I pay around $140 NZ - that's about $70 US, for two 256k down 128k up cable connections that each have a 5gig limit/month before paying 20cNZ (10c US) for each meg thereafter.
I have to have two connections because the companies who provide it (Paradise and Saturn) won't sell any sort of increased bandwidth option for thier accounts.
On the bright side, they do give you a static IP, don't mind you running servers, and specifically allow you to share you NAT your connection to multiple machines. They (Paradise) also run a few "free traffic" servers for gaming, shoutcast relays, usenet etc.
The way I see it this is just a kludge, a band aid slapped across the problem so it won't cause so much pain.
The real problem is not how to deal with the heat, but how to stop producing all that heat in the first place.
And the answer to that is to get away from this whole notion that to get something into space you have to ignite a whole load of chemicals in the general direction of the ground to get pushed in the general direction of space.
Only when the "rocket" idea is re-evaluated and ultimatly ditched can we get affordable, reusable and efficient space vehicles. It wasn't really a good idea to start with - now it's just really bad, if people had realised that from the start we could already be using something like
Magnetic Lauches
.
Humans and other animals routinely live in environments where the temperature is well below 0C (freezing), Antarctica, Alaska, Siberia, Iceland, Canada...
Oh, unless you mean body temperature less than freezing, in which case, yes, that's pretty _cool_:-).
If you have X running, not necessarily on your firewall (you just use fwbuilder to "compile" a script and run the script on the firewall box) then I can heartily recommend fwbuilder.
It's a totally object based graphical tool for building a firewall. You can just drag and drop "services" (ports) to create port mappings, drap and drop machines, other firewalls, networks, etc to determin who gets to do what.
Has a nice little druid in it to get you a working setup that you can modify to better suit your needs.
I have never had much luck using Gnutella, the main problem seems to be the lack of parallel download, if you have 20 users all with the same file you want, it is dismally painful to have to pick one.
Fasttrack on the other hand (Kazaa has a linux client that is IMHO better than the bloated windows offering) works very well in this regard. Choose a file and the client download it in parallel from as many clients as it can, makes for much quicker transfer.
Oh, right... Because they want to make it closed, sell it back to me with a restrictive EULA and then sue me under the DMCA for breaking the copy protection they put on it because I wanted to get at what was originaly public-funded research.
If the companies were just taing the BSD licensed code verbatim, closing it and selling it off as thier own software then I could see your point. But that is not necessarily what is happening, companies are taking the BSD licensed source, making significant additions or modifications, then closing it and selling it. This is fine IMHO - you can stil get at your publicly funded code - because the original BSD code is still available, and the company can reap the rewards of making thier significant changes to the code by closing thier modified source and selling it - not beign forced to have it open for the world - and thier competitors to see how they made the code to xyz without huge performance penalties.
Take for example Lindows.com, now they are just vapor at the moment I think, but say in a few months the release some fantastic thing that will run all your windows software, under linux - better than wine does but based on wine. Shouldn't they be able to reap rewards for the amount of work they did to make the improvements by closing the source and selling it ??
Ahh replying to myself - I mis-read my friends stats. Not an hour of downtime, but 5 connection drops in the last 20 hours or so. Which if you ask me is quite excessive.
Damn, as good ol' Fred Dagg would say, you don't know how lucky you are ! Here in New Zealand we only have one cable supplier, infact, only avery small portion of the country has cable, the supplier is in the process of the roll out now.
Anyway, I am lucky enough to have cable in my street, and through that cable I get my whizzy fast internet connection.
But the company's accounts are so lame-o that I only get 256kbps down, 128kbps (that's a small b, bits not bytes) up, only 5g of traffic/month, no option to increase the traffic.
Because of the crusty 5g/month I have two installs, that's 2 cable modems, 2 accounts, 2 bills etc to give me an effective 10g a month, which I am really pushing. For more than $50US/month.
If I go over the 5g on either account it's gonna cost me about $0.10US PER MEG for international (outside of NZ, which is pretty much everything) traffic.
I'd really like to run ftp server etc to share divx episodes of scifi shows. But at that I can not anywhere near afford it ! It's as much as I can do to restrit my downloading to 10g/month.
On top of all that the connection is flakey as hell, a friend has started logging downtime, he started this morning, and is already up to about an hour ! I'm gonna do the same so we can compare.
So to all you whingers who think that you should be getting fast upload, fast download, flat rate broadband for your $50US/month, spare a thought for we poor souls in countries where that is a mere pipe-dream.
Reminds me of noonoo (sp?) from telly tubbies
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 1
This thing reminds me of the vacuum cleaner from that Telly Tubbies pre-schooler show.
I can see it being really unstable, and extremely expensive to fix when you inevitably knock it over.
They wrote the software and are giving it away to you.
There is no law that says they must be all sweetness and light to users who give them no thanks half the time, no help almost all the time, and no money all the time.
They wrote the software, it is a priveledge they gant you to be able to use the software they put so much time into. Be thankful you get that priveledge, but don't expect the be waited on hand and foot.
I think most of the problem with VOD is bandwidth, or more to the point the lack of it - imagine if everybody on the cable network wanted to watch a movie at the same time - pandemonium:-)
Anyway. My idea is to take the technology of a digital video recorder, TiVO, ReplayTV, whatever. Some time before you want to watch the thing, say night before, day before, week before, perhaps you are given a list of new VOD's each week and select what you might want to watch. Your selection is sent off to the providor, who places your requested movie in an outbound queue if it's not already there, meanwhile your DVR waits around watching for your selection to come off the queue channel, when it sees it it grabs it down. Then when you decide to actually watch it your DVR sends a message to the providor to say "bill this client for this movie" and starts a 24hr clock ticking down that you have access to the movie for. If you try to watch the movie again after 24 hrs it just asks if you want to hire it again.
It's not quite VOD but it's pretty close. Of course it opens it up to the hackers I guess - you could concievably get movies out of the hard drive without sending the "bill me" message.
Off topic I know, but I'm in an argumentative mood:-)
And yes, I've got pretty high moral standards and do think pushing such standards on people is called for some of the time (like Osama - he needs morals pushed all the way up his nose).
You have pretty high christian moral standards, that's fine. But you see the problem is, Osama is Islamic, and has really high islamic moral standards. By your reasoning, if you may push your standards up Osama's nose, then he should be perfectly entititled to push his standards up your nose.
Not everbody has the same morals as you, not everybody believes the same things as you. I am definatly not christian (I'm very much atheist), I won't push my ideas on you, I wouldn't want you to push yours on me.
The same thing applies to these people (ok getting closer to on topic now:-)) who think a little portrayed violence will be the ruin of thier kids (ignoring the fact that kids will make guns out of clothes pegs to play with). They are entitiled to believe what they believe without being ridiculed for it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying if you believe murdering people is OK we shouldn't stop you from doing it. The fact of the matter is that it is against the law, if you choose to live in a land with such a law you are choosing to abide by that law (if you don't, you are breaking your intrinsic agreement) (Socrates said something to those effects a couple thousand years ago IIRC).
Oh man that's wierd. I was thinking about using a blowtorch (small butane one) to defrost my freezer just the other day.
Not only that but I live in New Zealand and by the looks of the URL so does that guy. Must be good-ol kiwi ingenuity again.
I think I'll end up using a hair dryer (if I can be stuffed hauling the freeze outside) cause there's some damn think ice in it, I reckon I have about 70% of the (tall upright) freezer as solid ice.
I't s a Dutch court making the order..
on
Kazaa to be shut down?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For those who didn't read the artikle, it's a Dutch court who ordered the Dutch company to cease & desist.
More to the point, Kazaa (the file sharing system) and FastTrack (the network (and libraries for accessing it)) are one and the same, so this should also affect Morpehus and Grokster (not to mention the buggy linux Kazaa client) !
This is bad bad news. Quick to the Kazaa before it goes away !
Here in New Zealand I have seen bits and pieces of our "Weakest Link" (IMHO, "The Weakest Link" is the Weakest Link, but then I think Survivor type shows are crap too) and our totals were miniscule compared to those, the couple of endings I saw had _grand-totals_ of about $5000 NZ as I remember which is about $2500 US. Perhaps that is why it is so crap here.
The only way that we will ever be able to experience true virtual reality in a totally immersive, convincing, for all intents and purposes real, way is to hook the machine running the VR program directly into our brain.
Stimulating our senses directly, and intercepting the commands our brain sends to our body to do stuff (eg right foot forward).
Not to mention that "the brain has infinite space" is simply not true. The brain is a finite collection of neurons. There is only so much space in any one person's head. Would you expect, say, a mouse to be able (physically) remember the entire works of shakespeare ?
No of course not, and likewise a single human could never remember the entire collection of literature ever written in the history of humans, the brain just isn't big enough.
. Acceptable to test animals, but not to humans and human babies. Now would be a good time for a film to be made detailing the hazards of cloning.
What makes it acceptable to test on animals ? If we are so bold as to test anything on other species then why should we not also test these things on our own species, why sacrifice them for us ? (Hunter -> Hunted and all that.)
Cloning is a good thing, we can grow replacement organic parts for our own bodies without the problems of rejection, this how many lives that could save, and how many lives that could better !
And fer crying out loud, it's not like a fully grown adult is gonna pop-out of the "clone-o-matic", even in the unlilkely event that clonign is used to make a fully _genetic_ copy of somebody, they will still be totally an individual. And the likelyhood of ever bringing a cloned fetus to term is so small as to not be worth worrying about at this time.
I had this. At the same time I also had a "Voice Recognition" unit that plugged into the user port as I remember. Anyway, I wrote a program in the speech system (it was pretty much basic with a "SAY" command IIRC) that interacted with the voice recognition system so I could have a kinda disjointed "conversation" with the old C64.
Problem was the voice recognition wasn't that great, and I usually ened up shouting at the unit in some wierd accented voice trying to get it to recognise "Yes" instead of "James" or soemthing like that.
MySQL has limitations, the absence of sub-selects for one. Postgres is apparently not very good at large applications, requiring "vacuming" often, which is a slow and exclusive process I believe.
These may have influenced thier decision.
Also with Oracle you get that on phone support should anything go bump in the night.
Dick Smith was an electronics entrepeneur, started a chain of electronics stores in Australia, which branched out into New Zealand and now has many many stores in both countries. Took over NZ's own David Reid electronics as well. Think Radio Shack for the south pacific region.
VCR's can NOT do this... the way I see it at least.
What they seem to have a patent on is the ability to pause live-tv, then continue playing it later, possibly while the live-tv is still live - i.e time shifting the TV within the period that the TV is still playing.
VCR's are limited to pausing the TV, and playing the TV back AFTER the completion of the TV program (i.e substitute "pause" for "press record" and "continue play" by "press stop, press play").
I'm not saying wether the patent is justified or not (that probably depends wether this is a trivial idea or not, grey area I suppose), just that VCR's don't infringe on the patent and are not evidence of prior art.
I think you'll find that while the store owners have bought the disks, they have not accepted the license for them and so it is legal for them to sell you the disks.
If you don't accept the license (by opening the package generally), you could sell it on legally too.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to have two connections because the companies who provide it (Paradise and Saturn) won't sell any sort of increased bandwidth option for thier accounts.
On the bright side, they do give you a static IP, don't mind you running servers, and specifically allow you to share you NAT your connection to multiple machines. They (Paradise) also run a few "free traffic" servers for gaming, shoutcast relays, usenet etc.
The real problem is not how to deal with the heat, but how to stop producing all that heat in the first place.
And the answer to that is to get away from this whole notion that to get something into space you have to ignite a whole load of chemicals in the general direction of the ground to get pushed in the general direction of space.
Only when the "rocket" idea is re-evaluated and ultimatly ditched can we get affordable, reusable and efficient space vehicles. It wasn't really a good idea to start with - now it's just really bad, if people had realised that from the start we could already be using something like Magnetic Lauches .
Oh, unless you mean body temperature less than freezing, in which case, yes, that's pretty _cool_ :-).
I saw a web interview about the sparrow once (wish I coudl remember where), man that thing looks cool. They also make other electric cars...
It's a totally object based graphical tool for building a firewall. You can just drag and drop "services" (ports) to create port mappings, drap and drop machines, other firewalls, networks, etc to determin who gets to do what.
Has a nice little druid in it to get you a working setup that you can modify to better suit your needs.
Really. Check it out.
Mod that man up.
I have never had much luck using Gnutella, the main problem seems to be the lack of parallel download, if you have 20 users all with the same file you want, it is dismally painful to have to pick one.
Fasttrack on the other hand (Kazaa has a linux client that is IMHO better than the bloated windows offering) works very well in this regard. Choose a file and the client download it in parallel from as many clients as it can, makes for much quicker transfer.
If the companies were just taing the BSD licensed code verbatim, closing it and selling it off as thier own software then I could see your point. But that is not necessarily what is happening, companies are taking the BSD licensed source, making significant additions or modifications, then closing it and selling it. This is fine IMHO - you can stil get at your publicly funded code - because the original BSD code is still available, and the company can reap the rewards of making thier significant changes to the code by closing thier modified source and selling it - not beign forced to have it open for the world - and thier competitors to see how they made the code to xyz without huge performance penalties.
Take for example Lindows.com, now they are just vapor at the moment I think, but say in a few months the release some fantastic thing that will run all your windows software, under linux - better than wine does but based on wine. Shouldn't they be able to reap rewards for the amount of work they did to make the improvements by closing the source and selling it ??
Ahh replying to myself - I mis-read my friends stats. Not an hour of downtime, but 5 connection drops in the last 20 hours or so. Which if you ask me is quite excessive.
Damn, as good ol' Fred Dagg would say, you don't know how lucky you are ! Here in New Zealand we only have one cable supplier, infact, only avery small portion of the country has cable, the supplier is in the process of the roll out now.
Anyway, I am lucky enough to have cable in my street, and through that cable I get my whizzy fast internet connection.
But the company's accounts are so lame-o that I only get 256kbps down, 128kbps (that's a small b, bits not bytes) up, only 5g of traffic/month, no option to increase the traffic.
Because of the crusty 5g/month I have two installs, that's 2 cable modems, 2 accounts, 2 bills etc to give me an effective 10g a month, which I am really pushing. For more than $50US/month.
If I go over the 5g on either account it's gonna cost me about $0.10US PER MEG for international (outside of NZ, which is pretty much everything) traffic.
I'd really like to run ftp server etc to share divx episodes of scifi shows. But at that I can not anywhere near afford it ! It's as much as I can do to restrit my downloading to 10g/month.
On top of all that the connection is flakey as hell, a friend has started logging downtime, he started this morning, and is already up to about an hour ! I'm gonna do the same so we can compare.
So to all you whingers who think that you should be getting fast upload, fast download, flat rate broadband for your $50US/month, spare a thought for we poor souls in countries where that is a mere pipe-dream.
This thing reminds me of the vacuum cleaner from that Telly Tubbies pre-schooler show.
I can see it being really unstable, and extremely expensive to fix when you inevitably knock it over.
They wrote the software and are giving it away to you.
There is no law that says they must be all sweetness and light to users who give them no thanks half the time, no help almost all the time, and no money all the time.
They wrote the software, it is a priveledge they gant you to be able to use the software they put so much time into. Be thankful you get that priveledge, but don't expect the be waited on hand and foot.
I think most of the problem with VOD is bandwidth, or more to the point the lack of it - imagine if everybody on the cable network wanted to watch a movie at the same time - pandemonium :-)
Anyway. My idea is to take the technology of a digital video recorder, TiVO, ReplayTV, whatever. Some time before you want to watch the thing, say night before, day before, week before, perhaps you are given a list of new VOD's each week and select what you might want to watch. Your selection is sent off to the providor, who places your requested movie in an outbound queue if it's not already there, meanwhile your DVR waits around watching for your selection to come off the queue channel, when it sees it it grabs it down. Then when you decide to actually watch it your DVR sends a message to the providor to say "bill this client for this movie" and starts a 24hr clock ticking down that you have access to the movie for. If you try to watch the movie again after 24 hrs it just asks if you want to hire it again.
It's not quite VOD but it's pretty close. Of course it opens it up to the hackers I guess - you could concievably get movies out of the hard drive without sending the "bill me" message.
Link in the article is broken, this is the fixed one (hmm, what's this it says down here, could it be "Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!")...
You have pretty high christian moral standards, that's fine. But you see the problem is, Osama is Islamic, and has really high islamic moral standards. By your reasoning, if you may push your standards up Osama's nose, then he should be perfectly entititled to push his standards up your nose.
Not everbody has the same morals as you, not everybody believes the same things as you. I am definatly not christian (I'm very much atheist), I won't push my ideas on you, I wouldn't want you to push yours on me.
The same thing applies to these people (ok getting closer to on topic now
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying if you believe murdering people is OK we shouldn't stop you from doing it. The fact of the matter is that it is against the law, if you choose to live in a land with such a law you are choosing to abide by that law (if you don't, you are breaking your intrinsic agreement) (Socrates said something to those effects a couple thousand years ago IIRC).
Oh man that's wierd. I was thinking about using a blowtorch (small butane one) to defrost my freezer just the other day.
Not only that but I live in New Zealand and by the looks of the URL so does that guy. Must be good-ol kiwi ingenuity again.
I think I'll end up using a hair dryer (if I can be stuffed hauling the freeze outside) cause there's some damn think ice in it, I reckon I have about 70% of the (tall upright) freezer as solid ice.
For those who didn't read the artikle, it's a Dutch court who ordered the Dutch company to cease & desist.
More to the point, Kazaa (the file sharing system) and FastTrack (the network (and libraries for accessing it)) are one and the same, so this should also affect Morpehus and Grokster (not to mention the buggy linux Kazaa client) !
This is bad bad news. Quick to the Kazaa before it goes away !
That's some serious moula there.
Here in New Zealand I have seen bits and pieces of our "Weakest Link" (IMHO, "The Weakest Link" is the Weakest Link, but then I think Survivor type shows are crap too) and our totals were miniscule compared to those, the couple of endings I saw had _grand-totals_ of about $5000 NZ as I remember which is about $2500 US. Perhaps that is why it is so crap here.
That and the host is a moron.
Think Virtual Reality.
The only way that we will ever be able to experience true virtual reality in a totally immersive, convincing, for all intents and purposes real, way is to hook the machine running the VR program directly into our brain.
Stimulating our senses directly, and intercepting the commands our brain sends to our body to do stuff (eg right foot forward).
Not to mention that "the brain has infinite space" is simply not true. The brain is a finite collection of neurons. There is only so much space in any one person's head. Would you expect, say, a mouse to be able (physically) remember the entire works of shakespeare ?
No of course not, and likewise a single human could never remember the entire collection of literature ever written in the history of humans, the brain just isn't big enough.
What makes it acceptable to test on animals ? If we are so bold as to test anything on other species then why should we not also test these things on our own species, why sacrifice them for us ? (Hunter -> Hunted and all that.)
Cloning is a good thing, we can grow replacement organic parts for our own bodies without the problems of rejection, this how many lives that could save, and how many lives that could better !
And fer crying out loud, it's not like a fully grown adult is gonna pop-out of the "clone-o-matic", even in the unlilkely event that clonign is used to make a fully _genetic_ copy of somebody, they will still be totally an individual. And the likelyhood of ever bringing a cloned fetus to term is so small as to not be worth worrying about at this time.
I had this. At the same time I also had a "Voice Recognition" unit that plugged into the user port as I remember. Anyway, I wrote a program in the speech system (it was pretty much basic with a "SAY" command IIRC) that interacted with the voice recognition system so I could have a kinda disjointed "conversation" with the old C64.
Problem was the voice recognition wasn't that great, and I usually ened up shouting at the unit in some wierd accented voice trying to get it to recognise "Yes" instead of "James" or soemthing like that.
Ah, good times, good times.
MySQL has limitations, the absence of sub-selects for one. Postgres is apparently not very good at large applications, requiring "vacuming" often, which is a slow and exclusive process I believe.
These may have influenced thier decision.
Also with Oracle you get that on phone support should anything go bump in the night.
Dick Smith was an electronics entrepeneur, started a chain of electronics stores in Australia, which branched out into New Zealand and now has many many stores in both countries. Took over NZ's own David Reid electronics as well. Think Radio Shack for the south pacific region.
New Zealand Online Branch : http://www.dse.co.nz/
Australian Online Branch : http://www.dse.com.au/
Try living in any country outside of North America, most out TV shows have actors with American accents !
VCR's can NOT do this... the way I see it at least.
What they seem to have a patent on is the ability to pause live-tv, then continue playing it later, possibly while the live-tv is still live - i.e time shifting the TV within the period that the TV is still playing.
VCR's are limited to pausing the TV, and playing the TV back AFTER the completion of the TV program (i.e substitute "pause" for "press record" and "continue play" by "press stop, press play").
I'm not saying wether the patent is justified or not (that probably depends wether this is a trivial idea or not, grey area I suppose), just that VCR's don't infringe on the patent and are not evidence of prior art.
I think you'll find that while the store owners have bought the disks, they have not accepted the license for them and so it is legal for them to sell you the disks.
If you don't accept the license (by opening the package generally), you could sell it on legally too.
Of course, IANAL.