Your roaring upswepts are pointing behind you. You're essentially inaudible to someone in a car in front of you, which is where 99% of your problems will be coming from. Loud pipes just piss off the citizens and get all of our motorcycles banned from roads and neighborhoods.
You seem to have applied the same leet reading comprehension skills to my comment as you did to the article.
As I pointed out in the quotation from the article in question, the effect has been demonstrated by the same researcher using other materials than nanotubes -- materials that are already common, readily available and much more robust than nanotubes. Given that fact, amply explained in the article as I quoted originally, I see far less reason than you to be pessimistic about this effect seeing commercial application in the near future. We'll just have to wait and see who's right.
RTFA, it's not just nanotubes that demonstate the effect:
Ajay Sood, professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and his student Shankar Ghosh blew a gas over a piece of wire and watched it generate electric current. Two years ago he had blown water over ultra-tiny wires - carbon nanotubes - and watched them generate a current too. Carbon nanotubes are bits of exotica for the layperson; you expect them to behave in ways that you had not known before. Some of the wires in the second experiment (apart from the nanotubes) were semiconductors, not too different from the ones inside your the ubiquitous personal computer. They are the stuff of everyday life. You could build the device with a few thousand rupees.
It's always good to read the article closely before taking it task for missing information.
From the bottom of the first page:
Finally, the X-Connect offers features such as P4/AMD support, Short Circuit Protection, In-rush Current Protection, and Thermal Overload Cutoff Protection.
Windows Update version 5 is being rolled out as part of the XP Service Pack 2 stuff, so if you don't have the XP SP 2 beta installed, that would explain why it won't validate you.
Installing SP 2 does require you to accept a EULA.
Ah, but what if the mod was making their own little joke?
What, you've never trolled with your mod points? The limit's only five a day and you can't cook what you catch, but there's still plenty of sport in it...
So, you joined a Beta Test, participated in an event that had Stress Test written all over it, and either you or they fell off the performance curve. Sounds like the developers got the data they were looking for. And given that everyone had the framerate issues, it sounds like that was a server issue, not client-limited. Which means they have a better shot at fixing it before they go live and the crowds descend. It's all good.
You can't judge the game by late-beta performance when they're obviously stress testing. And the fact that they got around to stress testing before they went live is a good sign, it means they probably have their other bugs under control. Anyone who's been in on the last few MMOG launches can tell you what happens when launch day *is* the stress test, and they won't be saying nice things.
If I'm being pissy/jealous it's because they once again scheduled a beta event for a time when us west-coasties were still at work or stuck in traffic trying to get home. Wah.
I'm only pointing out that who owns the hardware, and whether it's been modified, is incidental. The potential problem would be if the modification was used to violate the terms of service by e.g. removing bandwidth caps put in place by the provider. They can't tell you what to do with your hardware, but they can set requirements on what hardware may be connected to their service.
About that AUP you linked:
The Customer must comply with the then current bandwidth, data storage and other
limitations on the Services.
That "current...other limitations" vagueness in their policy is what I'm thinking of. It means "we can change our rules whenever we feel we need to address some new situation." Like, for instance, wider availability of hacked cable modems. Have you got the current list of limitations, and will you know if it changes?
I'm not a lawyer, and this is, as you say, just an intellectual exercise, but experience has shown that when dealing with any ISP, their real Acceptable Use Policy boils down to this: "Use it the way we want you to, or we'll boot you. And just because it was OK yesterday doesn't mean it will be OK tomorrow." So where your original post asked, "how can they cut me off for modifying hardware that I own," I'm just pointing out that they have the right to limit access to their network, regardless of who owns the hardware.
It's pretty straightforward. In exchange for being allowed to attach to their network, you agreed to use only certain (i.e. unmodified) equipment, and to allow them to access that equipment in order to ensure that it operates properly on their network (i.e. within the parameters they've decided to enforce.) It's not anything like trespassing on their part -- you gave them permission to do it when you signed up for the service.
Aside to Michael and FatCat: It's spelled "hobbyist".
I've worked on systems that had a legal requirement for hard-copy logging of certain events (airport access control -- for certain doors, you need to have a record of who opened that door for every time it was opened, and you don't want to lose any of that log to power or other equipment failure.) A dot-matrix printer loaded with a big box of fanfold paper is just the ticket for this application.
I do agree with you that there are shortcomings to the device, as explained in your comment and many others on this article. I never said the device was any good, but rather my point was that a decent review would have covered a lot more ground, a lot more thoroughly, than the THG article bothered to do.
And you might want to read the article again yourself. The installer told him he had a newer version already installed; and he chose (via a Yes/No dialog box, that's how it's done in Windows installers) not to overwrite the newer version. That's what he says. He made a selection, the result was a broken installation. I never said that made the installer good or the user stupid. But a responsible reviewer would have arranged to have a proper installation before he went on with the review, lest the installation problems lead to an inaccurate review.
The price comparison links for the iPod say they're for the 20Gb model when in fact they're for the 15Gb model, thus eliminating a major point in favor of the Dell model: no USD$50 Apple premium.
The conclusion makes it sound like there were many problems with the unit, but reading the rest of the pages I found that outside of the reviewer botching the software installation, his only criticism was that the unit isn't a very featureful voice recorder. (And how he expected things to work properly after he canceled the software installation in the middle, I don't understand. Maybe it could have been smoother, but panning it in the review when he did such an unusual thing in the setup just doesn't seem fair.)
There's almost no discussion of playback capabilities. Those of us who've used these devices know that there are issues to watch for: some devices have problems at certain bitrates, or with handling variable bit rate recordings, etc. No apparent effort was made by the reviewer to address those issues. I'd also have appreciated some discussion of the quality of the audio stage, how much power it has, how it performs with quality headphones, etc.
This "review" reads more like a poorly executed "first look" than the product of a reasonable-length, in-depth evaluation.
Re:BitTorrent is no-go for small files..
on
RSS & BT Together?
·
· Score: 1
Remember that bit of the article on page 1 where he thinks that RSS feeds should be multimedia extravaganzas, and that all the RSS traditionalists who just use it to serve up their blog's headlines are only barely this side of dinosaur status. You'd be back into multi-MB territory in no time if he had his way.
I'm unsure of the exact circumstances required, but Federal law can and does trump state or local laws. (I'm not sure if it's automatic, or if the Fed. law has to explicitly say it's taking precedence over local statutes.) Numerous people have been prosecuted for possession of marijuana in states whose local laws would have allowed the possession.
This is also how the Federal Civil Rights laws were able to be effective: the Federal law about equal access to voting registration and polling places (for example) trumped local laws that placed stricter limits on who could vote.
There are several notebook computers on the market that use the exact same graphics chips as the Powerbooks. Some have been specifically mentioned in the MacWorld coverage linked from Slashdot in the past week, usually in the part of that coverage that points out that the non-Apple alternatives are cheaper than the Powerbooks and available immediately.
There's absolutely nothing special about the Powerbooks' graphics abilities in a notebook; in fact, they're behind the curve, timewise.
Here in Seattle, we have an active recycling program and get regular updates from the city about how to use it. We've been explicitly told to put used batteries in the trash.
Alkalines used to contain mercury, but modern ones don't,so they're not considered hazardous waste any more.
The city's website recommends that we recycle batteries through local retailers who are set up to handle specific kinds of batteries. Reading between the lines, I guess that there are so many kinds of battery (lead-acid, NiCd, Li, alkaline) that they don't want to deal with the sorting and handling issues.
Amen. The saddest thing about EQ in particular, and to a lesser extent the MMOG scene as a whole, is the way it's dominated by the whiny, vocal few who make long, rambling posts to messageboards about why the game doesn't meet their personal criteria for perfection.
Not only is this an EQ messageboard post that should have stayed there, it's not even news. Drop the names specific to recent expansion packs, and it could be any anti-EQ rant written since it went public. I'm really surprised this item wasn't from Timothy; it certainly has his characteristic "the only clue I could find was one somebody else threw away" feel.
The point remains: if you need better reliability than you can get from residential-class service, you can pay to get it. If you're a contractor, then you do indeed need to factor that cost into your rate. I'm a contractor myself, and there are costs of doing business that way; I have to cover my own insurance, etc. It's not the sort of thing you should go around whining about, it's just part of the deal.
The original poster moved from Metro NYC to the Midwest US. He's saving enough money on housing to pay for a business-class connection, many times over.
It seems to be working well so far, I've had it installed for a month or so. I paid USD$229 for it over the counter at a local retail store, so the 120-160 quote sounds like a good deal to me.
I don't know enough to be able to comment on how secure the default configuration is, but it seems to do most of the things I've seen recommended, and it can be configured to do more if that's what you want. (It does most, but not all, of the routing checks recommended in the SANS article mentioned today on Slashdot.)
It worked fine for me out of the box. I get an IP address from my DSL provider via DHCP, which the RT311 handles just fine. Configuration is pretty straightforward and decently documented, should you need or want to adjust the default config. Configuration can be done either via a serial connection or over the protected network using telnet or a provided Windows program. The Windows program doesn't find my RT311, so I use telnet to configure. That's been the only aspect of using the RT311 that didn't work fine for me.
In answer to another poster, about the number of ports on the box, it has one port for connection to the wide world, and one port for connection to the protected network. It came with the proper cable (null-modem type thing, I forget what you call that in Ethernet cabling terms) for connection to the DSL box. I'm using a hub to share my DSL connection between multiple machines. I forget which way I had to set the switch on the hub before it connected properly to the RT311, but that's easy to figure out from the status lights.
I've spent the last year or so working with a 13-year-old who's been learning programming in exactly this way. He started with the visual programming language that came with Mindstorms and has moved on at his own pace to using NQC.
He's learned a lot of the basic skills of programming, and he hasn't been held back by having to cope with the nasty details of syntax. (I think that the tyrrany of the syntax checker is the hardest part of beginning to program, especially for younger people who aren't used to having to express themselves so precisely.) Sure, he'll have to cope with syntax eventually, but he's learning useful general programming concepts like breaking a problem into pieces, control flow, multitasking and such; meanwhile, he's sneaking up on the detail-oriented parts of programming in a context where the need for the precision is clearer. It's a lot easier to understand why the compiler needs all that help with punctuation after you've seen how many ways a simple robot program can go awry.
Here's the explanation I got while working on contract at a major publisher of games and consumer applications:
If you're working on commercial shrink-wrapped titles destined for home users (games, print shops, garden design, etc.,) most of the money spent on that class of software is spent during the Christmas Buying Season. It doesn't matter what date you announce; if you miss Christmas (which means in-store by October, which means Gold Master released to manufacturing in September) then your company is screwed.
No matter how good your program, no matter how good your marketing, PC consumers just don't buy enough software over the rest of the year to make up for missing Christmas. Thus commercial titles get booted out the door in September, no matter their state of readiness. The announced ship date isn't really a factor in this segment of the software market. If it's on the shelf in October/November, it'll sell, no matter how buggy. If it's on the shelf bug-free on the promised date in March, it'll sell maybe 10- to 25% as many copies. As another poster pointed out, it's simple capitalist economics - make the most money, in the most expedient manner.
I'd ask this question on the Homebrew digest, if it's still around. (I moved to Seattle a few years back and stopped brewing on the coals to Newcastle principle.)
Slashdot Mirror
Your roaring upswepts are pointing behind you. You're essentially inaudible to someone in a car in front of you, which is where 99% of your problems will be coming from. Loud pipes just piss off the citizens and get all of our motorcycles banned from roads and neighborhoods.
You seem to have applied the same leet reading comprehension skills to my comment as you did to the article.
As I pointed out in the quotation from the article in question, the effect has been demonstrated by the same researcher using other materials than nanotubes -- materials that are already common, readily available and much more robust than nanotubes. Given that fact, amply explained in the article as I quoted originally, I see far less reason than you to be pessimistic about this effect seeing commercial application in the near future. We'll just have to wait and see who's right.
From the bottom of the first page:
Windows Update version 5 is being rolled out as part of the XP Service Pack 2 stuff, so if you don't have the XP SP 2 beta installed, that would explain why it won't validate you.
Installing SP 2 does require you to accept a EULA.
Ah, but what if the mod was making their own little joke?
What, you've never trolled with your mod points? The limit's only five a day and you can't cook what you catch, but there's still plenty of sport in it...
So, you joined a Beta Test, participated in an event that had Stress Test written all over it, and either you or they fell off the performance curve. Sounds like the developers got the data they were looking for. And given that everyone had the framerate issues, it sounds like that was a server issue, not client-limited. Which means they have a better shot at fixing it before they go live and the crowds descend. It's all good.
You can't judge the game by late-beta performance when they're obviously stress testing. And the fact that they got around to stress testing before they went live is a good sign, it means they probably have their other bugs under control. Anyone who's been in on the last few MMOG launches can tell you what happens when launch day *is* the stress test, and they won't be saying nice things.
If I'm being pissy/jealous it's because they once again scheduled a beta event for a time when us west-coasties were still at work or stuck in traffic trying to get home. Wah.
About that AUP you linked:
That "current...other limitations" vagueness in their policy is what I'm thinking of. It means "we can change our rules whenever we feel we need to address some new situation." Like, for instance, wider availability of hacked cable modems. Have you got the current list of limitations, and will you know if it changes?
I'm not a lawyer, and this is, as you say, just an intellectual exercise, but experience has shown that when dealing with any ISP, their real Acceptable Use Policy boils down to this: "Use it the way we want you to, or we'll boot you. And just because it was OK yesterday doesn't mean it will be OK tomorrow." So where your original post asked, "how can they cut me off for modifying hardware that I own," I'm just pointing out that they have the right to limit access to their network, regardless of who owns the hardware.
It's pretty straightforward. In exchange for being allowed to attach to their network, you agreed to use only certain (i.e. unmodified) equipment, and to allow them to access that equipment in order to ensure that it operates properly on their network (i.e. within the parameters they've decided to enforce.) It's not anything like trespassing on their part -- you gave them permission to do it when you signed up for the service.
Aside to Michael and FatCat: It's spelled "hobbyist".
Jan is also a woman's name in English (the language the book is written in.)
The publisher's bio shown at the linked Barnes and Noble site for the book says, "She".
Another example:
I've worked on systems that had a legal requirement for hard-copy logging of certain events (airport access control -- for certain doors, you need to have a record of who opened that door for every time it was opened, and you don't want to lose any of that log to power or other equipment failure.) A dot-matrix printer loaded with a big box of fanfold paper is just the ticket for this application.
I do agree with you that there are shortcomings to the device, as explained in your comment and many others on this article. I never said the device was any good, but rather my point was that a decent review would have covered a lot more ground, a lot more thoroughly, than the THG article bothered to do.
And you might want to read the article again yourself. The installer told him he had a newer version already installed; and he chose (via a Yes/No dialog box, that's how it's done in Windows installers) not to overwrite the newer version. That's what he says. He made a selection, the result was a broken installation. I never said that made the installer good or the user stupid. But a responsible reviewer would have arranged to have a proper installation before he went on with the review, lest the installation problems lead to an inaccurate review.
This is an awfully sloppy review.
The price comparison links for the iPod say they're for the 20Gb model when in fact they're for the 15Gb model, thus eliminating a major point in favor of the Dell model: no USD$50 Apple premium.
The conclusion makes it sound like there were many problems with the unit, but reading the rest of the pages I found that outside of the reviewer botching the software installation, his only criticism was that the unit isn't a very featureful voice recorder. (And how he expected things to work properly after he canceled the software installation in the middle, I don't understand. Maybe it could have been smoother, but panning it in the review when he did such an unusual thing in the setup just doesn't seem fair.)
There's almost no discussion of playback capabilities. Those of us who've used these devices know that there are issues to watch for: some devices have problems at certain bitrates, or with handling variable bit rate recordings, etc. No apparent effort was made by the reviewer to address those issues. I'd also have appreciated some discussion of the quality of the audio stage, how much power it has, how it performs with quality headphones, etc.
This "review" reads more like a poorly executed "first look" than the product of a reasonable-length, in-depth evaluation.
Remember that bit of the article on page 1 where he thinks that RSS feeds should be multimedia extravaganzas, and that all the RSS traditionalists who just use it to serve up their blog's headlines are only barely this side of dinosaur status. You'd be back into multi-MB territory in no time if he had his way.
I'm unsure of the exact circumstances required, but Federal law can and does trump state or local laws. (I'm not sure if it's automatic, or if the Fed. law has to explicitly say it's taking precedence over local statutes.) Numerous people have been prosecuted for possession of marijuana in states whose local laws would have allowed the possession.
This is also how the Federal Civil Rights laws were able to be effective: the Federal law about equal access to voting registration and polling places (for example) trumped local laws that placed stricter limits on who could vote.
You say it like it's a bad thing. Do you actually read the comments that are posted, even at 3? I say, leave that mod box down.
There are several notebook computers on the market that use the exact same graphics chips as the Powerbooks. Some have been specifically mentioned in the MacWorld coverage linked from Slashdot in the past week, usually in the part of that coverage that points out that the non-Apple alternatives are cheaper than the Powerbooks and available immediately.
There's absolutely nothing special about the Powerbooks' graphics abilities in a notebook; in fact, they're behind the curve, timewise.
Here in Seattle, we have an active recycling program and get regular updates from the city about how to use it. We've been explicitly told to put used batteries in the trash.
Alkalines used to contain mercury, but modern ones don't,so they're not considered hazardous waste any more.
The city's website recommends that we recycle batteries through local retailers who are set up to handle specific kinds of batteries. Reading between the lines, I guess that there are so many kinds of battery (lead-acid, NiCd, Li, alkaline) that they don't want to deal with the sorting and handling issues.
Amen. The saddest thing about EQ in particular, and to a lesser extent the MMOG scene as a whole, is the way it's dominated by the whiny, vocal few who make long, rambling posts to messageboards about why the game doesn't meet their personal criteria for perfection.
Not only is this an EQ messageboard post that should have stayed there, it's not even news. Drop the names specific to recent expansion packs, and it could be any anti-EQ rant written since it went public. I'm really surprised this item wasn't from Timothy; it certainly has his characteristic "the only clue I could find was one somebody else threw away" feel.
The point remains: if you need better reliability than you can get from residential-class service, you can pay to get it. If you're a contractor, then you do indeed need to factor that cost into your rate. I'm a contractor myself, and there are costs of doing business that way; I have to cover my own insurance, etc. It's not the sort of thing you should go around whining about, it's just part of the deal.
The original poster moved from Metro NYC to the Midwest US. He's saving enough money on housing to pay for a business-class connection, many times over.
It seems to be working well so far, I've had it installed for a month or so. I paid USD$229 for it over the counter at a local retail store, so the 120-160 quote sounds like a good deal to me.
I don't know enough to be able to comment on how secure the default configuration is, but it seems to do most of the things I've seen recommended, and it can be configured to do more if that's what you want. (It does most, but not all, of the routing checks recommended in the SANS article mentioned today on Slashdot.)
It worked fine for me out of the box. I get an IP address from my DSL provider via DHCP, which the RT311 handles just fine. Configuration is pretty straightforward and decently documented, should you need or want to adjust the default config. Configuration can be done either via a serial connection or over the protected network using telnet or a provided Windows program. The Windows program doesn't find my RT311, so I use telnet to configure. That's been the only aspect of using the RT311 that didn't work fine for me.
In answer to another poster, about the number of ports on the box, it has one port for connection to the wide world, and one port for connection to the protected network. It came with the proper cable (null-modem type thing, I forget what you call that in Ethernet cabling terms) for connection to the DSL box. I'm using a hub to share my DSL connection between multiple machines. I forget which way I had to set the switch on the hub before it connected properly to the RT311, but that's easy to figure out from the status lights.
I've spent the last year or so working with a 13-year-old who's been learning programming in exactly this way. He started with the visual programming language that came with Mindstorms and has moved on at his own pace to using NQC.
He's learned a lot of the basic skills of programming, and he hasn't been held back by having to cope with the nasty details of syntax. (I think that the tyrrany of the syntax checker is the hardest part of beginning to program, especially for younger people who aren't used to having to express themselves so precisely.) Sure, he'll have to cope with syntax eventually, but he's learning useful general programming concepts like breaking a problem into pieces, control flow, multitasking and such; meanwhile, he's sneaking up on the detail-oriented parts of programming in a context where the need for the precision is clearer. It's a lot easier to understand why the compiler needs all that help with punctuation after you've seen how many ways a simple robot program can go awry.
Here's the explanation I got while working on contract at a major publisher of games and consumer applications:
If you're working on commercial shrink-wrapped titles destined for home users (games, print shops, garden design, etc.,) most of the money spent on that class of software is spent during the Christmas Buying Season. It doesn't matter what date you announce; if you miss Christmas (which means in-store by October, which means Gold Master released to manufacturing in September) then your company is screwed.
No matter how good your program, no matter how good your marketing, PC consumers just don't buy enough software over the rest of the year to make up for missing Christmas. Thus commercial titles get booted out the door in September, no matter their state of readiness. The announced ship date isn't really a factor in this segment of the software market. If it's on the shelf in October/November, it'll sell, no matter how buggy. If it's on the shelf bug-free on the promised date in March, it'll sell maybe 10- to 25% as many copies. As another poster pointed out, it's simple capitalist economics - make the most money, in the most expedient manner.
I'd ask this question on the Homebrew digest, if it's still around. (I moved to Seattle a few years back and stopped brewing on the coals to Newcastle principle.)
-Delf