..they have to torment me with 30Gb drives. As I work up to getting a DVD-R, now they're under £200 I've been thinking 'Ah great, smaller stacks of CDs, easier backups..' - and but with these it'd be even easier.
Great. Can't sit around forever I guess, though.
It'd be nicer if optical media had kept pace with hard drive storage. At least it's now starting to catch up - I spotted in the article that "Future generations of drives and media will increase the usable capacity of discs to 60GB and 120GB. Backward read capability will be maintained throughout the whole product roadmap."
120GB on a single disk? Optical media may be really useful once again - providing it's cheap enough, soon enough.
Trouble is, I can't think of an analogy that does fit the MP3 'problem'. Can you? The music industry will tell you it's one way. Users will say something else. People who don't share MP3s will say something else again.
"You wouldn't walk into a store and take a copy, would you? It's just the same" - Well no actually, it's nothing like it. "It's just like the radio, we hear music for free anyway" - Um, nope, again - not the same.
Nothing really fits, which is why it's such a pain to explain to those that don't really understand the situation.
[Don't worry - I'm sure it was humour too. The parent post just got me thinking..]
Perhaps a better analogy would be like flailing your arms around randomly in the dark.
Almost all of the time you hit air and it's a victimless crime. Sometimes you end up hitting criminals, helping the people trying to stop you. Other times you hit regular people, and cause real damage.
Most of the time you'd never have bought that MP3 you just downloaded. Some of the time you'll go buy an album after getting that MP3. Other times you'll download instead of buying, and they'll lose the sale.
The morality of downloading music is not clear cut.
Lets be honest, it doesn't really matter who announced their support for Hammer first. It was inevitable that that major OSes that run on consumer hardware would support the latest processor series from the world's second largest CPU manufacturer (who are in a great position to topple Intel from the #1 spot).
Pro-MS, Pro-Linux, it doesn't matter - putting a slant of this kind on this is pretty silly. Somebody has to announce support first.
The idea that when they ring you should interrupt whatever you are doing and answer them just seems impolite.
When somebody comes over in the office to talk to you, they're normally interrupting whatever it was you were doing before!
I also don't like talking to people on the telephone due to the amount of information you lose.
Sure, you lose a lot of information, but you lose even more by not talking to the people at all who want to get a message to you (or just if they want to chat).
I own a mobile, and often carry it around with me, but it's turned off unless I either need to make a call, or know someone actually needs to talk to me.
I've got a friend who does this, and it's unbelievably frustrating. Most of the time he has his phone off - nobody can ever get hold of him. Sometimes it can wait, other times it can be really quite important - how on earth are you supposed to predict when people actually need to talk to you?
If you're in a meeting, turn the phone off, or at least on vibrate. If someone calls you just divert them to voicemail if you really can't talk, but I don't think you can always assume that just because their call wasn't pre-planned, that it isn't important.
The ISP is charged by its provider for the bandwidth, and if the ISP suddenly has massive bandwidth utilisation during a month, and they have to pay extra, then it's understandable that they should pass the cost down to the customer.
However, if you think about it - the ISP wont be having to pay its provider more if it does "Above 1Mb/s on *this* pipe.. above.5Mb/s on *this* pipe.. " that they dish out to clients. It actually would get charged if it goes over "300Mb/s" on their providing line(s). (I could be wrong on this - perhaps most of the middle to big sized ISPs/Colos just have to pay a fixed rental, but I'm sure this is how it how it is for the small ISPs/colo facilities)
What if the ISP doesnt hit the utilisation required for it to be charged extra, but individual systems within its network get hit hard by a particular virus? (Slammer for example didn't pick IPs properly at random, so some IPs would be hit, others wouldn't)
In this situation, I think the ISP should let them off the fee. The ISP hasn't been charged any extra for the slammer traffic, so it should let the customer off the charge. It'll do wonders for loyalty if you can see your provider is fair and reasonable about things.
The other situation to consider is when an ISP does get billed by its backbone provider heavily for extreme and unsual utilisation.
Alright, hold that thought. Right at the top levels of backbone providers, there is no direct cost associated with using 80% or 10% of a backbone line. It simply is. It's at this stage I think, that they should possibly relieve their clients of bills that are easily attributed to big viruses that are doing the rounds. Granted, then what do you do about spam? Where do you draw the line as to what is 'unsolicted/extreme/garbage' traffic?
Another solution I've just thought of is to extend the period that an average is worked out over, so that over the year if you're under 1Mb/s, you don't get charged extra. It should even out massive, but short lived spikes from worms such as Slammer.
Yes, I know contracts are normally clear about traffic levels and bills that you will receive if you break them, but I do think it's unfair for a small site that has just gone colo to suddenly get a bill 10x its normal bill since the latest worm has been targetting its machine, primarily since there is no direct cost to the ISP, or the ISPs provider, that can be attributed to this extra traffic (as long as there is spare capacity!).
Why is it such a hassle for Unis to generate their own unique IDs for students?
As I undertsand, the SSN isn't even a *good* unique identifier - for one thing it has no built-in checksum, and it's possible that your number isn't unique (could be wrong on the latter, but it's not really my point..)
Just issuing consecutive numbers to students who enrol is just one extremely simple way to replace using SSNs.
My bank issues me a number that identifies my account, my mobile phone company gives me a number to identify my phone, why is it so hard for unis to issue numbers to identify students?
Why were the unis in Washington so unhappy with the change? Sure, a few thousand people need to be given numbers and that can take a while to physically issue - but if the law allowed, perhaps a phased implementation of the scheme, so new people are given one of the new numbers?
Well, you'd better have your mobile switched off beforehand, and never called the person before. Payphone records are tracked too.
If they're trying to track you down urgently, they'll check your mobile records. They'll check who you've called, who've they've called.. If you have a few regulars that you call (or call you), they'll start watching their accounts for calls.
You make a call on a nearby payphone - the number is recorded and flagged. Whoops, they got you. They now know where you are, even if you were smart enough to ditch the mobile phone you were carrying so that they couldn't track you that way.
Hell, lets go a step further.. you then jump into a car and drive away. Nearby CCTV catches you and they find your number plate. Ken's new security ( sorry - congestion ) cameras pick you up a few days later and flag your record up on a computer.
Alright, it's a bit extreme, but it's possible. I'm sure they wouldn't go to those lengths if say, you'd stolen a car, but if you were a suspect in a recent bombing I wouldn't be too surprised for them to go to these lengths to track and find you.
Also, the card ships with a nice and quiet Zalman heatpipe, which, though quiet as the fanless nature of it implies, probably cuts the life of the card to a year or so.
What sort of lifespan does a graphics card have with normal fan cooling then? I've never managed to run a card to its death (my upgrade cycle isn't too extreme either.. TNT2 -> GF2 GTS -> GF3 Ti500 )
My GF3 has had a Zalman cooler for about a year now I think. Now, if a GPU has a lifespan of say, 20 years, cutting it to 10 with a passive cooler isn't too much of a problem..
Don't forget Sky+ has [i]two[/i] Sky Digital decoders.
AFAIK, Tivo doesn't have any sky decoders - it can record two terrestrial channels at once, but it's limited to one sky channel, that your decoder is set to.
Sky+ though could record from say, Sky One and UK Gold at the same time.
Last month I sent over 500 in a month. None got 'lost'.
I had a couple that bouned back with an 'expired' report (SMS centres will keep retrying for I believe 3 days, then give up). These people had their phones off for a week or so, so they didn't get through.
At extreme peak times, such as new years eve/day, I had problems sending. However, it didn't lie and tell me they had sent and never arrived, but it always tells you "Message failed" so you can retry. Then some arrived a few hours late.
However, the rest of the time, they all arrive virtually straight away.
Rather than mandating one type of service *cough*GSM Europe*cough*, they're letting all the standards duke it out.
Why does it sound like you're suggesting our standardisation is A Bad Thing? Standards are good. I can use my phone I bought from one company with any others, and indeed have switched providers this month simply having to order a new SIM card.
I can use my mobile practically everywhere, even in rural areas I get a perfectly respectable signal. I can also use my phone in any country around the world, bar the US - since they all use GSM.
Eventually, the best service will win out.
Are you really sure about that? Does your average person on the street know what CDMA is, and will it factor in their purchase of a phone? Almost certainly not. They won't care, and as such the best technology will not previal through customer led demand, but the marketing of the network and the prices they charge. This has little to do with GSM/CDMA/TDMA - it just serves to frustrate people that there's no standard, and can't switch networks without getting a new phone.
We may have sim locks in the UK, but I believe providers are obliged by law to provide the unlock code when a contract expires or if they've already recovered their costs for the phone.
Virgin Mobile for example lock their phones, but you just call up requesting the code, and you'll have it within a couple of days.
The switch to O2 was easy - I ordered a new sim card, and it came in the post within a few days. With my phone unlocked, I just put the new SIM in. Tomorrow morning my old number gets transferred to O2, (true number portability is now reality) and everyone will be able to get hold of me on my new network.
I'm certain all the networks (Orange/Vodafone/O2/T-Mobile/Virgin) all have roaming agreements already. You typically can't roam using pay as you go deals, but on contract/direct debit deals you can. I've had no problems using my phone around Europe when I was with Virgin, and certainly none of this swapping SIM nonsense you mention!:)
It's not just the skidiving industry either - I know myself that some pharamacuetical or heath food related companies refuse to ship to the US, simply because liability inurance is far, far greater when you want to cover the US.
You could do this with those new VIA processors, and I'm sure you can get dual head cards without fans (possibly some Matrox or Radeon cards). The VIA processors can be run just using a large heatsink. Some motherboards have fans on the northbridge, but you can replace those with Zalman heatsinks which work a treat if you get into that situation.
The only remaining issue is the 1 fan on the PSU. There are some fanless PSUs around. There's only one make I've seen that are fanless, that I can't actually remember now, and they're nonstandard size. You can also get away with removing the fans on the PSU, but that can be a bit dodgy sometimes and prone to overheating. If you're not using much power though, you might find it works.
Is this something you'd particularily want though?
Very often people change email addresses so they're on one that the spammers don't have yet. Anyone you want to talk to can just send an email out saying you're changing your email address.
Sure, people who get lots of emails from people they don't know might find it desirable, but I'm sure more often than not people with new email addresses don't want the spam from their old one flooding into their nice new account.
Are you running on a 486 or something? (Yes, I know no AGP...)
I get in the 100-200fps at that resolution in Q3, CS etc (which are pretty old games). I'm running on an Athlon 1800+ with a GF3 Ti500, but still, you shouldn't be getting that slow.
You *do* have the VIA 4in1s don't you? (Assuming you run a VIA mobo)
You do know that you can easily get hold of DVD-Rs for less than $5 each, making them cheaper per gigabyte.
It really depends on how much data you have to store. If you have a lot, to recover your initial outlay of the drive won't take much doing. I do feel safer when I have thinks on optical media as well as hard drives - even entire RAID arrays can be completely trashed, and I usually end up just clearing backups on the hard drive to make room for more stuff I need..:)
Also just came out in England, I stand corrected. It was quite a while ago I last heard the release date, maybe it was brought forward - or I got confused with late Aug and early Sept.
It still was quite a while back it came out in America though.
Not as much as they would though if you bought the DVD in the UK. DVDs (and music) are more expensive here, so I wouldn't be surprised if they gave a damn.
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..they have to torment me with 30Gb drives. As I work up to getting a DVD-R, now they're under £200 I've been thinking 'Ah great, smaller stacks of CDs, easier backups..' - and but with these it'd be even easier.
Great. Can't sit around forever I guess, though.
It'd be nicer if optical media had kept pace with hard drive storage. At least it's now starting to catch up - I spotted in the article that "Future generations of drives and media will increase the usable capacity of discs to 60GB and 120GB. Backward read capability will be maintained throughout the whole product roadmap."
120GB on a single disk? Optical media may be really useful once again - providing it's cheap enough, soon enough.
You're right - it doesn't really fit.
Trouble is, I can't think of an analogy that does fit the MP3 'problem'. Can you? The music industry will tell you it's one way. Users will say something else. People who don't share MP3s will say something else again.
"You wouldn't walk into a store and take a copy, would you? It's just the same" - Well no actually, it's nothing like it.
"It's just like the radio, we hear music for free anyway" - Um, nope, again - not the same.
Nothing really fits, which is why it's such a pain to explain to those that don't really understand the situation.
[Don't worry - I'm sure it was humour too. The parent post just got me thinking..]
[Whoops..alright, punching the air isn't really a crime... :)]
(Yes, I know it's meant to be funny, But...)
Perhaps a better analogy would be like flailing your arms around randomly in the dark.
Almost all of the time you hit air and it's a victimless crime. Sometimes you end up hitting criminals, helping the people trying to stop you. Other times you hit regular people, and cause real damage.
Most of the time you'd never have bought that MP3 you just downloaded. Some of the time you'll go buy an album after getting that MP3. Other times you'll download instead of buying, and they'll lose the sale.
The morality of downloading music is not clear cut.
Lets be honest, it doesn't really matter who announced their support for Hammer first. It was inevitable that that major OSes that run on consumer hardware would support the latest processor series from the world's second largest CPU manufacturer (who are in a great position to topple Intel from the #1 spot).
Pro-MS, Pro-Linux, it doesn't matter - putting a slant of this kind on this is pretty silly. Somebody has to announce support first.
The idea that when they ring you should interrupt whatever you are doing and answer them just seems impolite.
When somebody comes over in the office to talk to you, they're normally interrupting whatever it was you were doing before!
I also don't like talking to people on the telephone due to the amount of information you lose.
Sure, you lose a lot of information, but you lose even more by not talking to the people at all who want to get a message to you (or just if they want to chat).
I own a mobile, and often carry it around with me, but it's turned off unless I either need to make a call, or know someone actually needs to talk to me.
I've got a friend who does this, and it's unbelievably frustrating. Most of the time he has his phone off - nobody can ever get hold of him. Sometimes it can wait, other times it can be really quite important - how on earth are you supposed to predict when people actually need to talk to you?
If you're in a meeting, turn the phone off, or at least on vibrate. If someone calls you just divert them to voicemail if you really can't talk, but I don't think you can always assume that just because their call wasn't pre-planned, that it isn't important.
The ISP is charged by its provider for the bandwidth, and if the ISP suddenly has massive bandwidth utilisation during a month, and they have to pay extra, then it's understandable that they should pass the cost down to the customer.
.5Mb/s on *this* pipe .. " that they dish out to clients. It actually would get charged if it goes over "300Mb/s" on their providing line(s). (I could be wrong on this - perhaps most of the middle to big sized ISPs/Colos just have to pay a fixed rental, but I'm sure this is how it how it is for the small ISPs/colo facilities)
However, if you think about it - the ISP wont be having to pay its provider more if it does "Above 1Mb/s on *this* pipe.. above
What if the ISP doesnt hit the utilisation required for it to be charged extra, but individual systems within its network get hit hard by a particular virus? (Slammer for example didn't pick IPs properly at random, so some IPs would be hit, others wouldn't)
In this situation, I think the ISP should let them off the fee. The ISP hasn't been charged any extra for the slammer traffic, so it should let the customer off the charge. It'll do wonders for loyalty if you can see your provider is fair and reasonable about things.
The other situation to consider is when an ISP does get billed by its backbone provider heavily for extreme and unsual utilisation.
Alright, hold that thought. Right at the top levels of backbone providers, there is no direct cost associated with using 80% or 10% of a backbone line. It simply is. It's at this stage I think, that they should possibly relieve their clients of bills that are easily attributed to big viruses that are doing the rounds. Granted, then what do you do about spam? Where do you draw the line as to what is 'unsolicted/extreme/garbage' traffic?
Another solution I've just thought of is to extend the period that an average is worked out over, so that over the year if you're under 1Mb/s, you don't get charged extra. It should even out massive, but short lived spikes from worms such as Slammer.
Yes, I know contracts are normally clear about traffic levels and bills that you will receive if you break them, but I do think it's unfair for a small site that has just gone colo to suddenly get a bill 10x its normal bill since the latest worm has been targetting its machine, primarily since there is no direct cost to the ISP, or the ISPs provider, that can be attributed to this extra traffic (as long as there is spare capacity!).
Why is it such a hassle for Unis to generate their own unique IDs for students?
As I undertsand, the SSN isn't even a *good* unique identifier - for one thing it has no built-in checksum, and it's possible that your number isn't unique (could be wrong on the latter, but it's not really my point..)
Just issuing consecutive numbers to students who enrol is just one extremely simple way to replace using SSNs.
My bank issues me a number that identifies my account, my mobile phone company gives me a number to identify my phone, why is it so hard for unis to issue numbers to identify students?
Why were the unis in Washington so unhappy with the change? Sure, a few thousand people need to be given numbers and that can take a while to physically issue - but if the law allowed, perhaps a phased implementation of the scheme, so new people are given one of the new numbers?
Well, you'd better have your mobile switched off beforehand, and never called the person before. Payphone records are tracked too.
If they're trying to track you down urgently, they'll check your mobile records. They'll check who you've called, who've they've called.. If you have a few regulars that you call (or call you), they'll start watching their accounts for calls.
You make a call on a nearby payphone - the number is recorded and flagged. Whoops, they got you. They now know where you are, even if you were smart enough to ditch the mobile phone you were carrying so that they couldn't track you that way.
Hell, lets go a step further.. you then jump into a car and drive away. Nearby CCTV catches you and they find your number plate. Ken's new security ( sorry - congestion ) cameras pick you up a few days later and flag your record up on a computer.
Alright, it's a bit extreme, but it's possible. I'm sure they wouldn't go to those lengths if say, you'd stolen a car, but if you were a suspect in a recent bombing I wouldn't be too surprised for them to go to these lengths to track and find you.
It's not quite as easy as you make it sound.
What sort of lifespan does a graphics card have with normal fan cooling then? I've never managed to run a card to its death (my upgrade cycle isn't too extreme either.. TNT2 -> GF2 GTS -> GF3 Ti500 )
My GF3 has had a Zalman cooler for about a year now I think. Now, if a GPU has a lifespan of say, 20 years, cutting it to 10 with a passive cooler isn't too much of a problem..
I got my cheque book and Visa Electron debit card at 16. Electron is accepted in quite a lot of shops, but rarely on the internet.
I couldn't have an overdraft though, obviously, being under 18 and all.
Don't forget Sky+ has [i]two[/i] Sky Digital decoders.
AFAIK, Tivo doesn't have any sky decoders - it can record two terrestrial channels at once, but it's limited to one sky channel, that your decoder is set to.
Sky+ though could record from say, Sky One and UK Gold at the same time.
Last month I sent over 500 in a month. None got 'lost'.
I had a couple that bouned back with an 'expired' report (SMS centres will keep retrying for I believe 3 days, then give up). These people had their phones off for a week or so, so they didn't get through.
At extreme peak times, such as new years eve/day, I had problems sending. However, it didn't lie and tell me they had sent and never arrived, but it always tells you "Message failed" so you can retry. Then some arrived a few hours late.
However, the rest of the time, they all arrive virtually straight away.
Oh, I'm in the UK.
Rather than mandating one type of service *cough*GSM Europe*cough*, they're letting all the standards duke it out.
Why does it sound like you're suggesting our standardisation is A Bad Thing? Standards are good. I can use my phone I bought from one company with any others, and indeed have switched providers this month simply having to order a new SIM card.
I can use my mobile practically everywhere, even in rural areas I get a perfectly respectable signal. I can also use my phone in any country around the world, bar the US - since they all use GSM.
Eventually, the best service will win out.
Are you really sure about that? Does your average person on the street know what CDMA is, and will it factor in their purchase of a phone? Almost certainly not. They won't care, and as such the best technology will not previal through customer led demand, but the marketing of the network and the prices they charge. This has little to do with GSM/CDMA/TDMA - it just serves to frustrate people that there's no standard, and can't switch networks without getting a new phone.
We may have sim locks in the UK, but I believe providers are obliged by law to provide the unlock code when a contract expires or if they've already recovered their costs for the phone.
:)
Virgin Mobile for example lock their phones, but you just call up requesting the code, and you'll have it within a couple of days.
The switch to O2 was easy - I ordered a new sim card, and it came in the post within a few days. With my phone unlocked, I just put the new SIM in. Tomorrow morning my old number gets transferred to O2, (true number portability is now reality) and everyone will be able to get hold of me on my new network.
I'm certain all the networks (Orange/Vodafone/O2/T-Mobile/Virgin) all have roaming agreements already. You typically can't roam using pay as you go deals, but on contract/direct debit deals you can. I've had no problems using my phone around Europe when I was with Virgin, and certainly none of this swapping SIM nonsense you mention!
It's not just the skidiving industry either - I know myself that some pharamacuetical or heath food related companies refuse to ship to the US, simply because liability inurance is far, far greater when you want to cover the US.
You could do this with those new VIA processors, and I'm sure you can get dual head cards without fans (possibly some Matrox or Radeon cards). The VIA processors can be run just using a large heatsink. Some motherboards have fans on the northbridge, but you can replace those with Zalman heatsinks which work a treat if you get into that situation.
The only remaining issue is the 1 fan on the PSU. There are some fanless PSUs around. There's only one make I've seen that are fanless, that I can't actually remember now, and they're nonstandard size. You can also get away with removing the fans on the PSU, but that can be a bit dodgy sometimes and prone to overheating. If you're not using much power though, you might find it works.
http://www.cenatek.com/ make rocket drives, sound like what you're after. They're PCI cards that are filled with up to 4GB (soon 8GB) of RAM per card.
:)
They even support Linux
Is this something you'd particularily want though?
Very often people change email addresses so they're on one that the spammers don't have yet. Anyone you want to talk to can just send an email out saying you're changing your email address.
Sure, people who get lots of emails from people they don't know might find it desirable, but I'm sure more often than not people with new email addresses don't want the spam from their old one flooding into their nice new account.
I've never, ever seen Mountain Dew in England, and only ever heard of it because of the net!
Red bull most certainly is available though..
Are you running on a 486 or something? (Yes, I know no AGP...)
I get in the 100-200fps at that resolution in Q3, CS etc (which are pretty old games). I'm running on an Athlon 1800+ with a GF3 Ti500, but still, you shouldn't be getting that slow.
You *do* have the VIA 4in1s don't you? (Assuming you run a VIA mobo)
You do know that you can easily get hold of DVD-Rs for less than $5 each, making them cheaper per gigabyte.
:)
It really depends on how much data you have to store. If you have a lot, to recover your initial outlay of the drive won't take much doing. I do feel safer when I have thinks on optical media as well as hard drives - even entire RAID arrays can be completely trashed, and I usually end up just clearing backups on the hard drive to make room for more stuff I need..
Also just came out in England, I stand corrected. It was quite a while ago I last heard the release date, maybe it was brought forward - or I got confused with late Aug and early Sept.
It still was quite a while back it came out in America though.
I can't say I've ever noticed, sure you're not just going to a crappy cinema? :D
Not as much as they would though if you bought the DVD in the UK. DVDs (and music) are more expensive here, so I wouldn't be surprised if they gave a damn.