Came here to say this. Currently looking at something 40-50 minutes out from my office during peak hour (30mins outside of peak periods) and will be looking at approximately half my income on repayments. And that's with a 20% downpayment!
I had assumed that California was this impossible-to-buy-a-house place but 20 minute commute and spending 40% of my income on a house?!! Sign me up! This is the stuff dreams are made of.
Nope! I don't see my Canon 1DX Mark II + 35mm f/1.4L II being replaced by my iPhone any time soon... and the photos I get from family at restaurants are gorgeous compared to what I can do with a phone camera.
The Apple PowerBook G4 aluminium systems have also suffered from this - but only when using the 2-pronged power plug. If I use the actual cable between the power adaptor and the wall (with three pins) then this is no longer an issue.
I believe the MacBook Pros also suffer from this however I haven't tested this.
This is normal - the university I used to work at did the same thing using an IDS and very strong firewalling. It's signature-based, so even using different ports wouldn't evade the detection. WoW did cause some issues - I'm not sure whether something has been done about this for on-campus students playing WoW.
The fact remains that while P2P has legitimate uses, the prominent use is for breaking the law. This places the university in a sucky legal position if they allow it and they need to be seen to be taking action to prevent such use.
Good point. Didn't think of that, but that does actually bother me. Typically when I turn on a light, I need full power almost right away and then turn it off when not required. I have one room where I do have to leave the light on for a while. Hmm.
Unfortunately nobody will be alive to notice because we're all busy dehydrating as a result of our mega drought. Yeah, apparently it's supposed to end Real Soon Now(tm) but that could still mean a few years. And we still continue to waste huge amounts of water, not domestically but industrially.
Let's fix that first.
I don't like the alternatives with lighting. Fluro bulbs and tubes DO flicker and produce a harsher light. Trying to colour match them with tungsten light isn't fun, either. You can't get spots as effective that way - which means I'd have to repalce those with halogens. I do agree that it's a good idea, but enforcing it WILL piss people off.
I just find incandescent lighting nicer on the eyes.
Indeed - Counter-Strike was what helped bring 3D gaming out of the geek's bedroom/garage LAN and into mainstream. It was amazing - I was no longer referred to as a geek when I wanted to invite my mates around for a LAN game or two. LAN events I was involved with tripled in numbers, mostly due to CS players coming along and the Quake (and C&C, and Starcraft etc) players became a minority and us Tribes players were laughed at!
Here in Melbourne, I used to frequent a BBS which offered the same capabilities without having to dial long distance (phew!). The community was incredible and - back in 1994 when DOOM2 was released, it was a unique way to play a game.
It was a year or so later where I had four PCs linked via coax (this cost us a fortune) and invited mates over to play on LAN. Quake came out but we didn't play it much - partly because the PCs needed to be more powerful, partly because we just found DOOM 2 more enjoyable. We're talking the first game to become mainstream for LAN-based play (it may have been the first?).
Some people still play DOOM today online with zdaemon [ www.zdaemon.org ] - includes a master server with a server browser and VERY intense CTF (!!!) gameplay. I've even run into some people I used to play against 12 years ago on some of those BBS's.
Perhaps I'm alone here. I don't use Linux because it's GPL'd or free, I use it because it is best suited to the purposes I use it for.
I'm thankful I use Windows on my desktops because I don't have to worry about political shitfights about licensing and "software needs to be free as in speech" getting in the way of me and my PC use.
Arguments and debates like this really impede productivity.
I say stick with the old GPL. It is sufficient and does not need to be changed.
As per subject. It's an interesting question because it gives you the power to make a hell of a change in the world we live in.
But unfortunately, with all the money that companies pour in to the research, it won't come for free (unless Governments subsidise it). Such a breakthrough development could be the *financial* breakthrough that a researcher would long to achieve.
That's also a hell of a lot of power to place in one person's hands. Or even a group of people. To save lives or to make money... Hmm.
Either way, it should be interesting to see what comes out of any developments relating to this story.
I've been considering the storage thing for a while now. My current configuration is a Broadcom RAIDcore 6x250GB RAID 5 in a dual Opteron system with PCI-X 64/133mhz slots. Given that it's a workstation Tyan board, it cost me a mint but I have oodles of bandwidth to play with. I've got a few other arrays in that machine on other controllers. The board also has U320 and was all set to buy some 15KRPM drives from eBay till I saw the benchmarks of WD's new Raptor 150 which seems to kill all but the top end 15KRPM drives - and even in some tests, the Raptor wins out (all current 15K models are around 18 months behind).
Now, ny disks are fast but my network is not. My primary use of the network is for data transfer and while ttcp can top out PCI-based NICs at 65MByte/sec, I find it hard to see even half that when accessing files remotely over the network. I'm after a solution to mount these disks remotely and improve upon performance of windows filesharing.
What would be even better, if I could have multiple mounts of the same filesystem. I run Windows and Mac OSX - in an ideal world, I'd like to be able to work off the disks on my PowerBook G4 as I know my GigE card on taht thing will beat FW400 and some FW800 systems. You know, if I could get 50-55MB/sec with disk reads across a network, I;d be happy.
I suppose I can lash out on a few FC cards, an FC switch and an FC enclosure that supports SATA drives. I have boxes of multimode fibre - which is handy, so I can put the disks in another room to save on heat production. Doesn't solve the powerbook issue but my other laptop has a PCI docking station which could take an FC card easily.
I've been involved with running large LAN gaming events for the last six years in Australia and never have I ever met someone so arrogant and up himself as this guy. He came over to win "only four thousand dollars worth". Australian dollars, so it's not THAT much - but the cheek!
While he would be considered a celebrity in gaming circles, I'd hardly consider him the be-all and end-all of competitive professional gaming.
1. Using DeCSS technology, copy your region encoded DVD to your PC's hard drive. 2. Watch movie 3.... 4. Profit! (but remember, this violates fair use policies if you do profit from this).
With a price point that sits it more closely to the iBook than a PowerBook, the 12" is by far one of the most popular Apple machine that I've seen.
The main reason is that it gives you the 5+ hours battery life and the size of many PC-based subnotebooks which are twice the price. I seriously doubt that it'd vanish from their lineup without replacement.
However, it also had the best battery life out of the lot (until recently). Titanium G4 1GHz was spec'd at 5 hours and I'd pull 4.5 with screen down to lowest brightness and CPU on reduced. 12" PowerBook claims 5 hours and I can pull 5 and a half with screen on low brightness and CPU in reduced - bluetooth off but airport ON. 15"? THey claimed 4.5. With screen backlight on lowest, bluetooth and wireless off and proc in reduced mode, I get 3.5 hours. I get 4 hours with screen backlight OFF.
New 15" gives me the correct 5.5 hours battery life from the tests I did on Friday but I can't bring myself to upgrade (crossgrade?) from a 1.5GHz superdrive machine.
One and a half years for mine and I used them everyday. They have a warranty of one year.
2. A CDROM drive with a dodgy eject button and requires a "right click -> eject".
My CDROM drive will randomly eject the tray - although it is a non-standard model for my Dell Inspiron 8200.
3. Keyboard marks rubbed onto the screen.
I get the same problem on my PowerBook G4 Aluminium.
4. A floppy drive which goes out of alignment after you first use it (two weeks after the warrantee ran out, because you don't use floppies that much). They demand money.
Well, the warranty terms are clear. Sony, Apple etc would have the same terms and attitude.
5. A trackpad/nipple which have you chanting, "The power of Christ compels you!..."
Yeah, well, that is an issue with some of the Dell, Toshiba etc notebooks which is why the nipple is starting to appear less and less.
6. Flimsy build.
Depends on the model with all manufacturers. But yes, Dell have a lot of these (so does Toshiba)
7. Poor performance (compared against other x86).
Never had THAT problem in fact my Dell Inspiron 8200 was the best performer at the time when I bought it.
8. Non English speaking support, once they actually answer the phone.
This is pretty frustrating. I hate this too. I find it very annoying when people try to talk down to me when I've simply got a physical or obvious fault and they want me to run the diagnostic CD. Then I have to get them to repeat everything three times because they screwed up the QoS on their VoIP infrastructure.
9. An OS made by someone else, with drivers made by yet some other people again. Install media if you are lucky. Roll-your-own if you are not.
What, Linux?:)
11. Anti virus software which takes the performance down by about one hundred annoyance notches. Only to be bothered for money 3 months later.
Then uninstall it.
12. Lots of half baked software which is designed to get you to "upgrade to the pro version which actually works" with yet more money.
Again, uninstall it or don't use it.
13. One hundred and fifty three billion different services installed and set to run by default, with a systray that goes half way across the screen when maximized.
Not really. Never seen this on a Dell out of the box.
14. A system which could come with any combination of a number of different parts. SOE hell.
Then order a Latitude. They pay careful attention to SOE with those. If you ask for a Seagate drive, nvidia graphics and Intel NICs, you'll get it.
15. A lesson in appreciation of quality over barrel bottom scraping "value".
Or cutting-edge. When I bought my 8200, nobody could offer me two batteries PLUS an optical drive, or the 1600x1200 16ms panel, or the 64MB nVidia 440 Go graphics... or the 5400RPM drive.. or the 2Ghz processor.. etc. The advantage of Dell is that they build to order using the latest components available.
What did Apple have? an 867Mhz Titanium PowerBook G4 with a 60GB drive, 8x combo drive (I got a 24x in the Dell) and a 32MB Radeon 7500.
C'mon.
You say you write that on a Vaio. Tried servicing those? My girlfriend has a Vaio desktop replacement (16" P4 2.6) that routinely overheats and needs to be sent back for them to do *god knows what* with it. That takes them SEVEN WEEKS TO DO.
Seriously, that's just NOT ON in the IT world. My Dell may have broken more, but onsite next-day service makes it a lot easier to swallow.
Will there be mandatory security for this stuff? eg, the AP won't work until you configure it sort-of-thing.
I'm sick and tired of people who buy wireless routers "just in case" when they don't even use the wireless features. Sometimes wireless routers are even cheaper than the wired-only versions so people install them without disabling the wireless features.
Does anyone remember this server? It used to be an MP3 search engine of music that this single server had - must've been about 20 or 30 GB of music. Lasted a year or two, too. Think it was around from 1997-98.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds just like Australia, then. No news here.
Came here to say this. Currently looking at something 40-50 minutes out from my office during peak hour (30mins outside of peak periods) and will be looking at approximately half my income on repayments. And that's with a 20% downpayment!
I had assumed that California was this impossible-to-buy-a-house place but 20 minute commute and spending 40% of my income on a house?!! Sign me up! This is the stuff dreams are made of.
Nope! I don't see my Canon 1DX Mark II + 35mm f/1.4L II being replaced by my iPhone any time soon... and the photos I get from family at restaurants are gorgeous compared to what I can do with a phone camera.
This proves that the Airbus A380 is 100% unsafe to fly and will result in death if you board one.
Please tell all your friends - I'm hoping that I get some cheaper A380 seats when I travel later this year if we can lower demand.
The Apple PowerBook G4 aluminium systems have also suffered from this - but only when using the 2-pronged power plug. If I use the actual cable between the power adaptor and the wall (with three pins) then this is no longer an issue.
I believe the MacBook Pros also suffer from this however I haven't tested this.
This is normal - the university I used to work at did the same thing using an IDS and very strong firewalling. It's signature-based, so even using different ports wouldn't evade the detection. WoW did cause some issues - I'm not sure whether something has been done about this for on-campus students playing WoW.
The fact remains that while P2P has legitimate uses, the prominent use is for breaking the law. This places the university in a sucky legal position if they allow it and they need to be seen to be taking action to prevent such use.
No, they will simply become useless as the Australian Government themselves!
Good point. Didn't think of that, but that does actually bother me. Typically when I turn on a light, I need full power almost right away and then turn it off when not required. I have one room where I do have to leave the light on for a while. Hmm.
Unfortunately nobody will be alive to notice because we're all busy dehydrating as a result of our mega drought. Yeah, apparently it's supposed to end Real Soon Now(tm) but that could still mean a few years. And we still continue to waste huge amounts of water, not domestically but industrially.
Let's fix that first.
I don't like the alternatives with lighting. Fluro bulbs and tubes DO flicker and produce a harsher light. Trying to colour match them with tungsten light isn't fun, either. You can't get spots as effective that way - which means I'd have to repalce those with halogens. I do agree that it's a good idea, but enforcing it WILL piss people off.
I just find incandescent lighting nicer on the eyes.
Indeed - Counter-Strike was what helped bring 3D gaming out of the geek's bedroom/garage LAN and into mainstream. It was amazing - I was no longer referred to as a geek when I wanted to invite my mates around for a LAN game or two. LAN events I was involved with tripled in numbers, mostly due to CS players coming along and the Quake (and C&C, and Starcraft etc) players became a minority and us Tribes players were laughed at!
Here in Melbourne, I used to frequent a BBS which offered the same capabilities without having to dial long distance (phew!). The community was incredible and - back in 1994 when DOOM2 was released, it was a unique way to play a game.
It was a year or so later where I had four PCs linked via coax (this cost us a fortune) and invited mates over to play on LAN. Quake came out but we didn't play it much - partly because the PCs needed to be more powerful, partly because we just found DOOM 2 more enjoyable. We're talking the first game to become mainstream for LAN-based play (it may have been the first?).
Some people still play DOOM today online with zdaemon [ www.zdaemon.org ] - includes a master server with a server browser and VERY intense CTF (!!!) gameplay. I've even run into some people I used to play against 12 years ago on some of those BBS's.
... at least they circled the problem, though.
The Pro version of that ASUS board DOES support the Core 2 Duo and presumably, the quad core chips as well.
Perhaps I'm alone here. I don't use Linux because it's GPL'd or free, I use it because it is best suited to the purposes I use it for.
I'm thankful I use Windows on my desktops because I don't have to worry about political shitfights about licensing and "software needs to be free as in speech" getting in the way of me and my PC use.
Arguments and debates like this really impede productivity.
I say stick with the old GPL. It is sufficient and does not need to be changed.
As per subject. It's an interesting question because it gives you the power to make a hell of a change in the world we live in.
But unfortunately, with all the money that companies pour in to the research, it won't come for free (unless Governments subsidise it). Such a breakthrough development could be the *financial* breakthrough that a researcher would long to achieve.
That's also a hell of a lot of power to place in one person's hands. Or even a group of people. To save lives or to make money... Hmm.
Either way, it should be interesting to see what comes out of any developments relating to this story.
I've been considering the storage thing for a while now. My current configuration is a Broadcom RAIDcore 6x250GB RAID 5 in a dual Opteron system with PCI-X 64/133mhz slots. Given that it's a workstation Tyan board, it cost me a mint but I have oodles of bandwidth to play with. I've got a few other arrays in that machine on other controllers. The board also has U320 and was all set to buy some 15KRPM drives from eBay till I saw the benchmarks of WD's new Raptor 150 which seems to kill all but the top end 15KRPM drives - and even in some tests, the Raptor wins out (all current 15K models are around 18 months behind).
Now, ny disks are fast but my network is not. My primary use of the network is for data transfer and while ttcp can top out PCI-based NICs at 65MByte/sec, I find it hard to see even half that when accessing files remotely over the network. I'm after a solution to mount these disks remotely and improve upon performance of windows filesharing.
What would be even better, if I could have multiple mounts of the same filesystem. I run Windows and Mac OSX - in an ideal world, I'd like to be able to work off the disks on my PowerBook G4 as I know my GigE card on taht thing will beat FW400 and some FW800 systems. You know, if I could get 50-55MB/sec with disk reads across a network, I;d be happy.
I suppose I can lash out on a few FC cards, an FC switch and an FC enclosure that supports SATA drives. I have boxes of multimode fibre - which is handy, so I can put the disks in another room to save on heat production. Doesn't solve the powerbook issue but my other laptop has a PCI docking station which could take an FC card easily.
As per subject.
I've been involved with running large LAN gaming events for the last six years in Australia and never have I ever met someone so arrogant and up himself as this guy. He came over to win "only four thousand dollars worth". Australian dollars, so it's not THAT much - but the cheek!
While he would be considered a celebrity in gaming circles, I'd hardly consider him the be-all and end-all of competitive professional gaming.
The artcle said that data discs will read fine - just movies won't play.
1. Using DeCSS technology, copy your region encoded DVD to your PC's hard drive. ...
2. Watch movie
3.
4. Profit! (but remember, this violates fair use policies if you do profit from this).
Is it just me, or does anyone else take this with a grain of salt? With a name like that..
With a price point that sits it more closely to the iBook than a PowerBook, the 12" is by far one of the most popular Apple machine that I've seen.
The main reason is that it gives you the 5+ hours battery life and the size of many PC-based subnotebooks which are twice the price. I seriously doubt that it'd vanish from their lineup without replacement.
However, it also had the best battery life out of the lot (until recently). Titanium G4 1GHz was spec'd at 5 hours and I'd pull 4.5 with screen down to lowest brightness and CPU on reduced. 12" PowerBook claims 5 hours and I can pull 5 and a half with screen on low brightness and CPU in reduced - bluetooth off but airport ON. 15"? THey claimed 4.5. With screen backlight on lowest, bluetooth and wireless off and proc in reduced mode, I get 3.5 hours. I get 4 hours with screen backlight OFF.
New 15" gives me the correct 5.5 hours battery life from the tests I did on Friday but I can't bring myself to upgrade (crossgrade?) from a 1.5GHz superdrive machine.
1. A battery which breaks within 3 weeks.
:)
.. etc. The advantage of Dell is that they build to order using the latest components available.
One and a half years for mine and I used them everyday. They have a warranty of one year.
2. A CDROM drive with a dodgy eject button and requires a "right click -> eject".
My CDROM drive will randomly eject the tray - although it is a non-standard model for my Dell Inspiron 8200.
3. Keyboard marks rubbed onto the screen.
I get the same problem on my PowerBook G4 Aluminium.
4. A floppy drive which goes out of alignment after you first use it (two weeks after the warrantee ran out, because you don't use floppies that much). They demand money.
Well, the warranty terms are clear. Sony, Apple etc would have the same terms and attitude.
5. A trackpad/nipple which have you chanting, "The power of Christ compels you!..."
Yeah, well, that is an issue with some of the Dell, Toshiba etc notebooks which is why the nipple is starting to appear less and less.
6. Flimsy build.
Depends on the model with all manufacturers. But yes, Dell have a lot of these (so does Toshiba)
7. Poor performance (compared against other x86).
Never had THAT problem in fact my Dell Inspiron 8200 was the best performer at the time when I bought it.
8. Non English speaking support, once they actually answer the phone.
This is pretty frustrating. I hate this too. I find it very annoying when people try to talk down to me when I've simply got a physical or obvious fault and they want me to run the diagnostic CD. Then I have to get them to repeat everything three times because they screwed up the QoS on their VoIP infrastructure.
9. An OS made by someone else, with drivers made by yet some other people again. Install media if you are lucky. Roll-your-own if you are not.
What, Linux?
11. Anti virus software which takes the performance down by about one hundred annoyance notches. Only to be bothered for money 3 months later.
Then uninstall it.
12. Lots of half baked software which is designed to get you to "upgrade to the pro version which actually works" with yet more money.
Again, uninstall it or don't use it.
13. One hundred and fifty three billion different services installed and set to run by default, with a systray that goes half way across the screen when maximized.
Not really. Never seen this on a Dell out of the box.
14. A system which could come with any combination of a number of different parts. SOE hell.
Then order a Latitude. They pay careful attention to SOE with those. If you ask for a Seagate drive, nvidia graphics and Intel NICs, you'll get it.
15. A lesson in appreciation of quality over barrel bottom scraping "value".
Or cutting-edge. When I bought my 8200, nobody could offer me two batteries PLUS an optical drive, or the 1600x1200 16ms panel, or the 64MB nVidia 440 Go graphics... or the 5400RPM drive.. or the 2Ghz processor
What did Apple have? an 867Mhz Titanium PowerBook G4 with a 60GB drive, 8x combo drive (I got a 24x in the Dell) and a 32MB Radeon 7500.
C'mon.
You say you write that on a Vaio. Tried servicing those? My girlfriend has a Vaio desktop replacement (16" P4 2.6) that routinely overheats and needs to be sent back for them to do *god knows what* with it. That takes them SEVEN WEEKS TO DO.
Seriously, that's just NOT ON in the IT world. My Dell may have broken more, but onsite next-day service makes it a lot easier to swallow.
Will there be mandatory security for this stuff? eg, the AP won't work until you configure it sort-of-thing.
I'm sick and tired of people who buy wireless routers "just in case" when they don't even use the wireless features. Sometimes wireless routers are even cheaper than the wired-only versions so people install them without disabling the wireless features.
C'mon. We have the choice of *Windows Vista* or *Mac OS X TIGER*. C'mon, I know what I'd choose.
Does anyone remember this server? It used to be an MP3 search engine of music that this single server had - must've been about 20 or 30 GB of music. Lasted a year or two, too. Think it was around from 1997-98.