The telco only owns the cable to the dmarc - the closet in the basement or wherever. The wire in the walls belongs to the condo. The sheer cost of running cable can kill this project. Unless enough people sign up, a T1 isn't cost effective either.
DSL would be a GREAT answer - if the CO level equipment was affordable.
An alternate is a cablemodem head end. A small unit goes for ~12K that would serve a complex just fine. Cable modems can be had for ~$50 each. Approx cost to retrofit wire each unit with one drop would be in the several hundreds of dollars each (~$30k+). With a cablemodem you would use the existing (again, condo owned) wire.
Well, who says you need the fiber running at 10Gb? Just use media converters. Fiber in, 10/100 ethernet out. If anything, fiber help future-proof things. If at some point 10 years from now they can get an OC12 to the complex, they can use it without a massive cost in upgrades. At this point in time, a bunch of media converters is a lot less expensive than a backbone switch that can handle 10 or so fiber ports (not knowing much about the layout of the complex, I'm assuming it is somewhat spread out.)
Frankly, the biggest cost is going to be cabling the individual units. How many drops to each unit? One in each bedroom and living room? Even if it's just one, it can cost hundreds of dollars per unit just for the labor of installing the cable.
I guess this is the reason for looking at cablemodem head ends (about 12K for a small one) or DSLAMS (no idea how much - assuming they are pretty pricey.) You can use existing wiring.
Yeah, preaching to the choir here. The biggest reason I see is that people want to be able to get to their pet web site that only works in IE, or that requires a plugin that only works in IE.
I'm at the point that I just don't care. If someone else wants to use a pop-up- friendly spyware-infested unstable pile of crap, that's just fine with me. When they bitch and moan, I just let them know that I don't have any of those problems because I use Linux. When they ask for help, I respond that I can only help them with Linux.
I just don't use sites that use non-standard flash crap, other strange plugins, or IE only non-standard HTML, just like I don't use "free registration required" sites. It's just too annoying to mess with, and life is too short for annoying crap.
Bootable CD's emulate floppies. That's how they work. The BIOS looks for a signature on the CD and if present, makes it look like a floppy. Of course, you can only use a floppies worth of information on that CD (I think 2.88M anyway) but that's enough to load drivers to access the rest of the CD in any case.
Some boot loaders such as GRUB which DO use INT 13 actually do quite a bit. They are almost as much (and maybe more so) of an OS than DOS was, and are quite small. GRUB may actually be a good replacement for DOS for BIOS updates, etc.
Hey, it's open source. Play with it. Modify it to suit your application / needs. Whatever.
Costs to the long-haul providers that own fiber is virtually nil at this point. There is MASSIVE overcapacity in dark fiber AND newer technology pushes more bits per second over existing links. There is NO long-haul bandwidth shortage in the US. Bandwidth problems occur at the DSL DSLAM / cable head ends, peering links, etc. which are easily solved with money. Cable companies just don't make enough off internet service to fix problems though. When a segment maxes, they don't bother to split it. Guess where cable companies buy their bandwidth and long-haul links - the telcos...
DSL technology at this point has nothing between the CO and the end-user. You have a dedicated wire. Bandwidth problems at the CO level are MUCH easier to solve than cable segment problems which require a field-trip and possibly new fiber installed to a neighborhood POP. Once extended-distance DSL and DLC compatible technology comes online though, this equation changes somewhat.
I tried out Adelphia Powerlink in Maine at it's flakey. During weekday mornings, I can get ~350KB down, but up is more like 15KB. After around 2:30 when "school" gets out, kiss your connection bye-bye. It drops to a pathetic 32KB or worse with high latency. Weekends are pretty much shit all the time. The service also flakes on a regular basis. The longest time of continuous connectivity is just over a day. Outages last from 5 minutes to over 12 hours. Hell, their support web site even sucks - half the links seem to be bad and the forms don't work. Support takes around 3 days to answer an email.
So I can understand that cable modems are faster - on AVERAGE, but I would suspect that this is NOT the case during peak usage times. In contrast, my DSL line went down maybe 2 times last year, and has very consistant full bandwidth available.
I really put this down to the fact that Telcos know what the hell they are doing for providing digital point to point communications as they have been doing it for YEARS. This is what they do. The cable industry on the other hand really doesn't fucking get it. Their bread and butter is still TV - pay-per-view, ads, movie channels, etc. Internet is kind of a "we can do it too" type of thing, and they are just not going to spend the dollars to build the right type of infrastructure needed to have reliable service on a consistant basis.
Yes, they are less expensive by far, but my wife and I found that my ring was much more expensive than hers due to size, style, etc. Mine was a gold on platinum very simple design for something like $400, hers was a simple white gold for something around $120 each (we got two - one goes on each side of her engagement ring which is yellow gold.) They are very simple plain smooth bands. For something you wear all the time, getting something fancy / ornate doesn't make much sense. It will get a little dinged up (gold is soft) and if it's plain, can be easily buffed up to look like new.
Yeah, and he sure as hell did not read any of the docs at stsf sourceforge. There is a good side-by-side comparison of xft2 and stsf.
It's quite interesting, and stsf looks like it may have certain advantages over xft2. xft2 for example does not do layout - that's an application thing (gnome uses pango according to the doc) and stsf DOES do layout. According to sun, stsf has a 30-200% performance improvement over xft2.
stsf does NOT solve all the problems with X fonts however. They are still a god awful mess in regards to configuration.
Looks like a dead project. There hasn't been an update to that site since fall of 2001, and Zero messages on the dev list in 2003 (99 in 2002, 1500 in 2001 for reference.)
Well, an interesting thing about the law. If a company does business in the US, they ARE subject to US laws. By spamming people in the US, they are doing business in the US and our laws apply to them. Elcomsoft can tell you that this is the case.
It's amazing how mainframe technology such as VM is just beginning to filter down to lower end systems. While there are some older concepts in mainframes that are kept for compatability, there are also features that lower end machines could really use. Hardware wise, the massive amounts of I/O available is truely amazing. Mainframes scale. They also use some of the very latest technology that just isn't affordable in smaller packages. Sun, for example just implemented over the past few years in it's highest end systems capability that mainframes have had for almost 30 years.
However, if the computer is absolutely important as a tool for your job (eg. as a freelance programmer) and you can't afford a replacement if it fails, then you should get the warranty.
If you can't afford to be without a computer or whatever, then these warranties are not going to help anyway. It can take WEEKS to get your system repaired.
In this case, what you really need is a high-end support package from the MANUFACTURER so you can get onsite service or spare-in-the-air replacements.
Frankly, these in-store service plans suck. The limitations and loopholes are amazing. You are better off getting a spare machine to have on hand from ebay or something for the price of that service contract.
I should depend on the book. I'd have a hard time believing that they wouldn't want a copy of a book that still on the NYT best sellers list, or other recently released hard cover books.
What libraries Don't want is crappy used paperbacks. You may find local middle / high schools that will take them however.
Don't forget local nursing homes too. Retired people usually read a lot.
Um, what a bizarre comment. There are many cases where raid-5 is NOT a good solution, where something like raid-0+1 works much better. In other cases, raid does NOTHING for you since you get redundancy over N boxes.
Raid is not a magic bullet, and raid-5 Definately isn't. There are many factors to consider when specifying hardware and configuration for a particular task. Bottom line, the lack of raid capability in a server doesn't mean that it is not a server.
If you want to compare apples to apples (sorry for the bad pun), you would need to compare the Xserve to a similar system that has multiple SCSI controllers with SCSI disks. You will find that SCSI will win due to the fact that SCSI drives have higher RPM and transfer rates. You can't do a valid comparison with a single controller SCSI versus multi-controller ATA and claim that ATA drive performance is better, because you are not comparing DRIVE performance, you are comparing ARCHITECTURE performance.
Xserve is a cool product though, and gives good bang for the buck.
Um, the Mac did not exist when the PC came out, and didn't have color for quite some time. Sound on Any PC was really bad back then too. Also, the very first PC DID have color with the CGA adaptor. I actually had one of the very first PC's with Both a monochrome And color screen, a full 64K ram, and a 10M hard drive. It was a really hot machine back then. It replaced my Apple ][.
Slashdot Mirror
The telco only owns the cable to the dmarc - the closet in the basement or wherever. The wire in the walls belongs to the condo. The sheer cost of running cable can kill this project. Unless enough people sign up, a T1 isn't cost effective either.
DSL would be a GREAT answer - if the CO level equipment was affordable.
An alternate is a cablemodem head end. A small unit goes for ~12K that would serve a complex just fine. Cable modems can be had for ~$50 each. Approx cost to retrofit wire each unit with one drop would be in the several hundreds of dollars each (~$30k+). With a cablemodem you would use the existing (again, condo owned) wire.
Well, who says you need the fiber running at 10Gb? Just use media converters. Fiber in, 10/100 ethernet out. If anything, fiber help future-proof things. If at some point 10 years from now they can get an OC12 to the complex, they can use it without a massive cost in upgrades. At this point in time, a bunch of media converters is a lot less expensive than a backbone switch that can handle 10 or so fiber ports (not knowing much about the layout of the complex, I'm assuming it is somewhat spread out.)
Frankly, the biggest cost is going to be cabling the individual units. How many drops to each unit? One in each bedroom and living room? Even if it's just one, it can cost hundreds of dollars per unit just for the labor of installing the cable.
I guess this is the reason for looking at cablemodem head ends (about 12K for a small one) or DSLAMS (no idea how much - assuming they are pretty pricey.) You can use existing wiring.
Yeah, preaching to the choir here. The biggest reason I see is that people want to be able to get to their pet web site that only works in IE, or that requires a plugin that only works in IE.
I'm at the point that I just don't care. If someone else wants to use a pop-up- friendly spyware-infested unstable pile of crap, that's just fine with me. When they bitch and moan, I just let them know that I don't have any of those problems because I use Linux. When they ask for help, I respond that I can only help them with Linux.
I just don't use sites that use non-standard flash crap, other strange plugins, or IE only non-standard HTML, just like I don't use "free registration required" sites. It's just too annoying to mess with, and life is too short for annoying crap.
open all new windows in a separate tab
FYI, Galeon already does this.
Bootable CD's emulate floppies. That's how they work. The BIOS looks for a signature on the CD and if present, makes it look like a floppy. Of course, you can only use a floppies worth of information on that CD (I think 2.88M anyway) but that's enough to load drivers to access the rest of the CD in any case.
Some boot loaders such as GRUB which DO use INT 13 actually do quite a bit. They are almost as much (and maybe more so) of an OS than DOS was, and are quite small.
GRUB may actually be a good replacement for DOS for BIOS updates, etc.
Hey, it's open source. Play with it. Modify it to suit your application / needs. Whatever.
Costs to the long-haul providers that own fiber is virtually nil at this point. There is MASSIVE overcapacity in dark fiber AND newer technology pushes more bits per second over existing links. There is NO long-haul bandwidth shortage in the US. Bandwidth problems occur at the DSL DSLAM / cable head ends, peering links, etc. which are easily solved with money. Cable companies just don't make enough off internet service to fix problems though. When a segment maxes, they don't bother to split it. Guess where cable companies buy their bandwidth and long-haul links - the telcos...
DSL technology at this point has nothing between the CO and the end-user. You have a dedicated wire. Bandwidth problems at the CO level are MUCH easier to solve than cable segment problems which require a field-trip and possibly new fiber installed to a neighborhood POP. Once extended-distance DSL and DLC compatible technology comes online though, this equation changes somewhat.
I tried out Adelphia Powerlink in Maine at it's flakey. During weekday mornings, I can get ~350KB down, but up is more like 15KB. After around 2:30 when "school" gets out, kiss your connection bye-bye. It drops to a pathetic 32KB or worse with high latency. Weekends are pretty much shit all the time. The service also flakes on a regular basis. The longest time of continuous connectivity is just over a day. Outages last from 5 minutes to over 12 hours. Hell, their support web site even sucks - half the links seem to be bad and the forms don't work. Support takes around 3 days to answer an email.
So I can understand that cable modems are faster - on AVERAGE, but I would suspect that this is NOT the case during peak usage times. In contrast, my DSL line went down maybe 2 times last year, and has very consistant full bandwidth available.
I really put this down to the fact that Telcos know what the hell they are doing for providing digital point to point communications as they have been doing it for YEARS. This is what they do. The cable industry on the other hand really doesn't fucking get it. Their bread and butter is still TV - pay-per-view, ads, movie channels, etc. Internet is kind of a "we can do it too" type of thing, and they are just not going to spend the dollars to build the right type of infrastructure needed to have reliable service on a consistant basis.
Yes, they are less expensive by far, but my wife and I found that my ring was much more expensive than hers due to size, style, etc. Mine was a gold on platinum very simple design for something like $400, hers was a simple white gold for something around $120 each (we got two - one goes on each side of her engagement ring which is yellow gold.) They are very simple plain smooth bands. For something you wear all the time, getting something fancy / ornate doesn't make much sense. It will get a little dinged up (gold is soft) and if it's plain, can be easily buffed up to look like new.
There is no such thing as a wedding band
:-)
Sure there is. They do poor renditions of popular music at half the price of your typical bar bands....
Yeah, even though the installation process sucks shit, it is documented. Once you get the thing installed, it works pretty well.
Yeah, and he sure as hell did not read any of the docs at stsf sourceforge. There is a good side-by-side comparison of xft2 and stsf.
It's quite interesting, and stsf looks like it may have certain advantages over xft2. xft2 for example does not do layout - that's an application thing (gnome uses pango according to the doc) and stsf DOES do layout. According to sun, stsf has a 30-200% performance improvement over xft2.
stsf does NOT solve all the problems with X fonts however. They are still a god awful mess in regards to configuration.
Looks like a dead project. There hasn't been an update to that site since fall of 2001, and Zero messages on the dev list in 2003 (99 in 2002, 1500 in 2001 for reference.)
Maybe someone can revive it.
Well, an interesting thing about the law. If a company does business in the US, they ARE subject to US laws. By spamming people in the US, they are doing business in the US and our laws apply to them. Elcomsoft can tell you that this is the case.
Collecting on any judgement is another matter.
The old ones I used back in the mid 80's were huge. I think it was purchased in the 70's.
FYI, a mainframe is Nothing like an AS/400. TOTALLY different architecture.
Nice troll.
It's amazing how mainframe technology such as VM is just beginning to filter down to lower end systems. While there are some older concepts in mainframes that are kept for compatability, there are also features that lower end machines could really use. Hardware wise, the massive amounts of I/O available is truely amazing. Mainframes scale. They also use some of the very latest technology that just isn't affordable in smaller packages. Sun, for example just implemented over the past few years in it's highest end systems capability that mainframes have had for almost 30 years.
However, if the computer is absolutely important as a tool for your job (eg. as a freelance programmer) and you can't afford a replacement if it fails, then you should get the warranty.
If you can't afford to be without a computer or whatever, then these warranties are not going to help anyway. It can take WEEKS to get your system repaired.
In this case, what you really need is a high-end support package from the MANUFACTURER so you can get onsite service or spare-in-the-air replacements.
Frankly, these in-store service plans suck. The limitations and loopholes are amazing. You are better off getting a spare machine to have on hand from ebay or something for the price of that service contract.
I should depend on the book. I'd have a hard time believing that they wouldn't want a copy of a book that still on the NYT best sellers list, or other recently released hard cover books.
What libraries Don't want is crappy used paperbacks. You may find local middle / high schools that will take them however.
Don't forget local nursing homes too. Retired people usually read a lot.
You obviously have a small penis. I'll add you to our list. Would you like breasts with that?
Bill? Is that you?
Windows Architecture
Well, proof will be in the pudding. Considering MS's (recent) past history on projected release dates, I have a near zero faith level in them.
Um, what a bizarre comment. There are many cases where raid-5 is NOT a good solution, where something like raid-0+1 works much better. In other cases, raid does NOTHING for you since you get redundancy over N boxes.
Raid is not a magic bullet, and raid-5 Definately isn't. There are many factors to consider when specifying hardware and configuration for a particular task. Bottom line, the lack of raid capability in a server doesn't mean that it is not a server.
If you want to compare apples to apples (sorry for the bad pun), you would need to compare the Xserve to a similar system that has multiple SCSI controllers with SCSI disks. You will find that SCSI will win due to the fact that SCSI drives have higher RPM and transfer rates. You can't do a valid comparison with a single controller SCSI versus multi-controller ATA and claim that ATA drive performance is better, because you are not comparing DRIVE performance, you are comparing ARCHITECTURE performance.
Xserve is a cool product though, and gives good bang for the buck.
Um, the Mac did not exist when the PC came out, and didn't have color for quite some time. Sound on Any PC was really bad back then too. Also, the very first PC DID have color with the CGA adaptor. I actually had one of the very first PC's with Both a monochrome And color screen, a full 64K ram, and a 10M hard drive. It was a really hot machine back then. It replaced my Apple ][.
It's been a long time, did the Lisa have color?