Last month Asus' Eee PCs hit store shelves in Taiwan, and Shih may have his breakthrough. The two-pound laptops starting at $340 sold out in 30 minutes, and buyers around the globe clamored to get their hands on them. This month they arrive in the U.S.--starting at $300--and Europe. The rollout will probably reach China early next year, with the schedule for the rest of Asia not yet set. The day they went on sale, Asustek's stock rose 4.9%. Kirk Yang, who heads Asia technology hardware research for Citigroup in Hong Kong, predicts that the company will sell at least 3 million Eee PCs next year but could easily tally 6 million. By comparison, Apple has sold 4.3 million laptops in the last four quarters. Analysts say the Eee PC will probably have the low-end market to itself for 18 months before the other big PC makers can jump in.
The Forbes article is slightly off in regards to the US price (it is actually $399.99 in the US), but there's some pretty obvious demand. At first glance the eee PC seems like a small underpowered laptop. However, the hardware is plenty to do the most common PC functions like reading emails, browsing the internet, and watching videos.
I do not think the PC market is going to diminish, but that it will change. There will be more ultra-portable devices like the eee or iphone to replace common functions of a PC. In the near future I see the desktop PC as a tool for demanding applications, but not for general home use. For example, my parents (we live in California) love it when their computer gets smaller because they only use it to write documents, check email, and browse the internet. There's no longer a need for a PC to take up as much space as it has in the past.
The founders of any company naturally want to maintain their control over where the company goes. That usually does not happen when you go public or when you are under venture capitalists because you (the founders) usually do not own the company. Instead, the investors own the company and they ultimately determine what you should do regardless of if you're a monopoly or not. So in one sense, the article is wrong that it is Google's CEO's fault. The CEO has limited power that is restricted by the actually company owner's restrictions.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size.
Don't compare on size, compare on market segments and business habbits. Has Google bought out significant competitors? Yes, see doubleclick and youtube. Who is the top online advertising agency today? Google.
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
There is no "premium" service in Google. The only service they make money from is adwords/adsense. See their financials and notice that 99% of their revenue is from the adwords/adsense program and nothing else.
Not true. While a good chunk of their revenue may come from advertisements directly on their own website, another portion of their revenue comes from advertisements on third party websites (see percentage of revenues on their financial statements). In this case, Google is providing the service for bridging advertisers to a network of content owners. There is no other Google service between the two other than adwords/adsense. This revenue comprises more than a third of their revenue.
Additionally, I do not think you can claim that Google's revenues would be as successful without their adsense technology used on their own pages.
You really have to have participated in adwords/adsense to see what Google is really all about. Google is basically king of online advertising these days.
The decision whether to make a bet in any game is based on a variety of factors - the size of the bet, the size of the possible prize, and the odds of winning. No one of those three is enough to make a decision, you need to know all three.
Not necessarily. In a system of infinite trials you can be guaranteed to win as long as your chances of winning for each trial is over 50%. This is why casinos make money and why they kick out good blackjack players/teams (there are ways to get above 50% chance of winning in blackjack). In most cases you are not given unlimited trials because you have a limited amount of money to play or you cannot play the game often enough. But if you think of the perspective of a casino where the capital is essentially infinite (they can get a large loan) and the house is always playing against thousands of players who each contribute hundreds of plays each. In that case the conditions are close enough. You will also notice that the casino never actually "bets". They have payouts which is basically the same as consistent betting. However, they do have to enforce a maximum bet. Otherwise a billionaire like Bill Gates could bet a few billion dollars on the roulette table, play black, and have a 47% chance of sinking the entire casino if he wins and they do not have enough cash to pay him. Instead if he wanted to bet 2 billion dollars, he would have to split it up into many many trials.
For fun, go to a casino and pickup one of their informational pamphlets that shows you the odds of each game. You'll find out that for all games the odds of you winning each game are lower than 50%.
Population density does not mean as much because the network is wireless. That means each base station is only capable of handling up to a certain number of customers. So even if a higher density area, more base stations or more powerful base stations are required to handle the amount of traffic. From wikipedia on Cell Sites, "In suburban areas, mast are commonly spaced 1-2 miles apart and in dense urban areas, mast may be as close as ¼-½ mile apart."
The reason why the American market has not improved is because most consumers (yes consumers) are locked into annual or 2 year contracts and they are using a locked phone. All features like ring tones are purposely locked out and require a fee despite the phone's original specification allowing more openness. Instead the phones are tied to the network's services and because they cost money, nobody uses them. Essentially their phones are bricks and they can't change them for years.
If your customers can't change their phones, why do you need to upgrade infrastructure? Furthermore, when they do change their phones, they usually change to yet another network locked phone and sign another 2 year contract. This is the business strategy and it can be broken if the consumers wake up.
No more contracts. I only pay for month to month service even if it is more expensive (though right now I am actually paying less than some of my friends who are on contracts).
No more locked phones. I will pay for an unlocked from the manufacturer even if the cost is higher than a contract + discounted "locked" phone.
By maintaining these two policies, I limit the control the provider has over my phone and I limit the control the provider has over their cash flow. At any month I can terminate my service and switch to another provider. They do not like that. If they want to continue to be my service provider, they must continue to satisfy me with their quality of service, and they must offer a price I agree with.
I understand that this could be an expensive endeavor, however, it is well worth it since it preserves my leveraging power. When I sign a contract, all leverage has been eliminated for the duration of the contract. When I am not happy I can simply take my business away from them and move to the next guy. The $100 or so dollars I save up front is not worth cost of being locked into shitty service and a shitty phone for 2 years.
I saw more horrible Best Buy policies than you could imagine, and I made a good living for a year of my life, trying to negotiate comprimises between customers who had been ripped off bluntly, and Best Buy's corporate ladder, to try and salvage any sliver of dignity that company could possibly salvage, and this speciality of mine only lasted until I'd expressed my concern to the corporate level enough that they realized it would be easier to push me out of their store than it would be to address the concerns that I brought to their attention with regard to their return, exchange, and serviec policies.
Was "avoid using periods at all costs" also part of their policy?
I bought a $300 video card in the past. And I bought a Wii. So I guess I fit both groups.
But the thing is that I bought that $300 video card 3 years ago and I still use it today. I expect to get another year of life out of it so that would bring service to 4 years. If I had not bought the video card, I probably would have found myself upgrading multiple times over those years. That would probably mean a $100 or more card at the same time I bought the $300 card and another investment about a year and a half later. The problem is that between those years AGP died and PCI-E came in. So the second upgrade would have been more costly as I'd have to replace multiple parts in addition to the video card.
Now I still can't play the latest games at all, but I could play the games I found fun with acceptable to good performance levels. I immediately learned that the eye candy isn't much worth it if the game play isn't there, but apparently game companies have no sense of this and keep moving in the direction of graphics instead.
The nice thing about this card is it performs just as fast as the more expensive versions, nVidia has priced it well ($200 to $250), and power consumption actually went down. In one sense you could say this is just like the iphone price cut except a whole lot better because you're actually getting better product for your needs.
Note: you should always check for DBI errors but I did not for the sake of simplicity.
What that code essentially does is reuse the same statement handle to perform multiple insert statements. This prevents the database's SQL parser from being called on the same statement more than once. Advanced databases can actually avoid this to some degree by statement caching. But if you change the SQL literals, the caching doesn't work.
Another advantage is if you split the binds into seperate calls, you can actually detect errors on binding to a particular field when it occurs using the database's type checking rather than your own. For example if you declare a table that has a field to store number types and somehow a string gets bound to the variable, you *should* get a DBI error on binding the variable rather than on execution of the SQL statement.
I'll play your game. The guy above you said that the point point releases are equivalent to MS service packs. Fair enough, both are free and both mainly contain security updates and fixes. Then that means that the "point" release is equivalent to NT versions. With that, I direct you to Wikipedia on Windows NT. There you will find NT 5.0 == Windows 2000, NT 5.1 == Windows XP. And finally, NT 5.2 is listed as Windows Server 2003, Windows XP (64bit), and Windows Home Server. I believe between those various versions you'll find significant changes to the distributed packages. Also the cost to "upgrade" to those other versions is not free just like Apple "point" releases.
The real truth to all of this is that it is all marketing BS for both companies. The version number has no significant meaning because everyone knows it is completely up to the developers to determine when and how they increment the version number. My opinion is that version numbers are useless for everyone including the developers. The only numbers that have any significant meaning are revision numbers (as an identifier, not as a measure of how much changed) and the build number (also as an identifier, not as a measure of how much changed). There is no good way to measure the amount of change in a software package let alone a source file. All we have to measure changes are the developer's claims.
The only thing that matters at the end of the day is whether or not the cost justifies the software product you receive. The answer to that question will be different for every user. The version number or marketing name (Tiger, Leopard, Vista, XP, 2k, etc) have no meaning except to appeal to you in an indirect manner. For all I care, I can just change the splash screen on a software package, bump the "big" version number, and claim that it is "new and improved" and stupid people will fall for it. Welcome to marketing.
A number of things make this event really different from the katrina event. I'd say, everything combined has made this disaster go that much smoother.
People in San Diego have been very cooperative. The worst crime incident so far is a couple of teenagers "looting" for alcohol. Every report from Qualcomm stadium has been positive: donations of food and supplies were excessive that they have to tell people to stop donating. Plenty of shelters have been opened. Even pets are being spoiled rotten.
Part of the reason may be that most people are fairly well off meaning middle to middle-upper class and the general feel of San Diegans is "chill". It matches the typical weather patterns where people start complaining when the temperature gets too cold for tshirts and shorts.
Another major factor is that San Diego has already been through another major fire disaster in 2003 called the Cedar Fire. Because of that event, the county was much better prepared to deal with a major fire disaster. All agencies have been communicating incredibly well, even to the degree that military support and even Mexican support is now integrated into the effort. There was footage today of military aircraft outfitted with water buckets to do water drops. The fire chief went on local TV and announced that they are getting additional help from Mexican fire engines.
Major changes to emergency procedures/technology such as reverse 911 has made communication with residents and coordination of evacuations much smoother. We received the reverse 911 call on our answering machine and the message clearly stated when the mandatory evacuation was in place and where residents should evacuate to. These calls are sent out well ahead and cover very large areas. If this happens in the future, I think most people will have well over an hour to pack their cars before they absolutely need to evacuate. Nursing homes and hospitals have also had plenty of time and cooperation with local officials to evacuate. The only people in immediate danger were those who refused to leave their homes until the very end. There have been a few cases of those, however, I think because those people actually wanted to stay, it kept many of the bad apples at home doing stupid things rather than causing problems in the shelters.
Another thing to be aware of is the fires only affect one area at a time and it is easy to see if you're affected. That is unlike a hurricane where entire large cities are affected all at once. The worst that happen in San Diego is one community gets evacuated to an evacuation center, and the next day that evacuation center has to evacuate even further. The fires move slow enough that people have enough time to figure out where to go next. Many people simply went over to a friend in another part of the county or booked a hotel 20 to 30 minutes away.
While there was plenty of time to evacuate, there is not plenty of time to move furniture or load your truck up with big objects. There is enough time to quickly prepare enough for a one week vacation, but you are still forced to look at all of your belongings and pick and choose between them. Some people had more time than others, but most people had enough time to think about getting the important papers, packing up some clothes, and picking a few important or favorite things. Many people also had enough time to move the cars out of garages and out to the street so they wouldn't burn if the house did.
The worst part of the entire disaster is knowing whether or not your place burned down. Watching the local news is like an evil lottery. If you win that lottery, you'll have the comfort in knowing your place burned to the ground, however, if you don't see your place, you're still in the dark and playing an evil game. Either way, you don't want to play or win the game. There's plenty of footage where a street will show a perfectly untouched house, but the two houses on both sides of it are completely gone.
It's very common with resumes and HR departments. Some recruiting firms require Word docs so they can add the recruiter's contact information onto your resume. A lot of resume/job listing web software will only take.doc formats. HR people even explicitly tell you to only send.doc files.
It's quite annoying because in my resume I used tables to layout things and make things more compact. But if you nest tables and save to.doc, either openoffice screws up or word screws up interpreting what openoffice wrote so the nested tables don't appear correctly.
Normally I try to send a PDF but then I usually get asked for a.doc version. I think when I rewrite my resume, I'm going to reformat it as plain text. A lot of job software requires you "paste" your resume into a plain text html form box and others simply take your word document and strip all the formatting.
The hope in increasing storage capacity is that at some point you'll hit a magic number that will basically mean "unlimited" for your needs. One example is documents. It used to be in the old days you could easily fill up a floppy disk with documents so you started fiddling around with multiple floppies to store your crap. The same was true to some extent for CDs. Once people started burning CDs. Suddenly you had collections of CDs filled with audio and data because each disk simply did not have enough capacity for all your crap. Now we're to ipods and portable external hard disks, which people are still filling, but much slower than the old removable media.
So assume for a second that the growth rate of customer's data is much slower than that of the growth rate of purchasable storage mediums. If that is true, at some point you will be able to buy a virtually unlimited storage medium for your needs. Purchase multiple storage mediums and now you can store all of your data with redundancy. To a degree, this is possible. With compression technology, we've actually been able to "shrink" data while providing similar quality.
The other problem you have to consider is how fast technology gets out dated. It is currently getting harder and harder to find a computer that can read floppy disks as well as people that still own working VCRs. That means that all data left behind on floppies and VCR tapes will at some point be unreadable and lost forever. So if you have a technology that is highly reliable, at some point, the interfaces to use that technology will be deprecated. So while the floppy or VCR may still work, perhaps computers and TVs will stop shipping with the legacy connections to save on cost. So you will find that if you want to keep reading your data, you will have to keep transferring it to new storage mediums. Once that happens, the old storage medium is basically useless. So whether it works or not for a really long time starts to become more of a novelty than a necessity.
There are other techniques for promoting a website other than using Google. One way is through word of mouth. For example there is no way I would have found slashdot because of a Google search. Rather, I found slashdot because I saw a friend browsing the site. Word of mouth is actually better than Google because it builds a trust relationship. For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. But if a friend recommends a website to you because of their experience with it, you immediately have more trust in that website compared to some other random website.
But as geeks, let's ignore that. After all, it involves socializing and dealing with people. Eww. Give me my Google exploits.
It's not stupid if you use it to charge up a really big battery and use it to power a really big laser or some other weapon. Sounds like someone at the pentagon has been watching too much Gundam.
Costco in San Diego California is also selling glass bottle imported Mexican Coca-Cola at a steep price of course. Certain restaurants also carry some stock.
First of all they used a different laptop. That probably means different hardware. In my experience the hardware choice has a big impact. Second they used this to measure the actual power consumption at the plug. Lastly, I believe they left the screen on for these tests (disabled screen saver). I don't think it is possible to get into the 10 watt range with the screen on.
Gentoo's case for optimizations and the like is massively overstated.
Agreed. Most people automatically think that if they compile it themselves, they will get better performance. That's very wrong as compiling and optimization order is an incredibly hard problem. The default optimizations are more of a rule of thumb or this is what has shown to be better than most other optimization orders. The real answer is there is no good way to know the optimal order of optimizations for a specific piece of code without trying every single combination. The result is most people use the defaults provided by Gentoo because they don't know what they're doing.
One of the main benefits of Gentoo is granularity with USE flags. You can either shoot yourself in the foot with this feature or bring your system better security by forcing software to be compiled without certain features. The USE flags allow very customized settings for compiling packages and software features. As an example, I setup a system and expected to have no sound support. So I got rid of all of the sound USE flags like ALSA. A year an a half later, I had the awesome idea of running MPD (music player daemon) and installing a sound card. Well that meant I needed to put back all of those use flags, recompile a number of packages, and install a bunch more because all of the packages had been compiled without that support.
Right now I am using 215MB or so of my 1GB of RAM... this is with Firefox (4 tabs), Thunderbird w/Lightning, aMSN, Terminal, Mousepad and a whole slew of items on my panel.
So you have more than 700MB of RAM sitting around doing nothing. Awesome. You'd be smart to reduce your RAM to 512MB in that situation so save a few watts.
But I think many people have flawed conceptions of what is bloat and what is not, and which types of bloat affect your computer's actual performance. So right now you give two measures of your system: the number of daemons that start and the memory utilization. In my experience, the number of daemons that start is fairly trivial as long as each daemon behaves (no long start-up time, little to no CPU utilization while running). In Ubuntu's case, many of these daemons are new services and usability improvements to make usability of the system better. In Gentoo there is no such effort because you are expected to manage your system for every detail except package dependency management. Ubuntu does not take that approach and assumes you do not want to manage the details. So more software is required to relieve you of the details. It is a time/usability vs resource utilization trade off.
In some cases you could even argue Ubuntu is more efficient because it is silently managing the package updates and it does not recompile the packages every time an update exists. In Ubuntu, you can simply sit there and use your computer. When updates are available, you are automatically notified. In Gentoo you are forced to sync to the repository (which is quite lengthy) and check for updates to packages yourself. Beyond that, Gentoo is never going to tell you if your compiler is outdated if you happen to sync a year later. It is all up to you to manage that.
The memory utilization number should be banished from the eyes of anyone who has never taken or read enough about operating systems and paged memory management. A much better statistic to look at to see if the memory system is not running optimally is virtual memory utilization or swap space utilization. You see, everything runs fine as long as the working set remains in main memory. Once the working set no longer fits you begin to swap pages to the disk which is a very bad thing for performance. Beyond that there is little reason to worry about how much free memory is there (unless the OS'es memory management scheme is incredibly stupid). People tend to think that the more "free memory" they have the better it is which is incredibly wrong. The real answer is the free memory statistic only gives you an idea of how much excess memory you have to work with. If your typical usage consistently shows that you have gobs of free memory sitting around (50% or more), you basically are running with extra hardware you will never use OR you have additional resource capacity to run other useful things. Given you already have the hardware, why not use it.
I've used Gentoo and I still use it (for now). But if I had to do it all over again, I would use Ubuntu for the desktop or home server instead. If memory ever became an issue, all I had to do was go out and buy RAM which is dirt cheap now. That would save me the tedium of managing the system myself and extremely long compile times (especially when the compiler or really large packages are updated). Gentoo is better suited for uncommon hardware configurations, learning how the linux system is built, and granular system configuration/control. Ubuntu is built to make your desktop experience simpler and more useful.
First off, you shouldn't have removed XP until you knew Ubuntu did what she needed. Second, you should have started her off on Kubuntu, which will at least have a familiar interface.
I do not see why the Gnome desktop is that far off compared to the Windows desktop. The only major difference with Gnome setup in Ubuntu compared to the Windows desktop is the applications menu is in the top left rather than bottom right, the clock is in the top right, and everything isn't piled into one menu. Other than that, the windows are configured pretty much identically: menu bar just under the title, minimize, maximize, and close on the top right with similar icons to Windows.
The other major downside to Gnome is there isn't as much customization compared to KDE. I don't think this is a problem for most normal users as they tend to accept the UI as it is. Whenever I have to work on their computers they tend to let any program install its icons all over the place and never bother with cleaning it up. Geeks on the other hand are in a league of their own. Every geek has his own specific way of utilizing the desktop (scratch pad with too many icons, organized icons into logical groups, or even no icons at all) and how every peculiar detail is setup (theme, specific shortcuts, even menu organization customizations). But for most people that are not tech savvy, everything is as default as it can get.
It's a hard problem indeed, but you have to consider the foreigner's view. What they're essentially forced to do now is learn a second way of writing things in their own language and it is pretty annoying.
For example I went the other direction and learned some Japanese. I can read hiragana, katakana, and a few kanjis. The hiragana and katakana are equivalent writing systems but for different purposes. Katakana is usually reserved for foreign words or emphasis (sorta like how people sometimes use all capitals). So let's take one example of an English word that is kanafied: (here since slashdot doesn't want to display my katakana). If we translate that to romanji it would be written as: chokoreeto (note the double ee just means to hold the 'e' sound longer). And as you might guess (or not guess) that word is obviously chocolate in English!
We were given a few katakana tests in class were we were supposed to write the phonetic translations in romanji and guess at what the word was in English. Half the time I couldn't even figure out what the word was despite the words being English words. I can only imagine it would be insanely frustrating in the other direction. For Japanese it is somewhat easier because English has all of the sounds Japanese has. However, other languages like the Chinese languages probably are not the same since English is missing a lot from their languages like tone. So it would be similar to my example above where katakana stripped features of English to represent the word in another language.
Slashdot Mirror
From Forbes:
The Forbes article is slightly off in regards to the US price (it is actually $399.99 in the US), but there's some pretty obvious demand. At first glance the eee PC seems like a small underpowered laptop. However, the hardware is plenty to do the most common PC functions like reading emails, browsing the internet, and watching videos.
I do not think the PC market is going to diminish, but that it will change. There will be more ultra-portable devices like the eee or iphone to replace common functions of a PC. In the near future I see the desktop PC as a tool for demanding applications, but not for general home use. For example, my parents (we live in California) love it when their computer gets smaller because they only use it to write documents, check email, and browse the internet. There's no longer a need for a PC to take up as much space as it has in the past.
The founders of any company naturally want to maintain their control over where the company goes. That usually does not happen when you go public or when you are under venture capitalists because you (the founders) usually do not own the company. Instead, the investors own the company and they ultimately determine what you should do regardless of if you're a monopoly or not. So in one sense, the article is wrong that it is Google's CEO's fault. The CEO has limited power that is restricted by the actually company owner's restrictions.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size.
Don't compare on size, compare on market segments and business habbits. Has Google bought out significant competitors? Yes, see doubleclick and youtube. Who is the top online advertising agency today? Google.
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
There is no "premium" service in Google. The only service they make money from is adwords/adsense. See their financials and notice that 99% of their revenue is from the adwords/adsense program and nothing else.
Not true. While a good chunk of their revenue may come from advertisements directly on their own website, another portion of their revenue comes from advertisements on third party websites (see percentage of revenues on their financial statements). In this case, Google is providing the service for bridging advertisers to a network of content owners. There is no other Google service between the two other than adwords/adsense. This revenue comprises more than a third of their revenue.
Additionally, I do not think you can claim that Google's revenues would be as successful without their adsense technology used on their own pages.
You really have to have participated in adwords/adsense to see what Google is really all about. Google is basically king of online advertising these days.
I'm having nightmares of the reincarnation of C++ into javascript. Oh the horror!
The decision whether to make a bet in any game is based on a variety of factors - the size of the bet, the size of the possible prize, and the odds of winning. No one of those three is enough to make a decision, you need to know all three.
Not necessarily. In a system of infinite trials you can be guaranteed to win as long as your chances of winning for each trial is over 50%. This is why casinos make money and why they kick out good blackjack players/teams (there are ways to get above 50% chance of winning in blackjack). In most cases you are not given unlimited trials because you have a limited amount of money to play or you cannot play the game often enough. But if you think of the perspective of a casino where the capital is essentially infinite (they can get a large loan) and the house is always playing against thousands of players who each contribute hundreds of plays each. In that case the conditions are close enough. You will also notice that the casino never actually "bets". They have payouts which is basically the same as consistent betting. However, they do have to enforce a maximum bet. Otherwise a billionaire like Bill Gates could bet a few billion dollars on the roulette table, play black, and have a 47% chance of sinking the entire casino if he wins and they do not have enough cash to pay him. Instead if he wanted to bet 2 billion dollars, he would have to split it up into many many trials.
For fun, go to a casino and pickup one of their informational pamphlets that shows you the odds of each game. You'll find out that for all games the odds of you winning each game are lower than 50%.
Who said they have to buy the next version of Windows? Why can't they just switch over to linux when their version of Windows is no longer supported?
Population density does not mean as much because the network is wireless. That means each base station is only capable of handling up to a certain number of customers. So even if a higher density area, more base stations or more powerful base stations are required to handle the amount of traffic. From wikipedia on Cell Sites, "In suburban areas, mast are commonly spaced 1-2 miles apart and in dense urban areas, mast may be as close as ¼-½ mile apart."
The reason why the American market has not improved is because most consumers (yes consumers) are locked into annual or 2 year contracts and they are using a locked phone. All features like ring tones are purposely locked out and require a fee despite the phone's original specification allowing more openness. Instead the phones are tied to the network's services and because they cost money, nobody uses them. Essentially their phones are bricks and they can't change them for years.
If your customers can't change their phones, why do you need to upgrade infrastructure? Furthermore, when they do change their phones, they usually change to yet another network locked phone and sign another 2 year contract. This is the business strategy and it can be broken if the consumers wake up.
By maintaining these two policies, I limit the control the provider has over my phone and I limit the control the provider has over their cash flow. At any month I can terminate my service and switch to another provider. They do not like that. If they want to continue to be my service provider, they must continue to satisfy me with their quality of service, and they must offer a price I agree with.
I understand that this could be an expensive endeavor, however, it is well worth it since it preserves my leveraging power. When I sign a contract, all leverage has been eliminated for the duration of the contract. When I am not happy I can simply take my business away from them and move to the next guy. The $100 or so dollars I save up front is not worth cost of being locked into shitty service and a shitty phone for 2 years.
Was "avoid using periods at all costs" also part of their policy?
I bought a $300 video card in the past. And I bought a Wii. So I guess I fit both groups.
But the thing is that I bought that $300 video card 3 years ago and I still use it today. I expect to get another year of life out of it so that would bring service to 4 years. If I had not bought the video card, I probably would have found myself upgrading multiple times over those years. That would probably mean a $100 or more card at the same time I bought the $300 card and another investment about a year and a half later. The problem is that between those years AGP died and PCI-E came in. So the second upgrade would have been more costly as I'd have to replace multiple parts in addition to the video card.
Now I still can't play the latest games at all, but I could play the games I found fun with acceptable to good performance levels. I immediately learned that the eye candy isn't much worth it if the game play isn't there, but apparently game companies have no sense of this and keep moving in the direction of graphics instead.
The nice thing about this card is it performs just as fast as the more expensive versions, nVidia has priced it well ($200 to $250), and power consumption actually went down. In one sense you could say this is just like the iphone price cut except a whole lot better because you're actually getting better product for your needs.
The major benefit of placeholders is not speed
Oh, there are speed benefits, but you have to use a statement handle (which they also do not use):
Note: you should always check for DBI errors but I did not for the sake of simplicity.
What that code essentially does is reuse the same statement handle to perform multiple insert statements. This prevents the database's SQL parser from being called on the same statement more than once. Advanced databases can actually avoid this to some degree by statement caching. But if you change the SQL literals, the caching doesn't work.
Another advantage is if you split the binds into seperate calls, you can actually detect errors on binding to a particular field when it occurs using the database's type checking rather than your own. For example if you declare a table that has a field to store number types and somehow a string gets bound to the variable, you *should* get a DBI error on binding the variable rather than on execution of the SQL statement.
I'll play your game. The guy above you said that the point point releases are equivalent to MS service packs. Fair enough, both are free and both mainly contain security updates and fixes. Then that means that the "point" release is equivalent to NT versions. With that, I direct you to Wikipedia on Windows NT. There you will find NT 5.0 == Windows 2000, NT 5.1 == Windows XP. And finally, NT 5.2 is listed as Windows Server 2003, Windows XP (64bit), and Windows Home Server. I believe between those various versions you'll find significant changes to the distributed packages. Also the cost to "upgrade" to those other versions is not free just like Apple "point" releases.
The real truth to all of this is that it is all marketing BS for both companies. The version number has no significant meaning because everyone knows it is completely up to the developers to determine when and how they increment the version number. My opinion is that version numbers are useless for everyone including the developers. The only numbers that have any significant meaning are revision numbers (as an identifier, not as a measure of how much changed) and the build number (also as an identifier, not as a measure of how much changed). There is no good way to measure the amount of change in a software package let alone a source file. All we have to measure changes are the developer's claims.
The only thing that matters at the end of the day is whether or not the cost justifies the software product you receive. The answer to that question will be different for every user. The version number or marketing name (Tiger, Leopard, Vista, XP, 2k, etc) have no meaning except to appeal to you in an indirect manner. For all I care, I can just change the splash screen on a software package, bump the "big" version number, and claim that it is "new and improved" and stupid people will fall for it. Welcome to marketing.
A number of things make this event really different from the katrina event. I'd say, everything combined has made this disaster go that much smoother.
People in San Diego have been very cooperative. The worst crime incident so far is a couple of teenagers "looting" for alcohol. Every report from Qualcomm stadium has been positive: donations of food and supplies were excessive that they have to tell people to stop donating. Plenty of shelters have been opened. Even pets are being spoiled rotten.
Part of the reason may be that most people are fairly well off meaning middle to middle-upper class and the general feel of San Diegans is "chill". It matches the typical weather patterns where people start complaining when the temperature gets too cold for tshirts and shorts. Another major factor is that San Diego has already been through another major fire disaster in 2003 called the Cedar Fire. Because of that event, the county was much better prepared to deal with a major fire disaster. All agencies have been communicating incredibly well, even to the degree that military support and even Mexican support is now integrated into the effort. There was footage today of military aircraft outfitted with water buckets to do water drops. The fire chief went on local TV and announced that they are getting additional help from Mexican fire engines.
Major changes to emergency procedures/technology such as reverse 911 has made communication with residents and coordination of evacuations much smoother. We received the reverse 911 call on our answering machine and the message clearly stated when the mandatory evacuation was in place and where residents should evacuate to. These calls are sent out well ahead and cover very large areas. If this happens in the future, I think most people will have well over an hour to pack their cars before they absolutely need to evacuate. Nursing homes and hospitals have also had plenty of time and cooperation with local officials to evacuate. The only people in immediate danger were those who refused to leave their homes until the very end. There have been a few cases of those, however, I think because those people actually wanted to stay, it kept many of the bad apples at home doing stupid things rather than causing problems in the shelters.
Another thing to be aware of is the fires only affect one area at a time and it is easy to see if you're affected. That is unlike a hurricane where entire large cities are affected all at once. The worst that happen in San Diego is one community gets evacuated to an evacuation center, and the next day that evacuation center has to evacuate even further. The fires move slow enough that people have enough time to figure out where to go next. Many people simply went over to a friend in another part of the county or booked a hotel 20 to 30 minutes away.
While there was plenty of time to evacuate, there is not plenty of time to move furniture or load your truck up with big objects. There is enough time to quickly prepare enough for a one week vacation, but you are still forced to look at all of your belongings and pick and choose between them. Some people had more time than others, but most people had enough time to think about getting the important papers, packing up some clothes, and picking a few important or favorite things. Many people also had enough time to move the cars out of garages and out to the street so they wouldn't burn if the house did.
The worst part of the entire disaster is knowing whether or not your place burned down. Watching the local news is like an evil lottery. If you win that lottery, you'll have the comfort in knowing your place burned to the ground, however, if you don't see your place, you're still in the dark and playing an evil game. Either way, you don't want to play or win the game. There's plenty of footage where a street will show a perfectly untouched house, but the two houses on both sides of it are completely gone.
It's very common with resumes and HR departments. Some recruiting firms require Word docs so they can add the recruiter's contact information onto your resume. A lot of resume/job listing web software will only take .doc formats. HR people even explicitly tell you to only send .doc files.
It's quite annoying because in my resume I used tables to layout things and make things more compact. But if you nest tables and save to .doc, either openoffice screws up or word screws up interpreting what openoffice wrote so the nested tables don't appear correctly.
Normally I try to send a PDF but then I usually get asked for a .doc version. I think when I rewrite my resume, I'm going to reformat it as plain text. A lot of job software requires you "paste" your resume into a plain text html form box and others simply take your word document and strip all the formatting.
The hope in increasing storage capacity is that at some point you'll hit a magic number that will basically mean "unlimited" for your needs. One example is documents. It used to be in the old days you could easily fill up a floppy disk with documents so you started fiddling around with multiple floppies to store your crap. The same was true to some extent for CDs. Once people started burning CDs. Suddenly you had collections of CDs filled with audio and data because each disk simply did not have enough capacity for all your crap. Now we're to ipods and portable external hard disks, which people are still filling, but much slower than the old removable media.
So assume for a second that the growth rate of customer's data is much slower than that of the growth rate of purchasable storage mediums. If that is true, at some point you will be able to buy a virtually unlimited storage medium for your needs. Purchase multiple storage mediums and now you can store all of your data with redundancy. To a degree, this is possible. With compression technology, we've actually been able to "shrink" data while providing similar quality.
The other problem you have to consider is how fast technology gets out dated. It is currently getting harder and harder to find a computer that can read floppy disks as well as people that still own working VCRs. That means that all data left behind on floppies and VCR tapes will at some point be unreadable and lost forever. So if you have a technology that is highly reliable, at some point, the interfaces to use that technology will be deprecated. So while the floppy or VCR may still work, perhaps computers and TVs will stop shipping with the legacy connections to save on cost. So you will find that if you want to keep reading your data, you will have to keep transferring it to new storage mediums. Once that happens, the old storage medium is basically useless. So whether it works or not for a really long time starts to become more of a novelty than a necessity.
The drivers filled the be with a fuel tank and were able to drive straight through without ever stopping or breaking the speed limit.
But the real question is, did they wear diapers?There are other techniques for promoting a website other than using Google. One way is through word of mouth. For example there is no way I would have found slashdot because of a Google search. Rather, I found slashdot because I saw a friend browsing the site. Word of mouth is actually better than Google because it builds a trust relationship. For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. But if a friend recommends a website to you because of their experience with it, you immediately have more trust in that website compared to some other random website.
But as geeks, let's ignore that. After all, it involves socializing and dealing with people. Eww. Give me my Google exploits.
It's not stupid if you use it to charge up a really big battery and use it to power a really big laser or some other weapon. Sounds like someone at the pentagon has been watching too much Gundam.
Costco in San Diego California is also selling glass bottle imported Mexican Coca-Cola at a steep price of course. Certain restaurants also carry some stock.
First of all they used a different laptop. That probably means different hardware. In my experience the hardware choice has a big impact. Second they used this to measure the actual power consumption at the plug. Lastly, I believe they left the screen on for these tests (disabled screen saver). I don't think it is possible to get into the 10 watt range with the screen on.
Gentoo's case for optimizations and the like is massively overstated.
Agreed. Most people automatically think that if they compile it themselves, they will get better performance. That's very wrong as compiling and optimization order is an incredibly hard problem. The default optimizations are more of a rule of thumb or this is what has shown to be better than most other optimization orders. The real answer is there is no good way to know the optimal order of optimizations for a specific piece of code without trying every single combination. The result is most people use the defaults provided by Gentoo because they don't know what they're doing.
One of the main benefits of Gentoo is granularity with USE flags. You can either shoot yourself in the foot with this feature or bring your system better security by forcing software to be compiled without certain features. The USE flags allow very customized settings for compiling packages and software features. As an example, I setup a system and expected to have no sound support. So I got rid of all of the sound USE flags like ALSA. A year an a half later, I had the awesome idea of running MPD (music player daemon) and installing a sound card. Well that meant I needed to put back all of those use flags, recompile a number of packages, and install a bunch more because all of the packages had been compiled without that support.
Right now I am using 215MB or so of my 1GB of RAM... this is with Firefox (4 tabs), Thunderbird w/Lightning, aMSN, Terminal, Mousepad and a whole slew of items on my panel.
So you have more than 700MB of RAM sitting around doing nothing. Awesome. You'd be smart to reduce your RAM to 512MB in that situation so save a few watts.
But I think many people have flawed conceptions of what is bloat and what is not, and which types of bloat affect your computer's actual performance. So right now you give two measures of your system: the number of daemons that start and the memory utilization. In my experience, the number of daemons that start is fairly trivial as long as each daemon behaves (no long start-up time, little to no CPU utilization while running). In Ubuntu's case, many of these daemons are new services and usability improvements to make usability of the system better. In Gentoo there is no such effort because you are expected to manage your system for every detail except package dependency management. Ubuntu does not take that approach and assumes you do not want to manage the details. So more software is required to relieve you of the details. It is a time/usability vs resource utilization trade off.
In some cases you could even argue Ubuntu is more efficient because it is silently managing the package updates and it does not recompile the packages every time an update exists. In Ubuntu, you can simply sit there and use your computer. When updates are available, you are automatically notified. In Gentoo you are forced to sync to the repository (which is quite lengthy) and check for updates to packages yourself. Beyond that, Gentoo is never going to tell you if your compiler is outdated if you happen to sync a year later. It is all up to you to manage that.
The memory utilization number should be banished from the eyes of anyone who has never taken or read enough about operating systems and paged memory management. A much better statistic to look at to see if the memory system is not running optimally is virtual memory utilization or swap space utilization. You see, everything runs fine as long as the working set remains in main memory. Once the working set no longer fits you begin to swap pages to the disk which is a very bad thing for performance. Beyond that there is little reason to worry about how much free memory is there (unless the OS'es memory management scheme is incredibly stupid). People tend to think that the more "free memory" they have the better it is which is incredibly wrong. The real answer is the free memory statistic only gives you an idea of how much excess memory you have to work with. If your typical usage consistently shows that you have gobs of free memory sitting around (50% or more), you basically are running with extra hardware you will never use OR you have additional resource capacity to run other useful things. Given you already have the hardware, why not use it.
I've used Gentoo and I still use it (for now). But if I had to do it all over again, I would use Ubuntu for the desktop or home server instead. If memory ever became an issue, all I had to do was go out and buy RAM which is dirt cheap now. That would save me the tedium of managing the system myself and extremely long compile times (especially when the compiler or really large packages are updated). Gentoo is better suited for uncommon hardware configurations, learning how the linux system is built, and granular system configuration/control. Ubuntu is built to make your desktop experience simpler and more useful.
I don't think there is a windows equivalent. You'd have to download some other tool like hdtach.
First off, you shouldn't have removed XP until you knew Ubuntu did what she needed. Second, you should have started her off on Kubuntu, which will at least have a familiar interface.
I do not see why the Gnome desktop is that far off compared to the Windows desktop. The only major difference with Gnome setup in Ubuntu compared to the Windows desktop is the applications menu is in the top left rather than bottom right, the clock is in the top right, and everything isn't piled into one menu. Other than that, the windows are configured pretty much identically: menu bar just under the title, minimize, maximize, and close on the top right with similar icons to Windows.
The other major downside to Gnome is there isn't as much customization compared to KDE. I don't think this is a problem for most normal users as they tend to accept the UI as it is. Whenever I have to work on their computers they tend to let any program install its icons all over the place and never bother with cleaning it up. Geeks on the other hand are in a league of their own. Every geek has his own specific way of utilizing the desktop (scratch pad with too many icons, organized icons into logical groups, or even no icons at all) and how every peculiar detail is setup (theme, specific shortcuts, even menu organization customizations). But for most people that are not tech savvy, everything is as default as it can get.
It's a hard problem indeed, but you have to consider the foreigner's view. What they're essentially forced to do now is learn a second way of writing things in their own language and it is pretty annoying.
For example I went the other direction and learned some Japanese. I can read hiragana, katakana, and a few kanjis. The hiragana and katakana are equivalent writing systems but for different purposes. Katakana is usually reserved for foreign words or emphasis (sorta like how people sometimes use all capitals). So let's take one example of an English word that is kanafied: (here since slashdot doesn't want to display my katakana). If we translate that to romanji it would be written as: chokoreeto (note the double ee just means to hold the 'e' sound longer). And as you might guess (or not guess) that word is obviously chocolate in English!
We were given a few katakana tests in class were we were supposed to write the phonetic translations in romanji and guess at what the word was in English. Half the time I couldn't even figure out what the word was despite the words being English words. I can only imagine it would be insanely frustrating in the other direction. For Japanese it is somewhat easier because English has all of the sounds Japanese has. However, other languages like the Chinese languages probably are not the same since English is missing a lot from their languages like tone. So it would be similar to my example above where katakana stripped features of English to represent the word in another language.