Yes, the Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazis -- but only as a means to an end -- the purification of the Aryan peoples and their homeland.
Nazi ideology promotes the Aryan race culture. The Nazis felt that Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Cripples, the Mentally Infirm and anyone else not of pure Aryan stock were diluting and debasing Aryan culture and people. The Nazis felt that those aforementioned groups' presence was polluting the Aryan race and culture and that the Jews were a prime example.
It wasn't "Let's hate the Jews for the sake of hating Jews" it was "Let's purify our culture of the degenerates and lowlifes debasing Aryan culture, and the Jews are our biggest target." But millions of others died, too, a fact that is typically missing from most public discourse on the holocaust. It typically turns into a "The Nazis hated the Jews, the end" story.
I'm sorry the facts of history intrude into your politically correct universe and it disturbs you. Maybe you should take up a hobby that doesn't involve confronting facts you can't handle.
However, Nazism promotes hate towards other human beings; communism does not.
Nazi ideology does not promote the hatred of Jews, homosexuals, cripples and others, it promotes the virtues of the pure aryan. The holocaust was merely the cleansing of the aryan state of lesser peoples. I'm not defending it, mind you, but at least get it right.
Official communist party propaganda always couches party actions in terms of the enemies of the people or the worker, but why are the enemies of the people always able to fit into particular ethnic and political categories? Tibetans and Muslims in present-day China, Ukranians, Jews, Central Asians in the Soviet Union have ALL been victims of massive resettlement, forced indoctrination, ethnic-majority colonization and outright murder.
How do you justify the prima faciae evidence of massive racial and ethnic annihilation by communist governments?
Besides, Soviet Russia wasn't communist anyway; it's "Stalinist".
Even that tidy little bit of revisionism doesn't cut it. Every iteration of communism has been associated with widespread killing, much of which has been merely ethnic cleansing re-branded as "defending the people's state". Trying to defend communism by claiming that all the major implementations of it don't meet your college radical's textbook definition of communism is both disingenuous and naive.
I run a dual-head setup at work on a Matrox G450 (21" @ 1600x1200) and don't have any gripes about it, and I do like the fact that its one video card, not two.
There's also the problem these days of *finding* a PCI based video card that doesn't totally suck goat testes.
I've been looking for a GeForce 4 card that supported dual displays on one card. Most have two connectors (DVI & VGA) but the "experts" in the computer stores have said that they *don't* drive dual monitors, it's multiple connectors/same signal.
We wanted HBO and had to upgrade to digital to get it. The classic "full basic cable" channels (below 100) are still analog, you just get them with the digital tuner box, which adds the on-screen guide.
We've had no problems with image degradation on any of the digital channels (> 100, HBO, Showtime). Strangely enough we had pretty awful reception on some of the analog stations, but with the digital tuner box the image quality has improved noticably. I'm not sure I get that, but I can only guess they've added some extra filtering or noise rejection not found in standard TVs.
Overall it's been a pretty good experience. I love the on-screen program guide.
I'm not (really) worried about them not honoring a repaired unit, but I'm worried about my total out of pocket for Tivo going beyond the $600 it already will be for the service and the device within at least two years.
It's a neat service and a neat device, but a blown HDD could push it into $1k land total real fast..
I'm on the cusp of buying one, but what's holding me back is the monthly service fee. I know I can buy a box lifetime subscription, but the box has to last at *least* two years for this to be worthwhile.
My biggest worry is the HDD going south. Yes, I know I can replace it, although I'd rather not have to (added cost, complexity, etc).
I'm suspecting that I'd use the Tivo for more of a smart VCR (season pass, wish list) than for the pause-live-tv functions.
Panasonic has a 40GB model with a DVD recorder that lets you record to/from the DVD and the HD with VCR-like functionality. But its $1k.
And as the Tivo zealots continually remind me, it's not the recording capabilities of Tivo that are so great, its the guide and other advanced recording options of the service that make it worthwhile.
Even without the DVD player/recorder integration, you'd think that an HDD-based recorder with VCR-type functionality wouldn't be too tough to make, although I have a hard time seeing it selling for less than $300 -- maybe closer to $500.
And as far as the dating girl comment - wild guess. You don't date much, right? (No, I'm not trying to be mean, it just seems like the most nonsensical explanation I've ever seen.)
No, not much, at least not since I got married five years ago.
I will concider [sic] an Apple next time I buy a computer!
This is proof that Apple still has a ways to go. If their changes were that radical, nobody would wait for "...next time I buy a computer.." and would actually do it NOW.
I'm sure some are/have, but convincing me your product is good enough to look at when I'm going to look at a new one is just a partial victory; like convincing a chick to consider dating you when she's done dating her current boyfriend..
Consider that the Soviet Army experienced an order of magnitude more intense and bloody fights than all other allies combined during WWII, and managed to win.
They won, but look what was in their favor: massive resupply from lend/lease, a brutal winter, and a German leader who simply refused to listen to his military leaders.
I'm not a military historian, but from what I have been exposed to the Germans killed Russians in HUGE ratios -- 10:1 or more -- and could have won the Eastern front if Hitler had let his Generals fight the war.
Boiling the Soviet victory down to sheer tenacity is giving the Red Army propagandists far too much credit.
Hopefully it saves the time on a single task, done once per week, otherwise you're not saving 20 minutes per week. Time isn't aggregatable like that -- you can't turn four minutes per day into 20 minutes per week, or 20 minutes per week into "2 days per year".
Plus the idea that you saved 20 minutes per week is kind of a joke in and of itself -- what good is 20 minutes, unless you're job is one of those hyper-monitored jobs where they know how many keystrokes/min you type, but based upon your post I'd say not.
You're assuming that the telcos are part of a very simple market mechanism and that VoIP users are somehow cheating the system.
Much of the cost of international calls isn't the bandwidth, but the overseas "termination charges" that carriers get to charge each other to terminate calls on their networks.
Which gets at your most important assumption, that Internet users are "stealing" bandwidth on long-haul links. The internet users have to be self-funded, including out of country bandwidth, otherwise the providers wouldn't be in business.
The subsidy that's probably happening is that the local phone company is probably funding 75% of its operations based on international termination fees and access to overseas carriers. Panama being Panama, you can imagine that about half the people don't even pay for phone service (steal it, government giveaways, etc), and the half that do pay probably pay some ridiculously cross-subsidized amount.
What needs to happen is that the Panama PTT needs to right its economics. The local phone network (ie, calls made end-end inside Panama) need to be wholly self-funding, and NOT reliant on international access & settlements. International calling needs to pay for international calling ONLY.
Likewise you can get a machine with an big ol batch of CPUs, most of them disabled. Over, say, the Christmas rush you call your salesperson and have the other CPUs turned on for a month. Again: Strange but the corporate customers seem to like it.
CPUs cost real money up front to make, ship, install, etc. If they send me 20, I only use 5, how do the other 15 get paid for?
The only way I can think of is grossly overcharging me for the 5 I do use, or REALLY overcharging me for on-demand capacity.
What I'm wondering about is when we'll see environments that are far most plastic -- ie, reactive to the weapons/tools used in the games.
For example, why can't I blow a hole in a door or a wall? Why don't wooden materials in a game start on fire (and continue burning, causing health damage) when exposed to explosive or flame weapons? Shouldn't continued exposure to explosive or high-powered weapons cause some buildings to collapse entirely?
While an obvious reason not to is it wouldeliminate the find-the-switch-to-open-the-door trivial puzzles, think of it as adding dimension to the game -- sure, blow the door open but you might get killed when the ceiling collapses.
I've been playing a lot of MOH:AA, and even some of the demo levels like Stalingrad would be more interesting if repeated RPG strikes blew walls over, if grenades blew open the floor, heavy machine gun rounds went through walls, and so on.
Most games have some trivial things you can "destroy" (boarded up windows, glass panes), but the basic architecture/structures are totally impervious, which strikes me as the single most unrealistic aspect.
I've never understood this, either -- if I can move to one side of a wall or the other, why does the wall have to be permanent?
My other gripe is with health, which should be more easily fixed. I think health should have two components -- an overall 'health' aspect which should gradually go down, and a 'current stamina' value which should quickly go down during rapid movement, climbing, firing of big weapons, but recharge by stopping and doing nothing. The stamina value should impact the health value, as well as how fast you can run, accurately shoot, etc.
I'm not the most exposed gamer, so I only know by the games I've played, but the simple health metrics and static environments have always surprised me.
Having a 50% penalty on illegal gains is actually an enducement to break the law.
Actually, no, it would be a pretty serious penalty when imposed on the personal wealth of the executives making the decisions but calculated on the corporate gain from the illegal scheme.
If International Widgets fixes prices and reaps a revenue windfall of $500M, then Liesure Larry, the exec responsible for it, would be fined $250M personally, even if he personally didn't make anything other than his usual salary and bonuses.
Sure, the corporation profits on this deal, but the people responsible for it pay very heavy prices out of their own pockets. If you want to eliminate that, make it 100% damages.
The whole point here is that the *people* engineering these schemes need to be accountable. Fining the corporation is pointless -- it just encourages the execs to be more careful and to raise their prices to cover future potential penalties.
The only thing that will have any impact on dirty corporate behavior will be serious fines (eg, 50% of illegal gain) and serious jail time levied against the *individuals* responsible for the corporate crimes.
Whoever makes that price-fixing deal in Europe ought to be paying $143M out of pocket as well as facing 5 years in a hard-core, anal rape kind of prison. I'd even throw in manditory termination without severance from whatever company they worked for, with lifetime banishment from the industry.
It used to be that shifty behavior by a corporation earned some negative reproach from the corporate community, which acted as a brake on the behavior.
Nowadays there is no reproach. These guys have an army of lawyers they consult beforehand and they know the potential fiduciary liability up front. They build in the liability to their overall pricing structure as insurance against getting caught -- if they don't get caught, it's just extra profit margin. If they do get caught, the cost is taken care of and the only "reproach" is to guys that get caught too often and can't cover their fine losses against the built-in "insurance".
Is PPTP all that bad? My impression was always that it was specific NT server implementations that had weaknesses and an early protocol version that used weak encryption.
I find IPSec harder and more complex to support for remote users compared to PPTP, on both the workstation and network sides. IPSec is pretty simple for dedicated tunnels.
The Replacements did everything Nirvana did 10 years before, except a staged spectacle on MTV.
Their early years were as nihilistic ("I Hate Music", "Careless"), intoxicated ("Johnny's Gonna Die"), and rebellious ("Fuck School"). Along with this or in spite of this, they could also write compelling songs like "Go", "Don't Ask Why", "I'm In Trouble", "Color Me Impressed", as well as a big stylistic range "If Only You Were Lonely", "Within Your Reach", "Treatment Bound".
Paul Westerberg also didn't succomb to his own image like Cobain did and continues to make great music. "Mono" is one of the best records this year, and his solo tour was one of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
At work (dual T1s): ~45ms to the old one, ~80ms to the new one.
At Home (DSL): ~75ms old, ~150ms to the new one, twice as bad.
It doesn't help that I don't get to Cable & Wireless except by going to Chicago. Going east it was on the way, going west its just a needless round trip.
The high performance of CPUs makes me wonder why we couldn't do a more interesting type of a machine.
I'd have a case with a crosbar type bus. In this you'd add CPU cards that had memory and a single daughtercard slot. The daughtercards would be to add custom interface electronics for specialized tasks, but not actual processors, so a CPU card could be a video card, a SCSI card, NIC, etc.
One CPU card would be the "master" CPU card which ran the core of the OS kernel plus applications. The other cards would run applications or kernel modules specifc to their hardware daughtercards; network stacks, filesystems, display components (renderers, GUI).
Increase performance? Add a CPU module. The kernel or user tools could manage which cards ran which applications -- some apps could be dedicated to a specific CPU card, other apps could be "floated" to CPU cards based on available cycles.
I don't think this is such a terribly new idea -- its kind of the modularity that IBM 390 or other NUMA architectures do now, but condensed into a single box. Think of a blade server box, but with a switching bus and the ability to access other systems memory.
It would require an OS with a lot more modularity. I'm not sure what would happen to apps that wanted RAM beyond a single CPU card's RAM capabilities, or how fast or easy you could move an app and its memory space from one card to another. I'm also not entirely sure that even a P3 @ 3.xx GHz would be able to do the work of an NVidia GeForce, even if thats all it had to do, either.
But it would be an interesting way to make a highly scalable platform, and scalable both ways -- big and small. An OS written for such hardware could run on a single-card system (think of a laptop or even a palmtop as a single-card system), and multi-card systems could come in S, M, L, and XL sizes depending on cost and need, as well as eliminating the CPU/Memory/Bus bottlenecks.
In addition, your reasons for not buying a TiVo are really weak.
TiVo's ability to record every new episode of a show--regardless of what the network (or local affiliate) decides to do to its time slot--is a huge feature.
I don't need or want that feature. If I don't watch most things about the time that they're on (within a few days), I won't ever watch them. TV watching fills "down" time, it's not that much of a purposeful activity for me.
What benefit do you get from having a built-in digital cable tuner?
The ability to tune the channels directly without the cable box overlays? The elimination of an overly complicated wiring setup? $8 per month discount, since I wouldn't have to rent the cable box?
Why is the inability to transfer a lifetime subscription a deal breaker?
I don't trust that the box will last for 3 years. All of my AV components have served me for at least that long before being replaced. I don't think a HDD will last that long, at least not suffering the abuse it would get in a DVR. Broken Tivo == lost service. I note that Tivo does not mention on their site what the product warrantee is. If Tivo would make product lifetime subscription transferable within 3 years I might bite, since my investment would have some protection.
The Tivo costs $349+$250. I get a bunch of VCR scheduling stuff I'm unlikely to use, and I run the risk of having it be pretty much useless if I have it break after 12 months or so. New Tivo, new service contract.
I'm happy with my digital cable guide now. I do occasionally record programs on TV, and some of them I actually want to keep. For $1k I get the Panasonic DVR that does VCR duty as well as making DVDs. It just sounds like a better fit, although $1k is still too expensive. When they hit $600 I'm buying one.
Lack of a program guide means it's not Tivo, but don't just judge it by Tivo's standards. Tivo doesn't have a DVD-R drive in it, either.
I have digital cable, and the set-top box is required for HBO and other pay services. The program guide included with the digital box is quite good. When I think about getting a Tivo and the service associated with it, I think I'm kind of paying twice. All I really want is a HD-based VCR -- I already have all the program guide I need.
This kind of a box fills the gap between what Tivo is hardware is, and what it does service-wise, with at least one great extra, DVD recording.
I'd buy a Tivo this afternoon if it could tune digital cable with an internal tuner, and if I could buy the service-for-life with the opportunity to transfer it ONCE to a new Tivo. otherwise it seems like just another $xx.xx per month I don't really feel the need for.
"Good" networks prevent forged packets by doing what you suggest, dropping packets with bogus source addresses at the edge of the network or at appropriate ingress points.
I think the argument that is made for not doing this at a lot of ISPs is that with most Cisco routers its expensive as a lot of their routers can't fast switch with ACLs applied, they process switch, turning an adequate router into an inadequate packet-dropper.
It can also be a PITA to maintain -- if you put it at the very edge, like on an ISPs peering router with their upstream, it doesn't prevent in-block spoofing (eg, spoofing packets within the ISPs block). If you try to beat that on all the aggregation routers, you have a lot of ACLs to maintain; customer churn could put address blocks all over the place.
I'd argue that ISPs should make it a term of service that *their* customers ACL their edge routers; we-catch-spoofing-we-cut-you-off language.
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Yes, the Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazis -- but only as a means to an end -- the purification of the Aryan peoples and their homeland.
Nazi ideology promotes the Aryan race culture. The Nazis felt that Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Cripples, the Mentally Infirm and anyone else not of pure Aryan stock were diluting and debasing Aryan culture and people. The Nazis felt that those aforementioned groups' presence was polluting the Aryan race and culture and that the Jews were a prime example.
It wasn't "Let's hate the Jews for the sake of hating Jews" it was "Let's purify our culture of the degenerates and lowlifes debasing Aryan culture, and the Jews are our biggest target." But millions of others died, too, a fact that is typically missing from most public discourse on the holocaust. It typically turns into a "The Nazis hated the Jews, the end" story.
I'm sorry the facts of history intrude into your politically correct universe and it disturbs you. Maybe you should take up a hobby that doesn't involve confronting facts you can't handle.
However, Nazism promotes hate towards other human beings; communism does not.
Nazi ideology does not promote the hatred of Jews, homosexuals, cripples and others, it promotes the virtues of the pure aryan. The holocaust was merely the cleansing of the aryan state of lesser peoples. I'm not defending it, mind you, but at least get it right.
Official communist party propaganda always couches party actions in terms of the enemies of the people or the worker, but why are the enemies of the people always able to fit into particular ethnic and political categories? Tibetans and Muslims in present-day China, Ukranians, Jews, Central Asians in the Soviet Union have ALL been victims of massive resettlement, forced indoctrination, ethnic-majority colonization and outright murder.
How do you justify the prima faciae evidence of massive racial and ethnic annihilation by communist governments?
Besides, Soviet Russia wasn't communist anyway; it's "Stalinist".
Even that tidy little bit of revisionism doesn't cut it. Every iteration of communism has been associated with widespread killing, much of which has been merely ethnic cleansing re-branded as "defending the people's state". Trying to defend communism by claiming that all the major implementations of it don't meet your college radical's textbook definition of communism is both disingenuous and naive.
I run a dual-head setup at work on a Matrox G450 (21" @ 1600x1200) and don't have any gripes about it, and I do like the fact that its one video card, not two.
There's also the problem these days of *finding* a PCI based video card that doesn't totally suck goat testes.
I've been looking for a GeForce 4 card that supported dual displays on one card. Most have two connectors (DVI & VGA) but the "experts" in the computer stores have said that they *don't* drive dual monitors, it's multiple connectors/same signal.
We wanted HBO and had to upgrade to digital to get it. The classic "full basic cable" channels (below 100) are still analog, you just get them with the digital tuner box, which adds the on-screen guide.
We've had no problems with image degradation on any of the digital channels (> 100, HBO, Showtime). Strangely enough we had pretty awful reception on some of the analog stations, but with the digital tuner box the image quality has improved noticably. I'm not sure I get that, but I can only guess they've added some extra filtering or noise rejection not found in standard TVs.
Overall it's been a pretty good experience. I love the on-screen program guide.
I'm not (really) worried about them not honoring a repaired unit, but I'm worried about my total out of pocket for Tivo going beyond the $600 it already will be for the service and the device within at least two years.
It's a neat service and a neat device, but a blown HDD could push it into $1k land total real fast..
I'm on the cusp of buying one, but what's holding me back is the monthly service fee. I know I can buy a box lifetime subscription, but the box has to last at *least* two years for this to be worthwhile.
My biggest worry is the HDD going south. Yes, I know I can replace it, although I'd rather not have to (added cost, complexity, etc).
I'm suspecting that I'd use the Tivo for more of a smart VCR (season pass, wish list) than for the pause-live-tv functions.
Panasonic has a 40GB model with a DVD recorder that lets you record to/from the DVD and the HD with VCR-like functionality. But its $1k.
And as the Tivo zealots continually remind me, it's not the recording capabilities of Tivo that are so great, its the guide and other advanced recording options of the service that make it worthwhile.
Even without the DVD player/recorder integration, you'd think that an HDD-based recorder with VCR-type functionality wouldn't be too tough to make, although I have a hard time seeing it selling for less than $300 -- maybe closer to $500.
And as far as the dating girl comment - wild guess. You don't date much, right? (No, I'm not trying to be mean, it just seems like the most nonsensical explanation I've ever seen.)
No, not much, at least not since I got married five years ago.
I will concider [sic] an Apple next time I buy a computer!
This is proof that Apple still has a ways to go. If their changes were that radical, nobody would wait for "...next time I buy a computer.." and would actually do it NOW.
I'm sure some are/have, but convincing me your product is good enough to look at when I'm going to look at a new one is just a partial victory; like convincing a chick to consider dating you when she's done dating her current boyfriend..
Consider that the Soviet Army experienced an order of magnitude more intense and bloody fights than all other allies combined during WWII, and managed to win.
They won, but look what was in their favor: massive resupply from lend/lease, a brutal winter, and a German leader who simply refused to listen to his military leaders.
I'm not a military historian, but from what I have been exposed to the Germans killed Russians in HUGE ratios -- 10:1 or more -- and could have won the Eastern front if Hitler had let his Generals fight the war.
Boiling the Soviet victory down to sheer tenacity is giving the Red Army propagandists far too much credit.
Hopefully it saves the time on a single task, done once per week, otherwise you're not saving 20 minutes per week. Time isn't aggregatable like that -- you can't turn four minutes per day into 20 minutes per week, or 20 minutes per week into "2 days per year".
Plus the idea that you saved 20 minutes per week is kind of a joke in and of itself -- what good is 20 minutes, unless you're job is one of those hyper-monitored jobs where they know how many keystrokes/min you type, but based upon your post I'd say not.
You're assuming that the telcos are part of a very simple market mechanism and that VoIP users are somehow cheating the system.
Much of the cost of international calls isn't the bandwidth, but the overseas "termination charges" that carriers get to charge each other to terminate calls on their networks.
Which gets at your most important assumption, that Internet users are "stealing" bandwidth on long-haul links. The internet users have to be self-funded, including out of country bandwidth, otherwise the providers wouldn't be in business.
The subsidy that's probably happening is that the local phone company is probably funding 75% of its operations based on international termination fees and access to overseas carriers. Panama being Panama, you can imagine that about half the people don't even pay for phone service (steal it, government giveaways, etc), and the half that do pay probably pay some ridiculously cross-subsidized amount.
What needs to happen is that the Panama PTT needs to right its economics. The local phone network (ie, calls made end-end inside Panama) need to be wholly self-funding, and NOT reliant on international access & settlements. International calling needs to pay for international calling ONLY.
What about my mouse settings? Acceleration, double-click speed, button assignm...er, nevermind.
Likewise you can get a machine with an big ol batch of CPUs, most of them disabled. Over, say, the Christmas rush you call your salesperson and have the other CPUs turned on for a month. Again: Strange but the corporate customers seem to like it.
CPUs cost real money up front to make, ship, install, etc. If they send me 20, I only use 5, how do the other 15 get paid for?
The only way I can think of is grossly overcharging me for the 5 I do use, or REALLY overcharging me for on-demand capacity.
What I'm wondering about is when we'll see environments that are far most plastic -- ie, reactive to the weapons/tools used in the games.
For example, why can't I blow a hole in a door or a wall? Why don't wooden materials in a game start on fire (and continue burning, causing health damage) when exposed to explosive or flame weapons? Shouldn't continued exposure to explosive or high-powered weapons cause some buildings to collapse entirely?
While an obvious reason not to is it wouldeliminate the find-the-switch-to-open-the-door trivial puzzles, think of it as adding dimension to the game -- sure, blow the door open but you might get killed when the ceiling collapses.
I've been playing a lot of MOH:AA, and even some of the demo levels like Stalingrad would be more interesting if repeated RPG strikes blew walls over, if grenades blew open the floor, heavy machine gun rounds went through walls, and so on.
Most games have some trivial things you can "destroy" (boarded up windows, glass panes), but the basic architecture/structures are totally impervious, which strikes me as the single most unrealistic aspect.
I've never understood this, either -- if I can move to one side of a wall or the other, why does the wall have to be permanent?
My other gripe is with health, which should be more easily fixed. I think health should have two components -- an overall 'health' aspect which should gradually go down, and a 'current stamina' value which should quickly go down during rapid movement, climbing, firing of big weapons, but recharge by stopping and doing nothing. The stamina value should impact the health value, as well as how fast you can run, accurately shoot, etc.
I'm not the most exposed gamer, so I only know by the games I've played, but the simple health metrics and static environments have always surprised me.
Having a 50% penalty on illegal gains is actually an enducement to break the law.
Actually, no, it would be a pretty serious penalty when imposed on the personal wealth of the executives making the decisions but calculated on the corporate gain from the illegal scheme. If International Widgets fixes prices and reaps a revenue windfall of $500M, then Liesure Larry, the exec responsible for it, would be fined $250M personally, even if he personally didn't make anything other than his usual salary and bonuses.
Sure, the corporation profits on this deal, but the people responsible for it pay very heavy prices out of their own pockets. If you want to eliminate that, make it 100% damages.
The whole point here is that the *people* engineering these schemes need to be accountable. Fining the corporation is pointless -- it just encourages the execs to be more careful and to raise their prices to cover future potential penalties.
The only thing that will have any impact on dirty corporate behavior will be serious fines (eg, 50% of illegal gain) and serious jail time levied against the *individuals* responsible for the corporate crimes.
Whoever makes that price-fixing deal in Europe ought to be paying $143M out of pocket as well as facing 5 years in a hard-core, anal rape kind of prison. I'd even throw in manditory termination without severance from whatever company they worked for, with lifetime banishment from the industry.
It used to be that shifty behavior by a corporation earned some negative reproach from the corporate community, which acted as a brake on the behavior.
Nowadays there is no reproach. These guys have an army of lawyers they consult beforehand and they know the potential fiduciary liability up front. They build in the liability to their overall pricing structure as insurance against getting caught -- if they don't get caught, it's just extra profit margin. If they do get caught, the cost is taken care of and the only "reproach" is to guys that get caught too often and can't cover their fine losses against the built-in "insurance".
Is PPTP all that bad? My impression was always that it was specific NT server implementations that had weaknesses and an early protocol version that used weak encryption.
I find IPSec harder and more complex to support for remote users compared to PPTP, on both the workstation and network sides. IPSec is pretty simple for dedicated tunnels.
The Replacements did everything Nirvana did 10 years before, except a staged spectacle on MTV.
Their early years were as nihilistic ("I Hate Music", "Careless"), intoxicated ("Johnny's Gonna Die"), and rebellious ("Fuck School"). Along with this or in spite of this, they could also write compelling songs like "Go", "Don't Ask Why", "I'm In Trouble", "Color Me Impressed", as well as a big stylistic range "If Only You Were Lonely", "Within Your Reach", "Treatment Bound".
Paul Westerberg also didn't succomb to his own image like Cobain did and continues to make great music. "Mono" is one of the best records this year, and his solo tour was one of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
It appears worse for me in the midwest.
At work (dual T1s): ~45ms to the old one, ~80ms to the new one.
At Home (DSL): ~75ms old, ~150ms to the new one, twice as bad.
It doesn't help that I don't get to Cable & Wireless except by going to Chicago. Going east it was on the way, going west its just a needless round trip.
The high performance of CPUs makes me wonder why we couldn't do a more interesting type of a machine.
I'd have a case with a crosbar type bus. In this you'd add CPU cards that had memory and a single daughtercard slot. The daughtercards would be to add custom interface electronics for specialized tasks, but not actual processors, so a CPU card could be a video card, a SCSI card, NIC, etc.
One CPU card would be the "master" CPU card which ran the core of the OS kernel plus applications. The other cards would run applications or kernel modules specifc to their hardware daughtercards; network stacks, filesystems, display components (renderers, GUI).
Increase performance? Add a CPU module. The kernel or user tools could manage which cards ran which applications -- some apps could be dedicated to a specific CPU card, other apps could be "floated" to CPU cards based on available cycles.
I don't think this is such a terribly new idea -- its kind of the modularity that IBM 390 or other NUMA architectures do now, but condensed into a single box. Think of a blade server box, but with a switching bus and the ability to access other systems memory.
It would require an OS with a lot more modularity. I'm not sure what would happen to apps that wanted RAM beyond a single CPU card's RAM capabilities, or how fast or easy you could move an app and its memory space from one card to another. I'm also not entirely sure that even a P3 @ 3.xx GHz would be able to do the work of an NVidia GeForce, even if thats all it had to do, either.
But it would be an interesting way to make a highly scalable platform, and scalable both ways -- big and small. An OS written for such hardware could run on a single-card system (think of a laptop or even a palmtop as a single-card system), and multi-card systems could come in S, M, L, and XL sizes depending on cost and need, as well as eliminating the CPU/Memory/Bus bottlenecks.
In addition, your reasons for not buying a TiVo are really weak.
TiVo's ability to record every new episode of a show--regardless of what the network (or local affiliate) decides to do to its time slot--is a huge feature.
I don't need or want that feature. If I don't watch most things about the time that they're on (within a few days), I won't ever watch them. TV watching fills "down" time, it's not that much of a purposeful activity for me.
What benefit do you get from having a built-in digital cable tuner?
The ability to tune the channels directly without the cable box overlays? The elimination of an overly complicated wiring setup? $8 per month discount, since I wouldn't have to rent the cable box?
Why is the inability to transfer a lifetime subscription a deal breaker?
I don't trust that the box will last for 3 years. All of my AV components have served me for at least that long before being replaced. I don't think a HDD will last that long, at least not suffering the abuse it would get in a DVR. Broken Tivo == lost service. I note that Tivo does not mention on their site what the product warrantee is. If Tivo would make product lifetime subscription transferable within 3 years I might bite, since my investment would have some protection.
The Tivo costs $349+$250. I get a bunch of VCR scheduling stuff I'm unlikely to use, and I run the risk of having it be pretty much useless if I have it break after 12 months or so. New Tivo, new service contract. I'm happy with my digital cable guide now. I do occasionally record programs on TV, and some of them I actually want to keep. For $1k I get the Panasonic DVR that does VCR duty as well as making DVDs. It just sounds like a better fit, although $1k is still too expensive. When they hit $600 I'm buying one.
I have digital cable and it has a great guide with it. Program details, run times, etc etc. It's included with my cable service.
Tivo would give me a better recording-oriented guide, but I can't see it being all that much better for watching.
Plus, Tivo can't decode digital cable internally anyway, so I end up with multiple guides. The extra money for the Tivo service doesn't seem worth it.
Lack of a program guide means it's not Tivo, but don't just judge it by Tivo's standards. Tivo doesn't have a DVD-R drive in it, either.
I have digital cable, and the set-top box is required for HBO and other pay services. The program guide included with the digital box is quite good. When I think about getting a Tivo and the service associated with it, I think I'm kind of paying twice. All I really want is a HD-based VCR -- I already have all the program guide I need.
This kind of a box fills the gap between what Tivo is hardware is, and what it does service-wise, with at least one great extra, DVD recording.
I'd buy a Tivo this afternoon if it could tune digital cable with an internal tuner, and if I could buy the service-for-life with the opportunity to transfer it ONCE to a new Tivo. otherwise it seems like just another $xx.xx per month I don't really feel the need for.
"Good" networks prevent forged packets by doing what you suggest, dropping packets with bogus source addresses at the edge of the network or at appropriate ingress points.
I think the argument that is made for not doing this at a lot of ISPs is that with most Cisco routers its expensive as a lot of their routers can't fast switch with ACLs applied, they process switch, turning an adequate router into an inadequate packet-dropper.
It can also be a PITA to maintain -- if you put it at the very edge, like on an ISPs peering router with their upstream, it doesn't prevent in-block spoofing (eg, spoofing packets within the ISPs block). If you try to beat that on all the aggregation routers, you have a lot of ACLs to maintain; customer churn could put address blocks all over the place.
I'd argue that ISPs should make it a term of service that *their* customers ACL their edge routers; we-catch-spoofing-we-cut-you-off language.