There is one major difference between trains and cars.
trains are long thin run on metal tracks with metal wheels (very low rolling resistance) only go up shallow inclines and usually are streamlined to at least some degree so the power they use in continous motion is relatively low.
However they are very heavy. So to start them moving you need high torque right the way down to stationary. mechanical transmissions fed by IC engines have great trouble providing this (basically the only way to get any tourque at all out of an IC engine at stationary is to use a slipping clutch) standing starts are about the ideal application of electric motors!
So it comes down to a case of you are going to have a non-mecanical (generally electric but hydralic is also seen in smaller trains) transmission to start the train. Do you wan't a mechanical one as well. train designers have obviously decided not (probablly at least partly because of the complications of running mechanical transmissions to bogies)
on the other hand in a car a mechanical transmission capable of handling continuous running at highway type speeds and little else (in a hybrid the eletric motor can cover the rest) and therefore providing the most efficiant transmission of the friction opposing power a car in continuous motion needs makes sense.
The customer is responsible for parking the car where it came from, but the space is reserved anyway, so that isn't difficult. out of interest do any of theese services offer one way travel (e.g. pick up at one depot drop off at another)?
those aren't produced for entertainment purposes though they are produced to let people know they are serious about killing hostages if thier demands are not met.
If there are areas where the specs need improvement to get closer to the "Write Once Run Anywhere" goal, by all means complain about those areas. the problem is twofold.
1: the java.* and javax.* trees are bloody massive so reimplementing it all is a huge ammount of work 2: most java developers don't give a fuck about runtime environments other than suns and some of the platform isn't very well documented (just go and have a look at some of the stuff in javax.swing.plaf). The result is that most java apps only work with sun java (and things that are slightly modified versions of it rather than from scratch implementions). This is essentially the same problem that wine has.
yeah a comprimised X server attacking the app would be possible but
1: in many cases there would be little point actually attacking the app when you could just use its UI to do what you wan'ted anyway.
2: the X server is generally running as root so this is only usefull if people are using remote apps.
an app trusts an X server in the same way an app trusts its controlling terminal. in both cases comprimising the interface with the user will likely give you a high level of control over the app.
thats ok if your document only contains text and some formatting of said text that you don't really care about.
but saving as plain text will not just destroy formatting. it will destroy diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulae, probablly tables and any other non-textual content.
maybe not a problem if your a programmer type that doesn't belive in flowcharts, uml or anything similar but a major issue if you are an electronics guy or a software engineering guy that uses tools like uml.
finally there is the issue of character encodings. if all your characters are ascii this is again not an issue. but if you are using any other script or worse a mixture of scripts in the same document (say russian text with greek letters for math stuff) then you have to 1: choose a suitable character encoding 2: remember what that encoding is 3: hope that you still have software that can work with that encoding however many years down the line.
do you know where i can find specs of said format, the wikipedia article just has links to an example parser written in perl (not a language i'm too familiar with) but the parser doesn't look terriblly long or complicated.
even if you assume they know the html to surround it with there is still no easy way for thier programs to get input etc (yes there are forms which can fire events but your into the whole realm of event driven programming then which is far from easy though its a nice way to program later).
not to mention that javascript acts differently during pageload from how its acts on an event.
so no i don't think thats anywhere close to a computer that starts at a prompt where you can enter basic commands, then join them into a program, then make yoru program take input and finally move onto stuff like loops subroutines etc.
the closest things i know of today (discounting people running really old copies of qbasic if they can find one) are the unix shell and matlab. The unix shell is not easilly availible to most computer users (as they run windows) and carries a lot of baggage from its origins as a command launcher thats been extended. Matlab is a very expensive peice of software that most users won't have access to until they go to university (and even then if they only do a technical course).
this has only be introduced VERY recently and it doesn't retroactivey apply to products sold before its introduction. So it'll be a few years before we find out how well it really works
if someone ships in stuff from a chineese manufacturer without a presence in the EU and then disapears before thier recycling dues come up what exactly can the state do about it? same question if the company who should be responsible goes bust?
and it seems like you missed the following paragraph of the directive when you came up with your missile defense example: "Equipment which is connected with the protection of the essential interests of the security of Member States, arms, munitions and war material shall be excluded from this Directive. This does not, however, apply to products which are not intended for specifically military purposes."
but you can't put more than one machine on a desktop generally (you can but it requires quite advanced trickery). So if they don't need more power than the old machine provides and the old machine isn't some insanely power hogging server then I don't see the issue.
Re:Why target NEC?
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 4, Informative
i'd guess because NEC is a well known brand without having so many existing deals with retailers/distributors that it would be difficult to set up such deals for the clone company
that humans (with good hearing) can hear up to 20KHZ. by the niquist sampling theorem that means you need at least a 40KHZ sample rate.
However the niquist sampling theorem assumes perfect filters in both encoder and decoder. Perfect filters cannot exist (they are non-causal) and so you end up trading off sharp response (nessacery to keep noise caused by aliasing down) for phase distortion (which manifests itself in the time domain as different delays at different freuquencies) or other types of distortion caused by digital filtering.
running on your own legs is very uncomfortable if you are overweight or not used to it. But if you start doing it regularlly you'll get used to it.
now the fact that the bounce isn't controlled by the body may make it worse but i still think its something people could get used to just as people get used to being on ships and similar.
they do but the human body is quite capable of dealing with falling over or having another person fall on it with no damage in the majority of cases.
the person on that walker is quite high up and there is the weight of the walker itself to deal with too. Falling while on that or having it fall on you would be a LOT nastier than falling while walking/running or having a person fall on you.
but i belive a dead electric wheelchair would be very difficult to move. Those things contain big heavy battery packs.
If you are relying on a machanical aid you have to plan for supplying it. This applies whether its a car, a powered wheelchair a ride on walker or a powersuit.
yeah sometimes progress brings with it worse failure modes. With appropriate diligence though theese should be manageable just as they are manageable for aircraft today.
having your product pirated does not cost you anything (well maybe a small ammount for things like update downloads but i doubt its too sigificant) and may infact bring you benifits (how do you think photoshop got where it is today)
persuading people who would have pirated your software to buy it legit is a win.
persuading people who would have pirated your software to go to a competitor (especially a free one) is short term neutral and long term loss (there are some situations where pirate software is considered too risky to use, most buisnesses for example, if people learn your software by using it pirate there is a good chance they will cause copies to be bought legit later).
MS fights piracy because it belives by doing so it can sell more legit copies. However every time it does so it risks driving people off windows completely. What theese vendors are doing is a prime example of that.
PSU uses roaming directories. They (almost always*) work fine. They need a third-party tool to enforce a 20MB quota on desktop size, and have actually I think completely changed the setup so that the desktop gets loaded from a network path so that they don't even need that.
If I were making a network with Windows machines in which people moving between computers was common I'd say there's no other way to approach things than roaming profiles. It's WAY too useful.
Roaming profiles are based on the idea of copying the profile arround
this means people can work offline but as the GP has stated it gets totally impractical rather quickly.
the soloution at least for desktops is to just load stuff directly off network shares, giving up the ability to work offline but saving a LOT of network load. This is certainly achiveable but it means a LOT of work manually reconfiguring applications and the OS to move stuff out of the profile and onto network drives.
sure they can but its a step above what the average pirate could/would do.
its also risky. if others start copying your update software then your update server could make you a major target for the anti-piracy brigade. I guess you could run it from a botnet but this would still require a lot of care and skill to get right.
its also a LOT of work. every time a ms update comes out you would have to quickly get it downloaded and then modify your software QUICKLY (every day its availible and your update isn't is a day in which your customers could notice the issue) to allow said update to install (or at least appear to install) cleanly.
you've also got a problem if your machines are used offline with ms updates brought to them on removable media.
If people can hack away the nagging window that John from the Shady Store can't then it is a Darwin Award to John: he deserves to be out of business. sure he can once he finds out about it.
but his previous customers will start getting the nags and possiblly asking questions. Particularlly if they hadn't explicitly agreed to not having a legit copy of windows. Thats bad for John even if he can hack it out on his new builds.
most people won't ahve USB 1.1 on there XP machine. i've certainly seen machines that only have usb 1.1 ports running XP but i agree they are the exception not the rule (the fact that the uni have a campus wide license to upgrade and downgrade windows probablly has an effect too).
i'd imagine more of an issue is hubs though. I still see usb 1 only hubs on sale all the time.
I don't see how replacing use of pirate windows with use of linux is a win for MS.
they don't get any money either way and more use of linux in the third world will mean more software made for it which will threaten thier profits in the first world.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one major difference between trains and cars.
trains are long thin run on metal tracks with metal wheels (very low rolling resistance) only go up shallow inclines and usually are streamlined to at least some degree so the power they use in continous motion is relatively low.
However they are very heavy. So to start them moving you need high torque right the way down to stationary. mechanical transmissions fed by IC engines have great trouble providing this (basically the only way to get any tourque at all out of an IC engine at stationary is to use a slipping clutch) standing starts are about the ideal application of electric motors!
So it comes down to a case of you are going to have a non-mecanical (generally electric but hydralic is also seen in smaller trains) transmission to start the train. Do you wan't a mechanical one as well. train designers have obviously decided not (probablly at least partly because of the complications of running mechanical transmissions to bogies)
on the other hand in a car a mechanical transmission capable of handling continuous running at highway type speeds and little else (in a hybrid the eletric motor can cover the rest) and therefore providing the most efficiant transmission of the friction opposing power a car in continuous motion needs makes sense.
The customer is responsible for parking the car where it came from, but the space is reserved anyway, so that isn't difficult.
out of interest do any of theese services offer one way travel (e.g. pick up at one depot drop off at another)?
that depleted uranium actaully gets more radioactive at first not less as the decay products have shorter half lives than the uranium itself.
anyone know if this is true?
those aren't produced for entertainment purposes though they are produced to let people know they are serious about killing hostages if thier demands are not met.
Trains are hybrids
not in the sense that hybrid cars are, i don't think there are any trains in common use that store sigificant energy in batteries.
If there are areas where the specs need improvement to get closer to the "Write Once Run Anywhere" goal, by all means complain about those areas.
the problem is twofold.
1: the java.* and javax.* trees are bloody massive so reimplementing it all is a huge ammount of work
2: most java developers don't give a fuck about runtime environments other than suns and some of the platform isn't very well documented (just go and have a look at some of the stuff in javax.swing.plaf). The result is that most java apps only work with sun java (and things that are slightly modified versions of it rather than from scratch implementions). This is essentially the same problem that wine has.
yeah a comprimised X server attacking the app would be possible but
1: in many cases there would be little point actually attacking the app when you could just use its UI to do what you wan'ted anyway.
2: the X server is generally running as root so this is only usefull if people are using remote apps.
an app trusts an X server in the same way an app trusts its controlling terminal. in both cases comprimising the interface with the user will likely give you a high level of control over the app.
the client libs only run as the app that calls them anyway so they aren't security critical code.
the X server otoh is security critical because it runs as root and serves other users.
thats ok if your document only contains text and some formatting of said text that you don't really care about.
but saving as plain text will not just destroy formatting. it will destroy diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulae, probablly tables and any other non-textual content.
maybe not a problem if your a programmer type that doesn't belive in flowcharts, uml or anything similar but a major issue if you are an electronics guy or a software engineering guy that uses tools like uml.
finally there is the issue of character encodings. if all your characters are ascii this is again not an issue. but if you are using any other script or worse a mixture of scripts in the same document (say russian text with greek letters for math stuff) then you have to
1: choose a suitable character encoding
2: remember what that encoding is
3: hope that you still have software that can work with that encoding however many years down the line.
it would not be a contridiction for legal immigrants to be helthier than the general population and illigal immigrants less so.
do you know where i can find specs of said format, the wikipedia article just has links to an example parser written in perl (not a language i'm too familiar with) but the parser doesn't look terriblly long or complicated.
even if you assume they know the html to surround it with there is still no easy way for thier programs to get input etc (yes there are forms which can fire events but your into the whole realm of event driven programming then which is far from easy though its a nice way to program later).
not to mention that javascript acts differently during pageload from how its acts on an event.
so no i don't think thats anywhere close to a computer that starts at a prompt where you can enter basic commands, then join them into a program, then make yoru program take input and finally move onto stuff like loops subroutines etc.
the closest things i know of today (discounting people running really old copies of qbasic if they can find one) are the unix shell and matlab. The unix shell is not easilly availible to most computer users (as they run windows) and carries a lot of baggage from its origins as a command launcher thats been extended. Matlab is a very expensive peice of software that most users won't have access to until they go to university (and even then if they only do a technical course).
a couple of points about WEEE
this has only be introduced VERY recently and it doesn't retroactivey apply to products sold before its introduction. So it'll be a few years before we find out how well it really works
if someone ships in stuff from a chineese manufacturer without a presence in the EU and then disapears before thier recycling dues come up what exactly can the state do about it? same question if the company who should be responsible goes bust?
and it seems like you missed the following paragraph of the directive when you came up with your missile defense example:
"Equipment which is connected with the protection of the essential interests of the security of Member States, arms, munitions and war material shall be excluded from this Directive. This does not, however, apply to products which are not intended for specifically military purposes."
that kind of ananlysis works for servers etc
but you can't put more than one machine on a desktop generally (you can but it requires quite advanced trickery). So if they don't need more power than the old machine provides and the old machine isn't some insanely power hogging server then I don't see the issue.
i'd guess because NEC is a well known brand without having so many existing deals with retailers/distributors that it would be difficult to set up such deals for the clone company
that humans (with good hearing) can hear up to 20KHZ. by the niquist sampling theorem that means you need at least a 40KHZ sample rate.
However the niquist sampling theorem assumes perfect filters in both encoder and decoder. Perfect filters cannot exist (they are non-causal) and so you end up trading off sharp response (nessacery to keep noise caused by aliasing down) for phase distortion (which manifests itself in the time domain as different delays at different freuquencies) or other types of distortion caused by digital filtering.
P.S. i can't hear the difference myself.
running on your own legs is very uncomfortable if you are overweight or not used to it. But if you start doing it regularlly you'll get used to it.
now the fact that the bounce isn't controlled by the body may make it worse but i still think its something people could get used to just as people get used to being on ships and similar.
they do but the human body is quite capable of dealing with falling over or having another person fall on it with no damage in the majority of cases.
the person on that walker is quite high up and there is the weight of the walker itself to deal with too. Falling while on that or having it fall on you would be a LOT nastier than falling while walking/running or having a person fall on you.
but i belive a dead electric wheelchair would be very difficult to move. Those things contain big heavy battery packs.
If you are relying on a machanical aid you have to plan for supplying it. This applies whether its a car, a powered wheelchair a ride on walker or a powersuit.
yeah sometimes progress brings with it worse failure modes. With appropriate diligence though theese should be manageable just as they are manageable for aircraft today.
having your product pirated does not cost you anything (well maybe a small ammount for things like update downloads but i doubt its too sigificant) and may infact bring you benifits (how do you think photoshop got where it is today)
persuading people who would have pirated your software to buy it legit is a win.
persuading people who would have pirated your software to go to a competitor (especially a free one) is short term neutral and long term loss (there are some situations where pirate software is considered too risky to use, most buisnesses for example, if people learn your software by using it pirate there is a good chance they will cause copies to be bought legit later).
MS fights piracy because it belives by doing so it can sell more legit copies. However every time it does so it risks driving people off windows completely. What theese vendors are doing is a prime example of that.
PSU uses roaming directories. They (almost always*) work fine. They need a third-party tool to enforce a 20MB quota on desktop size, and have actually I think completely changed the setup so that the desktop gets loaded from a network path so that they don't even need that.
If I were making a network with Windows machines in which people moving between computers was common I'd say there's no other way to approach things than roaming profiles. It's WAY too useful.
Roaming profiles are based on the idea of copying the profile arround
this means people can work offline but as the GP has stated it gets totally impractical rather quickly.
the soloution at least for desktops is to just load stuff directly off network shares, giving up the ability to work offline but saving a LOT of network load. This is certainly achiveable but it means a LOT of work manually reconfiguring applications and the OS to move stuff out of the profile and onto network drives.
sure they can but its a step above what the average pirate could/would do.
its also risky. if others start copying your update software then your update server could make you a major target for the anti-piracy brigade. I guess you could run it from a botnet but this would still require a lot of care and skill to get right.
its also a LOT of work. every time a ms update comes out you would have to quickly get it downloaded and then modify your software QUICKLY (every day its availible and your update isn't is a day in which your customers could notice the issue) to allow said update to install (or at least appear to install) cleanly.
you've also got a problem if your machines are used offline with ms updates brought to them on removable media.
If people can hack away the nagging window that John from the Shady Store can't then it is a Darwin Award to John: he deserves to be out of business.
sure he can once he finds out about it.
but his previous customers will start getting the nags and possiblly asking questions. Particularlly if they hadn't explicitly agreed to not having a legit copy of windows. Thats bad for John even if he can hack it out on his new builds.
most people won't ahve USB 1.1 on there XP machine.
i've certainly seen machines that only have usb 1.1 ports running XP but i agree they are the exception not the rule (the fact that the uni have a campus wide license to upgrade and downgrade windows probablly has an effect too).
i'd imagine more of an issue is hubs though. I still see usb 1 only hubs on sale all the time.
define working
I don't see how replacing use of pirate windows with use of linux is a win for MS.
they don't get any money either way and more use of linux in the third world will mean more software made for it which will threaten thier profits in the first world.