Clarification on "Installation took about an hour and 10 minutes":
I spent less than five minutes interacting with the computer and from there it was totally hands-off.
I needed to provide only two pieces of outside information: The key code and the name I wanted to give the computer.
Other than that there was just a license agreement screen and a couple of very simple screens relating to which disk partition I wanted it on... a total of 6 screens, each of which only asked one question.
Regardless of the bluster from some folks about how fast their favorite OS installs, it was still extremely smooth and far easier than any other version of Windows I've ever used... and I've used them all.
I have Vista B1 on a Thinkpad T40. Not enough time to really dig into it yet but here is a quick list of stuff I've noted so far:
Setup has been MUCH improved. Far easier to follow. Installation took about an hour and 10 minutes. (1.6GHz Pentium-M and 1GB of RAM)
The new UI, after a few minutes of adjustment, is a big improvement... a good blend of new-and-improved as well as the old-familiar-stuff.
Cleaner GUI with lots of OSX influence and visual "bling". The overall effect is much more modern but has a strong resemblance to XP with the "silver" UI theme applied.
Performance seems fine - same or better than XP pro on the same machine. Have't done any "real" tests.
Installing the SAV 10 client caused a bluescreen on the next boot but the system recovered on its own after a power-off and restart. Attempting to uninstall SAV failed and left SAV in a nonfunctional-and-nonremovable state. I'm wiping the machine and reinstalling.
Thunderbird 1.0.6 and GAIM 1.4 worked fine. IMO, Thunderbird looks a lot better with the new visual theme.
The Atheros-based 802.11a/b adapter only works in 802.11a mode. Probably a driver limitation. Fortunately my home network is 802.11a.:-)
If I feel brave enough (and our webmasters think they can survive a potential Slashdotting;-) ) I'll put up some blog entries about my experiences over the next few days.
I agree, Puzzle Pirates is a greay way to spend a few minutes on a game. Some activities (i.e. setting sail for another island) basically commit you to at least a half hour but the game is full of nice (and short) puzzles as well.
... that oxytocin is also the main drug used in inducing labor, usually for moms who aren't delivering fast enough for the doctor to make their tee time.
A good example of this learning curve for xbox developers is MechAssault vs. MechAssault 2 for xbox. The first one was a rocking good game but was clearly written by people who hadn't learned to really take advantage of all that the hardware could deliver.
MechAssault 2 plays almost identically to the first one but is light-years better visually.
With two fans I'll bet the 360 is pretty loud though.:-/
During a trip last year on the Acela I ran NetStumbler for a couple of hours as we cruised toward Washington DC and was able to find hundreds of access points. Here are a couple of the interesting SSID's from the log:
KeepDemBussesRollin (passing a state DOT building)
Don't mooch off my shit
testing-testing-testing
It was also common to use what looked like a business name or the a person's first name ("lisa") as the SSID. Some AP's had random alphanumerics or what was obviously an attempt at a password for the SSID.
I also did a very basic analysis of some of the interesting things I discovered, such as...
Most AP's were advertising 11Mbit speed but about 16% advertised higher speeds. I'm not sure if the higher speeds were "a" networks, "g" networks or both. My laptop had an a/b wireless card.
1/3 of the AP's detected were using what was obviously their vendor's default SSID (i.e. "Linksys" "default" "NETGEAR")
>60% of all AP's detected were not running WEP of any kind, but more than half of the Cisco AP's had WEP enabled (probably because end-users generally don't run Cisco stuff).
Vendor breakdown (no they don't add up to 100%)
Linksys 38%
Cisco 17%
NetGear 11%
D-Link 6%
Symbol 4%
Apple 2%
Microsoft 2%
Proxim/Agere/Orinoco 2%
Belkin 1.5%
BreezeNet 1.5%
... and a bunch of others that only appeared once or twice like Addtron, Sercomm,Gemtek, Z-Com, etc.
The sample size for this was about 250 AP's during the outbound trip. On the return trip I ran NetStumbler for a lerger portion of the ride and recorded over 1000 AP's (some of which were duplicates of course) but I haven't taken the time to anlyze this larger data set yet.
I didn't try to connect to any of the AP's... most of them would come and go within a few seconds anyway.:)
Anyone who's spent time listening to air traffic control radio near a major airport has certainly heard large aircraft identify themselves as " heavy" so my first thought was that "Delta 4 Heavy" sounded like a 747 instead of a rocket.
This idea made me immediately think of the Clock of the Long Now project. I wonder what they're up to these days... and if the clock will ever get built!
Good point. Most laptops have at least one and usually a pair of PC card slots in them. I never use mine because all of the peripherals I need (wired/wireless, bluetooth, etc) are built right in.
Perhaps this will spike renewed interest in PC Card hard drives?
This was my first thought too... that this would be a good drive for laptops. My laptop (Thinkpad T40) has a 2.5" 80GB 4200RPM drive in it. Yes, it's a bit slow but the extra capacity is nice.
Personally I think the person who suggested this would be great for digital video cams was right on target too.
When I was an undergrad (a long time ago now) one of my progrmaming profs, during a discussion of optimization, told of how one mainframe manufacturer (I don't remember which one) had a compiler which they built exclusively for compiling benchmark/performance-test code. This special compiler had unique optimizations in it, such as being able to notice when the input source code didn't do any output output...
The story goes that one time it "optimized" a competitor's benchmark down to a single NOOP since (you guessed it) the benchmark didn't produce any output! They gleefully used the resulting performance comparison against thier opponent -- who compiled it with a "normal" compiler -- application against their opponent until someone called them on it.
Don't forget that a lot of whiteboards are magnet-friendly these days so they make an awesome whiteboard toy. You can even embellish with diagrams, instructions, etc...
This site has been a fascinating read all summer long and Andrew has done an amazing job. As he predicted, I was surprised that such a highly respected and well-known CS person was behind it, I was expecting a team of grad students and/or an egghead professor of statistics or political science from the Midwest.:-)
It was very enlightening to follow along as things went back and forth (with a sprinkling of DoS attacks on the site) and the Votemaster's analysis was always a good read. Kudos to him for a job well done.
Now, for all of the US citizens out there, go vote.
I use an 802.11a network at home to avoid interference from a 2.8GHz phone also. It works fine but the range is lousy -- doesn't penetrate more than one layer of wall/floor so bedroom computing doesn't work very well.
802.11a also has the advantage of not being widely used in the non-business environment so they may be overlooked by casual wireless sniffers or cheap neighbors loking to ride on your wireless LAN.
"9/11 was to Bush what the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 was to the newly installed Chancellor Hitler, a disaster contrived by an opponent [...] that, in the government's view, was at once a proof of its policy and a means to advance it."
Didn't anyone read the stuff a few days ago about the pebble-bed reactors that the Chinese are bringing to reality which are cooled by nothing more than helium gas? If the coolant leaks out of those, they simply coast to a stop in a nice calm state. These US-designed things use molten lead as their coolant.
Yeah, that's safe! Let's not only ship a 100 ton breeder reactor to third world nations, let's also cool it with a highly toxic metal!
last year, Brin joined Page in proclaiming they should found a nanotech lab at Google.
[sarcasm] Today, General Motors announced they were launching a chain of fast-food resturaunts called "MotorEaters" and Coca-Cola began construction on a new factory to produce cruise missiles for the US military. [/sarcasm ]
Whatever happened to sticking to what you do best? Perhaps all that IPO money is going to fund an attempt to make Google into a frankenstein conglomerate of all the founders' whims.
I read this and throught it was excellent. It's part of my permanent book collection. Miller did a great job of discarding all the corny TV crap and turning Gotham into an apocalyptic goth hellzone and Bruce Wayne into a Batman with a real deathwish. It also has some good shots at then-president Reagan in it.
I bet it also inspired a big part of the Batman vs Superman movie that's rumored to be in the works.
The similarity between the picture on the web site and Frank Miller's "Batmobile" are indeed striking. Perhaps Miller is on the design team for the movie?
...a manufacturer can certify their hardware with the highest gain legal antennas of each type (yagi, omni, etc.) and then end-users can swap in antennas of equal or lesser signal characteristics...
This means that the listed performance characteristics (coverage pattern and gain, primarily) for access points will become basically useless while shopping for AP's because the numbers that the manufacturer uses in their specifications will represent "best case" antennas. At microwave frequencies, even tiny variations in the antenna can make a tremendous difference in its performance.
There have been problems for years in the ham radio arena with manufacturers advertising gain values for antennas which can't be duplicated by real-world users. The ARRL's magazine, QST, refuses to accept ads which list gain values for this very reason.
Slashdot Mirror
If you strip out the commercials you can watch it in under 20 minutes too.
Probably he stopped paying.
Clarification on "Installation took about an hour and 10 minutes":
I spent less than five minutes interacting with the computer and from there it was totally hands-off.
I needed to provide only two pieces of outside information: The key code and the name I wanted to give the computer.
Other than that there was just a license agreement screen and a couple of very simple screens relating to which disk partition I wanted it on... a total of 6 screens, each of which only asked one question.
Regardless of the bluster from some folks about how fast their favorite OS installs, it was still extremely smooth and far easier than any other version of Windows I've ever used... and I've used them all.
If I feel brave enough (and our webmasters think they can survive a potential Slashdotting ;-) ) I'll put up some blog entries about my experiences over the next few days.
I agree, Puzzle Pirates is a greay way to spend a few minutes on a game. Some activities (i.e. setting sail for another island) basically commit you to at least a half hour but the game is full of nice (and short) puzzles as well.
Har!
... that oxytocin is also the main drug used in inducing labor, usually for moms who aren't delivering fast enough for the doctor to make their tee time.
It's a Cylon Raider from the new Battlestar Glactica series, of course!
MechAssault 2 plays almost identically to the first one but is light-years better visually.
With two fans I'll bet the 360 is pretty loud though. :-/
Trivia: The CRT is the last vacuum tube left in computing. :)
If photos of me started coming out with my face all distorted like in "The Ring" I'd probably drop dead right there. :-)
It was also common to use what looked like a business name or the a person's first name ("lisa") as the SSID. Some AP's had random alphanumerics or what was obviously an attempt at a password for the SSID.
I also did a very basic analysis of some of the interesting things I discovered, such as...
The sample size for this was about 250 AP's during the outbound trip. On the return trip I ran NetStumbler for a lerger portion of the ride and recorded over 1000 AP's (some of which were duplicates of course) but I haven't taken the time to anlyze this larger data set yet.
I didn't try to connect to any of the AP's... most of them would come and go within a few seconds anyway. :)
Anyone who's spent time listening to air traffic control radio near a major airport has certainly heard large aircraft identify themselves as " heavy" so my first thought was that "Delta 4 Heavy" sounded like a 747 instead of a rocket.
This idea made me immediately think of the Clock of the Long Now project. I wonder what they're up to these days... and if the clock will ever get built!
Perhaps this will spike renewed interest in PC Card hard drives?
Personally I think the person who suggested this would be great for digital video cams was right on target too.
Or maybe a movIePOD?
The story goes that one time it "optimized" a competitor's benchmark down to a single NOOP since (you guessed it) the benchmark didn't produce any output! They gleefully used the resulting performance comparison against thier opponent -- who compiled it with a "normal" compiler -- application against their opponent until someone called them on it.
True? Perhaps.
Funny? Definitely.
Don't forget that a lot of whiteboards are magnet-friendly these days so they make an awesome whiteboard toy. You can even embellish with diagrams, instructions, etc...
It was very enlightening to follow along as things went back and forth (with a sprinkling of DoS attacks on the site) and the Votemaster's analysis was always a good read. Kudos to him for a job well done.
Now, for all of the US citizens out there, go vote.
802.11a also has the advantage of not being widely used in the non-business environment so they may be overlooked by casual wireless sniffers or cheap neighbors loking to ride on your wireless LAN.
"9/11 was to Bush what the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 was to the newly installed Chancellor Hitler, a disaster contrived by an opponent [...] that, in the government's view, was at once a proof of its policy and a means to advance it."
-- from Stanley Kauffman's review of Fahrenheit 9/11 in The New Republic
Direct link to the referenced review is here, you may need to be a subscriber to access it though.
Yeah, that's safe! Let's not only ship a 100 ton breeder reactor to third world nations, let's also cool it with a highly toxic metal!
[sarcasm] Today, General Motors announced they were launching a chain of fast-food resturaunts called "MotorEaters" and Coca-Cola began construction on a new factory to produce cruise missiles for the US military. [ /sarcasm ]
Whatever happened to sticking to what you do best? Perhaps all that IPO money is going to fund an attempt to make Google into a frankenstein conglomerate of all the founders' whims.
I bet it also inspired a big part of the Batman vs Superman movie that's rumored to be in the works.
The similarity between the picture on the web site and Frank Miller's "Batmobile" are indeed striking. Perhaps Miller is on the design team for the movie?
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
ISBN 1563893428
$13.95@bn.com
This means that the listed performance characteristics (coverage pattern and gain, primarily) for access points will become basically useless while shopping for AP's because the numbers that the manufacturer uses in their specifications will represent "best case" antennas. At microwave frequencies, even tiny variations in the antenna can make a tremendous difference in its performance.
There have been problems for years in the ham radio arena with manufacturers advertising gain values for antennas which can't be duplicated by real-world users. The ARRL's magazine, QST, refuses to accept ads which list gain values for this very reason.
"OS/2 is destined to be a very important piece of software.
During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilize this system."
Inside OS/2
by Gordon Letwin
foreword by Bill Gates
Microsoft Press
ISBN 1-55615-117-9 (c) 1988