I should have put a.net not.com. Here's a better site, but it's still different. They used to have a link to a DSL info site, with an explanation on the usenet cap, but now all I see is a link to prodigy. This was before the prodigy merger. Google cached the old page but no nested links, so it still goes to the new SBC DSL page. Ick.
I used to be a customer of SBC DSL. Recently I had them disconnect my phone and DSL because I was just too tired of putting up with their lousy service. There have been several issues, a few of them due totally to the incompetent service staff they aquired from Ameritech.
In one incident, the line went totally fubar, so they disconnected and reinstalled it (part of procedure, they said). It took over four months to get DSL back, all the while they tried to charge me.
That is just one (probably the worst, actually) of several incidents, but honestly I don't think I'd sue over it. If you push the issue, they will simply disconnect your DSL and stop billing you. I do take some small solace in the fact that, from the estimates of the hours of time I've wasted on the phone with technicians and managers, I've blown over US$2000 of theirs.
I'm a former SBC customer in Houston. What happened is that a few months ago, they had a lot of people sign up for DSL in a huge bout of advertising showers. You couldn't look anywhere without hearing about SBC DSL. They signed all these people up for mandatory one-year contracts. Now in mid-stream, they post a notice on the web page saying "to offer better service to our customers, we've capped our news servers to 128kbps" or so. It's also apparent that they've capped dowload rates to about the same, but they won't admit that.
When you call to complain, all they say is that they can only guarantee your DSL line speed, not the speed of another site. They repeat that when you say that your friend with a T1 (well, works at an ISP with one) can download at 140 KB/sec give or take, while I get 12 KB/sec.
At any rate, the suit appears to be over the fact that they signed you into a contract, then changed their side while offering no compensation. In my opinion, this lawsuit is well justified and overdue.
I too have to agree with this. Although, in the US, you're limited to US$50 liability if your card is stolen (an incentive in itself, to the companies, to profile your spending habits), it's still helpful to have people watching out for you. As scary as it might be, here's what happened to me:
I was at work one day, and left my wallet in my desk (I was cleaning swimming pools, didn't want it wet). Apparently, one of my coworkers filched the wallet out of my desk and went to the local walmart on a spending spree. Because my account was actively monitored, and since I NEVER bought anything by CC at walmart (and rarely in person, I prefer debit), they immediately noticed, tracked me down, and called me at work to ask if everything was okay. This was in the space of a few hours before I had noticed my wallet missing at all. Talk about custoner service.
Sure you're going to say that I really didn't benefit from allowing them to profile me. My liability was limited to US$50, and I actually didn't lose anything out of the deal. But that's only the short picture. Consider the disgustingly low interest rate I was offered for signing up for their online banking program, freebies I got, etc. They were also responsible about not referring me to "business partners" etc. At any rate, this is EXACTLY why collecting information can directly benefit you as a consumer. It also gets MBNA a plug.
Understandable, though, about the cat food, it appears to be an issue of poor implementation of standards (or lack thereof) than anything else.
Anyone stop to wonder if IBM is just trying to sell out to the linux hype crowd? First the Transmeta interference play, now a release about running linux on a watch. Or perhaps they're about to sell their big blue soul to Bill Gates, and are just trying ot glaze it over with flak.
"with part of the inner loop replaced by picoJava"
Are you sure there wasn't a java emulator running, in turn, on the x86 morphing layer? The morphing info page implies that the only morphing layer available is for x86. Of course, if it runs java code reasonably well while a morphed emulator is playing virtual machine, perhaps that means that when the java itself is morphed, it will run even faster. OTOH, this demonstration still does not take into account the possible overhead of switching and maintaining instruction sets.
Then again, it could have been running a java morphing layer too. If that's the case, then it looks like my reservations have been answered and I'm going to start getting excited about this.
This might be useful for say, firewalls or proxies, a smart switch or gateway or router. Could do anything from what I know now because the site has been SLASHDOTTED!
You know, running on that point, I think your logic is well founded. Of course, I'm widely considered to live in the past, though not quite as much as you. I think what would be a happy medium, running on your laptop/mainframe theme is to have a handheld running one of these magical math programs with a wireless link (something a little more advanced than the Palm VII wireless, maybe ethernet) to a workstation/mainframe/whatever.
I suppose this is back on the theme of offloading all your processing now, but this looks like an area where it would be significantly useful. Use the handheld for the UI, all the real work is done offsite. And hopefully not at Microsoft.NET
1394 ("firewire") and 809.2 over RF (wireless ethernet). At least I wish. Seriously, I remember the HP48GX taking expansion cards, if they move to the PC-Card interface with mobile Linux, and you plop TCP on it . . . You wanna see distributed.net REALLY take off?
And the teachers thought they had it bad when they made us put electrical tape over our IR ports . ..
I thought I was in hog-heaven when I got to run Z-Shell on my TI-85. Nowadays you kiddies are spoiled rotten, color screens, more than 20 mHz . ..
Slightly more seriously (and I say slightly with a reason) has anyone ever considered a fully scientific/graphing calc program for a handheld? It would seem that, with the right software, the removal of the linear input requirements would help your IO. Of course, I'm not sure if the average Palm has enough muscle to push out that kind of processing, and this Xpander almost certainly has a high-level math-optimized instruction set or coprocessor.
Oh how I pine for the days of yore, when we wrote real code on a numeric keypad (with trig functions for added fun!) and our upgrades to 20 mHz made us demigods.
I believe the lawsuits would regard Crusoe's implementing an x86 translator into the hardware (I think that's how they're trying to swing it, kinda makes sense since x86 is so prolific, but it also detracts from the portability concept). While I think we all pretty much agree that this is based on sound legal precedent, in our American age of lawsuit-happy bigwigs, someone is always gonna sue someone for some perceived wrong, no matter how frivilous.
IIRC, Crusoe is based on a standardized RISC instruction set and equipped with a software (or firmware, if you will) translator to attempt to run other platform code in realtime. I remember something from an article a few months back (long enough that I don't have the link at hand - anyone want +3, informative?) about how good it was that it can run MS Excel and open a spreadsheet just as fast as Excel on a then-top-of-the-line 500 mega-hurts x86.
Now, that's all fine and dandy, but isn't this just a little out of sorts in that you can get a run-of-the-puppymill wIntel chip that does the same thing, but runs cheaper?
Of course this is not the only factor, there are a couple of questions, the answers to which would completely change the tides in my personal opinion of the usefulness of the Crusoe chips:
1, is there a significant heat/power consumption difference from an x86 chip (that works at a speed comparable to the Crusoe running x86 code, we'll give Crusoe a chance here)
2, can the Crusoe chip execute code written in difference instruciton sets at the same time (well, as much as any other popular single-pipe processor executes multiple threads), eg can it run Crusoe-optimized x86 Debian running an application compiled for Alpha Linux?
I haven't seen hard facts on either of these. Opinions and facts would be appreciated - I can't find them. Honestly, though, I don't think the Crusoe is going to be the end-all of portable chips that the article's author seems to indicate it will be. I think we still have a couple of (chip) generations before everyone has their own personal wireless web pad (tm).
Re:Not files, singular (as in one big glob)
on
More Tivo Hacking
·
· Score: 1
Oh, that does sound more right. I think you're a lot closer than I was. Any chance you found links too?:)
I'd have to disagree with that. NT service pack == double-click on the icon, click "Agree", drool, reboot (generally in that order). I don't think you grasp the total cluelessness of the average desktop user, though. I can not have users install service packs by themselves (even with this three-click procedure and written instructions). They simply won't do it. For example (this is an actual event, I took this support call, I shit you not), the users had printed instructions on installing a Norton AV update. Step by step, foolproof, right? A dialogue comes up, says to select your location ("Houston, Woodlands, Toronto, Muncy"). "Click on your current plant location, click okay." The user said "I'm in Muncy, but I don't know what to pick. What do I pick?".
I'm sorry, but these types of users are not going to be capable of installing any kind of service pack.
I agree with your basic argument, it's a shame that these users choose not to learn (despite recurrent examples of near terminal stupidity, I still hold hope that it's possible), but too many people just see it as unnecessary to get their work done, and won't think otherwise. If you want your business to make money (thereby keeping you in a job), you're going to have to coddle these children.
Not files, singular (as in one big glob)
on
More Tivo Hacking
·
· Score: 1
As I understand the system, it uses a special partition format on a separate partition (or series thereof) to actually store the video. It's not in any file format, at least not a recognized one, just a long blob of MPEG data. The OS is contained on a primary FAT16 partition. This information was available on a previous link here at/., but I can't find it anywhere. I'll post it as soon as it makes itself apparent.
That depends entirely on your level of skill. As an admin/programmer, you and I may see no difficulty in patching the kernel or a library, but your average desktop user will be totally overwhelmed. Eventually, it comes down to the fact that 95% of the desktop users in the world will NEVER hack (or even follow step-by step directions to patch) their kernel, but they'd be happy to install a single-run service pack. End result, their Linux never gets patched, but NT will, while it may take a few months, be patched.
This begs the next question, why isn't somebody doing this? It would seem that a few of the right young smart people in the same college lab could hack a Sony TIVO (remember, they use a custom distro of linux, it's GPL'd), add a couple of custom digital out ports and a few new features, and demo it, publish the plans, etc?
If you want to be a real nitpicking dork about the issue, you can pretty much take an arbitrary string of numbers, select an appropriate decryption routine, and create a key to, in effect, decode that string into what you want. Of course, practically, you're decoding the key with the base, but remember that we're dealing with the courts here. In a far-reaching and partially intoxicated line of reasoning, that leaves open the possibility for control of just about any piece of information: "but it's really an encrypted version of a corporate-owned work of art!"
Hmmm, thinking on this . . . and in the spirit of compensating the author and not an unrelated third party, what if there were somehow a watermarking technology that replaced the ID3 tag (title, artist, album, etc). That would go a long way to prevent what might soon be a problem of bands which offer music freely from having another, malicious, entity change the name of the artist to something more personally beneficial. Now what if this technology was somehow incompatible with SDMI (overwrote its pattern, yeah, we're talking star trek physics here, I don't know SDMI that well). Useful, beneficial, informative, and removes a detrimental factor.
It was, a couple of days ago, from what I got. Or at least seriously fragmented. It appears to be working well now. Is there a link to more information on the issue?
Is there going to be any kind of protection from other users from spam/dos attacks originating from Havenco? How will this be determined? It seems that it would always brush the line of censorship.
Basically, I'm asking who decides what is a spam or attack, and by what criteria? I can't find them posted more specifically than at http://www.havenco.com/about_havenco/faq.html#four which only says that spammers/attackers will be shut down. I don't see any list of criteria, such as is found at spamcop (http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/64.html), which lists several requirements to allow using the service to report. Granted, this may be a small issue, but it could be important for some.
It would be nice, but the problem here is that AOL doesn't listen to the end-luser. All complaints and suggestions are moved to/dev/null for future reference.
Slashdot Mirror
Info on the DSL service
DSLreport.com has some good customer reviews of SBC DSL, people should read that too.
Unfortunately, I can't find anything on the SBC site about a cap. I'm going to try scanning DejaNews
In one incident, the line went totally fubar, so they disconnected and reinstalled it (part of procedure, they said). It took over four months to get DSL back, all the while they tried to charge me.
That is just one (probably the worst, actually) of several incidents, but honestly I don't think I'd sue over it. If you push the issue, they will simply disconnect your DSL and stop billing you. I do take some small solace in the fact that, from the estimates of the hours of time I've wasted on the phone with technicians and managers, I've blown over US$2000 of theirs.
When you call to complain, all they say is that they can only guarantee your DSL line speed, not the speed of another site. They repeat that when you say that your friend with a T1 (well, works at an ISP with one) can download at 140 KB/sec give or take, while I get 12 KB/sec.
At any rate, the suit appears to be over the fact that they signed you into a contract, then changed their side while offering no compensation. In my opinion, this lawsuit is well justified and overdue.
I was at work one day, and left my wallet in my desk (I was cleaning swimming pools, didn't want it wet). Apparently, one of my coworkers filched the wallet out of my desk and went to the local walmart on a spending spree. Because my account was actively monitored, and since I NEVER bought anything by CC at walmart (and rarely in person, I prefer debit), they immediately noticed, tracked me down, and called me at work to ask if everything was okay. This was in the space of a few hours before I had noticed my wallet missing at all. Talk about custoner service.
Sure you're going to say that I really didn't benefit from allowing them to profile me. My liability was limited to US$50, and I actually didn't lose anything out of the deal. But that's only the short picture. Consider the disgustingly low interest rate I was offered for signing up for their online banking program, freebies I got, etc. They were also responsible about not referring me to "business partners" etc. At any rate, this is EXACTLY why collecting information can directly benefit you as a consumer. It also gets MBNA a plug.
Understandable, though, about the cat food, it appears to be an issue of poor implementation of standards (or lack thereof) than anything else.
Are you sure there wasn't a java emulator running, in turn, on the x86 morphing layer? The morphing info page implies that the only morphing layer available is for x86. Of course, if it runs java code reasonably well while a morphed emulator is playing virtual machine, perhaps that means that when the java itself is morphed, it will run even faster. OTOH, this demonstration still does not take into account the possible overhead of switching and maintaining instruction sets.
Then again, it could have been running a java morphing layer too. If that's the case, then it looks like my reservations have been answered and I'm going to start getting excited about this.
I suppose this is back on the theme of offloading all your processing now, but this looks like an area where it would be significantly useful. Use the handheld for the UI, all the real work is done offsite. And hopefully not at Microsoft.NET
And the teachers thought they had it bad when they made us put electrical tape over our IR ports . . .
Slightly more seriously (and I say slightly with a reason) has anyone ever considered a fully scientific/graphing calc program for a handheld? It would seem that, with the right software, the removal of the linear input requirements would help your IO. Of course, I'm not sure if the average Palm has enough muscle to push out that kind of processing, and this Xpander almost certainly has a high-level math-optimized instruction set or coprocessor.
Oh how I pine for the days of yore, when we wrote real code on a numeric keypad (with trig functions for added fun!) and our upgrades to 20 mHz made us demigods.
Now, that's all fine and dandy, but isn't this just a little out of sorts in that you can get a run-of-the-puppymill wIntel chip that does the same thing, but runs cheaper? Of course this is not the only factor, there are a couple of questions, the answers to which would completely change the tides in my personal opinion of the usefulness of the Crusoe chips:
1, is there a significant heat/power consumption difference from an x86 chip (that works at a speed comparable to the Crusoe running x86 code, we'll give Crusoe a chance here)
2, can the Crusoe chip execute code written in difference instruciton sets at the same time (well, as much as any other popular single-pipe processor executes multiple threads), eg can it run Crusoe-optimized x86 Debian running an application compiled for Alpha Linux?
I haven't seen hard facts on either of these. Opinions and facts would be appreciated - I can't find them. Honestly, though, I don't think the Crusoe is going to be the end-all of portable chips that the article's author seems to indicate it will be. I think we still have a couple of (chip) generations before everyone has their own personal wireless web pad (tm).
Oh, that does sound more right. I think you're a lot closer than I was. Any chance you found links too? :)
I'd have to disagree with that. NT service pack == double-click on the icon, click "Agree", drool, reboot (generally in that order). I don't think you grasp the total cluelessness of the average desktop user, though. I can not have users install service packs by themselves (even with this three-click procedure and written instructions). They simply won't do it. For example (this is an actual event, I took this support call, I shit you not), the users had printed instructions on installing a Norton AV update. Step by step, foolproof, right? A dialogue comes up, says to select your location ("Houston, Woodlands, Toronto, Muncy"). "Click on your current plant location, click okay." The user said "I'm in Muncy, but I don't know what to pick. What do I pick?".
I'm sorry, but these types of users are not going to be capable of installing any kind of service pack.
I agree with your basic argument, it's a shame that these users choose not to learn (despite recurrent examples of near terminal stupidity, I still hold hope that it's possible), but too many people just see it as unnecessary to get their work done, and won't think otherwise. If you want your business to make money (thereby keeping you in a job), you're going to have to coddle these children.
As I understand the system, it uses a special partition format on a separate partition (or series thereof) to actually store the video. It's not in any file format, at least not a recognized one, just a long blob of MPEG data. The OS is contained on a primary FAT16 partition. This information was available on a previous link here at /., but I can't find it anywhere. I'll post it as soon as it makes itself apparent.
That depends entirely on your level of skill. As an admin/programmer, you and I may see no difficulty in patching the kernel or a library, but your average desktop user will be totally overwhelmed. Eventually, it comes down to the fact that 95% of the desktop users in the world will NEVER hack (or even follow step-by step directions to patch) their kernel, but they'd be happy to install a single-run service pack. End result, their Linux never gets patched, but NT will, while it may take a few months, be patched.
This begs the next question, why isn't somebody doing this? It would seem that a few of the right young smart people in the same college lab could hack a Sony TIVO (remember, they use a custom distro of linux, it's GPL'd), add a couple of custom digital out ports and a few new features, and demo it, publish the plans, etc?
If you want to be a real nitpicking dork about the issue, you can pretty much take an arbitrary string of numbers, select an appropriate decryption routine, and create a key to, in effect, decode that string into what you want. Of course, practically, you're decoding the key with the base, but remember that we're dealing with the courts here. In a far-reaching and partially intoxicated line of reasoning, that leaves open the possibility for control of just about any piece of information: "but it's really an encrypted version of a corporate-owned work of art!"
Hmmm, thinking on this . . . and in the spirit of compensating the author and not an unrelated third party, what if there were somehow a watermarking technology that replaced the ID3 tag (title, artist, album, etc). That would go a long way to prevent what might soon be a problem of bands which offer music freely from having another, malicious, entity change the name of the artist to something more personally beneficial.
Now what if this technology was somehow incompatible with SDMI (overwrote its pattern, yeah, we're talking star trek physics here, I don't know SDMI that well). Useful, beneficial, informative, and removes a detrimental factor.
It was, a couple of days ago, from what I got. Or at least seriously fragmented. It appears to be working well now. Is there a link to more information on the issue?
Exactly. Execution is the best crime deterrent there is: execute a murderer, and I guarantee they'll never kill another innocent person.
(Hi, Rashmi)
Is there going to be any kind of protection from other users from spam/dos attacks originating from Havenco? How will this be determined? It seems that it would always brush the line of censorship.r which only says that spammers/attackers will be shut down. I don't see any list of criteria, such as is found at spamcop (http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/64.html), which lists several requirements to allow using the service to report. Granted, this may be a small issue, but it could be important for some.
Basically, I'm asking who decides what is a spam or attack, and by what criteria? I can't find them posted more specifically than at http://www.havenco.com/about_havenco/faq.html#fou
I'm pretty sure the design of the AGP bus allows only one AGP interface per system bus (eg CPU/Memory/AGP shared bus)
It would be nice, but the problem here is that AOL doesn't listen to the end-luser. All complaints and suggestions are moved to /dev/null for future reference.