Chances are that the private sector would have utilized the precious bandwidth a lot more efficiently than the government has Maybe but I somewhat doubt it unless there was only one broadcaster in a given area.
The underlying problem is you have a tradeoff between bandwidth efficiancy and backwards compatibility. When TV was being designed limitations of the availible technology means that the entire picture had to be sent every frame in a form in which it could be sent immmediately to the TV tube.
Once a standard is established but there are better methods availible you get into a first mover problem, the first station to move to a new more efficiant transmission method would lose huge ammounts of viewership, probablly enough to make the move not viable. On the other hand a government can make all the broadcasters change at once freeing up the bandwidth for more profitable uses while not disadvantaging any particular broadcaster.
Afaict you can already get BBC HD and ITV HD and quite a few SD channels (including all regional variants of the BBC and ITV) free and unencrypted on digital sattalite. That site doesn't make it clear what they are really launching, maybe some extra channels or a new marketing name.
The problem with digital satalite is the installation cost, because there are four ways the LNB can be set by the receiver distributing programs from one dish to multiple tuners is far more of a pain that with digital terrestrial (for up to four tuners you use a quad LNB with seperate cablees to each receiver, for more you use a quattro LNB and a multiswitch with FOUR cables from the dish to the multiswitch and then seperate cables to each tuner from the multiswitch).
I don't know what it is like in the US but here in the UK there are quite a few lower end LCD TVs arround that do not have a built in digital terrestrial tuner.
However the boxes are so cheap that it isn't really a problem. What is more of a problem is that digital doesn't fail gradually. Without a signal strength and quality meter (which some boxes have built in but many don't) it is very hard to tell if your changes to the ariel setup are making things better or worse.
Apple don't offer the mac pro with 32GB of ram but by all accounts it handles it fine (which is not surprising given that it is essentially server class hardware in an unusual physical layout) and there is at least one vendor selling 4GB modules with suitable heatsinks (the mac pro has less agressive fan cooling than most server boxes so the heatsinks need to be bigger).
The mac pro is much cheaper than the xserver for basically the same hardware and probablly quieter too. Unless space is at a premium it seems like the more sensible choice. The mac pro is also availible with dual quad core processors whereas the xserve isn't.
Also many matlab users are in universities, they won't be paying anything like list price for matlab and will probablly have a central pool of matlab licenses that anyone from the university can use.
driver support for major PC components is pretty good afaict. Driver support for crappy consumer perhiperals isn't but most of the time people don't need to use those on thier heavy number crunching machines.
Umm the intel processors built into a riser card were the pentium 2 and it's associated xeon variant and the early celeron and P3. Not the original pentium.
Pretty much like a Toshiba Libretto to the point that I wouldn't buy an Eee because I already have a Libretto. Ok now lets suppose your libretto breaks beyond repair in the near future would you:
* buy an EEEPC? * buy a secondhand libretto? * buy some other ultraportable laptop? * give up on having an ultraportable laptop?
The way I see it a new EEEPC plus a whitebox OEM copy of XP pro and a 8 gig SD card is a little lower spec than a secondhand 2005 libretto (the last of the librettos) but also much cheaper (about $700 for the EEPC plus whitebox OEM XP pro plus the 8 gig SD card, about double that for a "refurbished" libretto U105 on ebay though you could probablly do better by shopping arround), a bit lighter, with solid state storage and a better warranty (the refurbished librettos only come with a 6 month warranty and being "direct from japan" I wonder how hard that warranty will be to excercise in the west.
It has been their claim since 6.06 was released. I'm sure i've seen people ask and get the opposite answer and i've certainly never seen anything that looked like an official statement either way.
If ubuntu is serious about going beyond thier ricer and newbie roots they need to get information about what support is availible and what upgrade paths will be supported up in a prominant location on thier website. I just clicked the documentation link on thier site and neither the "Version and Release Numbers" page nor the "backing and support page" even mentioned that lts releases existed.
If it was indeed thier plan all along like a developer in that thread claims then they haven't done a very good job of communicating this vital point to thier userbase and I don't think they have officially committed to doing it. When we have either an official promise to do it for every release or at least it done consistantly for a couple of LTS releases then it will mean something significant.
Regardless of that detail though it is IMO unwise to trust an organisation to deliver in ways they have never delivered before. It is even more unwise to trust promises of a 5 year support lifetime from a company that is less than 4 years old.
IMO the big test for ubuntu will be the wake of the release of 10.04 lts. They will then have to support 3 lts releases (dapper on servers only) and two non LTS releases at the same time. If they can support them all to an acceptable level then thier LTS plan will have been a success. Until then it must be regarded as an untested plan.
First there are simple wiring adaptors, theese are usally recognisable by being very small and only having a single PS2 port. Theese only work if the device supports both PS2 and USB but has the wrong plug for what you want.
Then there are converters that do implement PS2 to USB conversion but play fast and loose with the specs of the PS2 interface in one way or another presumablly to save cost (there are lots of ways in which this can be wrong e.g. wrong supply voltage to device, wrong imput tresholds, wrong output voltage on signal lines, insufficiant current drive on outputs, bugs in the software and so on). This type of converter usually has two sockets one each for keyboard and mouse and is usually built into a Y cable of some form.
I would guess that by your "university program" you mean MSDNAA and reading the EULA for that seems to indicate that by using it as your main desktop OS you would be in breach unless you only used your machine for academic work on software related courses (like hell anyone does that). If so you would come under the category of people using MSDN software outside of thier MSDN agreement that I mentioned.
ok good to know, thats completely different from every other n series device I could find and they don't seem to exactly promote this major difference form the rest of the range. Does the system come with compilers that run at a usable speed or do you have to cross compile? (in my experiance cross compiling is usually a pita).
IMO the most important examples of things that run on i386 and amd64 linux but not generally on other linux architectures are 1: flash 2: java appletts 3: wine
Also there is the issue of distro support. If you watch the bugtracker for say debian you very often see build failures or other issues that don't get debugged because of lack of access to the architectures in question. There is also always the risk that the distro will drop your architecture (as happened to m68k in debian recently) or move to a different ABI leaving no easy upgrade path (as looks likely to happen to arm in debian in the not too distant future).
Finally with the EEEPC you do always have the option of putting windows on it if the software you need doesn't have a linux version and doesn't work acceptably under wine.
does the US not have unfair dismissal laws that would cover this sort of organised plan to get rid of particular employees while ignoring that same behaviour in others?
I honestly think that title belongs to the Nokia N810 tablet. The thing is the N810 is not a PC. It uses an arm based processor and afaict the OS it runs is locked to be symbian.
IMO the EEEPC comes into much the same niche as the old toshiba libretto. Ideal for those who have to use a PC because of software support (i386/amd64 linux has much better support for propietry software than linux on any other architecture and there is always the option of putting windows on this thing) but aren't too bothered about performance and want as small a form factor as possible.
I suspect the vast majority of people who run server 2K3 as their desktop OS are either pirating it or at the very least using MSDN software outside the terms of the MSDN EULA. Server 2K3 would be prohibitively expensive for use as a desktop OS.
As for why they do it some claim it is more stable. Some probablly want the server features (e.g. multiple terminal services sessions at once). Some probablly want the support for more processors or ram (32 bit server editions of windows have supported enabled for more than 4GB of physical address space, 32 bit desktop editions don't). Some like the fact that the default configuration is far more locked down and so on.
4: give up on FLOSS and buy a propietry product that can do what you want now for a price you can afford.
Supporting a FLOSS project that does not yet replace a propietry product for you in the hope it will someday is not generally a good investment of your rescources unless you have a huge number of licenses to amortise those costs over.
The RHEL rebuilds are a solid choice IMO (i'm not so convinced about fedora, it is basically a playground for redhat), switching from one rebuild to another should be trivial and rhel itself isn't going to dissapear any time soon.
Debian is also a solid choice IMO for but for different reasons, the project is so damn huge and has been going so damn long that the chances of it dying are pretty damn slim. Debian users do have to accept that release schedules may be erratic and they will have to upgrade soonish after each release though.
Ubuntu is young, they haven't had a complete LTS cycle yet (LTS is supposed to be supported for 3 years on desktops and 5 on servers but would you really trust those figures when the first LTS release). Also afaict they haven't clearly committed to an easy upgrade path from one LTS release to the next (going via every intervening version does not count as an easy upgrade path, neither does reinstalling). Also last I heared they were still financially dependent on shuttleworth propping them up.
OSS gives you some options that don't exist with propietry software (pay someone to fix it, move to a differnt system distro or a differnet fork of an application) but ultimately they are last resort options and no replacement for choosing a stable and proven distro and running stable and proven applications.
What sort of authorization system do you expect Apple to set up? I would expect something like nokias setup. Basic capabilities maybe availible to anyone. More "risky" stuff availible to developers to use on thier own phone through IMEI locked devcerts and with an official signature/test process required for release.
Well they're *supposedly* opening up 3rd party apps next year when they release a real SDK. I guess only time will tell. My guess is we will end up with something like what the symbian based nokia phones do now.
The symbian way is that there is a system of capabilities, you must declare what capabilities you use at build time and you must sign your package. The application installer checks both the certificate and the capabilites and decides whether to install or not.
The most basic capabilities can be used with a self signed cert provided the user sets an option to allow it in the phones settings. The next level of capabilities are availible pretty freely to developers but you have to get your app approved to release it (the developer certs are IMEI locked to stop you just releasing apps signed with a devcert). Above that the capabilities get progressively harder to get until you get to ones only the phone manufacturers can touch.
Nokia also lets networks that resell thier phones change the rules (some set up the phones not to allow self signed apps at all) though the phones can I belive be reflashed back to nokia standard firmware. Hopefully apple will be able to avoid going down that road.
Afiact it is quite normal for acronyms to take on a meaning more specific than the words they stand for. HTML reffers specifically to the particular hypertext markup language used on the world wide web not to the concept of hypertext markup languages in general. CSS and XML similarlly. FTP reffers not to the general concept of a file transfer protocol but to one specific file transfer protocol and so on.
The ms winhlp source format (the old one before they went over to html) could be considered a markup language for hypertext but it is not HTML. Similarlly a mac can be considered a personal computer but it is not a PC.
Using Windows on a device like that just doesn't make sense. I strongly disagree with you there. Having your normal software on a machine that is almost getting down into the large PDA size range (amazon say 2lbs which is less than a kilo) is IMO worth a lot. Wine is still far from perfect and running a full VM on a machine with theese specs is likely a bad idea.
I very much doubt XP will be unacceptably slow on this thing (unless you load it down with crap like norton) it's CPU is THREE TIMES microsofts reccomended minimum and it's ram is FOUR TIMES microsofts reccomendation. Disk space could be an issue but a large SD card should fix that for the most part if you are disciplined about keeping as little as possible on c: .
Except nobody's forced to use a "big name linux desktop", and in this case they're not, so that doesn't really matter. Last time I tried ICEWM (which is what they are using here) I found it very unfriendly, no desktop icons, no integrated filebrowser, a difficult to edit menu and so on. I haven't tried the middleweight desktops like XFCE though.
The asus eeepc site doesn't seem to have much information on the software load, do you have any good links?
ubuntu releases every six months BUT three out of four of those releases have a short support life and are aimed at those who want/need to be on the bleeding edge. One release in four is supported for a much longer period (3 years on the desktop 5 on the server).
The problem as I understand it is that the current KDE situation has put ubuntu in a tight spot, they either totally rip up thier release schedule (which would not be a good thing for their acceptance in the enterprise), they pay people to do a lot of support work for a non default desktop (which would probblly be a lot of money spent for little gain) or they don't provide long term support for use of KDE with hardy.
half a gig of ram is easilly enough for XP to run pretty smoothly provided it is not loaded down with crap. The CPU is slow by todays standards but not that slow by the standards of when XP came out.
The impression I get is that the big name linux desktops (kde and gnome) are just as bloated if not more so than XP.
That would put most of the country on track with replacing their TV in the last 6 years. You are making the (IMO crazy) assumption that most households only have one TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are that the private sector would have utilized the precious bandwidth a lot more efficiently than the government has
Maybe but I somewhat doubt it unless there was only one broadcaster in a given area.
The underlying problem is you have a tradeoff between bandwidth efficiancy and backwards compatibility. When TV was being designed limitations of the availible technology means that the entire picture had to be sent every frame in a form in which it could be sent immmediately to the TV tube.
Once a standard is established but there are better methods availible you get into a first mover problem, the first station to move to a new more efficiant transmission method would lose huge ammounts of viewership, probablly enough to make the move not viable. On the other hand a government can make all the broadcasters change at once freeing up the bandwidth for more profitable uses while not disadvantaging any particular broadcaster.
Afaict you can already get BBC HD and ITV HD and quite a few SD channels (including all regional variants of the BBC and ITV) free and unencrypted on digital sattalite. That site doesn't make it clear what they are really launching, maybe some extra channels or a new marketing name.
The problem with digital satalite is the installation cost, because there are four ways the LNB can be set by the receiver distributing programs from one dish to multiple tuners is far more of a pain that with digital terrestrial (for up to four tuners you use a quad LNB with seperate cablees to each receiver, for more you use a quattro LNB and a multiswitch with FOUR cables from the dish to the multiswitch and then seperate cables to each tuner from the multiswitch).
I don't know what it is like in the US but here in the UK there are quite a few lower end LCD TVs arround that do not have a built in digital terrestrial tuner.
However the boxes are so cheap that it isn't really a problem. What is more of a problem is that digital doesn't fail gradually. Without a signal strength and quality meter (which some boxes have built in but many don't) it is very hard to tell if your changes to the ariel setup are making things better or worse.
Apple don't offer the mac pro with 32GB of ram but by all accounts it handles it fine (which is not surprising given that it is essentially server class hardware in an unusual physical layout) and there is at least one vendor selling 4GB modules with suitable heatsinks (the mac pro has less agressive fan cooling than most server boxes so the heatsinks need to be bigger).
The mac pro is much cheaper than the xserver for basically the same hardware and probablly quieter too. Unless space is at a premium it seems like the more sensible choice. The mac pro is also availible with dual quad core processors whereas the xserve isn't.
He probablly already has the matlab license.
Also many matlab users are in universities, they won't be paying anything like list price for matlab and will probablly have a central pool of matlab licenses that anyone from the university can use.
driver support for major PC components is pretty good afaict. Driver support for crappy consumer perhiperals isn't but most of the time people don't need to use those on thier heavy number crunching machines.
Umm the intel processors built into a riser card were the pentium 2 and it's associated xeon variant and the early celeron and P3. Not the original pentium.
Pretty much like a Toshiba Libretto to the point that I wouldn't buy an Eee because I already have a Libretto.
Ok now lets suppose your libretto breaks beyond repair in the near future would you:
* buy an EEEPC?
* buy a secondhand libretto?
* buy some other ultraportable laptop?
* give up on having an ultraportable laptop?
The way I see it a new EEEPC plus a whitebox OEM copy of XP pro and a 8 gig SD card is a little lower spec than a secondhand 2005 libretto (the last of the librettos) but also much cheaper (about $700 for the EEPC plus whitebox OEM XP pro plus the 8 gig SD card, about double that for a "refurbished" libretto U105 on ebay though you could probablly do better by shopping arround), a bit lighter, with solid state storage and a better warranty (the refurbished librettos only come with a 6 month warranty and being "direct from japan" I wonder how hard that warranty will be to excercise in the west.
It has been their claim since 6.06 was released.
I'm sure i've seen people ask and get the opposite answer and i've certainly never seen anything that looked like an official statement either way.
If ubuntu is serious about going beyond thier ricer and newbie roots they need to get information about what support is availible and what upgrade paths will be supported up in a prominant location on thier website. I just clicked the documentation link on thier site and neither the "Version and Release Numbers" page nor the "backing and support page" even mentioned that lts releases existed.
If it was indeed thier plan all along like a developer in that thread claims then they haven't done a very good job of communicating this vital point to thier userbase and I don't think they have officially committed to doing it. When we have either an official promise to do it for every release or at least it done consistantly for a couple of LTS releases then it will mean something significant.
Regardless of that detail though it is IMO unwise to trust an organisation to deliver in ways they have never delivered before. It is even more unwise to trust promises of a 5 year support lifetime from a company that is less than 4 years old.
IMO the big test for ubuntu will be the wake of the release of 10.04 lts. They will then have to support 3 lts releases (dapper on servers only) and two non LTS releases at the same time. If they can support them all to an acceptable level then thier LTS plan will have been a success. Until then it must be regarded as an untested plan.
There are different types of converter
First there are simple wiring adaptors, theese are usally recognisable by being very small and only having a single PS2 port. Theese only work if the device supports both PS2 and USB but has the wrong plug for what you want.
Then there are converters that do implement PS2 to USB conversion but play fast and loose with the specs of the PS2 interface in one way or another presumablly to save cost (there are lots of ways in which this can be wrong e.g. wrong supply voltage to device, wrong imput tresholds, wrong output voltage on signal lines, insufficiant current drive on outputs, bugs in the software and so on). This type of converter usually has two sockets one each for keyboard and mouse and is usually built into a Y cable of some form.
I would guess that by your "university program" you mean MSDNAA and reading the EULA for that seems to indicate that by using it as your main desktop OS you would be in breach unless you only used your machine for academic work on software related courses (like hell anyone does that). If so you would come under the category of people using MSDN software outside of thier MSDN agreement that I mentioned.
ok good to know, thats completely different from every other n series device I could find and they don't seem to exactly promote this major difference form the rest of the range. Does the system come with compilers that run at a usable speed or do you have to cross compile? (in my experiance cross compiling is usually a pita).
IMO the most important examples of things that run on i386 and amd64 linux but not generally on other linux architectures are
1: flash
2: java appletts
3: wine
Also there is the issue of distro support. If you watch the bugtracker for say debian you very often see build failures or other issues that don't get debugged because of lack of access to the architectures in question. There is also always the risk that the distro will drop your architecture (as happened to m68k in debian recently) or move to a different ABI leaving no easy upgrade path (as looks likely to happen to arm in debian in the not too distant future).
Finally with the EEEPC you do always have the option of putting windows on it if the software you need doesn't have a linux version and doesn't work acceptably under wine.
does the US not have unfair dismissal laws that would cover this sort of organised plan to get rid of particular employees while ignoring that same behaviour in others?
I honestly think that title belongs to the Nokia N810 tablet.
The thing is the N810 is not a PC. It uses an arm based processor and afaict the OS it runs is locked to be symbian.
IMO the EEEPC comes into much the same niche as the old toshiba libretto. Ideal for those who have to use a PC because of software support (i386/amd64 linux has much better support for propietry software than linux on any other architecture and there is always the option of putting windows on this thing) but aren't too bothered about performance and want as small a form factor as possible.
I suspect the vast majority of people who run server 2K3 as their desktop OS are either pirating it or at the very least using MSDN software outside the terms of the MSDN EULA. Server 2K3 would be prohibitively expensive for use as a desktop OS.
As for why they do it some claim it is more stable. Some probablly want the server features (e.g. multiple terminal services sessions at once). Some probablly want the support for more processors or ram (32 bit server editions of windows have supported enabled for more than 4GB of physical address space, 32 bit desktop editions don't). Some like the fact that the default configuration is far more locked down and so on.
4: give up on FLOSS and buy a propietry product that can do what you want now for a price you can afford.
Supporting a FLOSS project that does not yet replace a propietry product for you in the hope it will someday is not generally a good investment of your rescources unless you have a huge number of licenses to amortise those costs over.
The RHEL rebuilds are a solid choice IMO (i'm not so convinced about fedora, it is basically a playground for redhat), switching from one rebuild to another should be trivial and rhel itself isn't going to dissapear any time soon.
Debian is also a solid choice IMO for but for different reasons, the project is so damn huge and has been going so damn long that the chances of it dying are pretty damn slim. Debian users do have to accept that release schedules may be erratic and they will have to upgrade soonish after each release though.
Ubuntu is young, they haven't had a complete LTS cycle yet (LTS is supposed to be supported for 3 years on desktops and 5 on servers but would you really trust those figures when the first LTS release). Also afaict they haven't clearly committed to an easy upgrade path from one LTS release to the next (going via every intervening version does not count as an easy upgrade path, neither does reinstalling). Also last I heared they were still financially dependent on shuttleworth propping them up.
OSS gives you some options that don't exist with propietry software (pay someone to fix it, move to a differnt system distro or a differnet fork of an application) but ultimately they are last resort options and no replacement for choosing a stable and proven distro and running stable and proven applications.
What sort of authorization system do you expect Apple to set up?
I would expect something like nokias setup. Basic capabilities maybe availible to anyone. More "risky" stuff availible to developers to use on thier own phone through IMEI locked devcerts and with an official signature/test process required for release.
Well they're *supposedly* opening up 3rd party apps next year when they release a real SDK. I guess only time will tell.
My guess is we will end up with something like what the symbian based nokia phones do now.
The symbian way is that there is a system of capabilities, you must declare what capabilities you use at build time and you must sign your package. The application installer checks both the certificate and the capabilites and decides whether to install or not.
The most basic capabilities can be used with a self signed cert provided the user sets an option to allow it in the phones settings. The next level of capabilities are availible pretty freely to developers but you have to get your app approved to release it (the developer certs are IMEI locked to stop you just releasing apps signed with a devcert). Above that the capabilities get progressively harder to get until you get to ones only the phone manufacturers can touch.
Nokia also lets networks that resell thier phones change the rules (some set up the phones not to allow self signed apps at all) though the phones can I belive be reflashed back to nokia standard firmware. Hopefully apple will be able to avoid going down that road.
Afiact it is quite normal for acronyms to take on a meaning more specific than the words they stand for. HTML reffers specifically to the particular hypertext markup language used on the world wide web not to the concept of hypertext markup languages in general. CSS and XML similarlly. FTP reffers not to the general concept of a file transfer protocol but to one specific file transfer protocol and so on.
The ms winhlp source format (the old one before they went over to html) could be considered a markup language for hypertext but it is not HTML. Similarlly a mac can be considered a personal computer but it is not a PC.
Using Windows on a device like that just doesn't make sense.
I strongly disagree with you there. Having your normal software on a machine that is almost getting down into the large PDA size range (amazon say 2lbs which is less than a kilo) is IMO worth a lot. Wine is still far from perfect and running a full VM on a machine with theese specs is likely a bad idea.
I very much doubt XP will be unacceptably slow on this thing (unless you load it down with crap like norton) it's CPU is THREE TIMES microsofts reccomended minimum and it's ram is FOUR TIMES microsofts reccomendation. Disk space could be an issue but a large SD card should fix that for the most part if you are disciplined about keeping as little as possible on c: .
Except nobody's forced to use a "big name linux desktop", and in this case they're not, so that doesn't really matter.
Last time I tried ICEWM (which is what they are using here) I found it very unfriendly, no desktop icons, no integrated filebrowser, a difficult to edit menu and so on. I haven't tried the middleweight desktops like XFCE though.
The asus eeepc site doesn't seem to have much information on the software load, do you have any good links?
ubuntu releases every six months BUT three out of four of those releases have a short support life and are aimed at those who want/need to be on the bleeding edge. One release in four is supported for a much longer period (3 years on the desktop 5 on the server).
The problem as I understand it is that the current KDE situation has put ubuntu in a tight spot, they either totally rip up thier release schedule (which would not be a good thing for their acceptance in the enterprise), they pay people to do a lot of support work for a non default desktop (which would probblly be a lot of money spent for little gain) or they don't provide long term support for use of KDE with hardy.
half a gig of ram is easilly enough for XP to run pretty smoothly provided it is not loaded down with crap. The CPU is slow by todays standards but not that slow by the standards of when XP came out.
The impression I get is that the big name linux desktops (kde and gnome) are just as bloated if not more so than XP.
That would put most of the country on track with replacing their TV in the last 6 years.
You are making the (IMO crazy) assumption that most households only have one TV.