Or, you could do what you should have learned in your first ASM class, use more bytes! 64bit math is perfectly fine on a 8bit microcontroller, just a little slower. Extend the counter so it's in the range of months or years or tens of decades. Just make sure it's a little longer than some other required scheduled maintenance, like 2 election cycles. You should never reboot a MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM because of software, that's just TERRIBLE design. I can't believe you people!

And that's the point of DRM...controlling the hardware it can be transferred to and played on. For all we know, having the DRM could have been in the licensing for Apple to sell the songs at they price they sold them at...possible breaking the license if transferred to a DRM stripping/"incompatible with the terms" type of player.

Agreed 100%!

It's interesting that people seem to think that when a software gets popular enough, the company who made the software somehow loses the ability to make decisions about or have control over that software, that they poured probably millions into, and also becomes a monopoly at the same time.

Proof of this being
"We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency." when converting the power from the battery to the mobo.

Still, there should be a big efficiency using a mains converter that brings it down to 12 rather than many smaller supplies that bring it from line voltage to 12 and lower.

Oops...forgot to put why they do it that way...because one AC to DC power converter can be made to run much more efficiently than many AC to DC converters handling a fraction of the power.

If you look at the efficiency curve of a converter, it starts out at 0, rise steeply to near peak, rolls up to peak, then start to fall down a bit. Somewhat idle PC's use very little power, giving the least efficiency! So, if you have an overpopulated server farm (to handle spikes) then, most of your pc's will be idle...burning much more power than they should. So, they use one massive power converter that handles much more power, but is always running at/near the peak of the efficiency curve during "average" loads.

And, then you use big fat rails (think thick pipes) as a power bus to negate the increased resistive losses, as mentioned in the last post.

Your statement is completely wrong, and I assume you're a troll.

Lower voltages means higher current for the same amount of power (P=I*V).

The power loss for a resistive cable is P=(I^2)*R. So, as current increases, power loss increases dramatically!

And, this power is converted to heat, so, you must increase the thickness of the cable!

This is why we use 300,000V and higher for power transmission lines, to minimize the current flowing through the wire, minimizing the power lost due to the resistance of that wire. And, that's why obscene amounts of power can fly through those relatively thin cables.

Customer: So, since you cut a portion of my service, will I get a discounted rate?

ATTsaurus: RAAWWRRR...Why, I see your point there, of course we can do something for you!

Customer: ...what? really? Oh, ok, great!

ATTsaurus: Let me enter that into the computer...*pound pound pound*...ok...so...you used 5 megabytes accessing the Usenet server last month, and 9 gigabytes total...that comes to 0.054% off of your bill, or about 4.3 cents! Congratulations!

Customer: ...I hate you guys...

ATTsaurus: RAAWR!!!! *eats you*

No...it's anti-anyonebutnormalcustomer behavior. The people running dns servers are probably 0.000001% of internet users....the rest are probably just infected machines.

The question is *why* do they care about filtering DNS traffic? Do they offer this service as a paid service elsewhere, costing them *money*? Or is it simply to try to get a handle on worms and malware, which uses tons of bandwidth for a network as big as comcast, costing them *tons of money*.

They have a profit based mindset...it shouldn't be hard to figure out why they're doing it. If the cost from malware is more than the loss of a portion of a fairly insignificant customer base that in reality probably costs them what several regular users cost, then they'll choose to block the port!

At one point I called support and asked what kind of account I would need to legally (in terms of usage agreement: no servers allowed) run a website. They said I'd have to go elsewhere to a *hosting company*. That's probably what they'll tell you here.

I think as much as we complain, in the end, if you want a direct and unfiltered, higher risk, and more expensive to maintain connection to the internet, you'll have to...pay more....just like if you want to use 5x the bandwidth of a normal user, you'll have to pay more.

I like the idea of the internet being a standard connection, wide open and the same anywhere...but that's not going to happen without regulatory laws, cause it doesn't make much business sense.

Woot! I grabbed JohnDoe_SRJC@yahoo.com!

1. Check slashdot
2. Grab example email address from news article
3. ???
4. Profit!

I'm sitting here watching the yahoo inbox, just waiting for the bucket loads of money to start pouring in...hahaha...SUCKERS!

You're right...the electrons don't travel further than that...but the signal will...with some delay.

You don't need electrons to enter one end of the wire and exit the other at the same time...with long transmission lines, it's the change in potential, as a wave, that moves from one end of the wire to the other, not the electrons.

Like the other guy said, interfaces are attached to a pipeline...send the data to the peripheral, have it process the data, get some data back. Think gpu, physx, those kind of modern day coprocessors. You're not directly controlling the gpu hardware, you're sending data to it at high data rates, then telling it to crunch the numbers for you.

And...the other other guy is right, the point is moot since the dies are so small.

Wait...was this a troll?

Nah, just use it like a man!
My old Toshiba laptop, I used it as a cutting board, solder station, glueing surface, and diner plate...survived just fine, and looked rough, like a man!

...I just rearranged all of mine. All it takes is a screwdriver for the desktop keyboard, and a needle for the laptop.

That's the reason I switched...for the pain...and also for the challenge.

Pain went away. For that reason alone, Dvorak > Qwerty.