I used to work part time as a volunteer engineer at a community radio station. Aside from the digital audio playout system playing music off a Novell server, we had no money for IT. We occasionally experienced problems with stuttering music, caused by people transferring large files across the network which were causing packet collisions and interrupting the critical stream of audio data to the studio playout machine. This was prior to MP3 and the like, so the best audio file compression we got was 4:1 and the required bitrate was pretty hefty.
I was given a new 100Mb hub, the theory being that 100Mb is faster than the 10Mb we already had, so it would solve the problem. Not so! Those large files would still collide with the audio streaming because we had no intellient routing, traffic prioritising or cash to pay for a decent solution.
I discovered that the new hub would auto-sense the 10/100Mb speed from the NIC at the other end, but had no internal 10Mb100Mb switch capability. In other words it was effectively two hubs in one package with separate 10Mb and 100Mb buses inside. That turned out to be advantageous in the end. I set up all the audio workstations to run at 100Mb, and all the administrative workstations to run at 10Mb, so effectively we had two separate networks, one for audio and the other for admin. So the secretaries could continue sending their large files around, printing and so on, and it didn't affect the audio operations. There was only one PC that needed access to both audio and admin, and I solved that by simply giving it two NICs (making sure they weren't bridging).
It ran that way for several years. I believe more recently they employed the services of an IT contractor, who promptly saw fit to replace my old 10/100 hub with a fancy new switch. Almost immediately the stuttering problems returned. I don't know what they did to remedy that, but it seems to be better now. Presumably they have a bit more of an IT budget these days.
Despite following the model of real world sports advertising, current methods are not optimizing consumer engagement and are failing to influence the consumer in any significant way
That's because real world sports advertising targets the spectators, not the competitors. Spectators have time to look around when the action on the track/field/pitch is slow. Competitors are busy all the time.
"Need For Speed: Spectator Edition" - coming soon to Xbox360, PS3 and Wii (hotdogs sold separately).
I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.
Why would they bother to invite you to download IE7 when you are already running IE7?
Talking on a cell phone is really expensive (once you run over your minutes) compared to a text message.
Talking on a cellphone is expensive, but text messaging is fantastically expensive for what you are getting! Text messages in the UK typically cost around 10p, and for that you get 160 characters. A minute of speech costs around 30p and transmits several thousand bytes of audio data. No wonder the networks are really keen to get people texting. The network traffic is negligible and the cost-profits extraordinary. AND THEN you realise that sending a text often requires a response, and a response to the response, and so on. A one minute conversation is easily drawn out into half a dozen texts. I understand the USA has only recently started taking to texting in a big way. The telcos must have been salivating at the prospects, if they could just get it to catch on.
I found this knowledgebase article that deals specifically with this problem. It refers to all operating systems from Win98 onwards and talks about using the tzedit.exe utility I mentioned. It says you can get the utility by obtaining the Resource Kit for your operating system, but the one for Windows XP is well and truly hidden on the MS website; I couldn't find it. Judging by the KB article though, I am fairly sure the tzedit utility for Win98 will also work for XP. All it is doing is making a few registry changes, which appear to be the same on 98 and XP.
I also noticed there was a downloadable patch to correct for a DST change in Australia earlier this year when they changed the dates for the benefit of the Commonwealth Games which they were hosting. I think it is entirely probable that Microsoft will release a patch for XP to set the new daylight saving times in the USA before it happens. So you probably won't need to do those XP boxes manually, just the 98 boxes.
The original Win98, as I recall, came with a timezone editor on the original CD although it didn't install by default. I'm not sure whether it was included on the Win98SE CD, but if not the older one would probably still work. The program you're looking for is tzedit.exe and a quick search of the CD should show whether or not it is there.
Otherwise, Googling "timezone editor" came up with what looked like several alternatives and a link to a Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317211 which doesn't address this specific problem but does talk about using the timezone editor for another purpose, implicitly stating that there is a timezone editor available for many versions of Windows, and presumable also Win98SE.
It should be pretty simple to make the appropriate changes. It should be pretty simple for someone to automate the process too. I might even have a go at it myself even though the change doesn't affect me at all (being in the UK).
My "favourite" TV quote which can probably be heard a hundred times a day: "Stay tuned, we'll be right back." This is usually my cue to pick up the remote control. If they really wanted me to stay tuned, they wouldn't have gone away in the first place.
The problem with all of these chorded keyboard replacements - including this one - is that they are mostly useless for anyone with fewer than five working fingers [*] on each hand, either accidentally or from birth. And a person with the normal allocation of fingers who temporarily loses use of one, due to an injury for example, would have to revert to the standard keyboard which, happily, is still entirely functional - albeit slower. I would be very interested to see more designs of alternative input devices that can accommodate temporary and permanent disabilities.
Dixons/PC World in the UK recently got bust for advertising a cheap laptop and not having sufficient stock at the advertised price. (Their response was something along the lines of, "we never expected such a big response".) Admittedly it was the advertising standards authority that bust them, which amounted to little more than "don't do it again" and a very stern look.
With sufficient miniaturisation and careful placement you could have a number of heads placed all the way around the circumference of the disk platter. How about 8 or 16 heads all sweeping away independently.
I expect cost is the basic reasoning against this idea. If you want to improve performance by having several heads working independently, manufacturers will probably argue it is cheaper to stripe your data across several drives in a RAID, and there's no extra R&D to be done. Also, having lots of heads will probably make the drive a lot noisier. Personally I'd love to have a multi-head drive in my laptop, where it is obviously not feasible to have five disks in a RAID.
Imagine they had the technology and forethought 200 years ago to freeze people on the assumption that some time in the future someone would come up with the technology to thaw them out and "save" them from their terminal illness. Imagine also that we in 2006 now had the requisite thawing technology. Why should we bother to use it? The world already has enough of its own problems without reanimating a bunch of ancient aging rich snobs who are just going to complain that the music is too loud and the transport too fast. Will the modern day company, which evolved out of the company that signed the original contract 200 years ago, even bother fetching that contract from its display in the British Museum? Why should we think it will be any different 200 years from now?
Re:Spam is dead for me.
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
You don't even necessarily need to give up your corporate domain name email address to get the benefits of Gmail. (I guess, depending on how much email you are handling.) I have my own private domain name with DNS provided by zoneedit.com (free for small time users such as myself). They also have an email redirection facility which I use to redirect everything into my Gmail account. Result is I get to use my personal email address, with all the benefits of Gmail's filtering. You can also tell Gmail to use your personal email address as your return address if you want to. I then run Mercury/32 mail server on my laptop, which periodically downloads mail from Gmail via POP3* and sorts it out into individual mailboxes for all my family members.
[*] Gmail insists on SSL connections for POP3 downloads, which Mercury/32 can't do, but I worked around that by using stunnel as a mediator.
If anyone wants more detailed information on how I set this up, reply to this and I'll see what I can do about writing it all down. I've been meaning to do that for a long time anyway.
I learned to go to sleep very quickly (it takes about 2 minutes for me to go into snoring mode according to my wife)
I'm going a bit off-topic here, but can you shed some light on how you learnt to go to sleep very quickly? I often lie awake for ages - usually just thinking about stuff that has happened in the last few days or will happen in the next couple of days. Not worrying about it, just thinking about it. I'm interested to hear you were able to learn how to get to sleep quickly. Any specific techniques?
I've heard of some countries (Canada, for example?) having levies on blank CDs and MP3 players. The article mentions this is a possibility for Australia too. My question is how does the money raised by these levies find its way to the copyright holders? (Artists, publishers and so on.)
I mean in a practical sense, is there a form that you fill in to state that you are the copyright holder for a particular work, and then they hand over a bit of cash as your cut of the pool? Could I write and record a song, release it under my own label, then make a claim for blank media compensation? Or would I have to be a "recognised" popular artist, or signed to a big record label before the compensation kicks in? I'm genuinely curious to know how the money raised by these levies gets distributed.
The only "standardisation" of a keyboard that has any appeal to me, is one that solves the problem of the migratory backslash - the one key that simply can't stay put. There are at least seven different locations that I have found the backslash key on various PC keyboards I have used over the years, and that excludes laptops and other types of computer! If they would just pick one spot and leave it alone, I would be happy.
1. Between '=' and Backspace. 2. To the right of ']', above (half-height) Enter. 3. Between 'single-quote' and Enter. 4. Between '/' and Shift. 5. Between Shift and 'Z'. 6. Between Ctrl and Alt (before the advent of the Win key). 7. Between Tab and 'Q'.
I used to collect email in another free online service which permitted POP3 downloads (in this case to Mercury/32 running on my laptop, because I had special needs). I had a plugin for Mercury to scan for viruses and there seemed to be quite a few coming through. Then the free email service went dark for a few hours so I switched to using GMail, again with POP3 downloads, and I now almost never receive viruses. I think I had 4 over the whole of November, compared with in excess of 250 in the previous month. I just assumed GMail was filtering the viruses, so it seems strange that only now they mention it formally. Perhaps I was an unwitting beta tester.
My toothbrush charges in a similar way. You have to put it onto its base but there are no electrical contacts which leads me to presume it is done by inductance just like a transformer, with one coil in the base and another in the toothbrush.
I wonder how energy efficient this is. You get better efficiency by having the coils closer together, which is why the coils in a transformer are likely interlaced (forgive the lack of technical knowledge). Which means by default there is going to be more energy loss in a system where the coils could be millimetres (or more) apart. That's fine on a small scale, but when you have potentially millions of mobile phones and other devices, that could add up to a LOT of wasted energy.
Heh, just think of the ambush advertising possibilities. EvilTV buys 5 seconds of time on the competing channel, which is just enough to shout in a loud clear voice "switch channel to EvilTV!"
I think a lot of the problems we have with systems today are caused by the failure of the original designers... Not designing the system to allow for other uses or improvements
Because they want to trap the idiots that make those stupid splash screens, lure them with prizes and promises of untold fame, and kill them! Splash Screens sucks.
Oh my gosh, please please let this be true. I've lost count of the number of programs I've had to hack to get rid of the stupid splash screen. What do they think people go randomly clicking on icons to see what program starts up?
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. The only people who will know to email with "WTF" in the subject are those who RTFA. Anyone here does that?
Obviously a case of Hollywood accounting.
I used to work part time as a volunteer engineer at a community radio station. Aside from the digital audio playout system playing music off a Novell server, we had no money for IT. We occasionally experienced problems with stuttering music, caused by people transferring large files across the network which were causing packet collisions and interrupting the critical stream of audio data to the studio playout machine. This was prior to MP3 and the like, so the best audio file compression we got was 4:1 and the required bitrate was pretty hefty.
I was given a new 100Mb hub, the theory being that 100Mb is faster than the 10Mb we already had, so it would solve the problem. Not so! Those large files would still collide with the audio streaming because we had no intellient routing, traffic prioritising or cash to pay for a decent solution.
I discovered that the new hub would auto-sense the 10/100Mb speed from the NIC at the other end, but had no internal 10Mb100Mb switch capability. In other words it was effectively two hubs in one package with separate 10Mb and 100Mb buses inside. That turned out to be advantageous in the end. I set up all the audio workstations to run at 100Mb, and all the administrative workstations to run at 10Mb, so effectively we had two separate networks, one for audio and the other for admin. So the secretaries could continue sending their large files around, printing and so on, and it didn't affect the audio operations. There was only one PC that needed access to both audio and admin, and I solved that by simply giving it two NICs (making sure they weren't bridging).
It ran that way for several years. I believe more recently they employed the services of an IT contractor, who promptly saw fit to replace my old 10/100 hub with a fancy new switch. Almost immediately the stuttering problems returned. I don't know what they did to remedy that, but it seems to be better now. Presumably they have a bit more of an IT budget these days.
That's because real world sports advertising targets the spectators, not the competitors. Spectators have time to look around when the action on the track/field/pitch is slow. Competitors are busy all the time.
"Need For Speed: Spectator Edition" - coming soon to Xbox360, PS3 and Wii (hotdogs sold separately).
Why would they bother to invite you to download IE7 when you are already running IE7?
Talking on a cellphone is expensive, but text messaging is fantastically expensive for what you are getting! Text messages in the UK typically cost around 10p, and for that you get 160 characters. A minute of speech costs around 30p and transmits several thousand bytes of audio data. No wonder the networks are really keen to get people texting. The network traffic is negligible and the cost-profits extraordinary. AND THEN you realise that sending a text often requires a response, and a response to the response, and so on. A one minute conversation is easily drawn out into half a dozen texts. I understand the USA has only recently started taking to texting in a big way. The telcos must have been salivating at the prospects, if they could just get it to catch on.
I found this knowledgebase article that deals specifically with this problem. It refers to all operating systems from Win98 onwards and talks about using the tzedit.exe utility I mentioned. It says you can get the utility by obtaining the Resource Kit for your operating system, but the one for Windows XP is well and truly hidden on the MS website; I couldn't find it. Judging by the KB article though, I am fairly sure the tzedit utility for Win98 will also work for XP. All it is doing is making a few registry changes, which appear to be the same on 98 and XP.
I also noticed there was a downloadable patch to correct for a DST change in Australia earlier this year when they changed the dates for the benefit of the Commonwealth Games which they were hosting. I think it is entirely probable that Microsoft will release a patch for XP to set the new daylight saving times in the USA before it happens. So you probably won't need to do those XP boxes manually, just the 98 boxes.
The original Win98, as I recall, came with a timezone editor on the original CD although it didn't install by default. I'm not sure whether it was included on the Win98SE CD, but if not the older one would probably still work. The program you're looking for is tzedit.exe and a quick search of the CD should show whether or not it is there.
Otherwise, Googling "timezone editor" came up with what looked like several alternatives and a link to a Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317211 which doesn't address this specific problem but does talk about using the timezone editor for another purpose, implicitly stating that there is a timezone editor available for many versions of Windows, and presumable also Win98SE.
It should be pretty simple to make the appropriate changes. It should be pretty simple for someone to automate the process too. I might even have a go at it myself even though the change doesn't affect me at all (being in the UK).
My "favourite" TV quote which can probably be heard a hundred times a day: "Stay tuned, we'll be right back." This is usually my cue to pick up the remote control. If they really wanted me to stay tuned, they wouldn't have gone away in the first place.
No it's not. I've seen thousands of postings by Anonymous Coward prior to yours.
The problem with all of these chorded keyboard replacements - including this one - is that they are mostly useless for anyone with fewer than five working fingers [*] on each hand, either accidentally or from birth. And a person with the normal allocation of fingers who temporarily loses use of one, due to an injury for example, would have to revert to the standard keyboard which, happily, is still entirely functional - albeit slower. I would be very interested to see more designs of alternative input devices that can accommodate temporary and permanent disabilities.
[*] Ignoring the thumb-vs-finger debate.
Honestly, how long did anyone think it would be before such a patch was created?
Dixons/PC World in the UK recently got bust for advertising a cheap laptop and not having sufficient stock at the advertised price. (Their response was something along the lines of, "we never expected such a big response".) Admittedly it was the advertising standards authority that bust them, which amounted to little more than "don't do it again" and a very stern look.
..or more?
With sufficient miniaturisation and careful placement you could have a number of heads placed all the way around the circumference of the disk platter. How about 8 or 16 heads all sweeping away independently.
I expect cost is the basic reasoning against this idea. If you want to improve performance by having several heads working independently, manufacturers will probably argue it is cheaper to stripe your data across several drives in a RAID, and there's no extra R&D to be done. Also, having lots of heads will probably make the drive a lot noisier. Personally I'd love to have a multi-head drive in my laptop, where it is obviously not feasible to have five disks in a RAID.
Imagine they had the technology and forethought 200 years ago to freeze people on the assumption that some time in the future someone would come up with the technology to thaw them out and "save" them from their terminal illness. Imagine also that we in 2006 now had the requisite thawing technology. Why should we bother to use it? The world already has enough of its own problems without reanimating a bunch of ancient aging rich snobs who are just going to complain that the music is too loud and the transport too fast. Will the modern day company, which evolved out of the company that signed the original contract 200 years ago, even bother fetching that contract from its display in the British Museum? Why should we think it will be any different 200 years from now?
You don't even necessarily need to give up your corporate domain name email address to get the benefits of Gmail. (I guess, depending on how much email you are handling.) I have my own private domain name with DNS provided by zoneedit.com (free for small time users such as myself). They also have an email redirection facility which I use to redirect everything into my Gmail account. Result is I get to use my personal email address, with all the benefits of Gmail's filtering. You can also tell Gmail to use your personal email address as your return address if you want to. I then run Mercury/32 mail server on my laptop, which periodically downloads mail from Gmail via POP3* and sorts it out into individual mailboxes for all my family members.
[*] Gmail insists on SSL connections for POP3 downloads, which Mercury/32 can't do, but I worked around that by using stunnel as a mediator.
If anyone wants more detailed information on how I set this up, reply to this and I'll see what I can do about writing it all down. I've been meaning to do that for a long time anyway.
I'm going a bit off-topic here, but can you shed some light on how you learnt to go to sleep very quickly? I often lie awake for ages - usually just thinking about stuff that has happened in the last few days or will happen in the next couple of days. Not worrying about it, just thinking about it. I'm interested to hear you were able to learn how to get to sleep quickly. Any specific techniques?
I've heard of some countries (Canada, for example?) having levies on blank CDs and MP3 players. The article mentions this is a possibility for Australia too. My question is how does the money raised by these levies find its way to the copyright holders? (Artists, publishers and so on.)
I mean in a practical sense, is there a form that you fill in to state that you are the copyright holder for a particular work, and then they hand over a bit of cash as your cut of the pool? Could I write and record a song, release it under my own label, then make a claim for blank media compensation? Or would I have to be a "recognised" popular artist, or signed to a big record label before the compensation kicks in? I'm genuinely curious to know how the money raised by these levies gets distributed.
The only "standardisation" of a keyboard that has any appeal to me, is one that solves the problem of the migratory backslash - the one key that simply can't stay put. There are at least seven different locations that I have found the backslash key on various PC keyboards I have used over the years, and that excludes laptops and other types of computer! If they would just pick one spot and leave it alone, I would be happy.
1. Between '=' and Backspace.
2. To the right of ']', above (half-height) Enter.
3. Between 'single-quote' and Enter.
4. Between '/' and Shift.
5. Between Shift and 'Z'.
6. Between Ctrl and Alt (before the advent of the Win key).
7. Between Tab and 'Q'.
Can anyone add to this list?
I used to collect email in another free online service which permitted POP3 downloads (in this case to Mercury/32 running on my laptop, because I had special needs). I had a plugin for Mercury to scan for viruses and there seemed to be quite a few coming through. Then the free email service went dark for a few hours so I switched to using GMail, again with POP3 downloads, and I now almost never receive viruses. I think I had 4 over the whole of November, compared with in excess of 250 in the previous month. I just assumed GMail was filtering the viruses, so it seems strange that only now they mention it formally. Perhaps I was an unwitting beta tester.
My toothbrush charges in a similar way. You have to put it onto its base but there are no electrical contacts which leads me to presume it is done by inductance just like a transformer, with one coil in the base and another in the toothbrush.
I wonder how energy efficient this is. You get better efficiency by having the coils closer together, which is why the coils in a transformer are likely interlaced (forgive the lack of technical knowledge). Which means by default there is going to be more energy loss in a system where the coils could be millimetres (or more) apart. That's fine on a small scale, but when you have potentially millions of mobile phones and other devices, that could add up to a LOT of wasted energy.
Ah, but fun if you're learning to touch-type. Remember those old Casio keyboards from the 80s that taught you to "play" music by following the lights?
Heh, just think of the ambush advertising possibilities. EvilTV buys 5 seconds of time on the competing channel, which is just enough to shout in a loud clear voice "switch channel to EvilTV!"
I think a lot of the problems we have with systems today are caused by the failure of the original designers ... Not designing the system to allow for other uses or improvements
Hmm, a calendar that supports plug-ins.
Because they want to trap the idiots that make those stupid splash screens, lure them with prizes and promises of untold fame, and kill them! Splash Screens sucks.
Oh my gosh, please please let this be true. I've lost count of the number of programs I've had to hack to get rid of the stupid splash screen. What do they think people go randomly clicking on icons to see what program starts up?