It's the extra cost that makes 12" netbooks redundant or unsuccessful - it's nothing to do with performance or conspiracy.
Being around the price of a high-end iPod, 10" netbooks are bought as gifts and/or to liberate parents' computers from their children and that's why netbook sales are high. Sure, some customers need the form factor, but for the majority, 10" netbooks hit the price sweet spot that their 12" cousins overshoot.
But your comment was that development of new faster hardware has pretty much stalled. I strongly disagree with that.
It's true that laptop chips haven't done very much - I have the same 2.16 chip as you, in a late 2006 15" MBP - but the hardware has come a long way elsewhere, especially inside Apple. Just about everything other than the CPU is significantly better on the current versions of our respective laptops. Better screens with LED backlight, much faster graphics, huge multi-touch trackpad, and check out this battery life graph.
There's a lot more to come in 2009-10: Calpella, i.e. Core i7 Mobile, and the gradual, or possibly snowball-like, emergence of SSD drives in mainstream laptops.
As far as I can see, development of new faster hardware has pretty much stalled.
Are you kidding?! That was the case during the Pentium 4 / Athlon XP/64 years, but since 2006, mid-high range Intel systems have gone from strength to strength - Core Duo, C2 Duo, C2 Quad and now i7 all had pretty decent speed bumps. We're beginning to see quad-core laptops, for God's sake!
In my own video encoding (Handbrake) benchmarks, a Core i7 at 2.6GHz (May 2009) beat a Core 2 Quad at 3.3GHz (March 2009) by 70%...
I'm always fascinated by these mischievous tech battles - the higher profile and more legitimate the companies involved, the better. Examples:
Swimming: these weird low-friction or air-filled swimsuits that just got banned. Really devious stuff.
F1: so very many things. Freezing fuel, 'water-cooled' brakes that are just there to get past weight restrictions, 'engine cooling fans' that just happen to provide hundreds of kilos of downforce at the same time... and not to forget the recent creative interpretation of the 2009 rules that led to the double-diffusers.
OK, so the Pre pretending it's an iPod to iTunes is no double diffuser, but it's kind of a cheat, and so is Apple's fix by abusing the USB standard. Palm had it all planned out - they're trying to force Apple into some kind of consumer backlash which makes Apple look bad and Palm look like consumer-rights crusaders, and an antitrust lawsuit.
All that said, I do think Apple deserves a bit of this. They claimed that they were making iTunes DRM-free to give consumers the freedom to choose the device they want, but here they're deliberately, and unashamedly, blocking a device from syncing with iTunes.
"families affected by Autism", not "effected". In this context, "affected" means the families were impacted by Autism; "effected" means Autism implemented the families.
Did autism effect your grammar nazism?
Re:WebDAV? FTP over SSL/TLS?
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
The only downside I see, then, is that whichever client you use, there are still more options you have to set and therefore more scope for users to get the configuration wrong.
I'm using pure-ftpd on Debian and it took me less than 30 minutes to get FTPS working. There are plenty of howtos around - but I mainly used the pure-ftpd documentation. We use the FileZilla client on all platforms.
This is what you get when it's working...
Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ---------- Response: 220-You are user number 1 of 50 allowed. Response: 220-Local time is now 23:20. Server port: 21. Response: 220-This is a private system - No anonymous login Response: 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server. Response: 220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity. Command: AUTH TLS Response: 234 AUTH TLS OK. Status: Initializing TLS... Status: Verifying certificate... Command: USER ************** Status: TLS/SSL connection established.
Re:WebDAV? FTP over SSL/TLS?
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
Have many groups looked at WebSAV or FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS) as a replacement for FTP?
Just set this up on an Amazon EC2 host for a customer. It works nicely, but you have to set some non-default options in some FTP clients in addition to enabling TLS, so your instructions to the customer are now a long way from "Use your favourite FTP client to connect to ftp.foo.com, port 21, user foo, password bar".
If you can't find the time to walk for 30 minutes a day, then you don't want to.
I recently moved to London and notice that people in my age bracket are slimmer on average here than where I was before. I'll bet it's because the typical commute in London has far more walking involved - even if you take the tube everywhere, you still have to walk a lot through the system.
After I came back from a trip sponsored by Red Bull, where they handed out the stuff for free, I was hooked. At work I swapped snacks, sugary milky coffee and lunch for sugar-free Red Bull. I had about 4 per day and then a normal meal in the evenings. Horrible for your health I'm sure, but it does keep you going throughout the day with virtually zero calories:)
Sure, many enjoy the psychological effect of knowing it's lossless.
OK there is a psychological effect in play, but it's not snake oil and I believe it's a sound, legitimate choice. When you do a mass digital library import, which can take a whole weekend, you know that you will at some point read about a brand spanking new codec that blows yours away, and encoding fashions will come and go. Choosing lossless means that all new versions can do is improve on file size; nobody can tell you that a new codec is so good that it's worth re-ripping your entire library for quality reasons. That's the main reason why I chose lossless in 2004 and I'm glad I did.
...but I concede, it's annoying that I can't get much music on my phone without messy dual libraries:(
We think about the CD master or YV12 as being "lossless"
"Lossless" to me is used in reference to a codec that, when used, does not mathematically lose any audio definition from the source you give it. We lose plenty of definition going from instrument to microphone to mixing to CD. All we as consumers can control is how much we lose from CD to our digital libraries and from there how much we lose and what colour we add in selecting our playback equipment.
Getting the ultimate playback setup is mega expensive; choosing a lossless codec is comparatively not.
Putting lossles files on a capacity constrained device like a portable media player is spending a lot of bits...
Yes, when we had 512MB media players and used 56K modems it was a big deal. It's still a big deal with flash players because flash is expensive. It's not a big deal for today's internet connections and hard disk media players. When >100GB flash players hit the mainstream, I think lossless will become the new standard, just like 15 megapixel pocket cameras have.
[FLAC]...is, by far, the most popular lossless audio codec.
Maybe on torrent sites, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple Lossless wasn't a contender as the most popular lossless codec, being the only lossless codec supported out of the box by iTunes and the iPod/iPhone.
Upstream ratios are poor, yes. They're 10/0.5, 20/0.7, 50/1.5.
throttled back to ISDN speeds for a few hours
Personally I think it's a sensible and fair scheme, but I encourage all readers to decide for themselves. The 20Mbit throttle means 6GB in one peak period (there are two separate peak periods per weekday) and you're throttled to 5Mbit for five hours. Big fucking deal. The 50Mbit service is currently 100% cap-free but is considerably more expensive than the 20Mbit service.
Painful technical support
Oh please. Just power cycle your modem:)
IWF
Yes, they're as bad as everyone else.
Phorm
I'm worried about this. My instinct and optimism says it'll get bashed down by the EU or the incredibly bad PR before it goes live.
Moral of the story: say what you want about Virgin Media, but I get, and I mean I actually get 50 megabits on a fully IPV6 network, 24 hours a day, uncapped, at a consumer-level price. I downloaded an Ubuntu image at 4.6MB/s from the IPV6-only tracker at 3PM. Needless to say, I don't miss DSL and its repetitive "too far from the exchange" excuses.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the link to the video?!
It's the extra cost that makes 12" netbooks redundant or unsuccessful - it's nothing to do with performance or conspiracy.
Being around the price of a high-end iPod, 10" netbooks are bought as gifts and/or to liberate parents' computers from their children and that's why netbook sales are high. Sure, some customers need the form factor, but for the majority, 10" netbooks hit the price sweet spot that their 12" cousins overshoot.
Does this story remind anyone of this Monty Python sketch?
Oh, you're just waiting to upgrade aren't you?
You know it!
Not exactly true. The original chips were Core Duo
Late 2006 is core 2 :)
...there are hardly any of them in the shops
But your comment was that development of new faster hardware has pretty much stalled. I strongly disagree with that.
It's true that laptop chips haven't done very much - I have the same 2.16 chip as you, in a late 2006 15" MBP - but the hardware has come a long way elsewhere, especially inside Apple. Just about everything other than the CPU is significantly better on the current versions of our respective laptops. Better screens with LED backlight, much faster graphics, huge multi-touch trackpad, and check out this battery life graph.
There's a lot more to come in 2009-10: Calpella, i.e. Core i7 Mobile, and the gradual, or possibly snowball-like, emergence of SSD drives in mainstream laptops.
As far as I can see, development of new faster hardware has pretty much stalled.
Are you kidding?! That was the case during the Pentium 4 / Athlon XP/64 years, but since 2006, mid-high range Intel systems have gone from strength to strength - Core Duo, C2 Duo, C2 Quad and now i7 all had pretty decent speed bumps. We're beginning to see quad-core laptops, for God's sake!
In my own video encoding (Handbrake) benchmarks, a Core i7 at 2.6GHz (May 2009) beat a Core 2 Quad at 3.3GHz (March 2009) by 70%...
I'm always fascinated by these mischievous tech battles - the higher profile and more legitimate the companies involved, the better. Examples:
OK, so the Pre pretending it's an iPod to iTunes is no double diffuser, but it's kind of a cheat, and so is Apple's fix by abusing the USB standard. Palm had it all planned out - they're trying to force Apple into some kind of consumer backlash which makes Apple look bad and Palm look like consumer-rights crusaders, and an antitrust lawsuit.
All that said, I do think Apple deserves a bit of this. They claimed that they were making iTunes DRM-free to give consumers the freedom to choose the device they want, but here they're deliberately, and unashamedly, blocking a device from syncing with iTunes.
"families affected by Autism", not "effected". In this context, "affected" means the families were impacted by Autism; "effected" means Autism implemented the families.
Did autism effect your grammar nazism?
The only downside I see, then, is that whichever client you use, there are still more options you have to set and therefore more scope for users to get the configuration wrong.
I'm using pure-ftpd on Debian and it took me less than 30 minutes to get FTPS working. There are plenty of howtos around - but I mainly used the pure-ftpd documentation. We use the FileZilla client on all platforms.
This is what you get when it's working...
Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message...
Response: 220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ----------
Response: 220-You are user number 1 of 50 allowed.
Response: 220-Local time is now 23:20. Server port: 21.
Response: 220-This is a private system - No anonymous login
Response: 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server.
Response: 220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.
Command: AUTH TLS
Response: 234 AUTH TLS OK.
Status: Initializing TLS...
Status: Verifying certificate...
Command: USER **************
Status: TLS/SSL connection established.
Have many groups looked at WebSAV or FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS) as a replacement for FTP?
Just set this up on an Amazon EC2 host for a customer. It works nicely, but you have to set some non-default options in some FTP clients in addition to enabling TLS, so your instructions to the customer are now a long way from "Use your favourite FTP client to connect to ftp.foo.com, port 21, user foo, password bar".
Due to the energy hungry nitrogen fixation process required to make the fertilizer so rich in energy it can be used to make bombs
I buy organic, you insensitive clod!
If you can't find the time to walk for 30 minutes a day, then you don't want to.
I recently moved to London and notice that people in my age bracket are slimmer on average here than where I was before. I'll bet it's because the typical commute in London has far more walking involved - even if you take the tube everywhere, you still have to walk a lot through the system.
After I came back from a trip sponsored by Red Bull, where they handed out the stuff for free, I was hooked. At work I swapped snacks, sugary milky coffee and lunch for sugar-free Red Bull. I had about 4 per day and then a normal meal in the evenings. Horrible for your health I'm sure, but it does keep you going throughout the day with virtually zero calories :)
I use Hulu from the UK through the Witopia VPN service. Such services totally break IP-based location checking systems.
Ideas for future Ask Slashdot articles:
This iPhone App advertising scheme isn't fooling me and I'm tired of these Slashdot stories feeding the cycle.
Sure, many enjoy the psychological effect of knowing it's lossless.
OK there is a psychological effect in play, but it's not snake oil and I believe it's a sound, legitimate choice. When you do a mass digital library import, which can take a whole weekend, you know that you will at some point read about a brand spanking new codec that blows yours away, and encoding fashions will come and go. Choosing lossless means that all new versions can do is improve on file size; nobody can tell you that a new codec is so good that it's worth re-ripping your entire library for quality reasons. That's the main reason why I chose lossless in 2004 and I'm glad I did.
...but I concede, it's annoying that I can't get much music on my phone without messy dual libraries :(
it's not like we're trying to make bats dizzy.
Bats get dizzy on my '45s ;)
We think about the CD master or YV12 as being "lossless"
"Lossless" to me is used in reference to a codec that, when used, does not mathematically lose any audio definition from the source you give it. We lose plenty of definition going from instrument to microphone to mixing to CD. All we as consumers can control is how much we lose from CD to our digital libraries and from there how much we lose and what colour we add in selecting our playback equipment.
Getting the ultimate playback setup is mega expensive; choosing a lossless codec is comparatively not.
And its not like it's lossless from the mix anyway
That's a fucking excellent idea! I would actually start buying music downloads in preference to CDs...I'm off to call the Big Four!
Pretty sure that's compressed, bro... MOAR PEDANTRY! :D
I think you're confusing "Slashdot" with "4chan", but don't tase me, bro!
Putting lossles files on a capacity constrained device like a portable media player is spending a lot of bits...
Yes, when we had 512MB media players and used 56K modems it was a big deal. It's still a big deal with flash players because flash is expensive. It's not a big deal for today's internet connections and hard disk media players. When >100GB flash players hit the mainstream, I think lossless will become the new standard, just like 15 megapixel pocket cameras have.
[FLAC] ...is, by far, the most popular lossless audio codec.
Maybe on torrent sites, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple Lossless wasn't a contender as the most popular lossless codec, being the only lossless codec supported out of the box by iTunes and the iPod/iPhone.
Come on, that's a +5 funny.
The Guardian has even published a retraction blaming it on the Wikipedia vandalizer
Actually they've worded it quite fairly and I think they're brave to have admitted to falling victim to the hoax.
Upstream just about fast enough for the TCP ACKs
Upstream ratios are poor, yes. They're 10/0.5, 20/0.7, 50/1.5.
throttled back to ISDN speeds for a few hours
Personally I think it's a sensible and fair scheme, but I encourage all readers to decide for themselves. The 20Mbit throttle means 6GB in one peak period (there are two separate peak periods per weekday) and you're throttled to 5Mbit for five hours. Big fucking deal. The 50Mbit service is currently 100% cap-free but is considerably more expensive than the 20Mbit service.
Painful technical support
Oh please. Just power cycle your modem :)
IWF
Yes, they're as bad as everyone else.
Phorm
I'm worried about this. My instinct and optimism says it'll get bashed down by the EU or the incredibly bad PR before it goes live.
Moral of the story: say what you want about Virgin Media, but I get, and I mean I actually get 50 megabits on a fully IPV6 network, 24 hours a day, uncapped, at a consumer-level price. I downloaded an Ubuntu image at 4.6MB/s from the IPV6-only tracker at 3PM. Needless to say, I don't miss DSL and its repetitive "too far from the exchange" excuses.