And yet, still many people seem to be very opposed to it... The problem with digital TV is it doesn't degrade gracefully, you get a perfect picture down to a certain signal strength/quality and then bit error rate exceeds what the forward error correction can handle and the picture breaks up. There is no middle ground of a fuzzy but watchable picture like there is with analog TV.
The net result of this is that you can easilly end up with a setup where the picture looks perfect most of the time but every so often weather or the set top box getting hot (which makes the radio circuits in it noisier) it becomes unwatchable. Such problems are very hard for a layperson to troubleshoot.
The publics opinion of digital is made even worse by the fact that sometimes some of the mux's are broadcast outside of the normal band for the area and so don't come down very well on an old fassioned narrowband antenna. Generally this only affects the digitial only channels and it is likely to improve after the analog switch off but most people are unlikely to realise this especially when noone even tries to explain what a mux is or even that muxes exist to them (a mux is a group of channels multiplexed together digitially and then modulated for transmission in a frequency band the same bandwidth as an analog TV channel).
It's not quite as bad as it used to be, now some set top boxes are shipping with built in signal strength and quality meters and indicate which channels are on which frequency so you can get some idea of how much margin you have but it can still be a
It doesn't for the same reason XP doesn't - compatibility and reliability. *LOTS* of low-end consumer hardware (and/or drivers) breaks on systems running in PAE mode. Is there some way to enable it anyway and if not how do you know what it breaks?
IMO what is really needed is an OS that is mainly 32 bit but with support for more memory and running 64 bit apps. Sort of like win32s allowed you to run 32 bit apps on 16 bit windows. I don't know how feasible this is with the amd64 architecture though. ~~~~
Virtually every machine sold today is 64 bit capable. 1 gig of ram is now standard with 2 gigs not unusual and more reasonablly common so the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.
The problem is this time round MS hasn't released a transition OS. They expect everyone who want's to run a 64 bit apps to have 64 bit drivers for everything. Right now for most people the pain isn't worth the gain but as software bloat and game graphics sizes continue to rise eventually people will have to bite the bullet. MS has made the transition even more painfull by enforcing signed drivers in win64.
That price was inclusive of VAT (our eqivilent of sales tax) and not from the very cheapest supplier arround but your right we brits do tend to pay a bit more.
Using figures from newegg I get $139.99 vs $286.99, not quite as bad as my british example but still a lot more than the $20 alledged by the post I originally replied to.
1. Power down.
2. Remove battery.
3. Undo three screws.
At least in my case one of theese was very tight nessecitating using pliers to turn the jewlers screwdriver.
4. Lift out thin bit of metal held in place by said screws.
5. Pull the convenient tab attached to the hard drive.
6. Lift hard drive out of battery compartment.
7. Find a torx screwdriver of just the right size 8. unscrew the hard drive from the carrier
Theese last two steps are for some odd reason ommitted from apples guide, maybe they planned to sell hard drives already mounted up for the macbook but I can't find any such drives on thier website.
Reverse the procedure using the new hard drive and I'm done. bearing in mind that the HDD/ram shield has some padding on it which makes it awkward to get back into the right position.
but yeah it's not too bad by laptop standards.
However if you want to replace the hdd in a macbook pro or and old style iBook it's much harder.
If you play around with your xorg.conf monitor settings, be ye warned that over-clocking it can also fry a CRT monitor Monitors have had protection circuits for years to stop this sort of thing happening. Maybe if you are using a 386 or 486 era monitor this is true but it isn't for modern kit.
I can't say i've ever heared of a plain wireless AP being reffered to as a router by anyone in the know.
I always take router to mean anything that routes packets between two or more subnets. A home router certainly fits this definion as does a big enterprise box.
A Euro is about as likely as a US Dollar in the UK. No it isn't, I live in the UK and I don't think i've ever seen a US dollar coin or note (i've seen pictures of them and I may have seen them in displays but not seen them actually in use as currency) but not so long ago I found a 5 eurocent coin in my wallet. I don't know for sure where it came from but I expect someone thought it was a penny when giving change. My family (who visit europe from time to time) also tend to have some euros arround the house for trips to the continent.
I've seen windows crash and boil the CPU before (thankfully not fatally). If a system doesn't contain hardware protections against overheating (preferablly two thesholds, one for fans full and one for emergency shutoff) them IMO the design is defective.
But don't blame the retailer (in spite of the suckage) because the manufacturer is the one that screwed you. The retailer just was unfortunate enough to be the messenger. We are talking about PC World, probablly the biggest computer chain in the UK. They have more than enough influence to make thier suppliers behave if they want to and the only way to make them do that is to make them face up to thier obligations under UK consumer protection laws.
1: simple serial number but if you leak it then it will get blocked in the next update. 2: online activation (preferablly with the ability for IT to generate single activation keys from thier volume license, to deactivate machines that they belive were installed without permission to free up the licenses and to restrict the IP ranges from which activation on a key is possible) 3: internal license server doing the same as above but under thier control.
For options 2 and 3 I would also add in an emergency mode which would increase the licenses by 50% for say a month while they sort out purchasing more from you.
As others have said you can't stop the determined crackers all you can do is try and stop casual piracy (defined here as illegally copying software without the help of a cracker or cracking group).
matlab is from mathworks not macromedia and i'm pretty sure you can get nodelocked licenses that don't require a license server. If you really need matlab on the road then your company shouldn't have bought a floating license for you.
Windows XP corp and big brand OEM don't need activation either and even whitebox OEM and retail can be phone activated.
Dell typically uses crappy mainboards, and the expandability is highly limited. I don't have huge expansion requirements, just the ability to drop in extra ram (though admittedly the 3-4GB barrier is causing some complications in this area with all but the highest end machines but that is a temporary problemt that will blow over in time and it affects the lower end macs too) replace the graphics card when a new game comes out or add another hard drive, maybe add a second network adaptor. Most PCs (including dells) that I have seen allow for this. You do see the odd machine without a suitable AGP or PCI express x16 graphics card slot (btw if you are desperate you can get nvidia and ati cards in PCI and PCI express X1 though I don't know how they compare to thier AGP and larger PCI express counterparts) but in my experiance they are the exception not the rule even with suppliers like dell.
Even ignoring the issue of exapandability and kvm switches (which I firmly belive more people would use if the non geeks realised they existed and weren't obscenely expensive anymore) who really wants to lug arround a 20 or 24 inch screen just to take thier machine to the local geek to sort out some software problem? who really wants to take thier whole PC rig back to the manufacturer just because of a screen problem?
All in one machines have failed to take off many times. I strongly suspect the only reason apple gets away with it is that some people feel they must have a mac and the iMac is apples only midrange desktop.
They've had segementation between home/basic PC and office/workstation versions of windows since the releases of windows NT, it's just with XP they unified the codebases and therefore had to do the crippling of the home version on purpose for the first time.
My main criteria for a midrange desktop machine are reasonable graphics (e.g. low end nvidia/ati, not the intel crap), some expansion room and the ability to be put on a KVM switch (i'm not going to get rid of all my existing machines and I can't afford the desk space for more than one screen, especially ones as big as those on the current iMac lineup). The mini is totally unsitable for gaming because of lack of graphics and has no expansion room. The iMac has a built in monitor and no expansion room. Both fail two out of three of my criteria.
The pro is a monster of a machine built out of server class hardware with a price tag to match (though admittely not quite as bad as the $5000 the post you replied to quoted.. Worse it takes special ram (FB-DIMM with a special heat spreader to account for the fact that the case has less agressive cooling than most server cases) and only comes with a stingy 1GB by default.
To summerise apple forces you to go to thier top of the range desktop line just to get features that are standard in the PC world.
The difference in price is about $20.00 (at least that was the average difference between retail and oem copies of XP). Well looking at the source I normally buy from
windows XP pro whitebox OEM: £81.62 windows XP pro retail: £231.51 windows XP pro whitebox OEM 3 pack: £238.84
so for a shade more than the cost of one copy of retail I can get three copies of whitebox OEM. The big brand OEMs apparently pay even less though hard figures on what exactly they pay are not public. Upgrades are similar in price to whitebox OEM but you really aren't supposed to use them without a legit license to upgrade from (though they don't really do anything to enforce that beyond checking that you have the media for some prior version)
Only the big brand OEM version is motherboard locked and even then from what I have heared you can install with a whitebox OEM CD and your big brand OEM key then activate over the phone. I don't know if they are more stingy on activations with whitebox OEM than retail though.
I know people will say, "Well, we'll encrypt the message", but when my phone is a man in the middle, good luck transfering the key without me finding a way to get it. Assuming you have a central auth server it's pretty easy, the phones can be hardcoded with the public key of the auth server. The auth server can then securely provide the public key associated with a phone number.
Without the auth server you would have to resort to reffering to phones by thier public keys which may be a bit unweildy but is probablly feasible with a well put together phone book system.
Sometimes you may not even have access to the actual data files, for example with databases you will usually not be able to get at the raw binary files and will instead have to make a dump. Dumps can be very slow to make and are not without problems of thier own (sometimes A database will let you store something in a field that it cannot correctly store in the default dump format).
Sometimes you may not have enough disk space quota to make a tarball on the account.
Sometimes you may be able to make the tarball but find it very difficult to get it on to storage that is not under your hosting providers control.
Sometimes people just trust that when thier provider claims they are backing up that is better than anything they could do themselves.
A big problem I see with running an audit service is critical mass, doing financial checkups takes time/money and some types of audit require either a lot of cooperation from the company being audited or the use of force.
So you need either the backing of an organisation that can use force (which in practical terms means the government unless the mafia wants to get into ISP auditing) or the cooperation of the hosting provider (which requires you to have enough of a reputation that they are prepared to take the hassle of the audit in exchange for having your approval). The only way I can see such a thing getting started without governemnt intervention would be for the higher quality providers to get together and start one.
Ha...most companies pay the host to provide the backups. It is cheaper to have the host do it in the long run, since the good hosts will keep off site copies with a data storage facility provider. Sort of a worry free package. Until something like this happens.
The other big problem with flywheel batteries is failure. If the complicated superconducting bearing and vacum systems fail the energy could be released very rapidly. Add to that the fact that for maximum energy density the flywheel is probablly on the brink of flying apart and the potential for carnage is obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
in the uk digital TV decoder boxes are already less than that
http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999558/Nr.99.aspx?Ns=P_SORT_Price&btnResultSort.x=519&btnResultSort.y=208
And yet, still many people seem to be very opposed to it...
The problem with digital TV is it doesn't degrade gracefully, you get a perfect picture down to a certain signal strength/quality and then bit error rate exceeds what the forward error correction can handle and the picture breaks up. There is no middle ground of a fuzzy but watchable picture like there is with analog TV.
The net result of this is that you can easilly end up with a setup where the picture looks perfect most of the time but every so often weather or the set top box getting hot (which makes the radio circuits in it noisier) it becomes unwatchable. Such problems are very hard for a layperson to troubleshoot.
The publics opinion of digital is made even worse by the fact that sometimes some of the mux's are broadcast outside of the normal band for the area and so don't come down very well on an old fassioned narrowband antenna. Generally this only affects the digitial only channels and it is likely to improve after the analog switch off but most people are unlikely to realise this especially when noone even tries to explain what a mux is or even that muxes exist to them (a mux is a group of channels multiplexed together digitially and then modulated for transmission in a frequency band the same bandwidth as an analog TV channel).
It's not quite as bad as it used to be, now some set top boxes are shipping with built in signal strength and quality meters and indicate which channels are on which frequency so you can get some idea of how much margin you have but it can still be a
It doesn't for the same reason XP doesn't - compatibility and reliability. *LOTS* of low-end consumer hardware (and/or drivers) breaks on systems running in PAE mode.
Is there some way to enable it anyway and if not how do you know what it breaks?
IMO what is really needed is an OS that is mainly 32 bit but with support for more memory and running 64 bit apps. Sort of like win32s allowed you to run 32 bit apps on 16 bit windows. I don't know how feasible this is with the amd64 architecture though. ~~~~
Virtually every machine sold today is 64 bit capable. 1 gig of ram is now standard with 2 gigs not unusual and more reasonablly common so the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.
The problem is this time round MS hasn't released a transition OS. They expect everyone who want's to run a 64 bit apps to have 64 bit drivers for everything. Right now for most people the pain isn't worth the gain but as software bloat and game graphics sizes continue to rise eventually people will have to bite the bullet. MS has made the transition even more painfull by enforcing signed drivers in win64.
That price was inclusive of VAT (our eqivilent of sales tax) and not from the very cheapest supplier arround but your right we brits do tend to pay a bit more.
Using figures from newegg I get $139.99 vs $286.99, not quite as bad as my british example but still a lot more than the $20 alledged by the post I originally replied to.
At least in my case one of theese was very tight nessecitating using pliers to turn the jewlers screwdriver.
7. Find a torx screwdriver of just the right size
8. unscrew the hard drive from the carrier
Theese last two steps are for some odd reason ommitted from apples guide, maybe they planned to sell hard drives already mounted up for the macbook but I can't find any such drives on thier website.
Reverse the procedure using the new hard drive and I'm done.
bearing in mind that the HDD/ram shield has some padding on it which makes it awkward to get back into the right position.
but yeah it's not too bad by laptop standards.
However if you want to replace the hdd in a macbook pro or and old style iBook it's much harder.
If you play around with your xorg.conf monitor settings, be ye warned that over-clocking it can also fry a CRT monitor
Monitors have had protection circuits for years to stop this sort of thing happening. Maybe if you are using a 386 or 486 era monitor this is true but it isn't for modern kit.
I can't say i've ever heared of a plain wireless AP being reffered to as a router by anyone in the know.
I always take router to mean anything that routes packets between two or more subnets. A home router certainly fits this definion as does a big enterprise box.
there is something similar pubically availible
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
A Euro is about as likely as a US Dollar in the UK.
No it isn't, I live in the UK and I don't think i've ever seen a US dollar coin or note (i've seen pictures of them and I may have seen them in displays but not seen them actually in use as currency) but not so long ago I found a 5 eurocent coin in my wallet. I don't know for sure where it came from but I expect someone thought it was a penny when giving change. My family (who visit europe from time to time) also tend to have some euros arround the house for trips to the continent.
I've seen windows crash and boil the CPU before (thankfully not fatally). If a system doesn't contain hardware protections against overheating (preferablly two thesholds, one for fans full and one for emergency shutoff) them IMO the design is defective.
But don't blame the retailer (in spite of the suckage) because the manufacturer is the one that screwed you. The retailer just was unfortunate enough to be the messenger.
We are talking about PC World, probablly the biggest computer chain in the UK. They have more than enough influence to make thier suppliers behave if they want to and the only way to make them do that is to make them face up to thier obligations under UK consumer protection laws.
Maybe give the customers three options
1: simple serial number but if you leak it then it will get blocked in the next update.
2: online activation (preferablly with the ability for IT to generate single activation keys from thier volume license, to deactivate machines that they belive were installed without permission to free up the licenses and to restrict the IP ranges from which activation on a key is possible)
3: internal license server doing the same as above but under thier control.
For options 2 and 3 I would also add in an emergency mode which would increase the licenses by 50% for say a month while they sort out purchasing more from you.
As others have said you can't stop the determined crackers all you can do is try and stop casual piracy (defined here as illegally copying software without the help of a cracker or cracking group).
matlab is from mathworks not macromedia and i'm pretty sure you can get nodelocked licenses that don't require a license server. If you really need matlab on the road then your company shouldn't have bought a floating license for you.
Windows XP corp and big brand OEM don't need activation either and even whitebox OEM and retail can be phone activated.
Dell typically uses crappy mainboards, and the expandability is highly limited.
I don't have huge expansion requirements, just the ability to drop in extra ram (though admittedly the 3-4GB barrier is causing some complications in this area with all but the highest end machines but that is a temporary problemt that will blow over in time and it affects the lower end macs too) replace the graphics card when a new game comes out or add another hard drive, maybe add a second network adaptor. Most PCs (including dells) that I have seen allow for this. You do see the odd machine without a suitable AGP or PCI express x16 graphics card slot (btw if you are desperate you can get nvidia and ati cards in PCI and PCI express X1 though I don't know how they compare to thier AGP and larger PCI express counterparts) but in my experiance they are the exception not the rule even with suppliers like dell.
Even ignoring the issue of exapandability and kvm switches (which I firmly belive more people would use if the non geeks realised they existed and weren't obscenely expensive anymore) who really wants to lug arround a 20 or 24 inch screen just to take thier machine to the local geek to sort out some software problem? who really wants to take thier whole PC rig back to the manufacturer just because of a screen problem?
All in one machines have failed to take off many times. I strongly suspect the only reason apple gets away with it is that some people feel they must have a mac and the iMac is apples only midrange desktop.
Yeah, five desktop editions is probablly going a bit far.
They've had segementation between home/basic PC and office/workstation versions of windows since the releases of windows NT, it's just with XP they unified the codebases and therefore had to do the crippling of the home version on purpose for the first time.
My main criteria for a midrange desktop machine are reasonable graphics (e.g. low end nvidia/ati, not the intel crap), some expansion room and the ability to be put on a KVM switch (i'm not going to get rid of all my existing machines and I can't afford the desk space for more than one screen, especially ones as big as those on the current iMac lineup). The mini is totally unsitable for gaming because of lack of graphics and has no expansion room. The iMac has a built in monitor and no expansion room. Both fail two out of three of my criteria.
The pro is a monster of a machine built out of server class hardware with a price tag to match (though admittely not quite as bad as the $5000 the post you replied to quoted.. Worse it takes special ram (FB-DIMM with a special heat spreader to account for the fact that the case has less agressive cooling than most server cases) and only comes with a stingy 1GB by default.
To summerise apple forces you to go to thier top of the range desktop line just to get features that are standard in the PC world.
The difference in price is about $20.00 (at least that was the average difference between retail and oem copies of XP).
Well looking at the source I normally buy from
windows XP pro whitebox OEM: £81.62
windows XP pro retail: £231.51
windows XP pro whitebox OEM 3 pack: £238.84
so for a shade more than the cost of one copy of retail I can get three copies of whitebox OEM. The big brand OEMs apparently pay even less though hard figures on what exactly they pay are not public. Upgrades are similar in price to whitebox OEM but you really aren't supposed to use them without a legit license to upgrade from (though they don't really do anything to enforce that beyond checking that you have the media for some prior version)
Only the big brand OEM version is motherboard locked and even then from what I have heared you can install with a whitebox OEM CD and your big brand OEM key then activate over the phone. I don't know if they are more stingy on activations with whitebox OEM than retail though.
I know people will say, "Well, we'll encrypt the message", but when my phone is a man in the middle, good luck transfering the key without me finding a way to get it.
Assuming you have a central auth server it's pretty easy, the phones can be hardcoded with the public key of the auth server. The auth server can then securely provide the public key associated with a phone number.
Without the auth server you would have to resort to reffering to phones by thier public keys which may be a bit unweildy but is probablly feasible with a well put together phone book system.
Sometimes you may not even have access to the actual data files, for example with databases you will usually not be able to get at the raw binary files and will instead have to make a dump. Dumps can be very slow to make and are not without problems of thier own (sometimes A database will let you store something in a field that it cannot correctly store in the default dump format).
:(
Sometimes you may not have enough disk space quota to make a tarball on the account.
Sometimes you may be able to make the tarball but find it very difficult to get it on to storage that is not under your hosting providers control.
Sometimes people just trust that when thier provider claims they are backing up that is better than anything they could do themselves.
Sometimes people are just lazy
A big problem I see with running an audit service is critical mass, doing financial checkups takes time/money and some types of audit require either a lot of cooperation from the company being audited or the use of force.
So you need either the backing of an organisation that can use force (which in practical terms means the government unless the mafia wants to get into ISP auditing) or the cooperation of the hosting provider (which requires you to have enough of a reputation that they are prepared to take the hassle of the audit in exchange for having your approval). The only way I can see such a thing getting started without governemnt intervention would be for the higher quality providers to get together and start one.
Ha...most companies pay the host to provide the backups. It is cheaper to have the host do it in the long run, since the good hosts will keep off site copies with a data storage facility provider. Sort of a worry free package.
Until something like this happens.
The other big problem with flywheel batteries is failure. If the complicated superconducting bearing and vacum systems fail the energy could be released very rapidly. Add to that the fact that for maximum energy density the flywheel is probablly on the brink of flying apart and the potential for carnage is obvious.