The thing is even with all the bullshit flying is still by far the fastest and probablly the safest way of making long distance journeys. It takes days to cross the USA by road and iirc it takes over a week to cross from the USA to europe by ship.
If I were going to buy a computer, the first thing I would do once I got it is open it up and see what I could improve down the road. You don't research that before you buy?! After you have bought the machine and opened the case it is probablly a bit late to be deciding it doesn't meet your upgradability requirements.
I'd be surprised if something like msoffice actually worked after doing that. Afaict even on mac OS many larger applications need thier installers to do things to parts of the system outside the directory the app itself is in.
Now, REALISTICALLY, how much hardcore gaming are you going to do on EITHER of these systems? There is quite a gulf between those who don't play any even moderately recent 3D games and those who spend hundreds of pounds on a graphics card to play the latest games on the highest settings.
I don't know much about the particular chipsets in theese machines but my experiance is low end nvidia or ati cards (the kind that sell for arround £20) will happilly handle most games from the last few years provided you keep to reasonable settings while intel integrated graphics won't.
It depends a bit on the power of the lights chosen but afaict ordinary christmas bulbs are about 1W. Afaict household service in the UK and the USA usually means over 10KW of power availible.
Do you really think many people will want to use more than ten thousand bulbs in thier display?
800x600 = 480,000 lights - reasonable for a 4x3 display on the front of my house. Now to get the money together. Anyone have a clue as to what type of controller / interface you'd need for something like this? I If I had to design such a thing I would probablly use LEDs in 16x16 or so matricies each driven by a pic or similar. Then you need to design a system to distribute the signals to the controllers for the individual matricies. If you want monitor like refresh rates the higher levels of the control system would have to be running pretty damn fast.
Large displays of individual lighting elements are pretty damn expensive to build unfortunately. At say 2.5p or so (Price for standard 5mm red LEDs from rapid electronics) each the LEDs alone for a monochrome 800x600 display would cost £12000. Then you have the cost of getting the PCB(s) to mount them on fabricated and the costs of the control circuits on top of that.
BBC Weather doesn't give the temperature in Fahrenheit Looks like the website is in celcius by default but with a link for faranheight. I think they still announce both on the TV though I can't be bothered checking right now.
What I see is that FOSS tends to lead to freeloaders while traditional propietry commercial software tends to lead to monopolies.
Monopolies are bad because of the reasons you gave in your post.
Freeloaders are bad because they mean that the ammount spent on the project does not reflect it's value to all of it's users but only it's value to a small subset of it's users. The result as in the case of octave here is development is very slow.
If you needed a matlab feature not in octave what would make more financial sense for you to do? pay someone to add it to octave or buy a matlab license? For all but the most trivial features I suspect the latter would make more financial sense.
Any company who wants to survive will only provide services they can make a profit on.
If you want something delivered in a hurry you can still get that service but you will have to pay a lot for it because the demand is sufficiantly low that someone will have to make a special journey. The reason the demand is low is because the phone network provides similar services at higher speed and lower cost for messages and there aren't that many people sending packages that are that urgent.
That is progress, high frequency mail delivery (very labour intensive and still not very fast) replaced by telephones, telexes and later fax machines and email.
That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often! Presumablly they did it because thier was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it and there was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it because other means of communication were too expensive to be common.
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service. Yes because it doesn't make sense to do mass rounds for a service only a few people require.
Did spam make it across these networks as well? I doubt it for simple economical reasons. Theese networks were probablly more expensive to use than the postal service and unsolicited bulk messages aren't really very urgent.
CDs are 27 year old technology 25 according to wikipedia (taking their date for "first CD off the production line") but that is red book audio CD which is a special purpose format that can only store one particular audio format and has poor error correction so it isn't very relavent to a discussion of computer data storage media. Yellow book data CD is "only" 22 years old. Recordable CD is only 19 years old.
but yes CD has been a sucessfull and enduring format. So has DVD (about a decade old). In the meantime many other formats have gone through their complete life cycle. Formats that are aimed at unusually large storage capacities or other unusual markets tend to be particularlly short lived.
A filmmakers archive is going to be on high end media due to the sheer volume of data, that means it will be on a format that is relatively likely to dissapear and is likely be new enough that the media longevity is not well known.
If a film is popular enough to sell a run of pressed DVDs (a format that is both well established and has low media degredation rates) it is unlikely to be lost completely in the next decade or so and probablly longer (look how long VHS has stayed arround) but that isn't what this is about.
The bottom line is that if the studios don't do the archival job well enough some less popular films (particularlly those from before DVD took off that the studio hasn't bothered to re-release) are likely to be lost completely and for many others DVD quality may be the best that survives.
trouble is once the excitement fades films are likely to dissapear from P2P and even for those that don't the quality of films on P2P tends to be mediocre at best (the availiblity of HD rips may have changed things a bit but I bet things of DVD or lower quality still dominate).
Windows NT 4.0: 4 GB Windows 2000 Professional: 4 GB Windows 2000 Standard Server: 4 GB Windows 2000 Advanced Server: 8GB Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: 32GB Windows XP Professional: 4 GB Windows Server 2003 Web Edition: 2 GB Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition: 4 GB Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition: 32 GB Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition: 64 GB There is another article on the knowlagebase somewhere (I don't have the link to hand sorry) that clarifies those figures a bit. For the entries that say 4GB they mean 4GB of total physical address space not 4GB of ram.
I'm not sure why anyone would buy a new laptop, with a 64-bit CPU, that only came with a 32-bit OS anyway! Because all current intel/amd cpus are 64 bit capable but running a 64 bit OS is often impractical due to compatibility issues (either with the machine itself or with hardware it needs to be used with or with other software.
Vista32 doesn't require signed drivers at all and vista64 only requires that the driver maker buys a cert and signs them it does not require MS to bless each driver.
IIRC XP 32 bit (and I think vista 32 bit too) supports PAE but even with PAE on it still caps the physical address space at 4GB supposedly to avoid problems due to bad drivers (cynics would say that it was really to upsell people to server 2K3).
Is there really all that much of a premium for Apple hardware these days? The answer is it depends on what you compare it to.
If you compare PCs and mac laptops with similar specs and similar build quality the prices are pretty similar. Apple doesn't do conventional desktops so it is hard to compare prices in that arena.
If on the other hand you take your list of requirements and find a PC that meets those requirements and a mac that meets those requirements the mac can work out a lot more expensive because of the far more limited choice.
Doing a statistical analysis on a large mail archive is pretty easy, sitting there doing a similar analysis by watching the data on the wire is much harder. Not really, you just set up a box to watch the wire and add everything it sees to a large mail archive.
Except that Linux Distros are released far more frequently than Windows. Indeed, on the other hand when some hardware isn't supported out of the box things tend to be a lot more painfull in linux. Making windows driver floppies and slipstraming is well documented. Trying to build a driver floppy or a custom install CD for a linux distro is often far less well documented. For things that aren't vital during setup on windows it is a simple matter of following the manufacturers instructions on linux it requires a lot of searching and usually some command line knowlage.
This especially affects those of us who don't want thier machines on a 6 month upgrade treadmill and so use distros like debian stable, ubunutu lts and the rhel rebuilds.
sure but why would the person working there on a temp basis for low pay care too much about that? especially if they were getting bribed to put the stuff on.
It would run in 1280x1024 if you edited the config file though on the machines I tried it on 1280x1024 was unplayable and 1024x768 was only barely playable.
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The thing is even with all the bullshit flying is still by far the fastest and probablly the safest way of making long distance journeys. It takes days to cross the USA by road and iirc it takes over a week to cross from the USA to europe by ship.
If I were going to buy a computer, the first thing I would do once I got it is open it up and see what I could improve down the road.
You don't research that before you buy?! After you have bought the machine and opened the case it is probablly a bit late to be deciding it doesn't meet your upgradability requirements.
I'd be surprised if something like msoffice actually worked after doing that. Afaict even on mac OS many larger applications need thier installers to do things to parts of the system outside the directory the app itself is in.
Now, REALISTICALLY, how much hardcore gaming are you going to do on EITHER of these systems?
There is quite a gulf between those who don't play any even moderately recent 3D games and those who spend hundreds of pounds on a graphics card to play the latest games on the highest settings.
I don't know much about the particular chipsets in theese machines but my experiance is low end nvidia or ati cards (the kind that sell for arround £20) will happilly handle most games from the last few years provided you keep to reasonable settings while intel integrated graphics won't.
It depends a bit on the power of the lights chosen but afaict ordinary christmas bulbs are about 1W. Afaict household service in the UK and the USA usually means over 10KW of power availible.
Do you really think many people will want to use more than ten thousand bulbs in thier display?
800x600 = 480,000 lights - reasonable for a 4x3 display on the front of my house. Now to get the money together. Anyone have a clue as to what type of controller / interface you'd need for something like this? I
If I had to design such a thing I would probablly use LEDs in 16x16 or so matricies each driven by a pic or similar. Then you need to design a system to distribute the signals to the controllers for the individual matricies. If you want monitor like refresh rates the higher levels of the control system would have to be running pretty damn fast.
Large displays of individual lighting elements are pretty damn expensive to build unfortunately. At say 2.5p or so (Price for standard 5mm red LEDs from rapid electronics) each the LEDs alone for a monochrome 800x600 display would cost £12000. Then you have the cost of getting the PCB(s) to mount them on fabricated and the costs of the control circuits on top of that.
mmm, in that video it sounds like they aborted part way through the tune, I think I remember hearing a more complete version on top gear.
BBC Weather doesn't give the temperature in Fahrenheit
Looks like the website is in celcius by default but with a link for faranheight. I think they still announce both on the TV though I can't be bothered checking right now.
What I see is that FOSS tends to lead to freeloaders while traditional propietry commercial software tends to lead to monopolies.
Monopolies are bad because of the reasons you gave in your post.
Freeloaders are bad because they mean that the ammount spent on the project does not reflect it's value to all of it's users but only it's value to a small subset of it's users. The result as in the case of octave here is development is very slow.
If you needed a matlab feature not in octave what would make more financial sense for you to do? pay someone to add it to octave or buy a matlab license? For all but the most trivial features I suspect the latter would make more financial sense.
Any company who wants to survive will only provide services they can make a profit on.
If you want something delivered in a hurry you can still get that service but you will have to pay a lot for it because the demand is sufficiantly low that someone will have to make a special journey. The reason the demand is low is because the phone network provides similar services at higher speed and lower cost for messages and there aren't that many people sending packages that are that urgent.
That is progress, high frequency mail delivery (very labour intensive and still not very fast) replaced by telephones, telexes and later fax machines and email.
That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!
Presumablly they did it because thier was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it and there was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it because other means of communication were too expensive to be common.
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
Yes because it doesn't make sense to do mass rounds for a service only a few people require.
Did spam make it across these networks as well?
I doubt it for simple economical reasons. Theese networks were probablly more expensive to use than the postal service and unsolicited bulk messages aren't really very urgent.
CDs are 27 year old technology
25 according to wikipedia (taking their date for "first CD off the production line") but that is red book audio CD which is a special purpose format that can only store one particular audio format and has poor error correction so it isn't very relavent to a discussion of computer data storage media. Yellow book data CD is "only" 22 years old. Recordable CD is only 19 years old.
but yes CD has been a sucessfull and enduring format. So has DVD (about a decade old). In the meantime many other formats have gone through their complete life cycle. Formats that are aimed at unusually large storage capacities or other unusual markets tend to be particularlly short lived.
A filmmakers archive is going to be on high end media due to the sheer volume of data, that means it will be on a format that is relatively likely to dissapear and is likely be new enough that the media longevity is not well known.
If a film is popular enough to sell a run of pressed DVDs (a format that is both well established and has low media degredation rates) it is unlikely to be lost completely in the next decade or so and probablly longer (look how long VHS has stayed arround) but that isn't what this is about.
The bottom line is that if the studios don't do the archival job well enough some less popular films (particularlly those from before DVD took off that the studio hasn't bothered to re-release) are likely to be lost completely and for many others DVD quality may be the best that survives.
It isn't exactly free, it has patent issues which many people ignore (just like with MP3) but your right it wasn't invented by apple.
trouble is once the excitement fades films are likely to dissapear from P2P and even for those that don't the quality of films on P2P tends to be mediocre at best (the availiblity of HD rips may have changed things a bit but I bet things of DVD or lower quality still dominate).
Get an PRB (google it yourself).
neither google nor wikipedia seems to be turning up anything relavent, please tell us what you mean.
Windows NT 4.0: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Professional: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Standard Server: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Advanced Server: 8GB
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: 32GB
Windows XP Professional: 4 GB
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition: 2 GB
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition: 4 GB
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition: 32 GB
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition: 64 GB
There is another article on the knowlagebase somewhere (I don't have the link to hand sorry) that clarifies those figures a bit. For the entries that say 4GB they mean 4GB of total physical address space not 4GB of ram.
I'm not sure why anyone would buy a new laptop, with a 64-bit CPU, that only came with a 32-bit OS anyway!
Because all current intel/amd cpus are 64 bit capable but running a 64 bit OS is often impractical due to compatibility issues (either with the machine itself or with hardware it needs to be used with or with other software.
Vista32 doesn't require signed drivers at all and vista64 only requires that the driver maker buys a cert and signs them it does not require MS to bless each driver.
IIRC XP 32 bit (and I think vista 32 bit too) supports PAE but even with PAE on it still caps the physical address space at 4GB supposedly to avoid problems due to bad drivers (cynics would say that it was really to upsell people to server 2K3).
Is there really all that much of a premium for Apple hardware these days?
The answer is it depends on what you compare it to.
If you compare PCs and mac laptops with similar specs and similar build quality the prices are pretty similar. Apple doesn't do conventional desktops so it is hard to compare prices in that arena.
If on the other hand you take your list of requirements and find a PC that meets those requirements and a mac that meets those requirements the mac can work out a lot more expensive because of the far more limited choice.
Doing a statistical analysis on a large mail archive is pretty easy, sitting there doing a similar analysis by watching the data on the wire is much harder.
Not really, you just set up a box to watch the wire and add everything it sees to a large mail archive.
If you have to reinstall windows that often you are doing something seriously wrong.
Except that Linux Distros are released far more frequently than Windows.
Indeed, on the other hand when some hardware isn't supported out of the box things tend to be a lot more painfull in linux. Making windows driver floppies and slipstraming is well documented. Trying to build a driver floppy or a custom install CD for a linux distro is often far less well documented. For things that aren't vital during setup on windows it is a simple matter of following the manufacturers instructions on linux it requires a lot of searching and usually some command line knowlage.
This especially affects those of us who don't want thier machines on a 6 month upgrade treadmill and so use distros like debian stable, ubunutu lts and the rhel rebuilds.
sure but why would the person working there on a temp basis for low pay care too much about that? especially if they were getting bribed to put the stuff on.
It would run in 1280x1024 if you edited the config file though on the machines I tried it on 1280x1024 was unplayable and 1024x768 was only barely playable.