Most calls get digitized by the phone company, and the 53K modems take that into account to get almost all of the theoretical bandwidth. I know someone will correct me, but I think that most phone calls are digitized as 64Kb data streams. There may be some overhead in that, lowering the theoretical maximum throughput.
Of course, if all the phone companies upgraded their equipment to some different standard, they could probably support significantly higher data rates. But then again, isn't that called DSL?
Broadcasters have already won the first battle to restrict PVRs. The Broadcast Flag on HDTV will let them control the ability of PVRs to record their shows. As more people move towards HDTV, the networks will regain their control. And the people who are most interested in HDTV are generally the same set of people who are most interested in PVRs.
Fortunately, there's still another 18 months (I think until June 2005) to buy an ATSC tuner card for your computer that ignores the broadcast flag, so you can build your own TiVo-like system.
The law we actually need to deal with spam is a an allocation of $10million to the FBI to investigate and prosecute violations of existing laws where such violations include the use of bulk email. Then the FBI would have the resources to track down some of the spammers who are using hacked systems to send spam.
Only once the Department of Justice has done everything they can to enforce the current laws should new laws be passed.
I'm still researching this, as I haven't started purchasing the parts for my HTPC (home theater PC). My understanding, though, is that some of the GForce cards have support that helps with MPEG playback. If someone who knows more reads this, please post.
If there's TCP/IP support in the BIOS, how much of a step would it be to have support for booting iSCSI?
I believe that there's a lot of intest in diskless PCs in the corporate environment (with the storage on large storage servers). There are huge advantages in system administration possible with such a setup, not to mention better environmentals in the workspace.
HDTV support will be limited in capture cards for some time, and I'll explain why:
HDTV is sent in a MPEG-2 format, so if you can get the raw transport stream, you don't have to do any fancy encoding. So in theory, an HDTV capture card is less complicated than a traditional NTSC/PAL capture card. Unfortunately, there are several different standards for encoding the transport stream. For broadcast television, the standard is ATSC, and you can get several ATSC tuner cards, including one specifically for Linux. For cable TV, the standard is QAM, which applies to all digitial cable, not just HDTV. There are currently no QAM capture cards, and the minute they enter the market, the cable companies will start encrpyting the channels (some already are). Eventually, you should be able to get a QAM card that is cable addressable, so it will essentially be your set-top box in a card.
Oh, and I have no idea about how satellite encodes HDTV, though I assume that like cable, it uses the same method as with regular digital channels (they're all MPEG).
Perhaps someday someone will develop a card that takes a full decoded HDTV signal and re-encodes it into MPEG for you, but that would take a lot of processing power. (I heard one estimate that the work required is roughly the equivalent of a 6GHz processor--I read it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
I certainly realize that schools claim jurisdiction over their students regardless of where they are, but I would like to see those claims challenged and thrown out, especially for public institutions.
Likewise, employers shouldn't have control over what employees do in their non-work hours (like developing "Netflix Fanatic"), but all too aften they claim that they do have the right to control.
Likewise, the US federal government shouldn't regulate in-state activity that isn't directly tied to interstate commerce, but lawmakers have pretty much given up on even bothering to pretend that there's a connection when passing laws.
The idea of schools having policies about what students can do online (from their homes, not from school) is absurd. Sure, schools don't like it, but there's a much more serious problem of schools imposing jurisdiction outside of school. Schools have responsibility for students when they are on school grounds, participating in school functions, or on school-provided transportation. Other than that, the minute a student steps off school grounds, the school should have no jurisdiction over him.
Granted, if a student posts pictures on a private web site, and those pictures were taken at school in violation of a stated policy, then there could be room for action.
Use Proxy Auto Configuration to block ads. It's essentially a clever trick to incorporate the equivalent of JunkBuster into your browser. The idea is that any URL that matches the selection criteria is routed to a proxy that returns 1x1 transparent gifs for all requests.
I use it, and don't see ads anywhere. Because it can look at the entire URL, you can block ads from a given subdirectory without killing off the entire site. You can also block web-tracking images.
He recommends The Knight by Gene Wolfe. Unfortunately, it hasn't been published yet. I suppose he receives a lot of free books from publishers hoping to get quotes from him for the dust jackets.
They were able to do this because they used inetd to listed to the port for incoming connections. I don't think it is possible to write a stand-alone http server in awk, as that would require some mechanism for listening to ports. If you add in Bash, you can make outgoing connections using built-in special files/dev/tcp/host/port, but I don't think Bash lets you listen to a port for incoming connections (I may be wrong on that).
I know it's flamebait, but I would point out that one thing that Perl and Python let you do that sed/awk/grep don't is deal with networking. There once was a project to reimplement all the standard Unix utilities in Perl. Without debating the wisdom of doing so, I would like to know how you could implement an FTP server in awk.
On the other hand, I'll admit that I never learned Perl because everything that I needed to implement could, indeed, be done with awk and sed--they are quite powerful for text processing, but it's important to realize that they have limitations.
this magnificent galaxy is nearly one-fifth the diameter of the full moon
So the galaxy is less than 700km in diameter? Those must be the smallest stars ever discovered.
(Yes, I know that they mean the mosaic covers a region of space that, as observed from earth, covers about one-fifth the diameter of the moon, but they could have worded it better.)
What you need is a smarter boot loader. What if grub had the option to use a fallback kernel if it is invoked more than once in a one-hour period? What if you could tell grub to use a non-default kernel on the next boot only? Or some other option along those lines?
Then you could boot your test kernel remotely, and if it failed, you could power-cycle and be back to your safe kernel.
Another way of acomplishing this would be to implement loadlin for Linux to load your test kernel. (loadlin was a DOS program that would boot Linux on a multi-boot system used back in the days when many people used a UMSDOS file system.)
Yes, it is possible, but I doubt it is something that we'll see in Linux anytime soon. In order to do an online kernel upgrade, you have to keep track of all the changes in the kernel's data structures. If you make a point of defining them such that they don't change between kernels (much like you define static APIs), then that's not too painful. But doing that is a lot of work, and it impacts every area of the kernel. So it's a ton of work without a huge benefit.
Besides, it is counter to the Linux kernel philosophy of not worrying about compatibility when you can instead have a better implementation. (That's one reason third-party binary-only drivers often break.)
And what's the point? The general strategy for highly-available services is redundant servers. If you need to upgrade your kernel, just do it on one system at a time so the cluster as a whole doesn't have any downtime.
Why are they prosecuting this guy and not the serious spammers who do this every day?
Is it simply because someone complained to the right people at the FBI to get some action? If so, how do I get the same support if someone does that with my email address? If not, then shouldn't he be able to get off by claiming that he's being singled out instead of receiving equal justice?
For $6/month at pair.com (less if you pay a year in advance), they'll host a domain with one mailbox (POP3/IMAP). You can set up server-side mail filters, and they let you control Spam Assassin settings (including not using it if you don't like it).
The big difference between VoIP companies like Vonage and the traditional phone companies is that Vonage doesn't manage any physical connection to its customers. The implications of that one fact are huge.
First, it means they aren't a natural monopoly. Anyone can start a similar business without investing millions of dollars in each community. The regulatory approach to a non-monopoly should be completely different.
Second, it means that taxes based on physical connections aren't appropriate. Vonage shouldn't charge for the Universal Connectivity Fund. Granted, there may be good reason to create a Universal Broadband Fund, but that would be based on charges levied by the ISPs, not by secondary service providers.
While your point is valid, the military should have excellent records as to cases of AIDS among its personnel. So while they wouldn't be able to compare against the general population, they could compare against the expected number based on military statistics.
Of course, troop behaviour changes depending on deployment, so it may still be impossible to generate statistically-significant results.
On the other hand, there is also the population of health care workers who were vaccinated. Study them.
At $.20/watt, you have $200/kw. So if you want to break even, you have to run long enough to average $.15/hour, or 1333 1/3 hours. That's less than a year to break even.
At $4/watt, you need 20 times as long to break even, and you'll be lucky to have the system last that long.
You totally misunderstand how Massachusetts' Prop 2 1/2 works.
Towns are allowed to raise property taxes by 2.5% per year without an override vote. However, if property values change, the per-$1000 tax rate also changes to keep the amount of tax paid the same (on average). Hence, if house prices in town double, my taxes stay the same unless my house's value tripples.
So this becomes a huge problem for home owners when a $100,000 house suddenly becomes a $250,000 lot based on the tear-down value of the land for new construction. Outside of that case, the tax rates are reasonably fair. (Though I'm not convinced that property taxes are a good idea in general, but that's another debate.)
My understanding is that asynchronous processors require a lot of extra circuitry so that when the result is ready, the unit receiving the data recognizes it as complete. Imagine an asynchronous adder. It has to have inputs for two numbers and an out put for one. In an asynchronous design, it also has to have an output that indicates incomplete or complete, since you don't have a clock to tell you when the work is done. I've heard that adding that circuitry is non-trivial.
On the other hand, I've also heard that the amount of circuitry dedicated to managing the clock is non-trivial, and in many situations is even more significant than the asynchronous overhead. Hence, my understanding is that many modern CPUs actually do use asynchronous processing at some level within the chip.
I've also heard that one of the limiting factors in developing asynchronous chips is that all the design tools have been based on the assumption of a clock, so the development cost was higher.
(Obviously I'm not a chip designer, hence all the "I've heard" and "my understanding" comments. If you work in this field and can confirm or correct my statements, please reply.)
Once you have the CPU in the room, you're generating more heat. And in most cases, you have fans and a hard drive generating noise. Also, this is an environment where electronic noise may also be a factor, so the RF emmisions may be significant with a computer in the room.
Where this would be useful is remembering settings for car seats (and mirrors). Cars already do this using different codes on keys, but this might be a better mechanism.
Still, as other people mentioned, it sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
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Because that's all the bandwidth there is.
Most calls get digitized by the phone company, and the 53K modems take that into account to get almost all of the theoretical bandwidth. I know someone will correct me, but I think that most phone calls are digitized as 64Kb data streams. There may be some overhead in that, lowering the theoretical maximum throughput.
Of course, if all the phone companies upgraded their equipment to some different standard, they could probably support significantly higher data rates. But then again, isn't that called DSL?
Broadcasters have already won the first battle to restrict PVRs. The Broadcast Flag on HDTV will let them control the ability of PVRs to record their shows. As more people move towards HDTV, the networks will regain their control. And the people who are most interested in HDTV are generally the same set of people who are most interested in PVRs.
Fortunately, there's still another 18 months (I think until June 2005) to buy an ATSC tuner card for your computer that ignores the broadcast flag, so you can build your own TiVo-like system.
The law we actually need to deal with spam is a an allocation of $10million to the FBI to investigate and prosecute violations of existing laws where such violations include the use of bulk email. Then the FBI would have the resources to track down some of the spammers who are using hacked systems to send spam.
Only once the Department of Justice has done everything they can to enforce the current laws should new laws be passed.
I'm still researching this, as I haven't started purchasing the parts for my HTPC (home theater PC). My understanding, though, is that some of the GForce cards have support that helps with MPEG playback. If someone who knows more reads this, please post.
If there's TCP/IP support in the BIOS, how much of a step would it be to have support for booting iSCSI?
I believe that there's a lot of intest in diskless PCs in the corporate environment (with the storage on large storage servers). There are huge advantages in system administration possible with such a setup, not to mention better environmentals in the workspace.
HDTV support will be limited in capture cards for some time, and I'll explain why:
HDTV is sent in a MPEG-2 format, so if you can get the raw transport stream, you don't have to do any fancy encoding. So in theory, an HDTV capture card is less complicated than a traditional NTSC/PAL capture card. Unfortunately, there are several different standards for encoding the transport stream. For broadcast television, the standard is ATSC, and you can get several ATSC tuner cards, including one specifically for Linux. For cable TV, the standard is QAM, which applies to all digitial cable, not just HDTV. There are currently no QAM capture cards, and the minute they enter the market, the cable companies will start encrpyting the channels (some already are). Eventually, you should be able to get a QAM card that is cable addressable, so it will essentially be your set-top box in a card.
Oh, and I have no idea about how satellite encodes HDTV, though I assume that like cable, it uses the same method as with regular digital channels (they're all MPEG).
Perhaps someday someone will develop a card that takes a full decoded HDTV signal and re-encodes it into MPEG for you, but that would take a lot of processing power. (I heard one estimate that the work required is roughly the equivalent of a 6GHz processor--I read it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
I certainly realize that schools claim jurisdiction over their students regardless of where they are, but I would like to see those claims challenged and thrown out, especially for public institutions.
Likewise, employers shouldn't have control over what employees do in their non-work hours (like developing "Netflix Fanatic"), but all too aften they claim that they do have the right to control.
Likewise, the US federal government shouldn't regulate in-state activity that isn't directly tied to interstate commerce, but lawmakers have pretty much given up on even bothering to pretend that there's a connection when passing laws.
Then the bully-ers should be punished for the stalking at school.
The idea of schools having policies about what students can do online (from their homes, not from school) is absurd. Sure, schools don't like it, but there's a much more serious problem of schools imposing jurisdiction outside of school. Schools have responsibility for students when they are on school grounds, participating in school functions, or on school-provided transportation. Other than that, the minute a student steps off school grounds, the school should have no jurisdiction over him.
Granted, if a student posts pictures on a private web site, and those pictures were taken at school in violation of a stated policy, then there could be room for action.
I use it, and don't see ads anywhere. Because it can look at the entire URL, you can block ads from a given subdirectory without killing off the entire site. You can also block web-tracking images.
He recommends The Knight by Gene Wolfe. Unfortunately, it hasn't been published yet. I suppose he receives a lot of free books from publishers hoping to get quotes from him for the dust jackets.
They were able to do this because they used inetd to listed to the port for incoming connections. I don't think it is possible to write a stand-alone http server in awk, as that would require some mechanism for listening to ports. If you add in Bash, you can make outgoing connections using built-in special files /dev/tcp/host/port, but I don't think Bash lets you listen to a port for incoming connections (I may be wrong on that).
I know it's flamebait, but I would point out that one thing that Perl and Python let you do that sed/awk/grep don't is deal with networking. There once was a project to reimplement all the standard Unix utilities in Perl. Without debating the wisdom of doing so, I would like to know how you could implement an FTP server in awk.
On the other hand, I'll admit that I never learned Perl because everything that I needed to implement could, indeed, be done with awk and sed--they are quite powerful for text processing, but it's important to realize that they have limitations.
this magnificent galaxy is nearly one-fifth the diameter of the full moon
So the galaxy is less than 700km in diameter? Those must be the smallest stars ever discovered.
(Yes, I know that they mean the mosaic covers a region of space that, as observed from earth, covers about one-fifth the diameter of the moon, but they could have worded it better.)
What you need is a smarter boot loader. What if grub had the option to use a fallback kernel if it is invoked more than once in a one-hour period? What if you could tell grub to use a non-default kernel on the next boot only? Or some other option along those lines?
Then you could boot your test kernel remotely, and if it failed, you could power-cycle and be back to your safe kernel.
Another way of acomplishing this would be to implement loadlin for Linux to load your test kernel. (loadlin was a DOS program that would boot Linux on a multi-boot system used back in the days when many people used a UMSDOS file system.)
Yes, it is possible, but I doubt it is something that we'll see in Linux anytime soon. In order to do an online kernel upgrade, you have to keep track of all the changes in the kernel's data structures. If you make a point of defining them such that they don't change between kernels (much like you define static APIs), then that's not too painful. But doing that is a lot of work, and it impacts every area of the kernel. So it's a ton of work without a huge benefit.
Besides, it is counter to the Linux kernel philosophy of not worrying about compatibility when you can instead have a better implementation. (That's one reason third-party binary-only drivers often break.)
And what's the point? The general strategy for highly-available services is redundant servers. If you need to upgrade your kernel, just do it on one system at a time so the cluster as a whole doesn't have any downtime.
But it would be cool...
Why are they prosecuting this guy and not the serious spammers who do this every day?
Is it simply because someone complained to the right people at the FBI to get some action? If so, how do I get the same support if someone does that with my email address? If not, then shouldn't he be able to get off by claiming that he's being singled out instead of receiving equal justice?
For $6/month at pair.com (less if you pay a year in advance), they'll host a domain with one mailbox (POP3/IMAP). You can set up server-side mail filters, and they let you control Spam Assassin settings (including not using it if you don't like it).
The big difference between VoIP companies like Vonage and the traditional phone companies is that Vonage doesn't manage any physical connection to its customers. The implications of that one fact are huge.
First, it means they aren't a natural monopoly. Anyone can start a similar business without investing millions of dollars in each community. The regulatory approach to a non-monopoly should be completely different.
Second, it means that taxes based on physical connections aren't appropriate. Vonage shouldn't charge for the Universal Connectivity Fund. Granted, there may be good reason to create a Universal Broadband Fund, but that would be based on charges levied by the ISPs, not by secondary service providers.
While your point is valid, the military should have excellent records as to cases of AIDS among its personnel. So while they wouldn't be able to compare against the general population, they could compare against the expected number based on military statistics.
Of course, troop behaviour changes depending on deployment, so it may still be impossible to generate statistically-significant results.
On the other hand, there is also the population of health care workers who were vaccinated. Study them.
At $.20/watt, you have $200/kw. So if you want to break even, you have to run long enough to average $.15/hour, or 1333 1/3 hours. That's less than a year to break even.
At $4/watt, you need 20 times as long to break even, and you'll be lucky to have the system last that long.
You totally misunderstand how Massachusetts' Prop 2 1/2 works.
Towns are allowed to raise property taxes by 2.5% per year without an override vote. However, if property values change, the per-$1000 tax rate also changes to keep the amount of tax paid the same (on average). Hence, if house prices in town double, my taxes stay the same unless my house's value tripples.
So this becomes a huge problem for home owners when a $100,000 house suddenly becomes a $250,000 lot based on the tear-down value of the land for new construction. Outside of that case, the tax rates are reasonably fair. (Though I'm not convinced that property taxes are a good idea in general, but that's another debate.)
My understanding is that asynchronous processors require a lot of extra circuitry so that when the result is ready, the unit receiving the data recognizes it as complete. Imagine an asynchronous adder. It has to have inputs for two numbers and an out put for one. In an asynchronous design, it also has to have an output that indicates incomplete or complete, since you don't have a clock to tell you when the work is done. I've heard that adding that circuitry is non-trivial.
On the other hand, I've also heard that the amount of circuitry dedicated to managing the clock is non-trivial, and in many situations is even more significant than the asynchronous overhead. Hence, my understanding is that many modern CPUs actually do use asynchronous processing at some level within the chip.
I've also heard that one of the limiting factors in developing asynchronous chips is that all the design tools have been based on the assumption of a clock, so the development cost was higher.
(Obviously I'm not a chip designer, hence all the "I've heard" and "my understanding" comments. If you work in this field and can confirm or correct my statements, please reply.)
Once you have the CPU in the room, you're generating more heat. And in most cases, you have fans and a hard drive generating noise. Also, this is an environment where electronic noise may also be a factor, so the RF emmisions may be significant with a computer in the room.
Where this would be useful is remembering settings for car seats (and mirrors). Cars already do this using different codes on keys, but this might be a better mechanism.
Still, as other people mentioned, it sounds like a solution in search of a problem.