I think the US norm of callee-pays originally stemmed from the inability of the billing system/incumbent networks to cope with the other way, due to various limitations (but I could be wrong; it's been a while since I heard that, and my memory may be faulty).
I think the cellphone provider cartel in the US just wanted some extra cash. All phones in the US work on a caller-pays basis (other than included "free" minutes and various deals), including mobiles. But cell companies double-dip by having incoming, as well as outgoing, cellphone calls use up monthly minutes included in the plan, and charging the cell owner when those minutes aren't included.
Most cellphone providers give you a local number in the US. It costs the same as a local call to a landline, which may be nothing or very cheap depending on the region. The cell owner also usually gets a fixed number of minutes per month, including incoming calls, included "free" in their fixed monthly bill. It is no extra inconvenience, financially, to give out a cell number in the US.
As for landlines being skewed against low-income its simple. If you can only afford one phone (or only wish to afford one phone) the mobile is infinitely more flexible. If I had to choose between cutting my landline (ok ok voip line) or cellular bill, it would be a no brainer - the landline would go.
Completely agree.
If you're single and don't have any kids (ie many of those under 30), it's kind of a no-brainer. Dropping the landline is avoiding the duplication of phone bills. Why would you want two? As long as you get decent, consistent service in your home, and you're the only one who needs to use it, it is 100% equivalent to a landline for that use. Plus you can take it with you. The quality of conversations on the go doesn't factor into whether it is as good as a landline in the home (the only place you *can* use your landline).
It's also easier to give out a single number to everyone and have a single voicemail to check.
With a TDI, you don't have to rev it up to have lots of power, unlike a typical 4 cylinder. It moves pretty quick under normal driving, due to the torque. If you try and race it, the performance won't be so hot...you have to shift too early, and too often for a 0-60 or quarter mile. But if you drive like most people, you will probably be pretty happy with the performance.
Sounds like the TDI is completely different from every other VW Jetta/Golf then, which is surprising. I would have thought their gearing would have been the same. Every VW I have heard of gets peak torque around 5500 RPMs.
Where they fail at the 0-60 is the especially weak torque they get off the line until they hit 4500-5500 RPMs.
I'd bet that most of the inefficiency in winter has to do with the oil and much lower viscosity when cold. This means your engine has to work harder and is much less efficient. It's the reason people let their cars warm up in the morning. But they should really start their drive slowly, instead, so as not to waste gas and to also prevent the extra wear on an engine from idling, especially in the cold.
You need to make sure the car is level when you "fill up." Using the same gas pump, parked in exactly the same position is best. He keeps a log book of every fill up with MPG calculations and basically never uses his brakes. Driving paper routes at night in the country has its advantages. He's easily the best driver I've ever met, managing to drive standard and still fill paper tubes without taking his arm off while still moving. He goes so far as to calculate how many years he'll get out of a new car, how long the brakes will last with his driving method, basically every "hidden" expense that comes out of his paycheck by driving a paper route. Interesting guy. He's almost 70, and still going strong.
It is slightly off tradition that the GPU company's flagship product sails off not to meet the flagship of it's competitor, but one target lower. Then again, the lower we go down the price pyramid, the bigger the audience, more people with the budget to spend. I'd say that there is no clear winner between the 8800 GTS and X2900XT, the GTS displayed more consistent performance behavior while the X2900XT fluctuates around due to the in-matured driver. I would say that despite the heat thrown out by the GPU, the X2900XT overclocks better than the 8800GTS by 8-10%, but that's putting out a lot more heat and drawing more power than it already consumes. So this is something potential XT buyers should take note of, the heat produced by the card is no small amount, nor is the power consumed by it - more than 60w over the GTS. What you would be investing in is a higher potential of upcoming performance boosts (including the latest pre-Alpha 8.37.4.2_47323 Catalyst just released 3 days before this review) and full HDCP support with integrated audio controller. And of course the new programmable Tessellation technology which we will probably not see support in games until much later.
Not the fastest video card in the market for sure, but definitely holds it's own at it's current price-point. We only hope that supply will be adequate and not lead to an indirect increase in prices due to short supply. We hope to see some interesting implementations from various card partners as well, be it overclocked specifications, or improved coolers.
X2900XT Pros:
Better overclocking by 8-10%
Potential performance improvement in future drivers
Full HDCP support with integrated audio
New programmable Tessellation technology
8800 GTS Pros:
More consistent performance due to more mature driver
Runs cooler
Requires far less power (about 60 W less)
See the benchmarks for detailed performance comparisons.
"A lot of colleges require students to own a laptop or desktop," That's what I hear. But none that I've heard of in RL. Most have labs and libraries for that.
"and scholarships for laptops are easy to get." Never heard of that. Loans, yeah. Grants, if they've got it left over. But not "scholarships."
"The portion of college students that do not own computers is statistically insignificant." Maybe I just don't know the right people going to the right colleges, but I'd say they're not "statistically insignificant." This is all ignoring the fact that my premise wasn't dependent on whether or not college kids have computers.
Perhaps more significant is that it is GPL incompatible. Also, see the Mozilla Relicensing FAQ for details about their decision to triple license (MPL/GPL/LGPL), rather than modifying the MPL, to make Mozilla source compatible with the GPL.
AFAICT, the MPL is not a bad license, other than its GPL incompatibility.
Because many of those who own a console might not have their own PC, specifically HS and college kids. Whether they use their parents' computer, the library computers, or a hand-me-down, they might prefer to do most things on their brand new console. Consoles will likely get the full subset of features provided by cell phones, PDAs, and iPods. Well, everything except the phone calls. But a console is powerful enough to do IM, web browsing, music, video, all sorts of stuff. Actually, a Core 2 Duo or X-2 is overkill for everything except games and HDTV, both of which are covered by consoles with their specialized processors. Many people would prefer an appliance to a general-purpose computer for most tasks they do. The trend will only continue.
That said, I prefer a computer for all of the above, including games. I suspect I'm in the minority.
Hey Tacvek, I think my other post might help you too. Specifically, set RebootRelaunchTimeout to 1440 to change that to 24 hours. A couple other options should help too.
(PS - thanks for this thread - it answers a question my wife posed - why her windows machine rebooted overnight when she was in the middle of sorting digital photos to send to be printed, and there was no power outage.)
In case you're interested, since starting this thread I did some googling and came up with a solution for both XP Pro and Home.
I want the option for it to just "automatically update" my OS, silently, without rebooting. I'm fine if a systray bubble tells me it needs to reboot, but I don't want any other notifications or tray icons from it, ever. Simple enough. Possible with Pro, I now know. Not possible with Home. It's not configurable enough. I don't have much more to say than that.
Configure it to inform you but not automaticly download them & quit blaming your mistakes on Microsoft.
That's not really what I want. I don't want to be nagged. It's not really "automatic" then, right? And I don't want the nag yellow shield in the tray all the time. I just want some decent configuration options for it, like "just fscking do it and quit bothering and interrupting me". Guess if you have Pro and open gpedit.msc and hack some options you can get that, but that's no good to me. I'd rather disable it.
Thanks, but I have XP Home. gpedit.msc and the Security tab on files are all I would need from Pro. Unfortunately, I didn't give MS that much money for all the other stuff I don't need. Sounds like your solution would have worked best though.
I really just want it to install everything. Only thing I don't like is the reboots. Should really be clearly visible option in the AU panel. Thanks for your help. Can't believe some of the other responses I've gotten though...
So your machine only reboots on you when you're not looking once a month instead of every single day!
That pissed me off a couple days ago. I had stuff downloading overnight and scheduled SageTV recordings that got interrupted. I woke up to my computer at the login screen and thought the power must have gone out. Then the friendly green shield kindly informed me that it rebooted without my permission.
That's the cue for me to disable the Automatic Updates service. The idea is good but the implementation is awful.
It has to do with what RPM you need to be at to achieve peak torque or peak HP.
Going uphill, if you speed up before the hill to a point where you get close to peak torque for most of the hill, and if you drive standard, also pick the optimal gear, you will get much better mileage than cruise control will give you. Cruise control tries to stay in the lowest gear possible going into the hill, then has to downshift and try to make up for it partway up the hill, whereas (esp. standard trans.) you can stay in the same gear and rpm range the whole way.
When on flat terrain, staying in the peak HP range is best. A good driver can judge that better than cruise control as well. But the hills are the place where cruise control is most inefficient.
I agree, GP's argument doesn't hold up. I'd rather have a crazy driver crash behind me where I'm not going to hit them. Getting hit by them from behind at anything less than a full stop is much better than hitting a stopped/crashed vehicle in front of you.
I've posted a couple of creative commons videos to Google, in full, and was wondering if full redistribution was something allowed by the creative commons licenses. The directors/producers didn't seem to mind. A couple of them emailed me to thank me and ask how many hits the videos got. But it is officially allowed by the cc licenses to redistribute an exact copy of the full work, or does it have to be a derivative? I think one was CC Sampling Plus if that matters.
I would guess it's probably an extension that's causing this, but I'm not sure; I only have a few installed and enabled now.
(I just restarted FF a couple times so now it's only at 55 MB with 2 tabs, but when I posted that comment above I was over 400 MB of mem usage (with a VM size over 900 MB) with 10 tabs.
It's not just an extension causing it. Well, maybe the outrageous numbers like 400 MB. But default config can easily get up to 150-200 MB on WinXP.
It's hard to explain where that kind of memory could go. Even 30 tabs with pages full of images don't add up to that much memory. But it would be mitigated if the active page wasn't paged out. In fact, I don't know why the other tabs would be active in memory anyway. If you don't have that much memory, might as well pull some stuff back out of the cache instead of the pagefile. And too many actions are blocking. If Firefox has to wait for something unrelated to the current page/action to be pulled from VM before it will perform the action (say, a background tab to be loaded into memory), it's the primary reason why Firefox feels so slow, and it's not good design.
I have 1 GB but would probably get much better performance with 2 GB. That's pretty sad for a browser. Especially one I like so much.
Unless you are buying the absolute fastest chip on the shelf with a massive premium you want to know which chip offers a superior architecture. Comparing the performance of two chips at the same clock tells you that. Especially since AMD chips are much lower in price than Intel chips. Assuming you don't have a limitless budget you can definately get a rock solid AMD chip that outperforms the equally priced Intel chip at any price point but the very top.
Before AMD's price cuts, that statement would have been laughable. E6600 at $330 and E6300 at $185 were blowing away AMD chips priced hundreds more. I seem to remember E6600 beating a $900 AMD CPU then. Now it is much closer (and much cheaper), considering the 6000+ and E6600 are both ~$235, but I just looked up AnandTech's review of the 6000+ earlier today, and it is beat by the E6600 by only 5-10% in most benchmarks. Much closer, until you overclock the Core 2 Duo by 25-100% on air, depending on model. You won't see those kind of overclocks from the AMD.
I would consider $235 about right for most gamers. You are probably right about AMD having the advantage for chips less expensive than the E4300 at $125. That CPU is the one that gets 100% overclock, aka "the new budget king of overclocking" according to AnandTech. But I don't know: how many people spend less than $125 on a CPU?
It's absurd that you have to buy a $2000 PC to play $50 games, when a $200 console will work even better.
The PC I just built will run every game out there at performance ranging from acceptable to overkill. It is a Core 2 Duo E6600 with an EVGA nVidia 7600 GT. I paid about $750, and moved a couple old components to it. It even has a fancy Lian Li aluminum case, and an aftermarket CPU fan for overclocking. The E6600 has come down in price since, by about $100.
It's still about twice the price of a budget Dell, but it runs almost any game you throw at it, and doesn't cost anywhere close to $2000. Hell, it's fast enough to record TV with a tuner card while playing most games. That's really what I bought it for: video. But you can spend about $500 to build a decent game rig no problem. You can't put an 8800 GTX in it, but you don't really need that for most games.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like telling a bunch of South Park fans that Mickey Mouse is the funniest cartoon ever.
I think the cellphone provider cartel in the US just wanted some extra cash. All phones in the US work on a caller-pays basis (other than included "free" minutes and various deals), including mobiles. But cell companies double-dip by having incoming, as well as outgoing, cellphone calls use up monthly minutes included in the plan, and charging the cell owner when those minutes aren't included.
Most cellphone providers give you a local number in the US. It costs the same as a local call to a landline, which may be nothing or very cheap depending on the region. The cell owner also usually gets a fixed number of minutes per month, including incoming calls, included "free" in their fixed monthly bill. It is no extra inconvenience, financially, to give out a cell number in the US.
Completely agree.
If you're single and don't have any kids (ie many of those under 30), it's kind of a no-brainer. Dropping the landline is avoiding the duplication of phone bills. Why would you want two? As long as you get decent, consistent service in your home, and you're the only one who needs to use it, it is 100% equivalent to a landline for that use. Plus you can take it with you. The quality of conversations on the go doesn't factor into whether it is as good as a landline in the home (the only place you *can* use your landline).
It's also easier to give out a single number to everyone and have a single voicemail to check.
Sounds like the TDI is completely different from every other VW Jetta/Golf then, which is surprising. I would have thought their gearing would have been the same. Every VW I have heard of gets peak torque around 5500 RPMs.
Where they fail at the 0-60 is the especially weak torque they get off the line until they hit 4500-5500 RPMs.
I'd bet that most of the inefficiency in winter has to do with the oil and much lower viscosity when cold. This means your engine has to work harder and is much less efficient. It's the reason people let their cars warm up in the morning. But they should really start their drive slowly, instead, so as not to waste gas and to also prevent the extra wear on an engine from idling, especially in the cold.
You need to make sure the car is level when you "fill up." Using the same gas pump, parked in exactly the same position is best. He keeps a log book of every fill up with MPG calculations and basically never uses his brakes. Driving paper routes at night in the country has its advantages. He's easily the best driver I've ever met, managing to drive standard and still fill paper tubes without taking his arm off while still moving. He goes so far as to calculate how many years he'll get out of a new car, how long the brakes will last with his driving method, basically every "hidden" expense that comes out of his paycheck by driving a paper route. Interesting guy. He's almost 70, and still going strong.
X2900XT Pros:
8800 GTS Pros:
See the benchmarks for detailed performance comparisons.
"A lot of colleges require students to own a laptop or desktop,"
That's what I hear. But none that I've heard of in RL. Most have labs and libraries for that.
"and scholarships for laptops are easy to get."
Never heard of that. Loans, yeah. Grants, if they've got it left over. But not "scholarships."
"The portion of college students that do not own computers is statistically insignificant."
Maybe I just don't know the right people going to the right colleges, but I'd say they're not "statistically insignificant." This is all ignoring the fact that my premise wasn't dependent on whether or not college kids have computers.
Perhaps more significant is that it is GPL incompatible. Also, see the Mozilla Relicensing FAQ for details about their decision to triple license (MPL/GPL/LGPL), rather than modifying the MPL, to make Mozilla source compatible with the GPL.
AFAICT, the MPL is not a bad license, other than its GPL incompatibility.
Because many of those who own a console might not have their own PC, specifically HS and college kids. Whether they use their parents' computer, the library computers, or a hand-me-down, they might prefer to do most things on their brand new console. Consoles will likely get the full subset of features provided by cell phones, PDAs, and iPods. Well, everything except the phone calls. But a console is powerful enough to do IM, web browsing, music, video, all sorts of stuff. Actually, a Core 2 Duo or X-2 is overkill for everything except games and HDTV, both of which are covered by consoles with their specialized processors. Many people would prefer an appliance to a general-purpose computer for most tasks they do. The trend will only continue.
That said, I prefer a computer for all of the above, including games. I suspect I'm in the minority.
Hey Tacvek, I think my other post might help you too. Specifically, set RebootRelaunchTimeout to 1440 to change that to 24 hours. A couple other options should help too.
In case you're interested, since starting this thread I did some googling and came up with a solution for both XP Pro and Home.
how to
registry entries (works with XP Home as well)
I guess this has been an issue for about 3 years for people, but it never bugged me bad enough to fix it until I started recording TV on this box.
I want the option for it to just "automatically update" my OS, silently, without rebooting. I'm fine if a systray bubble tells me it needs to reboot, but I don't want any other notifications or tray icons from it, ever. Simple enough. Possible with Pro, I now know. Not possible with Home. It's not configurable enough. I don't have much more to say than that.
That's not really what I want. I don't want to be nagged. It's not really "automatic" then, right? And I don't want the nag yellow shield in the tray all the time. I just want some decent configuration options for it, like "just fscking do it and quit bothering and interrupting me". Guess if you have Pro and open gpedit.msc and hack some options you can get that, but that's no good to me. I'd rather disable it.
Thanks, but I have XP Home. gpedit.msc and the Security tab on files are all I would need from Pro. Unfortunately, I didn't give MS that much money for all the other stuff I don't need. Sounds like your solution would have worked best though.
I really just want it to install everything. Only thing I don't like is the reboots. Should really be clearly visible option in the AU panel. Thanks for your help. Can't believe some of the other responses I've gotten though...
That pissed me off a couple days ago. I had stuff downloading overnight and scheduled SageTV recordings that got interrupted. I woke up to my computer at the login screen and thought the power must have gone out. Then the friendly green shield kindly informed me that it rebooted without my permission.
That's the cue for me to disable the Automatic Updates service. The idea is good but the implementation is awful.
It has to do with what RPM you need to be at to achieve peak torque or peak HP.
Going uphill, if you speed up before the hill to a point where you get close to peak torque for most of the hill, and if you drive standard, also pick the optimal gear, you will get much better mileage than cruise control will give you. Cruise control tries to stay in the lowest gear possible going into the hill, then has to downshift and try to make up for it partway up the hill, whereas (esp. standard trans.) you can stay in the same gear and rpm range the whole way.
When on flat terrain, staying in the peak HP range is best. A good driver can judge that better than cruise control as well. But the hills are the place where cruise control is most inefficient.
I agree, GP's argument doesn't hold up. I'd rather have a crazy driver crash behind me where I'm not going to hit them. Getting hit by them from behind at anything less than a full stop is much better than hitting a stopped/crashed vehicle in front of you.
I've posted a couple of creative commons videos to Google, in full, and was wondering if full redistribution was something allowed by the creative commons licenses. The directors/producers didn't seem to mind. A couple of them emailed me to thank me and ask how many hits the videos got. But it is officially allowed by the cc licenses to redistribute an exact copy of the full work, or does it have to be a derivative? I think one was CC Sampling Plus if that matters.
It's not just an extension causing it. Well, maybe the outrageous numbers like 400 MB. But default config can easily get up to 150-200 MB on WinXP.
It's hard to explain where that kind of memory could go. Even 30 tabs with pages full of images don't add up to that much memory. But it would be mitigated if the active page wasn't paged out. In fact, I don't know why the other tabs would be active in memory anyway. If you don't have that much memory, might as well pull some stuff back out of the cache instead of the pagefile. And too many actions are blocking. If Firefox has to wait for something unrelated to the current page/action to be pulled from VM before it will perform the action (say, a background tab to be loaded into memory), it's the primary reason why Firefox feels so slow, and it's not good design.
I have 1 GB but would probably get much better performance with 2 GB. That's pretty sad for a browser. Especially one I like so much.
Most sites probably just link to the Doom9.net forum threads where all the cracking of Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and FairPlay have taken place.
Not really useless. It tells you what page you're on/article you're reading if the web dev is competent (ie not myspace devs).
F11 should do what you're looking for.
Before AMD's price cuts, that statement would have been laughable. E6600 at $330 and E6300 at $185 were blowing away AMD chips priced hundreds more. I seem to remember E6600 beating a $900 AMD CPU then. Now it is much closer (and much cheaper), considering the 6000+ and E6600 are both ~$235, but I just looked up AnandTech's review of the 6000+ earlier today, and it is beat by the E6600 by only 5-10% in most benchmarks. Much closer, until you overclock the Core 2 Duo by 25-100% on air, depending on model. You won't see those kind of overclocks from the AMD.
I would consider $235 about right for most gamers. You are probably right about AMD having the advantage for chips less expensive than the E4300 at $125. That CPU is the one that gets 100% overclock, aka "the new budget king of overclocking" according to AnandTech. But I don't know: how many people spend less than $125 on a CPU?
The PC I just built will run every game out there at performance ranging from acceptable to overkill. It is a Core 2 Duo E6600 with an EVGA nVidia 7600 GT. I paid about $750, and moved a couple old components to it. It even has a fancy Lian Li aluminum case, and an aftermarket CPU fan for overclocking. The E6600 has come down in price since, by about $100.
It's still about twice the price of a budget Dell, but it runs almost any game you throw at it, and doesn't cost anywhere close to $2000. Hell, it's fast enough to record TV with a tuner card while playing most games. That's really what I bought it for: video. But you can spend about $500 to build a decent game rig no problem. You can't put an 8800 GTX in it, but you don't really need that for most games.