Domain: webopedia.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to webopedia.com.
Comments · 311
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What's a voxel?
If you're wondering what a voxel is, webopedia has a pretty good definition.
Basically, it's a "volume pixel", which apparently is a box with height, width, and depth, and it has to do with how fine images appear. The more voxels in the image, the smoother it'll appear. So a pixel is to a 2D image what a voxel is to a 3D image. Wikipedia
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Re:NEWS FLASH!So deliberate misuses of language to gin up support for some argument is not a "silly" means of arguing a point to you either.
I guess that would depend on your defintion of misuse.
I'll remember that the next time I try to kiss my date goodnight and she accuses me of rape. It's silly to argue semantics, after all.
You should choose the people you date better.
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Re:Put Linux On It
And Firewire is isochronus, isocronus, <grrrr>, isochronous, in other words it allows DEDICATED bandwidth. So for video it is the only thing that makes sense. Camera says "I need 100 mbps" camera gets it. It can't be stolen and you don't get dropouts.
And you can network with Firewire, though few seem to do this.
Think about Ethernet with a (good quality) switch versus Ethernet with a hub (shudder) to get an idea of (what can be) the difference. -
Re:Marginal effect on Linux
6: Define "real" Unix
Stolen from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/UNIX.html:
Today, the trademarked "Unix" and the "Single UNIX Specification" interface are owned by The Open Group. An operating system that is certified by The Open Group to use the UNIX trademark conforms to the Single UNIX Specification.
Linux is not UNIX. Solaris and AIX are UNIX. You'll have to be more specific about the "BSDs". Some are UNIX (i.e pre-Solaris SunOS), some are not (i.e. FreeBSD, OS X). -
Re:Object-relation databasesObject-relation databases
There is no such animal. There is such a thing as object/relational technology. Some common examples of this are hibernate and EJB. These are not alternatives to relational databases. Rather, they serve to persist objects to and from relational databases. They are built on top of relational databases. They do not replace relational databases.
Alternatives to relational databases are LDAP databases such as openLDAP, OLAP databases such as Hyperion, and XML databases like exist. None of these technologies will replace the relational database. It's more about using the right tool for the job. Relational databases work best with operational data. OLAP works best for planning and forecasting. Think of LDAP as a distributed hierarchical database.
Various relational database products have proprietary extensions that may confuse you into thinking that they are alternatives to relational databases. For example, there are extensions to SQL Server that make them seem to act more like OLAP or XML databases.
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Re:Unauthorized access?
As far as I know, STP only kills ports that STP decides are causing a loop. Seeing a MAC address on two ports just makes it think that the system has moved
A cookie for you, good sir. Indeed the MAC addresses will age out of the table, but as soon as a MAC is noticed on another port, its table entry is updated. (This is why when you change a box's switch port, you can't ping it until the MAC timer expires, at which point it becomes an unknown-destination broadcast to all ports, or until the box sends a frame on the new port, causing the switch to notice it's moved.)
How STP detects loops is with BPDUs (Bridge Protocol Data Units).
And yes, I *am* Cisco certified. :) -
Re:Question
You can remotely wake up and boot a PC via PXE through the network and pull a new image. I'm sure any Mac can as well. I can only imagine the rig jobs you have going in your IT department if think booting and reimaging a PC/Mac from an iPod (or any portable drive for that matter) is a godsend. What were you doing before that was an option?
I don't know if the same thing is possible with USB and PCs
Yes it is and like above, PXE works as well, and the typical standard boot from cd or DVD too. If your image fits, you can have it on the DVD. If you are on a network, boot with a network boot disk, connect to a network share and pull a new image if PXE is not an option. Apple or PC, everyone of those options seems more logical then walking around with a portable drive visting and reimaging machines one by one. -
I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one...I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one that saw "PBX" and said, "WTF is a PBX?"
Short for private branch exchange, a private telephone network used within an enterprise. Users of the PBX share a certain number of outside lines for making telephone calls external to the PBX.
From the Webopedia.Most medium-sized and larger companies use a PBX because it's much less expensive than connecting an external telephone line to every telephone in the organization. In addition, it's easier to call someone within a PBX because the number you need to dial is typically just 3 or 4 digits.
A new variation on the PBX theme is the centrex, which is a PBX with all switching occurring at a local telephone office instead of at the company's premises.
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Re:Sell me an open phoneI posted that half in jest, but it turns out there's a lot of interest in this sort of stuff.
- http://www.voip-news.com/1/voipwifi.htm
- http://www.zyxel.com/product/P2000W.php
- http://www.vonage.com/
- http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2005
/ voIP_WiFi.asp - http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?s
e ction=platforms&id=1761 - http://www.voipsupply.com/home.php
- http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_1072.html
- http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php
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Re:Question
Not to shoot you down or anything, but it makes me giggle a bit that you say "I know what a GFlop is and all that", heh. As you then know, the basic abbreviation means "floating point operations per second". So, the last 's' is not to make it plural, it's part of the acronym. You can't say "a GFLOP", it's "a GFLOPS". The difference between 1 GFLOPS and 2 GFLOPS is 1 GFLOPS, not 1 GFLOP. And so on. This is one of my big zoo of pet peeves, not meant as a personal attack at all.
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Re:cell-phones?It matters when all you can do is dial 911, say "help", and faint from bloodloss. They'll still be able to send police/ambulance to your location.
E911 will fix that cell-phone problem.
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Re:Ok, since people insist America isn't "behind"
I'm afraid you made an error about the speed of OC-3. OC-3 is actually 155.52Mbps, not 45,135. Here's the chart on
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Re:virtual memory or page file...
Without a link to the document mentioned in the article, I am guessing that there is confusion in the article about virtual memory vs virtual disk.
ie: a RAM drive. -
Re:Ok, since people insist America isn't "behind"I don't "get it". How does "not having anything in the first place" make it cheaper and easier? I'd guess that there would be no difference either way, and it might be a little easier to upgrade in the US if you have cable conduits all over the cities and wiring in the house for it.
The reason you don't "get it" is because you don't realize the impact of captalist economies coupled with lack of geographical world knowledge. Market economies work as getting a better product to the people at lower prices. Or in the case of British Virgin Mobile not raping me by locking me into a contract. If people don't realize what's being offered to them, and let's face it, AOL advertising will be the pushing force for wider broadband access although this is changing; people are actually starting to get a clue
...To get to my point, since telco lines are leased by large corps whose goal is to profit
.. they can do so with cooperation of other circumstance. Namely computers have already been bought, what is it? 80% of American homes spent a couple thousand for computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound system, printer, scanner, digital camera, fax ... and we keep adding to the arsenal. Of course we also made way for really cheap computers by buying them very expensively; I saw an add recently for a computer for $300 including flat panel 15in ... wow ... not to mention MIT developing a $100 laptop ... double wow. I'm 21 and when I think of it, this stuff has me taken aback. I can't imagine how older people feel.But once again I digress
... companies can continue to rape people here because we don't know AND we don't need more, at least we're given that impression. Do you really think other countries have the same sort of threat of getting sued by the **IA? I know they have threatened, but check out Pirate Bay's legal threats section. That's some crazy stuff that I can't have the luxury of experiencing; I can still have the **IA subpoena my ISP for accessing the site, and then potentially tracking data transfer between that link and me ... I mean they are my ISP afterall (comcast; who also had the nerve to try to buy Disney).It's not as easy to just say "hey, let's just change this tire" when the threads are obviously still good. That's the perception we have, and the corps can make more money by not spending. I know this is only one person, but I have a 3 Mb down and 386 Kb up for $45/month. I run a web server and email server. It gets pumped through a openBSD 486dx firewall. I have wireless and what not. I occasionally download from P2P networks but more often from newsgroups. I use the internet extensively. I'm connected by a 1900+ AMD XP, 1 GB of ram on linux. I have no plans for upgrading my computer for at least a couple more years either. For the moment this speed is all I need. Would it not be cheaper and easier to upgrade. I guess I could get a 2800+ AMD and another gig of RAM, but would I really see a difference? Probably not. I don't think the majority of the rest of America would either.
Then again I see how you have a point. I had 512 MiB of RAM before I upgraded a few months back and 3 years ago I had a 15 flat panel which I gave to my grandmother and got me a 17 in flat panel. But it's not really cheaper because I could never recoup what I already had spent in that case. The ram was a good deal, but that's about all you can "add to" and get more. Most everything else is replacement which is mostly what you would have to do with wires and what not with the telco lines. I don't know though, you could maybe put up a few more COs, but then you would forget my other point above, we're made to think we are doing f
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Re:SensationalizedA EULA is defined as follows:
Short for End-User License Agreement, the type of license used for most software. An EULA is a legal contract between the manufacturer and/or the author and the end user of an application. The EULA details how the software can and cannot be used and any restrictions that the manufacturer imposes (e.g., most EULA's of proprietary software prohibit the user from sharing the software with anyone else).
Have you looked at the ADC agreement? It is exactly a EULA. The NDA portion begins on page four of ten.
I agree that he was wrong in what he did and he clearly broke the licensing agreement. I'm just pointing out the details for the "He signed a contract and needs put under the jail" crowd. He failed to fully read and comprehend the detailed click-through license agreement. He made a mistake and Apple dealt with it appropriately.
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Re:The price
It appears like really a really cool thing to have, but does any near future price compare to the $30 a KVM costs, just so that you can see two windows at the same time? You can even build KVMs yourself.
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Re:a plea for more letters, fewer acronyms
RBL:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RBL.html
MAPS:
http://www.mail-abuse.com/
And, last but not least:
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/ -
Distribution layer exists only in the Ciscoland
The term "distribution layer" is defined by Cisco, which is just a corporation. There is no standard where you will encounter this term.
The most well-known networking standards are the OSI model and the TCP/IP model. Neither of these standard models include the term "distribution layer", which means nothing by itself: Is it about physical-electrical distribution, data distribution or information distribution?
I personally dislike "standards" or tech-speak set by corporations and I believe international bodies and computer scientists should be preferred when it comes to standards and technical jargon: Imagine two computer scientists, one using Cisco-speak and the other knowing only Microsoft-speak, how are they going to communicate? It's impossible! - unless they both adopt a common language like these proposed in the OSI or TCP/IP model.
I personally can communicate network concepts using the OSI model, and I am completely unaware of Cisco-speak. In an attempt to answer your question, I will assume that by "distribution" Cisco means "routing", which translates to "Internet layer" in TCP/IP-speak and is related to the Internet Protocol, while in ISO-speak it translates to "Network layer". If my understanding is correct, then the answer is that no matter how small your network is, you will want to use routing, for example for connecting your small network to the Internet. Even if the routing functionality is included in a device of another layer, or even when it is implemented in software, it will always be there, no matter whether the users or even the administrator can see it, especially if you are going to use the TCP/IP protocol suite.
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Re:SIGH: Another reason not to go to the cinema
DLP uses compression and looks amazing. Compression doesnt always equal crap. I saw Ep2 in a DLP theater and was blown away at the sharpness and brightness of the picture. I saw the movie previously on film and in comparision it was dark, grainy, and a lot of the CGI looked worse on film.
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How can a computer help me watch [Intercast]?
"I have a TV and a place to watch it(recliner), I have a desk and a computer to do information processing... How can I use these to best advantage?"
By using InterCast. -
three other letters
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Overloading of ".NET language"
Well, then 9 out of 10 malware authors don't know what the hell they are doing since
.NET *IS NOT* a language.The three programming languages associated with the
.NET framework, namely C#, Managed C++, and VB.NET, are semantically equivalent. Therefore, ".NET language" can be overloaded to refer to any language that compiles to MSIL. -
Overloading "QuickTime codecs"
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture.
However, the standard QuickTime Pro distribution ships with codecs. I can see how a reasonable person would overload the term "QuickTime codec" to refer to the default codecs chosen by a popular video encoding app for the QuickTime architecture. In QuickTime 3 through 5, this was Sorenson video and QDesign audio; as of QuickTime 6, it is MPEG-4 advanced simple video and AAC audio.
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Re:infiniband?
Think of it like better than PCI. PCI is a parallel bus, InfiniBand is a serial interconenct bus. It's like SCSI vs. FireWire and serial ATA. Transfer rates for InfiniBand start at 2.5GBps.
More information:
http://inews.webopedia.com/TERM/I/InfiniBand.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniband -
Re:So when....
well what do you know? I had never heard that before, but apparently they're both correct.
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Re:Go ahead
There are 1,099,511,627,776 bytes in a Terabyte...
http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/FileSizeConvers ionTable.asp
Going on that basis:
1,099,511,627,776 / 8 = 137438953472 Bytes = 128 GB
(Divide by 8 as they specified bits) -
Re:Not really the same at all
owever, an EULA isn't a legal contract, and causing an animation of a button depress on a TV screen isn't legally binding either.
Are you so sure about that?
EULAs have been tested, and enforced,many times many times in court. Shrink-wrapped EULAs ("You agree by opening this box to... even though you haven't seen the agreement yet") might little easier to circumvent through a court case, but even those are valid contracts.
You don't need to sign every contract with a pen. People sign the FAFSA all the time without ever touching a mouse, and verbal contracts are also seen as legally binding in many places. -
SCMS
maybe the political climate just wasn't right for contesting it back then, but this "flag" reminds me a lot of SCMS (follow the link there to AHRA too)
basically consumer cd recorders could not digital 1 to 1 copy audio sources that were flagged with scms. industry (ie. music studio) gear ignored it. i think it was around a few years, but eventually disappeared, but i don't remember much of an uproar about it. -
SCMS
maybe the political climate just wasn't right for contesting it back then, but this "flag" reminds me a lot of SCMS (follow the link there to AHRA too)
basically consumer cd recorders could not digital 1 to 1 copy audio sources that were flagged with scms. industry (ie. music studio) gear ignored it. i think it was around a few years, but eventually disappeared, but i don't remember much of an uproar about it. -
Redundant Redundancy
For those a little slower than the rest...
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Array RAID
Please don't mod this redundant. -
Re:Malicious XPI's exist already
heck, even IE since it was based on Netscape, but it just shows a blue screen
Internet Exploder was not based upon Netscape, but it was based upon the Mosaic Web Browser.
Here's what it says in the "About Internet Explorer" dialog
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
They got the term for the Open source project Mozilla from Netscape's Original code name which is a contraction of Mosaic + Godzilla (i.e. Mosaic killer), and was coined by Jamie Zawinski (jwz) when Netscape's primary competition was Spyglass Mosaic.">
In other words, Mozilla/Netscape and Mosaic/Internet Explorer are not based on one another, they have nothing to do with one another except they're competing web browsers. -
Re:What's a computer?... According to the bill...
(3) the term `central processing unit' includes a case and all of its contents, such as the primary printed circuit board and its components, additional printed circuit boards, one or more disc drives, a transformer, interior wire, and a power cord;
OMFG, these people are really morons, they dare to start redefining the term CPU to be the entire case as opposed to just the processor chip. -
Re:Can you say worthless?
Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!
Hahaha, just wait a few years. If history holds, soon we will all be asking, "Who on earth needs a petabyte of storage?" :-) -
Re:Uh, what?
uhh this is
/. remember
The K stands for kilobyte -
Re:Dumb Question, Windows iPod here.
You can't use a windows iPod with a Media Access Control?
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Phishing was never programming
"(fishing) (n.) The act of sending an e-mail [...]"
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/phishing.html
Phishing was always social engineering rather than programming. It's more like phoning up and asking for the password while posing as someone you're not, than poking holes in the Operating System. -
Moore's Law
"These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months"
Why does everybody have to screw this "law" up? Moore observed in 1965 that the number of transistors per square inch doubled every 18 months.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html
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Re:Try FHSS!
I forgive you.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/F/FHSS.html -
Re:Well Moore's Law is not a law...
Moore's "law" has nothing to do with Hz.
From webopedia
(môrz lâ) (n.) The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. -
Re:Hmmm?
I'm not sure a bunch of WiFi access points is the same thing as a mesh network. Mesh networks are self-organizing routers that can (dynamically?) route packets directly from node to node. Access points simply are wireless network connections to what every network they are connected to (no routing or packet forwarding).
I suppose you could operate your 802.11b/g APs in adhoc mode, but I'm not sure that provides the required routing for true mesh networking. -
Re:Judge's signature
You can't write in drop-caps. A drop cap only comes at the begining of a paragraph.
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Re:Oh, it's the slashcode's fault . . .
Okay, well nothing is always that obvious I suppose. While I agree completely that "standard" ASCII is generally used to mean the 7-bit binary values 0-127 and their graphic representations, today's programmers and most systems--whether right or wrong--understand what is meant by the terms 8-bit ASCII and extended-ASCII (in that the values are full eight-bit with special characters in the 128-255 range); for example, this link. I started computers when we didn't have extended sets and made "special" characters with "escape sequences" so standardized extended sets and/or unicode would have been welcomed. As more and more systems use unicode for extended character sets and foreign languages, the whole ASCII issue may someday disappear (along with all that "great" ASCII art). Back to someone's original comment, it's pretty easy to display a mu on most people's computer screens (though not necessarily in
/. posts) through the ISO Latin-1 set (a superset to "standard ASCII"). -
ILEC??
An ILEC is a telephone company that was providing local service when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted.
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I miss PointCast for my grandfather-Intercast.
Intercast was a 1990's technology that delivered push technology. However it primarily used TV tuners and "theoretically" could deliver a richer experience, in a pre-broadband era.
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Moore's Law: Actual Definition
Actually Moore's Law says that the number of transistors per square inch in an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. While this has roughly translated into 2x speed increases in the same period, this has mostly been coincidental.
Linky
Google is your friend. -
Not Portable -- Luggable
Most people I know refered to the 'All-in-One' macs as 'Luggable'. They didn't have batteries (well, other than for the clock), and they had a seperate keyboard and mouse. You could move them, but it wasn't very small. (I still have an SE/30 w/ carrying case in my basement
... I think I have a zero-footprint 45meg SCSI drive down there, with carrying case, too).
The official Apple designation is 'Classic Macs, but that gets confusing, as there was a Mac Classic
I'd classify the iMacs and eMacs in a luggable category, as well. Along with any of the monitor-included Performas, the TAM, and all of the iMac and eMac lines. -
Distributed Processing
It has been stated before that the PlayStation 3 is expected to be capable of distributed processing due to the capabilities of the Cell architecture. Whether or not that will indeed be the case remains to be seen, it is certainly a lofty goal for the current market penetration (not to mention speeds) of broadband in the home. Does Sony expect these PS3s to cooperate with their Cell-based television sets?
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users backing up before MTBF
iPod has been a savior of Apple. The hardware has actually been driving sales of downloaded music and this fact has not been unnoticed by the business world. Hence the term, *iPod killer*.
Users typically spend a bity of time creating, transferring their music titles to the pod. But what happens at the end of the hard drive life? I wonder what steps a typical user has taken to backup their 40/80 Gb of music?
Will they be tempted to save their 40Gb to hard drive before any hardware problems occur? What is the MTBF of the iPod? [www.ipodhacks.com, iPod Boot Disk Burnout, 20,000 hrs]
Will the cost offset the user disatisfaction? Or will enough users purchased the next version with suitable upgrade of their music lists? -
Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer....
Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.
This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.
Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.
More info here. (Warning: PDF)
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Re:How to annoy phishersBut the credit card number I made up was detected as non-existent - or at least the fake website said so. Now, is there any way to:
1) Generate fake credit card numbers that pass as "valid"
They're probably doing something trivial with Luhn numbers. Trivial to implement, trivial to spoof. Generating apparently valid but fraudulent card numbers is known as carding.
2) Do this, and be certain that no-one actually owns that particular number, and if so, still not get into trouble?
Trouble with whom? The scammers? If you aren't using the number to commit fraud, I wouldn't worry. We want to get the phishers in trouble!