Re:What are these people's problems?
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Even if I only sire one child per year and only 25% of those children survive to reproduce, I will have still have been three times as effective as you have at propogating my genes.
But this is effective only in the single-generation local sense. How many of those children will survive and so on?
If any "equilibrium" is to be gained from your example, it is only that of a boom and bust cycle.
Among the fast breeder population, yes. And so, in the long term, it is not clear whether a promiscuous strategy works. If we presume that slow-breeders tend to congregate together, we'd see patches of sustainable growth surrounded by unsustainable growth among fast-breeders. Unless the fast-breeders ravage the food sources of the slow-breeders (which will happen to some extent), it would be reasonable to presume that they will be affected more by the bust part of the cycle.
It would be folly to suggest that the ability to reason resulted in the "accidental" co-evolution of free will: free will is part and parcel of rational thought, vis. the ability to choose.
I don't think that one rationally choses to limit offspring because of opinions about many generations hence, though, but rather because one prefers greater comforts for *this* generation. This, in turn, spurs technological advancements -- it's the old "geeks work hard because they are lazy paradox". Furthermore, surely some fast-breeders would chose to resist this urge as well as some slow-breeders would reject slow-breeding as a cultural norm -- there will be population migration.
But it strikes me that long vs. short term thinking is a useful trait to have within the population: surely fast breeders benefit from advances that slow breeders make (like knowledge to support a growing population). Granted, this is an extreme projection of fast-breeder --> idiot who only knows to fuck, and slow-breeder --> stoic planner, but somewhere between those extremes are the kind of individuals that make up the breeding population.
And that diversity, of short term rapid genetic propagation, with long-term conservative survival planning for one's own projeny, probably serves a useful purpose. I do think that this has occured due to evolution.
Being 100% responsible and considering the consequences of your actions before having sex is not a winning genetic strategy.
Winning stragegy for what?
Certainly it isn't a winning strategy for propagating one's genetic material, but it may be a winning stragegy for improving one's own quality of life -- supporting unwanted/unexpected offspring is expensive.
It all boils down to how much present pleasure one is willing to give up in exchange of the prospect of greater pleasure later (in either the same or a different form). Humans appear to be unique in their ability to make that tradeoff: we can look ahead and make long-term decisions, as opposed to short-term ones, or following blind genetic programming. This is free will.
If one wants to make an evolutionary argument, then one must accept that free will would not arise if it didn't have an evolutionary advantage as well. I can think that having fewer offspring that are better cared for, and thus fitter than average, might be one.
Of course the question then becomes, which evolutionary trait will win out? I don't thing that either will be totally eliminated, but rather that a stable population will result: occasionally fast breeding is necessary to save the species from some global calamity, left unchecked, the resulting population explosion would have dire consequences.
ObSciFi Reference: Piers Anthony isn't the only author who deals with taboo sexual topics. IIRC, Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology included a short story about a planet that was shunned because of it's secret: incest was a perfectly normal occurance. Don't remember the title or author, though.
thats why when I posted the original comment - i did it as AC... so as not to get my karma involved.
That rather defeats the purpose of karma. Also, can't you selectively decide what bonus to give to non-anonymous posts you read? I think so. Thus, the ability to post non-anonymously at 0 would be useful.
Should I post this anonymously, to avoid losing more karma? Ah fsck it, I'll post at +2, just to burn the points of those who insist on modding down to -1.
Actually, what pisses me off is when I have a relevant response to an off-topic post.
Because my response of off-topic to the main thread, I select the "No Score +1 Bonus", but this still causes me to post at +1. That usually gets an off-topic down mod.
There are times I wish I could post at 0 (instead of the default +2), but not have to do so anonymously.
Your point is noted, but you can't have it both ways:
Either issue a release candidate, with the intent of catching release-related oopses;
or branch the next version, release it, and backport release-related oopses;
or try your best, release, and patch release-related oopses to the stable branch either at the same time as the unstable branch, or delay forking the unstable branch for a while.
As you note, the first two approaches don't give enough feedback. The third results in less than perfect releases. Without a release test plan in place, I don't really know how this problem can be avoided, short of getting people to test "release candidate" releases. In the old days, that's what gamma tests were for -- beta tests from an end-user perspective.
Look, no matter when you release 2.6, you will want to change it. So, if you never want to change it, you will never release it.
So, the best time to let 2.6 "escape" is when you're fairly confident it's "ready" and won't need patching.
Of course, you'll be wrong -- it will need patching, or backports of useful features that just didn't make it in time.
But, the idea is that these patches or backports should be trivial "oopses" where the change does not require massive code review, or the backport is clearly something that was "99% done" already.
So, my suggestion is release 2.7, and hold off on release 2.6 until the obvious release-related "oops"es are found, say 1-2 weeks, then try your best to release a 2.6 that won't need patching. It will anyway, but don't lose sleep over it.
Sure, but it's that much more seperate "stuff". The combo of a cable modem, router, firewall, and wireless access point is attractive, you have to admit. Well, perhaps not to us old hands that like to separate functionality, but cirtainly to the newbies this is designed to attract.
FWIW, my linksys router/firewall can spoof MAC addresses for just this purpose. Of course, my ISP is decent enough that I don't have to.
Re:Technology has come a long way.
on
Live Via Satellite
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· Score: 4, Informative
Lesse, what do you take for granted that didn't exist for me, a child of the 60s (I'm presuming here that by child of the xx's, you mean someone born in the early part of the xx decade -- in some contexts "child" in that phrase refers to an adolescent and not "under 10").
0. ATMs and "multi-branch banking": no longer did you have to go to your branch to make deposits and withdrawls, nor did you have to deal with a human teller.
1. VCRs: they didn't start getting popular until about 1979-1981, and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Do you remember the VHS vs. Beta format wars?
2. Compact Disks: radio stations started using them instead of records, calling them "laser disks" (not to be confused with video laser disks), and making a big deal of the quality (over well-worn vinyl). The first ones were around $3000. By 1986, you could get a portable for around $200.
3. Cellular phones: about the size of a brick, access was available in few metropolitan areas. They first started to be used in cars, because of their bulk, replacing older-style "mobile phones", that were essentially radios.
4. Pocket calculators. We got to use slide-rules in science class: pocket calculators were considered an unfair advantage for those students who could afford $150 for four functions and square root.
5. Computers: the hobbyist Altair became available, with an 8080 CPU, and was featured in a January 1975 Popular Electronics article. The Apple ][, and a host of CP/M-based machines followed. As this is a geek forum, I'll dwell a bit on the pre-history of 1975-1981. The Altairs (and IMSAIs) were big, boxy, noisy, and expensive: I remember 256 bytes of memory costing $119. The 2102 1kbit static ram was a breakthrough: 8 kilobytes could fit on an S100 card (for the Altair or IMSAI) that was about the width and height of a notebook computer (thinner obviously). The only people who had such computers were die-hard geeks and hackers, generally with a hardware, rather than software bent: you built your own memory boards to save money, because pre-built boards where much more expensive than kits; and you scrounged HAM-fests for teletypes and built serial I/O and cassette interfaces (so you could save your programs). Altair Basic was a big deal: it only took 8 minutes to load from cassette. Dumb terminals could be had, but cost from one to three thousand dollars. The Apple ][ was one of the first compact, inexpensive computers: with a TV, disk drives, and DOS, a system could be put together for around $10,000.
Of course, 1981 brought the IBM PC (which initially supported a cassette port: disk drives were still a luxery for many). Ten megabyte hard disks became available by the mid 80s (full-height). I mention this because however crude you might think the PCs of the 80s were compared to today's PCs, they were light-years ahead of the mid to late 70s prehistoric versions, which really could not be called "personal".
By the mid-80s I had seen more technological innovation in 20 years, than my parents did since they were born: for them, the big things were affordable cars, planes, phones, TVs, and perhaps Cable TV. I suppose the really big thing for them was electricity.
Of course, 20 years later we have recordable CDs and DVDs, digital cameras, miniture cell phones, the Internet, on-line billing, ordering, blogs, cyber-porn (can you imagine the porn industry when the only distribution medium was 16 mm film for a projector: "dirty magazines" with still pictures was all there was for most male teens to leer at -- today if you want hard-core porn, you probably do "read Playboy just for the articles"), MP3 players, digital TVs, PDAs, combination MP3 players, phones, and PDAs, instant messaging, personal FAX machines, satellite TV, home theatres, multi-channel sound (though quadraphonic kinda sputtered and died in the 70s), and so on.
So, yeah, the last 20 years have been a whirlwind of technological progress. But the "slow, and dull" progress of the 60s and 70s, was, at the time, no less dizzying to those of us who lived through it (VCRs!: time shifting!! [evil teenage boy grin: live action pornography with sound!])
This seams like the obvious solution, but it has problems: over what period do you average bandwidth use?
Most traffic patterns are very bursty, somewhat less so, if you aggregate foerign "freebee" Wifi traffic with your own (and that's generally the problem, because the traffic models break). There are times when I'd want to suck data flat out for a short period of time (downloading the latest GNU/Linux distro, for example), and I'll be damned if I have to suck that data through a bandwidth-capping straw. I like my 768kb/s downstream DSL speed for that, thankyouverymuch.
Of course, the US$80 a month I pay (includes $15 for a dedicated pair 'cuase I'm too far from the DSLAM to ride on top of POTS) is nowhere near what it costs to deploy 3/4 of a T1 line, so using that bandwidth flat out is out of the question. The presumption is that, over the course of a month, use will average out, despite the bursty nature.
Now, compare that to a modem capped at, oh, 128 kb/s. Flat out that's 41-1/2 gigabytes over the course of a month. A recent check of the past 6-1/2 days traffic into my home LAN via the firewall showed 149 MB. This works out to 269 bytes per second, about 700 MB over the course of a month. I haven't downloaded any new distros lately, so lets add, oh, 1.5 Gig to that (multiple CDs, restarted downloads, etc.) That adds up to 2.2 GB/month or 6784 b/s, sustained. My use is probably on the heavy side.
The point is that 6.8 kb/s is a far cry from a 128 kb/s rate cap. So, such a rate cap would be (a) crippling for the occasional massive download, and (b) still too high if the traffic were anywhere near steady, as if it were shared. About the only thing the 128 kb/s rate cap does is even out use of a shared medium. Load balancing during peak use times would be better, and is generally used on DSL connections (because of the centralized nature of aggregation), but would require dynamic control of upstream traffic from distributed cable modems in a cable environment, with it's own overhead issues (though TCP could be rate-limited by delaying packet ACKs, the "interesting" traffic is not TCP).
The only solutions this leaves us with are either (a) pitifully crippling rate caps, (b) metered access, or (c) a certain amount of "free" traffic, followed by metered access to the rest. Option (d), "use all you want until we tell you its a problem", while currently common is crude and fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding.
Now, with a more intelligent network, and local traffic rate capping, shaping, and balancing, interesting possibilities abound: why not permit open access during off-peak times, when there is a light load? To some extent, this needs to be saved to average out heavy use later, but there's no rule that says this has to be 100%, as it is now. Off-peak discounts for bandwidth become possible. Maybe I know I won't be downloading a new distro this month, and my use will be below normal. Maybe next month, my neighbor's will be below normal. Maybe between us (and others), we can offer that excess for free. How much should be under our individual control, but one can see an opportunity to smooth out a neighborhood's overall traffic use by dumping occasional "excess" for free access -- without going to the trouble to secure a dedicated fat pipe, setting up a company to manage it, etc.
This does require technical improvements (local traffic shaping and load-balancing, with shared ISP/user control -- imagine an "ISP meter" like an electric meter, but not as draconian as current attempts at this sort of thing that completely lock out the user), as well as looking at a user's average traffic pattern as averaged over their use over time more than over the sumultaneous use by other users (so, you don't balance you're low use as much against your neighbor's high use, but rather your higher use in the past or the future). This creates the opportunity for "credits" for unused bandwidth to carry from month to month, with some fraction "lost" if not used (you can't carry them forever -- the ISP would have to carry the credit on it's books as earned but unpaid in your favour). Given a "use it or lose it" scenario, sharing of unused bandwidth should naturally happen.
We did it the old fashioned way: designing unit tests for each function and state transition for stateful interactions. The results were matched against what was supposed to happen, and stimuli for errors were included as well as stimuli for non-error responses. You can scale this technique up to subsystem and system testing and adapt it for client/server and p2p protocols.
You catch doc. errors this way because when the test reveals an error it means one of three things: (a) you coded the test wrong; (b) you found an implementation error; (c) the implementation is right, but you coded to the docs, which were wrong.
Now, if you use various 4GL tools (dunno if Rational Rose lets you do this), they might be able to automate the tests for you.
I did this at my last place of employment as well as my current one.
In fact regression tests spotted not only implementation errors, but documentation errors when the semantics of a function changed, but the docs, and hence the regression tests didn't match.
Now, strictly speaking, what you describe is more of a sanity audit rather than a regression test, unless you provide test data to trigger the potential conditions you test for.
Hmm, FreeBSD4.0 gives me 3 decimal places too. Of course in both the FreeBSD and GNU/Linux case, I see three decimal places when the ping time is under one milisecond.
This won't help much (sorry), but laptops are hard to see in bright light by the "normal" sighted. So, you're likely going to need a HMD (head mounted display). AFAIK, these are bulky, and sadly, expensive.
Regarding ferrets: they are nice, but high-maintenance. I have friends who've had ferrets. Somehow, "high maintenance" and "geek" don't seem to go along. That's why I suggested a cat.
Part of the problem is animals that are "cool", yet cruel or impractical to keep as pets. I like big cats, for example, as in cheetas. You can't tame them, they are an endangered species, and unless you can properly provide for their needs (and meet all applicable laws), it's pretty much criminal to have one.
OTOH, I knew a friend who had a cougar as a pet. Tame as could be at home. Of course it roamed at night, and the neighbors turned him in when one too many domestic cats wound up dead. Poor thing wound up in a zoo. It deserved to be free, but alas, it liked to rest with humans.
Now, I will say that seeing a wild animal in it's natural habitat (deer, fox, wolf, bear, raccoon) is certainly a pleasure [and catching a glimpse of a brown bear is damn hard], and definately exciting.
Eeew, how many computer do you HAVE running in that place?....
Right now, only two: my Athlon XP1600+ and an old Pentium 200 Mhz acting as a bulk data server (1/4 terabyte of uncompressed music). But there are plans for computers in the kids rooms, an STB-type system in the family room (so I can route music there), and possibly systems in the game room and spare bedroom.
There is an HDTV terrestrial/satellite receiver in the family room, and a plain Jane satellite receiver in one kid's bedroom. Another one is slated for the other kid's bedroom when he gets old enough.
The point is, if you're going to wire, you may as well get it all done and over with at one shot.
Wow, just did a search for RG6, never knew there where so many types of Coax. . . . LOL. I've had such crappy experience with Coax I've pretty much given up on it, you know what the friggin quality loss on that stuff is after the first 50 feet?
Loss varies with cable, distance, and frequency: higher frequencies are attenuated faster. That's what RF amps and tilt compensators are for. RG6 is sctually pretty good compared to run-of-the-mill RG59.
I said, "Neatness counts. Maybe not for you, but it does for me."
I didn't have much of an option, either that or routing it through a story of drywall, which was, err, put up by my friggin drunken grand father (gee thanks ga'pops) Yeesh. Boards spaced pretty much randomly throughout. . . . ick.
Any kind of retrofit, particularly between stories (as opposed to attic to top floor and basement/crawl to bottom floor) is going to be a pain... and older homes have fire breaks between the studs (what fun!).
Oh, and to refer back to the first line of your reply;
exposure to the elements? Well besides perhaps acting as a bit of a mini-lighting rod, not much has happened actually. Kind of surprising considering the wind and rain storms that happen around here, but hey, it keeps on working!
That's pretty good, then.
Ok so granted at one point I was pinging 200 to a computer on my own LAN but. . . . hehe. ^_^ (now it is down to 25 or so)
Custom home builders here charge arounbd $500 per drop for 2xCat5E and 2xRG6, Add headend equipment, faceplates and jacks, and yeah, you get up to at least $5k pretty fast. Aftermarket retrofit for a single telephone or "cable" drop is $75.
So, if that's what a homeowner wants, it's either gonna cost for a custom job, or you'll suffer with a retrofit. (No, the builder generally won't let you on the site after the framing is complete, but before the sheetrock goes up -- though I've known of, he he, "exceptions").
In general, when home prices dip, things like that prevent them from dipping as much as other comparables, though in a rising market they neither add or subtract anything.
I wired the house with solid core cable. My reference to Cat5e "patch" cables was in reference to 110 to 110 patches, not RJ45 to RJ45.
Though, I have found that using solid core cable with RJ45 plugs designed for stranded cable works fine: the biggest issue is flexibility of the cable vs. that of stranded.
I have my cable duct taped to the outside walls of the house, CAT5 is very VERY malleable, goes out window, window still shuts and all, down side of house, in window.
Aside from the problem of exposure to elements, this might be fine for a single Cat5 cable dropped from an upstairs room to a downstairs one, but running two Cat5 and two RG6 cables makes for a messy bundle. Even the combined cable you can get is 3/4" thick. A single RG6 cable is about 1/4" thick. To do this right, you really have to run a steel conduit on the outside (one inch diameter to accomodate the cable -- this gets visible and ugly), and drill through the wall.
Why the, err, fuss?
Neatness counts. Maybe not for you, but it does for me.
If you are worried about looks, go wireless, has been around for quite some time, though I can understand you not going that route if it was not accessible when you where doing things.
Wireless is still expensive, and puts everyone on the same (or a few) contention-based networks. I like my 10/100 Mb/s switch. Still, it is a good idea for mobile devices and the odd room that you can't reach by pulling a cable.
Finally, you want something that adds value to the home. I figure my $1000 investment and sweat equity added $5k to $10k to the resale value of the home.
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But this is effective only in the single-generation local sense. How many of those children will survive and so on?
If any "equilibrium" is to be gained from your example, it is only that of a boom and bust cycle.
Among the fast breeder population, yes. And so, in the long term, it is not clear whether a promiscuous strategy works. If we presume that slow-breeders tend to congregate together, we'd see patches of sustainable growth surrounded by unsustainable growth among fast-breeders. Unless the fast-breeders ravage the food sources of the slow-breeders (which will happen to some extent), it would be reasonable to presume that they will be affected more by the bust part of the cycle.
It would be folly to suggest that the ability to reason resulted in the "accidental" co-evolution of free will: free will is part and parcel of rational thought, vis. the ability to choose.
I don't think that one rationally choses to limit offspring because of opinions about many generations hence, though, but rather because one prefers greater comforts for *this* generation. This, in turn, spurs technological advancements -- it's the old "geeks work hard because they are lazy paradox". Furthermore, surely some fast-breeders would chose to resist this urge as well as some slow-breeders would reject slow-breeding as a cultural norm -- there will be population migration.
But it strikes me that long vs. short term thinking is a useful trait to have within the population: surely fast breeders benefit from advances that slow breeders make (like knowledge to support a growing population). Granted, this is an extreme projection of fast-breeder --> idiot who only knows to fuck, and slow-breeder --> stoic planner, but somewhere between those extremes are the kind of individuals that make up the breeding population.
And that diversity, of short term rapid genetic propagation, with long-term conservative survival planning for one's own projeny, probably serves a useful purpose. I do think that this has occured due to evolution.
The Dangerous Visions story referred above may have been "Evensong" (by Lester del Rey).
Winning stragegy for what?
Certainly it isn't a winning strategy for propagating one's genetic material, but it may be a winning stragegy for improving one's own quality of life -- supporting unwanted/unexpected offspring is expensive.
It all boils down to how much present pleasure one is willing to give up in exchange of the prospect of greater pleasure later (in either the same or a different form). Humans appear to be unique in their ability to make that tradeoff: we can look ahead and make long-term decisions, as opposed to short-term ones, or following blind genetic programming. This is free will.
If one wants to make an evolutionary argument, then one must accept that free will would not arise if it didn't have an evolutionary advantage as well. I can think that having fewer offspring that are better cared for, and thus fitter than average, might be one.
Of course the question then becomes, which evolutionary trait will win out? I don't thing that either will be totally eliminated, but rather that a stable population will result: occasionally fast breeding is necessary to save the species from some global calamity, left unchecked, the resulting population explosion would have dire consequences.
ObSciFi Reference: Piers Anthony isn't the only author who deals with taboo sexual topics. IIRC, Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology included a short story about a planet that was shunned because of it's secret: incest was a perfectly normal occurance. Don't remember the title or author, though.
That rather defeats the purpose of karma. Also, can't you selectively decide what bonus to give to non-anonymous posts you read? I think so. Thus, the ability to post non-anonymously at 0 would be useful.
Should I post this anonymously, to avoid losing more karma? Ah fsck it, I'll post at +2, just to burn the points of those who insist on modding down to -1.
Because my response of off-topic to the main thread, I select the "No Score +1 Bonus", but this still causes me to post at +1. That usually gets an off-topic down mod.
There are times I wish I could post at 0 (instead of the default +2), but not have to do so anonymously.
Personally, I'dve preferred to have number/non-number a user preference.
Either issue a release candidate, with the intent of catching release-related oopses;
or branch the next version, release it, and backport release-related oopses;
or try your best, release, and patch release-related oopses to the stable branch either at the same time as the unstable branch, or delay forking the unstable branch for a while.
As you note, the first two approaches don't give enough feedback. The third results in less than perfect releases. Without a release test plan in place, I don't really know how this problem can be avoided, short of getting people to test "release candidate" releases. In the old days, that's what gamma tests were for -- beta tests from an end-user perspective.
So, the best time to let 2.6 "escape" is when you're fairly confident it's "ready" and won't need patching.
Of course, you'll be wrong -- it will need patching, or backports of useful features that just didn't make it in time.
But, the idea is that these patches or backports should be trivial "oopses" where the change does not require massive code review, or the backport is clearly something that was "99% done" already.
So, my suggestion is release 2.7, and hold off on release 2.6 until the obvious release-related "oops"es are found, say 1-2 weeks, then try your best to release a 2.6 that won't need patching. It will anyway, but don't lose sleep over it.
Sure, but it's that much more seperate "stuff". The combo of a cable modem, router, firewall, and wireless access point is attractive, you have to admit. Well, perhaps not to us old hands that like to separate functionality, but cirtainly to the newbies this is designed to attract.
FWIW, my linksys router/firewall can spoof MAC addresses for just this purpose. Of course, my ISP is decent enough that I don't have to.
0. ATMs and "multi-branch banking": no longer did you have to go to your branch to make deposits and withdrawls, nor did you have to deal with a human teller.
1. VCRs: they didn't start getting popular until about 1979-1981, and cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Do you remember the VHS vs. Beta format wars?
2. Compact Disks: radio stations started using them instead of records, calling them "laser disks" (not to be confused with video laser disks), and making a big deal of the quality (over well-worn vinyl). The first ones were around $3000. By 1986, you could get a portable for around $200.
3. Cellular phones: about the size of a brick, access was available in few metropolitan areas. They first started to be used in cars, because of their bulk, replacing older-style "mobile phones", that were essentially radios.
4. Pocket calculators. We got to use slide-rules in science class: pocket calculators were considered an unfair advantage for those students who could afford $150 for four functions and square root.
5. Computers: the hobbyist Altair became available, with an 8080 CPU, and was featured in a January 1975 Popular Electronics article. The Apple ][, and a host of CP/M-based machines followed. As this is a geek forum, I'll dwell a bit on the pre-history of 1975-1981. The Altairs (and IMSAIs) were big, boxy, noisy, and expensive: I remember 256 bytes of memory costing $119. The 2102 1kbit static ram was a breakthrough: 8 kilobytes could fit on an S100 card (for the Altair or IMSAI) that was about the width and height of a notebook computer (thinner obviously). The only people who had such computers were die-hard geeks and hackers, generally with a hardware, rather than software bent: you built your own memory boards to save money, because pre-built boards where much more expensive than kits; and you scrounged HAM-fests for teletypes and built serial I/O and cassette interfaces (so you could save your programs). Altair Basic was a big deal: it only took 8 minutes to load from cassette. Dumb terminals could be had, but cost from one to three thousand dollars. The Apple ][ was one of the first compact, inexpensive computers: with a TV, disk drives, and DOS, a system could be put together for around $10,000.
Of course, 1981 brought the IBM PC (which initially supported a cassette port: disk drives were still a luxery for many). Ten megabyte hard disks became available by the mid 80s (full-height). I mention this because however crude you might think the PCs of the 80s were compared to today's PCs, they were light-years ahead of the mid to late 70s prehistoric versions, which really could not be called "personal".
By the mid-80s I had seen more technological innovation in 20 years, than my parents did since they were born: for them, the big things were affordable cars, planes, phones, TVs, and perhaps Cable TV. I suppose the really big thing for them was electricity.
Of course, 20 years later we have recordable CDs and DVDs, digital cameras, miniture cell phones, the Internet, on-line billing, ordering, blogs, cyber-porn (can you imagine the porn industry when the only distribution medium was 16 mm film for a projector: "dirty magazines" with still pictures was all there was for most male teens to leer at -- today if you want hard-core porn, you probably do "read Playboy just for the articles"), MP3 players, digital TVs, PDAs, combination MP3 players, phones, and PDAs, instant messaging, personal FAX machines, satellite TV, home theatres, multi-channel sound (though quadraphonic kinda sputtered and died in the 70s), and so on.
So, yeah, the last 20 years have been a whirlwind of technological progress. But the "slow, and dull" progress of the 60s and 70s, was, at the time, no less dizzying to those of us who lived through it (VCRs!: time shifting!! [evil teenage boy grin: live action pornography with sound!])
Most traffic patterns are very bursty, somewhat less so, if you aggregate foerign "freebee" Wifi traffic with your own (and that's generally the problem, because the traffic models break). There are times when I'd want to suck data flat out for a short period of time (downloading the latest GNU/Linux distro, for example), and I'll be damned if I have to suck that data through a bandwidth-capping straw. I like my 768kb/s downstream DSL speed for that, thankyouverymuch.
Of course, the US$80 a month I pay (includes $15 for a dedicated pair 'cuase I'm too far from the DSLAM to ride on top of POTS) is nowhere near what it costs to deploy 3/4 of a T1 line, so using that bandwidth flat out is out of the question. The presumption is that, over the course of a month, use will average out, despite the bursty nature.
Now, compare that to a modem capped at, oh, 128 kb/s. Flat out that's 41-1/2 gigabytes over the course of a month. A recent check of the past 6-1/2 days traffic into my home LAN via the firewall showed 149 MB. This works out to 269 bytes per second, about 700 MB over the course of a month. I haven't downloaded any new distros lately, so lets add, oh, 1.5 Gig to that (multiple CDs, restarted downloads, etc.) That adds up to 2.2 GB/month or 6784 b/s, sustained. My use is probably on the heavy side.
The point is that 6.8 kb/s is a far cry from a 128 kb/s rate cap. So, such a rate cap would be (a) crippling for the occasional massive download, and (b) still too high if the traffic were anywhere near steady, as if it were shared. About the only thing the 128 kb/s rate cap does is even out use of a shared medium. Load balancing during peak use times would be better, and is generally used on DSL connections (because of the centralized nature of aggregation), but would require dynamic control of upstream traffic from distributed cable modems in a cable environment, with it's own overhead issues (though TCP could be rate-limited by delaying packet ACKs, the "interesting" traffic is not TCP).
The only solutions this leaves us with are either (a) pitifully crippling rate caps, (b) metered access, or (c) a certain amount of "free" traffic, followed by metered access to the rest. Option (d), "use all you want until we tell you its a problem", while currently common is crude and fraught with difficulty and misunderstanding.
Now, with a more intelligent network, and local traffic rate capping, shaping, and balancing, interesting possibilities abound: why not permit open access during off-peak times, when there is a light load? To some extent, this needs to be saved to average out heavy use later, but there's no rule that says this has to be 100%, as it is now. Off-peak discounts for bandwidth become possible. Maybe I know I won't be downloading a new distro this month, and my use will be below normal. Maybe next month, my neighbor's will be below normal. Maybe between us (and others), we can offer that excess for free. How much should be under our individual control, but one can see an opportunity to smooth out a neighborhood's overall traffic use by dumping occasional "excess" for free access -- without going to the trouble to secure a dedicated fat pipe, setting up a company to manage it, etc.
This does require technical improvements (local traffic shaping and load-balancing, with shared ISP/user control -- imagine an "ISP meter" like an electric meter, but not as draconian as current attempts at this sort of thing that completely lock out the user), as well as looking at a user's average traffic pattern as averaged over their use over time more than over the sumultaneous use by other users (so, you don't balance you're low use as much against your neighbor's high use, but rather your higher use in the past or the future). This creates the opportunity for "credits" for unused bandwidth to carry from month to month, with some fraction "lost" if not used (you can't carry them forever -- the ISP would have to carry the credit on it's books as earned but unpaid in your favour). Given a "use it or lose it" scenario, sharing of unused bandwidth should naturally happen.
You catch doc. errors this way because when the test reveals an error it means one of three things: (a) you coded the test wrong; (b) you found an implementation error; (c) the implementation is right, but you coded to the docs, which were wrong.
Now, if you use various 4GL tools (dunno if Rational Rose lets you do this), they might be able to automate the tests for you.
Good luck.
In fact regression tests spotted not only implementation errors, but documentation errors when the semantics of a function changed, but the docs, and hence the regression tests didn't match.
Now, strictly speaking, what you describe is more of a sanity audit rather than a regression test, unless you provide test data to trigger the potential conditions you test for.
DAMN! That's the best suggestion I've seen in a long time.
Hmm, FreeBSD4.0 gives me 3 decimal places too. Of course in both the FreeBSD and GNU/Linux case, I see three decimal places when the ping time is under one milisecond.
-1 maybe, but damn! +5, Funny in my book. Though, you forgot the Ebay "bid on a 'ho" schtick. Kudos.
This won't help much (sorry), but laptops are hard to see in bright light by the "normal" sighted. So, you're likely going to need a HMD (head mounted display). AFAIK, these are bulky, and sadly, expensive.
Your point is noted, but I haven't had trouble. Fortunately, bad patch cords are easily replaced.
Er, the standard ping that comes with Red Hat Linux 7.2.
Part of the problem is animals that are "cool", yet cruel or impractical to keep as pets. I like big cats, for example, as in cheetas. You can't tame them, they are an endangered species, and unless you can properly provide for their needs (and meet all applicable laws), it's pretty much criminal to have one.
OTOH, I knew a friend who had a cougar as a pet. Tame as could be at home. Of course it roamed at night, and the neighbors turned him in when one too many domestic cats wound up dead. Poor thing wound up in a zoo. It deserved to be free, but alas, it liked to rest with humans.
Now, I will say that seeing a wild animal in it's natural habitat (deer, fox, wolf, bear, raccoon) is certainly a pleasure [and catching a glimpse of a brown bear is damn hard], and definately exciting.
Right now, only two: my Athlon XP1600+ and an old Pentium 200 Mhz acting as a bulk data server (1/4 terabyte of uncompressed music). But there are plans for computers in the kids rooms, an STB-type system in the family room (so I can route music there), and possibly systems in the game room and spare bedroom.
There is an HDTV terrestrial/satellite receiver in the family room, and a plain Jane satellite receiver in one kid's bedroom. Another one is slated for the other kid's bedroom when he gets old enough.
The point is, if you're going to wire, you may as well get it all done and over with at one shot.
Wow, just did a search for RG6, never knew there where so many types of Coax. . . . LOL. I've had such crappy experience with Coax I've pretty much given up on it, you know what the friggin quality loss on that stuff is after the first 50 feet?
Loss varies with cable, distance, and frequency: higher frequencies are attenuated faster. That's what RF amps and tilt compensators are for. RG6 is sctually pretty good compared to run-of-the-mill RG59.
I said, "Neatness counts. Maybe not for you, but it does for me."
I didn't have much of an option, either that or routing it through a story of drywall, which was, err, put up by my friggin drunken grand father (gee thanks ga'pops) Yeesh. Boards spaced pretty much randomly throughout. . . . ick.
Any kind of retrofit, particularly between stories (as opposed to attic to top floor and basement/crawl to bottom floor) is going to be a pain... and older homes have fire breaks between the studs (what fun!).
Oh, and to refer back to the first line of your reply;
exposure to the elements? Well besides perhaps acting as a bit of a mini-lighting rod, not much has happened actually. Kind of surprising considering the wind and rain storms that happen around here, but hey, it keeps on working!
That's pretty good, then.
Ok so granted at one point I was pinging 200 to a computer on my own LAN but. . . . hehe. ^_^ (now it is down to 25 or so)
I see ping times of around 0.367 ms.
So, if that's what a homeowner wants, it's either gonna cost for a custom job, or you'll suffer with a retrofit. (No, the builder generally won't let you on the site after the framing is complete, but before the sheetrock goes up -- though I've known of, he he, "exceptions").
In general, when home prices dip, things like that prevent them from dipping as much as other comparables, though in a rising market they neither add or subtract anything.
Though, I have found that using solid core cable with RJ45 plugs designed for stranded cable works fine: the biggest issue is flexibility of the cable vs. that of stranded.
Aside from the problem of exposure to elements, this might be fine for a single Cat5 cable dropped from an upstairs room to a downstairs one, but running two Cat5 and two RG6 cables makes for a messy bundle. Even the combined cable you can get is 3/4" thick. A single RG6 cable is about 1/4" thick. To do this right, you really have to run a steel conduit on the outside (one inch diameter to accomodate the cable -- this gets visible and ugly), and drill through the wall.
Why the, err, fuss?
Neatness counts. Maybe not for you, but it does for me.
If you are worried about looks, go wireless, has been around for quite some time, though I can understand you not going that route if it was not accessible when you where doing things.
Wireless is still expensive, and puts everyone on the same (or a few) contention-based networks. I like my 10/100 Mb/s switch. Still, it is a good idea for mobile devices and the odd room that you can't reach by pulling a cable.
Finally, you want something that adds value to the home. I figure my $1000 investment and sweat equity added $5k to $10k to the resale value of the home.