Because the stock firmware sucks for most uses except for simplistic home routing. You don't need the WRT54G to get that, though if you do get a router supporting DD-WRT/OpenWRT/TomatoUSB then you can get better firmware to put on it. My router got *better* performance after replacing the firmware!
You don't always need wireless though. This will do great if the only thing you use wifi for is your phone or tablet, because your tv and computer are on ethernet. Then you use the WRT54G to be your firewall, adblocker, guest AP, etc.
But it still does ethernet pretty well, just turn off the wifi if there are problems. That's the thing, you buy a wifi-router only for the ethernet routing because no one else makes a decent ethernet router that's affordable with customizable firmware. Don't even think about getting a price quote from Cisco if you value your money or time.
It surprises me that some companies don't want to make the "next gen" WRT style router. There are a few that are supposed to be this but ends up with too high a price. I suspect the market is just a bit too small, the product is profitable but mostly because of its age and low margins. Most users of it these days don't even care about the wireless stuff they just want the ethernet ports to make a firewall or something like that.
Many routers are not designed to be hackable. The vendors don't really want them to be open. Every new router model requires people trying to figure it out before it can be used with open source firmware. Vendor assistance is very rare. Nobody really makes the dream router for use with Linux based firmware, they've all got flaws, or too little memory, or some clumsy workaround, etc.
WRT54G(L) gets used as a default router for some people because it's the safe choice, they know it's going to work without hassle. By a random router off the shelf and chances are it will either not work or require some workaround or have a limitation. Even after I did the research the router I bought didn't work well with DD-WRT (but does great with TomatoUSB).
Even for some corporations it can be a waste of money to rent versus own. If a company keeps the same version of Office for several years, or keeps multiple versions of it, then buying will probably be cheaper than renting. Corporations do not need cloud support and a sane corporation will forbid using it. However there are those companies that do everything Microsoft asks of them on cue, and they'll probably save money via renting versus buying every new release that comes out.
For a home user though, paying maybe $140 for Office 2013 versus a $100/year subscription to Office 365 is a no brainer - if you use it for two years you're saving money already. If you keep it for ten years you save a ton of money. All you lose are cloud services but you can get that without going through Microsoft's crappy service and most people will never need a cloud service. It's really a ridiculous model just based on the cost.
We have reality already and it includes widely used Internet of Things devices that showed up before anyone started calling them IoT. These are smart electric meters and smart grid monitors. But but but, someone will say it's not real IoT unless it's for useless home consumer devices.
LoRa Alliance is just another one of many "we want to get in on IoT too with yet another incompatible standard!" We've got tons of these alliances because everyone wants to be the leader. Cisco says it's the leader because it makes the internet backbone devices, and ARM says it's the leader because it makes the chips, and so on and so on.
You posted this before. You're repeating yourself and not listening to any rebuttals. This list above could be used for "Computers", or "Internet". Internet of things just means things that are on the internet, and it runs the range from this sort of LoRa to bluetooth headsets to traffic lights to whatever.
Dell became a major brand while competing in a highly oversaturated market. But times changed, they're getting old and the joints are creaky, so they want to relax a bit and enjoy the grandkids instead of alway being competitive.
If they just went back to declaring that encryption was a munition, then encryption would receive 2nd amendment protection! Then Charlton Heston could claim "you can have my passphrase when you pry it out of my cold dead hands."
It's still an upgrade in-place rather than a clean install. That is, it will try to migrate all your settings, applications, and so forth. Which is ok, but it will leave around a lot of junk and you never really get back to that new computer smell.
I had a problem once where I screwed up the install by not exporting my files to a backup, so after wiping the primary partition and installing from scratch it ended up saying that all the files on the second partition were owned by an unknown user and couldn't be modified (a major hassle).
Yes those are cash grabs too. That's the major flaw in Windows 10, in that it tries downgrade itself to being merely a smart phone OS. So lots and lots of apps available, but after browsing them it turns out there are only 2 or 3 apps worth ever getting for free and 0 apps worth paying for.
The OEM-ness is inherited too I think. Ie, my PC came with Windows 7 pre-installed, then I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro and paid money for it ($15). But this special offer only applies to those who had purchased a new PC within a few weeks of Windows 8 release (normally a ridiculous $199 price). Then that could be upgraded (for free) to Windows 10 Pro. But it's probably still tainted by originally coming from an OEM.
It might be possible. However it's a bit risky. You get all the pain from upgrading combined with all the pain of doing a rollback, and the chance that one of those steps will go wrong. To do a rollback would mean you need an in-place upgrade that leaves lots of junk leftover on the system rather than doing a clean installation. If it did work you'd have to keep that authorization code stored away and then re-apply it in the future.
Things don't work the same way the used to. For instance, you can not just go and get your Windows 10 authentication code without actually upgrading. They'll probably have to change that when it's no longer free (my bet is that they keep extending the deadline in perpetuity, at least for Home version).
I'd be unhappy if there were services in the background of any name providing location services, indexing my files (I've always turned that off), and so forth. When I see my hard disk being constantly active when I've been sitting idle for an hour then I start getting suspicious of either malware or Microsoft bloat. Apple has an OSX update that tries to reduce CPU usage and improve power savings, whereas a Microsoft update seems to be about how to suck up even more of those cycles.
Right. And I'm a bit worried about the understanding of basic English by the author of the summary. The sentence "a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature" clearly confuses the word "major" with "yawn-inducing".
First step: come up with a rational reason up upgrade to Windows 10. I haven't seen one so far. Sure, if you're on Windows XP then upgrade to something. But if you're on Windows 7/8/8.1 then I haven't seen any reason to upgrade. Don't upgrade if there's no point to it, no matter which OS it is - it's time consuming and a headache, and a major time waster and major heachache if it screws up.
The whole reason for all this adware and begging and subterfuge to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 is because Microsoft knows there's not much there to entice people into upgrading normally. If they had a solid product then customers would upgrade voluntarily on their own. Especially when it's FREE and people are still wary of upgrading then you know something's off.
If it's for gaming, note that no one's really using DirectX 12 yet, just a couple games that no one is every going to miss, and there's no real advantage to using it instead of DX11. Future games will see that so many customers are avoiding Windows 10 that they will be hesitant to remove DX10/11 support and piss off the paying customers.
I would suggest getting Windows 8.1 over Windows 8 if you haven't done that though.
You can block with the router. However the script I saw that tried to do this was extremely broad. It blocked skype for instance, not just some part of skype but "*.skype.com". I don't use skype but it didn't give me a good feeling that they were using pinpoint accuracy.
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Because the stock firmware sucks for most uses except for simplistic home routing. You don't need the WRT54G to get that, though if you do get a router supporting DD-WRT/OpenWRT/TomatoUSB then you can get better firmware to put on it. My router got *better* performance after replacing the firmware!
You don't always need wireless though. This will do great if the only thing you use wifi for is your phone or tablet, because your tv and computer are on ethernet. Then you use the WRT54G to be your firewall, adblocker, guest AP, etc.
But it still does ethernet pretty well, just turn off the wifi if there are problems. That's the thing, you buy a wifi-router only for the ethernet routing because no one else makes a decent ethernet router that's affordable with customizable firmware. Don't even think about getting a price quote from Cisco if you value your money or time.
It surprises me that some companies don't want to make the "next gen" WRT style router. There are a few that are supposed to be this but ends up with too high a price. I suspect the market is just a bit too small, the product is profitable but mostly because of its age and low margins. Most users of it these days don't even care about the wireless stuff they just want the ethernet ports to make a firewall or something like that.
Many routers are not designed to be hackable. The vendors don't really want them to be open. Every new router model requires people trying to figure it out before it can be used with open source firmware. Vendor assistance is very rare. Nobody really makes the dream router for use with Linux based firmware, they've all got flaws, or too little memory, or some clumsy workaround, etc.
WRT54G(L) gets used as a default router for some people because it's the safe choice, they know it's going to work without hassle. By a random router off the shelf and chances are it will either not work or require some workaround or have a limitation. Even after I did the research the router I bought didn't work well with DD-WRT (but does great with TomatoUSB).
Even for some corporations it can be a waste of money to rent versus own. If a company keeps the same version of Office for several years, or keeps multiple versions of it, then buying will probably be cheaper than renting. Corporations do not need cloud support and a sane corporation will forbid using it. However there are those companies that do everything Microsoft asks of them on cue, and they'll probably save money via renting versus buying every new release that comes out.
For a home user though, paying maybe $140 for Office 2013 versus a $100/year subscription to Office 365 is a no brainer - if you use it for two years you're saving money already. If you keep it for ten years you save a ton of money. All you lose are cloud services but you can get that without going through Microsoft's crappy service and most people will never need a cloud service. It's really a ridiculous model just based on the cost.
We have reality already and it includes widely used Internet of Things devices that showed up before anyone started calling them IoT. These are smart electric meters and smart grid monitors. But but but, someone will say it's not real IoT unless it's for useless home consumer devices.
LoRa Alliance is just another one of many "we want to get in on IoT too with yet another incompatible standard!" We've got tons of these alliances because everyone wants to be the leader. Cisco says it's the leader because it makes the internet backbone devices, and ARM says it's the leader because it makes the chips, and so on and so on.
You posted this before. You're repeating yourself and not listening to any rebuttals.
This list above could be used for "Computers", or "Internet".
Internet of things just means things that are on the internet, and it runs the range from this sort of LoRa to bluetooth headsets to traffic lights to whatever.
Dell became a major brand while competing in a highly oversaturated market. But times changed, they're getting old and the joints are creaky, so they want to relax a bit and enjoy the grandkids instead of alway being competitive.
If they just went back to declaring that encryption was a munition, then encryption would receive 2nd amendment protection! Then Charlton Heston could claim "you can have my passphrase when you pry it out of my cold dead hands."
It's still an upgrade in-place rather than a clean install. That is, it will try to migrate all your settings, applications, and so forth. Which is ok, but it will leave around a lot of junk and you never really get back to that new computer smell.
I had a problem once where I screwed up the install by not exporting my files to a backup, so after wiping the primary partition and installing from scratch it ended up saying that all the files on the second partition were owned by an unknown user and couldn't be modified (a major hassle).
Yes those are cash grabs too. That's the major flaw in Windows 10, in that it tries downgrade itself to being merely a smart phone OS. So lots and lots of apps available, but after browsing them it turns out there are only 2 or 3 apps worth ever getting for free and 0 apps worth paying for.
The OEM-ness is inherited too I think. Ie, my PC came with Windows 7 pre-installed, then I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro and paid money for it ($15). But this special offer only applies to those who had purchased a new PC within a few weeks of Windows 8 release (normally a ridiculous $199 price). Then that could be upgraded (for free) to Windows 10 Pro. But it's probably still tainted by originally coming from an OEM.
It might be possible. However it's a bit risky. You get all the pain from upgrading combined with all the pain of doing a rollback, and the chance that one of those steps will go wrong. To do a rollback would mean you need an in-place upgrade that leaves lots of junk leftover on the system rather than doing a clean installation. If it did work you'd have to keep that authorization code stored away and then re-apply it in the future.
Things don't work the same way the used to. For instance, you can not just go and get your Windows 10 authentication code without actually upgrading. They'll probably have to change that when it's no longer free (my bet is that they keep extending the deadline in perpetuity, at least for Home version).
I'd be unhappy if there were services in the background of any name providing location services, indexing my files (I've always turned that off), and so forth. When I see my hard disk being constantly active when I've been sitting idle for an hour then I start getting suspicious of either malware or Microsoft bloat. Apple has an OSX update that tries to reduce CPU usage and improve power savings, whereas a Microsoft update seems to be about how to suck up even more of those cycles.
The GP didn't say anything about it being slow, only that it's buggy with bad design decisions.
This may be the first time where I would prefer a video version of that post.
You get that stuff from the periodic updates, not from a service pack.
Right. And I'm a bit worried about the understanding of basic English by the author of the summary. The sentence "a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature" clearly confuses the word "major" with "yawn-inducing".
First step: come up with a rational reason up upgrade to Windows 10. I haven't seen one so far. Sure, if you're on Windows XP then upgrade to something. But if you're on Windows 7/8/8.1 then I haven't seen any reason to upgrade. Don't upgrade if there's no point to it, no matter which OS it is - it's time consuming and a headache, and a major time waster and major heachache if it screws up.
The whole reason for all this adware and begging and subterfuge to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 is because Microsoft knows there's not much there to entice people into upgrading normally. If they had a solid product then customers would upgrade voluntarily on their own. Especially when it's FREE and people are still wary of upgrading then you know something's off.
If it's for gaming, note that no one's really using DirectX 12 yet, just a couple games that no one is every going to miss, and there's no real advantage to using it instead of DX11. Future games will see that so many customers are avoiding Windows 10 that they will be hesitant to remove DX10/11 support and piss off the paying customers.
I would suggest getting Windows 8.1 over Windows 8 if you haven't done that though.
Axiom #11: It's easier to tell the customer that they're using it wrong than to actually make the product work correctly.
You need to get around more then, or read more news, because it is real and people have been upgraded without ever clicking on a "yes" button.
You can block with the router. However the script I saw that tried to do this was extremely broad. It blocked skype for instance, not just some part of skype but "*.skype.com". I don't use skype but it didn't give me a good feeling that they were using pinpoint accuracy.
You'll still get the spyware though. Automatic windows update is always a bad idea. Inspect each one before manually applying.
Greatest feel good marketing slogan of all time: "You have to upgrade sooner or later so may as well do it now and get it over with."