as a matter of fact, my wife and I will be moving in about 5-6 months for unrelated reasons, so I'm hoping to god that one or both of my options at our new location (same general suburban area, most likely a different county though) will have better performance. Perhaps the proper amount of hardware in place for the number of subscribers, etc.
I really miss the comcast (yes, really!) cable we had at our old house. I pulled about 20mbps down (4mbps or so up) with consistent 10ms pings to the local node no matter the time of day or day of the week... and that was their basic package.
you keep going with that line of thinking, the "it can't happen to me, so anybody it does happen to must be a target of ridicule" thinking.
My brother and I were on the same LAN, with a DSL connection to the internet. The DSL connection would randomly drop anywhere from once every two or three hours to as bad as 4 to 5 times an hour. We couldn't even finish stupid easy achievements in SC2 such as "beat 5 medium opponents in a row" because the game would decide that if the connection drops for even 2-3 seconds, you need to be disconnected from battle.net.
I used to troubleshoot internet connections for a living, I knew what to do. I replaced the modem. I replaced the router. replaced the noise filters. removed the noise filters. I plugged both into a dedicated UPS. I had the lines checked. I had the local node checked. I had the dsl moved on to a separate physical line in the house (different wiring and everything). Every time, it got a little bit better, but never really got fixed. We had technicians out to check the wiring (the house is all of 2 years old I might add) and it never really fixed the problem.
Finally, in disgust, I called up the local cable company and said "bring me cable internet". They did. no more random drops... no, instead, I get anywhere between 6 and 12 hours during prime time where I'm getting horrendous packet loss instead, with the occasional blocks of ping spikes into the stratosphere. The cable company has obviously oversold the hardware, and obviously doesn't care either.
So what choice do I have here There are two choices for ISPs, and I've chosen both. Neither is an adequate replacement for LAN functionality for games that really do not need an internet connection.
Agreed. There have been about a dozen games that were supposed to kill wow, and none of them have made a dent. Last I heard, WoW's overall subscriber base was back up again and had broken the record they set a few years ago when they first brought the chinese client online.
Also, to the GP, I LIKE being a healer. When designed well, it's an enjoyable role.
A fiercely competitive marketplace benefits consumers with -choices-, but not with support.
A fiercely competitive marketplace hurts the IT industry. pardon me for being selfish about my job. I'm perfectly happy knowing that being a windows-based IT professional guarantees me job prospects almost anywhere I go. The last thing I want to have to do is learn a dozen operating systems and office suites because I'm not sure what my next employer may use.
disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboy. I've got two linux systems, but that's for my own interest, not for work.
I don't know about you guys, but when I was in school a million years ago, representing someone else's work as your own was grounds for immediate failure of the course and very possibly removal from the program.
I'm assuming now, with the past decade or more of patent trolling, that this is no longer the case in business schools, and representing someone else's work as your own is now encouraged and actually preferred by the staff and faculty to actually producing your own results. right?
I mean, they're supposed to be teaching you how things actually work, right?
Constellation was already billions of dollars over budget without even giving us a working launcher. I don't think the Mars Direct estimate was remotely realistic.
I don't think Constellation was a bad program when it was concieved either. Sure I think they could have made a better plan, but I don't think it was necessarily bad. You can't blame the program for the failings of it's parents (NASA) and grandparents (US government).
That's exactly why one of the tenants of my inital statement said that the program needed to be run by people who have a vested interest in it's success (hopefully engineers with some management experience) and not be politically motivated, and once you give them the resources they need you leave them alone with no government involvement along the lines of mandates to do anything other than the intial design goals.
I have no objection to a private investor spending $50 billion to get to Mars (it might actually be possible at that cost, if you cut out the government). In fact, I think this is exactly what should happen eventually, instead of yet another pissing match between imperial powers - but if I had $50 billion lying around, there are still a lot of sick and hungry people on this planet who can't help themselves and certainly aren't going to get any help from their government or ours.
I've never liked the "we can use the money to help the sick and the poor" because there will always be sick and poor until we are able to cure diseases on a gentic level (at which point we'll probably just find the really nast stuff) and food replicators that re-arrange molecules. I.e. until we reach star trek lifestyles. Of course, at that point the poor will just be living on other planets without that technology.
We've never had any problem doing great things and advancing humanity while injustices existed, and holding off on doing great things to try and fight injustice is a losing battle. I submit that elevating the human existance (of which, in part, I believe is becoming a race no longer teathered to one planet and it's resources) will do more in the long run than trying to feed hungry people today.
I also think it would be more efficient to research new technologies that might make interplanetary travel faster and easier, instead of pouring the money into thoroughly obsolete chemical rockets.
Why would anybody be trying to develop better space propulsion techniques if we're not going into space? once you make it clear that we're going to other planets... such as by going there, technological progress in the related fields grows by leaps and bounds as that research now has purpose and direction.
Once we made it clear that "we're going to the moon!" by starting the Mercury program and actually launching rockets into space, it only took what, 7 years, to develop the saturn V, a rocket capable of getting us there?
Purpose and direction.
Once we made it clear "we're done with the moon, we're going to play around in LEO for a few decades", research into heavy lift technologies utterly stagnated, to the point where we're now trying to recreate the saturn V (more or less) because we havn't come up with anything better in the past 45 years
We've also got much better technology than they had in the 16th century.
we can make 120 tons of breathable oxygen and methane (fuel/propellent) from 8 tons of hyrogen we bring with us and the free CO2 in the martian atmosphere.
large reserves of fresh water exist on mars, they're just frozen. we just have to heat them up. I think the byproduct heat of the nuclear reactors we'll almost certainly bring with us should work well.
food is a trickier subject, but soil analysis by martian landers has been quite promising for earth plants, and we've always got several decades of advances in hydroponic research to fall back on.
I think the real difficulty is the lack of building materials and lack of economy.
The new world was full of trees you could cut down. what do you build with on mars? iron and rock is pretty much what you've got to work with (not that we couldn't make do with that).
The other problem is the lack of (semi)immediate payback on investement that the new world had. It will take decades, maybe centuries, to build up an infrastructure on Mars to the point where it has an economy capable of equal trade with the earth (the old world).
while the challenges are more pronounced with the earth -> mars than with europe -> america, I think that technology has progressed right along with the increase in challenge, bringing the relative difficulty back into the managable.
We, as a species, are capable of starting this right now, today. The difference (for good or ill) is now we have to convince hundreds of congressmen (who have to convince millions of americans) that it's a good idea, rather than just needing to convince the king.
It's probably going to be easier once we have individuals or corporations who can finance these ventures on their own (we're getting awful close), but the downside to that is whether in 200 years my great great great great grandkids on Mars will be living in Paypal city and vacationing at iD Software canyon.
You are correct except for your knee-jerk desire to place blame on a single party. BOTH parties pull as much pork money into their states as possible, and in this case as many of the NASA contracts are in states that tend to vote republican, it happens to be republican senators pushing this particular issue... but do some reading on the subject and you'll find that there are plenty of democrats in the same situation with NASA contracts in their states as well.
Polictics is politics. No matter what team you're on, you play the same game. Political parties matter about as much as uniform colors. You root for the burgandy and gold team, I root for the yellow and black team.
I'm not against the idea at all, I just think that the government is the only entity that can currently afford to do it.
If Bill Gates wants to get together with Warren Buffet and some sultan from Abu-Dhabi, and privately finance this, I'm fine with that.
Not because I think they'd be any more altruistically minded than some government, more so I just want to see it done during my lifetime... and seeing as how I don't believe the aging gene(s) will be discovered and nullified before my time is over, I'm in the "whoever can get us there first" boat.
The Mars direct program layed out in the mid 90s pegged the cost at 20-30 billion over 10 years to put 3 teams of 4 astronauts (two scientists and two engineers each) onto nearly overlapping stays of 1.5 years apiece.
Current estimate, adjusted for inflation, is around 50 billion over 10 years. I believe that is somewhere around 20% of NASA's current (non expanded) budget.
Honestly, If I had 50 billion lieing around, hell yes that is EXACTLY what I'd do. I couldn't think of a better project to put it towards. I mean seriously, past a certain point you've got all the boats, mansions, and cars you can want, and you're just saving up to buy your own country. Why not go to mars instead?
Christopher Columbus showed up what, 3 or 4 times in the new world? comparativly speaking, he did little more than plant a flag and grab some moon rock (well, he planted a few flags, and grabbed some natives for slaves). He went there, proved it was there (well, not that the vikings hadn't done so already, but nobody remembered), and Europe's response was "wow, that's amazing" and then proceeded to dick around in the mediterranen.
I'm too lazy right now to go dig up exact dates, but if memory serves it was at least 100 years before spain, england, and france started seriously exploiting the resources of the new world, and even longer before your first permanant colonies started springing up.
I do not care whether it's Ares V, which doesn't really quite exist yet, the even more vaporware "new heavy lifter" that president Obama spoke of, or some weird hybrid that the nerds down in propulsion dynamics wrote up on the back of a napkin 2 or 3 years ago and havn't told you about yet...
But will you PLEASE get our monkey asses to Mars before I die?
I'd love to see the beginings of a manned Mars base (even, dare I dream, a colony?!), but at this point I'll take Neil Armstrong's grandson standing there holding a flag with 50 (or even 52) stars on it.
Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade. Also, if it's absolutely necessary to get the job done again, I'm ok with you telling them that the russians (or maybe the chinese, the're more likely to believe that nowadays) are going to take over the world (scratch that, the galaxy) if they don't succeed.
NOT the same thing. at all. chrome makes the ads not displayed (usually, sometimes it even fails at that), but they're still there in all their cpu abusing, bandwidth hogging, spyware laden goodness. hell sometimes you can still accidently click on them.
FF keeps them from loading entirely. I know that websites prefer the latter to the former, but I certainly do not.
Sonny, I remember the days when we had to manually type in http://www.altavista.com/ or http://www.lycos.com/ into our browsers to get to a search engine. We had to use our keyboards and everything! Then the search engine took a long time and returned bad results... and we liked it!
These newfangled search bars, they're the devil's work I tell ya.
no evil? how about deliberatly holding back on the browser hooks and infrastructure to allow for comprehensive robust adblock/scriptblock/etc ad-ons, due to such things being completely against their business model that is based on supplying advertisements?
I suppose that's not "evil", bit it is a pretty damn big roadblock to me adopting chrome over FF.
pretty sure that means you're not using a legally authorized version of windows, since you were not leagally able to authorize the installation due to not being able to sign the licensing agreement.
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Not caring about other people's lack of ability to take care of themselves is your definition of sociopathy?
I don't think you're going to like the real world much once you get there.
yep, pretty much exactly.
I don't care if cars benefit the end user. if they're happy with the buggies they've got, so much the better for me.
I'm concerned about -me-, not them. Nobody's watching out for me but me. If they're not watching out for themselves, that's their problem.
as a matter of fact, my wife and I will be moving in about 5-6 months for unrelated reasons, so I'm hoping to god that one or both of my options at our new location (same general suburban area, most likely a different county though) will have better performance. Perhaps the proper amount of hardware in place for the number of subscribers, etc.
I really miss the comcast (yes, really!) cable we had at our old house. I pulled about 20mbps down (4mbps or so up) with consistent 10ms pings to the local node no matter the time of day or day of the week... and that was their basic package.
you keep going with that line of thinking, the "it can't happen to me, so anybody it does happen to must be a target of ridicule" thinking.
My brother and I were on the same LAN, with a DSL connection to the internet. The DSL connection would randomly drop anywhere from once every two or three hours to as bad as 4 to 5 times an hour. We couldn't even finish stupid easy achievements in SC2 such as "beat 5 medium opponents in a row" because the game would decide that if the connection drops for even 2-3 seconds, you need to be disconnected from battle.net.
I used to troubleshoot internet connections for a living, I knew what to do. I replaced the modem. I replaced the router. replaced the noise filters. removed the noise filters. I plugged both into a dedicated UPS. I had the lines checked. I had the local node checked. I had the dsl moved on to a separate physical line in the house (different wiring and everything). Every time, it got a little bit better, but never really got fixed. We had technicians out to check the wiring (the house is all of 2 years old I might add) and it never really fixed the problem.
Finally, in disgust, I called up the local cable company and said "bring me cable internet". They did. no more random drops... no, instead, I get anywhere between 6 and 12 hours during prime time where I'm getting horrendous packet loss instead, with the occasional blocks of ping spikes into the stratosphere. The cable company has obviously oversold the hardware, and obviously doesn't care either.
So what choice do I have here There are two choices for ISPs, and I've chosen both. Neither is an adequate replacement for LAN functionality for games that really do not need an internet connection.
Agreed. There have been about a dozen games that were supposed to kill wow, and none of them have made a dent. Last I heard, WoW's overall subscriber base was back up again and had broken the record they set a few years ago when they first brought the chinese client online.
Also, to the GP, I LIKE being a healer. When designed well, it's an enjoyable role.
A fiercely competitive marketplace benefits consumers with -choices-, but not with support.
A fiercely competitive marketplace hurts the IT industry. pardon me for being selfish about my job. I'm perfectly happy knowing that being a windows-based IT professional guarantees me job prospects almost anywhere I go. The last thing I want to have to do is learn a dozen operating systems and office suites because I'm not sure what my next employer may use.
disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboy. I've got two linux systems, but that's for my own interest, not for work.
It's called an internet connection, bittorrent, and a ps3.
I don't know about you guys, but when I was in school a million years ago, representing someone else's work as your own was grounds for immediate failure of the course and very possibly removal from the program.
I'm assuming now, with the past decade or more of patent trolling, that this is no longer the case in business schools, and representing someone else's work as your own is now encouraged and actually preferred by the staff and faculty to actually producing your own results. right?
I mean, they're supposed to be teaching you how things actually work, right?
Constellation was already billions of dollars over budget without even giving us a working launcher. I don't think the Mars Direct estimate was remotely realistic.
I don't think Constellation was a bad program when it was concieved either. Sure I think they could have made a better plan, but I don't think it was necessarily bad. You can't blame the program for the failings of it's parents (NASA) and grandparents (US government).
That's exactly why one of the tenants of my inital statement said that the program needed to be run by people who have a vested interest in it's success (hopefully engineers with some management experience) and not be politically motivated, and once you give them the resources they need you leave them alone with no government involvement along the lines of mandates to do anything other than the intial design goals.
I have no objection to a private investor spending $50 billion to get to Mars (it might actually be possible at that cost, if you cut out the government). In fact, I think this is exactly what should happen eventually, instead of yet another pissing match between imperial powers - but if I had $50 billion lying around, there are still a lot of sick and hungry people on this planet who can't help themselves and certainly aren't going to get any help from their government or ours.
I've never liked the "we can use the money to help the sick and the poor" because there will always be sick and poor until we are able to cure diseases on a gentic level (at which point we'll probably just find the really nast stuff) and food replicators that re-arrange molecules. I.e. until we reach star trek lifestyles. Of course, at that point the poor will just be living on other planets without that technology.
We've never had any problem doing great things and advancing humanity while injustices existed, and holding off on doing great things to try and fight injustice is a losing battle. I submit that elevating the human existance (of which, in part, I believe is becoming a race no longer teathered to one planet and it's resources) will do more in the long run than trying to feed hungry people today.
I also think it would be more efficient to research new technologies that might make interplanetary travel faster and easier, instead of pouring the money into thoroughly obsolete chemical rockets.
Why would anybody be trying to develop better space propulsion techniques if we're not going into space? once you make it clear that we're going to other planets... such as by going there, technological progress in the related fields grows by leaps and bounds as that research now has purpose and direction.
Once we made it clear that "we're going to the moon!" by starting the Mercury program and actually launching rockets into space, it only took what, 7 years, to develop the saturn V, a rocket capable of getting us there?
Purpose and direction.
Once we made it clear "we're done with the moon, we're going to play around in LEO for a few decades", research into heavy lift technologies utterly stagnated, to the point where we're now trying to recreate the saturn V (more or less) because we havn't come up with anything better in the past 45 years
We've also got much better technology than they had in the 16th century.
we can make 120 tons of breathable oxygen and methane (fuel/propellent) from 8 tons of hyrogen we bring with us and the free CO2 in the martian atmosphere.
large reserves of fresh water exist on mars, they're just frozen. we just have to heat them up. I think the byproduct heat of the nuclear reactors we'll almost certainly bring with us should work well.
food is a trickier subject, but soil analysis by martian landers has been quite promising for earth plants, and we've always got several decades of advances in hydroponic research to fall back on.
I think the real difficulty is the lack of building materials and lack of economy.
The new world was full of trees you could cut down. what do you build with on mars? iron and rock is pretty much what you've got to work with (not that we couldn't make do with that).
The other problem is the lack of (semi)immediate payback on investement that the new world had. It will take decades, maybe centuries, to build up an infrastructure on Mars to the point where it has an economy capable of equal trade with the earth (the old world).
while the challenges are more pronounced with the earth -> mars than with europe -> america, I think that technology has progressed right along with the increase in challenge, bringing the relative difficulty back into the managable.
We, as a species, are capable of starting this right now, today. The difference (for good or ill) is now we have to convince hundreds of congressmen (who have to convince millions of americans) that it's a good idea, rather than just needing to convince the king.
It's probably going to be easier once we have individuals or corporations who can finance these ventures on their own (we're getting awful close), but the downside to that is whether in 200 years my great great great great grandkids on Mars will be living in Paypal city and vacationing at iD Software canyon.
You are correct except for your knee-jerk desire to place blame on a single party. BOTH parties pull as much pork money into their states as possible, and in this case as many of the NASA contracts are in states that tend to vote republican, it happens to be republican senators pushing this particular issue... but do some reading on the subject and you'll find that there are plenty of democrats in the same situation with NASA contracts in their states as well.
Polictics is politics. No matter what team you're on, you play the same game. Political parties matter about as much as uniform colors. You root for the burgandy and gold team, I root for the yellow and black team.
I'm not against the idea at all, I just think that the government is the only entity that can currently afford to do it.
If Bill Gates wants to get together with Warren Buffet and some sultan from Abu-Dhabi, and privately finance this, I'm fine with that.
Not because I think they'd be any more altruistically minded than some government, more so I just want to see it done during my lifetime... and seeing as how I don't believe the aging gene(s) will be discovered and nullified before my time is over, I'm in the "whoever can get us there first" boat.
The Mars direct program layed out in the mid 90s pegged the cost at 20-30 billion over 10 years to put 3 teams of 4 astronauts (two scientists and two engineers each) onto nearly overlapping stays of 1.5 years apiece.
Current estimate, adjusted for inflation, is around 50 billion over 10 years. I believe that is somewhere around 20% of NASA's current (non expanded) budget.
Honestly, If I had 50 billion lieing around, hell yes that is EXACTLY what I'd do. I couldn't think of a better project to put it towards. I mean seriously, past a certain point you've got all the boats, mansions, and cars you can want, and you're just saving up to buy your own country. Why not go to mars instead?
You've gotta start somewhere.
Christopher Columbus showed up what, 3 or 4 times in the new world? comparativly speaking, he did little more than plant a flag and grab some moon rock (well, he planted a few flags, and grabbed some natives for slaves). He went there, proved it was there (well, not that the vikings hadn't done so already, but nobody remembered), and Europe's response was "wow, that's amazing" and then proceeded to dick around in the mediterranen.
I'm too lazy right now to go dig up exact dates, but if memory serves it was at least 100 years before spain, england, and france started seriously exploiting the resources of the new world, and even longer before your first permanant colonies started springing up.
I do not care whether it's Ares V, which doesn't really quite exist yet, the even more vaporware "new heavy lifter" that president Obama spoke of, or some weird hybrid that the nerds down in propulsion dynamics wrote up on the back of a napkin 2 or 3 years ago and havn't told you about yet...
But will you PLEASE get our monkey asses to Mars before I die?
I'd love to see the beginings of a manned Mars base (even, dare I dream, a colony?!), but at this point I'll take Neil Armstrong's grandson standing there holding a flag with 50 (or even 52) stars on it.
Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade. Also, if it's absolutely necessary to get the job done again, I'm ok with you telling them that the russians (or maybe the chinese, the're more likely to believe that nowadays) are going to take over the world (scratch that, the galaxy) if they don't succeed.
That is all.
i'm holding my droid at 1 foot distance and I can't distinguish any single pixel. I have to get it to about 3-4 inches to do so convincingly.
Granted, anti-aliased fonts help a ton.
you're completely right and that's what I get for posting while trying to do work at the same time. next time i'll put the work aside first.
60% of the time, it works EVERY time...
compare adblock in chrome to adblock in FF.
NOT the same thing. at all. chrome makes the ads not displayed (usually, sometimes it even fails at that), but they're still there in all their cpu abusing, bandwidth hogging, spyware laden goodness. hell sometimes you can still accidently click on them.
FF keeps them from loading entirely. I know that websites prefer the latter to the former, but I certainly do not.
Sonny, I remember the days when we had to manually type in http://www.altavista.com/ or http://www.lycos.com/ into our browsers to get to a search engine. We had to use our keyboards and everything! Then the search engine took a long time and returned bad results... and we liked it!
These newfangled search bars, they're the devil's work I tell ya.
no evil? how about deliberatly holding back on the browser hooks and infrastructure to allow for comprehensive robust adblock/scriptblock/etc ad-ons, due to such things being completely against their business model that is based on supplying advertisements?
I suppose that's not "evil", bit it is a pretty damn big roadblock to me adopting chrome over FF.
pretty sure that means you're not using a legally authorized version of windows, since you were not leagally able to authorize the installation due to not being able to sign the licensing agreement.
that's such a brilliant idea that I would be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
but shouldn't 14 people in a single cab still be considered somewhat suspicious on it's own?
That's not even to mention that there are a thousand and one "windows tips and tricks!" websites out there to tell you things.
Now, I had a "dos for dummies" book, and I found certain things highly helpful... but that was also 1992. Things were a bit different then.