I've got the beginnings of something that can do ALL OF THE ABOVE.
For less than $200 I was able to pull together a computer that has part of the picture: it can play DVDs really, really well.
Swap out the Xpert128 for a PCI All-In-Wonder Radeon, add a nice audio card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and I'm good to go. I figure it will cost me less than $400 all told.
This machine's got brownie points because it runs on Linux, but barely. Yeah, I run this box on 2K Pro, but that's because ATI hasn't released specifics about their DVD acceleration to the Open Source community. Bug 'em until they do.
Even without that, and with a beefier processor to handle software DVD decoding, you could do this for a third of the price using commodity PC hardware. $1500? No freakin' way! Get the fsck out of here!
Comcast has been working on their own broadband cable network for a bit of time now, partly anticipating the demise of @Home as well as the issues rising out of the severe limitations that @Home put on commercial deals that Comcast wanted to pursue. Originally planned to launch in April 2002, the Comcast network, currently codenamed 'JumpStart', has been pushed forward to a potential launch January 1st 2002, assuming everything goes well. Due to the accelerated timetable there may be glitches in the initial rollout, but frankly intermittently buggy cable (assuming it will be fixed in the near future) is better than dialup in my opinion.
Sounds an awful lot like how Adelphia is handling its West Coast @Home customers. They "kept the lights on" all weekend while AT&T was dark. Today, beginning at 4pm PST, Adelphia will be switching us over to Adelphia PowerLink.
Adelphia has a bad rep amongst cable ISPs, but if they handle the rest of this transition as well as they handled the immediate crisis this weekend I feel I'm definitely in good hands.
http://www.kaspersky.com/ . Russian. F-Prot is also an option...they're Finnish. If memory serves, there are also Israeli options for virus protection. It's a big world. Even the FBI can't nail down everything.
Looking at this new version of The Tick on Fox, you can easily tell that there just wasn't enough research done on the characters, and not enough creative control given to Mr. Edlund. The wide-eyed, child-like facination with JUSTICE, as if it were a shiny bauble, seems gone from the latest interpretation. Patrick Wharburton just doesn't seem to understand that Tick is not a macho squinty-eyed action hero, but an excitable, innocent imbecile who leaps into danger with a mile-wide grin and a giggle. And The Tick doesn't say "bitch", that's for damn sure.
You have made my point. The Tick is Forrest Gump with superpowers. He's a 9 foot tall, 400 pounds of solid muscle 8-year-old. Patrick Warburton couldn't grok that but Townsend Coleman, the guy who gave voice to The Tick in the much superior animated series could. And therein lies the main problem with the series.
You can't do cartoony if you are not doing it as a cartoon. The live-action Tick is working at a distinct disadvantage.
Basically, what it comes down to is the Xbox has the shared memory architecture, and the PC does not. That is, there is no video card RAM on the Xbox, there is no system RAM on the Xbox, there is just 'RAM' on the Xbox.
OMG...that is absolutely horrible. SHARED RAM POOL!!! Have you ever had to deal with shared video? It's usually a Very Bad Idea (tm). I have had to deal with Intel 810 shared video, and it is slow, sluggish...UGH!
How does M$ think it's going to be able to compete with game boxes that give their video subsystems dedicated RAM?
I'd like to have a little pinch of what Gates et al are smoking...
I've seen the premiere (pilot) episode. It stinks on ice.
Patrick Warburton doesn't have the ability to convey the childlike innocence of The Tick. He's just muscle and bravado. The guy who did the voice of the animated Tick had it all totally down. The Tick is Forrest Gump with superpowers.
There has NEVER been a decent live-action remake of a cartoon. Never. I think that a live-action Cowboy Bebop could work if someone like Quentin Tarantino directed and he infused it with the same kind of berserk energy he gave "Pulp Fiction." But that's about it. Think about the march of iniquity that has resulted from live-action remakes of cartoons. Rocky And Bullwinkle. The Flintstones. The Flinststones in Viva Rock Vegas. Dudley Do-Right. The list goes on, and on, and on.
If Fox had any decency they'd buy the original characters from the animated series like American Maid and Sewer Urchin from Haim Saban, and revive the show as it should be...ANIMATED.
The original animated Tick never had a chance. It was a show for Fox Primetime, not a show to ghettoize on Fox Kids' Network. Ben, if you are reading this, please stop the charade and give this hideous excuse for a show the early death it deserves.
"This is bad...duh duh definitely bad." -- Sewer Urchin
A cable modem actually *is* a modulation-demodulation device. It's a DSL "modem" that is not one. Whether DOCSIS, WAN or the proprietary Terayon system that my cable company (Adelphia of the East San Fernando Valley) uses, there is actually a modulation (turning the digital signal into analog signals) demodulation (the reverse) process going on.
DSL, however, is bits from the CO to the client. No intervening modulation/demodulation steps. It requires REALLY clean phone lines to work right, from the CO to the internal wiring in the home. My experience with DSL (Flashcom with Verizon as the Last Mile provider) showed just how bad of an effect dirty wiring can have on your DSL experience. I got only HALF of the theoretical 768Kbps downstream bandwidth I was supposed to get. My prime suspect is the '50s-vintage copper in my home. Bleah!
Even with this weird-ass system that my cable company uses, I can get better than T1 speeds in the morning. Even at 10 at night, in the middle of peak usage, I get better than the 384Kbps I used to get from DSL.
Yep, I just took the plunge. Adelphia@Home just hooked me up two days ago. Now I hear that the majority of @Home creditors have banded together to force @Home into shutting down to try to extort more money out of AT&T. It's at http://www.dotcomscoop.com/.
Here's further coverage of the situation, from the same site. I really hate the fact that we @Home users are being used as pawns in negotiations in bankruptcy court. It ain't fair. I finally get my broadband back after over a year's drought, when I basically had to get rid of the DSL connection due to lack of funds, and this happens.
Maybe this might be a solution...Aerie Networks, the folks who bought Metricom for a pittance, is looking to involve local governments in basically providing their service as an utility. Last time I checked, cable TV is a utility and regulated as such. Maybe local governments with constituents directly affected by the @Home financial debacle should step up to the plate here.
I get greater-than-T1 speed from this connection. It's fun. It's a pleasure to not be sucking the Internet through a 45.5Kbps straw. I pray that this pleasure will not be short-lived.
Further interesting fact: the judge who ruled in the Bernstein case the code was speech is the same judge who nailed Napster to the wall (Marilyn C. Patel).
Actually she's the same judge who is now looking to nail the RIAA to another wall. She apparently is very disturbed about the anti-trust implications of such a cartel as the RIAA.
One thing not mentioned here is that ATI currently has the best hardware acceleration for DVD out there. NVidia can't even do it. In order to get hardware DVD acceleration on NVidia products, you need an add-on device that plugs in the back of all of their Geforce cards. Also ATI right now is making decent, sane video cards that work in both Windows and Linux for pretty cheap prices compared to the prices for the same thing with an NVidia label.
If it wasn't for that goddamn ad ATI ran in Computer Shopper this month (S&M sells, bay-bee!) I would be very enthusiastically defending them. Right now, I am more likely to spend the extra bucks and grab a Matrox because the idea of using an image of violence against women to sell video cards is repugnant to me.
No, it doesn't take a regular ATX mobo. It's a mATX. And I actually think this bitty cube is CUTE. An all-aluminum case beats a plastic/steel one anyday for the right combo of low weight and strength.
I am a big fan of sane bitty boxen. I recently acquired a microtower from a dot-bomb in Santa Barbara for a pittance. I'll be writing about my new acquisition in Low End PC next week or so. It's good to see good quality small form-factor PCs now. There are many, many applications for a small PC...sure it's not ultra-expandable but you don't need the expandability. The Firewire port does help for expandability, however...Firewire is your friend, unlike USB.
The only gripe I have with this is the Savage video subsystem. The absolute worst video chipset this side of the integrated video in an InHell i810 box.
Wow...David Dennis, the guy who ran Solsbury Hill, PODSnet, FIDOnet, ILink...I remember running up huge phone bills living in Van Nuys and calling the two best boards in LA, which happened to be in Sunland/Tujunga: The Ledge (1987-1997) and Mysteria (1986-present)...man, that rocked!
Anyone remember ByteBrothers? Not the Seattle company that makes security products, but the ILink discussion group that got so filthy and silly (very funny too!) that ILink pulled the plug! They started LuciferNet to keep it going...eventually BB made it onto Usenet. Jimmy Pearson, Goddess rest his soul...when he died of Cancer nothing was the same.
The old BBS discussion groups seemed to have a lot more civility, more friendliness, than anything that replaced it on the Internet, AOHell or IRC. Maybe it was because most of us were talking to our neighbors, and face-to-face meetings were more part of the scene.
Mysteria is still alive and kicking...reachable via Telnet. Phil Hansford is a national treasure. Treat his board well.
This is hardly an issue of "not getting the purdy blue" cable box.
Have you ever seen those "Web hog!" commercials that SBC Communications runs?
DOCSIS partially eliminates the problems of sharing bandwidth over an entire neighborhood by the way it doles out the bandwidth. Old-school cable is not as intelligent and you wind up with the slowdowns. DOCSIS also has security measures in the spec...Old-school cable is notoriously insecure.
Your sexist comments are upsetting, to say the least. Would you have said the same thing to a guy who was objecting to the lack of modern cable-modem equipment in his neighborhood? Doubtful.
I live in the east San Fernando Valley, and now I really don't have any decent options for broadband.
1.) Verizon is my ILEC out here. Verizon gave me only 384/128 dialup over a 768/128 "Bronze" ADSL connection when I had Flashcom service. Flashcom would point fingers at Verizon, Verizon would point fingers at Flashcom. Nothing got resolved. Eventually I quit in disgust.
2.) Adelphia@Home is the cable modem option out here. They actually had a hella deal for a while...free for 3 months, 1/2 price for 6 months, then 25% off for the next 3 months. However, I never got a straight answer about the infrastructure they are using in my neighborhood. Is it DOCSIS or is it old-school cable modem? What's the policy on adding nodes? The sales droids lied to me all the way down the line as far as what they were giving me. "DOCSIS? Sure! It's top-of-the-line infrastructure out your way!" Then when the cable guy came over to install it, I asked him what was going on. "Oh, this isn't DOCSIS. You're getting the old style setup...we won't be using DOCSIS in this neighborhood for at least six months." I told him thank you, no, and that's where that stands.
And what about other options? Satellite? Too expensive, Windows 95/98 only, latency is sucky. Ad-hoc 802.11b networks? Not enough geeks live here, security stinks on ice, Internet access questionable.
So here I sit with v90 dialup for the forseeable future. I don't live in some podunk town where you can throw a rock from end to end. I live in the Greater Los Angeles area. Thanks, ILECs, for killing all the DSL CLECs. Thank you, Los Angeles City Council, for not allowing competition for cable access. Thank you, assholes...I have to suck the Internet through a straw while other friends of mine have a big pipe. Fsck y'all.
AT&T Broadband shut down port 80 for everybody, if they were infected or not.. They should have only shut down infected people.
If memory serves me right, AT&T Broadband has a "no servers" clause in their TOS/AUP. I definitely know that @Home has a "no servers" clause. So did Flashcom when they were around.
There are DSL ISPs that don't care about servers on their customer accounts. However, with the advent of Nimda I suspect they will be very, very scarce soon.
An ISP has the right to enforce its policy. It's part of the cost of doing business with them. I'm sure I will be modded down about this, but it's reality. ISPs have it tough now. They are going broke left and right. Nimda might break some of them. Do you want the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers running EVERYTHING on the Internet? It could happen.
And this would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn WRONG.
The experience with municipal power indicates that this is not beneficial in the long term. The municipal power systems grow to be more expensive, lower quality, poorer service than commercial power.
Excuse me? I've got three letters for you, honey: DWP. Where Pacific Gas and Electric and SoCal Edison are either already bankrupt or teetering on the brink, the LA Department Of Water And Power has been providing us world-class service at low costs for years and years. Rolling blackouts? Not in DWP territory. We haven't had blackouts anywhere else in CA either, but we've had freaky weather this Summer and the relatively low temperatures have spared us the promised power crisis.
"Deregulation" has fscked up most of California's grid to no end. But not in Los Angeles. Thanks, DWP, you rock.
You can get on the city's fiber loop yourself, though, and from there get 'net access through MacNet (or whoever else is on it). Once installed, the city charges less than a hundred bucks a month for the link. MacNet will hit you for $325 for a T1's worth of bandwidth though.
Yes, but if that $425/mo was split between an entire apartment building, with everyone splitting the cost, it would suddenly be reasonable.
I was looking at the 20 mailboxes at my apartment building and thinking, "What if everyone chipped in on a T1, then set up a wiring closet with Cat 5 to every apartment?" It would probably work out to be as expensive or less expensive per unit than DSL or Cable, and you'd probably have faster and better service too.
I'd love to see municipal networks, but maybe thinking even smaller, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood, might get us to the goal of broadband for all sooner.
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I've got the beginnings of something that can do ALL OF THE ABOVE.
For less than $200 I was able to pull together a computer that has part of the picture: it can play DVDs really, really well.
Swap out the Xpert128 for a PCI All-In-Wonder Radeon, add a nice audio card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and I'm good to go. I figure it will cost me less than $400 all told.
This machine's got brownie points because it runs on Linux, but barely. Yeah, I run this box on 2K Pro, but that's because ATI hasn't released specifics about their DVD acceleration to the Open Source community. Bug 'em until they do.
Even without that, and with a beefier processor to handle software DVD decoding, you could do this for a third of the price using commodity PC hardware. $1500? No freakin' way! Get the fsck out of here!
AOHell ported to Linux?
Links, please!
Sounds an awful lot like how Adelphia is handling its West Coast @Home customers. They "kept the lights on" all weekend while AT&T was dark. Today, beginning at 4pm PST, Adelphia will be switching us over to Adelphia PowerLink.
Adelphia has a bad rep amongst cable ISPs, but if they handle the rest of this transition as well as they handled the immediate crisis this weekend I feel I'm definitely in good hands.
http://www.kaspersky.com/ . Russian. F-Prot is also an option...they're Finnish. If memory serves, there are also Israeli options for virus protection. It's a big world. Even the FBI can't nail down everything.
You have made my point. The Tick is Forrest Gump with superpowers. He's a 9 foot tall, 400 pounds of solid muscle 8-year-old. Patrick Warburton couldn't grok that but Townsend Coleman, the guy who gave voice to The Tick in the much superior animated series could. And therein lies the main problem with the series.
You can't do cartoony if you are not doing it as a cartoon. The live-action Tick is working at a distinct disadvantage.
Spoon!
OMG...that is absolutely horrible. SHARED RAM POOL!!! Have you ever had to deal with shared video? It's usually a Very Bad Idea (tm). I have had to deal with Intel 810 shared video, and it is slow, sluggish...UGH!
How does M$ think it's going to be able to compete with game boxes that give their video subsystems dedicated RAM?
I'd like to have a little pinch of what Gates et al are smoking...
Mod this WAY UP.
...the All-In-Wonder Radeon has Personal Video Recorder capability. So does Matrox's vid card that does the video ins and outs/TV tuner thing.
Patrick Warburton doesn't have the ability to convey the childlike innocence of The Tick. He's just muscle and bravado. The guy who did the voice of the animated Tick had it all totally down. The Tick is Forrest Gump with superpowers.
There has NEVER been a decent live-action remake of a cartoon. Never. I think that a live-action Cowboy Bebop could work if someone like Quentin Tarantino directed and he infused it with the same kind of berserk energy he gave "Pulp Fiction." But that's about it. Think about the march of iniquity that has resulted from live-action remakes of cartoons. Rocky And Bullwinkle. The Flintstones. The Flinststones in Viva Rock Vegas. Dudley Do-Right. The list goes on, and on, and on.
If Fox had any decency they'd buy the original characters from the animated series like American Maid and Sewer Urchin from Haim Saban, and revive the show as it should be...ANIMATED.
The original animated Tick never had a chance. It was a show for Fox Primetime, not a show to ghettoize on Fox Kids' Network. Ben, if you are reading this, please stop the charade and give this hideous excuse for a show the early death it deserves.
"This is bad...duh duh definitely bad." -- Sewer Urchin
DSL, however, is bits from the CO to the client. No intervening modulation/demodulation steps. It requires REALLY clean phone lines to work right, from the CO to the internal wiring in the home. My experience with DSL (Flashcom with Verizon as the Last Mile provider) showed just how bad of an effect dirty wiring can have on your DSL experience. I got only HALF of the theoretical 768Kbps downstream bandwidth I was supposed to get. My prime suspect is the '50s-vintage copper in my home. Bleah!
Even with this weird-ass system that my cable company uses, I can get better than T1 speeds in the morning. Even at 10 at night, in the middle of peak usage, I get better than the 384Kbps I used to get from DSL.
Mama don't take my broadband away...
Here's further coverage of the situation, from the same site. I really hate the fact that we @Home users are being used as pawns in negotiations in bankruptcy court. It ain't fair. I finally get my broadband back after over a year's drought, when I basically had to get rid of the DSL connection due to lack of funds, and this happens.
Maybe this might be a solution...Aerie Networks, the folks who bought Metricom for a pittance, is looking to involve local governments in basically providing their service as an utility. Last time I checked, cable TV is a utility and regulated as such. Maybe local governments with constituents directly affected by the @Home financial debacle should step up to the plate here.
I get greater-than-T1 speed from this connection. It's fun. It's a pleasure to not be sucking the Internet through a 45.5Kbps straw. I pray that this pleasure will not be short-lived.
Actually she's the same judge who is now looking to nail the RIAA to another wall. She apparently is very disturbed about the anti-trust implications of such a cartel as the RIAA.
Very interesting indeed...
Yes. According to Godwin's Law, he lost. ;-)
If it wasn't for that goddamn ad ATI ran in Computer Shopper this month (S&M sells, bay-bee!) I would be very enthusiastically defending them. Right now, I am more likely to spend the extra bucks and grab a Matrox because the idea of using an image of violence against women to sell video cards is repugnant to me.
Oh yeah, I buy my DVDs used, too.
I am a big fan of sane bitty boxen. I recently acquired a microtower from a dot-bomb in Santa Barbara for a pittance. I'll be writing about my new acquisition in Low End PC next week or so. It's good to see good quality small form-factor PCs now. There are many, many applications for a small PC...sure it's not ultra-expandable but you don't need the expandability. The Firewire port does help for expandability, however...Firewire is your friend, unlike USB.
The only gripe I have with this is the Savage video subsystem. The absolute worst video chipset this side of the integrated video in an InHell i810 box.
Mod this the hell up!!! This is the goddess-honest truth!!!
"Even in the future, nothing works!" -- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs
Anyone remember ByteBrothers? Not the Seattle company that makes security products, but the ILink discussion group that got so filthy and silly (very funny too!) that ILink pulled the plug! They started LuciferNet to keep it going...eventually BB made it onto Usenet. Jimmy Pearson, Goddess rest his soul...when he died of Cancer nothing was the same.
The old BBS discussion groups seemed to have a lot more civility, more friendliness, than anything that replaced it on the Internet, AOHell or IRC. Maybe it was because most of us were talking to our neighbors, and face-to-face meetings were more part of the scene.
Mysteria is still alive and kicking...reachable via Telnet. Phil Hansford is a national treasure. Treat his board well.
BBSen...god I miss those days...
Have you ever seen those "Web hog!" commercials that SBC Communications runs?
DOCSIS partially eliminates the problems of sharing bandwidth over an entire neighborhood by the way it doles out the bandwidth. Old-school cable is not as intelligent and you wind up with the slowdowns. DOCSIS also has security measures in the spec...Old-school cable is notoriously insecure.
Your sexist comments are upsetting, to say the least. Would you have said the same thing to a guy who was objecting to the lack of modern cable-modem equipment in his neighborhood? Doubtful.
1.) Verizon is my ILEC out here. Verizon gave me only 384/128 dialup over a 768/128 "Bronze" ADSL connection when I had Flashcom service. Flashcom would point fingers at Verizon, Verizon would point fingers at Flashcom. Nothing got resolved. Eventually I quit in disgust.
2.) Adelphia@Home is the cable modem option out here. They actually had a hella deal for a while...free for 3 months, 1/2 price for 6 months, then 25% off for the next 3 months. However, I never got a straight answer about the infrastructure they are using in my neighborhood. Is it DOCSIS or is it old-school cable modem? What's the policy on adding nodes? The sales droids lied to me all the way down the line as far as what they were giving me. "DOCSIS? Sure! It's top-of-the-line infrastructure out your way!" Then when the cable guy came over to install it, I asked him what was going on. "Oh, this isn't DOCSIS. You're getting the old style setup...we won't be using DOCSIS in this neighborhood for at least six months." I told him thank you, no, and that's where that stands.
And what about other options? Satellite? Too expensive, Windows 95/98 only, latency is sucky. Ad-hoc 802.11b networks? Not enough geeks live here, security stinks on ice, Internet access questionable.
So here I sit with v90 dialup for the forseeable future. I don't live in some podunk town where you can throw a rock from end to end. I live in the Greater Los Angeles area. Thanks, ILECs, for killing all the DSL CLECs. Thank you, Los Angeles City Council, for not allowing competition for cable access. Thank you, assholes...I have to suck the Internet through a straw while other friends of mine have a big pipe. Fsck y'all.
W2K Pro does NOT install Personal Web Server as part of the default install. Neither is it part of the default install in 98SE.
It *does* come as part of the default install with W2K Server/Advanced Server/Datacenter Server.
If memory serves me right, AT&T Broadband has a "no servers" clause in their TOS/AUP. I definitely know that @Home has a "no servers" clause. So did Flashcom when they were around.
There are DSL ISPs that don't care about servers on their customer accounts. However, with the advent of Nimda I suspect they will be very, very scarce soon.
An ISP has the right to enforce its policy. It's part of the cost of doing business with them. I'm sure I will be modded down about this, but it's reality. ISPs have it tough now. They are going broke left and right. Nimda might break some of them. Do you want the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers running EVERYTHING on the Internet? It could happen.
Offtopic.
Where's the discussion about the guy who changed the stories on Yahoo?
The experience with municipal power indicates that this is not beneficial in the long term. The municipal power systems grow to be more expensive, lower quality, poorer service than commercial power.
Excuse me? I've got three letters for you, honey: DWP. Where Pacific Gas and Electric and SoCal Edison are either already bankrupt or teetering on the brink, the LA Department Of Water And Power has been providing us world-class service at low costs for years and years. Rolling blackouts? Not in DWP territory. We haven't had blackouts anywhere else in CA either, but we've had freaky weather this Summer and the relatively low temperatures have spared us the promised power crisis.
"Deregulation" has fscked up most of California's grid to no end. But not in Los Angeles. Thanks, DWP, you rock.
Yes, but if that $425/mo was split between an entire apartment building, with everyone splitting the cost, it would suddenly be reasonable.
I was looking at the 20 mailboxes at my apartment building and thinking, "What if everyone chipped in on a T1, then set up a wiring closet with Cat 5 to every apartment?" It would probably work out to be as expensive or less expensive per unit than DSL or Cable, and you'd probably have faster and better service too.
I'd love to see municipal networks, but maybe thinking even smaller, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood, might get us to the goal of broadband for all sooner.
http://www.cartoonresearch.com/comments.html
Posting this as a text link for the sake of the Goatsex traumatized.