It sounds like the encryption settings are wrong on the laptop end: - First, make sure you're using the latest drivers for the Wi-Fi cards in the laptops. - Make sure you've got a good signal from the router. - Make sure you're using the same exact key as are the devices that are able to connect successfully. This is probably the most important thing to try. My guess is that you're either misunderstanding the configuration menus for your Wi-Fi card, or that you're confused about how WEP works. Note that some cards let you put in the passphrase and key number (I've seen this on Netgear cards), while some require the hexadecimal key itself (I've seen this on Linksys cards). - If you're trying to use a confguration app that came with the card, try disabling it and using WinXP Wireless Zero-Point Configuration (or whatever it's called) instead. If you're using the WinXP config tool, try disabling it (in the services menu) and use the app that came with the card instead. - Make sure you're using valid TCP/IP settings for the Wi-Fi cards. It's possible that they're trying to use a static IP on the wrong subnet, or trying to talk to the router at the wrong address, or something along those lines. - Search Google to see if others are having similar issues. There's probably a hundred forum threads out there somewhere that cover this already. - Call the tech support for the company that made your Wi-Fi cards and/or access point. While you're most likely to just be insulted and not find the solution, they might have something on their troubleshooting list that you didn't think of.
As others have mentioned, why are you trying to use WEP if WPA works? I'm guessing that some of your devices don't support the latter, but you should have mentioned that...
You could also turn off encryption and use MAC address restrictions to prevent unauthorized users from connecting to the network.
Lastly, to keep my karma balanced: why was this accepted by the editors? It's not interesting or challenging - it's just an everyday sort of IT problem that you have to bang your head on repeatedly until you find the solution.
FTA: The effect of the piracy, however, does not stop at just music or movies, suggests a study from another polling firm.
Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests.
First off, they polled people to determine how likely people are to commit various crimes? Second, it doesn't say who they polled in that particular poll. For all we know Environics went to some neighbourhood and polled some old guy who said, "I don't know what music piracy is, but if it's anything like not getting off my damned lawn, then I bet you damned kids these days are doing it!"
Bottom line is that site should be ashamed of posting such obvious crap from the recording industry, and that the recording industry has no shame (but we already knew that).
ii) If the US started to exercise internet control via DNS, alternative root servers would likely appear almost overnight. Remember that old saw about "routing round censorship"? This time it's actually true.
"...while I've heard rumors of Eolas vowing not to go after FOSS infringers -- like Mozilla -- all bets are off once the greed fever takes hold."
Yay, the Patent Office just created a baby SCO!
Seriously though, there are two things I don't understand about IP patents (actually there are many things am quite ignorant about regarding this subject):
1. Is there a burden of proof on one side or the other in a patent dispute to show that the alleged infringer copied the idea instead of developing it independently? People come up independently with the same IP ideas all the time; just because one person thought of it first doesn't mean he should be the only one who gets to use it. I suppose it's a cop out due to the difficulty in proving independent development vs. ripping off the idea.
2. Why do IP patents apply retroactively? (as the parent post seems to imply) It seems that if someone can file for a patent well after inventing it and then sue everyone who's been using it up to now, then patents are useless. Why? Because it means there's some sort of implied expectation that people/companies are legally responsible for tracking down and making a deal with the creator of an idea before using their invention without any patent having yet been filed. In other words, it's almost arguable that the mere threat of someone filing a patent at some point in the future accomplishes the same thing as an already existing patent.
Ha! We all know that ninjas are better and smarter than pirates. The average ninja has an IQ 50 points higher than the average pirate, plus they can flip out and kill people! They cut off people's heads all the time without even thinking about it. Therefore, ninjas are way better than pirates. QED.
Ironically, I saw the lack of character development as a pro. I found that being given the opportunity to imagine what all of my characters would be thinking made it was easier to "become" my characters and immerse myself in the game - in other words, it made it more fun. In BG, on the other hand, I felt more like I was watching a movie or reading a book about other characters (except of course that I had some control over them).
As a result of these differences, IWD ended up feeling more like a pen-and-paper RPG to me. I guess it depends on how much imagination you're willing to apply while playing.
You owe it to yourself to finish Planescape Torment.
It's on my list, and the article in The Escapist moved it up a few slots. To be honest however, I remember putting it down because - for my tastes - there was only exploring (good to a point) followed by too much talking to NPCs early in the game. I guess I was expecting more of a Baldur's Gate style RPG with fighting and trading and not just running around talking to people and having to read lots of text (would have been great if they'd recorded voices for all the text).
Nobody seems to mention that the following games all use various incarnations of the same engine (is this Bioware's Aurora engine, or am I confusing it with something else?): Baldur's Gate I & II (the series we all know and love) Planescape Torment (more of an adventure game from what I saw - good article in a recent issue of The Escapist) Icewind Dale I & II (like BG series except you create your whole party, and the games are shorter; I inexplicably preferred these over BG myself)
I've played them all but only ever managed to complete Icewind Dale I (with both of the expansions). The rest all left enough of an impression on me to end up on my ever-growing "would love to come back to eventually" list of games.
To those who would like to play both BG games: don't play the second one until you've beaten the first! The intro movie of BG2 spoiled some of the ending of BG1 for me, and I've still never managed to finish BG1...
Off-topic: That linked GameBanshee site redirected me to some stupid spyware scanner site that wouldn't take no for an answer in regards to performing a scan on my system. I was saved from its intrusiveness at the last second only because I use Firefox. In addition, I don't trust any ranking that puts Deus Ex out of the top 25 PC games:p
I haven't heard anything about Blu-Ray and UMD being compatable. Allowing users to play UMD movies via the PS3 is an interesting idea, although it would definitely depend on being able to make a single drive that is capable of reading both UMD and Rlu-Ray discs (otherwise Sony would have to include a second drive for UMD which would raise PS3 costs).
I don't think it would be significantly more confusing to the average person than the current coexistence of UMD, DVD, CD-ROM (data, audio, and mixed-format) and Gamecube optical disc formats. I do agree that it will be inconvenient and possibly more expensive, especially for things like movies and music.
Speaking of UMD, does anyone care to speculate as to why Sony is pushing two optical media formats simultaneously? Seems rather risky, although it makes me think that they're really intent on taking over a segment of the market with a proprietary storage medium that they own - regardless of what segment that may be.
Interesting. Do you think it could be possible that the RIAA knows about this and somehow managed to get a judge whose decision they knew they could overturn should the outcome be undesirable for them? Maybe that's too much of a tinfoil hat theory though.
I'm not even sure that the RIAA can afford so many lawsuits. Sure, they're a multi-billion dollar "co-op" organization "defending" artists, but each lawsuit costs them something. Even with in-house legal staff, there are still filing fees, follow-up costs, and the like. I'm assuming their return-on-investment is calculated by how many people they assume will stop pirating their music out of fear of lawsuits? So they're assuming that they'll be seeing a return from people buying more albums because they are afraid to pirate because the RIAA sues pirates? Confusing.
Actually, there have been very few (if any) RIAA lawsuits that have actually gone to court and reached a verdict. From what I gather, the RIAA has set up a telephone call center via which defendants can pay setllements in order to call off the lawyers. This costs them practically nothing: they just mail out threatening letters and wait for the money to roll in.
I think this is one of the first major defeats the RIAA has suffered so far in relation to its sue-the-customers scheme, and we can only hope that it will bolster more people into challenging the RIAA's suits instead of settling out of court via their hotline. The problem is that anyone who challenges the RIAA and wins will have to then pay their own lawyers' fees, so many people decide that settling is cheaper and less time-consuming - which is exactly what the RIAA is gambling on because they want to brag about how many people their goons have scared settlements out of so far.
I'd like to express my appreciation to these guys for performing a much-needed analysis and publishing the results for all to see. It's about time someone called PSU manufacturers' bluffs and published testing results for multiple brands and models. They even made sure to test mostly retail models to prevent the possibility of manufacturers supplying souped-up units.
Looks like the moral of the story is to look carefully to see whether the rating on the box is for peak or sustainable power output. I just had a cheap "550 Watt" PSU blow out on me a few weeks ago after about 8 months of moderate to heavy use (lots of hard drives, ATI Radeon 9800Pro, Athlon XP 3200+, but no neons or anything fancy like that), and bought a more expensive replacement in hopes that it will be of a higher quality. Several friends and family members have also had PSU troubles in the past few months. This article would have been nice to refer to when shopping for replacements.
Like many of the other posters here and in the HEXUS forum, I'm looking forward to future roundups that cover other brands. It was mentioned on the HEXUS forum that Antec and other brands will probably make the next round: http://forums.hexus.net/showpost.php?p=584160&post count=15
Me, personally, I look forward to the day when dualing is considered a legitimate form of dispute resolution. That way, instead of arguing with tools like yourself, I can just shoot you in the face. I mean, if we are going to call for abandoning any and all values, I personally choose natural law over this hedonistic nonsense.
"Dualing?" Is that like double-penetration? I suppose that would be an interesting way to resolve disputes.
FLAC is good for lossless audio compression. If you're going to use MPEG for video and PNG for pictures then you may as well use FLAC for audio.
There are also lossless video compressors such as Huffyuv.
Also, as the parent mentioned, there are some special considerations required when using CDs as a long-term storage medium. They're better than magnetic media, but in my opinion CDs are still too fragile and susceptible to degradation. I've had discs flake off after sitting undisturbed for a couple years in a soft case; I've also had discs become unusable due to the tiniest scratch on the top, where there is for some reason little to no protection against damage to the data layer. Hopefully the holographic storage we've been hearing about for years now will be a reality in the next decade.
>> Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack. Are you allowed to do this? NO.
> Actually, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. I'm not certain that whipping up crack is so much the problem as to what your intent is with it. If you were using the resulting chemical for non-biological scientific experiments (not sure what you'd do with crack, but hey) you probably would not be liable for criminal actions. Of course, it always helps to get a hazmat license to prove the fact before you begin your experiments.
Does the piezoelectric device keep on giving current when the button is held pushed (stationary) ?
No, piezoelectric devices only generate voltage while a change in pressure is occuring (and vice-versa). Common uses include internal speakers in modern PCs (voltage->pressure) and spark makers in barbecue lighters (pressure->voltage).
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like the encryption settings are wrong on the laptop end:
- First, make sure you're using the latest drivers for the Wi-Fi cards in the laptops.
- Make sure you've got a good signal from the router.
- Make sure you're using the same exact key as are the devices that are able to connect successfully. This is probably the most important thing to try. My guess is that you're either misunderstanding the configuration menus for your Wi-Fi card, or that you're confused about how WEP works. Note that some cards let you put in the passphrase and key number (I've seen this on Netgear cards), while some require the hexadecimal key itself (I've seen this on Linksys cards).
- If you're trying to use a confguration app that came with the card, try disabling it and using WinXP Wireless Zero-Point Configuration (or whatever it's called) instead. If you're using the WinXP config tool, try disabling it (in the services menu) and use the app that came with the card instead.
- Make sure you're using valid TCP/IP settings for the Wi-Fi cards. It's possible that they're trying to use a static IP on the wrong subnet, or trying to talk to the router at the wrong address, or something along those lines.
- Search Google to see if others are having similar issues. There's probably a hundred forum threads out there somewhere that cover this already.
- Call the tech support for the company that made your Wi-Fi cards and/or access point. While you're most likely to just be insulted and not find the solution, they might have something on their troubleshooting list that you didn't think of.
As others have mentioned, why are you trying to use WEP if WPA works? I'm guessing that some of your devices don't support the latter, but you should have mentioned that...
You could also turn off encryption and use MAC address restrictions to prevent unauthorized users from connecting to the network.
Lastly, to keep my karma balanced: why was this accepted by the editors? It's not interesting or challenging - it's just an everyday sort of IT problem that you have to bang your head on repeatedly until you find the solution.
FTA:
The effect of the piracy, however, does not stop at just music or movies, suggests a study from another polling firm.
Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests.
First off, they polled people to determine how likely people are to commit various crimes? Second, it doesn't say who they polled in that particular poll. For all we know Environics went to some neighbourhood and polled some old guy who said, "I don't know what music piracy is, but if it's anything like not getting off my damned lawn, then I bet you damned kids these days are doing it!"
Bottom line is that site should be ashamed of posting such obvious crap from the recording industry, and that the recording industry has no shame (but we already knew that).
ii) If the US started to exercise internet control via DNS, alternative root servers would likely appear almost overnight. Remember that old saw about "routing round censorship"? This time it's actually true.
.biz and .xxx debacles): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Actually, this has already happened to some extent (partially because of the
And I thought the editors had bad spelling . . . *looks at UID* . . . maybe there was some evil Low-ID-Spelling-Disease outbreak . . . .
Wee cn spal jest fin thx yo vry muck.
(just kidding, of course)
"...while I've heard rumors of Eolas vowing not to go after FOSS infringers -- like Mozilla -- all bets are off once the greed fever takes hold."
Yay, the Patent Office just created a baby SCO!
Seriously though, there are two things I don't understand about IP patents (actually there are many things am quite ignorant about regarding this subject):
1. Is there a burden of proof on one side or the other in a patent dispute to show that the alleged infringer copied the idea instead of developing it independently? People come up independently with the same IP ideas all the time; just because one person thought of it first doesn't mean he should be the only one who gets to use it. I suppose it's a cop out due to the difficulty in proving independent development vs. ripping off the idea.
2. Why do IP patents apply retroactively? (as the parent post seems to imply) It seems that if someone can file for a patent well after inventing it and then sue everyone who's been using it up to now, then patents are useless. Why? Because it means there's some sort of implied expectation that people/companies are legally responsible for tracking down and making a deal with the creator of an idea before using their invention without any patent having yet been filed. In other words, it's almost arguable that the mere threat of someone filing a patent at some point in the future accomplishes the same thing as an already existing patent.
Heckle away...
Ha! We all know that ninjas are better and smarter than pirates. The average ninja has an IQ 50 points higher than the average pirate, plus they can flip out and kill people! They cut off people's heads all the time without even thinking about it. Therefore, ninjas are way better than pirates. QED.
Yeah, ninjae are totally sweet: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Ninjas
Ah, so they snagged that idea from Opera and tabbed browsing from Mozilla? (or whoever Mozilla snagged it from if they didn't do it first either)
Ironically, I saw the lack of character development as a pro. I found that being given the opportunity to imagine what all of my characters would be thinking made it was easier to "become" my characters and immerse myself in the game - in other words, it made it more fun. In BG, on the other hand, I felt more like I was watching a movie or reading a book about other characters (except of course that I had some control over them).
As a result of these differences, IWD ended up feeling more like a pen-and-paper RPG to me. I guess it depends on how much imagination you're willing to apply while playing.
You owe it to yourself to finish Planescape Torment.
It's on my list, and the article in The Escapist moved it up a few slots. To be honest however, I remember putting it down because - for my tastes - there was only exploring (good to a point) followed by too much talking to NPCs early in the game. I guess I was expecting more of a Baldur's Gate style RPG with fighting and trading and not just running around talking to people and having to read lots of text (would have been great if they'd recorded voices for all the text).
Nobody seems to mention that the following games all use various incarnations of the same engine (is this Bioware's Aurora engine, or am I confusing it with something else?):
:p
Baldur's Gate I & II (the series we all know and love)
Planescape Torment (more of an adventure game from what I saw - good article in a recent issue of The Escapist)
Icewind Dale I & II (like BG series except you create your whole party, and the games are shorter; I inexplicably preferred these over BG myself)
I've played them all but only ever managed to complete Icewind Dale I (with both of the expansions). The rest all left enough of an impression on me to end up on my ever-growing "would love to come back to eventually" list of games.
To those who would like to play both BG games: don't play the second one until you've beaten the first! The intro movie of BG2 spoiled some of the ending of BG1 for me, and I've still never managed to finish BG1...
Off-topic: That linked GameBanshee site redirected me to some stupid spyware scanner site that wouldn't take no for an answer in regards to performing a scan on my system. I was saved from its intrusiveness at the last second only because I use Firefox. In addition, I don't trust any ranking that puts Deus Ex out of the top 25 PC games
I haven't heard anything about Blu-Ray and UMD being compatable. Allowing users to play UMD movies via the PS3 is an interesting idea, although it would definitely depend on being able to make a single drive that is capable of reading both UMD and Rlu-Ray discs (otherwise Sony would have to include a second drive for UMD which would raise PS3 costs).
I would be inclined to agree, except that (according to Sony at least) UMD movies seem to be selling surprisingly well.
I don't think it would be significantly more confusing to the average person than the current coexistence of UMD, DVD, CD-ROM (data, audio, and mixed-format) and Gamecube optical disc formats. I do agree that it will be inconvenient and possibly more expensive, especially for things like movies and music.
Speaking of UMD, does anyone care to speculate as to why Sony is pushing two optical media formats simultaneously? Seems rather risky, although it makes me think that they're really intent on taking over a segment of the market with a proprietary storage medium that they own - regardless of what segment that may be.
Interesting. Do you think it could be possible that the RIAA knows about this and somehow managed to get a judge whose decision they knew they could overturn should the outcome be undesirable for them? Maybe that's too much of a tinfoil hat theory though.
WTF? It was an honest question. Is there something I don't know that would cause it to be interpreted as a troll post?
I'm not even sure that the RIAA can afford so many lawsuits. Sure, they're a multi-billion dollar "co-op" organization "defending" artists, but each lawsuit costs them something. Even with in-house legal staff, there are still filing fees, follow-up costs, and the like. I'm assuming their return-on-investment is calculated by how many people they assume will stop pirating their music out of fear of lawsuits? So they're assuming that they'll be seeing a return from people buying more albums because they are afraid to pirate because the RIAA sues pirates? Confusing.
Actually, there have been very few (if any) RIAA lawsuits that have actually gone to court and reached a verdict. From what I gather, the RIAA has set up a telephone call center via which defendants can pay setllements in order to call off the lawyers. This costs them practically nothing: they just mail out threatening letters and wait for the money to roll in.
I think this is one of the first major defeats the RIAA has suffered so far in relation to its sue-the-customers scheme, and we can only hope that it will bolster more people into challenging the RIAA's suits instead of settling out of court via their hotline. The problem is that anyone who challenges the RIAA and wins will have to then pay their own lawyers' fees, so many people decide that settling is cheaper and less time-consuming - which is exactly what the RIAA is gambling on because they want to brag about how many people their goons have scared settlements out of so far.
Question: How much of a hand did you have in the recent remake of Pirates!, and what do you think of it?
Thanks!
I'd like to express my appreciation to these guys for performing a much-needed analysis and publishing the results for all to see. It's about time someone called PSU manufacturers' bluffs and published testing results for multiple brands and models. They even made sure to test mostly retail models to prevent the possibility of manufacturers supplying souped-up units.
t count=15
Looks like the moral of the story is to look carefully to see whether the rating on the box is for peak or sustainable power output. I just had a cheap "550 Watt" PSU blow out on me a few weeks ago after about 8 months of moderate to heavy use (lots of hard drives, ATI Radeon 9800Pro, Athlon XP 3200+, but no neons or anything fancy like that), and bought a more expensive replacement in hopes that it will be of a higher quality. Several friends and family members have also had PSU troubles in the past few months. This article would have been nice to refer to when shopping for replacements.
Like many of the other posters here and in the HEXUS forum, I'm looking forward to future roundups that cover other brands. It was mentioned on the HEXUS forum that Antec and other brands will probably make the next round: http://forums.hexus.net/showpost.php?p=584160&pos
Oh you fucking genius. Oh my god! You caught a spelling mistake!! Can I suck your penis? Will you let me pleasure you, you amazing hunk of manflesh??
Are you challenging me to a "dual"?
10:25PM GMT: TFA has been declared "a joke" by unanimous consensus of the /. community.
Nothing to see here, folks... Move along, move along...
Me, personally, I look forward to the day when dualing is considered a legitimate form of dispute resolution. That way, instead of arguing with tools like yourself, I can just shoot you in the face. I mean, if we are going to call for abandoning any and all values, I personally choose natural law over this hedonistic nonsense.
"Dualing?" Is that like double-penetration? I suppose that would be an interesting way to resolve disputes.
Oh wait, you probably mean "dueling"...
FLAC is good for lossless audio compression. If you're going to use MPEG for video and PNG for pictures then you may as well use FLAC for audio.
There are also lossless video compressors such as Huffyuv.
Also, as the parent mentioned, there are some special considerations required when using CDs as a long-term storage medium. They're better than magnetic media, but in my opinion CDs are still too fragile and susceptible to degradation. I've had discs flake off after sitting undisturbed for a couple years in a soft case; I've also had discs become unusable due to the tiniest scratch on the top, where there is for some reason little to no protection against damage to the data layer. Hopefully the holographic storage we've been hearing about for years now will be a reality in the next decade.
namely, SCO.
Are they dead yet?
Netcraft hasn't confirmed anything yet.
>> Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack. Are you allowed to do this? NO.
. 440&fuseaction=section
> Actually, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. I'm not certain that whipping up crack is so much the problem as to what your intent is with it. If you were using the resulting chemical for non-biological scientific experiments (not sure what you'd do with crack, but hey) you probably would not be liable for criminal actions. Of course, it always helps to get a hazmat license to prove the fact before you begin your experiments.
In many states, posession of certain ingredients with intent to manufacture certain controlled substances is a felony:
http://www.leg.wa.gov/RCW/index.cfm?section=69.50
Does the piezoelectric device keep on giving current when the button is held pushed (stationary) ?
No, piezoelectric devices only generate voltage while a change in pressure is occuring (and vice-versa). Common uses include internal speakers in modern PCs (voltage->pressure) and spark makers in barbecue lighters (pressure->voltage).
If you're a Wikipedia fan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric