it's not *just* line of sight. It gets tricker than simply being able to see someone flash a mirror at you from a long way away.
after having problems with an Aironet bridge, the company i work for finally got ahold of someone who knew what he was doing, who explained the physics and showed us the math to the effect that at 2.4 ghz we needed a 40 foot wide corridor from end to end, over a 7 mile span. Which simply wasn't happening. anything in the way - like a branch of a tree, or a telephone pole, will send the signals scattering.
we installed a 23ghz, licensed frequency WinNet bridge (unfortunate name, great hardware) that needs more like a 12 foot corridor, which is working perfectly.
however, neither of these are exactly low-cost solutions.
Yeah, I'm one of those guys who thinks it'd be Really Cool to have one less cable coming out of the side of his notebook. And I'd like to be able to take the notebook out in the yard, etc.
The Aviator cards sound like a fantastic deal, there's just one thing i wonder about.
How interoperable is this kinda thing? I ask, because my employer has a Lucent WaveLan Bronze bridge set up at work, and it would be Really Slick if i could carry my notebook to work, change the SSID, and hook up there as well.
I like the Lucent gear, sure, but sheesh it's expensive. I really like the price of the Webgear setup, but, are they doomed to be a closed loop? Will i have to buy another card to set up a bridge at work to use the same wireless setup there?
The only question i want to have answered is: When will FreeDOS acheive the level of compatibility that MS-DOS and PC-DOS acheived in the early nineties?
Recently I had a problem. I had an IBM Thinkpad 500 (486slc2-50, 12 megs ram, 540 meg hd) that had a few bad sectors on the hard disk.
I didn't have any Linux floppies with mkdosfs, and MS-DOS format was bailing when it hit them.
Too cheap to buy a new hard drive, and with lots of time on my hands (down with the flu), I decided that this was unacceptable, and that there must be some way to format around them.
Obviously, the first option is to try one of the free (or free-ish) DOSes.
I downloaded both FreeDOS and DR-DOS, made floppies.
Now, what was disappointing was that the TP500, an admittedly weak notebook, can run MS-DOS, PC-DOS (obviously, shipped with it), any version of OS/2, Win95, Win98 (slowly), and Linux without any problems (other than crappy APM support in Win32) - both FreeDOS and DR-DOS completely refused to boot on it.
I ended up digging out my old OS/2 Warp 4 maintenence disks and using OS/2's format -l2, which worked fine.
I later read that FreeDOS will choke and die on hard drives larger than 528 megs. Also possibly (or maybe quite likely) corrupt the partition table as it dies.
And that this has been a known problem for quite some time now.
I don't think DR-DOS suffers from the same problem, since I've used it on systems with hard drives larger than 528 megs. Obviously there's some sort of deeper weirdness going on, but i can't imagine what.
Granted, my specific problem may be related to the Thinkpad being oddly constructed. Some of these have BIOSs that don't report hard drive geometry, etc, tho this isn't one of them.
But the hard drive limitation sticks out like a sore thumb.
All I can say is, What's the deal?? Aren't there technical docs, even magazine articles about 10 years old that detail how Microsoft and IBM got around those sorts of limitations? I remember lengthy discussions about int13h, etc, adnausium in Byte, PC Mag, etc.
Is it a lack of time? developer apathy? What's the excuse? It seems like these are problems that have been overcome before, that are probably documented somewhere.
I guess I've said what i had to say. Please don't think I'm trying to be a jerk about this.
Why not circumvent backward compatibility by using a configuration template that can change with each revision of your application?
So you tweak the logic of your config options, the template file would reflect the change.
Essentially what you'd have, I guess, is a programming language for the configuration system.
But i do also agree that linuxconf is running full-steam in the wrong direction, and needs to be completely re-thought. In many instances it does things in entirely the wrong way. See the samba module for insight.
USB is not in the same class as SCSI. Heck, in terms of i/o throughput, USB is not in the same class as IDE.
Don't get me wrong, USB is great for a lot of things. I wish every digital camera had a USB port, etc. For moving relatively small chunks of data (50 megs or less), USB is a great way to do things.
But sheesh, that's 12 mega *BITS*, and it's a *SERIAL* interface. Divide by eight, then account for bus latency. Then compare it to the ATA-1 speed limitations. Yeah, a hard drive on USB would be soooo cool.
Firewire is interesting, arguably in the same class as some forms of scsi, especially in regards to price.
Yes, SCSI is expensive compared to IDE, from an end-user point of view.
But the host isn't anywhere near that pricy. Well, it doesn't have to be.
Symbios (NCR) scsi host adapter ICs are actually pretty good stuff. HP, IBM, Compaq, AMI, all use them on their RAID controllers.
Sure, you could spend $200 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, but you could also spend $150 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, and only be almost as foolish.
Adaptec has impeccable marketing, as scsi vendors go. Their products, however, are middle of the road.
SIIG, Initio, the performance isn't horrible but the quality is questionable. The pricing is competitive, but not fantastic.
BusLogic/Mylex, may be a notch above Initio/SIIG due merely for the fact that wars rage over whether or not BusLogic/Mylex cards are a lot better.
but Symbios, man, pound for pound, if budget is a concern, is the only way to go.
I'm typing this now on a machine sporting a Symbios SYM83c875 ultra-wide scsi host. Cost: $47.
And it even feels faster than the same drive did when it was on an Adaptec AIC7880 (aka 2940UW)
The drives, yes, they are more expensive, but keep an eye out for SCA drives and 80-64 pin adapters. Ultra/Wide scsi is quickly falling by the wayside in RAID arrays due to the lowering cost of LVD, and SCA interfaced UW drives are selling quite cheap at the surplus joints. I'm talking $345 for 18 gig 7200rpm IBM UltraStar.
Yeah, it's more expensive than IDE, but it's always been worth it in my experience.
Lets fire up your IDE system and watch you burn a CD on your IDE CD-R while ripping audio tracks off your IDE CD-ROM while encoding MP3 off your IDE harddrive while playing Quake II. I've done this on my dual celeron UW SCSI system more than once, system didn't even break a sweat.
What about technologies like SSA, that are used inside of those massive storage arrays?
I've seen storage arrays that used SSA internally and Fiber Channel externally, big things the size of an outhouse. near-terabyte to multi-terabyte stuff.
I don't think we've actually seen a dearth of innovation in browser software.
From where i sit, stuff like Flash only became really prevalant in this last year, and it's been a long time since anyone made any money off a browser.
Yeah, but it costs twice as much as the Apex unit.
If someone carries the Apex locally here in Utah at the same kinds of prices I've been hearing about, I'll buy two, and give mom a nice mother's day present. (she'll even appriciate the geek value)
I'm confused by katz's bit about stock analysts - I don't follow the market, but i thought the news was that aol and time-warner stock had been going *down* since the announcement.
OLE is a technology that Microsoft licensed from Big Blue. This isn't just a thing Microsoft copied, it's a thing they continue to shell out cash to include in their product.
DHCP is an extension of the bootp protocol, which is older than you.
Realtime spell checking was available as a shareware app for OS/2 2.0 well before Office implemented it. It's called Spellguard, and it dates back to before Win95 was released, let alone the versions of Office that implement it. see HERE if you don't believe me. A friend of mine wrote it.
ODBC - don't be silly, it's one more protocol for a concept older than you are.
MacOS and OS/2 both had extensive support for disabled people as far back as 1993.
Microsoft's foreign language support used to be pretty impressive, they've cut back quite a bit lately. I couldn't tell you if other OSs did a better job, I don't really know, but it's hardly an innovation - their implementation has generally be exceedingly buggy. Inbetween jobs i Y2K tested Win95 in several foreign languages, so i know first hand.
And their Unicode support is less than acceptable. I have a friend who speaks japanese and wanted to read a.jp news site, took him weeks to convince Win98 to let him do it.
As for docking menus and toolbars, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Didn't the edit window of SimCity have a docking toolbar? That was out before *Windows* man.
It's an interesting idea, and experimentaiton is good - but you do have to think about the product at the business end of your process - if we printed on round paper a round wordprocessor would make sense.
What's important is to figure out what it is that people would prefer to do, if they'd thought of it, but haven't yet.
I'm surprised theres's been so many posts already without any mention of Rosegarden
When i first started playing around with midi on Linux, the first program i found was Jazz++. It's got plenty of features if you like editing music on what looks and feels like a piano roll.
Unfortunately, I've been cursed with the knowledge of how to read music, so the piano roll feels clumsy.
Rosegarden is GPL'd and includes a well developed notation editor, it's own scripting language for the technically inclined, and will even help you print sheet music.
It's known to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, and even OpenVMS. And yes, it's completely free and open source.
Jazz++ does have some nice features, like GS compatibility, but for my purposes it would be incredibly obtuse to use for anything other than final touch-ups to the score.
What i need, and what i suspect most musicians prefer, is a midi sequencer with a notation editor - and there's already a pretty good one out there with a GPL license.
Arguably, remote commerce isn't anywhere near as dangerous as buying dinner at a decent restaurant.
Think about it. You're just handing your actual credit card to someone you've barely met. They may take it across the street and buy a TV for all you know, or they may just decide to keep it.
If ATi supports Linux and Open Source why have they routinely told the Video4Linux developers exactly where they can cram their inquiries about programming specs?
Yeah, they have a free, closed-source app now that lets you watch tv on an all-in-wonder, big deal.
I don't even know why they use that marketing term. Well, I guess i do. Morons are impressed by it i guess.
Lets say you sell popcicles.
Say in april you sold no popcicles at all. Then in may you sold fifty popcicles, and in june you sold 200 popcicles.
The curve of your growth rate would be pretty impressive, regardless of the fact that your sales are chump change.
So, the *Only* thing you could claim is "Well, we've got over 200 times the sales we did 3 months ago"
Which would indeed make you the fastest growing popcicle vendor.
This is much the same way that Windows NT became the "fastest growing server base" - it's real easy to go from none, to 500k, to 1 million installed. a LOT easier than it is to go from 10 million to 20 million installed. Even if it did take them almost 3 years to reach 1 million installed, including both 3.51 and 4.0.
And if enough people are impressed, you can go file your IPO and live off the stock for the rest of your life.
It's pointless responding to this at this point, but, heck.
Driving at the same speed wasn't the point at all.
The point was, whether the driver trusts their vehicle to respond appropriately to a needed change in the dynamics of traffic flow.
Whether or not the car really won't respond when you slam on the gas to accelerate out of a problem doesn't matter if the driver *believes* that it won't.
"in order to react to changing traffic conditions, yadda yadda yadda, the driver needs to trust that their vehicle will respond appropriately when a change from the norm is required"
Slashdot Mirror
USB is Intel's baby since Intel came up with it in the first place, deployed it in their chipsets first, etc.
Firewire is pretty fast. but it's nowhere near as fast as AGP, nor is it vaguely similar in any way i can think of.
For starters, AGP 4x is a few orders of magnitude wider than firewire, with **MUCH** shorter wire lengths . . .
it's not *just* line of sight. It gets tricker than simply being able to see someone flash a mirror at you from a long way away.
after having problems with an Aironet bridge, the company i work for finally got ahold of someone who knew what he was doing, who explained the physics and showed us the math to the effect that at 2.4 ghz we needed a 40 foot wide corridor from end to end, over a 7 mile span. Which simply wasn't happening. anything in the way - like a branch of a tree, or a telephone pole, will send the signals scattering.
we installed a 23ghz, licensed frequency WinNet bridge (unfortunate name, great hardware) that needs more like a 12 foot corridor, which is working perfectly.
however, neither of these are exactly low-cost solutions.
Yeah, I'm one of those guys who thinks it'd be Really Cool to have one less cable coming out of the side of his notebook. And I'd like to be able to take the notebook out in the yard, etc.
The Aviator cards sound like a fantastic deal, there's just one thing i wonder about.
How interoperable is this kinda thing? I ask, because my employer has a Lucent WaveLan Bronze bridge set up at work, and it would be Really Slick if i could carry my notebook to work, change the SSID, and hook up there as well.
I like the Lucent gear, sure, but sheesh it's expensive. I really like the price of the Webgear setup, but, are they doomed to be a closed loop? Will i have to buy another card to set up a bridge at work to use the same wireless setup there?
Lucent makes these for their WaveLan products, they've been around a real long time. Basically a little unit that accepts a wavelan pcmcia card.
Apple makes a lucent-compatible bridge for their AirPort line, or whatever it's called, that's supposed to just cost a couple hundred.
The only question i want to have answered is: When will FreeDOS acheive the level of compatibility that MS-DOS and PC-DOS acheived in the early nineties?
Recently I had a problem. I had an IBM Thinkpad 500 (486slc2-50, 12 megs ram, 540 meg hd) that had a few bad sectors on the hard disk.
I didn't have any Linux floppies with mkdosfs, and MS-DOS format was bailing when it hit them.
Too cheap to buy a new hard drive, and with lots of time on my hands (down with the flu), I decided that this was unacceptable, and that there must be some way to format around them.
Obviously, the first option is to try one of the free (or free-ish) DOSes.
I downloaded both FreeDOS and DR-DOS, made floppies.
Now, what was disappointing was that the TP500, an admittedly weak notebook, can run MS-DOS, PC-DOS (obviously, shipped with it), any version of OS/2, Win95, Win98 (slowly), and Linux without any problems (other than crappy APM support in Win32) - both FreeDOS and DR-DOS completely refused to boot on it.
I ended up digging out my old OS/2 Warp 4 maintenence disks and using OS/2's format -l2, which worked fine.
I later read that FreeDOS will choke and die on hard drives larger than 528 megs. Also possibly (or maybe quite likely) corrupt the partition table as it dies.
And that this has been a known problem for quite some time now.
I don't think DR-DOS suffers from the same problem, since I've used it on systems with hard drives larger than 528 megs. Obviously there's some sort of deeper weirdness going on, but i can't imagine what.
Granted, my specific problem may be related to the Thinkpad being oddly constructed. Some of these have BIOSs that don't report hard drive geometry, etc, tho this isn't one of them.
But the hard drive limitation sticks out like a sore thumb.
All I can say is, What's the deal?? Aren't there technical docs, even magazine articles about 10 years old that detail how Microsoft and IBM got around those sorts of limitations? I remember lengthy discussions about int13h, etc, adnausium in Byte, PC Mag, etc.
Is it a lack of time? developer apathy? What's the excuse? It seems like these are problems that have been overcome before, that are probably documented somewhere.
I guess I've said what i had to say. Please don't think I'm trying to be a jerk about this.
Why not circumvent backward compatibility by using a configuration template that can change with each revision of your application?
So you tweak the logic of your config options, the template file would reflect the change.
Essentially what you'd have, I guess, is a programming language for the configuration system.
But i do also agree that linuxconf is running full-steam in the wrong direction, and needs to be completely re-thought. In many instances it does things in entirely the wrong way. See the samba module for insight.
USB is not in the same class as SCSI. Heck, in terms of i/o throughput, USB is not in the same class as IDE.
Don't get me wrong, USB is great for a lot of things. I wish every digital camera had a USB port, etc. For moving relatively small chunks of data (50 megs or less), USB is a great way to do things.
But sheesh, that's 12 mega *BITS*, and it's a *SERIAL* interface. Divide by eight, then account for bus latency. Then compare it to the ATA-1 speed limitations. Yeah, a hard drive on USB would be soooo cool.
Firewire is interesting, arguably in the same class as some forms of scsi, especially in regards to price.
That's not entirely true.
Yes, SCSI is expensive compared to IDE, from an end-user point of view.
But the host isn't anywhere near that pricy. Well, it doesn't have to be.
Symbios (NCR) scsi host adapter ICs are actually pretty good stuff. HP, IBM, Compaq, AMI, all use them on their RAID controllers.
Sure, you could spend $200 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, but you could also spend $150 on an Adaptec ultra-wide setup, and only be almost as foolish.
Adaptec has impeccable marketing, as scsi vendors go. Their products, however, are middle of the road.
SIIG, Initio, the performance isn't horrible but the quality is questionable. The pricing is competitive, but not fantastic.
BusLogic/Mylex, may be a notch above Initio/SIIG due merely for the fact that wars rage over whether or not BusLogic/Mylex cards are a lot better.
but Symbios, man, pound for pound, if budget is a concern, is the only way to go.
I'm typing this now on a machine sporting a Symbios SYM83c875 ultra-wide scsi host. Cost: $47.
And it even feels faster than the same drive did when it was on an Adaptec AIC7880 (aka 2940UW)
The drives, yes, they are more expensive, but keep an eye out for SCA drives and 80-64 pin adapters. Ultra/Wide scsi is quickly falling by the wayside in RAID arrays due to the lowering cost of LVD, and SCA interfaced UW drives are selling quite cheap at the surplus joints. I'm talking $345 for 18 gig 7200rpm IBM UltraStar.
Yeah, it's more expensive than IDE, but it's always been worth it in my experience.
Lets fire up your IDE system and watch you burn a CD on your IDE CD-R while ripping audio tracks off your IDE CD-ROM while encoding MP3 off your IDE harddrive while playing Quake II. I've done this on my dual celeron UW SCSI system more than once, system didn't even break a sweat.
What about technologies like SSA, that are used inside of those massive storage arrays?
I've seen storage arrays that used SSA internally and Fiber Channel externally, big things the size of an outhouse. near-terabyte to multi-terabyte stuff.
I don't think we've actually seen a dearth of innovation in browser software.
From where i sit, stuff like Flash only became really prevalant in this last year, and it's been a long time since anyone made any money off a browser.
Yeah, but it costs twice as much as the Apex unit.
If someone carries the Apex locally here in Utah at the same kinds of prices I've been hearing about, I'll buy two, and give mom a nice mother's day present. (she'll even appriciate the geek value)
So, why don't you just blame the usenet cabal?
One of the other things you're missing here is that the UDP is not yet in effect. @home can still pull their heads out and do something about it.
I'm confused by katz's bit about stock analysts - I don't follow the market, but i thought the news was that aol and time-warner stock had been going *down* since the announcement.
I for one doubt their proxy detection will be any better than the dreck you find employed by some irc networks.
The classic WinGate acts like pretty much a socks server, when people are using it as a remote proxy at least.
I indeed run Socks5 on my gateway. And yes, it does bind to the public address. But will it let you proxy through it? No.
Unfortunately, this is still detected as an open proxy.
That conflicts with reports that a lot of region 2 dvd's aren't encrypted.
OLE is a technology that Microsoft licensed from Big Blue. This isn't just a thing Microsoft copied, it's a thing they continue to shell out cash to include in their product.
.jp news site, took him weeks to convince Win98 to let him do it.
DHCP is an extension of the bootp protocol, which is older than you.
Realtime spell checking was available as a shareware app for OS/2 2.0 well before Office implemented it. It's called Spellguard, and it dates back to before Win95 was released, let alone the versions of Office that implement it. see HERE if you don't believe me. A friend of mine wrote it.
ODBC - don't be silly, it's one more protocol for a concept older than you are.
MacOS and OS/2 both had extensive support for disabled people as far back as 1993.
Microsoft's foreign language support used to be pretty impressive, they've cut back quite a bit lately. I couldn't tell you if other OSs did a better job, I don't really know, but it's hardly an innovation - their implementation has generally be exceedingly buggy. Inbetween jobs i Y2K tested Win95 in several foreign languages, so i know first hand.
And their Unicode support is less than acceptable. I have a friend who speaks japanese and wanted to read a
As for docking menus and toolbars, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Didn't the edit window of SimCity have a docking toolbar? That was out before *Windows* man.
Hey, why don't we make the plugins themeable!
No, I'm kidding. Sorry.
It's an interesting idea, and experimentaiton is good - but you do have to think about the product at the business end of your process - if we printed on round paper a round wordprocessor would make sense.
What's important is to figure out what it is that people would prefer to do, if they'd thought of it, but haven't yet.
I'm surprised theres's been so many posts already without any mention of Rosegarden
When i first started playing around with midi on Linux, the first program i found was Jazz++. It's got plenty of features if you like editing music on what looks and feels like a piano roll.
Unfortunately, I've been cursed with the knowledge of how to read music, so the piano roll feels clumsy.
Rosegarden is GPL'd and includes a well developed notation editor, it's own scripting language for the technically inclined, and will even help you print sheet music.
It's known to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, and even OpenVMS. And yes, it's completely free and open source.
Jazz++ does have some nice features, like GS compatibility, but for my purposes it would be incredibly obtuse to use for anything other than final touch-ups to the score.
What i need, and what i suspect most musicians prefer, is a midi sequencer with a notation editor - and there's already a pretty good one out there with a GPL license.
Yes, and they want to use them for PC Telephony. Nothing on that page gives the impression that they even want to use them as modems.
And they don't seem to have much in the way of source code, other than a piece that will take a lucent-based winmodem on or off hook.
They do, however, have the closed-source binary that Lucent wrote to support their pci winmodem under linux.
Arguably, remote commerce isn't anywhere near as dangerous as buying dinner at a decent restaurant.
Think about it. You're just handing your actual credit card to someone you've barely met. They may take it across the street and buy a TV for all you know, or they may just decide to keep it.
If ATi supports Linux and Open Source why have they routinely told the Video4Linux developers exactly where they can cram their inquiries about programming specs?
Yeah, they have a free, closed-source app now that lets you watch tv on an all-in-wonder, big deal.
I don't even know why they use that marketing term. Well, I guess i do. Morons are impressed by it i guess.
Lets say you sell popcicles.
Say in april you sold no popcicles at all. Then in may you sold fifty popcicles, and in june you sold 200 popcicles.
The curve of your growth rate would be pretty impressive, regardless of the fact that your sales are chump change.
So, the *Only* thing you could claim is "Well, we've got over 200 times the sales we did 3 months ago"
Which would indeed make you the fastest growing popcicle vendor.
This is much the same way that Windows NT became the "fastest growing server base" - it's real easy to go from none, to 500k, to 1 million installed. a LOT easier than it is to go from 10 million to 20 million installed. Even if it did take them almost 3 years to reach 1 million installed, including both 3.51 and 4.0.
And if enough people are impressed, you can go file your IPO and live off the stock for the rest of your life.
It's pointless responding to this at this point, but, heck.
Driving at the same speed wasn't the point at all.
The point was, whether the driver trusts their vehicle to respond appropriately to a needed change in the dynamics of traffic flow.
Whether or not the car really won't respond when you slam on the gas to accelerate out of a problem doesn't matter if the driver *believes* that it won't.
Man, I should have used preview . . .
"in order to react to changing traffic conditions, yadda yadda yadda, the driver needs to trust that their vehicle will respond appropriately when a change from the norm is required"