yeah, meanwhile the actual academics and students who are reliant on windows only software will be screwed. Particuarlly as universities at least in the UK get thier MS licenses on a subscription bases.
where are you planning to move to (or are you planning to give up altogether)?
Afaict what keeps people on ebay is the network effect. Sellers want to expose thier products to as many buyers as possible and buyers want to search as many sellers as possible. This is especially true for obscure items.
What I wonder is why they moved from britan to luxembourg. Was it simply a better tax situation or are there some loopholes in luxembourg banking law that they want to exploit.
also that only applies to the european branch of paypal. The US branch is afaict where most of the horror stories come from.
mind you credit/debit card companies do the same afacit and from what I can gather at least in the US money from a check can become availible to you before the check has actually finished it's way through the clearing system and the check can ultimately be rejected.
DVD looks like crap on any television with coax inputs (a significant portion of them when DVD first came out) because of Macrovision copy protection. Running the DVD player through a VHS machine to get coax outputs triggered the copy protection, and DVD players did not have coax natively. At least in the UK there were many DVD players and DVD/VCR combos with coax outputs. You could also use a playstation 2 with an original playstation RF unit (I heared a rumour that doing that also stripped the copy protection but I can't confirm that).
Actually Blu-Ray will work just fine on older televisions, although it won't look any better than DVD. But if the prices do come down it would be silly to buy a DVD when you could future-proof your collection with a Blu-Ray disc instead.
Sure once all the DVD players in the family have been replaced by blue-ray players which even if the prices become similar will take some time to happen.
I suspect DVD will continue to be supported by players for a very long time and I don't have any plans to have a large (> 30 inch) TV in the forseeable future.
I (a brit) certainly wouldn't consider a 42 inch TV small.
I'm sure for quite a few people thier newest TV is HD ready simply because there are very few LCD or plasma TVs on the market that are not HD ready and losing that big box is very attractive for many people.
But most people have older TVs too. Can blue-ray players downscale for use with a standard defintion TV? are the menus of a blue-ray disc usable on a standard defintion TV? can many people afford to replace all thier DVD players with blue-ray players and if not will they be happy to buy content they can only watch on one of thier players?
on the other hand at least in the UK when DVD prices dropped VHS prices did too so for those looking for movies cheap VHS stayed the cheaper option. I haven't tried buying movies for a while but it wouldn't surprise me if this was still the case.
secondhand boxed sets of start TV series like start trek and stargate (yeah you can record yourself but you inevitablly miss stuff and at least here in the uk it is rare for the free to view channels to show series consistantly one after the other) still seem to be much cheaper on VHS than DVD too.
there was a pen plotter design supplied with the old technic control center set which somewhat works and could probablly be adapted to add rotation sensors etc.
the big problem with lego mechanisms though is slop. If you drive your mechanism a certain number of units left and the same number right then even if you have rotation sensors on the motors you are likely to end up several millimeters off from where you started. The more complex the mechanism the worse the slop.
Wine on the other hand, or anything else that leaves a sticky residue, will kill things stone dead. The first thing to do when any water based liquid gets on electronics is remove power (generally by removing the battery).
The second thing to do if the liquid wasn't plain water is to thouroughly rinse with water. Plain tap water (distilled water would be better still but is rarely handy and time is of the essense) is far less damaging than many water based soloutions.
the third thing to do is to thouroughly dry the device. If possible dismantle it. Water stuck in nooks and crannies is bad because it can cause disrpution.
It's less a case of wanting to make a phone call while you are wet (though I can see situations where that would be usefull) and more a case of happening to have your phone with you when you happen to get soaked.
Afaict most shareholders are in it for the money. They don't give a fuck what MS does with yahoo after the deal is done.
The current board can stall, get some concessions or a slightly better price maybe, whatever but ultimately MS is offering a lot more than the pre-negotiations share price and as such this deal is going to be very hard for anyone to block.
making a commodity of the software stack means healthier margins Maybe for the whitebox vendors, for the dells etc i'm not so convinced. We don't know how much they pay for windows but you can bet it will be less than the whitebox vendors pay.
did they really use tamper proof torx rather than regular torx? tamper proof torx (with the dimple in the middle of the screw) is quite rare in my experiance.
regular torx is quite common in such equipment because it gives very good torque transfer and at least in my experiance doesn't tend to foul.
you can really feel (in how much it creaks etc) the difference in build quality between a cheap craptop and a decent laptop (macbook, thinkpad, vaio, lattitude etc).
If the case is creaking/bending that is going to be putting stress on all the circuit boards which is going to increase the failure rate.
and there are many other areas in which spending a little extra money upfront will really increase the reliability of a peice of electronic equipment that is going to be moved arround all the time (for example my old time craptop has the hard drive solidly screwed to the case, I belive my macbook has it supported by shock absorbing rubber runners).
A while ago there was a/. story listing the drive failure stats from Google's server farms. It had a seriously large sample and they had some really detailed findings. yeah, unfortunately iirc the fact it was information from a datacenter meant thier temperature vs reliability data was lacking many data points for higher temperatures.
note: in this post bandwidth will be used in it's traditional radio sense not it's recent computer industry sense.
And since you need two full cycles to transmit a single bit Maybe if you use a really old fasioned modulation scheme with a single carrier etc.
According to nyquist you can in theory get two symbols per Hz of bandwidth. In practice you can't get quite this good but techniques like QAM combined with OFDM (as used in digital TV) can get pretty close.
The number of bits you can get per symbol depends on the signal to noise ratio of the line probablly between about 3 and 7 for most practical channels.
but while your figures are off the principle is right higher data rates require higher bandwidths. If you want a gigabit per second of data rate you are going to need frequencies in the hundreds of megahertz. Plenty high enough to screw with TV and FM radio systems.
Even if you only want data rates in the megabits per second you will still have frequencies high enough to screw with some radio users.
theres a good chance that at least one other disk has problems too, and you won't be able to recover everything anyway. ISTR that about 15% of all attempts to recover a raid fail because another disk has errors, or dies during the recovery. Frankly with the way most people build thier raid arrays i'm not surprised. What do you expect to happen if you take a group of identical drives and run them under almost identical load and environmental conditions.
I would like to see stats on raid recovery failures for raids built with a strict policy to make every drive a different model. I bet they would be much lower.
Like for example, the move from one version of Microsoft Office to another? 95->97->XP->2003 didn't seem to change that much in the layout of office.
Agree with you that 2007 is a big change though and many places are very reluctant to upgrade because of that.
Or like for example, the completely different GUIs in every version of Windows?
Using vista is going to be a *lot* harder in terms of user-training for people knowledgeable of XP than using Linux would. Having used vista it felt much windows like than the linux systems i've used (admittedly I did select the clasic theme).
The concept of drive letters was still there, taskbar resizing and toolbar positioning worked in the same way. The options for the classis start menu and classic theme were in the same place. Yes with the default theme selected things looked different (and horrible IMO) but they mostly worked the same.
network config files are different between debian based and redhat based systems and the new "network manager" seems to have rewriten the rulebook yet again.
the layout of the runlevel scripts differs between distros too iirc.
MS has said they will continue security updates for windows XP until 5 years after it leaves mainstream support or 2 years after windows 7 is released whichever comes later.
I would have thought that vendors catering to enterprises will continue to support XP as long as thier customers demand it.
mixing from different batches means you've increased the odds that at least one drive fails prematurely. but decreased the odds of a second drive failure before you can get the system back upto redundant running.
Yes raid isn't a replacement for backups because there are some types of threat it doesn't protect against but that doesn't mean improving reliability isn't part of it's function (if it wasn't everyone would be using RAID 0).
1: keep the system running after a drive failure 2: protect the data that is too recent to have been caught in a backup run yet against drive failure 3: improve performance
Many people claim they are doing raid for reliability but then go and buy identical drives rather than using a mixture of different brands.
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yeah, meanwhile the actual academics and students who are reliant on windows only software will be screwed. Particuarlly as universities at least in the UK get thier MS licenses on a subscription bases.
where are you planning to move to (or are you planning to give up altogether)?
Afaict what keeps people on ebay is the network effect. Sellers want to expose thier products to as many buyers as possible and buyers want to search as many sellers as possible. This is especially true for obscure items.
What I wonder is why they moved from britan to luxembourg. Was it simply a better tax situation or are there some loopholes in luxembourg banking law that they want to exploit.
also that only applies to the european branch of paypal. The US branch is afaict where most of the horror stories come from.
mind you credit/debit card companies do the same afacit and from what I can gather at least in the US money from a check can become availible to you before the check has actually finished it's way through the clearing system and the check can ultimately be rejected.
are you counting the PS3 in players?
are most of theese HD sets big enough to appreciate teh difference between blueray and well upscaled DVD.
DVD looks like crap on any television with coax inputs (a significant portion of them when DVD first came out) because of Macrovision copy protection. Running the DVD player through a VHS machine to get coax outputs triggered the copy protection, and DVD players did not have coax natively.
At least in the UK there were many DVD players and DVD/VCR combos with coax outputs. You could also use a playstation 2 with an original playstation RF unit (I heared a rumour that doing that also stripped the copy protection but I can't confirm that).
Actually Blu-Ray will work just fine on older televisions, although it won't look any better than DVD. But if the prices do come down it would be silly to buy a DVD when you could future-proof your collection with a Blu-Ray disc instead.
Sure once all the DVD players in the family have been replaced by blue-ray players which even if the prices become similar will take some time to happen.
according to information from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iphone_sales.svg
and
http://www.mobilemonday.net/news/global-mobile-phone-sales-down-3-8-percent-in-q1
the iphone works out at less than 3% of mobile phone sales for 1Q 2008. Not bad for a newcomer but nothing compared to the big players like nokia.
I suspect DVD will continue to be supported by players for a very long time and I don't have any plans to have a large (> 30 inch) TV in the forseeable future.
I (a brit) certainly wouldn't consider a 42 inch TV small.
I'm sure for quite a few people thier newest TV is HD ready simply because there are very few LCD or plasma TVs on the market that are not HD ready and losing that big box is very attractive for many people.
But most people have older TVs too. Can blue-ray players downscale for use with a standard defintion TV? are the menus of a blue-ray disc usable on a standard defintion TV? can many people afford to replace all thier DVD players with blue-ray players and if not will they be happy to buy content they can only watch on one of thier players?
on the other hand at least in the UK when DVD prices dropped VHS prices did too so for those looking for movies cheap VHS stayed the cheaper option. I haven't tried buying movies for a while but it wouldn't surprise me if this was still the case.
secondhand boxed sets of start TV series like start trek and stargate (yeah you can record yourself but you inevitablly miss stuff and at least here in the uk it is rare for the free to view channels to show series consistantly one after the other) still seem to be much cheaper on VHS than DVD too.
there was a pen plotter design supplied with the old technic control center set which somewhat works and could probablly be adapted to add rotation sensors etc.
the big problem with lego mechanisms though is slop. If you drive your mechanism a certain number of units left and the same number right then even if you have rotation sensors on the motors you are likely to end up several millimeters off from where you started. The more complex the mechanism the worse the slop.
Wine on the other hand, or anything else that leaves a sticky residue, will kill things stone dead.
The first thing to do when any water based liquid gets on electronics is remove power (generally by removing the battery).
The second thing to do if the liquid wasn't plain water is to thouroughly rinse with water. Plain tap water (distilled water would be better still but is rarely handy and time is of the essense) is far less damaging than many water based soloutions.
the third thing to do is to thouroughly dry the device. If possible dismantle it. Water stuck in nooks and crannies is bad because it can cause disrpution.
It's less a case of wanting to make a phone call while you are wet (though I can see situations where that would be usefull) and more a case of happening to have your phone with you when you happen to get soaked.
Afaict most shareholders are in it for the money. They don't give a fuck what MS does with yahoo after the deal is done.
The current board can stall, get some concessions or a slightly better price maybe, whatever but ultimately MS is offering a lot more than the pre-negotiations share price and as such this deal is going to be very hard for anyone to block.
making a commodity of the software stack means healthier margins
Maybe for the whitebox vendors, for the dells etc i'm not so convinced. We don't know how much they pay for windows but you can bet it will be less than the whitebox vendors pay.
did they really use tamper proof torx rather than regular torx? tamper proof torx (with the dimple in the middle of the screw) is quite rare in my experiance.
regular torx is quite common in such equipment because it gives very good torque transfer and at least in my experiance doesn't tend to foul.
either way the bits aren't hard to get.
you can really feel (in how much it creaks etc) the difference in build quality between a cheap craptop and a decent laptop (macbook, thinkpad, vaio, lattitude etc).
If the case is creaking/bending that is going to be putting stress on all the circuit boards which is going to increase the failure rate.
and there are many other areas in which spending a little extra money upfront will really increase the reliability of a peice of electronic equipment that is going to be moved arround all the time (for example my old time craptop has the hard drive solidly screwed to the case, I belive my macbook has it supported by shock absorbing rubber runners).
A while ago there was a /. story listing the drive failure stats from Google's server farms. It had a seriously large sample and they had some really detailed findings.
yeah, unfortunately iirc the fact it was information from a datacenter meant thier temperature vs reliability data was lacking many data points for higher temperatures.
note: in this post bandwidth will be used in it's traditional radio sense not it's recent computer industry sense.
And since you need two full cycles to transmit a single bit
Maybe if you use a really old fasioned modulation scheme with a single carrier etc.
According to nyquist you can in theory get two symbols per Hz of bandwidth. In practice you can't get quite this good but techniques like QAM combined with OFDM (as used in digital TV) can get pretty close.
The number of bits you can get per symbol depends on the signal to noise ratio of the line probablly between about 3 and 7 for most practical channels.
but while your figures are off the principle is right higher data rates require higher bandwidths. If you want a gigabit per second of data rate you are going to need frequencies in the hundreds of megahertz. Plenty high enough to screw with TV and FM radio systems.
Even if you only want data rates in the megabits per second you will still have frequencies high enough to screw with some radio users.
theres a good chance that at least one other disk has problems too, and you won't be able to recover everything anyway. ISTR that about 15% of all attempts to recover a raid fail because another disk has errors, or dies during the recovery.
Frankly with the way most people build thier raid arrays i'm not surprised. What do you expect to happen if you take a group of identical drives and run them under almost identical load and environmental conditions.
I would like to see stats on raid recovery failures for raids built with a strict policy to make every drive a different model. I bet they would be much lower.
Like for example, the move from one version of Microsoft Office to another?
95->97->XP->2003 didn't seem to change that much in the layout of office.
Agree with you that 2007 is a big change though and many places are very reluctant to upgrade because of that.
Or like for example, the completely different GUIs in every version of Windows?
Using vista is going to be a *lot* harder in terms of user-training for people knowledgeable of XP than using Linux would.
Having used vista it felt much windows like than the linux systems i've used (admittedly I did select the clasic theme).
The concept of drive letters was still there, taskbar resizing and toolbar positioning worked in the same way. The options for the classis start menu and classic theme were in the same place. Yes with the default theme selected things looked different (and horrible IMO) but they mostly worked the same.
network config files are different between debian based and redhat based systems and the new "network manager" seems to have rewriten the rulebook yet again.
the layout of the runlevel scripts differs between distros too iirc.
MS has said they will continue security updates for windows XP until 5 years after it leaves mainstream support or 2 years after windows 7 is released whichever comes later.
I would have thought that vendors catering to enterprises will continue to support XP as long as thier customers demand it.
mixing from different batches means you've increased the odds that at least one drive fails prematurely.
but decreased the odds of a second drive failure before you can get the system back upto redundant running.
Yes raid isn't a replacement for backups because there are some types of threat it doesn't protect against but that doesn't mean improving reliability isn't part of it's function (if it wasn't everyone would be using RAID 0).
1: keep the system running after a drive failure
2: protect the data that is too recent to have been caught in a backup run yet against drive failure
3: improve performance
Many people claim they are doing raid for reliability but then go and buy identical drives rather than using a mixture of different brands.