Yes, it's artificial. There are many different specs on DSL. First, see the following link:
http://www.efficient.com/tlc/dsltypes.html
What Americans are normally sold is G.Lite. Its a consumer-grade DSL. It is artificially limited, speed-wise. The max speed is 1.5Mbps, but I've seen this advertised as 1.1 and 768 Mbps. This might be marketing, but is more likely the ratings given to the DSL providers by the equipment vendors.
HDSL is quite interesting. It allows for a reliable, consistent 1.54 Mbps both ways, cheaper than Traditional T1's. At this time, more than half of the T1's being sold are HDSL. The Line cards convert the signal back to Tip and Ring for Transmit and Receive at the customer's Dmarc.
In any case, as far as I know, the limitation doesn't provide an increase in reliability. The G.Lite limitation cuts down on the number of frequency channels being used. It does not push the copper wire its hardest. This was probably done to keep the consumer market from choosing ADSL as an alternative to a T1.
Well, I'd love to be able to distribute anybody's music, and some part of me says it should be OK. I'm not sure it is really right to deprive an artist of income, but it doesn't sit well with me to thing that companies should be in control of it. Music and Business don't work well in the same sentence.
I've downloaded lots of stuff from Napster. Most of it was because I was too lazy to rip it from my own collection. There were two kinds of songs that I ripped from Napster:
1) The kind that I listened to, then bought the album.
2) The kind that I would not have bought, whether or not I got it from napster.
The third kind - The kind I would have bought, but didn't because I got it on Napster, doesn't exist for me. For the kind of people who buy CDs regularly, I don't think this exists. Anyway, back to the point.
Consider the following scenario:
This judgement passes. Non-RIAA bands are all that is on Napster. Napster becomes the source for all "non-commercial" music. Although it doesn't seem likely, it would be pretty interesting to have such an entity. Right now, it's so hard to see this working, but...
Imagine we went a step further. Since Napster would be totally in-the-clear, in terms of the law, there would be no reason to be afraid to get on. If Napster could compile ratings for bands, as well as associations: people who like band x like band y, and Band W sounds similar to band Z, you could have a very interesting, unbiased, recommendation system for listeners.
When I look at mp3.com's artists(of which I am one) and system, I see a big haystack. The best artists are the needles. Through the use of statistics and voluntary recommendations, I think the haystack could be turned into place where the music that is recommended is better than what you'll find on the MTVs of the world.(my farts sound better than what's on MTV).
More simply put, an unbiased, tracking, review, and recommendation system could allow you to get better yields with less effort(and cost) than the current system. The current system being personal recommendations and media hype.
I could see some advantages for indie bands who can't seem to make it through the RIAA gauntlet and come out heard.
rhadc
http://www.mp3.com/badboogaloo
An artist who -WANTS- his music traded on Napster.
So do I. I feel that FreeBSD is architecturally better. When the lazy in me takes over, I work with debian to play with software that I expect to be included in the distribution.
When I use FreeBSD, I get the feeling that all the core developers are years more experienced.
Working with FreeBSD is more work and more rewarding. I use FreeBSD for my servers because I don't want as many problems. Linux is really more of a toy.
Well, this isn't a fix-all, but community involvement would really help reduce spam. Here's how:
You receive spam. This particular piece of email is one you've recieved tens or hundreds of times. I have one that comes in regarding "U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A S". You call the number and talk to the people. You may have to leave your phone number. Yes, I know they put you on a phone number list. When they call you back, keep them on the phone for a while.
For a week or two, I'd get calls from people who wanted to talk with someone who didn't live at my residence. They always asked for the same wrong person. I finally realized that they were saying my name wrong.
With that particular company, I spoke with the guy who called me back for 10-20 minutes. I gave him hell about the spam. I demanded that he not contact me again.
A week later, a woman from the same company called up. This time I spoke with her for 30-40 minutes. This is long distance for them, BTW. I told the woman that I would try to make it unfeasible for her to afford to do business using spam.
If just a small percentage of the slashdot users alone would do this, I think some of these high-spam senders would go away. I did this once, and I'll do it again. If you make it your habit that once a month or quarter you'll give your least-favorite spam company hell, you'll be helping everybody.
This is a great argument for Open Source. With these closed solutions, even the best of us have trouble figuring out why the ( windows) box freezes at random. All the diagnostic tools in the world won't help you when your computer freezes 50 seconds, 2 minutes, or 3 hours after boot when you haven't even touched the keyboard or mouse.
We have quite a bit of information on hardware manufacturing for a specific product. Even buggy firmware becomes known.
It's the OS itself is difficult, though. The precompiled, closed-source binaries are what this article is really talking about. Sure there is poorly-designed Open Source programs, but it can be audited and fixed or replaced.
When one Open Source project is quite poorly written, another one pops up to replace it.
Well, I had some of the same reactions. Yesterday I installed NS6. I didn't like the profiles. I didn't like the way it didn't quite install correctly. I didn't like the countless references back to NS, AOL, and the time wasted in general when you accidently clicked on something you didn't mean to click on. The fact that it locked up(the app, not the machine) didn't help either.
My frustration comes from not having a feature-rich, yet fast, simple, and non-intrusive web browser. I'd tried all the IE's, Netscapes... Lynx, Opera...
But yesterday night I installed KDE(I've been biased toward Gnome for the last year), and I was quite impressed with the Browser and with KDE in general! In fact, it's the closest thing to the browser I've been looking for! Cosmetically, it doesn't look like a rocket ship. It is rather plain. What do we get for it looking plain? It loads quickly . It reacts. It's reads HTML well, from what I've seen. Isn't that what we've been looking for? Here's a screenshot from the KDE screenshots pages.
I've tried mozilla and found it to be inspiring, yet disturbingly buggy. Nobody ever said it wasn't buggy, but it was my light at the end of the tunnel, and still can be. But right now it takes between 60 and 120 Megs of memory while running. How much debug code is in there?? It is debug code.... right?
Well, we do have options. Some of them are GOOD options, depending on whether we're running KDE. It won't surprise me if at some point someone puts out a distribution of Mozilla that is stripped down, quicker, and to the point when it finally hits stable.
I'm in Atlanta and I just moved last weekend. Two of the three of us are "geeks," roughly. Between the two of us geeks we have 7 or more computers. We're thinking of reselling some DSL through wireless network cards to our neighbors. I don't know of any other "geek" houses personally, but I think there are surely some places like that near GaTech. The hard part is finding geeky interests and good social skills.
Don't have enough geek friends in Atlanta? I didn't feel that there was a shortage. Good luck finding them, though.
Tell ya what. I think if you go and wander aimlessly down Techwood drive between North Avenue and 10th Street you may come to a realisation. You may find yourself surrounded by "geeks". You might even discover that you feel a little uncomfortable. This is a sign that you aren't the geek you think you are. At any given time during the day, you can find 10-15 geeks walking down and around that street. If you head west a little, your feeling of anxiety/elation may increase. You'll even find something you may never has seen before--geeks who like football!
>which will just make you spend more
>time "online" at the cellphone. Shouldn't we
>fight for cheaper telephone rates instead of
>making more and more flash and candy which only
>will make the users spend more money.
I work in the voicemail/messaging industry and I think I have a response for this.
You can't fight for cheaper telephone rates. You will get lots more flash and candy. In fact, all this has just begun.
The phone industry works to optimize a measurement called "call completion." If you get a busy signal, the phone company has lost money. If your customer has gotten a busy signal when he calls you, you have lost money.
So they develop voicemail, call forwarding, call waiting, etc. Now they develop Unified Messaging, WAP, and other technologies to make sure the message gets through.
How will you fight the phone company for lower prices? Get a phone line through a CLEC? They are also in the game of optimizing call completion. They will buy gadgets for you and you will pay for them, whether or not you want them. Also, remember that the CLECs have to buy their service at a discounted rate from the RBOCs. Outside of the US, the situation is similar or worse -- many of the big phone companies have just been broken up. Phone service costs more - often per minute. This drives up the phone company's need to optimize call completion. They need to keep you on the phone.
Anyway, the free market doesn't effect phone companies much, since they own the infrastructure.
But good luck in the fight!
rhadc
If you're faced with such a decision, buy an $18 cd or download it, of course you'll download it. of course, a person on this kind of budget wouldn't be buying many CDs anyway. The question is really -- does mp3s being available to me cause me to buy fewer CDs? No. I truly don't believe mp3 makes a serious impact here. And I _WOULD_ say that it increases concert sales and many records are bought based on a person hearing the mp3 before hearing the music anywhere else.
It's suprising nobody has posted this yet. Go to http://www.gric.com
These guys team up with ISPs(very possibly yours) to allow ISPs to offer their services even while their customers are travelling in other companies. I know that Mindspring/Earthlink supports it. Others surely do. Basically it allows other ISPs to check your radius(I think) servers to authenticate you. Call your ISP and find out if they support gric. And when I did tech support for an unnamed major ISP, we were told about this, but I never got a call about it. So anyone you call will be very rusty on this. Call twice, or three times to make sure, if they say they don't support it.
I hear ya! I was trying to come up with some more bands, but You hit all the ones I would have listed and more.. I got a Jethro Tull T-Shirt on right now 8D.
Alright, peoples. I'm talkin' boug a little bit o' that James Brown. Or some Tower of Power, or some Sly and the Family Stone! Keep it off beat. To keep you away. It doesn't mean you'll be thinking straight, but at least you'll be thinking. If pull up some of that Pop ____, you're just turning your brain to jelly. and at 5am, when you've run out of cigarettes, jolt cola, and you have a test tomorrow, you gotta code to tha FUNK. don't crest the weasel.
Ok, look. I think Kansas has a serious point here. See, what scientists haven't been able to figure out is _why_ evolution stopped in Kansas in 1799. But why really doesn't matter. What matters is that the kids understand their immediate surroundings. Until they figure out how to jump-start evolution again, they shouldn't teach that evolution is something that occurs in Kansas. Evidence that evolution doesn't occur: 1. The gene pool hasn't changed in 200 years. The inbreeding has been happening over and over again. For proof, look who's running the board of edumacation! 2. The only people with cars in Kansas are people driving through. And the tourist attractions are 5-legged cows(and I'm serious here). 3. In Kansas, they go with 1799 puritan logic - black and white. Good and evil. Evolution and creation. The production team of "The Wizard of Oz" was on to something. As soon as Dorothy wasn't in Kansas anymore, Everything went color. And when she got back, everything was black and white again. 4. The state still excels in agriculture. Most of the land is devoted to it. Quantity, not quality. In more civilized states, they use science and evolution-based discoveries to create things like bigger, better, seedless fruits and vegetables, so they can devote more land to things that are good... like oil refineries!
So there it is. Proof that evolution in Kansas stopped in 1799. And because of that, I support the Kansas board of Education in NOT teaching evolution to children who will never experience it.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't find a picture of Big Jim Slade(from the Kentucky Fried Movie) when I needed one.
rhadc
Yes, it's artificial. There are many different specs on DSL. First, see the following link:
http://www.efficient.com/tlc/dsltypes.html
What Americans are normally sold is G.Lite. Its a consumer-grade DSL. It is artificially limited, speed-wise. The max speed is 1.5Mbps, but I've seen this advertised as 1.1 and 768 Mbps. This might be marketing, but is more likely the ratings given to the DSL providers by the equipment vendors.
HDSL is quite interesting. It allows for a reliable, consistent 1.54 Mbps both ways, cheaper than Traditional T1's. At this time, more than half of the T1's being sold are HDSL. The Line cards convert the signal back to Tip and Ring for Transmit and Receive at the customer's Dmarc.
In any case, as far as I know, the limitation doesn't provide an increase in reliability. The G.Lite limitation cuts down on the number of frequency channels being used. It does not push the copper wire its hardest. This was probably done to keep the consumer market from choosing ADSL as an alternative to a T1.
rhadc
Well, I'd love to be able to distribute anybody's music, and some part of me says it should be OK. I'm not sure it is really right to deprive an artist of income, but it doesn't sit well with me to thing that companies should be in control of it. Music and Business don't work well in the same sentence.
I've downloaded lots of stuff from Napster. Most of it was because I was too lazy to rip it from my own collection. There were two kinds of songs that I ripped from Napster:
1) The kind that I listened to, then bought the album.
2) The kind that I would not have bought, whether or not I got it from napster.
The third kind - The kind I would have bought, but didn't because I got it on Napster, doesn't exist for me. For the kind of people who buy CDs regularly, I don't think this exists. Anyway, back to the point.
Consider the following scenario:
This judgement passes. Non-RIAA bands are all that is on Napster. Napster becomes the source for all "non-commercial" music. Although it doesn't seem likely, it would be pretty interesting to have such an entity. Right now, it's so hard to see this working, but...
Imagine we went a step further. Since Napster would be totally in-the-clear, in terms of the law, there would be no reason to be afraid to get on. If Napster could compile ratings for bands, as well as associations: people who like band x like band y, and Band W sounds similar to band Z, you could have a very interesting, unbiased, recommendation system for listeners.
When I look at mp3.com's artists(of which I am one) and system, I see a big haystack. The best artists are the needles. Through the use of statistics and voluntary recommendations, I think the haystack could be turned into place where the music that is recommended is better than what you'll find on the MTVs of the world.(my farts sound better than what's on MTV).
More simply put, an unbiased, tracking, review, and recommendation system could allow you to get better yields with less effort(and cost) than the current system. The current system being personal recommendations and media hype.
I could see some advantages for indie bands who can't seem to make it through the RIAA gauntlet and come out heard.
rhadc
http://www.mp3.com/badboogaloo
An artist who -WANTS- his music traded on Napster.
So do I. I feel that FreeBSD is architecturally better. When the lazy in me takes over, I work with debian to play with software that I expect to be included in the distribution.
When I use FreeBSD, I get the feeling that all the core developers are years more experienced.
Working with FreeBSD is more work and more rewarding. I use FreeBSD for my servers because I don't want as many problems. Linux is really more of a toy.
rhadc
Well, this isn't a fix-all, but community involvement would really help reduce spam. Here's how:
You receive spam. This particular piece of email is one you've recieved tens or hundreds of times. I have one that comes in regarding "U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A S". You call the number and talk to the people. You may have to leave your phone number. Yes, I know they put you on a phone number list. When they call you back, keep them on the phone for a while.
For a week or two, I'd get calls from people who wanted to talk with someone who didn't live at my residence. They always asked for the same wrong person. I finally realized that they were saying my name wrong.
With that particular company, I spoke with the guy who called me back for 10-20 minutes. I gave him hell about the spam. I demanded that he not contact me again.
A week later, a woman from the same company called up. This time I spoke with her for 30-40 minutes. This is long distance for them, BTW. I told the woman that I would try to make it unfeasible for her to afford to do business using spam.
If just a small percentage of the slashdot users alone would do this, I think some of these high-spam senders would go away. I did this once, and I'll do it again. If you make it your habit that once a month or quarter you'll give your least-favorite spam company hell, you'll be helping everybody.
rhadc
This is a great argument for Open Source. With these closed solutions, even the best of us have trouble figuring out why the ( windows) box freezes at random. All the diagnostic tools in the world won't help you when your computer freezes 50 seconds, 2 minutes, or 3 hours after boot when you haven't even touched the keyboard or mouse.
We have quite a bit of information on hardware manufacturing for a specific product. Even buggy firmware becomes known.
It's the OS itself is difficult, though. The precompiled, closed-source binaries are what this article is really talking about. Sure there is poorly-designed Open Source programs, but it can be audited and fixed or replaced.
When one Open Source project is quite poorly written, another one pops up to replace it.
anyway,
rhadc
Well, I had some of the same reactions. Yesterday I installed NS6. I didn't like the profiles. I didn't like the way it didn't quite install correctly. I didn't like the countless references back to NS, AOL, and the time wasted in general when you accidently clicked on something you didn't mean to click on. The fact that it locked up(the app, not the machine) didn't help either.
.02 dollars.
My frustration comes from not having a feature-rich, yet fast, simple, and non-intrusive web browser. I'd tried all the IE's, Netscapes... Lynx, Opera...
But yesterday night I installed KDE(I've been biased toward Gnome for the last year), and I was quite impressed with the Browser and with KDE in general! In fact, it's the closest thing to the browser I've been looking for! Cosmetically, it doesn't look like a rocket ship. It is rather plain. What do we get for it looking plain? It loads quickly . It reacts. It's reads HTML well, from what I've seen. Isn't that what we've been looking for? Here's a screenshot from the KDE screenshots pages.
I've tried mozilla and found it to be inspiring, yet disturbingly buggy. Nobody ever said it wasn't buggy, but it was my light at the end of the tunnel, and still can be. But right now it takes between 60 and 120 Megs of memory while running. How much debug code is in there?? It is debug code.... right?
Well, we do have options. Some of them are GOOD options, depending on whether we're running KDE. It won't surprise me if at some point someone puts out a distribution of Mozilla that is stripped down, quicker, and to the point when it finally hits stable.
In any case, there's my
rhadc
I'm in Atlanta and I just moved last weekend. Two of the three of us are "geeks," roughly. Between the two of us geeks we have 7 or more computers. We're thinking of reselling some DSL through wireless network cards to our neighbors. I don't know of any other "geek" houses personally, but I think there are surely some places like that near GaTech. The hard part is finding geeky interests and good social skills.
Don't have enough geek friends in Atlanta? I didn't feel that there was a shortage. Good luck finding them, though.
Tell ya what. I think if you go and wander aimlessly down Techwood drive between North Avenue and 10th Street you may come to a realisation. You may find yourself surrounded by "geeks". You might even discover that you feel a little uncomfortable. This is a sign that you aren't the geek you think you are. At any given time during the day, you can find 10-15 geeks walking down and around that street. If you head west a little, your feeling of anxiety/elation may increase. You'll even find something you may never has seen before--geeks who like football!
Anyway, good luck man,
rhadc
>which will just make you spend more
>time "online" at the cellphone. Shouldn't we
>fight for cheaper telephone rates instead of
>making more and more flash and candy which only
>will make the users spend more money.
I work in the voicemail/messaging industry and I think I have a response for this. You can't fight for cheaper telephone rates. You will get lots more flash and candy. In fact, all this has just begun.
The phone industry works to optimize a measurement called "call completion." If you get a busy signal, the phone company has lost money. If your customer has gotten a busy signal when he calls you, you have lost money.
So they develop voicemail, call forwarding, call waiting, etc. Now they develop Unified Messaging, WAP, and other technologies to make sure the message gets through.
How will you fight the phone company for lower prices? Get a phone line through a CLEC? They are also in the game of optimizing call completion. They will buy gadgets for you and you will pay for them, whether or not you want them. Also, remember that the CLECs have to buy their service at a discounted rate from the RBOCs. Outside of the US, the situation is similar or worse -- many of the big phone companies have just been broken up. Phone service costs more - often per minute. This drives up the phone company's need to optimize call completion. They need to keep you on the phone.
Anyway, the free market doesn't effect phone companies much, since they own the infrastructure.
But good luck in the fight!
rhadc
If you're faced with such a decision, buy an $18 cd or download it, of course you'll download it. of course, a person on this kind of budget wouldn't be buying many CDs anyway. The question is really -- does mp3s being available to me cause me to buy fewer CDs? No. I truly don't believe mp3 makes a serious impact here. And I _WOULD_ say that it increases concert sales and many records are bought based on a person hearing the mp3 before hearing the music anywhere else.
Doh. I meant Countries instead of Companies up there. Feel free to tear apart spelling and grammar.
It's suprising nobody has posted this yet.
Go to http://www.gric.com
These guys team up with ISPs(very possibly yours) to allow ISPs to offer their services even while their customers are travelling in other companies.
I know that Mindspring/Earthlink supports it. Others surely do. Basically it allows other ISPs to check your radius(I think) servers to authenticate you.
Call your ISP and find out if they support gric.
And when I did tech support for an unnamed major ISP, we were told about this, but I never got a call about it. So anyone you call will be very rusty on this. Call twice, or three times to make sure, if they say they don't support it.
I hear ya!
I was trying to come up with some more bands, but You hit all the ones I would have listed and more.. I got a Jethro Tull T-Shirt on right now 8D.
Alright, peoples. I'm talkin' boug a little bit o' that James Brown. Or some Tower of Power, or some Sly and the Family Stone! Keep it off beat. To keep you away. It doesn't mean you'll be thinking straight, but at least you'll be thinking. If pull up some of that Pop ____, you're just turning your brain to jelly. and at 5am, when you've run out of cigarettes, jolt cola, and you have a test tomorrow, you gotta code to tha FUNK. don't crest the weasel.
Ok, look. I think Kansas has a serious point here. See, what scientists haven't been able to figure out is _why_ evolution stopped in Kansas in 1799. But why really doesn't matter. What matters is that the kids understand their immediate surroundings. Until they figure out how to jump-start evolution again, they shouldn't teach that evolution is something that occurs in Kansas.
Evidence that evolution doesn't occur:
1. The gene pool hasn't changed in 200 years. The inbreeding has been happening over and over again. For proof, look who's running the board of edumacation!
2. The only people with cars in Kansas are people driving through. And the tourist attractions are 5-legged cows(and I'm serious here).
3. In Kansas, they go with 1799 puritan logic - black and white. Good and evil. Evolution and creation. The production team of "The Wizard of Oz" was on to something. As soon as Dorothy wasn't in Kansas anymore, Everything went color. And when she got back, everything was black and white again.
4. The state still excels in agriculture. Most of the land is devoted to it. Quantity, not quality. In more civilized states, they use science and evolution-based discoveries to create things like bigger, better, seedless fruits and vegetables, so they can devote more land to things that are good... like oil refineries!
So there it is. Proof that evolution in Kansas stopped in 1799. And because of that, I support the Kansas board of Education in NOT teaching evolution to children who will never experience it.
rhadc