Disclaimer: I run a ISP that does exclusively DSL(www.acedsl.com). Hence, my views may be biased, but at least I know what I'm talking about;)
Firstly, lets go through your options: 1. Your physical line (local loop, last mile) is always provided by Local Telco (BA in your case). 2. Your line gets into CO. Now it has to be plugged into DSLAM (DSL access multiplexor, hardware that aggregates multiple subscriber lines into one ATM PVC. CLECs put their DSLAMs in telco COs and lease local loop from them. ILECs have their own DSLAMs, and they are offering DSL themselves. However, telcos are obligated to let other ISPs provide service over DSL.
Now, the actual service funnies start: 1. Bell sucks. Really does. Anything they do, they are very likely to mess up, so you'll be better off dealing with them as little as possible. 2. Bell is impossible to deal with if you are "just" a customer (such as in case of Infospeed). You will wait for 3 hours on hold, and then you'll get to talk to a tech support rep whose only answer is usually "Reinstall Windows". You are far better off dealing with your ISP who (if they are good) have a good (relationship/pull) on Telco.
3. CLECs: Bell hates CLECs. Bell is obligated to offer copper for 6-8$/month to them, but they do not really want to do that. Also, the lines are considered voice-grade service, and unlike a T1 (where MTTR is 4 hours), the guaranteed response is next business day.
4. If they are going through CLEC, your local ISP cannot deal with Bells directly. As a matter of fact, your ISP buys service from "Regional or National Reseller", who in turn buys lines from CLEC, who in turn has to contact the Telco. While CLECs aren't as badly messed up as Bells, they are still telcos, and they need to be pushed, yelled, whined at to get anywhere. If your ISP won't do that, you are not likely to get any service.
5. Bell's own end-to-end service: "Infospeed DSL" in BA case. It is provided by "Unregulated Subsidiary" of Bell. Benefit is, it all is provided by same company, however, since this company a telco, they do not care. They have all the pull they need (its same company, really), but they just won't do anything. The attitude is "We don't care, we don't have to". Technical support sucks (5 hours on hold until you get to talk to a "engineer" whose only response is "Reinstall Windows"), and they REALLY do not get IP. (Slow backbone connections, never give you a static IP, forcing you to use PPPoE which is a b*tch to set up for Windows, not even talking about *nixes).
6. Bell is also obligated to let other ISPs provide service using Bell's own DSLAMs deployed at COs, competing with Bell's end-to-end offerings like "Infospeed". This is what my company does, and in my (of course biased) opinion, this is the best option, since you are dealing with ISP that cares, and has a direct contact (and a push) on Telco. Most of time my partners spend on the phone is getting BA to follow up on trouble tickets, bothering them regarding installation dates, etc, etc. Of course, AceDSL isn't the only partner, check out remoteit.com and inch.com, who are also providing similar service.
Oh, we also support linux and (free/net/open)bsd, give static IPs, and even route networks (from/28 up to/24) to you. Generally, we have a clue;)
Also, please check out www.dslreports.com, its quite useful resource of user's reviews. It just so happens that flashcom has one of worst reputations, and in DSL business my company one of the best;)
Telco Jargon: ILEC: Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier: Your part of Ma Bell, Bell Atlantic. CLEC: Northpoint/Covad/Rhythms
Legally, the only people who can bring a copyright infringement lawsuits are the holders of the copyright in question. That is, only authors of software can sue for license violation.
For all "GNU" software (different from software released under GNU GPL), FSF is the copyright holder, and FSF will fight in court if needs be. (As they did when NeXT tried to bundle gcc pieces with their Objective C compiler).
All the more reasons to assign your copyright to FSF, I'd think.
MMDS (and LMDS) technology is far from new. There were many companies that tried to make 'consumer internet over wireless' work in the real world. All of them are not doing so well.
List of companies include: www.caiwireless.com (recovering from chapter 11 about a year ago) http://www.harmonicdata.com/ http://www.speedus.com (almost went bankrupt, sold 90% of their spectrum allocation, restarting with a different technology)
Winstar and ART Telecom are using MMDS as well, and doing well, but their business model is completely different. They aim at businesses, and they price it accordingly.
MMDS and LMDS does not work well if you do not have line-of-sight, no matter what the vendors tell you. Not-LOS span is about 1 mile, not 30.
LMDS and MMDS will work reasonably well in a rural or suburban areas, where LOS is not a major problem. But even there, the effective coverage ranger will be probably 2-3 miles per transmitter, not 30.
You must also consider that LMDS and MMDS are affected by rain and sleet. Company that decides to provide service in an area must license the spectrum from FCC. There can only be 2 licensors per area, one of them having 10x more bandwidth than the other. Licenses for a metropolitan area were going for 50-100M$. So, as result of all that , do not expect your neighbourhood ISP to offer MMDS service anytime soon...
This change means that many scripts that rely on whois to get contacts for domains for various purposes might break. NSI strikes again, without notice.
I feel that I should comment on this, given that I am running a company that is going to be offering ADSL in NY this month. (shameless plug: http://www.acecape.com)
First off, here's the current picture of DSL market in NYC: The only thing available RIGHT NOW is SDSL. There are two major providers for DSL, that is, Covad and NorthPoint. They operate by putting their DSL access multiplexors (DSLAMs) into Bell central offices, and leasing physical copper from customer to their DSLAM. Since DSLAMs are quite expensive, both Covad and Northpoint are knee-deep in debt. Correspondingly, they do not orient their services for consumer use, they are competing with normal T1 access for business.
There are many ISPs in NY area who offer SDSL access. Most of them are acting as resellers of Northpoint/covad, that is, your traffic does not even enter ISP's network. Some (like flashcom, globix) actually have deals with Northpoint/Covad that ISP provides internet access, and northpoint/covad provides physical connectivity to customer. At any case, ISP's cut is relatively minor, and northpoint/covad gets most of the money, and sets lower bound on price. You can expect paying around 400-500$ for SDSL 1.5Mbps service with any ISP. While this is very competitive with T1, its not for consumers.
Enter BellAtlantic and Acecape. To compete, BellAtlantic decided to just add DSL cards into their existing switches, which is much cheaper than what Covad/northpoint doing. Also, with this approach, it is possible to have both phone and DSL service on one line, using a low-pass splitter. However, with Bell being a stubborn telco, it takes them ages to do it. Also, in this regulated industry, it takes regulators ages to approve any consumer services. Well, finally, tariff for DSL was filed about 2 weeks ago, and expected to be approved Real Soon Now. Pricing is very competitive with normal phone ISPs. BA charges 40$/mo for physical connection, and we charge 20$/mo for internet service on that connection, total being 60$/month. This is about as much as you'd pay for second phone line and internet, so it really makes sense for heavy users.
We, as ISP, have OC3 connection from BA to us, which will be live mid-June. BA promises to start installing DSL for customers mid-june as well. So, given enough luck, we'll providing services soon.
1. US laws prohibit assassination of foreign leaders (unless a declaration of war is made). US did not declare war since WW2, and declaring war under international law carries consequences (use of force/declaring war is only legal with approval of UN). Faced with choice of breaking international law or breaking national law, Clinton always choses former, as international law is enforced only in UN where US has veto, therefore, US can essentially escape harmless no matter what they do, even if entire world is against it.
2. What gives US right to decide whether foreign leader is 'acceptable' leader for that region or has to be assassinated? Isn't the idea of democracy that people elect their leaders? If Milosevic was democratically elected, and he is Evil (tm), that shows that democracy is evil. However, no better option has been presented, other than US ruling entire world, of course, which probably won't be acceptable to say, Russia and China.
What's the point of this post? Democracy isn't always the answer, nor is dictatorship of single person or even government. Truth is somewhere in between.
I consider this as scary fact. If US Government legitimizes 'hacking' as form of warfare, there will be nothing to stop any other country from doing it.
For example, report talks about 'attacking Milosevic's bank accounts'. Presumably held in countries other than US, since in US, Clinton can order the funds frozen or seize them. Now, US is not at war with those third countries (most likely it will be Cyprus), but will be actively trying to rob those countries banks, while maintaining complete diplomatic relations.
Consider following. Lybia trying to break into UK banks to steal money held by (whoever) in UK. It will now be perfectly legitimate to do that without declaration of war or anything. Scary thought.
It started few days ago (2 or 3, I'm not sure). They don't exactly assert their copyright (There's no word "copyright" in the disclaimer), they just say that you cannot use it for commercial purposes.
This is done to prevent abuse of those addresses by spammers, and for NSI to be able to sue spammers for usage of NSI's mailing lists. I think that's a Good Thing(tm) by itself.
However, that doesn't stop NSI itself from sending spam to registered contacts. They did it on more than a few occasions...Ah well.
There's a funny thing about retina scans: In mid-1980sh, it was discovered that AIDS virus does transfer with eye fluids. It was discovered when some major biometrics conference was under way. Noone at the conference agreed to test retina scanner, and that was the death of retina scanners.
Pluris was doing it (or claimed to) since '97. They used hypercube for internal switching fabric configuration, and I believe used wireless very-short-distance (1m) links to reduce amount of wiring. Vadim Antonov was the brains behind it, he left the company in '98. Pluris didn't release anything, and their website (www.pluris.com) seems down. Vadim also is person who named major russian UUCP host as 'kremvax', developed/ported unix for soviet PDP-11 clone (called DEMOS), founded first russian ISP (also called DEMOS), architected much of SprintLink, etc.
Avici on other hand doesn't really say much about how their fabric is done, but I imagine it won't be crossconnect (2000x2000 wires...ugh). Probably some sort of hypercube or selective mesh. I wish Avici was as forthcoming with technical details as Pluris.:)
Take a look at twiddler at http://www.handykey.com. Its slightly on pricey side (150$+), but it does work. It took me around 6 hours of twiddling to get to 15 wpm speed on it. Fairly reasonable. There are few clones of it out there as well, which you can make yourself for around 30$ in parts.
Check out wearables.blu.org for a load of information about wearable computers. Also, Steve Mann has a website at www.wearcomp.org with his writings...
1. ViA had some (battery?) problems with their units and weren't shipping the old version since December. New version had just been shipped to their beta customers. Unfortunately, to get on beta list, you have to promise to use it daily and talk to them daily regarding your experience. I passed up:)
2. Prices aren't that much more expensive than a PC, at least for someone with few grand of spare cash. ViA 2 is 3200$, including batteries, chargers and liquidimage's M1 HMD.
3. HMD are getting better. The coolest thing I saw was www.microopticalcorp.com selling their HMD for 5000$. While it can be too much for a college geek, its not that much for a company or a geek with a good job. The HMD is almost undetectable, it just looks like a pair of eyeglasses (albeit with a fairly thick frame). I'm getting one when I can get my hands on production VIA 2.
4. It does run linux already. It has a cyrix mediaGX processor, which is supported by latest Xfree. I had a conversation with Steve Case (VP of Engineering at ViA) in which he stated that its already running in the lab, and it is possible to get a beta unit with Linux preloaded. Since you can buy a "bare" ViA, you don't pay MS tax on it...
As owner of previous VirtualVision display(Sport) and LiquidVision M1, here's my take:
First, these new monitors are in same price range as other monitors with comparable resolution. So they ain't expensive.
Second, they are not for VR applications, they are intended for 'mediated reality', that is, they are see-through, and you can do your normal work while looking at, say, aircraft assembly charts on your display. Having stereo displays is useless in this situation, as eye would probably not able to sync up to both images in HMD AND to outside world (so 3D aircraft assembly chart is not possible). In fact, new Sony Glasstron has 2 displays in it, but displays same image on both of them.
For now, www.microopticalcorp.com has the best display...Totally non-intrusive, people won't be able to tell that you are wearing it. Compare that to me walking around with M1 and looking like a borg. Or VirtualSport, which makes me look like a madman by wearing ski-goggle eyeglasses in summer:)
Maybe people should learn about US legal system before posting about it.
IP rights are upheld by courts, not DoJ. DoJ is executive branch, courts are not. If you break the law, MS will sue you in court, DoJ has nothing to do with it.
Criminal cases are another story, but that's irrelevant.
This stuff has been around for years. Search for EMP weapons, HERF (high energy radio frequency) weapons. The theory behind this is easy: charge up a bunch of capacitors and discharge their load into coil. The implementation is (supposedly) complex, although I think that someone with 100k$ for equipment and R&D can do that.
Also, do a search for TEMPEST. It is an army standard to protect their equipment from such attacks (basically a Faraday cage, with specs of how much EMI will be detectable from inside). It used to be very secret until about 5 years ago, but now you can buy TEMPEST-certified computer cases on the street. Someone (uncle Ira?) was selling them at last two DefCons for like 500$:). Be warned, these are HEAVY:)
By rumours, many military buildings are TEMPEST-proof, walls/windows are covered with electroconductive solution.
EV6-500 is more than twice as fast as Xeon-450 in integer and more than 4 times as fast in FP. So dual EV6 (approx 13000$) should be compared with quad Xeon.
Its an interesting fact that single-processor EV6 beats quad-processor Xeon in specFP...
This'll become more interesting as Samsung brings their production up, EV67 (750Mhz+) is released, and Slot A commodity motherboards become available. I expect EV67 CPU+MB to cost around 3000$, which should beat crap out of anything intel puts up.
Blah. Same thing as ISP's supporting Windows only. Who really cares what they "support"? Everyone's CAN do PPP to any ISP that supports PPP, and that's what matters. If the poster was more clueful, they'd just go "Yeah ok, I got an Pentium, just drop me the RJ-45 ethernet, and here's MAC address of the card". I personally know people who are using BA ADSL with linux without any problems. Not to say that the BA isn't clueless...They are.
So, we have identified 3 clueless people: User (Steve Godun), BA rep, and CmdrTaco who posts stories like that without thinking who's more at fault, BA or user.
Word 'FUD' was coined by Gene Amdahl, when he left IBM to form his own company and to compete with IBM. Then, IBM used FUD against him, claiming that there is no way a startup can match power of IBM, that Amdahl may go out of business, etc, etc. Basically, scare tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I run a ISP that does exclusively DSL(www.acedsl.com). Hence, my views may be biased, but at least I know what I'm talking about ;)
/28 up to /24) to you. Generally, we have a clue ;)
;)
Firstly, lets go through your options:
1. Your physical line (local loop, last mile) is always provided by Local Telco (BA in your case).
2. Your line gets into CO. Now it has to be plugged into DSLAM (DSL access multiplexor, hardware that aggregates multiple subscriber lines into one ATM PVC.
CLECs put their DSLAMs in telco COs and lease local loop from them. ILECs have their own DSLAMs, and they are offering DSL themselves. However, telcos are obligated to let other ISPs provide service over DSL.
Now, the actual service funnies start:
1. Bell sucks. Really does. Anything they do, they are very likely to mess up, so you'll be better off dealing with them as little as possible.
2. Bell is impossible to deal with if you are "just" a customer (such as in case of Infospeed). You will wait for 3 hours on hold, and then you'll get to talk to a tech support rep whose only answer is usually "Reinstall Windows".
You are far better off dealing with your ISP who (if they are good) have a good (relationship/pull) on Telco.
3. CLECs: Bell hates CLECs. Bell is obligated to offer copper for 6-8$/month to them, but they do not really want to do that. Also, the lines are considered voice-grade service, and unlike a T1 (where MTTR is 4 hours), the guaranteed response is next business day.
4. If they are going through CLEC, your local ISP cannot deal with Bells directly. As a matter of fact, your ISP buys service from "Regional or National Reseller", who in turn buys lines from CLEC, who in turn has to contact the Telco. While CLECs aren't as badly messed up as Bells, they are still telcos, and they need to be pushed, yelled, whined at to get anywhere. If your ISP won't do that, you are not likely to get any service.
5. Bell's own end-to-end service: "Infospeed DSL" in BA case. It is provided by "Unregulated Subsidiary" of Bell. Benefit is, it all is provided by same company, however, since this company a telco, they do not care. They have all the pull they need (its same company, really), but they just won't do anything. The attitude is "We don't care, we don't have to".
Technical support sucks (5 hours on hold until you get to talk to a "engineer" whose only response is "Reinstall Windows"), and they REALLY do not get IP. (Slow backbone connections, never give you a static IP, forcing you to use PPPoE which is a b*tch to set up for Windows, not even talking about *nixes).
6. Bell is also obligated to let other ISPs provide service using Bell's own DSLAMs deployed at COs, competing with Bell's end-to-end offerings like "Infospeed". This is what my company does, and in my (of course biased) opinion, this is the best option, since you are dealing with ISP that cares, and has a direct contact (and a push) on Telco. Most of time my partners spend on the phone is getting BA to follow up on trouble tickets, bothering them regarding installation dates, etc, etc. Of course, AceDSL isn't the only partner, check out remoteit.com and inch.com, who are also providing similar service.
Oh, we also support linux and (free/net/open)bsd, give static IPs, and even route networks (from
Also, please check out www.dslreports.com, its quite useful resource of user's reviews. It just so happens that flashcom has one of worst reputations, and in DSL business my company one of the best
Telco Jargon:
ILEC: Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier: Your part of Ma Bell, Bell Atlantic.
CLEC: Northpoint/Covad/Rhythms
Legally, the only people who can bring a copyright infringement lawsuits are the holders of the copyright in question. That is, only authors of software can sue for license violation.
For all "GNU" software (different from software released under GNU GPL), FSF is the copyright holder, and FSF will fight in court if needs be. (As they did when NeXT tried to bundle gcc pieces with their Objective C compiler).
All the more reasons to assign your copyright to FSF, I'd think.
MMDS (and LMDS) technology is far from new. There were many companies that tried to make 'consumer internet over wireless' work in the real world. All of them are not doing so well.
List of companies include:
www.caiwireless.com (recovering from chapter 11 about a year ago)
http://www.harmonicdata.com/
http://www.speedus.com (almost went bankrupt, sold 90% of their spectrum allocation, restarting with a different technology)
Winstar and ART Telecom are using MMDS as well, and doing well, but their business model is completely different. They aim at businesses, and
they price it accordingly.
MMDS and LMDS does not work well if you do not have line-of-sight, no matter what the vendors tell you. Not-LOS span is about 1 mile, not 30.
LMDS and MMDS will work reasonably well in a rural or suburban areas, where LOS is not a major problem. But even there, the effective coverage ranger will be probably 2-3 miles per transmitter, not 30.
You must also consider that LMDS and MMDS are affected by rain and sleet. Company that decides to provide service in an area must license the spectrum from FCC. There can only be 2 licensors per area, one of them having 10x more bandwidth than the other. Licenses for a metropolitan area were going for 50-100M$. So, as result of all that , do not expect your neighbourhood ISP to offer MMDS service anytime soon...
This change means that many scripts that rely on whois to get contacts for domains for various purposes might break. NSI strikes again, without notice.
I feel that I should comment on this, given that I am running a company that is going to be offering ADSL in NY this month. (shameless plug: http://www.acecape.com)
First off, here's the current picture of DSL market in NYC:
The only thing available RIGHT NOW is SDSL. There are two major providers for DSL, that is, Covad and NorthPoint. They operate by putting their DSL access multiplexors (DSLAMs) into Bell central offices, and leasing physical copper from customer to their DSLAM. Since DSLAMs are quite expensive, both Covad and Northpoint are knee-deep in debt. Correspondingly, they do not orient their services for consumer use, they are competing with normal T1 access for business.
There are many ISPs in NY area who offer SDSL access. Most of them are acting as resellers of Northpoint/covad, that is, your traffic does not even enter ISP's network. Some (like flashcom, globix) actually have deals with Northpoint/Covad that ISP provides internet access, and northpoint/covad provides physical connectivity to customer. At any case, ISP's cut is relatively minor, and northpoint/covad gets most of the money, and sets lower bound on price.
You can expect paying around 400-500$ for SDSL 1.5Mbps service with any ISP. While this is very competitive with T1, its not for consumers.
Enter BellAtlantic and Acecape.
To compete, BellAtlantic decided to just add DSL cards into their existing switches, which is much cheaper than what Covad/northpoint doing.
Also, with this approach, it is possible to have both phone and DSL service on one line, using a low-pass splitter. However, with Bell being a stubborn telco, it takes them ages to do it. Also, in this regulated industry, it takes regulators ages to approve any consumer services. Well, finally, tariff for DSL was filed about 2 weeks ago, and expected to be approved Real Soon Now.
Pricing is very competitive with normal phone ISPs. BA charges 40$/mo for physical connection, and we charge 20$/mo for internet service on that connection, total being 60$/month. This is about as much as you'd pay for second phone line and internet, so it really makes sense for heavy users.
We, as ISP, have OC3 connection from BA to us, which will be live mid-June. BA promises to start installing DSL for customers mid-june as well. So, given enough luck, we'll providing services soon.
Any questions, contact info@acecape.com
-alex
Two points:
1. US laws prohibit assassination of foreign leaders (unless a declaration of war is made). US did not declare war since WW2, and declaring war under international law carries consequences (use of force/declaring war is only legal with approval of UN). Faced with choice of breaking international law or breaking national law, Clinton always choses former, as international law is enforced only in UN where US has veto, therefore, US can essentially escape harmless no matter what they do, even if entire world is against it.
2. What gives US right to decide whether foreign leader is 'acceptable' leader for that region or has to be assassinated? Isn't the idea of democracy that people elect their leaders? If Milosevic was democratically elected, and he is Evil (tm), that shows that democracy is evil. However, no better option has been presented, other than US ruling entire world, of course, which probably won't be acceptable to say, Russia and China.
What's the point of this post? Democracy isn't always the answer, nor is dictatorship of single person or even government. Truth is somewhere in between.
I consider this as scary fact. If US Government legitimizes 'hacking' as form of warfare, there will be nothing to stop any other country from doing it.
For example, report talks about 'attacking Milosevic's bank accounts'. Presumably held in countries other than US, since in US, Clinton can order the funds frozen or seize them. Now, US is not at war with those third countries (most likely it will be Cyprus), but will be actively trying to rob those countries banks, while maintaining complete diplomatic relations.
Consider following. Lybia trying to break into UK banks to steal money held by (whoever) in UK. It will now be perfectly legitimate to do that without declaration of war or anything. Scary thought.
It started few days ago (2 or 3, I'm not sure).
They don't exactly assert their copyright (There's no word "copyright" in the disclaimer), they just say that you cannot use it for commercial purposes.
This is done to prevent abuse of those addresses by spammers, and for NSI to be able to sue spammers for usage of NSI's mailing lists. I think that's a Good Thing(tm) by itself.
However, that doesn't stop NSI itself from sending spam to registered contacts. They did it on more than a few occasions...Ah well.
There's a funny thing about retina scans:
In mid-1980sh, it was discovered that AIDS virus does transfer with eye fluids. It was discovered when some major biometrics conference was under way. Noone at the conference agreed to test retina scanner, and that was the death of retina scanners.
Pluris was doing it (or claimed to) since '97. They used hypercube for internal switching fabric configuration, and I believe used wireless very-short-distance (1m) links to reduce amount of wiring. Vadim Antonov was the brains behind it, he left the company in '98. Pluris didn't release anything, and their website (www.pluris.com) seems down. Vadim also is person who named major russian UUCP host as 'kremvax', developed/ported unix for soviet PDP-11 clone (called DEMOS), founded first russian ISP (also called DEMOS), architected much of SprintLink, etc.
:)
Avici on other hand doesn't really say much about how their fabric is done, but I imagine it won't be crossconnect (2000x2000 wires...ugh). Probably some sort of hypercube or selective mesh. I wish Avici was as forthcoming with technical details as Pluris.
Take a look at twiddler at http://www.handykey.com. Its slightly on pricey side (150$+), but it does work. It took me around 6 hours of twiddling to get to 15 wpm speed on it. Fairly reasonable. There are few clones of it out there as well, which you can make yourself for around 30$ in parts.
Check out wearables.blu.org for a load of information about wearable computers. Also, Steve Mann has a website at www.wearcomp.org with his writings...
Few items of note:
:)
1. ViA had some (battery?) problems with their units and weren't shipping the old version since December. New version had just been shipped to their beta customers. Unfortunately, to get on beta list, you have to promise to use it daily and talk to them daily regarding your experience. I passed up
2. Prices aren't that much more expensive than a PC, at least for someone with few grand of spare cash. ViA 2 is 3200$, including batteries, chargers and liquidimage's M1 HMD.
3. HMD are getting better. The coolest thing I saw was www.microopticalcorp.com selling their HMD for 5000$. While it can be too much for a college geek, its not that much for a company or a geek with a good job. The HMD is almost undetectable, it just looks like a pair of eyeglasses (albeit with a fairly thick frame). I'm getting one when I can get my hands on production VIA 2.
4. It does run linux already. It has a cyrix mediaGX processor, which is supported by latest Xfree. I had a conversation with Steve Case (VP of Engineering at ViA) in which he stated that its already running in the lab, and it is possible to get a beta unit with Linux preloaded. Since you can buy a "bare" ViA, you don't pay MS tax on it...
-alex
As owner of previous VirtualVision display(Sport) and LiquidVision M1, here's my take:
:)
First, these new monitors are in same price range as other monitors with comparable resolution. So they ain't expensive.
Second, they are not for VR applications, they are intended for 'mediated reality', that is, they are see-through, and you can do your normal work while looking at, say, aircraft assembly charts on your display. Having stereo displays is useless in this situation, as eye would probably not able to sync up to both images in HMD AND to outside world (so 3D aircraft assembly chart is not possible). In fact, new Sony Glasstron has 2 displays in it, but displays same image on both of them.
For now, www.microopticalcorp.com has the best display...Totally non-intrusive, people won't be able to tell that you are wearing it. Compare that to me walking around with M1 and looking like a borg. Or VirtualSport, which makes me look like a madman by wearing ski-goggle eyeglasses in summer
Maybe people should learn about US legal system before posting about it.
IP rights are upheld by courts, not DoJ. DoJ is executive branch, courts are not. If you break the law, MS will sue you in court, DoJ has nothing to do with it.
Criminal cases are another story, but that's irrelevant.
This stuff has been around for years. Search for EMP weapons, HERF (high energy radio frequency) weapons. The theory behind this is easy: charge up a bunch of capacitors and discharge their load into coil. The implementation is (supposedly) complex, although I think that someone with 100k$ for equipment and R&D can do that.
:)
Also, do a search for TEMPEST. It is an army standard to protect their equipment from such attacks (basically a Faraday cage, with specs of how much EMI will be detectable from inside). It used to be very secret until about 5 years ago, but now you can buy TEMPEST-certified computer cases on the street. Someone (uncle Ira?) was selling them at last two DefCons for like 500$:). Be warned, these are HEAVY
By rumours, many military buildings are TEMPEST-proof, walls/windows are covered with electroconductive solution.
EV6-500 is more than twice as fast as Xeon-450 in integer and more than 4 times as fast in FP. So dual EV6 (approx 13000$) should be compared with quad Xeon.
Its an interesting fact that single-processor EV6 beats quad-processor Xeon in specFP...
This'll become more interesting as Samsung brings their production up, EV67 (750Mhz+) is released, and Slot A commodity motherboards become available. I expect EV67 CPU+MB to cost around 3000$, which should beat crap out of anything intel puts up.
Blah. Same thing as ISP's supporting Windows only. Who really cares what they "support"? Everyone's CAN do PPP to any ISP that supports PPP, and that's what matters. If the poster was more clueful, they'd just go "Yeah ok, I got an Pentium, just drop me the RJ-45 ethernet, and here's MAC address of the card". I personally know people who are using BA ADSL with linux without any problems. Not to say that the BA isn't clueless...They are.
So, we have identified 3 clueless people: User (Steve Godun), BA rep, and CmdrTaco who posts stories like that without thinking who's more at fault, BA or user.
Word 'FUD' was coined by Gene Amdahl, when he left IBM to form his own company and to compete with IBM. Then, IBM used FUD against him, claiming that there is no way a startup can match power of IBM, that Amdahl may go out of business, etc, etc. Basically, scare tactics.
Is the title of this link supposed to be parody on "Dreaded wookie defense?". Sure seems such to me.