Since this *all* depends on where your local ISP has access points, towers and whatnot, why don't you ask THEM? If the service works at your place, then buy it. The best advice I could give you is: learn to act like an intelligent customer.
Your questions are non relevant to an end user of the ISP.
1) Bandwidth: The equipment iitself claims to be capable. Your ISP may pack too many people onto it or not have enough upstream bandwidth. Ask them for realistic speeds. Ask them if they can come give you a demo at your location. I could say "I have a terayon cablemodem or a breezecom radio - is my local isp going to suck?" The answer would be -- "well your particular cablemodem has the capability to trancieve data at 14 megabits" or "your radio has an over-the-air rate maximum of 3 megabits" -- but it all doesnt matter if the ISP cant deliver me roughly 768K down and 256K as advertised. The equipment is not going to be the limiting factor in bandwidth problems for you. That'd be like a company selling you 2 megabit SDSL service, pulling in the ISDN circut for it, then putting a 128K ISDN router on it and saying "well, the line is capable of 2 megabits. That is what you are paying for." or going into a company and upgrading all of the workstations 10 megabit nics with 100 megabit ones to speed things up but leaving a 10 megabit hub in the center of the whole thing.
2) Line of sight: Ask your isp. It doesnt matter if the equipment is capable of blasting through 10 foot lead walls if the range isn't good enough to get to the nearest access point. Line of sight problems are theirs -- not yours. Typically they'll come out to do a survey and say yes it will work or no it wont. Ask them. Slashdot doesn't know.
3) Security: Um... what? This is your upstream open-to-all-who-send-traffic-to-it internet connection. To be brutally honest -- even if the security of the equipment is totally flawed and anyone who goes out and buys a radio can attach to the network -- it's not your problem. Buy a firewall appliance. It doesnt really matter how you are connected to the internet -- if you are blasting your credit card number and passwords out unencrypted over the wire(less) and leaving your "always-on" connection plugged into a vulnerable computer, you're screwed no matter how you look at it.
Finally, if it's the only game in town for you at your location, try it. Cancel the service if it sucks. If they want a one or two year commitment contract, ask for a demo. Instead, you are asking slashdot all the questions that the ISP should have asked when they selected the equipment for purchase. If they have been around for a while and are a good and well respected local business, it's quite likely that they made a well informed and proper decision for their wireless infrastructure. If you have to ask someone else, ask some of their customers. They are the only people capable of giving you an accurate recommendation about the service.
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft will license and has written wma decoding libraries for embedded things other than windows such as DSP based hardware CODEC's - feed them a wma bitstream and they spit out audio.
Needless to say, there is no embedded windows in this thing. Using embedded windows (requiring beefy hardware compared to the probably 2 dsp's and a small microcontroller such an mp3 player would actually require) would do nothing except cut into the profit of the company making the player (licensing fees for the whole OS + the cost of the more expensive hardware to run it) and decrease things like battery life.
You think your car can get hot? Try trying to run a switch/router/etc in a metal enclosure 200 feet up on a grain elevator in the texas panhandle. 75% of the year, the metal will be either too hot to touch or have about 1" of ice coating it. Generally the cold is not a problem as the components (as long as they dont actually stop running) keep everything warm enough not to have any low-temp problems. The heat is another story.
Since the box must be sealed to the weather, we have to use heat exchangers -- they are devices that mount through the sidewall of the box. They come in varietys that range from what amounts to huge peltiers when air cannot possibly be exchanged all the way down to what amounts to very tiny split system air conditioners. They're fairly expensive to run when it gets really hot, but they will cool the inside.
The main problem you're going to have in your car is the initial startup of your electronics. Your trunk is going to have no love from your car's climate control systems. Hence if it's 110 or -20 degrees outside and your car sits out for 8 hours while you are at work, *everything* in the trunk will reach the ambient temp. So, you might have to pre-heat your computer case in the winter or pre-cool it in the summer even before starting.
Good job justifying your inability to finish anything you start, Raster.
I mean, after all, why are we bothering to even develop GUI's at all because in a couple hundred years or so the whole idea of computing behind a screen, keyboard, and mouse will be obsolete!
Burners are ATAPI devices - Calling them "IDE" is sort of like saying "Ethernet" when you mean "http" or something else like that. ATAPI was invented to bring SCSI devices into the consumer market with minimum cost to hardware manufacturers (ie no change of command api's in the devices firmware). As far as the command set goes, they are actually almost 100% SCSI. Ditto with ATAPI zip drives and tape drives. Heck, even the parallel port zip drives are SCSI (with a built in ppa SCSI controller). USB mass storage uses the SCSI command set also -- and I think Firewire does too (I may be wrong about firewire). ide-scsi is *not* a SCSI emulator. It is a transport, the same as the USB mass storage transport.
IMO, the mistake was to write a seperate driver for ATAPI in the beginning that did NOT tie to the SCSI system - we might have a mature ATAPI/SCSI interface by now that did not have the problems that we see today.
And why do you mention only CD burners? I use ide-scsi for regular CDROMS, zip drives, and tape drives. The application support is much better (ie i can do cd to cd copies, use all backup software, etc)
Ah. Thank you. That does make sense. Anyway, i'm just grateful for spamassassin:) It kills about 80 spams per day to my inbox - a horrible consequence to having so many public addresses
Let's say the next time you load up thinkgeek.com and buy some overpriced gadget, your machine gets a spoofed ip during the DNS query, and instead of talking to thinkgeek.com you pass through some web proxy that harvests your credit card number and personal info (perhaps you fail to notice the lack of https:// this time). Of course, your thinkgeek order proxies right through to thinkgeek.com properly by the spoofed machine, then your local DNS cache expires and there's no trace of what happened.
What about reading and piping back the D-Theater content stored on your PC back through the DVHS deck for decoding to your HDTV or back to your computer? After all, it is an authorized decoder!
That DVD resolution is non nterlaced, while the HDTV resolution is. DVD supports up to 9megabits/s datarate. Most movies typically use 2-5megabits for the picture. At least 720x920 interlaced resolution is possible with 720x480 encoding provided you are running at 60 fields/s which you can do with DVD. Plus the DVD standard can easily be extended to support a new bunch of resolutions or datarates. I believe the DVD Video spec is at least at 2.0.. My old player was compliant with DVD Video 1.9, and had some problems with newer dvd's.
In short, they can just define DVD 3.0.. call it HDVD or something else catchy and just add the extended resolutions and maybe even crossport CSS2 from DVD-Audio so the fuckers at the MPAA will spooge over it and viola!
I'm working on this problem. ITs a difficult one- here are some of the issues:
Geez. Do you research anything before you code?
1) IR codes vary greatly from device to device. But more importantly, they are not explicit. In other words the "ON" code is "On" when the machines off, but if the machines on, then it will turn the machine off. so there's no way for one to say "on" and *know* that you're going to get the machine turned on, rather than off. (in many cases)
A PVR system pretty much requires the cable box to be on all the time. TiVo and Replay don't bother toggling the power to these. It's not like they use that much electricity. Leave it on and stop worrying about discrete on/off codes. If your power goes out or something, you probably have more to worry about than your cable box not powering bacvk on.
2) There seems to be no good hardware. What makes sense is to both send and recieve IR signals. so you can control your pc based PVR from a remote... but there is little hardware that will do this and what is there won't do both really elegantly. Making custom hardware is possible, but that involves a lot of issues as well.
LIRC supports a ton of good IR hardware including many devices that send and recieve CIR signals just fine. Many are commercially available, and as you said, you can roll your own if you are looking to add IR support to an embedded device or want to "do it on the cheap" if you will.
3) The setup of the home entertainment system affects how this works. Is there a VCR between the cable box and the PVR? which output of the VCR is the PVR hooked up to? Whatever system will have to either force people to set up their system in a way the PVR IR controller can control, or have a way to teach the PVR about the setup.
Why on earth would you hook up a VCR between your cable box and PVR system and then expect to be able to do anything useful with it? The cable box should be somehow directly connected to your PVR system and then somehow to a video output device -- TV, video switcher (reciever), or maybe connected to the TV through the VCR so that you could actually archive a program on your PVR to video tape if you felt so inclined... The only thing you might want the PVR to be able to do is tell the VCR to start and stop recording for automatic show archival.
But my biggest concern is finding all the codes, and translating them into a format I can use... manufacturers make variations on the even the same model of VCR...
You don't necessarily have to distribute the code library for every cable box on the planet. Just include an option under some setup menu that lets you teach the computer PVR the codes from the cable box remote.
Your half-baked planning is useless. Don't claim to be "working on the problem" until you are actually working on it.
Dude, probably about 50% of all new desktop/server/etc. computers have a watchdog timer in them these days. Every new Intel chipset has one including the 845E that this motherboard uses. Some of VIA's chipsets have one. It's really hardly any work at all to put a watchdog into a chipset.
This board is about as useful to the embedded market as a 440hp straight-8 engine would be to a compact car manufacturer.
F-Prot is available for Linux (non-commercial use is free) and it's very good. I have even seen it detect viruses that were not in its database yet. Updating my DAT files resulted in my ability to disinfect the virus. It detects and can disinfect about everything. I will scan your.prc and.pdb files for PalmOS viruses, even!
QMS was running a sale on their MagiColor 2 DeskLaser printer, and I picked one up for about 800 bucks. I print a fair amount, but haven't yet had to replace any of the consumables. (And when I do, they are reasonably priced)
I have only been able to get windows to print to this printer, but it is a network printer and I have figured out how to send spool files (created on windows) to it via Linux. If that's not sufficient, the control board can be replaced with a MagiColor 2 CX board or something so that the printer will support postscript and work just fine with any OS. A duplex option is also available.
I have seen this printer sell new from some places as low as 500 dollars. Color laser is fully within the reach of home users. Go buy it!
Though I will admit that thermal transfer or inkjet can produce better looking "photo" prints.. if you intend to frame them or something... but the cost per page for doing that kind of work with an entry level inkjet is very reasonable.
This, as several other threads note, is the approach that Hans Reiser is taking with his filesystem. That is, if the filesystem is not good enough for storing our (large-grained) data, that we are resorting to what basically amounts to indexed archive files or databases full of BLOB objects to store our data, then our filesystems are broken. A directory with 1,000,000 files in it shouldn't take any longer to return a sorted directory listing than one with say, 10 files - because it all should be indexed behind the scenes. Same for the problems of inode starvation, fsck, etc. A program such as mail clients and servers (for most people anyway) -- or any other apps that need simple storage should use the filesystem as the storage mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this *all* depends on where your local ISP has access points, towers and whatnot, why don't you ask THEM? If the service works at your place, then buy it. The best advice I could give you is: learn to act like an intelligent customer.
Your questions are non relevant to an end user of the ISP.
1) Bandwidth: The equipment iitself claims to be capable. Your ISP may pack too many people onto it or not have enough upstream bandwidth. Ask them for realistic speeds. Ask them if they can come give you a demo at your location. I could say "I have a terayon cablemodem or a breezecom radio - is my local isp going to suck?" The answer would be -- "well your particular cablemodem has the capability to trancieve data at 14 megabits" or "your radio has an over-the-air rate maximum of 3 megabits" -- but it all doesnt matter if the ISP cant deliver me roughly 768K down and 256K as advertised. The equipment is not going to be the limiting factor in bandwidth problems for you. That'd be like a company selling you 2 megabit SDSL service, pulling in the ISDN circut for it, then putting a 128K ISDN router on it and saying "well, the line is capable of 2 megabits. That is what you are paying for." or going into a company and upgrading all of the workstations 10 megabit nics with 100 megabit ones to speed things up but leaving a 10 megabit hub in the center of the whole thing.
2) Line of sight: Ask your isp. It doesnt matter if the equipment is capable of blasting through 10 foot lead walls if the range isn't good enough to get to the nearest access point. Line of sight problems are theirs -- not yours. Typically they'll come out to do a survey and say yes it will work or no it wont. Ask them. Slashdot doesn't know.
3) Security: Um... what? This is your upstream open-to-all-who-send-traffic-to-it internet connection. To be brutally honest -- even if the security of the equipment is totally flawed and anyone who goes out and buys a radio can attach to the network -- it's not your problem. Buy a firewall appliance. It doesnt really matter how you are connected to the internet -- if you are blasting your credit card number and passwords out unencrypted over the wire(less) and leaving your "always-on" connection plugged into a vulnerable computer, you're screwed no matter how you look at it.
Finally, if it's the only game in town for you at your location, try it. Cancel the service if it sucks. If they want a one or two year commitment contract, ask for a demo. Instead, you are asking slashdot all the questions that the ISP should have asked when they selected the equipment for purchase. If they have been around for a while and are a good and well respected local business, it's quite likely that they made a well informed and proper decision for their wireless infrastructure. If you have to ask someone else, ask some of their customers. They are the only people capable of giving you an accurate recommendation about the service.
~GoRK
fuck you moderators
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft will license and has written wma decoding libraries for embedded things other than windows such as DSP based hardware CODEC's - feed them a wma bitstream and they spit out audio.
Needless to say, there is no embedded windows in this thing. Using embedded windows (requiring beefy hardware compared to the probably 2 dsp's and a small microcontroller such an mp3 player would actually require) would do nothing except cut into the profit of the company making the player (licensing fees for the whole OS + the cost of the more expensive hardware to run it) and decrease things like battery life.
You think your car can get hot? Try trying to run a switch/router/etc in a metal enclosure 200 feet up on a grain elevator in the texas panhandle. 75% of the year, the metal will be either too hot to touch or have about 1" of ice coating it. Generally the cold is not a problem as the components (as long as they dont actually stop running) keep everything warm enough not to have any low-temp problems. The heat is another story.
Since the box must be sealed to the weather, we have to use heat exchangers -- they are devices that mount through the sidewall of the box. They come in varietys that range from what amounts to huge peltiers when air cannot possibly be exchanged all the way down to what amounts to very tiny split system air conditioners. They're fairly expensive to run when it gets really hot, but they will cool the inside.
The main problem you're going to have in your car is the initial startup of your electronics. Your trunk is going to have no love from your car's climate control systems. Hence if it's 110 or -20 degrees outside and your car sits out for 8 hours while you are at work, *everything* in the trunk will reach the ambient temp. So, you might have to pre-heat your computer case in the winter or pre-cool it in the summer even before starting.
REPOst repost repost repost
Good job justifying your inability to finish anything you start, Raster.
I mean, after all, why are we bothering to even develop GUI's at all because in a couple hundred years or so the whole idea of computing behind a screen, keyboard, and mouse will be obsolete!
Well you are wrong about one thing: "100% IDE"
Burners are ATAPI devices - Calling them "IDE" is sort of like saying "Ethernet" when you mean "http" or something else like that. ATAPI was invented to bring SCSI devices into the consumer market with minimum cost to hardware manufacturers (ie no change of command api's in the devices firmware). As far as the command set goes, they are actually almost 100% SCSI. Ditto with ATAPI zip drives and tape drives. Heck, even the parallel port zip drives are SCSI (with a built in ppa SCSI controller). USB mass storage uses the SCSI command set also -- and I think Firewire does too (I may be wrong about firewire). ide-scsi is *not* a SCSI emulator. It is a transport, the same as the USB mass storage transport.
IMO, the mistake was to write a seperate driver for ATAPI in the beginning that did NOT tie to the SCSI system - we might have a mature ATAPI/SCSI interface by now that did not have the problems that we see today.
And why do you mention only CD burners? I use ide-scsi for regular CDROMS, zip drives, and tape drives. The application support is much better (ie i can do cd to cd copies, use all backup software, etc)
~GoRK
Ah. Thank you. That does make sense. Anyway, i'm just grateful for spamassassin :) It kills about 80 spams per day to my inbox - a horrible consequence to having so many public addresses
If you can run unsigned code without hardware mods, then why do you need a replacement BIOS?
As I understand it, the proper way to do things these days is with a double opt-in instead.
Uh.. DNS
Let's say the next time you load up thinkgeek.com and buy some overpriced gadget, your machine gets a spoofed ip during the DNS query, and instead of talking to thinkgeek.com you pass through some web proxy that harvests your credit card number and personal info (perhaps you fail to notice the lack of https:// this time). Of course, your thinkgeek order proxies right through to thinkgeek.com properly by the spoofed machine, then your local DNS cache expires and there's no trace of what happened.
You can also try sinek, a GTK frontend for xine. Xine is actually two pieces -- xinelib - the player and xine-ui, the weird xine skinnable UI.
Until your monitor blows up
What about reading and piping back the D-Theater content stored on your PC back through the DVHS deck for decoding to your HDTV or back to your computer? After all, it is an authorized decoder!
MMM black box decryption.
That DVD resolution is non nterlaced, while the HDTV resolution is. DVD supports up to 9megabits/s datarate. Most movies typically use 2-5megabits for the picture. At least 720x920 interlaced resolution is possible with 720x480 encoding provided you are running at 60 fields/s which you can do with DVD. Plus the DVD standard can easily be extended to support a new bunch of resolutions or datarates. I believe the DVD Video spec is at least at 2.0 .. My old player was compliant with DVD Video 1.9, and had some problems with newer dvd's.
.. call it HDVD or something else catchy and just add the extended resolutions and maybe even crossport CSS2 from DVD-Audio so the fuckers at the MPAA will spooge over it and viola!
In short, they can just define DVD 3.0
Hmm PHP. Talk about a language that breaks things between versions! #include behavior was changed between two revision numbers!
hahahaha you were so trolled
I'm working on this problem. ITs a difficult one- here are some of the issues:
Geez. Do you research anything before you code?
1) IR codes vary greatly from device to device. But more importantly, they are not explicit. In other words the "ON" code is "On" when the machines off, but if the machines on, then it will turn the machine off. so there's no way for one to say "on" and *know* that you're going to get the machine turned on, rather than off. (in many cases)
A PVR system pretty much requires the cable box to be on all the time. TiVo and Replay don't bother toggling the power to these. It's not like they use that much electricity. Leave it on and stop worrying about discrete on/off codes. If your power goes out or something, you probably have more to worry about than your cable box not powering bacvk on.
2) There seems to be no good hardware. What makes sense is to both send and recieve IR signals. so you can control your pc based PVR from a remote... but there is little hardware that will do this and what is there won't do both really elegantly. Making custom hardware is possible, but that involves a lot of issues as well.
LIRC supports a ton of good IR hardware including many devices that send and recieve CIR signals just fine. Many are commercially available, and as you said, you can roll your own if you are looking to add IR support to an embedded device or want to "do it on the cheap" if you will.
3) The setup of the home entertainment system affects how this works. Is there a VCR between the cable box and the PVR? which output of the VCR is the PVR hooked up to? Whatever system will have to either force people to set up their system in a way the PVR IR controller can control, or have a way to teach the PVR about the setup.
Why on earth would you hook up a VCR between your cable box and PVR system and then expect to be able to do anything useful with it? The cable box should be somehow directly connected to your PVR system and then somehow to a video output device -- TV, video switcher (reciever), or maybe connected to the TV through the VCR so that you could actually archive a program on your PVR to video tape if you felt so inclined... The only thing you might want the PVR to be able to do is tell the VCR to start and stop recording for automatic show archival.
But my biggest concern is finding all the codes, and translating them into a format I can use... manufacturers make variations on the even the same model of VCR...
You don't necessarily have to distribute the code library for every cable box on the planet. Just include an option under some setup menu that lets you teach the computer PVR the codes from the cable box remote.
Your half-baked planning is useless. Don't claim to be "working on the problem" until you are actually working on it.
~GoRK
Dude, probably about 50% of all new desktop/server/etc. computers have a watchdog timer in them these days. Every new Intel chipset has one including the 845E that this motherboard uses. Some of VIA's chipsets have one. It's really hardly any work at all to put a watchdog into a chipset.
This board is about as useful to the embedded market as a 440hp straight-8 engine would be to a compact car manufacturer.
Fuck LP-ROM. Let's replace DVD-Video with Vinyl Video!
Uhm, dude, grab yourself a geiger counter and a lantern mantle and read this site: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
F-Prot is available for Linux (non-commercial use is free) and it's very good. I have even seen it detect viruses that were not in its database yet. Updating my DAT files resulted in my ability to disinfect the virus. It detects and can disinfect about everything. I will scan your .prc and .pdb files for PalmOS viruses, even!
Um, so go buy a color laser. I did.
.. if you intend to frame them or something... but the cost per page for doing that kind of work with an entry level inkjet is very reasonable.
QMS was running a sale on their MagiColor 2 DeskLaser printer, and I picked one up for about 800 bucks. I print a fair amount, but haven't yet had to replace any of the consumables. (And when I do, they are reasonably priced)
I have only been able to get windows to print to this printer, but it is a network printer and I have figured out how to send spool files (created on windows) to it via Linux. If that's not sufficient, the control board can be replaced with a MagiColor 2 CX board or something so that the printer will support postscript and work just fine with any OS. A duplex option is also available.
I have seen this printer sell new from some places as low as 500 dollars. Color laser is fully within the reach of home users. Go buy it!
Though I will admit that thermal transfer or inkjet can produce better looking "photo" prints
~GoRK
This, as several other threads note, is the approach that Hans Reiser is taking with his filesystem. That is, if the filesystem is not good enough for storing our (large-grained) data, that we are resorting to what basically amounts to indexed archive files or databases full of BLOB objects to store our data, then our filesystems are broken. A directory with 1,000,000 files in it shouldn't take any longer to return a sorted directory listing than one with say, 10 files - because it all should be indexed behind the scenes. Same for the problems of inode starvation, fsck, etc. A program such as mail clients and servers (for most people anyway) -- or any other apps that need simple storage should use the filesystem as the storage mechanism.
They could even use the tower to cook! Shape some aluminum foil into a microwave reflector and put the foodstuff at the focus. mmm them's good eatin