why would you have to extend? Just buy a replacement phone at full price. Personally, I don't find it worth it to save $100 or so by committing to spend 24 x $90/month.
Unless of course you were going to spend 24x90 anyway. Its not like you get a reduced rate if you buy the equipment outright, so you might as well take the subsidies.
The fact that Apple ties their music store (iTMS) to their music player (iTunes) to their portable player (iPod), and the fact that the latter has near-monopoly status.
You do realize the grandparent poster was talking about Apple bundling Safari, Mail, and Quicktime with OSX right? So my rebuttal of his argument was based on THAT.
But lets address your music player example.
The iPod's market share is around 85%. That's arguably just as much a monopoly as Microsoft's share of the OS market, which just dropped below 90%.
Your argument basically fails, in my opinion in one key place.
The first is relying on the "percentage points" to gauge whether or not Apple has a monopoly. Monopoly is more than just percentage points - what is far more important is the 'coerciveness' of the monopoly. Apple could probably have 99% of the mp3 player market, and still not be ruled a monopoly, because there would still be NOTHING whatsoever preventing you or anyone else from buying a Sansa or Creative or Zune, and using Windows Media player or Amarok.
My entire family could have iPods, and there would still really be nothing stopping me from buying a Sansa. The devices don't interact much, and my ripped Mp3's will work on their devices... and vice versa. Granted any DRMed AAC files they might have bought in iTMs might not work, but that has nothing to do with their ipod dominance. The iTMS is far from the dominant source of music.
Microsoft was in a very different position. Back when the trial was going on there were (and still are) REAL barriers to not using Windows. Most of the programs people already had were for windows, and many had no real alternatives. Businesses with Active Directory, and Exchange, etc were even more tightly bound to MS, your coworker couldn't just show up one day with a Mac laptop...it simply wasn't a realistic or viable option. Hell, even your average ISP wouldn't support you on alternative OSes (although they worked of course if you could figure it out yourself, just pray you didn't have any network outages).
Things have actually come a long way since then, but even today, Microsoft Windows is still FAR more entrenched than Apple's ipods.
My point is that its not just about marketshare, its about how much power the vendor has in the market. Apple is dominant sure, but it doesn't really wield much power. People could start buying Zunes en masse tomorrow and there wouldn't really be any major problems. The same is not true of people switching to Linux or OSX.
The market can easily decide for itself that it doesn't like Apple or its tactics. And because of this, we don't need regulatory oversight to keep it in check.
And conversely the reason we needed regulatory oversight with microsoft, is that the markets hands were effectively tied... Microsoft didn't merely have dominance, it had power, even if we didn't like what MS was doing, for the most part you still had to buy it.
Pfft. Nobody is a convicted monopolist, since it is not a crime.
Its shorthand for "ruled a monopoly and convicted of abusing its monopoly position", the latter of which was the unspecified crime referred to in the "convicted monopolist" shorthand.
In the same way that "my convicted uncle" is shorthand for "of my uncles the one I'm referring to is the one that has been convicted". Obviously the 'convicted' refers to an unspecified crime, not of being my uncle.
See also: How Lord of The Rings Should Have Ended. [Frodo and Galdalf fly to Mt Doom on an eagle and drop the ring in]
If that had been the real ending. Some smart-ass on youtube would have created a parody showing a single orc archer taking it down with an arrow, the eagle crashing into a river, and the ring being lost for 1000's of years again.
In any case I highly doubt a giant eagle flying into Mordor would have completely escaped attention, as amusing an idea as it is...
You want a movie where the entire movie plot is completely pointless, check out something like Tombraider... where at pretty much every single step, the end-of-the-world-crisis at the end would have been completely averted if Lara Croft had simply stayed home in pretty much ANY SCENE leading up to the climax.
So now that you've wasted my time with your uneducated rhetoric, back to work I go.
The world extends beyond the US borders.
Microsoft was independently ruled to be an abusive monopoly in the EU, and this has not been successfully overturned/appealed/settled in that jurisdiction. Its not a coincidence that its the EU where they are being treated like a monopolist here.
As far the EU is concerned, MS is a convicted monopolist.
Apple isn't a convicted monopolist. What the HELL makes this so hard for people to grasp.
If Microsoft can't bundle those apps, nobody else should be able to either.
Your local convenience store can decide one day that to buy their donuts you must also buy product Y. Your local monopoly power company can't decide one day that to receive power you must also buy product Y.
Why? Because you could easily shop at different convenience store. Or buy a different cake-type snack. Your local convenience store isn't a monopoly.
If your local monopoly power company decides you have to buy product Y you are stuck. You can't easily switch to another power company (if you could it wouldn't be a monopoly, which, for this argument, it is). And you can't easily decide to switch to an alternative product - the consumer is stuck.
This why the conveniece store is free to set up any bundles they like, while the power company can't.
This is why the rules are different for monopolies.
Now a court determined Microsoft had a monopoly, and so now the the rules that apply to monopolies apply to Microsoft. Apple has not been determined to be a monopoly so it is not subject to those rules. So comparing microsoft to apple here is as ignorant as comparing a local monopoly power company to a local convenience store.
If you want to argue that Microsoft isn't a monopoly (anymore?) fine, there is even some legitimacy to that argument... but don't go ignorantly declaring that restrictions on monopolies should apply to everyone. The differences are there for a sound reason.
I think it would be more accurate as "Since Ubuntu isn't a convicted monopolist, I doubt it."
Monopolies operate under different rules. Comparing monopolies to non-monopolies is just stupid, whether its the Apple-Safari or Ubuntu-Firefox bundles, it doesn't matter. Those aren't monopolies so the rules are completely different.
One would think that a new leader in today's economy, especially one who promotes "change", would have a dozen people together and maybe the press and swear in. Instead this "politics as usual" phony spends millions of dollars with his coronation ceremony.
If you want the kind of change Obama has promised, the best way for him to make it happen is to keep the public engaged, keep them thinking about presidents and politics and policy... instead of "American Idol" and "Ow! My Balls!"
A big inauguration ceremony will keep the public and the world in tune and talking about it. Your suggestion, on the other hand would engage the public less than "Home Improvement" reruns.
The burst rate allows the 12mb connection to achieve the ~22mb rates for a brief period of time. The XP box cannot achieve > 10-12 mb on this particular connection;
Possibly. Or possibly that the speedboost technology is working properly with XP, and not Ubuntu. Another poster reported that for a while at least, his ISPs speedboost didn't work correctly with Ubuntu or Vista -- both OSes got 22Mbps sustained, while his XP box got 22Mbps boost, and then promptly throttled down the way it was supposed to.
The ISP fixed this shortly thereafter and then his Ubuntu and Vista started behaving properly too.
most probably due to the way the TCP window scaling is limited in the default configuration.
This is improbable. If XP can't get >22Mbps its more likely really crappy drivers or a cable problem than window scaling issues. In my experience adjusting the window scaling rarely makes much difference. And when it does make a difference there are extenuating circumstances... its never just a vanilla dsl/broadband line.
Is this even relevant anymore? Does anyone even care?
That's what I was thinking too...
I actually used Netscape enterprise server way back when... it did LDAP, email imap/pop, and other stuff too... not just web. It competed, in my opinion more than just Apache.
Its surely seriously outdated code by now in terms of standards supported, etc so its probably not very useful... but who knows... maybe there is something worth looking at in the code. Its certainly not a bad thing that its been open sourced.
But driving like an idiot, speeding, flaunting the other traffic laws, that has no intent for causing harm.
You point? Those are all offenses too.
However "driving like an idiot" (unsafe for the conditions) is pretty subjective, and difficult to measure.
Speeding is goofy, because you are SUPPOSED to drive right up near the limit, but yet not go over it, so having massive penalties the moment you go over it is stupid.
And other 'traffic laws'? I was personally ticketed for "failing to signal a lane change" as a teen (which at the time I thought was beyond lame, but in hindsight the cop probably thought I was "driving like an idiot" and gave me a ticket for something convenient rather than trying an 'unsafe driving' charge. And I fully support penalties for red light runners...
I hate to tell you this but the vast majority of collisions and deaths in vehicles don't involve anyone who has been drinking.
So what? The vast majority of collisions and deaths in vehicles don't involve people who are applying makeup in the rearview mirror or reading the paper either. Should that be legal?
You've been brainwashed by the MADD morons.
Hardly.
Driving like an idiot is perfectly ok but driving perfectly with a BAC over.08 should be punishable by death despite the fact that the former is a far greater cause of the carnage on the roads than the later.
Who said driving like an idiot is ok? But -is- hard to prove. Driving drunk IS driving like an idiot... but its easy to measure objectively. If only idioticness was equally easy to measure.
If people drove responsible while sober, driving while your reaction time is slightly impaired wouldn't be much of an issue.
Well when you figure out how to enforce the former, we can review the latter. Oh, and "slightly impaired"? Drunk is a continuum from "slightly impaired" right up to "unconscious". Even if people drove responsibly sober, there should still be an illegal BAC level.
Driving with a.08 BAC doesn't mean you're actively trying to cause harm.
That's your opinion.
In my opinion getting yourself reaction and judgment impaired and then hopping into the drivers seat is actively trying to cause harm.
Perhaps it shouldn't actually be a 'criminal offense'. But driving is a privilege not a right, and if you think its ok to get wasted and drive around you should have that privilege revoked.
Now you might argue that 0.08BAC is too low and that it doesn't affect you or whatever, fine, we can have a debate about what the actual number should be. Although I think 0.08 is in the right ballpark, and there are a number of studies which have shown that as you get drunk your ability to accurately gauge how drunk you are goes down. So the people arguing they are just fine at X BAC are far more often than not straight up wrong.
Your drag-and-drop explanation makes no sense. Many other music players have drag-and-drop functionality.
And they were markedly slower to access the music and playlists on them, especially back when the first ipod launched. No other player had 5+ GB and was anywhere near as fast to access the music.
And... meta data...?! Now THAT "feature" is truly silly. Last play date?!
Jokes on you. That is one of the best features of the ipod.
The way my ipod is set up... 4 and 5 "star" music is always loaded. While 2 and 3 star music is rotated out automatically every time I sync, and replaced with a new selection of 2 and 3 star music. It does this by checking last play date... stuff that was listened to recently is rotated out, and replaced with stuff from my library that hasn't been.
I also have a skip count playlist that tracks songs with high skip counts that are in the rotation... which I check periodically to re-rate the music... if I start skipping a track everytime it comes on, i probably don't want it to be played as much, and I'll either pull it out of rotation or downgrade its rating, or both.
This allows me to have a few 300 track playlists that contain all my favorite stuff along with a selection of other tracks I like. Everytime I dock it the selection updates automatically; my faves stay, while the selection changes.
If I'd tried to put everything i liked on the pod, it would over fill it; I only have an 8GB touch, after all. And if I got a bigger ipod, then I'd just never hear my favorites, because I have maybe 100 songs in my favorites list, and around 8,000 in rotation. If they were in one big list, I'd hear a favorite 1 out of 80 give or take.
The way I've got it set up I hear a favorite track around 1 out of 3. And I never really know what the other 2 will be, beyond they'll be something in the rotation that I haven't heard for a while.
For me, going back to 'drag and drop' would be a HUGE STEP BACKWARDS. Having to manually managing one's playlists is for chumps.
A final advantage of the ipods method, is that it it is more efficient and reliable. If i have 10 playlists with a lot of overlap, I either have to have the song copied 10 ten times with drag and drop, or spend a lot of effort making sure that all the songs on my playlists are actually on the device. That's a hassle I don't need.
Yeah, if its a 12mbps link, and ubuntu is getting 22mbps, there is more likely something else going on than "ubuntu > xp" here.
A lot of cable providers provide 'speed boosts' to the first bit of bandwidth you request from a given source. It makes the internet as a whole a lot snappier, while large downloads etc take about as long as usual.
Perhaps they speed boosted his ubuntu test for some reason.
Another possibility, is that their bandwidth analyzer isn't working properly on ubuntu and is reporting double what it should be.
I mean, if XP was getting significantly less than his link speed and ubuntu was getting the full link speed I'd suggest bad drivers, bad cable, bad something... but XP is delivering what it should be, while ubuntu is delivering apparently more than is possible -- so my first approach would be to ensure ubuntu is REALLY getting 22mbps here, and determine how that's even possible.
e.g.... When you measure the speed of light and find it to be twice c, your first assumption would be that you've done something seriously wrong in calculating the result, not that you've just figured out a technique for FTL communications.
1) There was probably a bit of making it at least slightly inconvenient to appease the RIAA to get them to join up with the iTunes music store. This is really the only reason I can see for the fact that the ipod library is 'hidden' on the ipod.
2) There is also a valid technical reason for not having drag and drop - performance and integration. The ipod (even the first one, had GIGABYTES of space at a time when most devices were a fraction the size) It would have taken considerable time to, at each time it was powered up to re-index the entire drive looking for new playable files and playlists. So instead itunes builds this index and syncs it to the device... the device can load the index and your are off to the races.
Would you really want to power on your ipod, and then wait a few minutes for it to index your 80GB hard drive? Sure you could not make it automatic, and make it a manually selected option, but that makes the device clumsier for average users to use... "why isn't my music showing up?" oh... you have to index it first...
Secondly, itunes/ipod stores and syncs a bunch of meta data about the file that isn't in the file itself... play count, skip count, last played date, etc... if people are just dragging and dropping files back and forth, then there is no way to effectively sync this other information.
Of course, I don't believe drinking and driving should really even be a crime to begin with. There's already laws against hitting someone while driving.
The point is to stop you from driving impaired, BEFORE you hit someone, so that you don't hit someone.
Sort of like why 'attempted murder' is illegal. So they can legally stop you before you succeed.
One hell of a jamming technology to block the laser to satellite communication of a high-altitude plane.
1) Satellite communications are not generally referred to as "low-latency" which the OP suggested were required.
2) Two way Laser links are extremely difficult to maintain outside of your idealized scenario. Two rapidly moving endpoints, one of which might be engaged in combat.
First, the main thrust of my post was really to comment that getting to the desktop BEFORE everything else is running is a victory simply not worth fighting for.
I.e.deferring things to startup AFTER you arrive at the desktop to give you the appearance of a faster boot time is pointless if you need those things to actually use it... or even if the fact that those things are still starting up is pegging your cpu/hard drive making it essentially unsusable even if you aren't loading something dependant on the items still loading.
That said...
The entire distribution is 50 MB and it includes network, Gui, etc... Based on your numbers above we should be able to load this entire distro into Memory within a second or two, maybe another 2-3 additional seconds if you want to add a 3d desktop like Compiz.
I think potentially, yes, this is theoretically possible. There is a laptop out there, for example, with an instant on Linux distro flashed into the BIOS, that you can use to quickly browse the web etc, without having to boot up the OS off the hard drive.
So this absolutely -can- exist. I'm not sure just how instant, instant-on is here, but it sounds like its in the 3-5 seconds range.
Other services could potentially be loaded in the background after the login screen and/or desktop are available.
I think this is a bad idea. See above, for why.
I see little reason why an OS like Ubuntu can't reduce boot times down to the sub 10 second range with a little work. It's all about scheduling.
Sure, I agree 10 seconds is quite concievable conceivable.
However much beyond that and I think coping with querying the hardware itself will take longer than that. Just querying all the buses etc to make sure nothing has changed will probably take a few seconds.
If the OS has to do a bunch of initializations every time it start up, why cant it just do a memory dump after those initializations, then only load the ones that change every time the computer starts?
Why bother reinventing the wheel? We ALREADY have "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to Disk" and that is basically already what it does. Trouble is, the device drivers have to support it for it to work properly. And it turns out that, for suspend to disk at least, that reading in the big ballooned out memory image to and from disk is usually SLOWER than just booting clean because of all the extra data involved.
And on top of that you STILL have to wait for a pile of device initialization because simply loading in your network/video/audio/etc driver to a particular ram image state doesn't do a thing towards actually putting the network/video/audio/etc device into a suitable state.
(This is in fact precisely why you need a dedicated protocol to communicate you are going into and out of suspend and device driver support for it.)
I never use any "search service" since I know what a computer is so I know where "internet" will download the files.
On OSX I use spotlight to locate things. On Vista I use the the new start menu search for almost everything. etc
Not because I don't know where stuff is, but for anything not pinned to the start menu or taskbar or dock or the top menu in ubuntu... its FASTER than browsing hierarchical menu or filesystems.
I don't need an IP address until I need to go online,
The first thing I usually do after logging in is launch either my browser or my email.
and my thinkpad does not have a harddrive that churns.
Whether you can hear it or not is irrellevant to the conversation. Its still going to pushing data as fast as it can.
A huge percentage of that data is not loaded from disk, but rather either calculated data (tables that are initiated, allocated buffers, structures for GTK/QT windows etc). Another big amount of this may be actual data, which is not read but mmapped, and yes, the kernel, drivers, localization, firewall, background image, will all fit under 50MB.
I agree a big part of the ram usage of an operating system is mmapped and in memory allocated tables and buffers etc, however I think you are mistaken that the sum of all the binaries and configuration files that are completely loaded is less than 50 MB in a modern system startup sequences that hasn't been seriously seriously gutted.
This magic is called DMA
Care to explain how DMA is supposed to allow the PC to initialize the kernel, wifi, sound, network, printer monitor/spooler, firewall, all simultaneously, apparently while letting you run and use other programs that somehow manage to avoid depending on the above list?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.
Hard to say if there's really a point to booting up before the services are running.
What good is the PC being 'at the desktop' if the search service still hasn't started, the network still hasn't obtained an ip-address, half my tray icons aren't up? and the hard drive is still madly churning to get everything else running, so anything I try and launch is just going to be thrown into the queue and it probably will depend on something that hasn't started up yet anyway.
Seriously, how much stuff could you really -defer- to after seeing the desktop and have a useful system?
Remember the average hard drive moves under 50MB/s. Even a fairly modest Ubuntu desktop requires several times that much RAM. If the hard drive started loading data at maximum speed you've got maybe 50MB you can load in that time, and probably far less in actual practice. That means your kernel, drivers, HAL, desktop environment, localization, firewall, network, background, theme, etc has to ALL fit in under 50MB. And you'd need some sort of impossible situation where the cpu could run all the initialization code for all that in parallel, without waiting... nevermind that it almost has to be initialized in sequence due to the layer dependancies.
If you want instant on PCs, the only real solution is to never turn them off, waking from suspend to RAM is about as good as its going to get for the forseeable future.
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why would you have to extend? Just buy a replacement phone at full price. Personally, I don't find it worth it to save $100 or so by committing to spend 24 x $90/month.
Unless of course you were going to spend 24x90 anyway. Its not like you get a reduced rate if you buy the equipment outright, so you might as well take the subsidies.
Even your translation is wrong because you're still using the word convicted.
def Convict - to prove or declare guilty of an offense
The fact that Apple ties their music store (iTMS) to their music player (iTunes) to their portable player (iPod), and the fact that the latter has near-monopoly status.
You do realize the grandparent poster was talking about Apple bundling Safari, Mail, and Quicktime with OSX right? So my rebuttal of his argument was based on THAT.
But lets address your music player example.
The iPod's market share is around 85%. That's arguably just as much a monopoly as Microsoft's share of the OS market, which just dropped below 90%.
Your argument basically fails, in my opinion in one key place.
The first is relying on the "percentage points" to gauge whether or not Apple has a monopoly. Monopoly is more than just percentage points - what is far more important is the 'coerciveness' of the monopoly. Apple could probably have 99% of the mp3 player market, and still not be ruled a monopoly, because there would still be NOTHING whatsoever preventing you or anyone else from buying a Sansa or Creative or Zune, and using Windows Media player or Amarok.
My entire family could have iPods, and there would still really be nothing stopping me from buying a Sansa. The devices don't interact much, and my ripped Mp3's will work on their devices... and vice versa. Granted any DRMed AAC files they might have bought in iTMs might not work, but that has nothing to do with their ipod dominance. The iTMS is far from the dominant source of music.
Microsoft was in a very different position. Back when the trial was going on there were (and still are) REAL barriers to not using Windows. Most of the programs people already had were for windows, and many had no real alternatives. Businesses with Active Directory, and Exchange, etc were even more tightly bound to MS, your coworker couldn't just show up one day with a Mac laptop...it simply wasn't a realistic or viable option. Hell, even your average ISP wouldn't support you on alternative OSes (although they worked of course if you could figure it out yourself, just pray you didn't have any network outages).
Things have actually come a long way since then, but even today, Microsoft Windows is still FAR more entrenched than Apple's ipods.
My point is that its not just about marketshare, its about how much power the vendor has in the market. Apple is dominant sure, but it doesn't really wield much power. People could start buying Zunes en masse tomorrow and there wouldn't really be any major problems. The same is not true of people switching to Linux or OSX.
The market can easily decide for itself that it doesn't like Apple or its tactics. And because of this, we don't need regulatory oversight to keep it in check.
And conversely the reason we needed regulatory oversight with microsoft, is that the markets hands were effectively tied... Microsoft didn't merely have dominance, it had power, even if we didn't like what MS was doing, for the most part you still had to buy it.
Actually, Excel 2007's limit is 1,048,576 rows or 2^20 which is pretty round in binary, but still somewhat arbitrary.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA100778231033.aspx
Pfft. Nobody is a convicted monopolist, since it is not a crime.
Its shorthand for "ruled a monopoly and convicted of abusing its monopoly position", the latter of which was the unspecified crime referred to in the "convicted monopolist" shorthand.
In the same way that "my convicted uncle" is shorthand for "of my uncles the one I'm referring to is the one that has been convicted". Obviously the 'convicted' refers to an unspecified crime, not of being my uncle.
See also: How Lord of The Rings Should Have Ended. [Frodo and Galdalf fly to Mt Doom on an eagle and drop the ring in]
If that had been the real ending. Some smart-ass on youtube would have created a parody showing a single orc archer taking it down with an arrow, the eagle crashing into a river, and the ring being lost for 1000's of years again.
In any case I highly doubt a giant eagle flying into Mordor would have completely escaped attention, as amusing an idea as it is...
You want a movie where the entire movie plot is completely pointless, check out something like Tombraider... where at pretty much every single step, the end-of-the-world-crisis at the end would have been completely averted if Lara Croft had simply stayed home in pretty much ANY SCENE leading up to the climax.
So now that you've wasted my time with your uneducated rhetoric, back to work I go.
The world extends beyond the US borders.
Microsoft was independently ruled to be an abusive monopoly in the EU, and this has not been successfully overturned/appealed/settled in that jurisdiction. Its not a coincidence that its the EU where they are being treated like a monopolist here.
As far the EU is concerned, MS is a convicted monopolist.
But nobody complains.
Apple isn't a convicted monopolist. What the HELL makes this so hard for people to grasp.
If Microsoft can't bundle those apps, nobody else should be able to either.
Your local convenience store can decide one day that to buy their donuts you must also buy product Y.
Your local monopoly power company can't decide one day that to receive power you must also buy product Y.
Why? Because you could easily shop at different convenience store. Or buy a different cake-type snack. Your local convenience store isn't a monopoly.
If your local monopoly power company decides you have to buy product Y you are stuck. You can't easily switch to another power company (if you could it wouldn't be a monopoly, which, for this argument, it is). And you can't easily decide to switch to an alternative product - the consumer is stuck.
This why the conveniece store is free to set up any bundles they like, while the power company can't.
This is why the rules are different for monopolies.
Now a court determined Microsoft had a monopoly, and so now the the rules that apply to monopolies apply to Microsoft. Apple has not been determined to be a monopoly so it is not subject to those rules. So comparing microsoft to apple here is as ignorant as comparing a local monopoly power company to a local convenience store.
If you want to argue that Microsoft isn't a monopoly (anymore?) fine, there is even some legitimacy to that argument... but don't go ignorantly declaring that restrictions on monopolies should apply to everyone. The differences are there for a sound reason.
Since Ubuntu don't make Firefox, I doubt it.
I think it would be more accurate as "Since Ubuntu isn't a convicted monopolist, I doubt it."
Monopolies operate under different rules. Comparing monopolies to non-monopolies is just stupid, whether its the Apple-Safari or Ubuntu-Firefox bundles, it doesn't matter. Those aren't monopolies so the rules are completely different.
One would think that a new leader in today's economy, especially one who promotes "change", would have a dozen people together and maybe the press and swear in. Instead this "politics as usual" phony spends millions of dollars with his coronation ceremony.
If you want the kind of change Obama has promised, the best way for him to make it happen is to keep the public engaged, keep them thinking about presidents and politics and policy... instead of "American Idol" and "Ow! My Balls!"
A big inauguration ceremony will keep the public and the world in tune and talking about it. Your suggestion, on the other hand would engage the public less than "Home Improvement" reruns.
The burst rate allows the 12mb connection to achieve the ~22mb rates for a brief period of time. The XP box cannot achieve > 10-12 mb on this particular connection;
Possibly. Or possibly that the speedboost technology is working properly with XP, and not Ubuntu. Another poster reported that for a while at least, his ISPs speedboost didn't work correctly with Ubuntu or Vista -- both OSes got 22Mbps sustained, while his XP box got 22Mbps boost, and then promptly throttled down the way it was supposed to.
The ISP fixed this shortly thereafter and then his Ubuntu and Vista started behaving properly too.
most probably due to the way the TCP window scaling is limited in the default configuration.
This is improbable. If XP can't get >22Mbps its more likely really crappy drivers or a cable problem than window scaling issues. In my experience adjusting the window scaling rarely makes much difference. And when it does make a difference there are extenuating circumstances... its never just a vanilla dsl/broadband line.
Shouldn't they be trying to hire the best technical people out there.....regardless of their sexual persuasion, race or sex??
Yes.
Why would they want to attract someone 'because' of their sexual persuasion?
They don't.
But guess what, some the best technical people out there happen to be gay (lesbian, black, jewish, or any other minotiry).
If the most qualified person your headhunter can find happens to be gay, its going to be a lot harder to convince him to relocate to California now.
Is this even relevant anymore? Does anyone even care?
That's what I was thinking too...
I actually used Netscape enterprise server way back when... it did LDAP, email imap/pop, and other stuff too... not just web. It competed, in my opinion more than just Apache.
Its surely seriously outdated code by now in terms of standards supported, etc so its probably not very useful... but who knows... maybe there is something worth looking at in the code. Its certainly not a bad thing that its been open sourced.
But driving like an idiot, speeding, flaunting the other traffic laws, that has no intent for causing harm.
You point? Those are all offenses too.
However "driving like an idiot" (unsafe for the conditions) is pretty subjective, and difficult to measure.
Speeding is goofy, because you are SUPPOSED to drive right up near the limit, but yet not go over it, so having massive penalties the moment you go over it is stupid.
And other 'traffic laws'? I was personally ticketed for "failing to signal a lane change" as a teen (which at the time I thought was beyond lame, but in hindsight the cop probably thought I was "driving like an idiot" and gave me a ticket for something convenient rather than trying an 'unsafe driving' charge. And I fully support penalties for red light runners...
I hate to tell you this but the vast majority of collisions and deaths in vehicles don't involve anyone who has been drinking.
So what? The vast majority of collisions and deaths in vehicles don't involve people who are applying makeup in the rearview mirror or reading the paper either. Should that be legal?
You've been brainwashed by the MADD morons.
Hardly.
Driving like an idiot is perfectly ok but driving perfectly with a BAC over .08 should be punishable by death despite the fact that the former is a far greater cause of the carnage on the roads than the later.
Who said driving like an idiot is ok? But -is- hard to prove. Driving drunk IS driving like an idiot... but its easy to measure objectively. If only idioticness was equally easy to measure.
If people drove responsible while sober, driving while your reaction time is slightly impaired wouldn't be much of an issue.
Well when you figure out how to enforce the former, we can review the latter. Oh, and "slightly impaired"? Drunk is a continuum from "slightly impaired" right up to "unconscious". Even if people drove responsibly sober, there should still be an illegal BAC level.
Driving with a .08 BAC doesn't mean you're actively trying to cause harm.
That's your opinion.
In my opinion getting yourself reaction and judgment impaired and then hopping into the drivers seat is actively trying to cause harm.
Perhaps it shouldn't actually be a 'criminal offense'. But driving is a privilege not a right, and if you think its ok to get wasted and drive around you should have that privilege revoked.
Now you might argue that 0.08BAC is too low and that it doesn't affect you or whatever, fine, we can have a debate about what the actual number should be. Although I think 0.08 is in the right ballpark, and there are a number of studies which have shown that as you get drunk your ability to accurately gauge how drunk you are goes down. So the people arguing they are just fine at X BAC are far more often than not straight up wrong.
Your drag-and-drop explanation makes no sense. Many other music players have drag-and-drop functionality.
And they were markedly slower to access the music and playlists on them, especially back when the first ipod launched. No other player had 5+ GB and was anywhere near as fast to access the music.
And... meta data...?! Now THAT "feature" is truly silly. Last play date?!
Jokes on you. That is one of the best features of the ipod.
The way my ipod is set up... 4 and 5 "star" music is always loaded. While 2 and 3 star music is rotated out automatically every time I sync, and replaced with a new selection of 2 and 3 star music. It does this by checking last play date... stuff that was listened to recently is rotated out, and replaced with stuff from my library that hasn't been.
I also have a skip count playlist that tracks songs with high skip counts that are in the rotation... which I check periodically to re-rate the music... if I start skipping a track everytime it comes on, i probably don't want it to be played as much, and I'll either pull it out of rotation or downgrade its rating, or both.
This allows me to have a few 300 track playlists that contain all my favorite stuff along with a selection of other tracks I like. Everytime I dock it the selection updates automatically; my faves stay, while the selection changes.
If I'd tried to put everything i liked on the pod, it would over fill it; I only have an 8GB touch, after all. And if I got a bigger ipod, then I'd just never hear my favorites, because I have maybe 100 songs in my favorites list, and around 8,000 in rotation. If they were in one big list, I'd hear a favorite 1 out of 80 give or take.
The way I've got it set up I hear a favorite track around 1 out of 3. And I never really know what the other 2 will be, beyond they'll be something in the rotation that I haven't heard for a while.
For me, going back to 'drag and drop' would be a HUGE STEP BACKWARDS. Having to manually managing one's playlists is for chumps.
A final advantage of the ipods method, is that it it is more efficient and reliable. If i have 10 playlists with a lot of overlap, I either have to have the song copied 10 ten times with drag and drop, or spend a lot of effort making sure that all the songs on my playlists are actually on the device. That's a hassle I don't need.
Yeah, if its a 12mbps link, and ubuntu is getting 22mbps, there is more likely something else going on than "ubuntu > xp" here.
A lot of cable providers provide 'speed boosts' to the first bit of bandwidth you request from a given source. It makes the internet as a whole a lot snappier, while large downloads etc take about as long as usual.
Perhaps they speed boosted his ubuntu test for some reason.
Another possibility, is that their bandwidth analyzer isn't working properly on ubuntu and is reporting double what it should be.
I mean, if XP was getting significantly less than his link speed and ubuntu was getting the full link speed I'd suggest bad drivers, bad cable, bad something... but XP is delivering what it should be, while ubuntu is delivering apparently more than is possible -- so my first approach would be to ensure ubuntu is REALLY getting 22mbps here, and determine how that's even possible.
e.g. ... When you measure the speed of light and find it to be twice c, your first assumption would be that you've done something seriously wrong in calculating the result, not that you've just figured out a technique for FTL communications.
Why no drag-and-drop functionality?
2 reasons for the ipod implementation:
1) There was probably a bit of making it at least slightly inconvenient to appease the RIAA to get them to join up with the iTunes music store. This is really the only reason I can see for the fact that the ipod library is 'hidden' on the ipod.
2) There is also a valid technical reason for not having drag and drop - performance and integration. The ipod (even the first one, had GIGABYTES of space at a time when most devices were a fraction the size) It would have taken considerable time to, at each time it was powered up to re-index the entire drive looking for new playable files and playlists. So instead itunes builds this index and syncs it to the device... the device can load the index and your are off to the races.
Would you really want to power on your ipod, and then wait a few minutes for it to index your 80GB hard drive? Sure you could not make it automatic, and make it a manually selected option, but that makes the device clumsier for average users to use... "why isn't my music showing up?" oh... you have to index it first...
Secondly, itunes/ipod stores and syncs a bunch of meta data about the file that isn't in the file itself... play count, skip count, last played date, etc... if people are just dragging and dropping files back and forth, then there is no way to effectively sync this other information.
Of course, I don't believe drinking and driving should really even be a crime to begin with. There's already laws against hitting someone while driving.
The point is to stop you from driving impaired, BEFORE you hit someone, so that you don't hit someone.
Sort of like why 'attempted murder' is illegal. So they can legally stop you before you succeed.
One hell of a jamming technology to block the laser to satellite communication of a high-altitude plane.
1) Satellite communications are not generally referred to as "low-latency" which the OP suggested were required.
2) Two way Laser links are extremely difficult to maintain outside of your idealized scenario. Two rapidly moving endpoints, one of which might be engaged in combat.
First, the main thrust of my post was really to comment that getting to the desktop BEFORE everything else is running is a victory simply not worth fighting for.
I.e.deferring things to startup AFTER you arrive at the desktop to give you the appearance of a faster boot time is pointless if you need those things to actually use it... or even if the fact that those things are still starting up is pegging your cpu/hard drive making it essentially unsusable even if you aren't loading something dependant on the items still loading.
That said...
The entire distribution is 50 MB and it includes network, Gui, etc... Based on your numbers above we should be able to load this entire distro into Memory within a second or two, maybe another 2-3 additional seconds if you want to add a 3d desktop like Compiz.
I think potentially, yes, this is theoretically possible. There is a laptop out there, for example, with an instant on Linux distro flashed into the BIOS, that you can use to quickly browse the web etc, without having to boot up the OS off the hard drive.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/77281,asus-laptops-to-offer-instanton-linux.aspx
So this absolutely -can- exist. I'm not sure just how instant, instant-on is here, but it sounds like its in the 3-5 seconds range.
Other services could potentially be loaded in the background after the login screen and/or desktop are available.
I think this is a bad idea. See above, for why.
I see little reason why an OS like Ubuntu can't reduce boot times down to the sub 10 second range with a little work. It's all about scheduling.
Sure, I agree 10 seconds is quite concievable conceivable.
However much beyond that and I think coping with querying the hardware itself will take longer than that. Just querying all the buses etc to make sure nothing has changed will probably take a few seconds.
If the OS has to do a bunch of initializations every time it start up, why cant it just do a memory dump after those initializations, then only load the ones that change every time the computer starts?
Why bother reinventing the wheel? We ALREADY have "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to Disk" and that is basically already what it does. Trouble is, the device drivers have to support it for it to work properly. And it turns out that, for suspend to disk at least, that reading in the big ballooned out memory image to and from disk is usually SLOWER than just booting clean because of all the extra data involved.
And on top of that you STILL have to wait for a pile of device initialization because simply loading in your network/video/audio/etc driver to a particular ram image state doesn't do a thing towards actually putting the network/video/audio/etc device into a suitable state.
(This is in fact precisely why you need a dedicated protocol to communicate you are going into and out of suspend and device driver support for it.)
Do you even need AI if you can do low-latency remote control?
You do if your opponent has some sort of communications jamming technology.
I never use any "search service" since I know what a computer is so I know where "internet" will download the files.
On OSX I use spotlight to locate things.
On Vista I use the the new start menu search for almost everything.
etc
Not because I don't know where stuff is, but for anything not pinned to the start menu or taskbar or dock or the top menu in ubuntu... its FASTER than browsing hierarchical menu or filesystems.
I don't need an IP address until I need to go online,
The first thing I usually do after logging in is launch either my browser or my email.
and my thinkpad does not have a harddrive that churns.
Whether you can hear it or not is irrellevant to the conversation. Its still going to pushing data as fast as it can.
A huge percentage of that data is not loaded from disk, but rather either calculated data (tables that are initiated, allocated buffers, structures for GTK/QT windows etc). Another big amount of this may be actual data, which is not read but mmapped, and yes, the kernel, drivers, localization, firewall, background image, will all fit under 50MB.
I agree a big part of the ram usage of an operating system is mmapped and in memory allocated tables and buffers etc, however I think you are mistaken that the sum of all the binaries and configuration files that are completely loaded is less than 50 MB in a modern system startup sequences that hasn't been seriously seriously gutted.
This magic is called DMA
Care to explain how DMA is supposed to allow the PC to initialize the kernel, wifi, sound, network, printer monitor/spooler, firewall, all simultaneously, apparently while letting you run and use other programs that somehow manage to avoid depending on the above list?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.
Hard to say if there's really a point to booting up before the services are running.
What good is the PC being 'at the desktop' if the search service still hasn't started, the network still hasn't obtained an ip-address, half my tray icons aren't up? and the hard drive is still madly churning to get everything else running, so anything I try and launch is just going to be thrown into the queue and it probably will depend on something that hasn't started up yet anyway.
Seriously, how much stuff could you really -defer- to after seeing the desktop and have a useful system?
Remember the average hard drive moves under 50MB/s. Even a fairly modest Ubuntu desktop requires several times that much RAM. If the hard drive started loading data at maximum speed you've got maybe 50MB you can load in that time, and probably far less in actual practice. That means your kernel, drivers, HAL, desktop environment, localization, firewall, network, background, theme, etc has to ALL fit in under 50MB. And you'd need some sort of impossible situation where the cpu could run all the initialization code for all that in parallel, without waiting... nevermind that it almost has to be initialized in sequence due to the layer dependancies.
If you want instant on PCs, the only real solution is to never turn them off, waking from suspend to RAM is about as good as its going to get for the forseeable future.
Nice strawman
Thanks.
Some people just don't know a joke when they see one.
Look in the mirror. ;)