In other news, nobody really cares because Apple is switching to x86 based hardware sooner than these will make it into the hardware stream.
Part of what makes the Mac experience what it is is that Apple doesn't try to cram legacy support into every product they make. With Apple it's out with the old and in with the new; PPC will be a dead end like 68k.
Just don't make me spend any money on it or force it to be in my car. I don't drink, never have, and never intend to. Why should I be punished for other people's mistakes?
So why the fuck don't they just give everyone a fixed IP? They CAN do this, on both cable and adsl networks (we've been offered a fixed IP for on adsl free at the office, years after they said it wasn't possible "for technical reasons".
At the ISP I used to work for as a network admin, we assigned static IP addresses to all of our ADSL accounts but told the customers they were dynamic. If they wanted "static" we simply added $5/mo to their bill, but didn't actually change anything. The difference was that if we ever started to run short on addresses in the DSL pool we would start rotating the "dynamic" ones since many people turn the DSL modem off when they turned the computer off, thus freeing X number of addresses.
I don't work there anymore, but the $5/mo for pretend static IP was just the tip of the iceberg.
Re:PC-based DVRs have massive drawbacks...
on
Build Your Own DVR
·
· Score: 1
2. The user interface on a lot of the DVRs that come from the cable companies is awful. It's slow, full of ugly colors, and unstable
And if you live where I live (Charter), 50% of the guide display is taken up by ads. Luckily I have Dish, which still lacks that feature.
Because, as we know "It Just Works" was invented by Apple.
It's not like the phrase returns 150,000 hits on Google or anything. And Linux distros like Ubuntu certainly haven't used that phrase to describe their OS.
Come on; you know that we're supposed to be against Microsoft on this one. Didn't you get the memo?
This one here puzzles me... maybe it's just tricking my eyes but it looks like there's hardly any room in the cockpit for a crew of 4 or 5. Are there any shuttles on display (Smithsonian perhaps?) where visitors can sit in the real thing ?
While it does look a little bit perspective skewed, only two people sit in the cockpit proper - the pilot and commander. The rest of the crew either sits in chairs behind the cockpit on the flight deck, or in chairs on the mid-deck below.
I do, however, try to be careful about not letting anyone get information about me they shouldn't and I rarely, if ever, use a credit card online. This is why I was surprised to find out one morning that identity thieves had racked up thousands of dollars one two of my credit cards.
A good sign that the internet is not to blame for all of our problems. It's more likely that someone you gave the card to offline was the one who stole it. It's a lot easier for a petty thief to, for example, jot down your info at a restaurant as they process your card out of view than it is to steal it from some database.
This may seem a bit naive but if someone has this setup at home, what features do they actually use? I mean stuff like three way calling / voice mail etc are already provided with most if not telephone lines. I'd love to tinker with it but would love to hear opinions on why an average home would want this?
I'm running Asterisk in a home environment. Although it's being fed by two POTS lines, how Astersk connects with the rest of the world doesn't actually matter.
First advantage: ghetto hunt group. With busy call forwarding ($1/mo instead of $5/mo for call waiting on a single line), if the main number for the house is busy, the calls ring over to the other line. Cheaper and way better than call waiting because the calls always ring through. If nobody answers, it ends up on voice mail.
Second advantage: Asterisk picks a free line when someone wants to make a call. It does this automatically with the simple "pick up and dial" method. No more talking on the phone only to have someone else in the house barge in on a call or start dialing numbers. No, you can't listen in on conversations anymore. That has to be done at the PBX level or the demarc box outside. But it's good for simple privacy.
Third advantage: invididual voicemail boxes. For free. The phone company (SBC, in my case) charges for all these extra things. Asterisk already has them, and therefore they are free. It can email them to you, too. Plus you can check the voicemail from any phone in the system, or with a little extra config, outside the system.
Fourth advanatge: direct dial. Rather than ringing the whole house, people can direct dial in. Or if they do call the whole house, and whoever is not home, you can just transfer them to the extention they want and leave a voicemail with that person.
Fifth advantage: the good ol' extention-to-extention calls. No more shouting across the house at someone for a simple question, only to not be able to hear it anyway. A 5 second call is way more convenient.
There's many more useful features for the home environment, such as routing calls based on caller id numbers (we don't have caller id on the outside lines, so I just inject something like "Incoming L1" as the CID if a call rings in on line 1), routing outbound calls, restricting long distance or toll numbers, and pretty much anythig else you can imagine.
I'll tell you one thing I can't imagine: going back to telephony in a multiuser environment not managed by a PBX. Whether it's 4 or 400 people, you will find it useful.
What DARPA wants is a combat-ready system that can drive cross-country with little or no outside help.
Different problems, and they require different solutions, and a system that could pass the DARPA test would be overkill and unsuitable for the daily commute to work.
I suppose that depends on what one considers a combat zone; dealing with "drivers" who are busy eating a bagel, reading the paper, drinking coffee, talking on a cell phone, shaving, and putting on makeup might require a combat-ready system.
Apparently I'm smarter than you to realize that PayPal isn't a bank, and although they encourage you to keep a balance with them, they don't purport themselves to be a bank.
Paypal, with its "we can suspend your account and you can't do fuckal about it, hooray, we get to keep your money".
My workaround to this problem is simple: don't store money in PayPal. Transfer it out to a real bank account or get them to cut you a check. PayPal is not a bank and should not be used as such.
I too have never had a complaint with SBC DSL. The only other option where I live is Charter cable or overpriced local ISP. Cable, of course, requires some "digital package" which is way more than the basic package or the price of the base phone line you need for DSL. SBC let me do my own routing and will even set up reverse DNS delegations (to your own nameserver so you can control them) for your IP block upon request. I never need to call them except for rare line failures that are beyond my control, and at that point, you're just dealing with a lineman who isn't telling you to reboot your computer. SBC lets you run servers, too, and no port blocking yet. I'm hard pressed to find something better.
I have a secret tho... I ordered the bare minimum basic DSL to get the free equipment and no install fees for stuff I can do myself. The girl on the phone told me to wait a week and then upgrade to whatever plan I wanted, which would spare me the useless fees.
She was right: no install fees or equipment fees. It worked out pretty great because apparently someone over there forgot to charge me for the upgrade, because I'm getting their $80/mo static IP package with the only thing on the bill being some $1.10 tax. The base package and isntall fees showed up, followed by credits for the same. Total monthy fee for DSL with phone line: $26.30. Unfortunately we have to move to a new place now, so the free internet deal probably won't survive the move.
Think of it like better than PCI. PCI is a parallel bus, InfiniBand is a serial interconenct bus. It's like SCSI vs. FireWire and serial ATA. Transfer rates for InfiniBand start at 2.5GBps.
... running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass.
Every time I've read your OS X on x86 post that's the line that always makes me laugh; because that's the whole point.
With so much bitching about how much Dell sucks and AMD is better blah blah blah, I thought I'd offer my experience.
First off, I have never dealt with Dell Home before, only Dell Small Business. Rumor has it that the latter division has better prices. What I needed was a 1U dual processor rack mount server. I needed it for a crazy low price because it was going to feed a donation-funded service, and I needed the hardware before I could wait for the cash. I looked at almost everyone I could find: HP and IBM were way too expensive for what I could find (their websites were kind of annoying too), random box vendors like Monarch wanted to charge me for shit like $80 to install Fedora (no thanks, I wanted Debian) and other stuff like silver grease for $15 per processor, and others like Penguin Computing who looked great but were just too expensive.
Ultimately it came down to some Dell 1U servers that were giving away free double hard drive capacity upgrades and double RAM on their magic rotating deals. Yeah, the deal changes and will probably be better next week, but what the hell. I bought two and waited.
The servers are very nice for the price. They come with wonderful stuff like BIOS level serial console redirection, too, that seems to be some super-cost option from random box builder. They're rock solid, very fast, and Dell builds them with Linux support in mind anyway. I bought mine with no OS, rather than paying some mystical install tax.
I like AMD processors as well as the next guy - all three desktop systems I've built have been AMD processors. But I went with Dell because they had what I needed with a price I was willing to pay for it. I am, by no means, a "cost is no object" player and I really don't have an extra $600 to fudge with.
Now, if I missed someone out there who can beat the $1500 price tag (I usually buy in multiples of two) of the Dells I have that uses Opteron processors, I will definately look at them for my next purchase. I prefer AMD, but the Xeons in my Dell servers will have to do.
As I sad at the beginning, maybe this isn't the case when you are looking for home computers or some workstations, but I buy Apple for that stuff, anyway. Mac for the desktop and iX86 for the rack. The Xserve is nice, but fscking expensive.
Various characters made references that some of the ships had trouble keeping up with 33 minutes as it was - their FTL drives weren't designed to be used in such short timespans. The Galactica's was, but it's also a big ass military ship. The FTL drive on the Colonial One was not up to the task.
Besides, the Olympic Carrier probably had a spy on it relaying their coordinates. The ship shows up late for one jump and the Clyons arrave shortly after; it gets destroyed and the Clyons aren't showing up anymore. Explanations in the eipsode aside, I recall Moore not wanting to go the technobabble route of explaining why it took 33 minutes - it's just 33 minutes.
I like Netflix because I can rent all kinds of things without feeling like paying for it directly. Will it suck? Doesn't matter because I don't feel like I wasted any money as I send it back to its home, only to be replaced by something else.
Yes, it lacks the impusiveness that the rental store or bargan rack has, but I think that's a good thing. I'm just a poor college student and I should really be doing homework or something while I wait for a movie I really want to watch to arrive. A fixed amount of money per month on the entertainment drain is easier on the wallet than going crazy at the video store.
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In other news, nobody really cares because Apple is switching to x86 based hardware sooner than these will make it into the hardware stream.
Part of what makes the Mac experience what it is is that Apple doesn't try to cram legacy support into every product they make. With Apple it's out with the old and in with the new; PPC will be a dead end like 68k.
Just don't make me spend any money on it or force it to be in my car. I don't drink, never have, and never intend to. Why should I be punished for other people's mistakes?
Why not Linux?
Because he was asked "mainstream computer user".
Disclaimer: not a troll.
Read: "What about all us obese americans who end up mashing the keypad"
No, that's how you obtain the special dialing wand.
3. All geeks (including those pirating movies) suffer heart attack and die
And all this time I've been wondering what the missing step was!
Hasn't Joss been involved with print comics before? If so, this doesn't see like much of a strecth.
So why the fuck don't they just give everyone a fixed IP? They CAN do this, on both cable and adsl networks (we've been offered a fixed IP for on adsl free at the office, years after they said it wasn't possible "for technical reasons".
At the ISP I used to work for as a network admin, we assigned static IP addresses to all of our ADSL accounts but told the customers they were dynamic. If they wanted "static" we simply added $5/mo to their bill, but didn't actually change anything. The difference was that if we ever started to run short on addresses in the DSL pool we would start rotating the "dynamic" ones since many people turn the DSL modem off when they turned the computer off, thus freeing X number of addresses.
I don't work there anymore, but the $5/mo for pretend static IP was just the tip of the iceberg.
2. The user interface on a lot of the DVRs that come from the cable companies is awful. It's slow, full of ugly colors, and unstable
And if you live where I live (Charter), 50% of the guide display is taken up by ads. Luckily I have Dish, which still lacks that feature.
Because, as we know "It Just Works" was invented by Apple.
It's not like the phrase returns 150,000 hits on Google or anything. And Linux distros like Ubuntu certainly haven't used that phrase to describe their OS.
Come on; you know that we're supposed to be against Microsoft on this one. Didn't you get the memo?
Usually on big providers overriding the TTL of the zone is a usual practice for sure, I do that myself in the ISP I'm working for (it's middle sized).
Why?
The Internet does not support multicast, so it doesn't matter. Also, multicast has nothing to do with IPv6.
Ours doesn't, but I'm pretty sure that part of Internet2 is a multicast requirement. Right now multicast usually gets dropped at the edge.
This one here puzzles me... maybe it's just tricking my eyes but it looks like there's hardly any room in the cockpit for a crew of 4 or 5. Are there any shuttles on display (Smithsonian perhaps?) where visitors can sit in the real thing ?
o wn/sts107/crewseat.htm
While it does look a little bit perspective skewed, only two people sit in the cockpit proper - the pilot and commander. The rest of the crew either sits in chairs behind the cockpit on the flight deck, or in chairs on the mid-deck below.
Here's how the seating on STS-107 was arranged:
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/shuttle/countd
first i dont really care of NMHD because they have have a charge memory.
-1 Wrong
Nickel-metal hydride does suffer from a memory effect; nickel-cadmium, however, does.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/battery7.htm
I do, however, try to be careful about not letting anyone get information about me they shouldn't and I rarely, if ever, use a credit card online. This is why I was surprised to find out one morning that identity thieves had racked up thousands of dollars one two of my credit cards.
A good sign that the internet is not to blame for all of our problems. It's more likely that someone you gave the card to offline was the one who stole it. It's a lot easier for a petty thief to, for example, jot down your info at a restaurant as they process your card out of view than it is to steal it from some database.
This may seem a bit naive but if someone has this setup at home, what features do they actually use? I mean stuff like three way calling / voice mail etc are already provided with most if not telephone lines. I'd love to tinker with it but would love to hear opinions on why an average home would want this?
I'm running Asterisk in a home environment. Although it's being fed by two POTS lines, how Astersk connects with the rest of the world doesn't actually matter.
First advantage: ghetto hunt group. With busy call forwarding ($1/mo instead of $5/mo for call waiting on a single line), if the main number for the house is busy, the calls ring over to the other line. Cheaper and way better than call waiting because the calls always ring through. If nobody answers, it ends up on voice mail.
Second advantage: Asterisk picks a free line when someone wants to make a call. It does this automatically with the simple "pick up and dial" method. No more talking on the phone only to have someone else in the house barge in on a call or start dialing numbers. No, you can't listen in on conversations anymore. That has to be done at the PBX level or the demarc box outside. But it's good for simple privacy.
Third advantage: invididual voicemail boxes. For free. The phone company (SBC, in my case) charges for all these extra things. Asterisk already has them, and therefore they are free. It can email them to you, too. Plus you can check the voicemail from any phone in the system, or with a little extra config, outside the system.
Fourth advanatge: direct dial. Rather than ringing the whole house, people can direct dial in. Or if they do call the whole house, and whoever is not home, you can just transfer them to the extention they want and leave a voicemail with that person.
Fifth advantage: the good ol' extention-to-extention calls. No more shouting across the house at someone for a simple question, only to not be able to hear it anyway. A 5 second call is way more convenient.
There's many more useful features for the home environment, such as routing calls based on caller id numbers (we don't have caller id on the outside lines, so I just inject something like "Incoming L1" as the CID if a call rings in on line 1), routing outbound calls, restricting long distance or toll numbers, and pretty much anythig else you can imagine.
I'll tell you one thing I can't imagine: going back to telephony in a multiuser environment not managed by a PBX. Whether it's 4 or 400 people, you will find it useful.
What DARPA wants is a combat-ready system that can drive cross-country with little or no outside help.
Different problems, and they require different solutions, and a system that could pass the DARPA test would be overkill and unsuitable for the daily commute to work.
I suppose that depends on what one considers a combat zone; dealing with "drivers" who are busy eating a bagel, reading the paper, drinking coffee, talking on a cell phone, shaving, and putting on makeup might require a combat-ready system.
Apparently I'm smarter than you to realize that PayPal isn't a bank, and although they encourage you to keep a balance with them, they don't purport themselves to be a bank.
Idiot.
Paypal, with its "we can suspend your account and you can't do fuckal about it, hooray, we get to keep your money".
My workaround to this problem is simple: don't store money in PayPal. Transfer it out to a real bank account or get them to cut you a check. PayPal is not a bank and should not be used as such.
I too have never had a complaint with SBC DSL. The only other option where I live is Charter cable or overpriced local ISP. Cable, of course, requires some "digital package" which is way more than the basic package or the price of the base phone line you need for DSL. SBC let me do my own routing and will even set up reverse DNS delegations (to your own nameserver so you can control them) for your IP block upon request. I never need to call them except for rare line failures that are beyond my control, and at that point, you're just dealing with a lineman who isn't telling you to reboot your computer. SBC lets you run servers, too, and no port blocking yet. I'm hard pressed to find something better.
I have a secret tho... I ordered the bare minimum basic DSL to get the free equipment and no install fees for stuff I can do myself. The girl on the phone told me to wait a week and then upgrade to whatever plan I wanted, which would spare me the useless fees.
She was right: no install fees or equipment fees. It worked out pretty great because apparently someone over there forgot to charge me for the upgrade, because I'm getting their $80/mo static IP package with the only thing on the bill being some $1.10 tax. The base package and isntall fees showed up, followed by credits for the same. Total monthy fee for DSL with phone line: $26.30. Unfortunately we have to move to a new place now, so the free internet deal probably won't survive the move.
But hey... a whole year of free DSL? Bonus!
Think of it like better than PCI. PCI is a parallel bus, InfiniBand is a serial interconenct bus. It's like SCSI vs. FireWire and serial ATA. Transfer rates for InfiniBand start at 2.5GBps.
More information:
http://inews.webopedia.com/TERM/I/InfiniBand.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniband
... running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass.
Every time I've read your OS X on x86 post that's the line that always makes me laugh; because that's the whole point.
With so much bitching about how much Dell sucks and AMD is better blah blah blah, I thought I'd offer my experience.
First off, I have never dealt with Dell Home before, only Dell Small Business. Rumor has it that the latter division has better prices. What I needed was a 1U dual processor rack mount server. I needed it for a crazy low price because it was going to feed a donation-funded service, and I needed the hardware before I could wait for the cash. I looked at almost everyone I could find: HP and IBM were way too expensive for what I could find (their websites were kind of annoying too), random box vendors like Monarch wanted to charge me for shit like $80 to install Fedora (no thanks, I wanted Debian) and other stuff like silver grease for $15 per processor, and others like Penguin Computing who looked great but were just too expensive.
Ultimately it came down to some Dell 1U servers that were giving away free double hard drive capacity upgrades and double RAM on their magic rotating deals. Yeah, the deal changes and will probably be better next week, but what the hell. I bought two and waited.
The servers are very nice for the price. They come with wonderful stuff like BIOS level serial console redirection, too, that seems to be some super-cost option from random box builder. They're rock solid, very fast, and Dell builds them with Linux support in mind anyway. I bought mine with no OS, rather than paying some mystical install tax.
I like AMD processors as well as the next guy - all three desktop systems I've built have been AMD processors. But I went with Dell because they had what I needed with a price I was willing to pay for it. I am, by no means, a "cost is no object" player and I really don't have an extra $600 to fudge with.
Now, if I missed someone out there who can beat the $1500 price tag (I usually buy in multiples of two) of the Dells I have that uses Opteron processors, I will definately look at them for my next purchase. I prefer AMD, but the Xeons in my Dell servers will have to do.
As I sad at the beginning, maybe this isn't the case when you are looking for home computers or some workstations, but I buy Apple for that stuff, anyway. Mac for the desktop and iX86 for the rack. The Xserve is nice, but fscking expensive.
Various characters made references that some of the ships had trouble keeping up with 33 minutes as it was - their FTL drives weren't designed to be used in such short timespans. The Galactica's was, but it's also a big ass military ship. The FTL drive on the Colonial One was not up to the task.
Besides, the Olympic Carrier probably had a spy on it relaying their coordinates. The ship shows up late for one jump and the Clyons arrave shortly after; it gets destroyed and the Clyons aren't showing up anymore. Explanations in the eipsode aside, I recall Moore not wanting to go the technobabble route of explaining why it took 33 minutes - it's just 33 minutes.
I like Netflix because I can rent all kinds of things without feeling like paying for it directly. Will it suck? Doesn't matter because I don't feel like I wasted any money as I send it back to its home, only to be replaced by something else.
Yes, it lacks the impusiveness that the rental store or bargan rack has, but I think that's a good thing. I'm just a poor college student and I should really be doing homework or something while I wait for a movie I really want to watch to arrive. A fixed amount of money per month on the entertainment drain is easier on the wallet than going crazy at the video store.
Damn... beat me by a few seconds.