Well if you set up a monopoly it will be abused, you need very strong regulators to keep anything clean. Doesn't matter if its a state run monopoly (NHS, BT (before privatisation), British Rail etc) or a granted monopoly. or indeed if it is a monopoly (or near monopoly) that appears naturally through market forces.
given that a monopoly is the likely outcome for last mile communication service (yes some areas have duopolies but that is due to the fact that pre-digitisation phone and TV had very different needs). Given this a granted monopoly with strict rules on allowing compertition over everything except the natural monopoly part is probablly the best option.
If the machine originally came with big brand OEM windows and you either can't find the right brand of install CD or you have had to replace the motherboard you will have to install using a whitebox OEM CD and then try and convince MS to activate over the phone. Apparently this can sometimes be difficult. Same problem if a machine originally had whitebox OEM windows and has used up it's quota of activations (say because it's owner upgrades a lot).
and then of course there is the situation where the machine has a OEM sticker but the sticker is placed in a position where it was vulnerable to damage and is no longer legible.
you'd still have to scrape off the solder mask and you may have problems mounting the board accurately enough (afaict during factory testing and programming boards are usually dealt with as complete panels with the mounting holes for the test fixture being in the parts of the panel that do not become part of any final board).
redhat used to make thier main distro free and sell support for it if you wanted it.
Then they basically told people that they had to either pay up for RHEL (and have the support whether they wanted it or not) or go for the at the time very unstable fedora.
The rebuild projects turned up later as a reaction to this and since redhat release everything of importance as open source there wasn't much they could do about them other than getting them to remove references to redhat to make it less likely people would find them.
Red Hat has always been a strong contributor to open source projects being a strong contributor to open source and trying to convince people that they have to buy support they don't want or need are not mutually exclusive.
and does not deserve that sort of FUD It's not FUD
Form factor and driver loading is the problem. You can easilly buy wiring/form factor adaptors that take a CF card and fit into a laptop drive bay (though admittedly laptops moving to sata will make this harder). You can then install any OS you like (space permitting but you can easilly buy 16 gigabyte CF cards which should be enough for XP and I suspect if you look arround you can buy ones big enough for vista) with no driver issues at all since as far as the motherboard is concerned it is a standard IDE drive.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the product) is free. That is why CentOS exists. The only cost to using CentOS is having employees who can set it up and keep it running. but afaict redhat tries to hide the fact this option exists. Afaict they make the projects rebuild from source and strip out all the identity of the OS. They also make them replace the update mechanism but that is a fairly minor point.
it seems like redhat thinks the money they can make by getting people to buy support they don't need is worth giving the likes of MS ammo for thier FUD campaigns.
You can even access the internet through that said Nintendo DS using the information gathered. Granted, it is quite limited on the scope of what it can do well a DS can access anything that is accesible through the web provided you have bought opera for it (though I belive americans will have to import it from europe).
The difference with enriched uranium is the dose is higher relative to anything its diluted in. no enriched means there has been isotope seperation, if enriched uranium escapes and there isn't much natural uranium around in the area in similar chemical compounds then it can be turned back into concentrated enriched uranium by purely chemical means.
if someone from a country which doesn't respect your copyrights decides to pay you anyway I'd think the sensible thing to do would be to let them;) after all it's basically money for nothing.
The real reason why things like music sites restrict geographic distribtion are both predatory pricing and having to live within thier geographically limited distribution contracts.
However, what is keeping me from actually putting it to use is that when you put several different VMs inside one box, then all of those VMs can be taken down by a single failure (disk, power supply, nic, etc) that would have normally only taken down a single "real" machine. If you have lots of tasks that don't take much computing power by todays standards and you don't have a massive budget then you have two choices.
1: put each one on it's own cheap shit box 2: put them all on one higher grade box which has raid storage, redundant power supplies, a decent quality motherboard etc
opton 1 means that only one service will go down at a time but you can almost gaurantee you will have failures frequently, option 2 allows you to spec out decent hardware that is far less likely to fail. However many services have strange requirements that make it difficult to agregate them, virtualisaion provides a way arround this.
for big homogeneous workloads like say google has you have the option of designing your software so machine failures are tollerated but I can't see how you can do that with a mix of legacy applications.
Furthermore unless all your portable players play aac you are going to have to transcode those aac tracks further losing quality.
The walmart deal certainly seems better than the apple one to me if they carry the music you want and you are in the US (presumablly walmart won't sell internationally)
I've not seen this, but I always used XP Professional as a domain member. Maybe that's the difference? Afaict joining a domain automatically sets up XP pro to act much like 2K pro does with the ctrl+alt+del prompt and the full permissions system exposed.
This doesn't need to be rocket science, either: consider that switching from using signatures to using PINs to authenticate card transactions has reduced card fraud by something like 80% in several European countries. It also makes it much harder to prove that you have been stolen from. I wonder how much of the reduction you claim is due to actual reduction and how much is due to people being unable to prove the crime ever happened.
I think the household then had some kind of combined cable bring the services into the household. They have two cables coming in, a phone cable for phone service and a coax cable for TV and broadband.
I do remember it taking the cablecos a VERY long time to get broadband service rolled out accross thier network.
If you use a sewer topological architecture you will be able to wire up all habitable dwellings quite easily, but your nodes will tend to be either at pumping stations or sewage treatment works. At any rate, somewhere down in a valley. sewage needs to run downhill most of the time but data connections don't. So there is no need for the fibers to leave the sewer at the same place the sewage does.
I don't see how stuff growing on the cable sheath is any more of a problem than it growing on the inside of the pipe and you can probablly treat the cable sheath with stuff to discourage such growth. Presumablly they will have special peices for sealing arround the cables where they leave the pipes.
chemicals again if the drainpipe can be designed to resist them then I don't see why the cable sheath can't.
reducing capacity may be a slight issue but I imagine in most cases the size of the fiber will be negligable compared to the size of the pipes. I imagine it could make blockages more common though. Mechanical damage from clearing kit could indeed be an issue but i'd imagine you could control use of that fairly effectively in a uni residence block (where I imagine all the drainage pipes are dealt with by companies employed by the uni).
Pro does too. I think you only get a login screen if you add multiple users, set a password or do something that disables the welcome screen login system and replaces it with a different one.
At least one of the UK providers using access nodes also offers data so I guess that doesn't apply now. There are only two companies in the UK with sigificant nationwide phone line coverage. BT openreach (part of BT group) who have landline coverage almost everywhre and virgin media (an amalgamation of the cable companies) who have service to about half of households.
BT use the nodes you mentioned in some areas and at the time I read about it you couldn't get ADSL in those areas, I don't know if this has changed and I don't see how the fact that BT offers ADSL in some areas would be relavent to this.
I don't know how virgin media manage thier phone lines but it is irrelevent as their broadband service runs on thier cable TV cables not thier phone lines.
I disagree that CHP plants can't be compared with pure electricity plants for efficiency. Either the energy in the fuel is used usefully or it's not. Lets assume the fuel in question is gas because it's the one that fits all the possibilites well. Lets also assume that the local requirement is for heating rather than cooling.
The way I see it if you want heat for warming buildings and electricity to run appliances/trains/whatever you have several options.
1: traditional power plant plus resistive heaters 2: traditional power plant plus heat pumps 3: traditional power plant plus gas heating 4: combined heat and power
lets pick some some values from memory and previous posts in this thread so we can run some rough calculations. My assumed values are given below.
gas power plants have efficiancy 50% resistive electric heating has efficiancy 100% heat pumps have efficiancy 200% (that is the heat that comes from outside is equal to the heat that comes from electricity) gas boilers for domestic heating have efficiancy 95% chp plants have efficiancy 88% heating requirement is equal to electricty requirement.
for option 1 efficiancy=50% for option 2 efficiancy=(50%*50%)+(50%*50%*200%)=75% for option 3 efficiancy=(50%*50%)+(50%*95%)=72.5% for option 4 efficiancy=88%
My figures probablly aren't very accurate but the point is it is unfair to consider options 1 and 4 without considering options 2 and 3.
Germany has wisely seen fit to invest one-seventh of its power money in wind energy. And it has legislated, and many Germnans have benefited for years already, from a solar-energy subsidy. wind energy is relatively expensive particularlly for what it offers (which is generation when the wind blows which isn't too well corrolated to when energy is required) so it seems like with that level of investment a relatively small proportion (probablly less than 10%) of total power and an even smaller proportion of peak load supply will end up coming from wind.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember linus immediately selling any distro stock he was given to avoid potential conflict of interest.
Well if you set up a monopoly it will be abused, you need very strong regulators to keep anything clean. Doesn't matter if its a state run monopoly (NHS, BT (before privatisation), British Rail etc) or a granted monopoly.
or indeed if it is a monopoly (or near monopoly) that appears naturally through market forces.
given that a monopoly is the likely outcome for last mile communication service (yes some areas have duopolies but that is due to the fact that pre-digitisation phone and TV had very different needs). Given this a granted monopoly with strict rules on allowing compertition over everything except the natural monopoly part is probablly the best option.
out of interest what if any limitations did you notice on your use of the machine while it was in the "invalidated" state?
If the machine originally came with big brand OEM windows and you either can't find the right brand of install CD or you have had to replace the motherboard you will have to install using a whitebox OEM CD and then try and convince MS to activate over the phone. Apparently this can sometimes be difficult. Same problem if a machine originally had whitebox OEM windows and has used up it's quota of activations (say because it's owner upgrades a lot).
and then of course there is the situation where the machine has a OEM sticker but the sticker is placed in a position where it was vulnerable to damage and is no longer legible.
you'd still have to scrape off the solder mask and you may have problems mounting the board accurately enough (afaict during factory testing and programming boards are usually dealt with as complete panels with the mounting holes for the test fixture being in the parts of the panel that do not become part of any final board).
it seems to be back up now, probablly just a slashdotting.
buy them in the US, unlock them and export them? I presume the iphone supports the european bands as well as the american ones.
redhat used to make thier main distro free and sell support for it if you wanted it.
Then they basically told people that they had to either pay up for RHEL (and have the support whether they wanted it or not) or go for the at the time very unstable fedora.
The rebuild projects turned up later as a reaction to this and since redhat release everything of importance as open source there wasn't much they could do about them other than getting them to remove references to redhat to make it less likely people would find them.
Red Hat has always been a strong contributor to open source projects
being a strong contributor to open source and trying to convince people that they have to buy support they don't want or need are not mutually exclusive.
and does not deserve that sort of FUD
It's not FUD
Form factor and driver loading is the problem.
You can easilly buy wiring/form factor adaptors that take a CF card and fit into a laptop drive bay (though admittedly laptops moving to sata will make this harder). You can then install any OS you like (space permitting but you can easilly buy 16 gigabyte CF cards which should be enough for XP and I suspect if you look arround you can buy ones big enough for vista) with no driver issues at all since as far as the motherboard is concerned it is a standard IDE drive.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the product) is free. That is why CentOS exists. The only cost to using CentOS is having employees who can set it up and keep it running.
but afaict redhat tries to hide the fact this option exists. Afaict they make the projects rebuild from source and strip out all the identity of the OS. They also make them replace the update mechanism but that is a fairly minor point.
it seems like redhat thinks the money they can make by getting people to buy support they don't need is worth giving the likes of MS ammo for thier FUD campaigns.
You can even access the internet through that said Nintendo DS using the information gathered. Granted, it is quite limited on the scope of what it can do
well a DS can access anything that is accesible through the web provided you have bought opera for it (though I belive americans will have to import it from europe).
The difference with enriched uranium is the dose is higher relative to anything its diluted in.
no enriched means there has been isotope seperation, if enriched uranium escapes and there isn't much natural uranium around in the area in similar chemical compounds then it can be turned back into concentrated enriched uranium by purely chemical means.
if someone from a country which doesn't respect your copyrights decides to pay you anyway I'd think the sensible thing to do would be to let them ;) after all it's basically money for nothing.
The real reason why things like music sites restrict geographic distribtion are both predatory pricing and having to live within thier geographically limited distribution contracts.
However, what is keeping me from actually putting it to use is that when you put several different VMs inside one box, then all of those VMs can be taken down by a single failure (disk, power supply, nic, etc) that would have normally only taken down a single "real" machine.
If you have lots of tasks that don't take much computing power by todays standards and you don't have a massive budget then you have two choices.
1: put each one on it's own cheap shit box
2: put them all on one higher grade box which has raid storage, redundant power supplies, a decent quality motherboard etc
opton 1 means that only one service will go down at a time but you can almost gaurantee you will have failures frequently, option 2 allows you to spec out decent hardware that is far less likely to fail. However many services have strange requirements that make it difficult to agregate them, virtualisaion provides a way arround this.
for big homogeneous workloads like say google has you have the option of designing your software so machine failures are tollerated but I can't see how you can do that with a mix of legacy applications.
Furthermore unless all your portable players play aac you are going to have to transcode those aac tracks further losing quality.
The walmart deal certainly seems better than the apple one to me if they carry the music you want and you are in the US (presumablly walmart won't sell internationally)
I've not seen this, but I always used XP Professional as a domain member. Maybe that's the difference?
Afaict joining a domain automatically sets up XP pro to act much like 2K pro does with the ctrl+alt+del prompt and the full permissions system exposed.
This doesn't need to be rocket science, either: consider that switching from using signatures to using PINs to authenticate card transactions has reduced card fraud by something like 80% in several European countries.
It also makes it much harder to prove that you have been stolen from. I wonder how much of the reduction you claim is due to actual reduction and how much is due to people being unable to prove the crime ever happened.
I think the household then had some kind of combined cable bring the services into the household.
They have two cables coming in, a phone cable for phone service and a coax cable for TV and broadband.
I do remember it taking the cablecos a VERY long time to get broadband service rolled out accross thier network.
http://www.google.com/tisp/notfound.html
looks like it was a joke
If you use a sewer topological architecture you will be able to wire up all habitable dwellings quite easily, but your nodes will tend to be either at pumping stations or sewage treatment works. At any rate, somewhere down in a valley.
sewage needs to run downhill most of the time but data connections don't. So there is no need for the fibers to leave the sewer at the same place the sewage does.
I don't see how stuff growing on the cable sheath is any more of a problem than it growing on the inside of the pipe and you can probablly treat the cable sheath with stuff to discourage such growth. Presumablly they will have special peices for sealing arround the cables where they leave the pipes.
chemicals again if the drainpipe can be designed to resist them then I don't see why the cable sheath can't.
reducing capacity may be a slight issue but I imagine in most cases the size of the fiber will be negligable compared to the size of the pipes. I imagine it could make blockages more common though. Mechanical damage from clearing kit could indeed be an issue but i'd imagine you could control use of that fairly effectively in a uni residence block (where I imagine all the drainage pipes are dealt with by companies employed by the uni).
Pro does too. I think you only get a login screen if you add multiple users, set a password or do something that disables the welcome screen login system and replaces it with a different one.
At least one of the UK providers using access nodes also offers data so I guess that doesn't apply now.
There are only two companies in the UK with sigificant nationwide phone line coverage. BT openreach (part of BT group) who have landline coverage almost everywhre and virgin media (an amalgamation of the cable companies) who have service to about half of households.
BT use the nodes you mentioned in some areas and at the time I read about it you couldn't get ADSL in those areas, I don't know if this has changed and I don't see how the fact that BT offers ADSL in some areas would be relavent to this.
I don't know how virgin media manage thier phone lines but it is irrelevent as their broadband service runs on thier cable TV cables not thier phone lines.
I disagree that CHP plants can't be compared with pure electricity plants for efficiency. Either the energy in the fuel is used usefully or it's not.
Lets assume the fuel in question is gas because it's the one that fits all the possibilites well. Lets also assume that the local requirement is for heating rather than cooling.
The way I see it if you want heat for warming buildings and electricity to run appliances/trains/whatever you have several options.
1: traditional power plant plus resistive heaters
2: traditional power plant plus heat pumps
3: traditional power plant plus gas heating
4: combined heat and power
lets pick some some values from memory and previous posts in this thread so we can run some rough calculations. My assumed values are given below.
gas power plants have efficiancy 50%
resistive electric heating has efficiancy 100%
heat pumps have efficiancy 200% (that is the heat that comes from outside is equal to the heat that comes from electricity)
gas boilers for domestic heating have efficiancy 95%
chp plants have efficiancy 88%
heating requirement is equal to electricty requirement.
for option 1 efficiancy=50%
for option 2 efficiancy=(50%*50%)+(50%*50%*200%)=75%
for option 3 efficiancy=(50%*50%)+(50%*95%)=72.5%
for option 4 efficiancy=88%
My figures probablly aren't very accurate but the point is it is unfair to consider options 1 and 4 without considering options 2 and 3.
Germany has wisely seen fit to invest one-seventh of its power money in wind energy. And it has legislated, and many Germnans have benefited for years already, from a solar-energy subsidy.
wind energy is relatively expensive particularlly for what it offers (which is generation when the wind blows which isn't too well corrolated to when energy is required) so it seems like with that level of investment a relatively small proportion (probablly less than 10%) of total power and an even smaller proportion of peak load supply will end up coming from wind.