They have the exact same problem everyone else offering consumer broadband has. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth they offer between your home and their end, on the other side they are connected to the internet, and they are paying a hell of a lot more than $50/month per 10 mb/sec on that end.
As people become used to broadband and start trying to use their high speed connections, all broadband providers will either cap speeds, or switch to tiered or metered pricing.
The can't really provide a T1's worth of downloads to each customer for $50/month.
I guess what I'm wondering about is this: is making Linux (or insert your favorite open-source OS here:) more "internally consistent" something that we, as its users, really want to do? I mean, if all you want is one way to do something, then Windows works just fine:)
You are still confused. "Internally consistent" doesn't mean that there is only one way to do things. It's perfectly fine for my computer to use CTRL-C for cut and yours to use some kind of weird mouse gesture, for instance.
What "internally consistent" means is that when I tell my computer I want to use CTRL-C for cut and you tell yours that you want to use that weird mouse gesture, the system and all applications obey our preferences.
I can set my desktop up completely differently than the guy in the next WorkCube and be productive as hell
That's not what people mean by internal consistency. Consider, say, scroll bars. How many ways could scroll bars reasonably work? Let's look at some decisions that a scroll bar designer could makes:
1. Direction. Is the scroll bar logically moving the document in the view, or the view over the document?
2. Does the thingamajig in the scroll bar indicate just the position of the view, or the siz also?
3. How do you control scroll direction? Clicking in arrows, or do different mouse buttons scroll different amounts?
4. What specifies the distance you scroll per click? One line? Or maybe it depends on where you click (classic X behaviour)
Internal consistency means that whatever choice is made for all these (whether made by the system designer or by you) applies everywhere. You aren't going to be "productive as hell" with 10 apps open if each one is doing scrollbars totally differently, and menus totally diffently, and uses its own keyboard shortcuts for common operations, etc.
Re:Your out of luck with Dish Network...
on
Comparing the DVRs?
·
· Score: 2
It seems kind of hopeless for all these companies and the audio fingerprinting. About a year and a half ago some company came out with a similar idea, except is was a separate device and you would have to wait until you got home and connect it to your computer. And it only worked with 2 radio stations
It was Sony. It was basically a clock with a USB interface. When you heard a song you wanted to identify, you pressed a button, and it stored a timestamp. When you got home, you plugged it into the USB port, and the software read the timestamps, and then reported what was playing on the participating radio stations in your area at those times.
They had quite a few more than two radio stations.
Which brings us back to the question of: What exactly am I paying for when I'm purchasing my home broadband connection?
You are paying for membership in a variable-sized pool of people who are sharing a downstream channel and an upstream channel, with the downstream channel having much more bandwidth than the upstream channel.
This difference in speed between upstream and downstream is part of the way cable works. They allocate frequencies below a certain point for the upstream, and frequencies above that point for the downstream. That certain point is constrained to being below the frequency of the lowest television channel, and places an upper limit on the upstream bandwidth the cable company can support. For downstream bandwidth, they can add more by simply using another TV channel (at the cost of being able to offer one less TV channel).
Much of cable company policy is aimed at dealing with that limited upstream. That's why most cable companies limit individual cable modems to 128 kbps upload speed, and that's why they limit servers.
You might think that limiting upload speed would be enough...why not let people try to run any servers they want, and let the 128 kpbs upload cap limit them?
The reason is that a couple hundred people saturating their 128 kbps slice of the upstream is enough to saturate the aggregate upstream.
When an upstream gets saturated, bad things happen to the downstream. TCP can't get ACKs through, and download speeds go way down.
This is why DSL tends to be more friendly to servers. Although DSL is shared, just like cable, the sharing starts on the ATM connection from the DSLAM to your ISP, not on the connection from your home to the DSLAM. The place where you have a speed difference between upstream and downstream with DSL is between your home and the DSLAM, and that part is not shared.
Uhm...there's no difference between analog and digital media here, except that digital media is way easier to copy.
The underlying theme of the "it was OK for analog, but copyright has no place in digital" argument that is common on slashdot is really "with digital media, copyright actually incoveniences me, so I'm against it".
Let's see...when there are things that aren't compatible with Microsoft (e.g., Staroffice), people complain that Microsoft is a monopoly and keeps third parties from being compatible.
Now, when there is going to be a thing compatible with Microsoft (DVD players), people complain that the Microsoft monopoly is being extended!
Well, since it seems to be controlled largely by sensing your balance, perhaps three wheels would have made it too stable?
Read the article at Time[time.com]. The impression I get is that you lean forward slightly, which presumably makes it start to tip forward, which is sensed by the gyros, and it starts moving forward. With three wheels, you'd have to use pressure sensors or something to sense this, and it would be much less nature. It wouldn't tie in with your natural balance.
No you don't. You pay to be in a pool of people sharing a certain amount of bandwidth. Big difference. At the data rate cable provides, you can easily transfer enough data that your monthly fee doesn't cover their cost. Remember, the cable company has to pay for their connection to the rest of the world.
They care how you use your connection because their pricing model is based on average usage patterns.
To really get cable data rates with no limit on what you can do costs a heck of a lot more than $40/month. It's called a T1.
Considering that for pretty much every benchmark except 2 or 3 of them, the NVidia chipsets are in the middle of the back of VIA chipsets, and the difference is around half a percent, which is less than the variation amount the VIA chipsets, it is pretty clear that these benchmarks don't show that the VIA chipsets are faster.
Other differences in the motherboards are more significant than the chipset differences. Note that within the VIA motherboards, it tends to be the same ones near the top and the bottom of the results.
Hardly comparable...if I take my cell phone to a country that is on a different standard, it won't work. If I take my GPS receiver to a country that uses a different standard, it will still work.
I think it was an essay by Heinlein (but may have been Asimov) that said that the important thing is not describing or anticipating future technology in SF, but rather the effect of that technology.
E.g., if you were writing a story in 1870, descrbing how everyone would be driving around in cars in the future is amusing, but not important. How the automobile will change society by giving people a much greater range of movement is what is important.
I'd say the biggest influence of SF on future technology has been inspirational. A lot of people involved in the space program in the 60's and 70's got hooked by reading SF, especially Heinlein's works, for example.
First person shooters aren't the hardest games graphically. Something like Everquest, where there might be 80 players and several monsters on screen at once in a large area, put more strain on the card.
Policemen, firemen, astronauts, and army guys all have jobs where they wear uniforms and have changing/showering facilities at work. Once guys see each others dicks, they bowl and BBQ together.
If you want your IT workplace to bond like that, try to get "casual friday" changed to "nude friday".
So now you've seen two basically identical tests product completely opposite results
The tests aren't basically identical. AMD was using a newer version of the processor, with different thermal protection. AMD's tests are relevant if you are putting together a new Athlon system. Tom's tests are relevant if you are worried about an Athlon system that is a month or two old or older.
Sure a fan can fail, but there are monitoring systems that tell you when this happens...
Perhaps you should read the referenced articles before posting?
1. Many people find they need a rather big (and heavy) heatsink to keep an Athlon cool enough. These heavy heatsinks can fall off.
2. The CPU thermal sensor used on Athlons cannot respond to temperature changes faster than about 1C/second. Tom's tests showed the CPU melting in just a few seconds, so your monitoring software would do nothing to help you in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
They have the exact same problem everyone else offering consumer broadband has. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth they offer between your home and their end, on the other side they are connected to the internet, and they are paying a hell of a lot more than $50/month per 10 mb/sec on that end.
The can't really provide a T1's worth of downloads to each customer for $50/month.
How's that work for apartments?
You are still confused. "Internally consistent" doesn't mean that there is only one way to do things. It's perfectly fine for my computer to use CTRL-C for cut and yours to use some kind of weird mouse gesture, for instance.
What "internally consistent" means is that when I tell my computer I want to use CTRL-C for cut and you tell yours that you want to use that weird mouse gesture, the system and all applications obey our preferences.
That's not what people mean by internal consistency. Consider, say, scroll bars. How many ways could scroll bars reasonably work? Let's look at some decisions that a scroll bar designer could makes:
1. Direction. Is the scroll bar logically moving the document in the view, or the view over the document?
2. Does the thingamajig in the scroll bar indicate just the position of the view, or the siz also?
3. How do you control scroll direction? Clicking in arrows, or do different mouse buttons scroll different amounts?
4. What specifies the distance you scroll per click? One line? Or maybe it depends on where you click (classic X behaviour)
Internal consistency means that whatever choice is made for all these (whether made by the system designer or by you) applies everywhere. You aren't going to be "productive as hell" with 10 apps open if each one is doing scrollbars totally differently, and menus totally diffently, and uses its own keyboard shortcuts for common operations, etc.
Uhm...Dish Network sells a PVR themselves.
It was Sony. It was basically a clock with a USB interface. When you heard a song you wanted to identify, you pressed a button, and it stored a timestamp. When you got home, you plugged it into the USB port, and the software read the timestamps, and then reported what was playing on the participating radio stations in your area at those times.
They had quite a few more than two radio stations.
You are paying for membership in a variable-sized pool of people who are sharing a downstream channel and an upstream channel, with the downstream channel having much more bandwidth than the upstream channel.
This difference in speed between upstream and downstream is part of the way cable works. They allocate frequencies below a certain point for the upstream, and frequencies above that point for the downstream. That certain point is constrained to being below the frequency of the lowest television channel, and places an upper limit on the upstream bandwidth the cable company can support. For downstream bandwidth, they can add more by simply using another TV channel (at the cost of being able to offer one less TV channel).
Much of cable company policy is aimed at dealing with that limited upstream. That's why most cable companies limit individual cable modems to 128 kbps upload speed, and that's why they limit servers.
You might think that limiting upload speed would be enough...why not let people try to run any servers they want, and let the 128 kpbs upload cap limit them?
The reason is that a couple hundred people saturating their 128 kbps slice of the upstream is enough to saturate the aggregate upstream.
When an upstream gets saturated, bad things happen to the downstream. TCP can't get ACKs through, and download speeds go way down.
This is why DSL tends to be more friendly to servers. Although DSL is shared, just like cable, the sharing starts on the ATM connection from the DSLAM to your ISP, not on the connection from your home to the DSLAM. The place where you have a speed difference between upstream and downstream with DSL is between your home and the DSLAM, and that part is not shared.
I don't believe factoring is known to be NP-complete.
The underlying theme of the "it was OK for analog, but copyright has no place in digital" argument that is common on slashdot is really "with digital media, copyright actually incoveniences me, so I'm against it".
Now, when there is going to be a thing compatible with Microsoft (DVD players), people complain that the Microsoft monopoly is being extended!
Make up your minds.
Uhm...free software has as many security problems as Windows. The difference is that Windows has 95% of the users, and so is a much bigger target.
Read the article at Time[time.com]. The impression I get is that you lean forward slightly, which presumably makes it start to tip forward, which is sensed by the gyros, and it starts moving forward. With three wheels, you'd have to use pressure sensors or something to sense this, and it would be much less nature. It wouldn't tie in with your natural balance.
No you don't. You pay to be in a pool of people sharing a certain amount of bandwidth. Big difference. At the data rate cable provides, you can easily transfer enough data that your monthly fee doesn't cover their cost. Remember, the cable company has to pay for their connection to the rest of the world.
They care how you use your connection because their pricing model is based on average usage patterns.
To really get cable data rates with no limit on what you can do costs a heck of a lot more than $40/month. It's called a T1.
Bah..."middle of the pack", not "middle of the back". That's what I get for not previewing.
Best is 100.5, NVidia is 100, worst is 99.5.
Considering that for pretty much every benchmark except 2 or 3 of them, the NVidia chipsets are in the middle of the back of VIA chipsets, and the difference is around half a percent, which is less than the variation amount the VIA chipsets, it is pretty clear that these benchmarks don't show that the VIA chipsets are faster.
Other differences in the motherboards are more significant than the chipset differences. Note that within the VIA motherboards, it tends to be the same ones near the top and the bottom of the results.
Hardly comparable...if I take my cell phone to a country that is on a different standard, it won't work. If I take my GPS receiver to a country that uses a different standard, it will still work.
E.g., if you were writing a story in 1870, descrbing how everyone would be driving around in cars in the future is amusing, but not important. How the automobile will change society by giving people a much greater range of movement is what is important.
I'd say the biggest influence of SF on future technology has been inspirational. A lot of people involved in the space program in the 60's and 70's got hooked by reading SF, especially Heinlein's works, for example.
First person shooters aren't the hardest games graphically. Something like Everquest, where there might be 80 players and several monsters on screen at once in a large area, put more strain on the card.
If you want your IT workplace to bond like that, try to get "casual friday" changed to "nude friday".
It's a British boarding school, so that goes without saying.
HBO doesn't do it. Showtime doesn't do it. If they ever do start doing it, I'll cancel my subscriptions and switch all my movie viewing to DVD rental.
The tests aren't basically identical. AMD was using a newer version of the processor, with different thermal protection. AMD's tests are relevant if you are putting together a new Athlon system. Tom's tests are relevant if you are worried about an Athlon system that is a month or two old or older.
Perhaps you should read the referenced articles before posting?
1. Many people find they need a rather big (and heavy) heatsink to keep an Athlon cool enough. These heavy heatsinks can fall off.
2. The CPU thermal sensor used on Athlons cannot respond to temperature changes faster than about 1C/second. Tom's tests showed the CPU melting in just a few seconds, so your monitoring software would do nothing to help you in that case.
Use an ISP that isn't where you live.