No you are the one is confused, when someone says 24bit/192kHz they mean the 192kHz as a sample rate. High end audio gear usually offers this sample rate though it's doubtful if there is any benefit. 96kHz is probablly more than sufficiant in practice.
That 192 kilobit per second is also a bitrate used for crappy compress
Amazon force you to use their payment processing service to an even greater extent than ebay force you to use paypal. Ebay force sellers in most categories (at least on ebay.com and ebay.co.uk, other country sites may have different rules) to offer paypal and strongly encourage buyers to use it if offered but there are other options sellers can offer.
Amazon is very much set up arround the idea of "pick a price, list a product and wait for it to sell at that price" whereas ebay was set up arround the idea of fixed duration auctions and later added buy it now listings which are also fixed duration. So if you want to sell something quickly then ebay may well be a better bet. Also because all ebay listings (even buy it now) are fixed duration it reduces the risk that a seller disappears while leaving their product listing up.
This really needs to be divided into two questions, firstly why do buyers use paypal and secondly way do sellers use paypal.
Why do buyers use paypal?
1: While i'm sure their security model has flaws it's a lot better than the credit card system of "hand the merchant a number that lets them withdraw whatever they like". 2: They make international transactions easy and tell the buyer the actual cost in their own currency including any conversion fees before the buyer clicks buy (unlike credit cards where you only find out the real cost in your own currency after the transaction is processed).
Why do sellers use paypal? 1: It's really easy to get started, while fees are charged they are only charged based on transactions that actually happen unlike with credit card merchant agreements where you often have to pay a fixed subscription on top of per-transaction fees. Afaict it's easy to integrate them in your website and all the security sensitive stuff happens on paypal's website not yours,
There are also of course network affects running in both directions, if lots of sellers use paypal that will encourage buyers to use them and if lots of buyers use paypal that will encourage sellers to use paypal.
PayPal has always done things I found objectionable.
I wouldn't disagree there but so have visa, mastercard etc. The main ones that all of them do is bias themselves towards the buyer in any dispute and to premptively freeze funds to make sure that if the buyer wins a dispute it's the merchant who is left out of pocket not them.
because there are EU regulations against that crap.
Indeed there are.
Unfortunately AIUI while the "single euro payments area" does cover the UK and means they can't charge you more for a euro transfer to germany than a euro transfer to a euro demoninated account in the UK they are free to charge whatever they like for making a euro denominated transaction on a sterling denominated account.
I've had people send me cash by courier from the UK because of this kind of nonsense.
I've personally sent cash through the post to complete a purchase from a german ebay seller when I forgot to check if they took paypal before bidding*.
* I do not know if ebay.de's policies force sellers to offer paypal nowadays or not, they certainly didn't at the time.
The problem is by adding centralisation and automation you help the spooks subvert the system. Centralisation helps them because they can attack the central authority. Automation helps them because automatons behave predictablly. It's much harder to quietly MITM a process with humans in the loop because those humans may be cross-checking in ways you don't know about.
(note: details in this post are from memory and may be imperfect)
I remember talking to someone who'd previously worked at a place which designed some kind of control hardware that was used by among others the mining industry.
Unfortunately this hardware was becoming a pain to support, it was a somewhat obsolete design and also had a habit of catching fire from time to time so they wanted to encourage customers to move to newer designs. On the other hand they didn't want to discontinue it and leave customers in the lurch. So they decided to give their customers a not so subtule hint by doubling the price.
It didn't work, customers kept buying them in nearly the same quantity as before so they doubled the price again.
IIRC after a few doublings of price they decided that the product line was worth keeping going after all.
If you look at the submarine cable map [submarinecablemap.com], you can pretty much see at a glance which countries are more aggressive about internet and technology in general
Kind of interesting.
If you look at the US there are lots of submarine cables but most of them are heading out across the ocean to europe and asia with a few links heading up along the coast to alaska and south/central america. If you look at europe you see the occasional coast hugging submarine cable but most of the submarine cables are either crossing a local body of water (e.g. english channel, mediteranian sea, north sea, baltic sea ) or heading off towards America or africa/asia. Australasia is a similar picture, there are submarine cables sure but they are either connecting islands or heading off out the area. I interpret this to mean that the overland infrastructure is good enough and the countries trust their neighbours enough that submarine cables are only used when there is a good technical reason for using them.
On the other hand if you look at The middle east, africa, south and east asia and south america you see the map is dominated by cables hugging the coast with lots of landing points (virtually every non-landlocked country is hooked up to at least one of the coast hugging cables). I interpret this to mean that either the overland infrastructure in those areas sucks and/or the countries don't trust their neighbours.
In a couple of places (libya, angola, south africa) I even see cables that only land in one country but hug the coast landing repeatedly. This really suggests that the conditions for building overland infrastructure in those places must suck.
I also notice that a lot of the so called "undersea cables" from europe to asia cut across land in Egypt to get from the Mediterranean sea to the gulf of Suez. Could be nasty if egypt stops being friendly with the west.
The number system is a mess and really does feel like it was designed by marketing.
Afaict the fundamental issue is that Intel has recently been focussing more on it's laptop and mainstream desktop markets than the high end desktop and server markets. The result is that the high end desktop stuff is currently about a generation behind the mainstream desktop stuff.
Of course intel doesn't want to make that too obvious, so they have made the first digit of the part numbers on their last two generations of high end desktop stuff one higher than it should be for consistency with their mainstream desktop stuff.
oh wait but its an older name
Indeed, unlke the part numbers the microarchitecture names don't seem to be being influenced by dubious marketing.
no wait, it's got an -E
Which means it's for the high end ("enthusiast") desktop platform rather than the mainstream desktop platforms.
but the box is Blue.
AIUI only extreme editions get the black boxes.
But yes it is confusing if you don't follow this stuff. As I said I strongly suspect the confusion is deliberate.
Interestingly according to the die photo this time round it appears to have been designed as a 6 core rather than designed as an 8 core and then crippled to make a 6-core like it was with SB-E.
Is this the first multiplier unlocked Intel chip (K series) that I can buy without a crappy Intel IGPU?
No.
Even counting just K suffix chips. There was the i7-875K back in 2010 though noone showed much interest because it was before Intel clamped down on multiplier overclocking. There was also the i7-3930K 6-core SB-E chip more recently. If you also count extreme edition (X suffix) chips then there were a lot more unlocked intel chips without integrated GPUs.
So it should be cheaper, right?
No
While you are doing away with the GPU yes but you are getting more memory channels, more PCIe lanes and possiblly more cores (depending on which of the three models you buy). To support the extra memory channels and PCIe lanes (as well as the QPI links for dual socket variants) the socket also has a lot more pins.
AIUI Intel takes a handful of basic designs and cripples them in different ways to produce a wide variety of products which they then sell at different price points depending on what they think customers will be willing to pay.
The better per-thread performance of the competing Haswell part may keep them away, though(unless the increased cache makes up for it). Games make better use of additional cores than they used to; but they still don't tend to go as far in that direction as server or some workstation loads.
Indeed.
Since sandy bridge Intel has been releasing the high end desktop parts very late compared to the mainstream parts. By the time SB-E came out the mainstream desktop parts were on very nearly on IVY bridge. This time it was even worse, not only did IB-E comw out AFTER the mainstream desktop parts were on haswell but haswell brings a more substantial improvement in IPC than IVY did.
They try to hide it with misleading model numbers but I strongly suspect that most of the people who spend this much money on a CPU are not so easilly fooled.
The main proposed use for He3 has been as a fusion fuel but while the fusion reaction involving He3 does have the advantage of being aneutronic it is unlikly to be used in practical fusion for two reasons. The reactions involving He3 requires much higher energy levels than the fusion reactions being investigated currently. This implies two things.
1: He3+D fusion is going to be much harder to pull off than D+T or even D+D fusion (where D is duterium and T is tritium). 2: The He3+D fusion reaction will always be accompanied by a side D+D fusion so the overall reaction wouldn't be aneutronic.
There is also apparently a He3+He3 reaction that would be aneutronic but is even harder to pull off.
Some would like ipv6 to be the end of NAT but I suspect we will still see some NATs either because of ISPs restricting addresses for buisness reasons* or because customers want to switch ISPs without renumbering internally or using PI space and BGP**.
And even in the absence of NAT similar (thought slightly less complex) hole poking techniques will be needed to punch through stateful firewalls.
* For example a mobile phone provider may refuse to perform prefix delegation at all to discourage tethering or a home provider may limit it's users to one subnet worth of addresses to discourage business use. ** There is fundamentally a limit to the number of organisations worldwide that can use PI space and BGP because for every organisation that does that there needs to be a route in every core router on the planet.
Nuclear, on the other hand, basically can't be turned off.
You can insert the control rods which will pretty quickly reduce or stop the fission. Of course you still have decay heat (iirc about 10%) so the plant isn't going to be completely "off" but it's certainly going to be producing a lot less than before you inserted them.
Of course just because you can turn something off doesn't mean you want to. The fuel is a pretty minor part of the cost of running a nuclear plant. So once you have paid for all those construction costs and paid for the salaries of those running it you don't save much by shutting it down.
an independent private company
Which holds an effective monopoly and which originates from a government privitisation activity.
who you would be perfectly free to set up a competitor to
Do you have any evidence that people are free to set up competitors to national grid?
I don't miss the days of either metered dialup or unmetered plans that kicked you off after an hour forcing you to wait through that modem dialing again making use of IM impractical. I don't miss the days of having my phone line being blocked by being online. I don't miss the days of video being something you waited hours to see a short low quality clip. Yes sometimes it's enfuriating when some idiot makes video the only option but it's often much easier to see how to do something when you are shown it than from reading a complex discription. I don't miss it being virtually impractical to download CD images of linux distros due to the download time being longer than my ISP would let me stay connected at once.
Of course for those unlucky few who are still stuck on dialup things must really suck now.
Well it means they have decided that dialup is no longer important enough to handle as part of their main buisness. So they have pushed off the responsibility of handling those customers unlucky enough to be stuck on dialup to a relatively small subsidary.
Short version: Whereever they are in the UK they will pay the same charges to use the internet either paying a fixed subscription fee and then no phone call charges or paying by the minuite to their phone provider.
Long version: The fact you use the term "long distance charges" makes me suspect you are an american. Things played out differently in the UK.
AIUI in the USA local calls were traditionally free, so if you found an ISP in your local call area then you paid no phone call charges. If your ISP was outside your local call area then you would pay "long distance charges" to connect to it in addition to whatever your ISP charged.
In the UK calls were traditionaly divided into "local", "regional" and "national". Local calls were cheapest (but not free), regional calls more expensive and national calls the most expensive. None were free.
When dialup ISPs first turned up in the UK they had only the occasional point of presense and it had a regular geographic number, so if you were outside of london you may well have had to pay national call rates to use them. This made internet access fairly expensive.
Then ISPs realised they could use 0845 numbers. At the time 0845 numbers cost the same as a local call regardless of where you were in the UK* and due to the crazy way regulatory structures were set up the reciving telco could actually make a profit off the call. At first ISPs just added 0845 lines as a feature and continued to charge subscription fees and/or per minuite charges of their own but later ISPs showed up where the only thing the customer had to pay was the 0845 call charges.
Arround this time there was also a short lived product called "surftime" from BT where the end user paid an additional charge on their phone line rental and in exchange got unmetered access (possiblly only at certain times of day) to special dialup phone numbers intended specially for use with the surftime package (though they could also be used by non-surftime users who would have to pay a per-minuite charge for the call)
Finally ISPs started offering "unmetered" packages where you pay a subscription to your ISP but you don't pay any phone call prices. From the end users point of view it looks like they are calling a freephone number and nothing appears on their phone bill but from the ISPs point of view there are special tarrifs for this service that are much cheaper than a regular freephone call.
Arround this time cheap (often unmetered) calling plans for phone calls to geographic numbers came in but 0845 calls were excluded from them and often the geographic numbers of ISPs were explicitly exlcuded too. So you couldn't really use them to access the internet.
Surftime basically died out (I can find any announcement saying it was no longer available to new customers, i've no idea if they ever got arround to killing it completely) so now for dialup in the UK you have basically two options. Either you use an ISP with no subscription fees and an 0845 number (and pay your telephone provider per minuite) or you use an ISP where you pay a subscription fee and then get free calls to the ISP.
* Since then the cost of calls to geograpic numbers has dropped through the floor while 0845 prices have remained much the same, so this is no longer the case.
For example, how many American companies apply for.us domain? The other side of the coin is that you are only talking about the English speaking world.
Heck he is probablly only talking about the USA
Over here in the uk.co.uk is pretty commonly used. Sometimes.com will take you to the right place too but other tines it will take you to a foreign company of the same name or for multinational companies to the american website of the company in question.
Which covers a wide range of technologies intended to limit the conditions under which a peice of software or media can be used.
DRM for a game has two possible failure modes: 1. You can't play a game that you should be able to play. 2. You can play a game that you shouldn't be able to play.
The problem is people WILL try to circumvent DRM. So an effective DRM system needs to not just check that the conditions under which the software are allowed to be used appear to be met. It also needs to check for indications of circumvention measures and that brings a risk of false positives.
Some developers have taken to subtuly breaking games if the DRM system thinks it is under attack. This makes it much harder for the pirates for produce a "clean crack" but can also lead to massive frustration among legitimate users if there is a false positive.
Some developers have also taken to using reliance on an external server as a key component in their DRM systems. The idea (and it's a valid though horrible one) is that by putting some components of the drm system or possiblly even components of the game itself on a machine the pirate can't touch they make it much harder to crack. However reliance on external servers leads to the possibility of bringing problems that used to be unique to multiplayer into the singleplayer experiance.
Or maybe it's that the US tends to use a LOT of overhead wiring. Here in the UK you only really see overhead wiring in the countryside (and power cuts are far more common in the countryside than in urban/suburban areas).
Slashdot Mirror
No you are the one is confused, when someone says 24bit/192kHz they mean the 192kHz as a sample rate. High end audio gear usually offers this sample rate though it's doubtful if there is any benefit. 96kHz is probablly more than sufficiant in practice.
That 192 kilobit per second is also a bitrate used for crappy compress
IIRC policies can vary by region but in the UK they force sellers to offer paypal and strongly encourage buyers to use it.
Amazon force you to use their payment processing service to an even greater extent than ebay force you to use paypal. Ebay force sellers in most categories (at least on ebay.com and ebay.co.uk, other country sites may have different rules) to offer paypal and strongly encourage buyers to use it if offered but there are other options sellers can offer.
Amazon is very much set up arround the idea of "pick a price, list a product and wait for it to sell at that price" whereas ebay was set up arround the idea of fixed duration auctions and later added buy it now listings which are also fixed duration. So if you want to sell something quickly then ebay may well be a better bet. Also because all ebay listings (even buy it now) are fixed duration it reduces the risk that a seller disappears while leaving their product listing up.
Why do people use PayPal at all?
This really needs to be divided into two questions, firstly why do buyers use paypal and secondly way do sellers use paypal.
Why do buyers use paypal?
1: While i'm sure their security model has flaws it's a lot better than the credit card system of "hand the merchant a number that lets them withdraw whatever they like".
2: They make international transactions easy and tell the buyer the actual cost in their own currency including any conversion fees before the buyer clicks buy (unlike credit cards where you only find out the real cost in your own currency after the transaction is processed).
Why do sellers use paypal?
1: It's really easy to get started, while fees are charged they are only charged based on transactions that actually happen unlike with credit card merchant agreements where you often have to pay a fixed subscription on top of per-transaction fees. Afaict it's easy to integrate them in your website and all the security sensitive stuff happens on paypal's website not yours,
There are also of course network affects running in both directions, if lots of sellers use paypal that will encourage buyers to use them and if lots of buyers use paypal that will encourage sellers to use paypal.
PayPal has always done things I found objectionable.
I wouldn't disagree there but so have visa, mastercard etc. The main ones that all of them do is bias themselves towards the buyer in any dispute and to premptively freeze funds to make sure that if the buyer wins a dispute it's the merchant who is left out of pocket not them.
because there are EU regulations against that crap.
Indeed there are.
Unfortunately AIUI while the "single euro payments area" does cover the UK and means they can't charge you more for a euro transfer to germany than a euro transfer to a euro demoninated account in the UK they are free to charge whatever they like for making a euro denominated transaction on a sterling denominated account.
I've had people send me cash by courier from the UK because of this kind of nonsense.
I've personally sent cash through the post to complete a purchase from a german ebay seller when I forgot to check if they took paypal before bidding*.
* I do not know if ebay.de's policies force sellers to offer paypal nowadays or not, they certainly didn't at the time.
The problem is by adding centralisation and automation you help the spooks subvert the system. Centralisation helps them because they can attack the central authority. Automation helps them because automatons behave predictablly. It's much harder to quietly MITM a process with humans in the loop because those humans may be cross-checking in ways you don't know about.
(note: details in this post are from memory and may be imperfect)
I remember talking to someone who'd previously worked at a place which designed some kind of control hardware that was used by among others the mining industry.
Unfortunately this hardware was becoming a pain to support, it was a somewhat obsolete design and also had a habit of catching fire from time to time so they wanted to encourage customers to move to newer designs. On the other hand they didn't want to discontinue it and leave customers in the lurch. So they decided to give their customers a not so subtule hint by doubling the price.
It didn't work, customers kept buying them in nearly the same quantity as before so they doubled the price again.
IIRC after a few doublings of price they decided that the product line was worth keeping going after all.
there IS a difference in box color? hfs. i was having fun with it at the end. i wasnt even aware they had a box color thing going on.
Yep, Intel use black boxes for their extreme edition chips and blue boxes for pretty much everything else.
AMD do much the same, "black edition" processors get black boxes, other processes get green boxes.
If you look at the submarine cable map [submarinecablemap.com], you can pretty much see at a glance which countries are more aggressive about internet and technology in general
Kind of interesting.
If you look at the US there are lots of submarine cables but most of them are heading out across the ocean to europe and asia with a few links heading up along the coast to alaska and south/central america. If you look at europe you see the occasional coast hugging submarine cable but most of the submarine cables are either crossing a local body of water (e.g. english channel, mediteranian sea, north sea, baltic sea ) or heading off towards America or africa/asia. Australasia is a similar picture, there are submarine cables sure but they are either connecting islands or heading off out the area. I interpret this to mean that the overland infrastructure is good enough and the countries trust their neighbours enough that submarine cables are only used when there is a good technical reason for using them.
On the other hand if you look at The middle east, africa, south and east asia and south america you see the map is dominated by cables hugging the coast with lots of landing points (virtually every non-landlocked country is hooked up to at least one of the coast hugging cables). I interpret this to mean that either the overland infrastructure in those areas sucks and/or the countries don't trust their neighbours.
In a couple of places (libya, angola, south africa) I even see cables that only land in one country but hug the coast landing repeatedly. This really suggests that the conditions for building overland infrastructure in those places must suck.
I also notice that a lot of the so called "undersea cables" from europe to asia cut across land in Egypt to get from the Mediterranean sea to the gulf of Suez. Could be nasty if egypt stops being friendly with the west.
its got a higher number...
The number system is a mess and really does feel like it was designed by marketing.
Afaict the fundamental issue is that Intel has recently been focussing more on it's laptop and mainstream desktop markets than the high end desktop and server markets. The result is that the high end desktop stuff is currently about a generation behind the mainstream desktop stuff.
Of course intel doesn't want to make that too obvious, so they have made the first digit of the part numbers on their last two generations of high end desktop stuff one higher than it should be for consistency with their mainstream desktop stuff.
oh wait but its an older name
Indeed, unlke the part numbers the microarchitecture names don't seem to be being influenced by dubious marketing.
no wait, it's got an -E
Which means it's for the high end ("enthusiast") desktop platform rather than the mainstream desktop platforms.
but the box is Blue.
AIUI only extreme editions get the black boxes.
But yes it is confusing if you don't follow this stuff. As I said I strongly suspect the confusion is deliberate.
before Intel clamped down on multiplier overclocking.
Brainfart, I mean before they cracked down on FSB/BCLK overclocking.
Interestingly according to the die photo this time round it appears to have been designed as a 6 core rather than designed as an 8 core and then crippled to make a 6-core like it was with SB-E.
Is this the first multiplier unlocked Intel chip (K series) that I can buy without a crappy Intel IGPU?
No.
Even counting just K suffix chips. There was the i7-875K back in 2010 though noone showed much interest because it was before Intel clamped down on multiplier overclocking. There was also the i7-3930K 6-core SB-E chip more recently. If you also count extreme edition (X suffix) chips then there were a lot more unlocked intel chips without integrated GPUs.
So it should be cheaper, right?
No
While you are doing away with the GPU yes but you are getting more memory channels, more PCIe lanes and possiblly more cores (depending on which of the three models you buy). To support the extra memory channels and PCIe lanes (as well as the QPI links for dual socket variants) the socket also has a lot more pins.
AIUI Intel takes a handful of basic designs and cripples them in different ways to produce a wide variety of products which they then sell at different price points depending on what they think customers will be willing to pay.
The better per-thread performance of the competing Haswell part may keep them away, though(unless the increased cache makes up for it). Games make better use of additional cores than they used to; but they still don't tend to go as far in that direction as server or some workstation loads.
Indeed.
Since sandy bridge Intel has been releasing the high end desktop parts very late compared to the mainstream parts. By the time SB-E came out the mainstream desktop parts were on very nearly on IVY bridge. This time it was even worse, not only did IB-E comw out AFTER the mainstream desktop parts were on haswell but haswell brings a more substantial improvement in IPC than IVY did.
They try to hide it with misleading model numbers but I strongly suspect that most of the people who spend this much money on a CPU are not so easilly fooled.
The main proposed use for He3 has been as a fusion fuel but while the fusion reaction involving He3 does have the advantage of being aneutronic it is unlikly to be used in practical fusion for two reasons. The reactions involving He3 requires much higher energy levels than the fusion reactions being investigated currently. This implies two things.
1: He3+D fusion is going to be much harder to pull off than D+T or even D+D fusion (where D is duterium and T is tritium).
2: The He3+D fusion reaction will always be accompanied by a side D+D fusion so the overall reaction wouldn't be aneutronic.
There is also apparently a He3+He3 reaction that would be aneutronic but is even harder to pull off.
Some would like ipv6 to be the end of NAT but I suspect we will still see some NATs either because of ISPs restricting addresses for buisness reasons* or because customers want to switch ISPs without renumbering internally or using PI space and BGP**.
And even in the absence of NAT similar (thought slightly less complex) hole poking techniques will be needed to punch through stateful firewalls.
* For example a mobile phone provider may refuse to perform prefix delegation at all to discourage tethering or a home provider may limit it's users to one subnet worth of addresses to discourage business use.
** There is fundamentally a limit to the number of organisations worldwide that can use PI space and BGP because for every organisation that does that there needs to be a route in every core router on the planet.
Nuclear, on the other hand, basically can't be turned off.
You can insert the control rods which will pretty quickly reduce or stop the fission. Of course you still have decay heat (iirc about 10%) so the plant isn't going to be completely "off" but it's certainly going to be producing a lot less than before you inserted them.
Of course just because you can turn something off doesn't mean you want to. The fuel is a pretty minor part of the cost of running a nuclear plant. So once you have paid for all those construction costs and paid for the salaries of those running it you don't save much by shutting it down.
an independent private company
Which holds an effective monopoly and which originates from a government privitisation activity.
who you would be perfectly free to set up a competitor to
Do you have any evidence that people are free to set up competitors to national grid?
I don't miss the days of either metered dialup or unmetered plans that kicked you off after an hour forcing you to wait through that modem dialing again making use of IM impractical. I don't miss the days of having my phone line being blocked by being online. I don't miss the days of video being something you waited hours to see a short low quality clip. Yes sometimes it's enfuriating when some idiot makes video the only option but it's often much easier to see how to do something when you are shown it than from reading a complex discription. I don't miss it being virtually impractical to download CD images of linux distros due to the download time being longer than my ISP would let me stay connected at once.
Of course for those unlucky few who are still stuck on dialup things must really suck now.
Well it means they have decided that dialup is no longer important enough to handle as part of their main buisness. So they have pushed off the responsibility of handling those customers unlucky enough to be stuck on dialup to a relatively small subsidary.
Short version:
Whereever they are in the UK they will pay the same charges to use the internet either paying a fixed subscription fee and then no phone call charges or paying by the minuite to their phone provider.
Long version:
The fact you use the term "long distance charges" makes me suspect you are an american. Things played out differently in the UK.
AIUI in the USA local calls were traditionally free, so if you found an ISP in your local call area then you paid no phone call charges. If your ISP was outside your local call area then you would pay "long distance charges" to connect to it in addition to whatever your ISP charged.
In the UK calls were traditionaly divided into "local", "regional" and "national". Local calls were cheapest (but not free), regional calls more expensive and national calls the most expensive. None were free.
When dialup ISPs first turned up in the UK they had only the occasional point of presense and it had a regular geographic number, so if you were outside of london you may well have had to pay national call rates to use them. This made internet access fairly expensive.
Then ISPs realised they could use 0845 numbers. At the time 0845 numbers cost the same as a local call regardless of where you were in the UK* and due to the crazy way regulatory structures were set up the reciving telco could actually make a profit off the call. At first ISPs just added 0845 lines as a feature and continued to charge subscription fees and/or per minuite charges of their own but later ISPs showed up where the only thing the customer had to pay was the 0845 call charges.
Arround this time there was also a short lived product called "surftime" from BT where the end user paid an additional charge on their phone line rental and in exchange got unmetered access (possiblly only at certain times of day) to special dialup phone numbers intended specially for use with the surftime package (though they could also be used by non-surftime users who would have to pay a per-minuite charge for the call)
Finally ISPs started offering "unmetered" packages where you pay a subscription to your ISP but you don't pay any phone call prices. From the end users point of view it looks like they are calling a freephone number and nothing appears on their phone bill but from the ISPs point of view there are special tarrifs for this service that are much cheaper than a regular freephone call.
Arround this time cheap (often unmetered) calling plans for phone calls to geographic numbers came in but 0845 calls were excluded from them and often the geographic numbers of ISPs were explicitly exlcuded too. So you couldn't really use them to access the internet.
Surftime basically died out (I can find any announcement saying it was no longer available to new customers, i've no idea if they ever got arround to killing it completely) so now for dialup in the UK you have basically two options. Either you use an ISP with no subscription fees and an 0845 number (and pay your telephone provider per minuite) or you use an ISP where you pay a subscription fee and then get free calls to the ISP.
* Since then the cost of calls to geograpic numbers has dropped through the floor while 0845 prices have remained much the same, so this is no longer the case.
For example, how many American companies apply for .us domain? The other side of the coin is that you are only talking about the English speaking world.
Heck he is probablly only talking about the USA
Over here in the uk .co.uk is pretty commonly used. Sometimes .com will take you to the right place too but other tines it will take you to a foreign company of the same name or for multinational companies to the american website of the company in question.
In a single 5.25 inch slot you can fit 4, 2.5 inch drives.
Or even six.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998144
DRM means Digital Rights Management.
Which covers a wide range of technologies intended to limit the conditions under which a peice of software or media can be used.
DRM for a game has two possible failure modes: 1. You can't play a game that you should be able to play. 2. You can play a game that you shouldn't be able to play.
The problem is people WILL try to circumvent DRM. So an effective DRM system needs to not just check that the conditions under which the software are allowed to be used appear to be met. It also needs to check for indications of circumvention measures and that brings a risk of false positives.
Some developers have taken to subtuly breaking games if the DRM system thinks it is under attack. This makes it much harder for the pirates for produce a "clean crack" but can also lead to massive frustration among legitimate users if there is a false positive.
Some developers have also taken to using reliance on an external server as a key component in their DRM systems. The idea (and it's a valid though horrible one) is that by putting some components of the drm system or possiblly even components of the game itself on a machine the pirate can't touch they make it much harder to crack. However reliance on external servers leads to the possibility of bringing problems that used to be unique to multiplayer into the singleplayer experiance.
Or maybe it's that the US tends to use a LOT of overhead wiring. Here in the UK you only really see overhead wiring in the countryside (and power cuts are far more common in the countryside than in urban/suburban areas).