I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic here or if you really believe that. Apple does not prevent you from installing another OS on you iDevice
Apple locks down the bootloaders on their idevices in an attempt to stop you running anything other than their blessed OS. Some andriod vendors do the same but afaict most have come round and provided ways of unlocking their bootloaders.
Now in some cases* that lockdown is imperfect and people find ways to bypass it. That doesn't mean we should support vendors who lock their bootloaders down.
* You will notice if you follow the link to open iboot from your linked article that it only applies to the original iphone and the iphone 3g, not to more modern devices. Apple is learning how to lock things down harder.
When you advertise something over BGP you essentially broadcast it to every core router in the world. Having every core router know about every device is just not going to happen. Having every router know about every ISP and large company is bad enough. Also BGP is built on a mixture of trust and manually applied filters. So unless you want to open it up to every idiot breaking other peoples traffic then it's not going to handle systems that regually move arround very well.
Also internet routing looks for the path with the least number of AS hops and will generally only use one connection for any particular pair of end systems. What you really want as an end user with multiple connections is to use both paths at once to connect to the same place.
You clearly don't have a clue about how european VAT works. Generally (there are a handful of exceptions) companies claim back VAT on what they buy and charge VAT on what they sell. The price they "intended" to sell it at makes no difference, only the price they actually sell it at.
Nowadays only the shittiest PSUs have voltage selector switches. AIUI once they are doing active power factor correction it becomes just as easy to design a universal input as a switchable input.
Plus i'd expect a votlage switchable PSU set to 120V to blow up almost immediately if connected to a 240V supply.
I'm in the UK and I know if I order something worth above £15 (including delivery) from outside the EU the VAT is supposed to be collected at import time. Presumablly something similar could be done by the US if they so desired.
I'm sure i've seen "keyed" on card receipts that came with online orders implying that the company collected the card details through the website and then manually keyed them into a POS terminal.
1: there is a very large and not particaully rich country called india where english is one of the official languages (the other being hindi but afaict that isn't used much for technical stuff) 2: some countries deliberately establish english speaking universities in the hope of being more attractive to foreign talent. 3: Even in the UK which is english speaking and fairly rich afaict there is far less tolerance and pushing of overpriced textbooks than in the USA.
Put all of these together and at a university level there is going to be a pretty big market for textbooks in english outside the USA and in general those outside america aren't prepared to pay as much as those inside america. The textbook vendors want to split the market so they can choose a different "most profitable price" for the USA and the rest of the world.
The mac pros currently ship with westmere based CPUs. The most recent comparable CPUs are sandy bridge based. So even if you count both new core designs and die shrinks as "generations" it's still only one generation behind comparable CPUs.
Connectors are selectively plated with gold only on the mating surfaces. It doesn't go on the part that gets soldered.
My guess would be this was a custom connector and either
1: some subcontractor decided that given low volumes it was cheaper to just plate the whole thing at the highest specified thickness than to work out how to selectively plate it (possibly in violation of a spec, possiblly following a spec that only specified minimum thickness of gold not maximum). 2: whoever was designing the connnector specified uniform gold plating
In theory yes, in practice it would be nontrivial (but probablly not impossible) to pull off. If you just pushed the transaction out to the network in the normal way it would likely end up on both forks. So you'd either have to find a way to craft a transaction that was only valid on one fork or you'd have to find a way to feed your transaction into one blockchain without it ever getting out onto the transaction distribution system.
The key thing to understand is that there is no central authority "approving" blocks. It is up to each client (including but not limited to miners) to download a block, check is follows the rules and if it follows the rules and is stronger than the strongest chain they know about to accept it.
Blocks are based on the most recent block in the strongest chain the miner knows about. The existence of stronger chains that the miner does not know about will not stop it trying to extend the strongest chain it does know about.
0.7 miners couldn't import the large block and therefore couldn't import any of it's children. If a miner can't import something then it doesn't know it exists. So 0.7 miners kept looking for (and finding) blocks based on the block immediately before the large block and passing those blocks to each other forming a blockchain with no large blocks.
At the same time 0.8 miners continued looking for (and finding) blocks based on the large block. AIUI there were initially more 0.8 miners than 0.7 miners so the blockchain they produced remained stronger than the one the 0.7 miners produced. This left two substantial groups of users out of sync. The only way to fix this quickly was to downgrade miners so that the blockchain with no large blocks became the stronger blockchain.
I suspect the long term fix will involve declaring a particular block some time in the future as the point from which large blocks will be allowed and then convincing everyone who matters to upgrade by that block number.
Or perhaps a little simpler is this scheme: miners will probably end up skipping 0.8 and going directly to 0.9, which should artificially limit the size of blocks it signs while accepting larger blocks from other sources.
The problem with that approach is that there is already a version in the wild (0.8) that can generate large blocks. Undoubtablly whatever the official advice is some subset of bitcoin miners are likely to stick with that version.
If most miners accept large blocks and a miner still on 0.8 generates a large block then the 0.7 users will get "forked off". So the goal of allowing people to upgrade while delaying the "forking off" of 0.7 users will not have been acheived.
At some point miners will need to switch to 0.8 too.
I don't think it's feasible to get everyone to upgrade at once and miners switching to 0.8 gradually would just cause a repeat of the problem we are having now.
What i'd think needs to happen is a new version be put out that says "big blocks are only valid after block x" and then all exchanges and a sufficient proportion of miners need to be persuaded to upgrade to that new version before block x hits.
The only one of these I see as valid is (1). And all to often I am unconvinced that a speed camera will actually improve safety - if people are driving too fast and the introduction of a speed camera causes more accidents by encouraging harsh braking then it has failed at improving safety.
mmm, conventional point speed cameras encourage people to slow down suddenly for the camera and then speed up again afterwards.
If the aim is really to keep drivers to a safe speed through a hazardous area then average speed check systems (like they use for motorway roadworks in the UK) seem like the way to go.
Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
There were always ways to lose mails. One obvious way is if a mail server dies then you lose all mail between the last backup and the mailserver dieing. Another is if both the original mail and the bounce suffer a delivery failure but these circumstances were rare afaict. The majority of the time mails were either delivered successfully or bounced to the sender.
Then spam and virus mails with faked from addresses came along. If you bounce such mails you create backscatter for an unrelated user. If you reject them during the SMTP session then there is less chance of backscatter than if you bounce them yourself but it can still happen if the spam/virus mail is being sent to you by another MTA rather than directly by the virus/spamming tool. To avoid backscatter and keep things simple many filters just discard mails that they identify as spam or virus mails without attempting to inform the sender. If a mail is misidenfied as spam or a virus mail in such a system either due to imperfect hueristics or a configuration screwup then it will be silently lost.
In summary the deluge of spam and virus mails has lead to reactions that destroyed the relibility of internet email.
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
MS still has a near monopoly on the computers people use for office and engineering work. Yes a lot of people have andrios or iOS smartphones but they are in addition to a windows PC, not instead of a windows PC.
So, it's the fault of the Internet service provider if I send my mom (5 GB cap, 3 years no overages) a link, www.google.com, and she browses for hours and uses her cap
No it's not the ISPs fault that someone goes over the cap because they received a link to services that use far more bandwidth than the ones they have been using before.
It IS the ISPs fault if they provide no warning that someone is about to go over the cap and then use it as an excuse to apply financial penalties that are disproportionate to both the cost of providing the extra service and the ammount that would be charged for a similar volume of data included with a plan. It's even more their fault if the sales material assured the customer that they should not worry about the draconian overage fees because they would "never hit their cap".
But then, I also use one with no financial penalties, so I don't worry that much.
Sounds like you managed to find a provider with a non-exploitive contract, good for you! but that doesn't mean that we should accept companies burying exploititive clauses in the fine print. Especially when those companies sometimes have very little competition.
My guess would be what actually happened is that the "cat videos" were links that the person followed without realising the size.
On a normal setup sites like youtube will start downloading immediately and will continue doing so until you close the window or navigate away.
IMO any setup where the price for overage is significantly higher than the price for committed traffic should come with both WARNINGS upfront and tools to help manage that usage. Not doing so is highly explioitative.
Most decent office printers will take printable data in PCL or postscript and print it. They will also take and print plain text* and sometimes even command codes intended for old dot matrix printers. Heck with my printer I can even upload files of printable data through the web interface! Afaict on *nix** postscript is the "standard" format for printable data so postscript printers don't really need a "driver" as such on *nix just a file describing the printer's capabilities.
Meanwhile low end consumer printers usually need data in a printer specific format. So you need a new driver for every printer (or small family of printers).
* Which can unfortunately lead to a LOT of junk being printed if they are sent data they don't recognise and end up treating it as plain text. ** Windows is a different matter, windows has it's own internal format for print data from apps so to windows "postscript" is as foreign as any other printer language.
What keeps x86 alive however is closed source binaries, only the original authors can port them to a new architecture and they may not be able to, or may not want to (eg due to not enough users - chicken and egg problem),
Not to mention microsoft gimped the arm port of windows so that even if developers recompile their traditional windows apps users can't officially run them (there is a "jailbreak" that allows conventional windows apps to be built and run but who knows how long MS will leave it open)
Most ISPs in the consumer/small buisness sapce uses the term "up to", DSL ISPs have the vaugarities of phone lines and sometimes congestion on the exchange backhault while cable ISPs can have congestion on the local cable segment and cellular providers have congestion on the airwaves. Congestion on the backbone is also a potential issue though that is easier to keep under control (the more users you aggregate the more stable your overall usage becomes).
Still with some ISPs the higher tiers make a real difference while others are so congested that they don't.
Afaict if a provider is deploying from scratch the cost of gigabit connections* isn't much higher than the cost of lower speeds so may as well put them in. OTOH the incumbents have a load of infrastructure already in place that they would rather string out as long as possible before they have to upgrade it. Therefore they are going to downplay the extra speed the new guy is offering.
* Actually providing a gigabit of continuous throughput to a substantial fraction of users is a different matter. If a popular application comes along that can actually eat up that much bandwidth in a domestic situation then the likes of google fiber will have to do something to restrict it.
"Great Britain" is the main island (containing engliand scotland and wales) "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the whole country "United Kingdom" is a term that currently usually reffers to the above country but there have been other united kingdoms in the past.
In general when forming their country the ISO has preffered to use geographic terms from the country's name over parts of the name that represent how it is currently governed even if those geographic terms don't precisely line up with the countries current borders. Taken in this light the GB and IE country codes make perfect sense.
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I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic here or if you really believe that. Apple does not prevent you from installing another OS on you iDevice
Apple locks down the bootloaders on their idevices in an attempt to stop you running anything other than their blessed OS. Some andriod vendors do the same but afaict most have come round and provided ways of unlocking their bootloaders.
Now in some cases* that lockdown is imperfect and people find ways to bypass it. That doesn't mean we should support vendors who lock their bootloaders down.
* You will notice if you follow the link to open iboot from your linked article that it only applies to the original iphone and the iphone 3g, not to more modern devices. Apple is learning how to lock things down harder.
When you advertise something over BGP you essentially broadcast it to every core router in the world. Having every core router know about every device is just not going to happen. Having every router know about every ISP and large company is bad enough. Also BGP is built on a mixture of trust and manually applied filters. So unless you want to open it up to every idiot breaking other peoples traffic then it's not going to handle systems that regually move arround very well.
Also internet routing looks for the path with the least number of AS hops and will generally only use one connection for any particular pair of end systems. What you really want as an end user with multiple connections is to use both paths at once to connect to the same place.
You clearly don't have a clue about how european VAT works. Generally (there are a handful of exceptions) companies claim back VAT on what they buy and charge VAT on what they sell. The price they "intended" to sell it at makes no difference, only the price they actually sell it at.
Nowadays only the shittiest PSUs have voltage selector switches. AIUI once they are doing active power factor correction it becomes just as easy to design a universal input as a switchable input.
Plus i'd expect a votlage switchable PSU set to 120V to blow up almost immediately if connected to a 240V supply.
I'm in the UK and I know if I order something worth above £15 (including delivery) from outside the EU the VAT is supposed to be collected at import time. Presumablly something similar could be done by the US if they so desired.
I'm sure i've seen "keyed" on card receipts that came with online orders implying that the company collected the card details through the website and then manually keyed them into a POS terminal.
A few things to consider.
1: there is a very large and not particaully rich country called india where english is one of the official languages (the other being hindi but afaict that isn't used much for technical stuff)
2: some countries deliberately establish english speaking universities in the hope of being more attractive to foreign talent.
3: Even in the UK which is english speaking and fairly rich afaict there is far less tolerance and pushing of overpriced textbooks than in the USA.
Put all of these together and at a university level there is going to be a pretty big market for textbooks in english outside the USA and in general those outside america aren't prepared to pay as much as those inside america. The textbook vendors want to split the market so they can choose a different "most profitable price" for the USA and the rest of the world.
The mac pros currently ship with westmere based CPUs. The most recent comparable CPUs are sandy bridge based. So even if you count both new core designs and die shrinks as "generations" it's still only one generation behind comparable CPUs.
Connectors are selectively plated with gold only on the mating surfaces. It doesn't go on the part that gets soldered.
My guess would be this was a custom connector and either
1: some subcontractor decided that given low volumes it was cheaper to just plate the whole thing at the highest specified thickness than to work out how to selectively plate it (possibly in violation of a spec, possiblly following a spec that only specified minimum thickness of gold not maximum).
2: whoever was designing the connnector specified uniform gold plating
In theory yes, in practice it would be nontrivial (but probablly not impossible) to pull off. If you just pushed the transaction out to the network in the normal way it would likely end up on both forks. So you'd either have to find a way to craft a transaction that was only valid on one fork or you'd have to find a way to feed your transaction into one blockchain without it ever getting out onto the transaction distribution system.
The key thing to understand is that there is no central authority "approving" blocks. It is up to each client (including but not limited to miners) to download a block, check is follows the rules and if it follows the rules and is stronger than the strongest chain they know about to accept it.
Blocks are based on the most recent block in the strongest chain the miner knows about. The existence of stronger chains that the miner does not know about will not stop it trying to extend the strongest chain it does know about.
0.7 miners couldn't import the large block and therefore couldn't import any of it's children. If a miner can't import something then it doesn't know it exists. So 0.7 miners kept looking for (and finding) blocks based on the block immediately before the large block and passing those blocks to each other forming a blockchain with no large blocks.
At the same time 0.8 miners continued looking for (and finding) blocks based on the large block. AIUI there were initially more 0.8 miners than 0.7 miners so the blockchain they produced remained stronger than the one the 0.7 miners produced. This left two substantial groups of users out of sync. The only way to fix this quickly was to downgrade miners so that the blockchain with no large blocks became the stronger blockchain.
I suspect the long term fix will involve declaring a particular block some time in the future as the point from which large blocks will be allowed and then convincing everyone who matters to upgrade by that block number.
Or perhaps a little simpler is this scheme: miners will probably end up skipping 0.8 and going directly to 0.9, which should artificially limit the size of blocks it signs while accepting larger blocks from other sources.
The problem with that approach is that there is already a version in the wild (0.8) that can generate large blocks. Undoubtablly whatever the official advice is some subset of bitcoin miners are likely to stick with that version.
If most miners accept large blocks and a miner still on 0.8 generates a large block then the 0.7 users will get "forked off". So the goal of allowing people to upgrade while delaying the "forking off" of 0.7 users will not have been acheived.
At some point miners will need to switch to 0.8 too.
I don't think it's feasible to get everyone to upgrade at once and miners switching to 0.8 gradually would just cause a repeat of the problem we are having now.
What i'd think needs to happen is a new version be put out that says "big blocks are only valid after block x" and then all exchanges and a sufficient proportion of miners need to be persuaded to upgrade to that new version before block x hits.
The only one of these I see as valid is (1). And all to often I am unconvinced that a speed camera will actually improve safety - if people are driving too fast and the introduction of a speed camera causes more accidents by encouraging harsh braking then it has failed at improving safety.
mmm, conventional point speed cameras encourage people to slow down suddenly for the camera and then speed up again afterwards.
If the aim is really to keep drivers to a safe speed through a hazardous area then average speed check systems (like they use for motorway roadworks in the UK) seem like the way to go.
Yeap, the whole mail system is designed from the core so mail should never be lost as I learnt in my young days.
There were always ways to lose mails. One obvious way is if a mail server dies then you lose all mail between the last backup and the mailserver dieing. Another is if both the original mail and the bounce suffer a delivery failure but these circumstances were rare afaict. The majority of the time mails were either delivered successfully or bounced to the sender.
Then spam and virus mails with faked from addresses came along. If you bounce such mails you create backscatter for an unrelated user. If you reject them during the SMTP session then there is less chance of backscatter than if you bounce them yourself but it can still happen if the spam/virus mail is being sent to you by another MTA rather than directly by the virus/spamming tool. To avoid backscatter and keep things simple many filters just discard mails that they identify as spam or virus mails without attempting to inform the sender. If a mail is misidenfied as spam or a virus mail in such a system either due to imperfect hueristics or a configuration screwup then it will be silently lost.
In summary the deluge of spam and virus mails has lead to reactions that destroyed the relibility of internet email.
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
MS still has a near monopoly on the computers people use for office and engineering work. Yes a lot of people have andrios or iOS smartphones but they are in addition to a windows PC, not instead of a windows PC.
So, it's the fault of the Internet service provider if I send my mom (5 GB cap, 3 years no overages) a link, www.google.com, and she browses for hours and uses her cap
No it's not the ISPs fault that someone goes over the cap because they received a link to services that use far more bandwidth than the ones they have been using before.
It IS the ISPs fault if they provide no warning that someone is about to go over the cap and then use it as an excuse to apply financial penalties that are disproportionate to both the cost of providing the extra service and the ammount that would be charged for a similar volume of data included with a plan. It's even more their fault if the sales material assured the customer that they should not worry about the draconian overage fees because they would "never hit their cap".
But then, I also use one with no financial penalties, so I don't worry that much.
Sounds like you managed to find a provider with a non-exploitive contract, good for you! but that doesn't mean that we should accept companies burying exploititive clauses in the fine print. Especially when those companies sometimes have very little competition.
XP hasn't reached the end of it's support lifecycle yet, it's still in extended support for another 13 months.
My guess would be what actually happened is that the "cat videos" were links that the person followed without realising the size.
On a normal setup sites like youtube will start downloading immediately and will continue doing so until you close the window or navigate away.
IMO any setup where the price for overage is significantly higher than the price for committed traffic should come with both WARNINGS upfront and tools to help manage that usage. Not doing so is highly explioitative.
Most decent office printers will take printable data in PCL or postscript and print it. They will also take and print plain text* and sometimes even command codes intended for old dot matrix printers. Heck with my printer I can even upload files of printable data through the web interface! Afaict on *nix** postscript is the "standard" format for printable data so postscript printers don't really need a "driver" as such on *nix just a file describing the printer's capabilities.
Meanwhile low end consumer printers usually need data in a printer specific format. So you need a new driver for every printer (or small family of printers).
* Which can unfortunately lead to a LOT of junk being printed if they are sent data they don't recognise and end up treating it as plain text.
** Windows is a different matter, windows has it's own internal format for print data from apps so to windows "postscript" is as foreign as any other printer language.
What keeps x86 alive however is closed source binaries, only the original authors can port them to a new architecture and they may not be able to, or may not want to (eg due to not enough users - chicken and egg problem),
Not to mention microsoft gimped the arm port of windows so that even if developers recompile their traditional windows apps users can't officially run them (there is a "jailbreak" that allows conventional windows apps to be built and run but who knows how long MS will leave it open)
Most ISPs in the consumer/small buisness sapce uses the term "up to", DSL ISPs have the vaugarities of phone lines and sometimes congestion on the exchange backhault while cable ISPs can have congestion on the local cable segment and cellular providers have congestion on the airwaves. Congestion on the backbone is also a potential issue though that is easier to keep under control (the more users you aggregate the more stable your overall usage becomes).
Still with some ISPs the higher tiers make a real difference while others are so congested that they don't.
Afaict if a provider is deploying from scratch the cost of gigabit connections* isn't much higher than the cost of lower speeds so may as well put them in. OTOH the incumbents have a load of infrastructure already in place that they would rather string out as long as possible before they have to upgrade it. Therefore they are going to downplay the extra speed the new guy is offering.
* Actually providing a gigabit of continuous throughput to a substantial fraction of users is a different matter. If a popular application comes along that can actually eat up that much bandwidth in a domestic situation then the likes of google fiber will have to do something to restrict it.
It's messier than that.
"Great Britain" is the main island (containing engliand scotland and wales)
"The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the whole country
"United Kingdom" is a term that currently usually reffers to the above country but there have been other united kingdoms in the past.
In general when forming their country the ISO has preffered to use geographic terms from the country's name over parts of the name that represent how it is currently governed even if those geographic terms don't precisely line up with the countries current borders. Taken in this light the GB and IE country codes make perfect sense.