That they have more information than you is a given. They have pretty much direct access to the gurus that brewed the engine. Probably their devs even have access to the source I'm pretty sure that engine licenses for game developers tend to come with full source code and that game developers can and do tweak the engine code that goes into their games.
windows 95 identifies itself as windows 4.0, 98 is 4.1 and according to another reply to your topic ME is 4.9. In general classic windows releases and windows NT releases that were released at arround the same time had similar version numbers.
But on the other hand I have had quite a few people in the last 6 months or so decide to buy a desktop when their laptop broke, because the repair on a 2 year old laptop just wasn't worth it price wise (lot of Dell's with completely fried motherboards, for example.) Exactly, cheap laptops tend to have a high failure rate and repair is expensive. Desktops otoh can generally be repaired cheaply and easilly by the local neighbourhood geek. I bet right now many people are buying thier first laptop and so haven't been burnt by this before.
iirc JAVA inlines primitive constants so if you change one then you have to recompile everything that use it.
Worse I'm not sure they bother to provide a mechanism for finding out what files are affected by a primitive constant change so you may end up having to recompile everything to be sure.
Why would a programmer's laptop need more muscle than one that runs office apps? Video editing, yeah. Graphics editing, I can see. But programming? Depends on what you are programming, i've been doing some short term work which involves programming FPGAs and let me tell you that if I was going to be doing that on a long term basis a high end desktop would be extremely valuable.
PC programming uses a model which allows easy incremental changes without recompiling almost everything so fast hardware isn't so important (though it can still be a bitch if you change a main header file). FPGA programming doesn't. Whenever I wanted to see if my changes would synthisize correctly without timing errors or test the code i've just written on the real FPGA it was 15-20 minuite (depending on how much is already cached) wait.
Similar considerations apply if you are packaing software for linux distros. The packaging tools at least for the debian family are generally quite unfriendly to the idea of incremental recompliations.
Also test environments may also be quite bulky, not much point in using a laptop if you can't test what you have written.
terms used in this post bandwidth: availible channel bandwidth measured in hz bitrate: number of bits that can be transmitted qam: quadrature amplitude modulation symbol: a voltage level encoding one or more bits/
Channel capacity is measured in bits/second, not Hz. I can transmit 1Mb/s using a 100kHz channel You probablly can. with appropriate modulation schemes (such as qam) you can get 2 symbols per Hz. That means you need to cram 5 bits per symbol. That means 32 level encoding. That is feasible.
OTOH if you wanted 2Mb/s over a 100khz channel you would need to cram 10 bits per symbol, that would mean 1024 levels which is not feasible due to noise.
the trouble with multi-level encoding is you rapidly hit diminishing returns. A doubling in level count only gets you one extra bit per symbol and for a given background noise level a doubling in level count means a doubling in required voltage (and hence a quadrupling of required power) to maintain correct decoding.
In other words yes we have improved the number of bits/hz a lot over the years (early systems often had one bit/hz) but we can't take that approach much further.
The relevant parameters are bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio right but center frequency (roughly the same as carrier frequency) affects availible bandwidth for a few reasons.
1: the obvious limit, there is no such thing as 1mhz of bandwidth centered on 100khz. 2: antenna capabilities, you couldn't easilly (if at all) design an antenna to go from 10khz to 1.01mhz but you could easilly design one to go from 10mhz to 11mhz. 3: spectrum crowding, its pretty crowded arround the few ghz spectrum, the only way to get more bandwidth is to either buy it at great expense or move to higher frequency bands where there is more total bandwidth availible.
If you can live in an environment that is isolated software wise and don't mind the lack of modern features then sure you can keep running old hardware/software combinations.
OTOH if you buy a new machine running windows it will probablly be running vista. There are ways to downgrade of course but in most cases that is either expensive or legally dubious unless you already have XP Pro and your vista OEM license is a buisness edition. If you want to use the modern internet without extreme pain you will need a modern web browser and a modern virus scanner wouldn't go amiss either. If you want to exchange documents without a lot of pain you need to be running the same or at least similar versions of office (which in turn implies similar versions of windows). This software uses up a lot of rescources unless you take a lot of effort to trim it down (and sometimes even when you do).
The BSD licenses primerally benifit those who don't want to give much back. The GPL primerally benifits library developers as (at least if you follow the FSFs interpretation) its restrictions are effectively far nastier for library users than for users of other types of software.
Afaict companies like redhat and IBM make the bulk of thier money out of support and the GPL ranges from inconsequential to an annoyance (think of the large number of distros that freeload off RHEL) for them.
I suspect the GPLs dominance over BSD has a lot to do with it's viral nature, if you are agnostic about license issues but see an interesting GPL library your app will have to be GPL even if that doesn't represent what you belive in.
OGG is a huge legal liability, and will never be included in any major device or application for that reason. how major is major too you. Afaict all major linux distributions (including the likes of redhat and suse) contain it as does at least one major windows game engine.
The Vorbis designers made a reasonable attempt to avoid the use of patented techniques, but due to the broken patent system it's impossible to rule out the chance that some patent troll would find some tortured logic to bring am infringement suit against any company that used the format. As we've seen with the Eolas and BlackBerry lawsuits, this sort of action is often very effective, even against determined opponents. sadly you are correct, at least in the US you can't really write software at all without exposing yourself to patent trolls.
With the correct hardware (and short enough runs) even 10 to 1000 does not mean pulling cords ect. I think that depends on why the link is running at 10 mbps in the first place.
If its just running at that speed because it is connected to old switches and the wiring is to modern standards then sure. OTOH if its run with 2 pair cat 3 or worse you are going to have trouble getting 100 Mbps let alone 1000 Mbps.
but I agree with the general point, in situations with a high density of high bandwidth using devices (say university of manchester public cluster machines) wireless just isn't going to be feasible.
Near as I can tell onstar uses nothing more than a cellphone and a gps receiver. It's fairly low-tech to have the cellphone phone home periodically and give it the location. Of course, having every car on the road doing this continuously would eat a lot of cellphone bandwidth. i'd think a dword pair would be more than enough for a cars location, we aren't talking about very much data there. The packet overheads would probablly be bigger than the data but we still aren't talking high rates.
How much bandwidth does a mobile phone use just from being left on in a moving car anyway? My guess is a well implemented auto tracking system wouldn't use much more than just leaving a mobile phone on does.
I run firefox on an old latop (among other machines) under windows 2000 (which was a current OS at the time the machine was made and is in the list on the machines "designed for" sticker). After the initial load time its fairly snappy on most sites provided I don't open too many tabs but only because of the flashblock and adblock plus extentions (normally i don't block ads on principle but the heavy javascript of some adds was really bogging the machine down and i really didn't want to turn off javascript completely).
but this is exactly the problem - rather than try and create a solid OS, they've looked for ways to lock customers into Windows. Afaict microsofts main profit centers are windows desktop and office. MS therefore ttries to crush anything that threatens those products. Maybe this is a bad strategy long term but the stock market only really cares about the short term.
Looked at in this light IE (particularlly free IE) and MSN are reaction to netscape and googles threats to make the desktop OS irrelvent. The XBOX line is a reaction to sonys attempts to expand games consoles into the tasks of desktop PCs. The zune is a reaction to apples highly popular iPod/iTunes which give PC users a taster of the Mac.
Quick, off the top of your head, what's sugardeath.net's IP address? The key difference I see is that DNS is a global database that is accessible from anywhere you can browse the web from and unlikely to dissapear unless the sites it reffers to does as well. Your address book on the other hand is a private database that may or may not be availible when you want to contact someone.
There is actually no point in remembering phone numbers except for self dial phones with a 10 number block. And if they die out, we don't need phone numbers anymore. The downside of this attitude is if your mobiles battery dies you can't contact the people you know using other phones (payphones, friends phones, office phones etc).
Don't tell anyone, but we already do. Check, for instance, how many non-British people are posting on Doctor Who discussion forums the day after the UK broadcast. Helped of course by the fact that the BBC (and all the other channels that are on the "freeview" system) broadcast unencrypted digital streams which anyone in range of a transmitter can record with cheaply availible equipment.
If they've got code that they have no means of supporting that's bad management, I mean how can a business rely on something that they have no means of updating or fixing if it goes wrong? afaict the typical scenario is that a small buisness cannot afford to have a proper software engineer on staff even if they can find one so things are either written by an employee who happens to have some skill in the area or by a contractor. Either way those commisioning the site will not have the skill to judge if the resulting code is well written and maintainable or not, that won't be discovered until the person who commisioned the site has to get someone in to change something.
If a small business owner got an employee who knew a bit about electrical wiring to come in and wire their physical place of business, and then a few years later a safety regulator comes in and says the wiring is unsafe and could cause a fire would the business owner find it unreasonable that he should have to pay to get a professional to do the job properly? Assuming the safety inspector directly or indirectly (by indirectly i mean things like mandatory insurance and inspections required to get it) had the force of governement behind them. They would probablly pay up grudgingly because they had no choice but to do so or close up buisness.
To my knowlage there aren't government enforcers chasing down websites that use php 4 and register globals or webhosts that offer those features (sure there are laws like data protection in some countries but those are difficult to enforce until after the damage is done).
When I look around for software to run a site on, most of the top few choices are written in PHP. Why? If someone already has a hosting account that offers php and nothing else and they want to add another service to thier site are they going to migrate all thier services to a new host (risky)? are they going to have two seperate hosting accounts (expensive)? or are they just going to choose a php app to provide the service?
I see php on the web as similar to VB on the desktop. It provides an easy way for those who can barely program to put together stuff that sort of works and can be deployed almost anywhere. Those who can really programm then get sucked in to writing the stuff through a variety of routes (deplyoyment condierations, maintinance monkey availibility, possibility for users who can barely program to hack in thier own changes, integration with existing code and so on)
There are only 2 players in the HD console market: MS and Sony. Nintendo has decided not to play that game (an understandable descision and i wish them well but people with a large HDTV rig aren't going to want a Wii as thier main console).
Sony aren't liked any more than MS by the/. crowd (rootkit scandal anyone) and atm MS are offering the only reasonally priced HD capable console.
P.S. Afaict the only reason MS are in the console market at all is because sony were threatening to attack the PC market through thier consoles first with the PS2 linux kit (which never caught on but was a threat of things to come) then with the PS3's built in linux support (though they bottled out of loading linux onto the PS3 from the factory at the last minuite).
afaict adding a SATA driver shouldn't be any more disruptive than adding a driver for any other SCSI or SCSI-like interface.
IMO there is nothing wrong with backporting new drivers (which should only affect people who use the hardware for which the new drivers are designed, not any other users of the kernel) into a stable kernel tree.
You could say that the prices are due to scarcity, but I haven't seen any gas stations without gas, so there is no actual shortage. in a market economy a rise in price means a fall in demand. A rise in price also means an increase in aupply as previously uneconomical supplies become economical.
What sets the price of a unit of the commodity is NOT the average cost of producting a unit but the cost of producing another unit on top of what is currently being produced/the saving from not producing the most expensive units currently being produced (in the case of an extracted commodity like crude oil the prices the governments charge for access to the underground rescource must be included in the cost). This does of course mean that those who have control of the cheaper to extract supplies make a killing but thats the way capitalism has always worked.
The only time when something becomes unavailible at any price is either: 1: if there is a local surge in demand or supply foulup that is not balanced by changes in prices due to either government regulation or its short term nature. 2: If it actually runs out (In the case of fuels they have effectively run out when it takes more energy to extract them than they produce) 3: If governments get involved to fix prices and/or what people can buy (e.g. during major wars many countries decide that giving the very limited rescources to those who will pay most for them is not the best descision and therefore impose rationing)
Tabs are for indentation. Spaces are for alignment. which will work great until you want to say put an ascii art diagram next to a block of code to explain it and the block of code it is next to has varying levels of indentation.
Slashdot Mirror
That they have more information than you is a given. They have pretty much direct access to the gurus that brewed the engine. Probably their devs even have access to the source
I'm pretty sure that engine licenses for game developers tend to come with full source code and that game developers can and do tweak the engine code that goes into their games.
the "NT" is seperate from the version number
windows 95 identifies itself as windows 4.0, 98 is 4.1 and according to another reply to your topic ME is 4.9. In general classic windows releases and windows NT releases that were released at arround the same time had similar version numbers.
But on the other hand I have had quite a few people in the last 6 months or so decide to buy a desktop when their laptop broke, because the repair on a 2 year old laptop just wasn't worth it price wise (lot of Dell's with completely fried motherboards, for example.)
Exactly, cheap laptops tend to have a high failure rate and repair is expensive. Desktops otoh can generally be repaired cheaply and easilly by the local neighbourhood geek. I bet right now many people are buying thier first laptop and so haven't been burnt by this before.
iirc JAVA inlines primitive constants so if you change one then you have to recompile everything that use it.
Worse I'm not sure they bother to provide a mechanism for finding out what files are affected by a primitive constant change so you may end up having to recompile everything to be sure.
Why would a programmer's laptop need more muscle than one that runs office apps? Video editing, yeah. Graphics editing, I can see. But programming?
Depends on what you are programming, i've been doing some short term work which involves programming FPGAs and let me tell you that if I was going to be doing that on a long term basis a high end desktop would be extremely valuable.
PC programming uses a model which allows easy incremental changes without recompiling almost everything so fast hardware isn't so important (though it can still be a bitch if you change a main header file). FPGA programming doesn't. Whenever I wanted to see if my changes would synthisize correctly without timing errors or test the code i've just written on the real FPGA it was 15-20 minuite (depending on how much is already cached) wait.
Similar considerations apply if you are packaing software for linux distros. The packaging tools at least for the debian family are generally quite unfriendly to the idea of incremental recompliations.
Also test environments may also be quite bulky, not much point in using a laptop if you can't test what you have written.
terms used in this post
bandwidth: availible channel bandwidth measured in hz
bitrate: number of bits that can be transmitted
qam: quadrature amplitude modulation
symbol: a voltage level encoding one or more bits/
Channel capacity is measured in bits/second, not Hz. I can transmit 1Mb/s using a 100kHz channel
You probablly can. with appropriate modulation schemes (such as qam) you can get 2 symbols per Hz. That means you need to cram 5 bits per symbol. That means 32 level encoding. That is feasible.
OTOH if you wanted 2Mb/s over a 100khz channel you would need to cram 10 bits per symbol, that would mean 1024 levels which is not feasible due to noise.
the trouble with multi-level encoding is you rapidly hit diminishing returns. A doubling in level count only gets you one extra bit per symbol and for a given background noise level a doubling in level count means a doubling in required voltage (and hence a quadrupling of required power) to maintain correct decoding.
In other words yes we have improved the number of bits/hz a lot over the years (early systems often had one bit/hz) but we can't take that approach much further.
The relevant parameters are bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio
right but center frequency (roughly the same as carrier frequency) affects availible bandwidth for a few reasons.
1: the obvious limit, there is no such thing as 1mhz of bandwidth centered on 100khz.
2: antenna capabilities, you couldn't easilly (if at all) design an antenna to go from 10khz to 1.01mhz but you could easilly design one to go from 10mhz to 11mhz.
3: spectrum crowding, its pretty crowded arround the few ghz spectrum, the only way to get more bandwidth is to either buy it at great expense or move to higher frequency bands where there is more total bandwidth availible.
If you can live in an environment that is isolated software wise and don't mind the lack of modern features then sure you can keep running old hardware/software combinations.
OTOH if you buy a new machine running windows it will probablly be running vista. There are ways to downgrade of course but in most cases that is either expensive or legally dubious unless you already have XP Pro and your vista OEM license is a buisness edition. If you want to use the modern internet without extreme pain you will need a modern web browser and a modern virus scanner wouldn't go amiss either. If you want to exchange documents without a lot of pain you need to be running the same or at least similar versions of office (which in turn implies similar versions of windows). This software uses up a lot of rescources unless you take a lot of effort to trim it down (and sometimes even when you do).
different licenses benifit different companies.
The BSD licenses primerally benifit those who don't want to give much back.
The GPL primerally benifits library developers as (at least if you follow the FSFs interpretation) its restrictions are effectively far nastier for library users than for users of other types of software.
Afaict companies like redhat and IBM make the bulk of thier money out of support and the GPL ranges from inconsequential to an annoyance (think of the large number of distros that freeload off RHEL) for them.
I suspect the GPLs dominance over BSD has a lot to do with it's viral nature, if you are agnostic about license issues but see an interesting GPL library your app will have to be GPL even if that doesn't represent what you belive in.
OGG is a huge legal liability, and will never be included in any major device or application for that reason.
how major is major too you. Afaict all major linux distributions (including the likes of redhat and suse) contain it as does at least one major windows game engine.
The Vorbis designers made a reasonable attempt to avoid the use of patented techniques, but due to the broken patent system it's impossible to rule out the chance that some patent troll would find some tortured logic to bring am infringement suit against any company that used the format. As we've seen with the Eolas and BlackBerry lawsuits, this sort of action is often very effective, even against determined opponents.
sadly you are correct, at least in the US you can't really write software at all without exposing yourself to patent trolls.
tell us the sequence!
They said "unbeatable" not "always wins", there is a subtule difference.
With the correct hardware (and short enough runs) even 10 to 1000 does not mean pulling cords ect.
I think that depends on why the link is running at 10 mbps in the first place.
If its just running at that speed because it is connected to old switches and the wiring is to modern standards then sure. OTOH if its run with 2 pair cat 3 or worse you are going to have trouble getting 100 Mbps let alone 1000 Mbps.
but I agree with the general point, in situations with a high density of high bandwidth using devices (say university of manchester public cluster machines) wireless just isn't going to be feasible.
Near as I can tell onstar uses nothing more than a cellphone and a gps receiver. It's fairly low-tech to have the cellphone phone home periodically and give it the location. Of course, having every car on the road doing this continuously would eat a lot of cellphone bandwidth.
i'd think a dword pair would be more than enough for a cars location, we aren't talking about very much data there. The packet overheads would probablly be bigger than the data but we still aren't talking high rates.
How much bandwidth does a mobile phone use just from being left on in a moving car anyway? My guess is a well implemented auto tracking system wouldn't use much more than just leaving a mobile phone on does.
I run firefox on an old latop (among other machines) under windows 2000 (which was a current OS at the time the machine was made and is in the list on the machines "designed for" sticker). After the initial load time its fairly snappy on most sites provided I don't open too many tabs but only because of the flashblock and adblock plus extentions (normally i don't block ads on principle but the heavy javascript of some adds was really bogging the machine down and i really didn't want to turn off javascript completely).
but this is exactly the problem - rather than try and create a solid OS, they've looked for ways to lock customers into Windows.
Afaict microsofts main profit centers are windows desktop and office. MS therefore ttries to crush anything that threatens those products. Maybe this is a bad strategy long term but the stock market only really cares about the short term.
Looked at in this light IE (particularlly free IE) and MSN are reaction to netscape and googles threats to make the desktop OS irrelvent. The XBOX line is a reaction to sonys attempts to expand games consoles into the tasks of desktop PCs. The zune is a reaction to apples highly popular iPod/iTunes which give PC users a taster of the Mac.
Quick, off the top of your head, what's sugardeath.net's IP address?
The key difference I see is that DNS is a global database that is accessible from anywhere you can browse the web from and unlikely to dissapear unless the sites it reffers to does as well. Your address book on the other hand is a private database that may or may not be availible when you want to contact someone.
There is actually no point in remembering phone numbers except for self dial phones with a 10 number block. And if they die out, we don't need phone numbers anymore.
The downside of this attitude is if your mobiles battery dies you can't contact the people you know using other phones (payphones, friends phones, office phones etc).
Don't tell anyone, but we already do. Check, for instance, how many non-British people are posting on Doctor Who discussion forums the day after the UK broadcast.
Helped of course by the fact that the BBC (and all the other channels that are on the "freeview" system) broadcast unencrypted digital streams which anyone in range of a transmitter can record with cheaply availible equipment.
If they've got code that they have no means of supporting that's bad management, I mean how can a business rely on something that they have no means of updating or fixing if it goes wrong?
afaict the typical scenario is that a small buisness cannot afford to have a proper software engineer on staff even if they can find one so things are either written by an employee who happens to have some skill in the area or by a contractor. Either way those commisioning the site will not have the skill to judge if the resulting code is well written and maintainable or not, that won't be discovered until the person who commisioned the site has to get someone in to change something.
If a small business owner got an employee who knew a bit about electrical wiring to come in and wire their physical place of business, and then a few years later a safety regulator comes in and says the wiring is unsafe and could cause a fire would the business owner find it unreasonable that he should have to pay to get a professional to do the job properly?
Assuming the safety inspector directly or indirectly (by indirectly i mean things like mandatory insurance and inspections required to get it) had the force of governement behind them. They would probablly pay up grudgingly because they had no choice but to do so or close up buisness.
To my knowlage there aren't government enforcers chasing down websites that use php 4 and register globals or webhosts that offer those features (sure there are laws like data protection in some countries but those are difficult to enforce until after the damage is done).
When I look around for software to run a site on, most of the top few choices are written in PHP. Why?
If someone already has a hosting account that offers php and nothing else and they want to add another service to thier site are they going to migrate all thier services to a new host (risky)? are they going to have two seperate hosting accounts (expensive)? or are they just going to choose a php app to provide the service?
I see php on the web as similar to VB on the desktop. It provides an easy way for those who can barely program to put together stuff that sort of works and can be deployed almost anywhere. Those who can really programm then get sucked in to writing the stuff through a variety of routes (deplyoyment condierations, maintinance monkey availibility, possibility for users who can barely program to hack in thier own changes, integration with existing code and so on)
There are only 2 players in the HD console market: MS and Sony. Nintendo has decided not to play that game (an understandable descision and i wish them well but people with a large HDTV rig aren't going to want a Wii as thier main console).
/. crowd (rootkit scandal anyone) and atm MS are offering the only reasonally priced HD capable console.
Sony aren't liked any more than MS by the
P.S. Afaict the only reason MS are in the console market at all is because sony were threatening to attack the PC market through thier consoles first with the PS2 linux kit (which never caught on but was a threat of things to come) then with the PS3's built in linux support (though they bottled out of loading linux onto the PS3 from the factory at the last minuite).
afaict adding a SATA driver shouldn't be any more disruptive than adding a driver for any other SCSI or SCSI-like interface.
IMO there is nothing wrong with backporting new drivers (which should only affect people who use the hardware for which the new drivers are designed, not any other users of the kernel) into a stable kernel tree.
You could say that the prices are due to scarcity, but I haven't seen any gas stations without gas, so there is no actual shortage.
in a market economy a rise in price means a fall in demand. A rise in price also means an increase in aupply as previously uneconomical supplies become economical.
What sets the price of a unit of the commodity is NOT the average cost of producting a unit but the cost of producing another unit on top of what is currently being produced/the saving from not producing the most expensive units currently being produced (in the case of an extracted commodity like crude oil the prices the governments charge for access to the underground rescource must be included in the cost). This does of course mean that those who have control of the cheaper to extract supplies make a killing but thats the way capitalism has always worked.
The only time when something becomes unavailible at any price is either:
1: if there is a local surge in demand or supply foulup that is not balanced by changes in prices due to either government regulation or its short term nature.
2: If it actually runs out (In the case of fuels they have effectively run out when it takes more energy to extract them than they produce)
3: If governments get involved to fix prices and/or what people can buy (e.g. during major wars many countries decide that giving the very limited rescources to those who will pay most for them is not the best descision and therefore impose rationing)
Tabs are for indentation.
Spaces are for alignment.
which will work great until you want to say put an ascii art diagram next to a block of code to explain it and the block of code it is next to has varying levels of indentation.