I've gotten a lot of CAT6 cables from monoprice.com and they are cheaper and better than I could make myself. They are seriously the cheapest place I have ever seen by a long long margin.
But are they exactly the right length to pull from A to B, or do you have some coiled up uglies? And what kind of termination is there - jack or plug?
When we built our house a few years ago, I wired it with a coil of cat6 STP, and terminated every cable myself. They all work fine at 100Mbps, and it did not require any special tools or special effort. All of the cables are in ducts inside the walls and floors and have wall jacks at both ends (two ports per room for most rooms). We use short patch cables (usually 50cm or 100cm) to connect devices to the wall jacks.
Can't speak for CSPAN, but PBS has an awesome video portal to most of their content now... http://www.pbs.org/video#
It was just launched last week
Thanks for the link - PBS rocks. Unfortunately either they are having problems, or they're restricting distribution (perhaps geographically, as I'm in Europe). All I get, on any of the shows, is "this content is currently unavailable" either in audio or as text.
So... instead of looking to compete, seek legislation to put a competitor out of business?
What school of economics did TWC go to?
They went to business school and law school, and avoided effete topics such as economics.
Are you ready to bend over and be a good bitch for TW's legion of MBAs and lawyers now?
If you were a smart intelligence officer, what would you do after the 1st attempt?
The terms "smart" and "intelligence" are often strongly associated. However, please remember that the current context is a military organization or its commercial suppliers. It is entirely possible that those terms are almost mutually exclusive here.
As soon as the cop turns away, the tattoo can morph to a new form, perhaps au naturel but exaggerating one's finer points. Or try au naturel of the opposite sex, if you're wierd enough. That might spook the cop out completely - is it public nudity, a porn show, or performance art?
But it's probably only old fat hirsute gargoyles who'd dare do this.
Interesting. I currently live in a western European country that's consistently ranked near the top of the world in any happiness related poll.
Why? Once you've mastered their ridiculous language, are able to read their papers, and they occasionally forget you are an outsider, you discover that they actually hate absolutely everyone and everything; that they are the most miserable and depressed culture ever to have walked the earth.
Then why do they consistently rank near the top in such polls? There is an overpowering, crushing social pressure in this culture to keep up the appearance that everything about this place is the best the world has to offer, and if you can't even be ecstatically happy here, there is no hope for you.
Please enlighten us. Do you refer to Finland or to Sweden?
I'm betting on Finland (where I live), because the Swedes enthusiastically broadcast their misery to anyone who comes within range.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network
The ISPs you refer to either underbuilt their networks, or they oversold their capacity, or a bit of both. But don't lump all ISPs into the same bucket of inadequacy.
d) Everything stays priced the same as now, without throttling or download caps
So pick a, b, or c. And stop kidding yourself that you can pick d.
I have d; it's not even very expensive at eur55/month, and the ISP appears to be profitable. Fiber to the house delivers 100/10 Mbps uncapped internet access (accompanied by IP TV, FWIW). Also, the ISP has adequately provisioned the network infrastructure for these speeds. At present, ALL of their customers could use 1TB each per month without overloading the main set of 10Gb switches. And to reach higher delivered capacity, only those main switches would need to be upgraded. Each customer's house is already provided with an optical switch with 8 cat6 ports. They have planned on us using even higher bandwidth than at present.
Finland. Hmm.. thats where I live... Luckily it's just this small village where I live, that is monopolized by my ISP. I bet that you can guess which one.
Actually, I can't guess - where is it (or who is the idiot ISP)?
I live outside Hiltulanlahti, BTW, and have the Mediakoti package (IP internet+TV+telephone over fiber, either 20/2 or 100/10 Mbps) which was provided by KPY a few years ago. They provisioned the infrastructure quite well, at the insistence of the Kuopio municipality. Alas, KPY was assimilated into DNA, and the Mediakoti package will probably not spread much beyond the Kuopio area. However, there are equivalent services now around Helsinki, at similar or lower prices, or so I'm told.
I have 100/10 Mbps fiber. No caps. In rural Finland, 55eur/month.
In principle, we could download many TB per month. In practice, we rarely exceed 400GB per month. The System Monitor says 3GB so far today to this PC, probably a similar amount to my daughter's PC.
Many patents begin with the text "Method for..." and do not reference hardware at all.
But many of them go on to describe a method for transforming a material. The Bilski ruling explicitly allows transformation of materials to be patented.
Well, I guess to the extent that murdering somebody is considered "transforming matter" under Bilski, you could patent the murder process.
I don't think you can get a patent granted for something which is intrinsically illegal, such as committing murder. However, you might be able to patent a method and apparatus for killing a human, provided it is presented as a solution for the task of lawful killing (such as carrying out a death sentence given by a competent court or court-martial). However, we humans are an inventive and dastardly lot, so it might take real creativity to come up with a killing method which is not already in the public domain.
Anyway, if someone were infringing my patent by deliberately killing people, I'd be very wary of taking them on in any merely legal fashion.
The problem with Disney is they screw up the discs so it looks like there's ~100 titles, all with close to the correct running time.
I've used that technique with our Disney DVDs, and it works fine.
The Teaching Company seems to take the opposite approach. They have only one title which contains the FBI warning, 43 seconds long. That's it, there are no other titles listed. There are many chapters listed in the structure, but not contained in any title, and with bizarre lengths. They are also in random numerical sequence and don't correspond to the chapters/lessons as viewed.
I'd really like to find a solution which reads the DVD structure the same way it is read while being played - i.e. using the information in the stream and/or menus, not just the structure as given in the table of contents. All of these DVDs play fine in VLC or mplayer or anything else, just the contents information is obfuscated making them near-impossible to rip.
We have almost 100 DVDs purchased from The Teaching Company (courses in astronomy, geology, math, physics, etc.) So far, we have no tool for easily ripping them onto our LAN server (sorry, no P2P). I have tried acidrip, dvd::rip, handbrake, thoggen, and VLC's convert function. None of them can rip these DVDs properly, but we can rip any other DVD we have with any of these tools.
With a DVD from TTC, all of them just see one title with a length of 43 seconds - the FBI warning. The DVDs play fine in VLC or any other player, but the structure information (IFO file?) is deliberately corrupt or obfuscated, on every single TTC DVD!
If I use chapter mode in dvd::rip or handbrake, or use convert mode in VLC, then individual "chapters" can be ripped, one at a time. Unfortunately, the chapter structure also appears to be obfuscated. Chapters in the table of contents according to handbrake or dvd::rip vary from a few seconds to 15 minutes in length, whereas the actual chapters/lessons when played are all about 25 minutes. Moreover, to assemble the chapters/lessons as viewed, from the individual "chapters" as ripped, one must combine them in a nearly random non-numerical-sequence order, and often split a ripped "chapter" between two actual chapters/lessons. It's labour-intensive and very annoying, since what we're trying to do is a legitimate fair-use (format shift for play on PCs, DVDs then left on shelf).
Does anyone have a ripping solution which works easily on DVDs from The Teaching Company, or on other DVDs with an obfuscated table of contents?
I used it on windows for almost 2 years before I discovered uTorrent.
Its small, but I'd rather use a command-line based program than bittornado ever again. And why not rtorrent or utorrent? They're both well-developed and work flawlessly...
We're well-provisioned with RAM and bandwidth, so any non-toxic BT client will work fine for me. BitTornado's use of screen real-estate is also a non-issue (dual monitors with multiple desktops). I might give rTorrent a whirl some time. We're a linux-only home, so uTorrent is not practical (don't use Wine or Windows in VMs).
Although I know very little about the causes of sunspots (aside from cooler surface temperatures, of course), it seems to me there may be something more to our calendar than one would think. We base it on the planet's revolution. Since the Earth exerts a pull on the Sun (albeit a small one) as it revolves, maybe the calendar isn't completely unrelated. If the pull of a planet on a star is enough to locate one many light-years away, perhaps it could have an effect on something like sunspots.
Q1: which planet exerts the greatest gravitational force on the Sun?
Q2: which planet exerts the greatest tidal force on the Sun?
If you search for the answers to these two questions, you'll probably learn a lot besides. I won't tell you what the right answers are, but the Earth is the wrong answer in both cases, and by a good factor. Our calendar year is essentially irrelevant to sunspots.
According to Wikipedia, China uses year-month-day, which means they'd write it 4/1. So at least one fifth of the world's population would write 4/1.
No, they don't. They usually specify which number is month and which is day, whether the year is given or not. In some cases which include the year, they use dashes as separators (never slashes), so it would be 2000-4-1 (NOT 2000/4/1). More typically, the characters for year, month, day are inserted after the corresponding number, giving something like 2000year4month1day or 4month1day. Here's the authority cited by Wikipedia: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/globalization/locales/China-SimplifiedChinese_Date.pdf
The only people who would write the first day of April as 4/1 are those listed as using the "middle-endian" date format in the Wikipedia article. And some of those use "little-endian" and "big-endian" forms as well (e.g. Canada).
Incidentally the British didn't deliberately starve the people - after they'd woken up to the trouble, they did ship in large amounts of aid and close the ports to food exports.
As you say, there has been a great deal of bunk written about the Hunger in Ireland in the late 1840s. However, you may have added to it.
Irish ports were closed to food exports in the previous famine in 1783, but not at any time in the 1840s or 1850s. Ireland remained an exporter of food (mostly grain & cattle) in great quantity during the Hunger. What food aid arrived in Ireland was the result of charities, not the British government. In fact, the British attempted to prevent food aid from arriving from some other countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine
There was also a lesser famine in Scotland at the same time, caused by the same over-reliance on potatoes which were hit by potato blight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Potato_Famine This caused great hardship in the Highlands, but food aid provided directly by the British government meant there were relatively few deaths from starvation or malnutrition-related diseases.
If someone could recommend a good FOSS torrent client for Windows, I'd hop on it in a second.
Have you tried BitTornado? It's actually quite OK - functional but not overburdened with crap - and is widely included in Linux distributions. The Windows binary and Python source (also for Linux) are available from http://www.bittornado.com/
You could do a lot worse (e.g. Vuze [pukes copiously]).
Slashdot Mirror
...force the engineers to work overtime as erotic dancers...
How to lose staff and alienate customers?
Oracle has a track record of such brilliance.
I've gotten a lot of CAT6 cables from monoprice.com and they are cheaper and better than I could make myself. They are seriously the cheapest place I have ever seen by a long long margin.
But are they exactly the right length to pull from A to B, or do you have some coiled up uglies? And what kind of termination is there - jack or plug?
When we built our house a few years ago, I wired it with a coil of cat6 STP, and terminated every cable myself. They all work fine at 100Mbps, and it did not require any special tools or special effort. All of the cables are in ducts inside the walls and floors and have wall jacks at both ends (two ports per room for most rooms). We use short patch cables (usually 50cm or 100cm) to connect devices to the wall jacks.
Can't speak for CSPAN, but PBS has an awesome video portal to most of their content now... http://www.pbs.org/video#
It was just launched last week
Thanks for the link - PBS rocks. Unfortunately either they are having problems, or they're restricting distribution (perhaps geographically, as I'm in Europe). All I get, on any of the shows, is "this content is currently unavailable" either in audio or as text.
Read the answer by Mike Godwin
Damn. You just Hitlered the debate!
It could have made it more convincing if her "boyfriend" was there to reinforce the con. err, I mean stunt. err, I mean social experiment.
And the "boyfriend" would have to be a male stripper who's hung like a donkey...
So... instead of looking to compete, seek legislation to put a competitor out of business? What school of economics did TWC go to?
They went to business school and law school, and avoided effete topics such as economics.
Are you ready to bend over and be a good bitch for TW's legion of MBAs and lawyers now?
640K is enough for anyone.
640K = 640*1024 = 655360.
If you were a smart intelligence officer, what would you do after the 1st attempt?
The terms "smart" and "intelligence" are often strongly associated. However, please remember that the current context is a military organization or its commercial suppliers. It is entirely possible that those terms are almost mutually exclusive here.
So they may do something, or they may do something else, or even the opposite. Call back later.
Oracle already has Linux (a re-branded RHEL) for it's *NIX platform.
But perhaps they'd prefer something unbreakable. Like Solaris.
...I'm wearing a full-body tattoo of clothing!
As soon as the cop turns away, the tattoo can morph to a new form, perhaps au naturel but exaggerating one's finer points. Or try au naturel of the opposite sex, if you're wierd enough. That might spook the cop out completely - is it public nudity, a porn show, or performance art?
But it's probably only old fat hirsute gargoyles who'd dare do this.
Sounds like she's been reading too many horoscopes.
I suspect she's qualified to write horoscopes! Sounds way kookier than any chick I met (and I have encountered real rubber-room quality kooks).
Interesting. I currently live in a western European country that's consistently ranked near the top of the world in any happiness related poll.
Why? Once you've mastered their ridiculous language, are able to read their papers, and they occasionally forget you are an outsider, you discover that they actually hate absolutely everyone and everything; that they are the most miserable and depressed culture ever to have walked the earth.
Then why do they consistently rank near the top in such polls? There is an overpowering, crushing social pressure in this culture to keep up the appearance that everything about this place is the best the world has to offer, and if you can't even be ecstatically happy here, there is no hope for you.
Please enlighten us. Do you refer to Finland or to Sweden?
I'm betting on Finland (where I live), because the Swedes enthusiastically broadcast their misery to anyone who comes within range.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network
The ISPs you refer to either underbuilt their networks, or they oversold their capacity, or a bit of both. But don't lump all ISPs into the same bucket of inadequacy.
d) Everything stays priced the same as now, without throttling or download caps
So pick a, b, or c. And stop kidding yourself that you can pick d.
I have d; it's not even very expensive at eur55/month, and the ISP appears to be profitable. Fiber to the house delivers 100/10 Mbps uncapped internet access (accompanied by IP TV, FWIW). Also, the ISP has adequately provisioned the network infrastructure for these speeds. At present, ALL of their customers could use 1TB each per month without overloading the main set of 10Gb switches. And to reach higher delivered capacity, only those main switches would need to be upgraded. Each customer's house is already provided with an optical switch with 8 cat6 ports. They have planned on us using even higher bandwidth than at present.
Finland. Hmm.. thats where I live... Luckily it's just this small village where I live, that is monopolized by my ISP. I bet that you can guess which one.
Actually, I can't guess - where is it (or who is the idiot ISP)?
I live outside Hiltulanlahti, BTW, and have the Mediakoti package (IP internet+TV+telephone over fiber, either 20/2 or 100/10 Mbps) which was provided by KPY a few years ago. They provisioned the infrastructure quite well, at the insistence of the Kuopio municipality. Alas, KPY was assimilated into DNA, and the Mediakoti package will probably not spread much beyond the Kuopio area. However, there are equivalent services now around Helsinki, at similar or lower prices, or so I'm told.
I have 100/10 Mbps fiber. No caps. In rural Finland, 55eur/month.
In principle, we could download many TB per month. In practice, we rarely exceed 400GB per month. The System Monitor says 3GB so far today to this PC, probably a similar amount to my daughter's PC.
Many patents begin with the text "Method for ..." and do not reference hardware at all.
But many of them go on to describe a method for transforming a material. The Bilski ruling explicitly allows transformation of materials to be patented.
Well, I guess to the extent that murdering somebody is considered "transforming matter" under Bilski, you could patent the murder process.
I don't think you can get a patent granted for something which is intrinsically illegal, such as committing murder. However, you might be able to patent a method and apparatus for killing a human, provided it is presented as a solution for the task of lawful killing (such as carrying out a death sentence given by a competent court or court-martial). However, we humans are an inventive and dastardly lot, so it might take real creativity to come up with a killing method which is not already in the public domain.
Anyway, if someone were infringing my patent by deliberately killing people, I'd be very wary of taking them on in any merely legal fashion.
The problem with Disney is they screw up the discs so it looks like there's ~100 titles, all with close to the correct running time.
I've used that technique with our Disney DVDs, and it works fine.
The Teaching Company seems to take the opposite approach. They have only one title which contains the FBI warning, 43 seconds long. That's it, there are no other titles listed. There are many chapters listed in the structure, but not contained in any title, and with bizarre lengths. They are also in random numerical sequence and don't correspond to the chapters/lessons as viewed.
I'd really like to find a solution which reads the DVD structure the same way it is read while being played - i.e. using the information in the stream and/or menus, not just the structure as given in the table of contents. All of these DVDs play fine in VLC or mplayer or anything else, just the contents information is obfuscated making them near-impossible to rip.
We have almost 100 DVDs purchased from The Teaching Company (courses in astronomy, geology, math, physics, etc.)
So far, we have no tool for easily ripping them onto our LAN server (sorry, no P2P). I have tried acidrip, dvd::rip, handbrake, thoggen, and VLC's convert function. None of them can rip these DVDs properly, but we can rip any other DVD we have with any of these tools.
With a DVD from TTC, all of them just see one title with a length of 43 seconds - the FBI warning. The DVDs play fine in VLC or any other player, but the structure information (IFO file?) is deliberately corrupt or obfuscated, on every single TTC DVD!
If I use chapter mode in dvd::rip or handbrake, or use convert mode in VLC, then individual "chapters" can be ripped, one at a time. Unfortunately, the chapter structure also appears to be obfuscated. Chapters in the table of contents according to handbrake or dvd::rip vary from a few seconds to 15 minutes in length, whereas the actual chapters/lessons when played are all about 25 minutes. Moreover, to assemble the chapters/lessons as viewed, from the individual "chapters" as ripped, one must combine them in a nearly random non-numerical-sequence order, and often split a ripped "chapter" between two actual chapters/lessons. It's labour-intensive and very annoying, since what we're trying to do is a legitimate fair-use (format shift for play on PCs, DVDs then left on shelf).
Does anyone have a ripping solution which works easily on DVDs from The Teaching Company, or on other DVDs with an obfuscated table of contents?
I used it on windows for almost 2 years before I discovered uTorrent.
Its small, but I'd rather use a command-line based program than bittornado ever again. And why not rtorrent or utorrent? They're both well-developed and work flawlessly...
We're well-provisioned with RAM and bandwidth, so any non-toxic BT client will work fine for me. BitTornado's use of screen real-estate is also a non-issue (dual monitors with multiple desktops). I might give rTorrent a whirl some time. We're a linux-only home, so uTorrent is not practical (don't use Wine or Windows in VMs).
Although I know very little about the causes of sunspots (aside from cooler surface temperatures, of course), it seems to me there may be something more to our calendar than one would think. We base it on the planet's revolution. Since the Earth exerts a pull on the Sun (albeit a small one) as it revolves, maybe the calendar isn't completely unrelated. If the pull of a planet on a star is enough to locate one many light-years away, perhaps it could have an effect on something like sunspots.
Q1: which planet exerts the greatest gravitational force on the Sun?
Q2: which planet exerts the greatest tidal force on the Sun?
If you search for the answers to these two questions, you'll probably learn a lot besides. I won't tell you what the right answers are, but the Earth is the wrong answer in both cases, and by a good factor. Our calendar year is essentially irrelevant to sunspots.
According to Wikipedia, China uses year-month-day, which means they'd write it 4/1. So at least one fifth of the world's population would write 4/1.
No, they don't. They usually specify which number is month and which is day, whether the year is given or not. In some cases which include the year, they use dashes as separators (never slashes), so it would be 2000-4-1 (NOT 2000/4/1). More typically, the characters for year, month, day are inserted after the corresponding number, giving something like 2000year4month1day or 4month1day. Here's the authority cited by Wikipedia:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/globalization/locales/China-SimplifiedChinese_Date.pdf
The only people who would write the first day of April as 4/1 are those listed as using the "middle-endian" date format in the Wikipedia article. And some of those use "little-endian" and "big-endian" forms as well (e.g. Canada).
Incidentally the British didn't deliberately starve the people - after they'd woken up to the trouble, they did ship in large amounts of aid and close the ports to food exports.
As you say, there has been a great deal of bunk written about the Hunger in Ireland in the late 1840s. However, you may have added to it.
Irish ports were closed to food exports in the previous famine in 1783, but not at any time in the 1840s or 1850s. Ireland remained an exporter of food (mostly grain & cattle) in great quantity during the Hunger. What food aid arrived in Ireland was the result of charities, not the British government. In fact, the British attempted to prevent food aid from arriving from some other countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine
There was also a lesser famine in Scotland at the same time, caused by the same over-reliance on potatoes which were hit by potato blight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Potato_Famine This caused great hardship in the Highlands, but food aid provided directly by the British government meant there were relatively few deaths from starvation or malnutrition-related diseases.
If someone could recommend a good FOSS torrent client for Windows, I'd hop on it in a second.
Have you tried BitTornado? It's actually quite OK - functional but not overburdened with crap - and is widely included in Linux distributions. The Windows binary and Python source (also for Linux) are available from http://www.bittornado.com/
You could do a lot worse (e.g. Vuze [pukes copiously]).