you're talking about true emulators, which some VMs actually are (e.g. ones that support endian or different CPUs). I actually wanted to avoid using the word VM in my post because it is a limited form of VM with pretty much only I/O emulation like MoL and not one with hardware emulation or special mode processing (though you're correct in that if they want to support some features like protected mode, they would need an exception), which is why I started by calling it a transparent emulator.
And speaking of endian-ness (which will not be the case here because we know the processor is Win-Tel), only a small subset of cases need special attention code-wise if your hardware ran the same assembly instruction set but in a different endian-ness (called bi-endian CPUs) - I/O (e.g. swapping during I/O) and the special case of some types of casting. This is not the case of most emulators that emulate other hardware - I would assume they store in the native endian-ness and bytecode interpret the other processor's assembly set.
Here's why you need a special handler for casting:
short one = 1; char *cp = (char*)
if *cp is now 0, you are running on big endian hardware (or in big endian mode on bi-endian hardware) and if *cp is 0, you are running on little endian hardware. This is a common test for runtime endian-ness.
That is part of the picture, but lets face it - Dev Corvin (the author) is pushing the blame when the reality is Microsoft has huge, swathing changes from release-to release such as the deprecation of the C library in XP, replacing it with buffer safe versions (functions now have a leading underscore, so _strcat, for instance).
IE on first release was NOT integrated into the OS - they did that later to force installation and non-removal because Netscape was superior at the time. When told they needed to pull the OS ties out, they only rooted them deeper. There is no reason they did this other than to destroy the company they felt was a threat to them - especially when Netscape suggested the browser would be the new desktop. They lost anti-trust suits in the US and Europe because of this illegal bundling, but the US basically gave them a slap on the wrist and said don't do it again rather than slapping them with massive damages and forcing them to unbundle it like Europe did.
Microsoft has always released new VC runtime libraries with each new OS and most aren't included with the OS (meaning good installers contain the redistributable binaries). All of these contain significant changes to functions and I seriously doubt more than.5-1% of these are browser uncoupling. Having multiple versions of these libraries open at once is a memory hit, and that itself may impact performance.
specifically, the integration of assistive applications such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player into the core operating system. Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism).
The first problem was Microsoft using bundling as a way to force Netscape out of the market. They tied IE to the OS after already getting sued (and losing) for using monopoly power in the market to influence hardware vendors (by giving drastically cheaper rates for exclusive contracts that forced competitors out). Part of that agreement was that they couldn't force bundling of products they own, either (which was mostly MS-SQL databases and MS Office).
So they were already being blocked from releasing competing products and what do they do as an encore? Release a media player. The only reason this was a problem was it was in their anti-trust agreement that they wouldn't do it.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with them releasing a media player or a browser - it was the tie to the OS that bugged me. This tie will finally be removed with Win7.
I seriously doubt DRM code is causing Vista slowness - why would that have an effect on game performance? Maybe when sound files are loaded, but general performance is slower. I suspect it's partially tied to resource issues, especially when Aero is used (Aero uses hardware resources) and partially due to insufficient profiling of code in a rush to shove it out to market. Remember Vista was a hack - it was meant for Win7 (probably even with the VM model described) and they pulled it off the top and grafted chunks of it onto Windows 2003. That's probably also the main reason WinFS support was dropped (if there's any feature I want in Win7 it's WinFS - a metadata supporting filesystem - finally).
Transparent emulators (should they even be called that?) are very fast - ever run a VM? They just pass through code into the native processor and make sure functions get routed to the appropriate library. Not quite as fast as running natively, but if you are able to significantly increase your "native" speed, the tradeoff is usually worth it (at most it's about a 20% hit - real world is usually much less).
Where you DO run into problems is with I/O, meaning we get the driver headache again. I believe that is one reason Vista pushed a new driver model - an attempt at future-proofing for this new OS model.
The plus side of a VM is you get a layer of stability for free if you do it right (I don't count on MS to do anything right, especially the first time...) - crashing the VM doesn't necessarily crash the native OS (depends on what caused the crash - bad memory crashes everything).
they also stated they will have a tiered pricing system - $150 is max for the 50Mbps, so they may have, say $75 for 25Mbps, which would be more attractive to consumers.
AFAIK, Comcast has never had caps, but sometimes they pull the plug on excessive users because they wrote they could do that in their terms of service (which is pretty draconian, IMO). I believe the $150 service is targeted towards businesses and power users because there is no fast and cheap alternative in the area. The only way to get 5Mbps upstream is to lease a T2 or T3 line, which was running over $1000/mo last I checked.
only its not urban - it's a fairly large swath of urban to semi-rural that compromises the Twin Cities Region. For instance, it includes West Lakeland Township, which is fairly rural including farms and small developments (and many mansions) and has no formal town - it is in between small towns Lake Elmo and Lakeland and larger towns Stillwater, and Hudson (Wisconsin). I have relatives with Comcast service there.
Comcast can do this in the Twin Cities market and has no competition. Ignoring the Star Tribune newspaper's error (5Mbps max, it's actually 7), that still puts them at a theoretical peak of about 7x faster (being a token network, actual speed will probably be slower).
Here are the base broadband options (excluding Satellite):
There are 2 bare line DSL providers in the Twin Cities that I know of after the death of Rhythms and Northpoint (there are still some like EDGE that serve semi-rural suburbs like Anoka) Quest and COVAD.
Quest broadband: bare lines can run ADSL 7Mbps at most.
COVAD: bare lines are ADSL (7Mbps). Focus is business only, but they lease consumer lines to ISPs (e.g. Speakeasy).
notice - ADSL2+ (generally offered as 15Mbps service, peak at 24Mbps) and FIOS service is NOT available in the market. Quest is anemic at offering service and only bumps service when competition forces them to (meaning they bumped to 5,6, and 7Mbps only when Comcast boosted their speeds). COVAD only bumps when the business market demands, so you've got one market leader a follower, and one that mixes leading and following based on customers.
The only problem I foresee with Comcast failing to dominate the market (as they already do) is supersaturation - my neighborhood already had too much saturation when I was on Comcast last (100k down/10k up and 500ms ping times was a good speed at 7PM on a weeknight when I had 3Mbps service). Last year (or maybe 2 years ago) they buried new fiber and set up a new hub in the area, so I expect that is no longer the case.
As far as debt goes, yes, the majority of the US population and the government are foolish - attempting to avoid a recession by BORROWING money is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of, but the US as a whole has a debt problem and there are plenty of people out there that think they will win the lottery and it will pull them out of the toilet (I am not one of these, and am still debating whether I should do the right thing and spend the economic stimulus or do the wrong thing and put an extra payment against my mortgage... I'm leaning towards the wrong thing).
I'm pretty sure the US gets most of its oil from Canada and Venezuela, so your argument makes little sense. There are plenty of other OPEC nations and the largest other exporter is an ally (Saudi Arabia). I seriously doubt oil really drove the attack (and why the hell would we have invaded Afghanistan? nothing but opium there - maybe Bush did it for his dealer buddy from his coke snorting days)
As far as morals go, I don't think we're any worse than we were. Personally, I don't find the naked body or sex offensive in general (e.g. natural sex vs, say bestiality), so in that respect I'm more European. You can argue objectification, and I agree, in a way it is objectification if it's real or on TV, but why, then, rate a game M if it has ANY nudity (I'm not talking sex - nudity gets an automatic M by the ESRB, which means 17+, but a PG movie can show some nudity)? You're talking about a natural human body shape and no real actors! Some war games get T (Teen) ratings - really, I'm a firm believer that.01s of virtual boobie is going to harm a minor more than a murder trainer FPS (yes, that was tongue firmly planted in cheek).
Drug and gang culture is a problem, but you're probably talking about a tiny percentage of the population. I briefly lived in just such a neighborhood as you described (lets say I'd prefer not to ever see the business end of a gun again), but we're talking about a small part of the United States and a small percentage of its people. My parents and neighbors go to church every Sunday too - are they watching porn and doing drugs? I highly doubt it (my dad has never even had a drink in his life). I also know plenty of people that smoked weed (most no longer or rarely do) and have never touched a handgun.
and again, oddly enough the Republicans were considered leftists (liberals) prior to the reconstruction and the Democrats were the conservative party. The Republicans formed from the ashes of the Whig party, as I recall, which was split over slavery but traditionally fairly liberal.
Incidentally, maybe it's time to resurrect the Whigs, despite the silly name - their ticket was based on Congressional power over Executive power and both the Republicans and Democrats have strayed deeply into executive power over Congressional.
The irony is Bush has proven time and again that his job is to write law not interpret it. In fact, it's not that far of a stretch to say in some ways we are no longer a Republic, but a elected representative dictatorship. For someone that pushes "Democracy" as much as Bush, he sure doesn't act like it (incidentally, neither did Clinton and escalation has almost been exponential in recent years).
Executive Orders by a President are law unless Congress overturns them, and both Clinton and Bush have used them excessively (and that's just Bush's public ones) to dictate policy and bypass Congress. In fact, some such as the wiretapping law were issued as National Security Directives (Bush's name) which don't have to be publicly disclosed (even to Congress, as I understand it). He also issues Homeland Security directives, which are basically NSDs with a different name. This dictatorial power is based on loose interpretation of some provisions of the Constitution (see links above).
I'm not saying the US is a dictatorship yet, but each President seems to abuse executive privilege more and more and I personally think it's time to rein in that power. Bush has issued at least one blatantly unconstitutional law in the federal warrantless wiretapping. Not only that, but he gave the job to an agency that cannot legally operate in the US (the NSA), even though he has an agency that has legal privilege to operate inside the country at his disposal (the FBI).
yeah - I was a bit bummed too. I had read about this previously in PopSci, and I doubt it was the April fools article (not even sure if that was from the April issue).
Slashdot apparently wants to be taken as seriously./me pines for a bygone era... and is eaten by a grue
nice generalization on Americans - what are you, French? (sorry, in advance for that)
Maybe it's where I'm from, but I don't see that at all here from the people I know - most people are glad to help a foreigner, even if they don't speak the language. About the only bad thing I have to say about my Mexican neighbors that speak almost no English is they have terrible taste - the tacky plastic swans and puce house painted siding makes me want to barf. I have nothing but praise for the Hmong family that lives across the street from them (they speak no English, so all conversation is through their 10 year old, but I've lent them my snowblower after a bad snowstorm so they didn't have to shovel, although they did shovel and brush what didn't get blown). I admit, I'm not living in an English Only Movement state, and I doubt my state will ever be, but even then that movement is usually only meant for official documentation.
Incidentally, I don't think it's bad that someone pokes fun at bad grammar, because if someone didn't point it out, the person with bad grammar would continue to make the same mistakes. It didn't sound like the poster was trying to be malicious, just trying to be funny and unfortunately someone was the butt of the joke. If they had posted "lern gramar sp3lling and you f*cking piGdoG id10t forinner! 1337!," I'd find it insulting and offensive and troll them.
America is a large country and just because you hear of some restaurant owning ass in Philly says "if you're in America and come into his restaurant you need to speak English" (incidentally, Pennsylvania has no such law), it doesn't mean everyone in the country or even that state thinks that way. In fact, as the US becomes more global I see just the opposite, at least at the "white collar" (desk job) level - I personally work for Germans and the majority of my coworkers are Indian and Chinese, which doesn't leave a lot of room for intolerance.
I do believe it's important to learn English if you're living in America, but if I were in Germany I'd say it's important to learn German (even though it really isn't, in my experience). My Hmong and Mexican neighbors basically speak through their kids but my Mexican neighbors are trying to learn English and my Hmong neighbors aren't. I worry about the Hmong family - if their kids move out (like my Hmong high school friend in nearly the same situation, but at least his dad spoke some English) they will probably have some problems.
I use nvEmulate to test rendering OpenGL 2.0 shaders (currently geometry, but adding layer for single pass cubemaps) on my Windows XP box and this is the DirectX equivalent. Hideous framerates, but at least I can see if it works. I don't actively develop or even build on my Windows XP box (I also have Vista, Linux, and Mac), so all I really do is verify it works.
fyi, Brawndo is the Gatorade like drink in the movie Idiocracy that replaced drinking water. I would put that as 9 insults - 8 being Brawndo and 9 for a reference to Idiocracy.
*Spoiler alert* - They used it to water plants and the electrolytes (salts, typically sodium and potassium) were killing them. */Spoiler*
Personally I have no great love for Apple or any great hate of them, even though I was once a fanboy (Apple ][ forever!). For one, I think a lot of their hardware is overpriced in the same way I think a BMW or Jaguar is overpriced - you pay a premium for a premium brand and reputation, but it still does essentially the same thing as something much cheaper. Some products like the macbook air are cool but flawed - odd jacks and sealed case for instance. Apple continued a tradition of removing features it deems obsolete, and in the case of the Air it was an Ethernet jack. To be honest, I've used my PC laptop's Ethernet jack exactly once in the past year, and that was to replace my wireless G router with a wireless n router, so I consider this a non-issue, but the case where the Air is your only machine that could be a problem since most Ethernet routers need to be wired to set them up (I don't know about AirPort, but Belkin and LinkSys do).
Your wife should try google - here's the first hit I got searching for ipod to PC.
I was trying to explain why it was hard to do in the past.
Many of these issues are no longer true or not as bad as in the past. Some like Ubuntu are definitely targeting the end user experience and trying to remove a lot of the complexity. Are they there yet? I'd say no, but getting there. KUbuntu 10 was a lot easier for me than Mandrake 9/10. I'm currently on SuSE 9 again (due to work), but plan to move back to Ubuntu soon.
Windows and Ubuntu use the default drive as the preferred partition, but SuSE 7/8 and even Mandrake 10 showed the default as/dev/hd0 and I always thought that would be very confusing to an end user, though since most people would just click through it may not be a huge problem. I consider myself fairly seasoned in UNIX, but I remember being confused by the SATA/SCSI drive IDs (I had both, but the SCSI disks were much smaller and older).
Dual Boot is how I've set up every copy of Linux the first time - most users are not willing to completely separate from Windows, mostly due to Office:(
The move to calling programs Media Player (aliasing) and the like is recent; again, I was referring to problems that mainly are in the past, where most would have a category called Media Players, but that category contained programs as named, so you may have xmms, divx, etc. and you would have to learn what each did. I remember seeing one distribution that had a Graphics folder and it contained applications like GIMP and X display configuration tools (the next release I believe separated them in a submenu - I think that was Mandrake, but I'm not positive).
most routers I've purchased default to user: password: admin
fortunately, most require a wired connection from the LAN side to make changes.
I think most routers are open by default because most people are too stupid to know how to set up a security enabled network. I'm not blaming the people for their stupidity (we all have out areas of expertise), I'm blaming the router manufacturers for not making this easier. For instance, instead of recommending copying the codes to a USB drive and then copy the security codes into network setup on a laptop, they could include a secure encrypted USB drive (FOB) that plugs in to the router to load keys and then an installer for the computer you want to enable (enter user/password to decrypt the drive). The installer would be the tricky part (due to platform issues), but universal filesystems could be used (e.g. ISO 9660 or a successor).
I've had non-fatal driver crashes several dozen times, but only one hard crash requiring a forced reboot.
the video driver crashes were mostly caused by this: KB940105
the hard crash I'm not sure about, but because I'm pretty sure the kernel was hosed (graphics went to garbage, sound in repeating loop, no way to change apps). I'm 99% sure it was video driver related in some way (I was watching full screen video at the time with several apps including VS2008 and Firefox running in the background). That is exactly 1 more hard crash than my oldest XP box has had in 5 years (which is to say I've never hard crashed that XP box, though my dual boot Linux/XP had a bunch of BSODs when a memory chip went bad). OTOH, my mom and dad can crash XP and Vista daily, and third party software has a lot to do with it. When you throttle your system with background crap like Weatherbug and 15 million similar apps you're bound to have some conflicts (they had over 100 items in their system tray when I cleaned it last - wtf?).
Windows is often a corporate standard (meaning every user has at least 1 Windows box
MS Office is exclusive to Windows and often a corporate standard
freeware is seen as less valuable than something you pay for
The last one was definitely true - there were definitely problems with using Linux: for example 1) installing Linux - need to understand partitioning, drives and obscure notations - specifically hd (IDE disk) vs sd (originally SCSI, but now also SATA disks). Dual or triple boot requires even more knowledge (like knowing to install Windows first). 2) obscure program names - xmms means/does what? Compare to Windows Media Player or iTunes - at least I have a clue what they may do. 3) installing hardware accelerated graphics (which required compiling the driver for a while). 4) Data files with no relations to applications - this is fixed, but used to be a problem - double click a.txt file and it should open so you can read and/or edit it in some default application. I'm hoping metadata will improve this more (identifying the exact app to use and fallbacks, for instance).
just because it isn't Constitutional doesn't mean it isn't law - take Washington D.C.'s forbidding the sale of handguns, which is also viewed as unconstitutional, or even things as benign as forbidding the sale of M and AO rated games to minors (such as the law recently struck down in Minnesota). It needs to be reviewed and struck down by a judge, and it may not even be known to any judges because national security directives don't need to be disclosed. As for the NSA wiretapping (a national security directive exposed by a newspaper), the NSA claims that the calls all originate or terminate in a foreign country, but again, we're taking their word for it, and they're still wiretapping a US citizen.
I really dislike national security directives, because they are essentially secret laws written by one person - the President. For all I know, Bush could have a law making it a felony to post about national security directives on forums and they're running up my tab before they haul me in to lock me in solitary for the rest of my days.
INTERCAL is a bit like learning FORTRAN - it's a bit long of tooth - maybe try bf, unlambda, whitespace or my personal favorite, java2k. Any base 11 probabilistic programming language is tops in my book.
true - if you polled my wife or any of her friends, they would be clueless about this issue because they a) don't care b) don't want to know
If I even bring up politics I get the "talk to the hand" response.
I, and most of my friends, on the other hand, care a lot. I particularly loved this quote in the rebuttal, which blatantly wrong:
that Americans believe (51-43%) that "the President does not have the legal authority to authorize wiretapes [sic] without a warrant to fight terrorism.
In fact, the President has the power to create any law instantly, at least until Congress knocks it down. NSA warrantless wiretaps on US citizens are a perfect example of this, because the NSA charter forbid them from operating in the United States until President Bush signed a national security directive giving them this power. Any executive order (EO) is instantly law, just as if it were passed by both the House and Senate.
In fact, national security directives such as the one Clinton used to empower FEMA (which was created by the Carter administration, I believe) don't even need to be disclosed to Congress - it's believed FEMA can sidestep Congress and declare martial law if needed (which is unconstitutional). In my opinion, the United States is essentially a dictatorship if the President abuses such power (and I'm not the first to say this), and the last couple of Presidents have been very dictatorial with their power (as if Bush's "I'm the Decider!" wasn't clue enough) with a large number of EOs and an unknown number of national security directives. EOs can be challenged in court, but it's hard to challenge them if you don't know about them - like national security directives.
I'm joking, but just so I don't get sued for slander - it's an analogy for it seemed like a good deal at the time, but the deal doesn't seem so good in the long run (and I did exactly this - 3 years of use, paid for it over 10 years).
If I had an Intel Mac, I'd probably run the now Sun owned VirtualBox because it's GPL, and therefore no stealing required. The beta in mid-February still had some major open issues, however (broken USB, audio in, and virtualized networking), but I would hope it has progressed since then.
Slashdot Mirror
you're talking about true emulators, which some VMs actually are (e.g. ones that support endian or different CPUs). I actually wanted to avoid using the word VM in my post because it is a limited form of VM with pretty much only I/O emulation like MoL and not one with hardware emulation or special mode processing (though you're correct in that if they want to support some features like protected mode, they would need an exception), which is why I started by calling it a transparent emulator.
And speaking of endian-ness (which will not be the case here because we know the processor is Win-Tel), only a small subset of cases need special attention code-wise if your hardware ran the same assembly instruction set but in a different endian-ness (called bi-endian CPUs) - I/O (e.g. swapping during I/O) and the special case of some types of casting. This is not the case of most emulators that emulate other hardware - I would assume they store in the native endian-ness and bytecode interpret the other processor's assembly set.
Here's why you need a special handler for casting:
short one = 1;
char *cp = (char*)
if *cp is now 0, you are running on big endian hardware (or in big endian mode on bi-endian hardware) and if *cp is 0, you are running on little endian hardware. This is a common test for runtime endian-ness.
That is part of the picture, but lets face it - Dev Corvin (the author) is pushing the blame when the reality is Microsoft has huge, swathing changes from release-to release such as the deprecation of the C library in XP, replacing it with buffer safe versions (functions now have a leading underscore, so _strcat, for instance).
.5-1% of these are browser uncoupling. Having multiple versions of these libraries open at once is a memory hit, and that itself may impact performance.
IE on first release was NOT integrated into the OS - they did that later to force installation and non-removal because Netscape was superior at the time. When told they needed to pull the OS ties out, they only rooted them deeper. There is no reason they did this other than to destroy the company they felt was a threat to them - especially when Netscape suggested the browser would be the new desktop. They lost anti-trust suits in the US and Europe because of this illegal bundling, but the US basically gave them a slap on the wrist and said don't do it again rather than slapping them with massive damages and forcing them to unbundle it like Europe did.
Microsoft has always released new VC runtime libraries with each new OS and most aren't included with the OS (meaning good installers contain the redistributable binaries). All of these contain significant changes to functions and I seriously doubt more than
The first problem was Microsoft using bundling as a way to force Netscape out of the market. They tied IE to the OS after already getting sued (and losing) for using monopoly power in the market to influence hardware vendors (by giving drastically cheaper rates for exclusive contracts that forced competitors out). Part of that agreement was that they couldn't force bundling of products they own, either (which was mostly MS-SQL databases and MS Office).
So they were already being blocked from releasing competing products and what do they do as an encore? Release a media player. The only reason this was a problem was it was in their anti-trust agreement that they wouldn't do it.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with them releasing a media player or a browser - it was the tie to the OS that bugged me. This tie will finally be removed with Win7.
I seriously doubt DRM code is causing Vista slowness - why would that have an effect on game performance? Maybe when sound files are loaded, but general performance is slower. I suspect it's partially tied to resource issues, especially when Aero is used (Aero uses hardware resources) and partially due to insufficient profiling of code in a rush to shove it out to market. Remember Vista was a hack - it was meant for Win7 (probably even with the VM model described) and they pulled it off the top and grafted chunks of it onto Windows 2003. That's probably also the main reason WinFS support was dropped (if there's any feature I want in Win7 it's WinFS - a metadata supporting filesystem - finally).
Transparent emulators (should they even be called that?) are very fast - ever run a VM? They just pass through code into the native processor and make sure functions get routed to the appropriate library. Not quite as fast as running natively, but if you are able to significantly increase your "native" speed, the tradeoff is usually worth it (at most it's about a 20% hit - real world is usually much less).
Where you DO run into problems is with I/O, meaning we get the driver headache again. I believe that is one reason Vista pushed a new driver model - an attempt at future-proofing for this new OS model.
The plus side of a VM is you get a layer of stability for free if you do it right (I don't count on MS to do anything right, especially the first time...) - crashing the VM doesn't necessarily crash the native OS (depends on what caused the crash - bad memory crashes everything).
they also stated they will have a tiered pricing system - $150 is max for the 50Mbps, so they may have, say $75 for 25Mbps, which would be more attractive to consumers.
AFAIK, Comcast has never had caps, but sometimes they pull the plug on excessive users because they wrote they could do that in their terms of service (which is pretty draconian, IMO). I believe the $150 service is targeted towards businesses and power users because there is no fast and cheap alternative in the area. The only way to get 5Mbps upstream is to lease a T2 or T3 line, which was running over $1000/mo last I checked.
only its not urban - it's a fairly large swath of urban to semi-rural that compromises the Twin Cities Region. For instance, it includes West Lakeland Township, which is fairly rural including farms and small developments (and many mansions) and has no formal town - it is in between small towns Lake Elmo and Lakeland and larger towns Stillwater, and Hudson (Wisconsin). I have relatives with Comcast service there.
Comcast can do this in the Twin Cities market and has no competition. Ignoring the Star Tribune newspaper's error (5Mbps max, it's actually 7), that still puts them at a theoretical peak of about 7x faster (being a token network, actual speed will probably be slower).
Here are the base broadband options (excluding Satellite):
There are 2 bare line DSL providers in the Twin Cities that I know of after the death of Rhythms and Northpoint (there are still some like EDGE that serve semi-rural suburbs like Anoka) Quest and COVAD.
Quest broadband: bare lines can run ADSL 7Mbps at most.
COVAD: bare lines are ADSL (7Mbps). Focus is business only, but they lease consumer lines to ISPs (e.g. Speakeasy).
notice - ADSL2+ (generally offered as 15Mbps service, peak at 24Mbps) and FIOS service is NOT available in the market. Quest is anemic at offering service and only bumps service when competition forces them to (meaning they bumped to 5,6, and 7Mbps only when Comcast boosted their speeds). COVAD only bumps when the business market demands, so you've got one market leader a follower, and one that mixes leading and following based on customers.
The only problem I foresee with Comcast failing to dominate the market (as they already do) is supersaturation - my neighborhood already had too much saturation when I was on Comcast last (100k down/10k up and 500ms ping times was a good speed at 7PM on a weeknight when I had 3Mbps service). Last year (or maybe 2 years ago) they buried new fiber and set up a new hub in the area, so I expect that is no longer the case.
As far as debt goes, yes, the majority of the US population and the government are foolish - attempting to avoid a recession by BORROWING money is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of, but the US as a whole has a debt problem and there are plenty of people out there that think they will win the lottery and it will pull them out of the toilet (I am not one of these, and am still debating whether I should do the right thing and spend the economic stimulus or do the wrong thing and put an extra payment against my mortgage... I'm leaning towards the wrong thing).
.01s of virtual boobie is going to harm a minor more than a murder trainer FPS (yes, that was tongue firmly planted in cheek).
I'm pretty sure the US gets most of its oil from Canada and Venezuela, so your argument makes little sense. There are plenty of other OPEC nations and the largest other exporter is an ally (Saudi Arabia). I seriously doubt oil really drove the attack (and why the hell would we have invaded Afghanistan? nothing but opium there - maybe Bush did it for his dealer buddy from his coke snorting days)
As far as morals go, I don't think we're any worse than we were. Personally, I don't find the naked body or sex offensive in general (e.g. natural sex vs, say bestiality), so in that respect I'm more European. You can argue objectification, and I agree, in a way it is objectification if it's real or on TV, but why, then, rate a game M if it has ANY nudity (I'm not talking sex - nudity gets an automatic M by the ESRB, which means 17+, but a PG movie can show some nudity)? You're talking about a natural human body shape and no real actors! Some war games get T (Teen) ratings - really, I'm a firm believer that
Drug and gang culture is a problem, but you're probably talking about a tiny percentage of the population. I briefly lived in just such a neighborhood as you described (lets say I'd prefer not to ever see the business end of a gun again), but we're talking about a small part of the United States and a small percentage of its people. My parents and neighbors go to church every Sunday too - are they watching porn and doing drugs? I highly doubt it (my dad has never even had a drink in his life). I also know plenty of people that smoked weed (most no longer or rarely do) and have never touched a handgun.
they don't?
How about these:
"Read My Lips - No New Taxes" - Bush (Sr).
(well, OK, he believed that was true at the time, but he didn't keep his promise)
"People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."
-Nixon
if you have someone breaking and entering and spying illegally, that makes you a crook.
and again, oddly enough the Republicans were considered leftists (liberals) prior to the reconstruction and the Democrats were the conservative party. The Republicans formed from the ashes of the Whig party, as I recall, which was split over slavery but traditionally fairly liberal.
Incidentally, maybe it's time to resurrect the Whigs, despite the silly name - their ticket was based on Congressional power over Executive power and both the Republicans and Democrats have strayed deeply into executive power over Congressional.
The irony is Bush has proven time and again that his job is to write law not interpret it. In fact, it's not that far of a stretch to say in some ways we are no longer a Republic, but a elected representative dictatorship. For someone that pushes "Democracy" as much as Bush, he sure doesn't act like it (incidentally, neither did Clinton and escalation has almost been exponential in recent years).
Executive Orders by a President are law unless Congress overturns them, and both Clinton and Bush have used them excessively (and that's just Bush's public ones) to dictate policy and bypass Congress. In fact, some such as the wiretapping law were issued as National Security Directives (Bush's name) which don't have to be publicly disclosed (even to Congress, as I understand it). He also issues Homeland Security directives, which are basically NSDs with a different name. This dictatorial power is based on loose interpretation of some provisions of the Constitution (see links above).
I'm not saying the US is a dictatorship yet, but each President seems to abuse executive privilege more and more and I personally think it's time to rein in that power. Bush has issued at least one blatantly unconstitutional law in the federal warrantless wiretapping. Not only that, but he gave the job to an agency that cannot legally operate in the US (the NSA), even though he has an agency that has legal privilege to operate inside the country at his disposal (the FBI).
yeah - I was a bit bummed too. I had read about this previously in PopSci, and I doubt it was the April fools article (not even sure if that was from the April issue).
/me pines for a bygone era... and is eaten by a grue
Slashdot apparently wants to be taken as seriously.
nice generalization on Americans - what are you, French? (sorry, in advance for that)
Maybe it's where I'm from, but I don't see that at all here from the people I know - most people are glad to help a foreigner, even if they don't speak the language. About the only bad thing I have to say about my Mexican neighbors that speak almost no English is they have terrible taste - the tacky plastic swans and puce house painted siding makes me want to barf. I have nothing but praise for the Hmong family that lives across the street from them (they speak no English, so all conversation is through their 10 year old, but I've lent them my snowblower after a bad snowstorm so they didn't have to shovel, although they did shovel and brush what didn't get blown). I admit, I'm not living in an English Only Movement state, and I doubt my state will ever be, but even then that movement is usually only meant for official documentation.
Incidentally, I don't think it's bad that someone pokes fun at bad grammar, because if someone didn't point it out, the person with bad grammar would continue to make the same mistakes. It didn't sound like the poster was trying to be malicious, just trying to be funny and unfortunately someone was the butt of the joke. If they had posted "lern gramar sp3lling and you f*cking piGdoG id10t forinner! 1337!," I'd find it insulting and offensive and troll them.
America is a large country and just because you hear of some restaurant owning ass in Philly says "if you're in America and come into his restaurant you need to speak English" (incidentally, Pennsylvania has no such law), it doesn't mean everyone in the country or even that state thinks that way. In fact, as the US becomes more global I see just the opposite, at least at the "white collar" (desk job) level - I personally work for Germans and the majority of my coworkers are Indian and Chinese, which doesn't leave a lot of room for intolerance.
I do believe it's important to learn English if you're living in America, but if I were in Germany I'd say it's important to learn German (even though it really isn't, in my experience). My Hmong and Mexican neighbors basically speak through their kids but my Mexican neighbors are trying to learn English and my Hmong neighbors aren't. I worry about the Hmong family - if their kids move out (like my Hmong high school friend in nearly the same situation, but at least his dad spoke some English) they will probably have some problems.
I use nvEmulate to test rendering OpenGL 2.0 shaders (currently geometry, but adding layer for single pass cubemaps) on my Windows XP box and this is the DirectX equivalent. Hideous framerates, but at least I can see if it works. I don't actively develop or even build on my Windows XP box (I also have Vista, Linux, and Mac), so all I really do is verify it works.
fyi, Brawndo is the Gatorade like drink in the movie Idiocracy that replaced drinking water. I would put that as 9 insults - 8 being Brawndo and 9 for a reference to Idiocracy.
*Spoiler alert* - They used it to water plants and the electrolytes (salts, typically sodium and potassium) were killing them.
*/Spoiler*
Personally I have no great love for Apple or any great hate of them, even though I was once a fanboy (Apple ][ forever!). For one, I think a lot of their hardware is overpriced in the same way I think a BMW or Jaguar is overpriced - you pay a premium for a premium brand and reputation, but it still does essentially the same thing as something much cheaper. Some products like the macbook air are cool but flawed - odd jacks and sealed case for instance. Apple continued a tradition of removing features it deems obsolete, and in the case of the Air it was an Ethernet jack. To be honest, I've used my PC laptop's Ethernet jack exactly once in the past year, and that was to replace my wireless G router with a wireless n router, so I consider this a non-issue, but the case where the Air is your only machine that could be a problem since most Ethernet routers need to be wired to set them up (I don't know about AirPort, but Belkin and LinkSys do).
Your wife should try google - here's the first hit I got searching for ipod to PC.
I was trying to explain why it was hard to do in the past.
/dev/hd0 and I always thought that would be very confusing to an end user, though since most people would just click through it may not be a huge problem. I consider myself fairly seasoned in UNIX, but I remember being confused by the SATA/SCSI drive IDs (I had both, but the SCSI disks were much smaller and older).
:(
Many of these issues are no longer true or not as bad as in the past. Some like Ubuntu are definitely targeting the end user experience and trying to remove a lot of the complexity. Are they there yet? I'd say no, but getting there. KUbuntu 10 was a lot easier for me than Mandrake 9/10. I'm currently on SuSE 9 again (due to work), but plan to move back to Ubuntu soon.
Windows and Ubuntu use the default drive as the preferred partition, but SuSE 7/8 and even Mandrake 10 showed the default as
Dual Boot is how I've set up every copy of Linux the first time - most users are not willing to completely separate from Windows, mostly due to Office
The move to calling programs Media Player (aliasing) and the like is recent; again, I was referring to problems that mainly are in the past, where most would have a category called Media Players, but that category contained programs as named, so you may have xmms, divx, etc. and you would have to learn what each did. I remember seeing one distribution that had a Graphics folder and it contained applications like GIMP and X display configuration tools (the next release I believe separated them in a submenu - I think that was Mandrake, but I'm not positive).
most routers I've purchased default to
user:
password: admin
fortunately, most require a wired connection from the LAN side to make changes.
I think most routers are open by default because most people are too stupid to know how to set up a security enabled network. I'm not blaming the people for their stupidity (we all have out areas of expertise), I'm blaming the router manufacturers for not making this easier. For instance, instead of recommending copying the codes to a USB drive and then copy the security codes into network setup on a laptop, they could include a secure encrypted USB drive (FOB) that plugs in to the router to load keys and then an installer for the computer you want to enable (enter user/password to decrypt the drive). The installer would be the tricky part (due to platform issues), but universal filesystems could be used (e.g. ISO 9660 or a successor).
I've had non-fatal driver crashes several dozen times, but only one hard crash requiring a forced reboot.
the video driver crashes were mostly caused by this:
KB940105
the hard crash I'm not sure about, but because I'm pretty sure the kernel was hosed (graphics went to garbage, sound in repeating loop, no way to change apps). I'm 99% sure it was video driver related in some way (I was watching full screen video at the time with several apps including VS2008 and Firefox running in the background). That is exactly 1 more hard crash than my oldest XP box has had in 5 years (which is to say I've never hard crashed that XP box, though my dual boot Linux/XP had a bunch of BSODs when a memory chip went bad). OTOH, my mom and dad can crash XP and Vista daily, and third party software has a lot to do with it. When you throttle your system with background crap like Weatherbug and 15 million similar apps you're bound to have some conflicts (they had over 100 items in their system tray when I cleaned it last - wtf?).
The last one was definitely true - there were definitely problems with using Linux:
for example
1) installing Linux - need to understand partitioning, drives and obscure notations - specifically hd (IDE disk) vs sd (originally SCSI, but now also SATA disks). Dual or triple boot requires even more knowledge (like knowing to install Windows first).
2) obscure program names - xmms means/does what? Compare to Windows Media Player or iTunes - at least I have a clue what they may do.
3) installing hardware accelerated graphics (which required compiling the driver for a while).
4) Data files with no relations to applications - this is fixed, but used to be a problem - double click a
just because it isn't Constitutional doesn't mean it isn't law - take Washington D.C.'s forbidding the sale of handguns, which is also viewed as unconstitutional, or even things as benign as forbidding the sale of M and AO rated games to minors (such as the law recently struck down in Minnesota). It needs to be reviewed and struck down by a judge, and it may not even be known to any judges because national security directives don't need to be disclosed. As for the NSA wiretapping (a national security directive exposed by a newspaper), the NSA claims that the calls all originate or terminate in a foreign country, but again, we're taking their word for it, and they're still wiretapping a US citizen.
I really dislike national security directives, because they are essentially secret laws written by one person - the President. For all I know, Bush could have a law making it a felony to post about national security directives on forums and they're running up my tab before they haul me in to lock me in solitary for the rest of my days.
INTERCAL is a bit like learning FORTRAN - it's a bit long of tooth - maybe try bf, unlambda, whitespace or my personal favorite, java2k. Any base 11 probabilistic programming language is tops in my book.
a) don't care
b) don't want to know
If I even bring up politics I get the "talk to the hand" response.
I, and most of my friends, on the other hand, care a lot. I particularly loved this quote in the rebuttal, which blatantly wrong:
In fact, the President has the power to create any law instantly, at least until Congress knocks it down. NSA warrantless wiretaps on US citizens are a perfect example of this, because the NSA charter forbid them from operating in the United States until President Bush signed a national security directive giving them this power. Any executive order (EO) is instantly law, just as if it were passed by both the House and Senate.
In fact, national security directives such as the one Clinton used to empower FEMA (which was created by the Carter administration, I believe) don't even need to be disclosed to Congress - it's believed FEMA can sidestep Congress and declare martial law if needed (which is unconstitutional). In my opinion, the United States is essentially a dictatorship if the President abuses such power (and I'm not the first to say this), and the last couple of Presidents have been very dictatorial with their power (as if Bush's "I'm the Decider!" wasn't clue enough) with a large number of EOs and an unknown number of national security directives. EOs can be challenged in court, but it's hard to challenge them if you don't know about them - like national security directives.
one more OSS virtualization link I just found: kju
translation: sold my soul to Sallie Mae.
I'm joking, but just so I don't get sued for slander - it's an analogy for it seemed like a good deal at the time, but the deal doesn't seem so good in the long run (and I did exactly this - 3 years of use, paid for it over 10 years).
If I had an Intel Mac, I'd probably run the now Sun owned VirtualBox because it's GPL, and therefore no stealing required. The beta in mid-February still had some major open issues, however (broken USB, audio in, and virtualized networking), but I would hope it has progressed since then.
I seem to recall we're listed as "Mostly Harmless"
;)
In any case, we have unlimited potential for good, as well. Just because I'm Chaotic Evil doesn't mean you have to be