Back when I was in second year comp sci (mid/late 90s) we had a course which was roughly titled "Programming in C". The basics of C were covered in a single week; after that it was all about algorithms etc... One of the students asked the professor why we had gone over learning the language so quickly to which he gave an answer which has stuck with me to the current day:
"We are not here to teach you C. C is only a tool. We are here to teach you how to solve problems."
That's what your degree is about. Gaining the knowledge and background to solve problems.
It always boggles me why designers often neglect sound. Can you think of a really AAA title that has poor quality sound and music? Sound is often the singular difference in between a good game and #$%#$% awesome game.
If you want an example of how great sound design can take a game to the next level look at Castlevatia: SOTN. There are lots of platform games that have a similar style and execution but a big reason that its the finest platform game of all time is that the music is BRILLIANT.
Actually a the maximum bandwidth of a downstream channel is about 48Mbps not 25. This is with a 3.2Mhz channel width. I know the 1.x/2.0 spec says 42 but trust me, its actually 47 or so on most head ends. A single modem can achieve this speed.
DOCSIS 1.0 upstream is approximately 10Mbps and 2.0 is 30 or so. The maximum speed for a single modem is upstream is about 18Mbps due to the way the upstream works. (time slicing)
You are correct that there is much less space for upstream channels then there is downstream. My memory is really fuzzy since I haven't been working in cable modems for a few years now but I think upstream channels are limited to the 5-42Mhz range and downstream for North America is 200-800 or so.
I recently purchased a Macbook pro after a 10+ year hiatus from using Macs. My last Mac was a PowerMac 6100 way back when the PPC601 was brand new (and very cool) CPU tech. I switched over from XP simply because I dont play as many PC games anymore preferring my consoles and bigass TV for most things. I really liked the concept of OSX, nice *NIX underpinnings with high quality GUI layered on top and things like bootcamp pretty much made it a no brainer.
My Leopard experience has been ok so far. Honestly I think its acceptable quality for a.0 (now.1) release of a major OS increment. Yes there are bugs. Yes some of them are pretty annoying such as the airport driver bug which kernel panics after some time running any torrent client. All of them have fairly easy workarounds. (e.g: use Ethernet) None of them can be really labelled as critical design flaws which is something that can not be said of the Vista.
As usual with anything you are vastly more likely to hear people with complaints saying things rather then the majority that has no issues.
Truth be told certainly its a step backwards in stability from 10.4.10 however the under the hood and features is a big step forward. It just needs a bit of polish which will probably come in the next few months.
Its not that uncommon. I am more tech savvy then my friends and have been accumulating for years and years now. My buddies know this and its not uncommon for them to wander over with an external drive which I am only too happy to fill up for them.
Its not that they don't buy music. Like me they will buy stuff to support the artists they like however this is a good way to get old tracks that are really hard to buy and also a great way to discover new music. The net effect is more of a win for the music industry then anything else. My buddies certainly would not go out of their way to purchase really old/inaccessible music and they might find something they like and start supporting that artist. Nothing lost, something potentially gained.
As someone who writes TV driver code for a living I have a bit of insight to offer. Oddly enough, just today I just submitted some code that makes our noise reduction code work on some 1080P sources so its still fresh in my mind.:)
Arguments about the frame rate of 1080i vs 1080p aside from the display devices perspective it is VASTLY preferable to receive a 1080P source. MUCH less post processing will be done and it takes a significantly less amount of memory bandwidth leaving more for other features.
With a 1080i signal you will get fed through things like 3:2 pulldown, bob/weave de-interlacing, Y and/or UV noise reduction, hdmfd etc etc which do an excellent job of RECONSTRUCTING full frames... however its still way better if we don't have to do it in the first place! Even BETTER then all of the above is if the material is presented in a very high bitrate so we don't have to use a lot of post processing to try and make it look better! This is the real reason to go to HD-DVD and BD!
Re:Self Tuner
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This has already been done by at least a dozen companies. Motec, Pectel, Hondata, DTA, TEC and a whole lot more. You can control everything in realtime and the higher end systems will also allow you to do much more esoteric things like traction control, launch control, turbo anti-lag schemes and others.
The trouble with full programmable engine menagement is that it does not suffer the incompetent. There are LOTS and LOTS of parameters which depend on eachother, the entire system operates in realtime and you had better KNOW what you are doing and how they interact with eachother before you start fooling around with stuff. Getting it wrong can have catastrophic consequences; a simple mistake like not supplying enough fuel or adding too much ignition can and WILL cost your engine.
So in short if you have the knowledge and the tools (wideband O2, lots of guages like EGT, fuel pressure etc etc) programmable engine management is the best thing since sliced bread. I have a Pectel T2 in my Focus and its great stuff to be in full control. Just read up and UNDERSTAND what you are doing before going down that road. Just like you wouldent run your Athlon with no heatsink you dont want to be putting 40 degrees of timing advance at 20psi of boost!
> This is six to eight month old hardware, there > are not 3d drivers for linux for it, the article > dosen't even have any linux benchmarks.
The Utax-GLX project has had a full featured OpenGL driver for the g400 series of cards for a number of months now. Performance (in q3a) is almost equal to the windows version with turbogl.
Unfortunatly there is no DRI driver for Xfree 4.0 yet however it should be arriving sometime within the next couple of months.
> I do have a question I havent seen answered > sufficently for me. Does the "dualhead" feature > work under linux?
Not really.. Yet. The last I looked there was alpha support for moving a console onto the second head via fbcon in the 2.3 series of kernels. There is also basic NTSC/PAL out support via the same module. Check it out at:
http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/~vana/matroxfb.html
I belive Precision Insight has been contracted to write a drive with full featured dual head support which has an ETA of this summer. This will have full xinerama/TVOut support for the card.
So a quick summary:
2D Support: Excellent 3D Support: Good (q3a, GL screensavers, UT still not perfect but very soon) Dual Head: Only for the hardcore (but full support within a few months)
If anyone has more recent information please correct me I havent really been keeping close track of developments lately.
Re:Don't Make Me Laugh
on
VDSL Demoed
·
· Score: 1
The signal degradation thing is highly implementation dependant. You are right that for VDSL its likely you will have to be extremely close (wild guess 2000ft ) to the CO for maximum performance. Of course the chances of you getting 60Mbps to your house anytime in the next 5-10 years are pretty much 0 as the backbones can barely support the current load, much less a few thousand people with T3s to thier doorsteps.
On the other hand most ADSL modems work best at a range of 6-9000ft and things dont get too ugly till about 12000ft or so. Past 13000ft and you might as well forget it. An interesting fact about ADSL is that the middle range is actually better then being point blank as all the ADSL modems transmit at a fixed power level, too far from the CO and it degrades, too close and it leaks into other frequencies. This is of course assuming the copper you are on doesnet suck completely.
There are special implmentations such as Nortels 1 meg modem that will deliver 1Mbit+ way out at 20000ft.
I can see this being a great distributed computing computing problem. Take the full set of all possible moves/outcomes, split it up into work units and send it out to N machines. Im sure we could put together significantly more computing power then deep blue, it would just be a matter of decding the work units and algorithms to use as I recall the search space come the midgame is too large to be searched even with all the computing power on earth.
Re:All domains should be allowed
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 1
Of course you can turn off your radio if you dont like what you hear. I mean that you are a captive audience once you are tuned into a station in the respect that you do not have control of the content.
My point was that on the internet YOU are the primary factor in what you choose to see.
Chris
Yeah yeah, the thread is long dead. I still felt compelled to respond.:)
All domains should be allowed
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 2
Frankly, I think any combination of symbols allowed by the DNS protocol should be legitamate. The semantics of those symbols is irrevalent.
Unlike the radio where you are a captive audience on the internet you have to dileberately choose to go somewhere. True there are exceptions such as automatic redirects but generally speaking no one is forcing you to go anywhere.
Just for informational purposes im quickly going to run thru the major methods of getting a DSL connection. I imagine the same applies for cable.
When you power up your DSL modem the first thing that happens after the power on test is it attempts to sync with a line card in the captive office. Depending on what kind of system you are on this could be at anywhere from 100kbps to 9Mbps and down. Typically up tends to be significantly less then down (usually in the 320kbps to 1.5Mbit range) but it does not have to be.
There are several encapsulation methods used to get packets over the DSL wire all of them revolving around ATM.
The end to end connection typically looks something like this:
PC --Ethernet-> Modem --DSL-> LineCard --ATM-> ATM Switch/Router --Whatever-> Internet
From there it your data can bounce around the net being re-encapsulated until it eventually becomes ethernet again.:)
Typical encapsulation methods over DSL are:
RFC 1483 Ethernet over ATM (most common) RFC 1577 Classical IP over ATM RFC 2364 PPP over ATM
1483 encapsulation involves setting up a bridge group on your router. A bridge group is essentially a software hub that sucks in packets from multiple connections and forwards them along to wherever they need to go. If you have a setup like this, when you look in your arp cache you should only ever see the (fictional) MAC address of your bridge group. (and your modems MAC assuming its not a dumb bridge either)
1577 isnt used much in the real world as it requires more effort to setup and maintain.
2364 is becoming more prevalant, especially a nasty variant called PPP over Ethernet which is like a combo of PPP over ATM and 1483 bridging.
Just so you can see all the work thats going on here are the quick protocol stacks for the data encapsulation methods before the data ever hits the phone wire. (pretty complicated:P)
Oh yes, one last note about speeds. While most DSL available today sits in the 1Mbit range or so within a year or so high speed DSL will start to roll out offering equal or better bandwidth compared to cable (i.e up to full 10Mbit down and 1.5Mbit+ up)
Enjoy the competition, its good for you the end user.
While I generally dont like saying bad things about websites, macosrumors will often make up complete crap. For instance the Sawtooth article from a bit back, notice there are no pictures? No real benchmarks? Vague assertions?
quote: >"We have not yet been able to gather exact >MacBench numbers because of benchmark performance > differences between various seeded Sawtooths, >but it didn't take much of these sorts of >experiences with > the beautiful machine to realize what a speed >demon it is shaping up to be. "
Yes, thats because you dont have one!
From todays page: >In a related note, we were surprised to hear from >several third party developers that not only > had they succesfully used prototype >multiple-G4 upgrade boards on Beige and Blue G3s.
Uhhh yeah, apple is just handing those SMP g4 prototype upgrades out left and right. And they all leak info to you of course.
If you want real mac news sites try macintouch.com or macnn.com or maccentral.com.
It just upsets me to see people actually believing some of the crud that appears on that site.
Well, in the tech specs it says it uses a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) 24 pin connector with TMDS. (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling)
So no, you cant hook it up to your standard 15-pin D-SUB connector (or 3/5 BNC if yer real cool:)) and yes, you will need a special video card (special ATI rage 128 I assume since thats what is in the G4 boxes) to use this monitor.
This is pretty much the same as the SGI flat panel where you could only use the number 9 video card that came with the panel to drive it.
Actually if you post a message of over a certain length (i think its 10000 characters) it is automagically given +1 to its score. So its probably not someone just being stupid with moderator points but rather someone taking advantage of this fact to bore the general public and make moderators waste points. -N
This is pretty acurate. I used to be a teaching assistant for first year computer courses. Women are outrageously nice to you when they need explanations for simple computer stuff.
True I was getting payed to help people but I would go to extremes like meeting them on my own time to tutor them for free in the hopes that I might be able to actually engage them in conversation after I had explained the 16 op assembly language the course used. (yes yes, this->desperate == TRUE, now shut up about it already:))
Anyhow, cutting to the chase it didnt work very well. Really all I wanted was conversation but I guess they just saw me as a facilitator of a good mark.
I guess perhaps im just bitter. I probably smell funny too.
Anyhow quick summary: Hes right dont go down this road it leads nowhere.
Is there any offical word on when SMP support will be included in the linux builds? I can understand that its probably something that no doubt requires some linux specific code and thus is probably sort of backburnerish after getting most of the win32 issues sorted out but still painful to see SMP support for NT and not linux.
For those of you who are curious it varies from completely hilarious to completely awful. And yes the NC-17 rating is completely deserved, if not for the continous stream of bad language (more then a Dennis Leary/Andrew Dice Clay combo special) then for many, many downright nasty allusions/jokes (most of the sexual).
Now onto the movie itself. Its actually a musical. The plot more or less runs like: Kids go see new Terrance and Philip movie (its a foreign film from Canada doncha know?) which contains profuse amouts of bad language (one whole musical number is compesed almost entirely of swearing:O) from which they develop potty mouth. The rest of the movie involves the parents of sp lead by Kyles mom attempting to cure/rescue thier children from this awful affliction.
The movie is at its best during the musical numbers which are grand in the finest broadway/classical tradition. (Cartmans solo song about Kyles mother is particularly memorable)
The jokes are extremely crude and crass, (and I mean REALLY crude and crass) anyone who has not seen an episode of southpark in thier lives might be offended to the point where they might walk out if they have strong religious/moral views. Parents be warned, be sure to explain to your kids the difference between satire (the movie) and blind repetition lest you risk your kids coming down with the same problems the sp kids have. (trust me the tunes are pretty catchy, and not a one is something you want to be singing out loud in public:)) As I said the movie swings alot between really great and really awful, most of the awful bits are stupid tasteless dialog (dont get me wrong I like stupid tasteless dialog, but it gets a bit tried after the first 15 minutes) parts.
Anyhow, overall impression was that it was a decently entertaining movie. Bad dialog, great musical numbers, average (crude) jokes and one truly great scene involving Bill Gates.:)
I can imagine there wont be much of a middle ground for reviews on this movie, you will either like it, or absolutely detest it. Having said that I suggest you go see the movie and find out which category you are in!
Well, the local cable modem provider (videon) has a different solution. A fixed upload/download quota. For a standard account you are limited to 10GB down and 1GB up of data. If you exceed these values you get charged $$$. (especially for the upload one, its like $10/100MB) It is very effective in deterring people from running bandwidth sucking servers. They have no problem with you running a server as long as it doesent exceed the quota. In case you think these numbers are small, only 1% of subscribers even do more then 5GB down/month. Im not sure about the upload stats, probably a bit tighter since 1GB isnt a walloping amount, fine for online gaming and sending small stuff around but bad if you happen to be an iso warez courier. Its a shame that they will be merging with @home in sept. Oh well, time to get xDSL.:)
A bit more technical explanation cause I have nothing better to do::)
Once the SS7 traffic gets too heavy (i.e massive ISDN-UP requests from incoming calls) the switch will go into congestion mode and start dropping requests. ISDN-UP (which contains the call setup/takedown stuff) is among the first stuff to go. I think SCCP (which is the 800 stuff) is pretty low priority as well. There are several congenstion levels which ramp up what gets dropped.
You can also get a call nixed if the switch is out of trunks to carry it, but in that case you usually get a recorded message. Lastly, I dont think the switch will crash. Calls not getting through, sure. Switch dead, requires reboot, no.
I just downloaded the win32 version and tried it out as I was having sporadic crashes with the linux version.
I have this to say:
win32 mouse is muuuuch smoother (anyone know how to get it that smooth in linux)
win32 version looks like CRAP on the same card (voodoo2). the rendering, especially the textures and smoke fromt the rockets looks absolutely awful. im not sure if its a driver thing or what but the linux version looks 5x better. (of course the g200 in windows looked hella better then the voodoo2 in linux but at barely half the speed:))
Slashdot Mirror
Back when I was in second year comp sci (mid/late 90s) we had a course which was roughly titled "Programming in C". The basics of C were covered in a single week; after that it was all about algorithms etc... One of the students asked the professor why we had gone over learning the language so quickly to which he gave an answer which has stuck with me to the current day:
"We are not here to teach you C. C is only a tool. We are here to teach you how to solve problems."
That's what your degree is about. Gaining the knowledge and background to solve problems.
Ehhhh, as someone who has been around for a while I assure you the signal to noise ratio here is still good and thats what really counts.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I'm not sure what you are posting about? The device in question is not a hard drive and has absolutely nothing to do with the WD hard drive division.
It's a media player which supports playback from USB attached storage or over a wired network connection.
It always boggles me why designers often neglect sound. Can you think of a really AAA title that has poor quality sound and music? Sound is often the singular difference in between a good game and #$%#$% awesome game.
If you want an example of how great sound design can take a game to the next level look at Castlevatia: SOTN. There are lots of platform games that have a similar style and execution but a big reason that its the finest platform game of all time is that the music is BRILLIANT.
I assume you guys in Norway have special set top boxes to decode DVB-T using H.264? I don't know of any TVs that support this natively.
Actually a the maximum bandwidth of a downstream channel is about 48Mbps not 25. This is with a 3.2Mhz channel width. I know the 1.x/2.0 spec says 42 but trust me, its actually 47 or so on most head ends. A single modem can achieve this speed.
DOCSIS 1.0 upstream is approximately 10Mbps and 2.0 is 30 or so. The maximum speed for a single modem is upstream is about 18Mbps due to the way the upstream works. (time slicing)
You are correct that there is much less space for upstream channels then there is downstream. My memory is really fuzzy since I haven't been working in cable modems for a few years now but I think upstream channels are limited to the 5-42Mhz range and downstream for North America is 200-800 or so.
I recently purchased a Macbook pro after a 10+ year hiatus from using Macs. My last Mac was a PowerMac 6100 way back when the PPC601 was brand new (and very cool) CPU tech. I switched over from XP simply because I dont play as many PC games anymore preferring my consoles and bigass TV for most things. I really liked the concept of OSX, nice *NIX underpinnings with high quality GUI layered on top and things like bootcamp pretty much made it a no brainer.
.0 (now .1) release of a major OS increment. Yes there are bugs. Yes some of them are pretty annoying such as the airport driver bug which kernel panics after some time running any torrent client. All of them have fairly easy workarounds. (e.g: use Ethernet) None of them can be really labelled as critical design flaws which is something that can not be said of the Vista.
My Leopard experience has been ok so far. Honestly I think its acceptable quality for a
As usual with anything you are vastly more likely to hear people with complaints saying things rather then the majority that has no issues.
Truth be told certainly its a step backwards in stability from 10.4.10 however the under the hood and features is a big step forward. It just needs a bit of polish which will probably come in the next few months.
Its not that uncommon. I am more tech savvy then my friends and have been accumulating for years and years now. My buddies know this and its not uncommon for them to wander over with an external drive which I am only too happy to fill up for them.
Its not that they don't buy music. Like me they will buy stuff to support the artists they like however this is a good way to get old tracks that are really hard to buy and also a great way to discover new music. The net effect is more of a win for the music industry then anything else. My buddies certainly would not go out of their way to purchase really old/inaccessible music and they might find something they like and start supporting that artist. Nothing lost, something potentially gained.
As someone who writes TV driver code for a living I have a bit of insight to offer. Oddly enough, just today I just submitted some code that makes our noise reduction code work on some 1080P sources so its still fresh in my mind. :)
Arguments about the frame rate of 1080i vs 1080p aside from the display devices perspective it is VASTLY preferable to receive a 1080P source. MUCH less post processing will be done and it takes a significantly less amount of memory bandwidth leaving more for other features.
With a 1080i signal you will get fed through things like 3:2 pulldown, bob/weave de-interlacing, Y and/or UV noise reduction, hdmfd etc etc which do an excellent job of RECONSTRUCTING full frames... however its still way better if we don't have to do it in the first place! Even BETTER then all of the above is if the material is presented in a very high bitrate so we don't have to use a lot of post processing to try and make it look better! This is the real reason to go to HD-DVD and BD!
This has already been done by at least a dozen companies. Motec, Pectel, Hondata, DTA, TEC and a whole lot more. You can control everything in realtime and the higher end systems will also allow you to do much more esoteric things like traction control, launch control, turbo anti-lag schemes and others. The trouble with full programmable engine menagement is that it does not suffer the incompetent. There are LOTS and LOTS of parameters which depend on eachother, the entire system operates in realtime and you had better KNOW what you are doing and how they interact with eachother before you start fooling around with stuff. Getting it wrong can have catastrophic consequences; a simple mistake like not supplying enough fuel or adding too much ignition can and WILL cost your engine. So in short if you have the knowledge and the tools (wideband O2, lots of guages like EGT, fuel pressure etc etc) programmable engine management is the best thing since sliced bread. I have a Pectel T2 in my Focus and its great stuff to be in full control. Just read up and UNDERSTAND what you are doing before going down that road. Just like you wouldent run your Athlon with no heatsink you dont want to be putting 40 degrees of timing advance at 20psi of boost!
> This is six to eight month old hardware, there
> are not 3d drivers for linux for it, the article
> dosen't even have any linux benchmarks.
The Utax-GLX project has had a full featured OpenGL driver for the g400 series of cards for a number of months now. Performance (in q3a) is almost equal to the windows version with turbogl.
Unfortunatly there is no DRI driver for Xfree 4.0 yet however it should be arriving sometime within the next couple of months.
> I do have a question I havent seen answered
> sufficently for me. Does the "dualhead" feature
> work under linux?
Not really.. Yet. The last I looked there was alpha support for moving a console onto the second head via fbcon in the 2.3 series of kernels. There is also basic NTSC/PAL out support via the same module. Check it out at:
http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/~vana/matroxfb.html
I belive Precision Insight has been contracted to write a drive with full featured dual head support which has an ETA of this summer. This will have full xinerama/TVOut support for the card.
So a quick summary:
2D Support: Excellent
3D Support: Good (q3a, GL screensavers, UT still not perfect but very soon)
Dual Head: Only for the hardcore (but full support within a few months)
If anyone has more recent information please correct me I havent really been keeping close track of developments lately.
The signal degradation thing is highly implementation dependant. You are right that for VDSL its likely you will have to be extremely close (wild guess 2000ft ) to the CO for maximum performance. Of course the chances of you getting 60Mbps to your house anytime in the next 5-10 years are pretty much 0 as the backbones can barely support the current load, much less a few thousand people with T3s to thier doorsteps.
On the other hand most ADSL modems work best at a range of 6-9000ft and things dont get too ugly till about 12000ft or so. Past 13000ft and you might as well forget it. An interesting fact about ADSL is that the middle range is actually better then being point blank as all the ADSL modems transmit at a fixed power level, too far from the CO and it degrades, too close and it leaks into other frequencies. This is of course assuming the copper you are on doesnet suck completely.
There are special implmentations such as Nortels 1 meg modem that will deliver 1Mbit+ way out at 20000ft.
Chris
I can see this being a great distributed computing computing problem. Take the full set of all possible moves/outcomes,
split it up into work units and send it out to N machines. Im sure we could put together significantly more computing power then deep blue, it would just be a matter of decding the work units and algorithms to use as I recall the search space come the midgame is too large to be searched even with all the computing power on earth.
Of course you can turn off your radio if you dont like what you hear. I mean that you are a captive audience once you are tuned into a station in the respect that you do not have control of the content.
:)
My point was that on the internet YOU are the primary factor in what you choose to see.
Chris
Yeah yeah, the thread is long dead. I still felt compelled to respond.
Frankly, I think any combination of symbols allowed by the DNS protocol should be legitamate.
The semantics of those symbols is irrevalent.
Unlike the radio where you are a captive audience
on the internet you have to dileberately choose
to go somewhere. True there are exceptions such
as automatic redirects but generally speaking no one is forcing you to go anywhere.
If you find it offensive, simply dont go there.
-N
Just for informational purposes im quickly going to run thru the major methods of getting a DSL connection. I imagine the same applies for cable.
:)
:P)
When you power up your DSL modem the first thing that happens after the power on test is it attempts to sync with a line card in the captive office. Depending on what kind of system you are on this could be at anywhere from 100kbps to 9Mbps and down. Typically up tends to be significantly less then down (usually in the 320kbps to 1.5Mbit range) but it does not have to be.
There are several encapsulation methods used to get packets over the DSL wire all of them revolving around ATM.
The end to end connection typically looks something like this:
PC --Ethernet-> Modem --DSL-> LineCard --ATM-> ATM Switch/Router --Whatever-> Internet
From there it your data can bounce around the net
being re-encapsulated until it eventually becomes ethernet again.
Typical encapsulation methods over DSL are:
RFC 1483 Ethernet over ATM (most common)
RFC 1577 Classical IP over ATM
RFC 2364 PPP over ATM
1483 encapsulation involves setting up a bridge group on your router. A bridge group is essentially a software hub that sucks in packets from multiple connections and forwards them along to wherever they need to go.
If you have a setup like this, when you look in your arp cache you should only ever see the (fictional) MAC address of your bridge group.
(and your modems MAC assuming its not a dumb bridge either)
1577 isnt used much in the real world as it requires more effort to setup and maintain.
2364 is becoming more prevalant, especially a nasty variant called PPP over Ethernet which is like a combo of PPP over ATM and 1483 bridging.
Just so you can see all the work thats going on
here are the quick protocol stacks for the data encapsulation methods before the data ever hits the phone wire. (pretty complicated
1483: TCP/IP->802.3->RFC 1483->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
1577: TCP/IP->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
2364: TCP/IP->PPP->RFC 2364->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
PPP over Ethernet: TCP/IP->PPPOE->802.3->RFC 1483->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
Anyhow, hope this was useful.
Oh yes, one last note about speeds. While most DSL available today sits in the 1Mbit range or so
within a year or so high speed DSL will start to roll out offering equal or better bandwidth compared to cable (i.e up to full 10Mbit down and 1.5Mbit+ up)
Enjoy the competition, its good for you the end user.
-N
While I generally dont like saying bad things about websites, macosrumors will often make up complete crap. For instance the Sawtooth article from a bit back, notice there are no pictures?
No real benchmarks? Vague assertions?
quote:
>"We have not yet been able to gather exact >MacBench numbers because of benchmark performance
> differences between various seeded Sawtooths, >but it didn't take much of these sorts of >experiences with
> the beautiful machine to realize what a speed >demon it is shaping up to be. "
Yes, thats because you dont have one!
From todays page:
>In a related note, we were surprised to hear from >several third party developers that not only
> had they succesfully used prototype >multiple-G4 upgrade boards on Beige and Blue G3s.
Uhhh yeah, apple is just handing those SMP g4 prototype upgrades out left and right. And they all leak info to you of course.
If you want real mac news sites try macintouch.com
or macnn.com or maccentral.com.
It just upsets me to see people actually believing some of the crud that appears on that site.
-N
Well, in the tech specs it says it uses a DVI
:)) and yes, you will need a special video card (special ATI rage 128 I assume since thats what is in the G4 boxes) to use this monitor.
(Digital Visual Interface) 24 pin connector
with TMDS. (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling)
So no, you cant hook it up to your standard 15-pin D-SUB connector (or 3/5 BNC if yer real cool
This is pretty much the same as the SGI flat panel where you could only use the number 9 video card that came with the panel to drive it.
-N
Actually if you post a message of over a certain length (i think its 10000 characters) it is automagically given +1 to its score. So its probably not someone just being stupid with moderator points but rather someone taking advantage of this fact to bore the general public and make moderators waste points. -N
This is pretty acurate. I used to be a teaching
:))
assistant for first year computer courses.
Women are outrageously nice to you when they need explanations for simple computer stuff.
True I was getting payed to help people but I would go to extremes like meeting them on my own time to tutor them for free in the hopes that I might be able to actually engage them in conversation after I had explained the 16 op assembly language the course used.
(yes yes, this->desperate == TRUE, now shut up about it already
Anyhow, cutting to the chase it didnt work very well. Really all I wanted was conversation but I guess they just saw me as a facilitator of a good mark.
I guess perhaps im just bitter. I probably smell funny too.
Anyhow quick summary: Hes right dont go down this road it leads nowhere.
-N
Is there any offical word on when SMP support will be included in the linux builds? I can understand
that its probably something that no doubt requires
some linux specific code and thus is probably
sort of backburnerish after getting most of the
win32 issues sorted out but still painful to see
SMP support for NT and not linux.
-N
I saw a screening of the movie last night.
:O) from which they develop potty mouth. The rest of the movie involves the parents of sp lead by Kyles mom
:)) As I said the movie swings alot between really great and really awful, most of the awful bits are stupid tasteless dialog (dont get me wrong I like stupid tasteless dialog, but it gets a bit tried after the first 15 minutes) parts.
:)
For those of you who are curious it varies from
completely hilarious to completely awful. And yes
the NC-17 rating is completely deserved, if not for the continous stream of bad language (more then a Dennis Leary/Andrew Dice Clay combo special) then for many, many downright nasty allusions/jokes (most of the sexual).
Now onto the movie itself.
Its actually a musical.
The plot more or less runs like: Kids go see new Terrance and Philip movie (its a foreign film from Canada doncha know?) which contains profuse amouts of bad language (one whole musical number is compesed almost entirely of swearing
attempting to cure/rescue thier children from this
awful affliction.
The movie is at its best during the musical numbers which are grand in the finest broadway/classical tradition. (Cartmans solo song about Kyles mother is particularly memorable)
The jokes are extremely crude and crass, (and I mean REALLY crude and crass) anyone who has not
seen an episode of southpark in thier lives might be offended to the point where they might walk out if they have strong religious/moral views. Parents be warned, be sure to explain to your kids the difference between satire (the movie) and blind repetition lest you risk your kids coming down with the same problems the sp kids have. (trust me the tunes are pretty catchy, and not a one is something you want to be singing out loud in public
Anyhow, overall impression was that it was a decently entertaining movie. Bad dialog, great musical numbers, average (crude) jokes and one truly great scene involving Bill Gates.
I can imagine there wont be much of a middle ground for reviews on this movie, you will either like it, or absolutely detest it.
Having said that I suggest you go see the movie and find out which category you are in!
Well, the local cable modem provider :)
(videon) has a different solution. A fixed upload/download quota.
For a standard account you are limited to 10GB down and 1GB up of data. If you exceed these values you get charged $$$. (especially for the upload one, its like $10/100MB) It is very effective in deterring people from running bandwidth sucking servers. They have no problem with you running a server as long as it doesent exceed the quota. In case you think these numbers are small, only 1% of subscribers even do more then 5GB down/month. Im not sure about the upload
stats, probably a bit tighter since 1GB isnt a walloping amount, fine for online gaming and sending small stuff around but bad if you happen to be an iso warez courier. Its a shame that they will be merging with @home in sept. Oh well, time to get xDSL.
A bit more technical explanation cause I have :)
:P
nothing better to do:
Once the SS7 traffic gets too heavy (i.e massive
ISDN-UP requests from incoming calls) the switch
will go into congestion mode and start dropping
requests. ISDN-UP (which contains the call
setup/takedown stuff) is among the first stuff
to go. I think SCCP (which is the 800 stuff) is
pretty low priority as well. There are several
congenstion levels which ramp up what gets dropped.
You can also get a call nixed if the switch
is out of trunks to carry it, but in that case
you usually get a recorded message.
Lastly, I dont think the switch will crash.
Calls not getting through, sure. Switch dead,
requires reboot, no.
Ah, for the days of working as a Nortel intern.
-N
I just downloaded the win32 version and tried it out as I was having sporadic crashes with the
:))
linux version.
I have this to say:
win32 mouse is muuuuch smoother (anyone know
how to get it that smooth in linux)
win32 version looks like CRAP on the same
card (voodoo2). the rendering, especially the
textures and smoke fromt the rockets looks
absolutely awful. im not sure if its a driver
thing or what but the linux version looks 5x
better. (of course the g200 in windows looked
hella better then the voodoo2 in linux but at
barely half the speed
Anyone got ideas on either of these?
-N