My workplace recently increased their filtering. It went from blocking the usual suspects to blocking all sorts of nonsense. I discovered the changes right away too... I loaded up slashdot and it blocked any article from games.slashdot.org...
So I checked some forums that I was reading... I can still browse one of the games related ones... but not it's main site...
There are blocks for streaming media(google video still works), and free hosting sites. It's gone overboard in terms of blocking. Although I think it was more of a regime change here that caused the increased blocking.
I'd rather work for a place that had an intelligent policy about these things. Not just randomly blocking sites because they may cause a problem.
What is needed is an incentive that would make it worthwhile for a author to release their work into the public domain.
So in order to get the government to act against the current wishes of authors their incentive would be... money.
So give every author a time period(say 15-20 years) of free copyright protection. Past that date they author that wishes to keep their works in the PD will pay a yearly fee.
Now to make older works more likely to get put in the PD you increase the fee after a number of years have passed. So that at some point the author will get little benefit from keeping the copyright. Once it becomes unprofitable to maintain the copyright they will release it. The government gets paid and the public gets compensated for the copyrighted work not being available.
The way I see it now they won't release it unless they think there is no money in it... and that won't happen because they will hold on to thought that it must have still have some value.
There was a BT setup for the demo's release and everyone was very eager to use it. However when the time came to use it people realized it was still slower than ftping the demo. It doesn't work for online games... because as soon as it's downloaded the BT will get shutdown so that they can immediately go online...
You made an assumption based on Unreal Tournament actually. It is a fairly well known fact that UT was very CPU dependant(Q3 being vid card dependant).
Well UT2003 is a totally different. The latest version of UT is v436. UT2003 should have a version number in the 600's... then old engine was meant to run great on 3dfx cards... the new one will not(a V3 will not be able to run the new version).
Now back to the cpu myth. They changed the engine to allow for the latest eye candy and effects... so it will not be CPU dependant... as they designed the engine to run on a certain class of video cards(Radeons and above). It is the video card that is holding back games these days...
Where do you live? It's definately not in my neighbourhood. I rarely get 1Mbit down and my up is capped at 364K.
I also have no choice in highspeed for my area. It's cable or go back to 56K.
I think it's time to contact the CRTC since there is no true competition in my area.
The only way I could see it being worthwhile to pay more is if they removed the caps on downloads and uploads. I'd even be willing to live with throttling if it was based on usage at any given time instead of the fixed rate we currently have.
The S3TC textures on the second CD can be used with the new beta drivers they just released. As long as your videocard supports texture compression.
The reason Unreal Tournament is so great is the weapons and the AI handling. The maps are pretty good too and not to hard to create once you get the hang of it. I'm curious how many new games are coming out using the quake engine compared to the Unreal engine. Seems to me that Unreal has a lot more potential...
If you go to a restaurant and get bad service you won't go back. If everyone does that they go out of business. With all these e-business ventures trying to make it you would think they would be more considerate to their clients. Such is life. Send them a message. Tell your friends and never go back.
I was doing some online price shopping in my area and found this site:
http://www.fedelecomputers.com/
This site won't even let you in to see the site to get something simple like a phone number or email address.
I bought my computer elsewhere of course. If people don't complain about such bad practices peole will continue to do it... until it won't matter any more.
Your falling for the common mistake... Mhz does not equate to a chip being faster in performance.
The P4 is a poor performer because it was designed to have high clock speeds by using a longer data path. If the P4 doesn't execute the right code the penalty to correct that mistake is greater than on other CPU's such as the P!!!. Those mistakes slow down the chip and that is why the Athlon at 1.2Ghz is a better chip performance-wise and price-wise. If it executes the wrong code it can recover faster...
Everyone keeps mentioning that he should have read his contract terms. However ISP's are not like Amazon where ANY change in their terms gets noted.
If you signup for a service and have them for awhile there's a good chance they've changed the terms from when you first joined the service. MP3's didn't hit public awareness until Napster became popular. Before that they were there but they weren't blamed for everything under the sun like they are now. So an ISP will likely change thier policy to reflect changes in technology but won't bother to tell the customer... why confuse the poor users???
That script they use will defeat those average user but won't stop the users they don't like(anyone who wants to use the services to thier full usefulness).
As far as everyone else who says find a better ISP... do they exist? I've got a small hobby website and I'm looking for a new place for it... I can't put it on my ISP's server... it's just a dumbed down bookmark page that you can create using your browser... but you'll get 5MB of space if you can tolerate thier interface... and thier approved page layouts, etc.
ISP's don't like us... we know what we're doing and we usually know more than they do(they react after something becomes mainstream and hits critical mass). They prefer to cater to the idiot user who doesn't even know that there is life outside windows... or IE.
Guess my rants done... fire away.
First lets clear some things up:
The $50 price that was quoted isn't really enforced because you can pay more for business plans. For consumers we pay about $35-40 Cdn per month for service.
As far as QoS goes my friend got a cable modem recently and for his first month of service he didn't have a connection for half of it... well it worked the first week though. I also know people who have DSL and are very happy with it and rarely have connection problems.
The biggest difference between the two services is that DSL has competition while cable is run by one company in the area(there used to be two companies but they killed one off to make our lives easier). Sure cable competes against DSL now but they are in no hurry to improve the service since the demand is increasing and I don't know of too many people who switch high speed connections once they get one.
I'm currently looking for high speed service and I would have gone cable if they were reliable... instead I get to choose between wireless or DSL.
What I would like to see is the usuage statistics for these services. If they force them to reveal how much bandwidth you get along with things like ping rates, uptime, subscribers sharing the connection(for cable at least), etc. then it would be a nice step towards better QoS.
I've never experienced a cordless keyboard but at one point I had a keyboard extension cable so that I could sit on my bed in my dorm room and use the PC. I had a textbook/mousepad for the mouse and I could put my feetup and type to my hearts content.
As far as ergonomics go I was much more comfortable with the keyboard on my lap and my feet up than I ever was sitting at my desk. Even now typing with a keyboard tray holding my keyboard(which that desk didn't have) I still find the keyboard too high for comfort(and lowering it means I bang my knees a lot.
So the big benefit of cordless is freedom to adjust your keyboard to what suits you best...
I've got a Mouseman serial mouse that I bought years ago. It still works great but I hate the cord... at work I have a MS mouse and I keep knocking it off the mousepad when my foot hits the cord. Each time that happens I really want a cordless mouse. I was checking out the latest logitech mice and I hit a small problem. For $90 Cdn I can get either a cordless or an optical mouse...
what I'd rather have is a cordless optical mouse and when that happens my old faithful will get retired(unless I can find a way to use both of them). For me a cordless mouse is the only reason I'd switch since I've had my current mouse for well over 5 years(and the computers have come and gone yet the mouse lives on).
As far as that MS mouse goes... I plan on replacing it with a real mouse once it falls one time to many. Which means I'll go cordless as well.
Most agree that the patent office is overworked. Some agree that the patent office doesn't have the necessary knowledge to grant some of these broad patents as well.
If they were to recruit a standards approach where recognized experts were given a chance to remark on patent applications and their possible effects to help the patent office reduce their workload. Eventually the patent office would have a basis to judge new patents on(since the software patent is a relatively new idea and software has been around for a while).
Seems to me that no matter how you handle passwords they can be compromised. With a plain text file it's easy to grab the info... but if given enough time or preparation could the ones who comprimise the system just redirect any requests to login to a thirdparty.
If the password was encrypted could they not prevent that encryption from happening and then steal the passwords?
For that matter a plain text list would make a good defense... if it wasn't the real password list. Just depends on how you store the real info and how to prevent people from realizing where it's stored.
Slashdot Mirror
My workplace recently increased their filtering. It went from blocking the usual suspects to blocking all sorts of nonsense. I discovered the changes right away too... I loaded up slashdot and it blocked any article from games.slashdot.org...
So I checked some forums that I was reading... I can still browse one of the games related ones... but not it's main site...
There are blocks for streaming media(google video still works), and free hosting sites. It's gone overboard in terms of blocking. Although I think it was more of a regime change here that caused the increased blocking.
I'd rather work for a place that had an intelligent policy about these things. Not just randomly blocking sites because they may cause a problem.
What is needed is an incentive that would make it worthwhile for a author to release their work into the public domain.
So in order to get the government to act against the current wishes of authors their incentive would be... money.
So give every author a time period(say 15-20 years) of free copyright protection. Past that date they author that wishes to keep their works in the PD will pay a yearly fee.
Now to make older works more likely to get put in the PD you increase the fee after a number of years have passed. So that at some point the author will get little benefit from keeping the copyright. Once it becomes unprofitable to maintain the copyright they will release it. The government gets paid and the public gets compensated for the copyrighted work not being available.
The way I see it now they won't release it unless they think there is no money in it... and that won't happen because they will hold on to thought that it must have still have some value.
There was a BT setup for the demo's release and everyone was very eager to use it. However when the time came to use it people realized it was still slower than ftping the demo. It doesn't work for online games... because as soon as it's downloaded the BT will get shutdown so that they can immediately go online...
Could someone explain what exactly they 'cut out'?
Kazaa lite came up when I did a search...
http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/sata150/
Take a look at the article on that website as it actually talks about the more technical issues including why they switched the power connector.
You made an assumption based on Unreal Tournament actually. It is a fairly well known fact that UT was very CPU dependant(Q3 being vid card dependant).
Well UT2003 is a totally different. The latest version of UT is v436. UT2003 should have a version number in the 600's... then old engine was meant to run great on 3dfx cards... the new one will not(a V3 will not be able to run the new version).
Now back to the cpu myth. They changed the engine to allow for the latest eye candy and effects... so it will not be CPU dependant... as they designed the engine to run on a certain class of video cards(Radeons and above). It is the video card that is holding back games these days...
Where do you live? It's definately not in my neighbourhood. I rarely get 1Mbit down and my up is capped at 364K.
I also have no choice in highspeed for my area. It's cable or go back to 56K.
I think it's time to contact the CRTC since there is no true competition in my area.
The only way I could see it being worthwhile to pay more is if they removed the caps on downloads and uploads. I'd even be willing to live with throttling if it was based on usage at any given time instead of the fixed rate we currently have.
The S3TC textures on the second CD can be used with the new beta drivers they just released. As long as your videocard supports texture compression.
The reason Unreal Tournament is so great is the weapons and the AI handling. The maps are pretty good too and not to hard to create once you get the hang of it. I'm curious how many new games are coming out using the quake engine compared to the Unreal engine. Seems to me that Unreal has a lot more potential...
If you go to a restaurant and get bad service you won't go back. If everyone does that they go out of business. With all these e-business ventures trying to make it you would think they would be more considerate to their clients. Such is life. Send them a message. Tell your friends and never go back.
I was doing some online price shopping in my area and found this site:
http://www.fedelecomputers.com/
This site won't even let you in to see the site to get something simple like a phone number or email address.
I bought my computer elsewhere of course. If people don't complain about such bad practices peole will continue to do it... until it won't matter any more.
Your falling for the common mistake... Mhz does not equate to a chip being faster in performance. The P4 is a poor performer because it was designed to have high clock speeds by using a longer data path. If the P4 doesn't execute the right code the penalty to correct that mistake is greater than on other CPU's such as the P!!!. Those mistakes slow down the chip and that is why the Athlon at 1.2Ghz is a better chip performance-wise and price-wise. If it executes the wrong code it can recover faster...
Everyone keeps mentioning that he should have read his contract terms. However ISP's are not like Amazon where ANY change in their terms gets noted.
If you signup for a service and have them for awhile there's a good chance they've changed the terms from when you first joined the service. MP3's didn't hit public awareness until Napster became popular. Before that they were there but they weren't blamed for everything under the sun like they are now. So an ISP will likely change thier policy to reflect changes in technology but won't bother to tell the customer... why confuse the poor users???
That script they use will defeat those average user but won't stop the users they don't like(anyone who wants to use the services to thier full usefulness).
As far as everyone else who says find a better ISP... do they exist? I've got a small hobby website and I'm looking for a new place for it... I can't put it on my ISP's server... it's just a dumbed down bookmark page that you can create using your browser... but you'll get 5MB of space if you can tolerate thier interface... and thier approved page layouts, etc.
ISP's don't like us... we know what we're doing and we usually know more than they do(they react after something becomes mainstream and hits critical mass). They prefer to cater to the idiot user who doesn't even know that there is life outside windows... or IE. Guess my rants done... fire away.
First lets clear some things up: The $50 price that was quoted isn't really enforced because you can pay more for business plans. For consumers we pay about $35-40 Cdn per month for service.
As far as QoS goes my friend got a cable modem recently and for his first month of service he didn't have a connection for half of it... well it worked the first week though. I also know people who have DSL and are very happy with it and rarely have connection problems.
The biggest difference between the two services is that DSL has competition while cable is run by one company in the area(there used to be two companies but they killed one off to make our lives easier). Sure cable competes against DSL now but they are in no hurry to improve the service since the demand is increasing and I don't know of too many people who switch high speed connections once they get one.
I'm currently looking for high speed service and I would have gone cable if they were reliable... instead I get to choose between wireless or DSL.
What I would like to see is the usuage statistics for these services. If they force them to reveal how much bandwidth you get along with things like ping rates, uptime, subscribers sharing the connection(for cable at least), etc. then it would be a nice step towards better QoS.
I've never experienced a cordless keyboard but at one point I had a keyboard extension cable so that I could sit on my bed in my dorm room and use the PC. I had a textbook/mousepad for the mouse and I could put my feetup and type to my hearts content. As far as ergonomics go I was much more comfortable with the keyboard on my lap and my feet up than I ever was sitting at my desk. Even now typing with a keyboard tray holding my keyboard(which that desk didn't have) I still find the keyboard too high for comfort(and lowering it means I bang my knees a lot. So the big benefit of cordless is freedom to adjust your keyboard to what suits you best...
I've got a Mouseman serial mouse that I bought years ago. It still works great but I hate the cord... at work I have a MS mouse and I keep knocking it off the mousepad when my foot hits the cord. Each time that happens I really want a cordless mouse. I was checking out the latest logitech mice and I hit a small problem. For $90 Cdn I can get either a cordless or an optical mouse... what I'd rather have is a cordless optical mouse and when that happens my old faithful will get retired(unless I can find a way to use both of them). For me a cordless mouse is the only reason I'd switch since I've had my current mouse for well over 5 years(and the computers have come and gone yet the mouse lives on). As far as that MS mouse goes... I plan on replacing it with a real mouse once it falls one time to many. Which means I'll go cordless as well.
Most agree that the patent office is overworked. Some agree that the patent office doesn't have the necessary knowledge to grant some of these broad patents as well. If they were to recruit a standards approach where recognized experts were given a chance to remark on patent applications and their possible effects to help the patent office reduce their workload. Eventually the patent office would have a basis to judge new patents on(since the software patent is a relatively new idea and software has been around for a while).
Seems to me that no matter how you handle passwords they can be compromised. With a plain text file it's easy to grab the info... but if given enough time or preparation could the ones who comprimise the system just redirect any requests to login to a thirdparty. If the password was encrypted could they not prevent that encryption from happening and then steal the passwords? For that matter a plain text list would make a good defense... if it wasn't the real password list. Just depends on how you store the real info and how to prevent people from realizing where it's stored.