don't want to use blind vias (which are expensive and complicate the design process) you have to get tracks between the vias.
If you have a minimum hole size of.25mm and a minimum track gap and annular ring of.1mm (theese are not hypothetical figures, they are zot's "standard production" figures). With a 1mm pitch BGA you can get two tracks between a pair of vias on each layer. With an 8mm pitch BGA you only get one track between a pair of vias on each layer. In other words making BGAs even slightly finer pitch hugely drives up the PCB requirements.
For chips in more conventional packages with leads at the edge 1mm is actually quite a large pitch (just a tad smaller than the 1.27mm of SOIC) and easy to hand solder. Most modern convential chip packages have.5mm pitches.
another thing to realise is that afaict martian "soil" isn't something we have a huge ammount of experiance with. All our knowlage comes from instruments on probes which are way way behind what we have on earth.
On the other hand if mail order sales of theese drugs to the general public were made legal then people wouldn't be driven to buy them from such dodgy suppliers.
To be honest, to me this seems like a thing of the past. Apple-critics tend to use it as an argument against Macs but really, that was fixed when the Mighty Mouse came out. for desktops yes (and as you say you could use a third party multi button mouse before that) thier laptops still come with only one button below the touchpad though.
web browser - yes (IE) word processor - two, you get both MS works and "starsuite" (which appears to be the new name for staroffice. im client - windows live messenget only, but people usually install theese from downloads anyway so thats a non issue.
so the basics are covered in the default install, it is not as though it is a plain install of windows and nothing else.
but you are right if thier tech skills are so low they can't work out how to copy an install CD to thier flash stick or share a CD drive over the network and they are too cheap to buy a CD drive to go with the machine they are going to have some trouble installing software. I doubt most of them will have too much trouble finding someone who can helpt them with that though.
Re:This is how economics is supposed to work!
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
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· Score: 1
Governments have recognised that cars are a problem and the sensible ones have taken steps to push for improvements in thier fuel economy and some are taking futher steps to discourage thier use.
IIRC in the USA there are laws requiring manufacturers to gradually reduce the average fuel consumption and emmisions of the cars they produce.
But somehow the motor industry managed to convince the government that SUVs were trucks not cars making them immune to those laws.
Maybe if there was some law that forced carriers to itemize their bill to show the cost attributed to the subsidized phone, and allowed people who purchase their phones not to pay that additional charge.... oh wait that will never happen here. For this to work here also needs to be another part of the law that forces them to sell the phone seperately on the same payment plan they itemise on thier contract (maybe with a small strictly limited admin fee since one contract is less overhead than two)
Otherwise the carriers will just itemise the phone part at a couple of cents and we are back to square 1.
Afaict if you are a heavy enough user that pay as you go is a bad deal you are basically paying for a new phone every year or so whether you decide to take it or not.
When all the firms structure thier deals that way there isn't much choice for the customer.
Not sure on the current status but I'm sure at some points copies of MS office came with rights to install it on your laptop as well as your desktop as long as you are the primary user of both machines.
and of course not everyone cares about staying legit.
Video games -- perfectly feasible as long as you don't insist on the latest and greatest. Zoo tycoon, starcraft and even the 3D rendered ports of duke3D all run just fine (though unfortunately many older games require configuration tweaking to run in 1024x600).
Matlab -- you wouldn't want to run big similuations but for writing the code and testing with small datasets/low iteration counts it should be fine.
Maya -- no idea, never used it and have no idea what it's requirements are like.
and I beleive there are a huge variety of specialist applications that are not all that demanding on system requirements and would be usefull to have with you all the time.
minor document editing Which if they value thier sanity they will want to do with the same package they are already using on thier other machines.
And maybe that is it for most home users (though I would add at least some level of gaming for many of them) but buisness users are going to want to be able to run whatever apps they use for thier job. I would bet that most buisness users use at least one specialist or internal application. What that application is will of course vary.
not really, it may be the year of linux on the cheap ultraportable but even that is far from certain. The 900 series have got the screen size up to the point where using XP is not at all unpleasent and I bet as people realise thier EEEPC can be reformatted to become a standard PC a lot of them will get reformatted by the local geek with a pirate XP CD.
And I bet cheap ultraportables make up a pretty tiny fraction of the overall PC market. Probablly even a pretty small proportion of the laptop market.
Having used an EEE 900 series with windows (it is my brothers) the experiance felt just fine to me. I could run normal windows applications including some older games just fine and the screen size wasn't a problem for most applications (the only time I had to go into top/bottom scroll mode was for a settings dialog in itunes).
To a non techie if it doesn't run windows it's not a PC.
ASUS's default windows install needed a bit of cleaning but that is nearly always the case with machines from the big OEMs.
I think asus put linux on for two reasons, firstly to make the headline price of the initial model even lower. Secondly to make it clear to MS that they had another option for the machine (load linux from the factory and let people put warez XP on themselves) if MS refused to keep selling them XP.
Linux was the intial factory option on the EEE which was one of the first cheap subnotebooks.
But now on the EEE series windows is availible from the factory and runs very nicely. I would imagine once people realise that for a little more (or even a little less in some cases) they can get the familiar XP and use thier familiar appliacations while also getting the micro form factor and of course avoiding vista the EEEPC 900 with XP will look like a very attractive option.
Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is based on consensus decision making, which has a different set of flaws There is certainly some democratic element to it, new admins are made through a voting process and some of the board members are also voted for.
And the procedure they reffer to as "getting a rough consensus" is pretty much voting but the admins can deny votes on a whim.
There is also a god king element. Wales has stacked the board in his favour and admins must not undo actions taken by him or his underlings or they lose thier admin powers.
I suspect there is also a cabel element though only those in a cabel will really know for sure if it exists or not.
and finally there is simple persistance. If the admin cabel and the foundation board don't get involved the most persistant editors will win through repeatedly compromising and then setting up a new conflict. It helps to have an army of sockpuppets or better still meatpuppets preferablly with different IP addresses (or better still ISPs) and writing styles.
All in all a bit of a weired mix. Seems to work ok for articles with mostly indisputable content. Not so well for anything political.
btw do you know if there is any way arround the very limited range of partitioning options that the PS3 offers? Afaict you have to give 10 gig to one side and all the rest to the other which seems very unbalanced if you have a big drive.
Woody-sarge was longer than the ubuntu LTS release cycle, all the other debian release cycles were shorter.
The security update overlap between releases for desktop stuff is also about the same as ubuntu LTS (for server stuff it is much worse at least if canonical keep thier promises) and certainly nowhere close to the 7 YEARs or more that microsofts current lifecycle policy specifies.
IIRC the PS3's main processor is slow but the cell also has some other hardware to play with that with correctly optimised code can give very good performance.
Another big reason to do this is because you want a powerpc system for some form of testing use. This may be slow compared to some of IBMs boxes or the later gen powerpc macs but it will almost certainly be faster than emulation or a gamecube.
I can think of at least two reasons for wanting a powerpc machine. 1: it is a big endian architecture that is reasonablly fast. So it is a decent choice for checking the endian portability of your code (assuming you wrote it on the little endian x86 or x64 architecture) 2: you want to see a package make it into debian testing but it is being held up by a build failure on powerpc that noone seems to be doing anything about.
The start menu system was designed as part of windows 95. Multiuser support in 95 seems to have been very much an afterthought ans was usually left disabled.
The start menu you see on a modern windows system is actually the merger of two seperate menus, one is your menu and one is the "all users" menu. Unfortunately there is no mechanism for your menu to change things that are part of the "all users" menu.
The result is that you may think you are reorganising your start menu but in fact you are most likely removing things from the all users menu and adding them to your own menu.
I agree it's a broken system but unfortunately it is very hard to do anything about it without causing big problems for installers/uninstallers.
You forget, they can install as user (no admin rights) because it only needs access to the users home directory. Sure it is technically possible to make software for linux that can be installed without admin privilages. It is equally possible to do it for windows.
But given that the two main package management systems used by linux distros aren't setup to support doing things that way (and supporting it opens up a huge can of worms, e.g. what if root wants to remove a library that a user installed app is depending on) so most linux users are just as used to installing software as root as windows users are to installing it as admin.
at least on the linux systems I have used a very large proportion of the drivers are part of the kernel image packages. So as well as bloating the size of the installer they also bloat the size of the installed system and the kernel security updates.
OTOH opensource and the fact that the prefered way for drivers to be maintained and distributed is as part of the kernel source encourages code reuse and spinning off common functionality from the drivers into a more general subsystem.
Slashdot Mirror
ok so your repackager can monitor an installer and turn it into an MSI, that is great for making your apps easier to deploy in a corp environment but I don't see how it helps with backup. If you have the original installer you can just back that up, the main reason someone would want to back up an application off thier computer is because they no longer have the installer.
The problem with trying to back up an application that is already installed is it can be near impossible to work out which of the files on your system may be used by the app. Maybe you can get that info from the uninstall data but my guess is that data does not dependably list everything the app needs (e.g. there are some updates to windows components that app installers are allowed to install but should never remove)
wikipedia claims the triple point of water is 611.73 pascals which would put it just below martian surface pressure, so liquid water should be able to exist albiet in a pretty narrow temperature band.
Water doesn't sublime.
It does if the pressure is low enough, I think on mars there would be a liquid phase though it would be much much narrower than on earth such that it would be almost too narrow to notice.
1mm isn't really all that small.
.25mm and a minimum track gap and annular ring of .1mm (theese are not hypothetical figures, they are zot's "standard production" figures). With a 1mm pitch BGA you can get two tracks between a pair of vias on each layer. With an 8mm pitch BGA you only get one track between a pair of vias on each layer. In other words making BGAs even slightly finer pitch hugely drives up the PCB requirements.
.5mm pitches.
Thing is that under a BGA you need a grid of vias and if you don't want to use blind vias (which are expensive and complicate the design process) you have to get tracks between the vias.
If you have a minimum hole size of
For chips in more conventional packages with leads at the edge 1mm is actually quite a large pitch (just a tad smaller than the 1.27mm of SOIC) and easy to hand solder. Most modern convential chip packages have
another thing to realise is that afaict martian "soil" isn't something we have a huge ammount of experiance with. All our knowlage comes from instruments on probes which are way way behind what we have on earth.
has anyone even tried sieving the stuff before?
On the other hand if mail order sales of theese drugs to the general public were made legal then people wouldn't be driven to buy them from such dodgy suppliers.
To be honest, to me this seems like a thing of the past. Apple-critics tend to use it as an argument against Macs but really, that was fixed when the Mighty Mouse came out.
for desktops yes (and as you say you could use a third party multi button mouse before that) thier laptops still come with only one button below the touchpad though.
so grab an old 10 megabit hub and connect it to the office network. plug the eee into one port, the sniffer into another.
problem solved
Lets see the standard EEE 900 windows load
web browser - yes (IE)
word processor - two, you get both MS works and "starsuite" (which appears to be the new name for staroffice.
im client - windows live messenget only, but people usually install theese from downloads anyway so thats a non issue.
so the basics are covered in the default install, it is not as though it is a plain install of windows and nothing else.
but you are right if thier tech skills are so low they can't work out how to copy an install CD to thier flash stick or share a CD drive over the network and they are too cheap to buy a CD drive to go with the machine they are going to have some trouble installing software. I doubt most of them will have too much trouble finding someone who can helpt them with that though.
Governments have recognised that cars are a problem and the sensible ones have taken steps to push for improvements in thier fuel economy and some are taking futher steps to discourage thier use.
IIRC in the USA there are laws requiring manufacturers to gradually reduce the average fuel consumption and emmisions of the cars they produce.
But somehow the motor industry managed to convince the government that SUVs were trucks not cars making them immune to those laws.
Maybe if there was some law that forced carriers to itemize their bill to show the cost attributed to the subsidized phone, and allowed people who purchase their phones not to pay that additional charge.... oh wait that will never happen here.
For this to work here also needs to be another part of the law that forces them to sell the phone seperately on the same payment plan they itemise on thier contract (maybe with a small strictly limited admin fee since one contract is less overhead than two)
Otherwise the carriers will just itemise the phone part at a couple of cents and we are back to square 1.
Afaict if you are a heavy enough user that pay as you go is a bad deal you are basically paying for a new phone every year or so whether you decide to take it or not.
When all the firms structure thier deals that way there isn't much choice for the customer.
Not sure on the current status but I'm sure at some points copies of MS office came with rights to install it on your laptop as well as your desktop as long as you are the primary user of both machines.
and of course not everyone cares about staying legit.
Photoshop -- screen would probablly cripple this.
Video games -- perfectly feasible as long as you don't insist on the latest and greatest. Zoo tycoon, starcraft and even the 3D rendered ports of duke3D all run just fine (though unfortunately many older games require configuration tweaking to run in 1024x600).
Matlab -- you wouldn't want to run big similuations but for writing the code and testing with small datasets/low iteration counts it should be fine.
Maya -- no idea, never used it and have no idea what it's requirements are like.
and I beleive there are a huge variety of specialist applications that are not all that demanding on system requirements and would be usefull to have with you all the time.
minor document editing
Which if they value thier sanity they will want to do with the same package they are already using on thier other machines.
And maybe that is it for most home users (though I would add at least some level of gaming for many of them) but buisness users are going to want to be able to run whatever apps they use for thier job. I would bet that most buisness users use at least one specialist or internal application. What that application is will of course vary.
not really, it may be the year of linux on the cheap ultraportable but even that is far from certain. The 900 series have got the screen size up to the point where using XP is not at all unpleasent and I bet as people realise thier EEEPC can be reformatted to become a standard PC a lot of them will get reformatted by the local geek with a pirate XP CD.
And I bet cheap ultraportables make up a pretty tiny fraction of the overall PC market. Probablly even a pretty small proportion of the laptop market.
Having used an EEE 900 series with windows (it is my brothers) the experiance felt just fine to me. I could run normal windows applications including some older games just fine and the screen size wasn't a problem for most applications (the only time I had to go into top/bottom scroll mode was for a settings dialog in itunes).
To a non techie if it doesn't run windows it's not a PC.
ASUS's default windows install needed a bit of cleaning but that is nearly always the case with machines from the big OEMs.
I think asus put linux on for two reasons, firstly to make the headline price of the initial model even lower. Secondly to make it clear to MS that they had another option for the machine (load linux from the factory and let people put warez XP on themselves) if MS refused to keep selling them XP.
Linux was the intial factory option on the EEE which was one of the first cheap subnotebooks.
But now on the EEE series windows is availible from the factory and runs very nicely. I would imagine once people realise that for a little more (or even a little less in some cases) they can get the familiar XP and use thier familiar appliacations while also getting the micro form factor and of course avoiding vista the EEEPC 900 with XP will look like a very attractive option.
Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is based on consensus decision making, which has a different set of flaws
There is certainly some democratic element to it, new admins are made through a voting process and some of the board members are also voted for.
And the procedure they reffer to as "getting a rough consensus" is pretty much voting but the admins can deny votes on a whim.
There is also a god king element. Wales has stacked the board in his favour and admins must not undo actions taken by him or his underlings or they lose thier admin powers.
I suspect there is also a cabel element though only those in a cabel will really know for sure if it exists or not.
and finally there is simple persistance. If the admin cabel and the foundation board don't get involved the most persistant editors will win through repeatedly compromising and then setting up a new conflict. It helps to have an army of sockpuppets or better still meatpuppets preferablly with different IP addresses (or better still ISPs) and writing styles.
All in all a bit of a weired mix. Seems to work ok for articles with mostly indisputable content. Not so well for anything political.
btw do you know if there is any way arround the very limited range of partitioning options that the PS3 offers? Afaict you have to give 10 gig to one side and all the rest to the other which seems very unbalanced if you have a big drive.
Woody-sarge was longer than the ubuntu LTS release cycle, all the other debian release cycles were shorter.
The security update overlap between releases for desktop stuff is also about the same as ubuntu LTS (for server stuff it is much worse at least if canonical keep thier promises) and certainly nowhere close to the 7 YEARs or more that microsofts current lifecycle policy specifies.
IIRC the PS3's main processor is slow but the cell also has some other hardware to play with that with correctly optimised code can give very good performance.
Another big reason to do this is because you want a powerpc system for some form of testing use. This may be slow compared to some of IBMs boxes or the later gen powerpc macs but it will almost certainly be faster than emulation or a gamecube.
I can think of at least two reasons for wanting a powerpc machine.
1: it is a big endian architecture that is reasonablly fast. So it is a decent choice for checking the endian portability of your code (assuming you wrote it on the little endian x86 or x64 architecture)
2: you want to see a package make it into debian testing but it is being held up by a build failure on powerpc that noone seems to be doing anything about.
indeed, this is a big issue with windows.
The start menu system was designed as part of windows 95. Multiuser support in 95 seems to have been very much an afterthought ans was usually left disabled.
The start menu you see on a modern windows system is actually the merger of two seperate menus, one is your menu and one is the "all users" menu. Unfortunately there is no mechanism for your menu to change things that are part of the "all users" menu.
The result is that you may think you are reorganising your start menu but in fact you are most likely removing things from the all users menu and adding them to your own menu.
I agree it's a broken system but unfortunately it is very hard to do anything about it without causing big problems for installers/uninstallers.
You forget, they can install as user (no admin rights) because it only needs access to the users home directory.
Sure it is technically possible to make software for linux that can be installed without admin privilages. It is equally possible to do it for windows.
But given that the two main package management systems used by linux distros aren't setup to support doing things that way (and supporting it opens up a huge can of worms, e.g. what if root wants to remove a library that a user installed app is depending on) so most linux users are just as used to installing software as root as windows users are to installing it as admin.
at least on the linux systems I have used a very large proportion of the drivers are part of the kernel image packages. So as well as bloating the size of the installer they also bloat the size of the installed system and the kernel security updates.
OTOH opensource and the fact that the prefered way for drivers to be maintained and distributed is as part of the kernel source encourages code reuse and spinning off common functionality from the drivers into a more general subsystem.