Only apple can sell DRM "protected" music that will play on an iPod.
So if you want to buy music online from labels that won't sell thier music online without DRM you have to buy from apple.
Furthermore if you want to play the music you have bought from apple on a portable device without using legally questionable cracks or wasting time and losing quality by burning and re-ripping you can only use apples players.
And iirc the videos apple sells for use on the iPod are even more locked down then the music.
same goes for XP on these low end devices from what I've heard. They can get XP on there but stuff just the user eXPerience is really poor. I can't imagine it is that bad when sensiblly configured. Sure the site linked in the article shows the dialog running off the screen but it is only just off and I bet it fits under the classic theme.
The performance while it won't be a world beater shouldn't be too bad either. The processor and ram are slow/low by current standards but not bad by the standards of when XP was released.
I ran 9x (which has much the same GUI as XP once you switch XP to the classic theme) on 640x480 screens for a long time and it wasn't too bad.
MS had to keep thier dialogs usable in 640x480 because until very recently (I think one of the service packs for XP added VESA support but i'm not sure) the fallback display mode was VGA 640x480 16 color.
8GB of "disk space" is enough for windows office and a few other apps. Even 4GB will fit windows and office. You can put in an SD card for user storage if you get short on space so that's not really too much of an issue.
I don't see the point of starting from CE. Most of the point in going for windows is that it can run standard windows applications. If you lose that ability there is no real advantage to using windows.
My guess is MS will offer a version of XP with a little bit of extra stripping down and keep that on the market until the hardware in theese devices has caught up with the hardware requirements of vista.
It can run windows, sure some more modern apps may be a little inconviniant on that screen but most stuff should be usable especially if you use older versions.
The EEE has brought ultraportables to the cheap end market. Afaict prior to the EEEPC your only real choices if you wanted a very small (less than 12 inch) laptop (I will define a laptop here as something that can run standard wintel or lintel apps) were a refurbished libretto or one of the smaller sony VAIOs.
Sure you can get a conventional laptop cheaper but that is missing the point of the EEEPC. The point of the EEEPC is it is reasonablly cheap and extremely portable.
I remember when my desktop monitor had a resoloution of 640x480. I used 9x on such a monitor for years (I was given a 386 machine which came with this monitor and when I upgraded to a machine that could run 9x I didn't buy a new monitor to save money).
Once you switch to the classic theme XPs gui isn't any more bloated than 9x's
where did you get the idea they were? ASUS is selling EEEPCs with both linux and windows as options.
Of course if ASUS wants a custom build of windows they will obviously have to negotiate with MS just as they would have to negotiate with the vendor wanted a custom build of any propietry software.
I would have thought standard windows should be usable on such machines. Once you switch to the classic theme screen real estate shouldn't be any more of an issue that it was for running 9x on 640x480 (which I did for many years) and the CPU/RAM specs aren't that low. It looks like ASUS also allows a virtual desktop that is bigger than the actual screen size (this was a common feature on laptops before they had 1024x768 screens)
speaker cables shouldn't need shielding. At those kinds of powers it is going to take a hell of a lot of intereference to have a noticable effect.
Take a look at van-damme proffessional speaker cable (which is afaict what is used at many big events) and you will notice that it is not shielded.
On long speaker runs your biggest problem is going to be volt drop so the most important thing is to use a thick cable.
On the other hand line level cables most certainly do need shielding because of the much lower power involved. Balanced line is also preferable for long runs.
Remember the way bittorrent works is to basically hand out a random slection from the list of machines using the torrent to any client who wants them.
so all someone wanting to monitor a torrent needs to do is connect thier own client to the tracker and poll at a similar rate to a normal bittorrent client. Obviously how long it takes to get most of the users IPs depends on how fast they can get away with polling and how busy the torrent is but I don't imagine it would generally take that long.
how much congestion is there. Do you consistantly get those speeds? Do you usually get those speeds but sometimes run into congestion? Or are those speeds theoretical maximums that are never achived in practice?
Just FYI - whilst Virgin have the cable market in the UK sewn up, we're lucky enough to not have a situation whereby ISPs are limited to any particular area. Well the ISPs that became virgin media did have an effective monopoly on any areas that have cable TV wiring but are too far from the phone exchange for decent DSL speeds or on a phone exchange that hasn't been upgraded to support DSL. I don't know if there are any such areas left now but I expect there are still a few.
And then there is the weired situation in hull (which for historic reasons has it's own telco).
There are two other options for TV but top-up TV have a very limited channel list and tiscali require you to either get a second phoneline or use thier really shitty (far worse than virgin media) broadband service.
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (*) act of god
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) users of email will not put up with it ( ) microsoft will not put up with it ( ) the police will not put up with it ( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business (*) convincing god to do this would be virtually impossible
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) open relays in foreign countries ( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) asshats ( ) jurisdictional problems ( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) huge existing software investment in smtp ( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack ( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email ( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes ( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) extreme profitability of spam ( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) technically illiterate politicians ( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (*) gods lack of time for interfering in the affairs of man when they do not find it amusing ( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) blacklists suck ( ) whitelists suck ( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored ( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) sending email should be free ( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) i don't want the government reading my email (*) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(*) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work. ( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
mythbusters failed to beat the speed camera they tried by speed alone (top gear I belive succeeded though with the one they tried and an appropirately fast supercar)
mythbusters also tried a variety or soloutions to try and obscure the number plate from cameras without making it look suspcious when a human looked at the plate (you aren't allowed to deliberately obscure your number plate in most places). All the passive soloutions got busted but a revolving number plate was found to be a workable soloution.
well assuming they are acting lawfully they will be paying for some portion of the cost of the bandwidth between thier machine and your ISPs machine. What proporition will vary depending on location and how well the ISPs are doing in peering/transit negotiations. Could be anywhere from nearly none of it to all of it.
but really that is likely to be a small part of the cost of the spam and as you say many spammers are using stolen bandwidth anyway.
yeah, a lot of real life is a bore, we do it because we have to do so in order to get money which buys us food. Sure most first world contries have some form of benefits but they are usually set at such a level that those reciving them have only enough for the bare essentials.
games are supposed to be stuff you do for enjoyment during your free time, not a second job.
afaict it is a paladin that has been currupted by the litch/scorge. A character who started as a paladin and was later turned into a death night was one of the main characters in warcraft 3.
I would have thought in a well organised competition you would agree on settings before you started rather than trying to optimise your settings to try and gain an unfair advantage.
What affect if any would ithave on governemnt institutions who have subscription based licenses for microsoft software? would they be allowed to renew thier subscriptions or would they be forced to port before thier current subscription expired.
Exactly! Until new hardware is being purchased it isn't a problem. What about license subscriptions? Just because retail licenses are perpetual doesn't mean all licenses for MS software are.
look how many academic institutions are still netware dependent. I'm sure few places use it for new networks but there is still a hell of a lot of maintinance and expansion of existing networks.
Even worse in this case is a lot of MS academic and big corporate licenses are subscriptions. Therefore a block on purchases would force migration of existing systems as well as blocking expansion.
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Only apple can sell DRM "protected" music that will play on an iPod.
So if you want to buy music online from labels that won't sell thier music online without DRM you have to buy from apple.
Furthermore if you want to play the music you have bought from apple on a portable device without using legally questionable cracks or wasting time and losing quality by burning and re-ripping you can only use apples players.
And iirc the videos apple sells for use on the iPod are even more locked down then the music.
same goes for XP on these low end devices from what I've heard. They can get XP on there but stuff just the user eXPerience is really poor.
I can't imagine it is that bad when sensiblly configured. Sure the site linked in the article shows the dialog running off the screen but it is only just off and I bet it fits under the classic theme.
The performance while it won't be a world beater shouldn't be too bad either. The processor and ram are slow/low by current standards but not bad by the standards of when XP was released.
I ran 9x (which has much the same GUI as XP once you switch XP to the classic theme) on 640x480 screens for a long time and it wasn't too bad.
MS had to keep thier dialogs usable in 640x480 because until very recently (I think one of the service packs for XP added VESA support but i'm not sure) the fallback display mode was VGA 640x480 16 color.
8GB of "disk space" is enough for windows office and a few other apps. Even 4GB will fit windows and office. You can put in an SD card for user storage if you get short on space so that's not really too much of an issue.
I don't see the point of starting from CE. Most of the point in going for windows is that it can run standard windows applications. If you lose that ability there is no real advantage to using windows.
My guess is MS will offer a version of XP with a little bit of extra stripping down and keep that on the market until the hardware in theese devices has caught up with the hardware requirements of vista.
It can run windows, sure some more modern apps may be a little inconviniant on that screen but most stuff should be usable especially if you use older versions.
The EEE has brought ultraportables to the cheap end market. Afaict prior to the EEEPC your only real choices if you wanted a very small (less than 12 inch) laptop (I will define a laptop here as something that can run standard wintel or lintel apps) were a refurbished libretto or one of the smaller sony VAIOs.
Sure you can get a conventional laptop cheaper but that is missing the point of the EEEPC. The point of the EEEPC is it is reasonablly cheap and extremely portable.
I remember when my desktop monitor had a resoloution of 640x480. I used 9x on such a monitor for years (I was given a 386 machine which came with this monitor and when I upgraded to a machine that could run 9x I didn't buy a new monitor to save money).
Once you switch to the classic theme XPs gui isn't any more bloated than 9x's
where did you get the idea they were? ASUS is selling EEEPCs with both linux and windows as options.
Of course if ASUS wants a custom build of windows they will obviously have to negotiate with MS just as they would have to negotiate with the vendor wanted a custom build of any propietry software.
I would have thought standard windows should be usable on such machines. Once you switch to the classic theme screen real estate shouldn't be any more of an issue that it was for running 9x on 640x480 (which I did for many years) and the CPU/RAM specs aren't that low. It looks like ASUS also allows a virtual desktop that is bigger than the actual screen size (this was a common feature on laptops before they had 1024x768 screens)
speaker cables shouldn't need shielding. At those kinds of powers it is going to take a hell of a lot of intereference to have a noticable effect.
Take a look at van-damme proffessional speaker cable (which is afaict what is used at many big events) and you will notice that it is not shielded.
On long speaker runs your biggest problem is going to be volt drop so the most important thing is to use a thick cable.
On the other hand line level cables most certainly do need shielding because of the much lower power involved. Balanced line is also preferable for long runs.
there is absoloutely no need to seed or download to get peer IPs from a torrent tracker.
Remember the way bittorrent works is to basically hand out a random slection from the list of machines using the torrent to any client who wants them.
so all someone wanting to monitor a torrent needs to do is connect thier own client to the tracker and poll at a similar rate to a normal bittorrent client. Obviously how long it takes to get most of the users IPs depends on how fast they can get away with polling and how busy the torrent is but I don't imagine it would generally take that long.
the size of the population doesn't really matter much.
I can't remember the details of the stats but if you have 48 random samples and they are all faulty that is pretty damning evidence.
What may be significant is the sampling. Were theese rivits all from different parts of the titanic or were they all close together.
how much congestion is there. Do you consistantly get those speeds? Do you usually get those speeds but sometimes run into congestion? Or are those speeds theoretical maximums that are never achived in practice?
Just FYI - whilst Virgin have the cable market in the UK sewn up, we're lucky enough to not have a situation whereby ISPs are limited to any particular area.
Well the ISPs that became virgin media did have an effective monopoly on any areas that have cable TV wiring but are too far from the phone exchange for decent DSL speeds or on a phone exchange that hasn't been upgraded to support DSL. I don't know if there are any such areas left now but I expect there are still a few.
And then there is the weired situation in hull (which for historic reasons has it's own telco).
There are two other options for TV but top-up TV have a very limited channel list and tiscali require you to either get a second phoneline or use thier really shitty (far worse than virgin media) broadband service.
company data going over public IM networks with little to no privicy or security gaurantees strikes me as a bad thing.
how do they get arround the problem of people modding thier clients to lie to the tracker?
your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (*) act of god
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
(*) convincing god to do this would be virtually impossible
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) huge existing software investment in smtp
( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) gods lack of time for interfering in the affairs of man when they do not find it amusing
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
(*) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(*) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
mythbusters failed to beat the speed camera they tried by speed alone (top gear I belive succeeded though with the one they tried and an appropirately fast supercar)
mythbusters also tried a variety or soloutions to try and obscure the number plate from cameras without making it look suspcious when a human looked at the plate (you aren't allowed to deliberately obscure your number plate in most places). All the passive soloutions got busted but a revolving number plate was found to be a workable soloution.
well assuming they are acting lawfully they will be paying for some portion of the cost of the bandwidth between thier machine and your ISPs machine. What proporition will vary depending on location and how well the ISPs are doing in peering/transit negotiations. Could be anywhere from nearly none of it to all of it.
but really that is likely to be a small part of the cost of the spam and as you say many spammers are using stolen bandwidth anyway.
yeah, a lot of real life is a bore, we do it because we have to do so in order to get money which buys us food. Sure most first world contries have some form of benefits but they are usually set at such a level that those reciving them have only enough for the bare essentials.
games are supposed to be stuff you do for enjoyment during your free time, not a second job.
afaict it is a paladin that has been currupted by the litch/scorge. A character who started as a paladin and was later turned into a death night was one of the main characters in warcraft 3.
umm there are 8760 hours in a year.
still averaging 12 hours a day of a mmorpg does not sound sane to me.
iirc you don't even really need to mod them you can just decode the encrypted stream in software.
pluto is part of the solar system, it may be a long way out but the sun is still the dominant factor in it's orbit.
I would have thought in a well organised competition you would agree on settings before you started rather than trying to optimise your settings to try and gain an unfair advantage.
What affect if any would ithave on governemnt institutions who have subscription based licenses for microsoft software? would they be allowed to renew thier subscriptions or would they be forced to port before thier current subscription expired.
Exactly! Until new hardware is being purchased it isn't a problem.
What about license subscriptions? Just because retail licenses are perpetual doesn't mean all licenses for MS software are.
look how many academic institutions are still netware dependent. I'm sure few places use it for new networks but there is still a hell of a lot of maintinance and expansion of existing networks.
Even worse in this case is a lot of MS academic and big corporate licenses are subscriptions. Therefore a block on purchases would force migration of existing systems as well as blocking expansion.