Firstly, I agree completely with you on every point you've discussed: ISO is a lousy distribution method for general use, since there's far better and simpler alternatives.
But it does make a decent archive method for stuff which is already in that format, as it preserves the original structure by default.
I find myself mounting ISOs somewhat frequently using third-party software under Windows. Whether to test a layout for a DVD project, or to install drivers for a finicky Audigy card that I have where it's easier to just mount the ISO from my capacious home server than go hunting for the original CD.
In fact, I keep backups of most of my purchased software on rotating hard drive storage in ISO 9660 form, which is then simply shared on the network.
I may be an odd corner case. But I think it fits hand-in-hand with Vista/7's ability to burn an ISO directly from Windows Explorer, and will also be useful to me when I'm working on a customer's PC and don't want to muck it up with third-party intermediate utilities or bother with wasting burnable media for a one-off process.
That all said, it's quite late to the party, and the functionality should have been in place a decade and a half ago when I was merrily doing the same thing under Linux.
There's extreme examples to everything, though, too.
While we both seem to want to emphasize proper engine braking technique, it's not always so easy as picking a lower gear and having things magically work themselves out: I've gone somewhat sideways on a mild, straight ice-covered downhill road just by lifting my foot from the accelerator with the auto transmission in drive. Things were obviously on the very edge of the friction curve, and the little bit of extra resistance on the rear axle caused by lifting the throttle was enough to upset the balance. Downshifting would've made it worse.
In either extreme case, a subtle amount of throttle input will readily keep things sane and straight, at least for the downhill portion. The stop light at the ice-covered intersection below might become an issue, but at least one will arrive there on four turning wheels and therefore be better prepared to handle whatever is ahead than if sideways or upside-down....
This all entails a lesson on vehicle dynamics and basic physics. I want to say that such a lesson should be part of every driver's ed course, but I feel that any such training will be immediately and totally lost on the vast majority of the population.
My dad had a saying: Brake parts are cheaper than engine parts.
But I have my own saying: Engine parts are cheaper than human parts.
So, yeah: I downshift and use engine braking as appropriate.
I think part of the reason this isn't done as commonly as it should be is purely psychological, a bit of whimsical "OMG teh RPMs are teh high!!!" that flitters through the unwitting mind, causing folks to stubbornly resist downshifting and use the brake pedal in a misguided attempt at keeping the tach at a low reading and noise to a minimum.
But then, they've got no problem with the engine soaring along at several thousand RPM on a flat stretch of highway for hours at a time. The difference is that they're not thinking about engine speed at that time, and they can barely hear it over the wind and road noise, so the sound of it isn't as obvious as it is on a slower downhill pass.
Braking in general is a sign of wasted energy. It doesn't matter how hard it is: Whatever the rate of deceleration, or the mechanism for doing so, you're just converting X units of forward momentum into Y units of heat.
But whatever. Braking early to match a light maximizes average velocity, which both gets you there faster and minimizes fuel consumption. Braking harder (ie: earlier) simply contributes to that effect.
We had a few accounts compromised on public-facing *nix host, once.
The reason? The person doing admin had set up a whole bunch of accounts with "phone" as a password. To say that I was surprised at this level of incompetence is a bit of an understatement.
His defense? "Well, that's what the boss told me to do."
Me: "Did you bother trying explain to him just how bad of an idea that was?"
Him: "No."
The mess was easy for me to clean up. And since then, the passwords are much harder. And after the dude responsible moved on to greener pastures, everything about IT in that company got a lot easier.
(Note that I don't blame the PHB, who is actually a very rational guy. It's the PHB's job to make decisions, but it's the gunther's job to tell him when he's wrong.)
Noon will still be when the sun is directly overhead, as it always has been even before we had these silly things called clocks. And midnight will still be in the middle of the night, twelve hours later.
All that changes is that neither of these will happen at 12:00.
Seconded on the inverter-type generators. They're very expensive to buy, per-watt, but they'll pay for themselves in fuel (and noise and weight) if you use them much.
After a flood which killed a bunch of underground electrical infrastructure, I was charged with keeping a generator online on top of a 12-story building to power some local law enforcement radio gear.
At first, we had a smallish Honda with an inverter. This drove a UPS and the gear just fine, and had a small fuel tank which would keep it running almost 24 hours.
So, about every 20 hours I trundled up the stairs to refuel the thing. It was a pain, but it worked. It was light-weight and quiet, even under load.
Then, it died. No idea why it died, but it failed to start. (But it wasn't my generator, and I didn't have the tools to work on it. But the oil was good, so I'm sure whatever happened was simple to fix.)
So we brought up a replacement -- a 5,000 Watt conventional unit. This thing failed to drive a UPS, and needed a lot more fuel twice as often to keep it running. I have no idea how much it weighed but it, and the fuel, got a lot heavier with every flight of stairs, and it made the same hard-to-shout-over racket whether it was doing work or just loafing along. Keeping that thing fed with fuel every 8-12 hours really fucked up my sleep habits that week.
This experience has taught me that if I ever buy a generator for my own household purposes (which I should: we get tornados, floods, and blizzards here), it'll either be a big, fixed Generac running from natural gas, or a portable unit built around an inverter.
What, exactly, are you expecting from laptop support that cannot be surmised as "This widget is broken. Please deliver a new widget."
Whether I'm talking to a Mexican with poor English skills in Tampa, or a native Indian with excellent British in Bangalore, the result is the same: "The widget is broken. Please send another."
Why? Because if the laptop is suffering from something systemic other than an incidentally-broken appendage, "support" (no matter the nationality) isn't going to help. You need an engineer. And that engineer's nationality and language skillset are going to be wholly different from whatever continent it is that "support" happens to camp out on this week.
So why do you think it makes a difference?
(This comment obviously written for a technically-adept Slashdot crowd. It does not apply to luddites.)
I like it. I think an angry mob is a bit much, though: Just a little name-and-shame might be in order, along with a much shorter extra wait: Perhaps 30 seconds.
A sign reading "This red light brought to you by green BMW, Ohio FC50PL!" along with a picture of the vehicle would be adequate to shame the driver, but inadequate for other drivers to bother with more than a few well-chosen words -- especially since they'll all be on their way again in 30 seconds.
The rest of the time, the fancy signage can display advertisements or safety messages or concert info or something.:)
Just because you (and the shallow bucket of folks you've worked with) are happy enough when they see anamorphic 480p stretched and pulled out to 1080 on a big screen, doesn't mean that everyone else is.
Please broaden your horizons. You sound like folks in the early '80s, going "110 is a good enough film format for snapshots." Or folks in the '90s, going "VHS is fine; who needs DVD?" Or folks in the '10s, going "DVD is pretty good. Why do we need this other format with more than twice the resolution and uncompressed audio?".
Media tanks? Hah. At the size of a BD, I don't want to invest in that sort of online storage. It works quite well enough sitting on the shelf waiting for manual retrieval: A couple of minutes spent per film browsing and selecting a movie does not pay for a few thousand dollars in rotating storage and time to rip it all down.
When straight people do it, it's just plain obnoxious
- Ok, world:
I admit it. I'm straight.
I've had my innocent childhood curiosity forays with my male peers. I've had openly gay friends as an adult. And girls are just better. Better enough that I don't care about the other gender, at all: They're just not attractive like that. I've tried to keep an open mind, and at times in my teenage years I might've wished to be gay to avoid all of the pain wrought by teenaged girls, but it just doesn't work.
I'm straight as an arrow. Despite my occasional viewing of Thai ladyboy porn, I'm straight. (The ladyboys aren't really men, anyway, but just some mentally-twisted halfbreed that I sometimes find entertaining to watch. When I am rich and famous, I intend to hire one full-time as a "personal trainer", just to go along with the wife's persistence on having a "pool boy" on staff (whether or not we actually own a pool). I'm sure there will be drinking and Lulz and weird gratification for all.)
Just so you all know. And so there's nothing to be confused about. -
Yeah, you're right. Even when you're (at best) 90% straight, declaring oneself as such does seem pretty obnoxious.
The only useful function I can conceive of for storing positional data long-term is for network analysis: Despite all the bitching and moaning that folks do about cellular services in general, it's no accident that it works as well as it does. Having some historical data available will make an engineer's job easier at improving things further.
The privacy advocate in me says that such data, while useful, should have sufficiently large granularity that individual activities can't be discovered, but the engineer in me says that it's impossible to have too much data available when troubleshooting or planning: Everything is potentially useful.
At the same time, the armchair cryptographer in me says that there's no way at all to sufficiently anonymize the data while retaining useful long-term results for individual devices (so the engineers can do their job better) without also having giant gaping holes in that paper-thin veil of anonymity, so it's impossible to cryptographically satisfy both privacy and engineering concerns.
I, therefore, don't opine that it's right or wrong for VZW to hold onto that stuff for a good long while. And, no, I don't think 113 days is too long from the perspective of an engineer. I do think that the court has no business requesting this data ex-post-facto, however (though I do feel that they've every right and responsibility to issue a warrant for the collection of it, and have law enforcement monitor that data during the effective duration of that warrant as long so long as it is of limited time and not retroactive).
The scholar in me says that this all conspires to mean that I feel that the data is above subpoena, which is impossible, but the voter in me doesn't give a fuck about scholarly law: I just want what's right.
Meanwhile, I submit that the data itself is likely to be pretty terse. Verizon's answer to E911's location data requirements was not to use cellular triangulation, but to incorporate GPS receivers into every handset and to disallow new activation of handsets which do not have GPS. And as the GPS radio is generally only activated (and detailed position collected) when performing an E911 call, it's not going to be a very detailed log of position even in the best case.
So instead of a continuous log of location data within 100 meters, they've only got a vague idea of where the handset is: They know which sector of which tower site you're connected to, along with signal strengths in both directions, and might have similar data for other near(ish) sites (though I doubt it: that's more of a GSM trick). This may be good enough to triangulate a very coarse position history, but by no means would it reliably pin it down to 100 meters -- especially indoors or anywhere remotely near large buildings.
More likely, it's just barely good enough to tell what section of a town you're in, and to reproduce a general route of travel when mobile. That's still enough data to be incriminating, depending on the case, but it's not at all as if VZW is harboring detailed location data on everyone: The tech isn't there for it.
My personal experience closely observing several different E911 dispatch centers in operation also bears this out: Even with all of the super-priority that emergency calls like 911 have had on every cellular network since the dawn of time (a 911 call ALWAYS goes through as long as there's signal, no matter what, even if someone else's non-emergency call is immediately dropped to make room for it), the dispatcher's CAD screen generally first pins the caller's location down directly on top of the cellular tower they're connected to. *Eventually*, if the call lasts long enough, it begins to show more detailed information, but that seems to take however long a GPS fix happens to take on [random handset] in [random place]...
(Other carriers, like AT&T, do have different tricks up their sleeves. But I'm deep in Verizon country, myself, so that's about all I've been able to directly observe, and conveniently enough that seems to be the context of TFA. I lack the knowledge and experience to guess at how other carriers behave.)
Do you realize how slow a 2.4GHz 802.11 connection is in the real world with random consumer devices and hidden nodes? And that's only half-duplex, CSMA. That's only good for maybe half a dozen users, tops. Get a few people watching YouTube [.....], and a "54mbps" radio is anything but.
(I'd parody the rest of your comment, but you're so far off in left field with regards to what the poster was asking for that you wouldn't get it anyway.)
What happened: Minidisc failed to ever really gain any foothold. Slow acceptance of MP3 on portable and other devices leading to a world largely void of Sony digital players. Conflicting goals from being a media company and a hardware company. Expiration of Trinitron patent compounded by introduction of LCD and plasma TVs and market dilution with the introduction of a new host of competitors, allowing them to lose their well-earned perception of providing superior picture quality. Homogenization of DVD (and later BD) player features leading to downward price spiral on hardware. Inability of PalmOS to keep up with the times. And, of course, more recently they seem to enjoy actively pissing off/away their customers.
Is there any reason at all to use greater than 10 megabit Ethernet at all?
10base-T is made for Cat 3, and it's nowhere near as slow/ugly with modern gear as some of us remember from the dark old days of cheap unswitched networking. Just ratchet the port speed down to 10Mbps and call it a day (with the usual caveats about distance limits and the like).
Setting the port speed explicitly results in much more reliable communication than just expecting the NICs at either end to just figure it out for themselves, which they're generally not terribly good at doing.
If some of the lines are very long, or dedicated pairs are not available, there's other options. HPNA is one standard which can work at absurdly long distances over ruddy existing cabling and can piggyback on existing telephone and coax circuits. (Though using coax may conflict with any video-on-demand system that the hotel may already be using.)
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to not get the link to the data which doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, I agree completely with you on every point you've discussed: ISO is a lousy distribution method for general use, since there's far better and simpler alternatives.
But it does make a decent archive method for stuff which is already in that format, as it preserves the original structure by default.
I find myself mounting ISOs somewhat frequently using third-party software under Windows. Whether to test a layout for a DVD project, or to install drivers for a finicky Audigy card that I have where it's easier to just mount the ISO from my capacious home server than go hunting for the original CD.
In fact, I keep backups of most of my purchased software on rotating hard drive storage in ISO 9660 form, which is then simply shared on the network.
I may be an odd corner case. But I think it fits hand-in-hand with Vista/7's ability to burn an ISO directly from Windows Explorer, and will also be useful to me when I'm working on a customer's PC and don't want to muck it up with third-party intermediate utilities or bother with wasting burnable media for a one-off process.
That all said, it's quite late to the party, and the functionality should have been in place a decade and a half ago when I was merrily doing the same thing under Linux.
Better late than never, I guess.
I seem to recall MSI packages checking for, and downloading if necessary, .NET and other various dependencies.
It is handled wholly differently than deb or rpm or even portage, but that doesn't mean that dependency checking does not or can not happen.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
There's extreme examples to everything, though, too.
While we both seem to want to emphasize proper engine braking technique, it's not always so easy as picking a lower gear and having things magically work themselves out: I've gone somewhat sideways on a mild, straight ice-covered downhill road just by lifting my foot from the accelerator with the auto transmission in drive. Things were obviously on the very edge of the friction curve, and the little bit of extra resistance on the rear axle caused by lifting the throttle was enough to upset the balance. Downshifting would've made it worse.
In either extreme case, a subtle amount of throttle input will readily keep things sane and straight, at least for the downhill portion. The stop light at the ice-covered intersection below might become an issue, but at least one will arrive there on four turning wheels and therefore be better prepared to handle whatever is ahead than if sideways or upside-down....
This all entails a lesson on vehicle dynamics and basic physics. I want to say that such a lesson should be part of every driver's ed course, but I feel that any such training will be immediately and totally lost on the vast majority of the population.
My dad had a saying: Brake parts are cheaper than engine parts.
But I have my own saying: Engine parts are cheaper than human parts.
So, yeah: I downshift and use engine braking as appropriate.
I think part of the reason this isn't done as commonly as it should be is purely psychological, a bit of whimsical "OMG teh RPMs are teh high!!!" that flitters through the unwitting mind, causing folks to stubbornly resist downshifting and use the brake pedal in a misguided attempt at keeping the tach at a low reading and noise to a minimum.
But then, they've got no problem with the engine soaring along at several thousand RPM on a flat stretch of highway for hours at a time. The difference is that they're not thinking about engine speed at that time, and they can barely hear it over the wind and road noise, so the sound of it isn't as obvious as it is on a slower downhill pass.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Braking in general is a sign of wasted energy. It doesn't matter how hard it is: Whatever the rate of deceleration, or the mechanism for doing so, you're just converting X units of forward momentum into Y units of heat.
But whatever. Braking early to match a light maximizes average velocity, which both gets you there faster and minimizes fuel consumption. Braking harder (ie: earlier) simply contributes to that effect.
We had a few accounts compromised on public-facing *nix host, once.
The reason? The person doing admin had set up a whole bunch of accounts with "phone" as a password. To say that I was surprised at this level of incompetence is a bit of an understatement.
His defense? "Well, that's what the boss told me to do."
Me: "Did you bother trying explain to him just how bad of an idea that was?"
Him: "No."
The mess was easy for me to clean up. And since then, the passwords are much harder. And after the dude responsible moved on to greener pastures, everything about IT in that company got a lot easier.
(Note that I don't blame the PHB, who is actually a very rational guy. It's the PHB's job to make decisions, but it's the gunther's job to tell him when he's wrong.)
Fistfucking fistfuckers fistfucked horny lesbo muff. Goddamn dyke ejaculated.
Motherfucking hotsex.
Noon will still be when the sun is directly overhead, as it always has been even before we had these silly things called clocks. And midnight will still be in the middle of the night, twelve hours later.
All that changes is that neither of these will happen at 12:00.
So what?
Still waiting...
Seconded on the inverter-type generators. They're very expensive to buy, per-watt, but they'll pay for themselves in fuel (and noise and weight) if you use them much.
After a flood which killed a bunch of underground electrical infrastructure, I was charged with keeping a generator online on top of a 12-story building to power some local law enforcement radio gear.
At first, we had a smallish Honda with an inverter. This drove a UPS and the gear just fine, and had a small fuel tank which would keep it running almost 24 hours.
So, about every 20 hours I trundled up the stairs to refuel the thing. It was a pain, but it worked. It was light-weight and quiet, even under load.
Then, it died. No idea why it died, but it failed to start. (But it wasn't my generator, and I didn't have the tools to work on it. But the oil was good, so I'm sure whatever happened was simple to fix.)
So we brought up a replacement -- a 5,000 Watt conventional unit. This thing failed to drive a UPS, and needed a lot more fuel twice as often to keep it running. I have no idea how much it weighed but it, and the fuel, got a lot heavier with every flight of stairs, and it made the same hard-to-shout-over racket whether it was doing work or just loafing along. Keeping that thing fed with fuel every 8-12 hours really fucked up my sleep habits that week.
This experience has taught me that if I ever buy a generator for my own household purposes (which I should: we get tornados, floods, and blizzards here), it'll either be a big, fixed Generac running from natural gas, or a portable unit built around an inverter.
Dear sir,
I find your admission appalling, and would like to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
It doesn't matter.
What, exactly, are you expecting from laptop support that cannot be surmised as "This widget is broken. Please deliver a new widget."
Whether I'm talking to a Mexican with poor English skills in Tampa, or a native Indian with excellent British in Bangalore, the result is the same: "The widget is broken. Please send another."
Why? Because if the laptop is suffering from something systemic other than an incidentally-broken appendage, "support" (no matter the nationality) isn't going to help. You need an engineer. And that engineer's nationality and language skillset are going to be wholly different from whatever continent it is that "support" happens to camp out on this week.
So why do you think it makes a difference?
(This comment obviously written for a technically-adept Slashdot crowd. It does not apply to luddites.)
It's amazing how people can declare that government must be either competent and efficient at everything, or incompetent and lousy at everything.
The world (including government) is much more grey than that.
I like it. I think an angry mob is a bit much, though: Just a little name-and-shame might be in order, along with a much shorter extra wait: Perhaps 30 seconds.
A sign reading "This red light brought to you by green BMW, Ohio FC50PL!" along with a picture of the vehicle would be adequate to shame the driver, but inadequate for other drivers to bother with more than a few well-chosen words -- especially since they'll all be on their way again in 30 seconds.
The rest of the time, the fancy signage can display advertisements or safety messages or concert info or something. :)
Just because you (and the shallow bucket of folks you've worked with) are happy enough when they see anamorphic 480p stretched and pulled out to 1080 on a big screen, doesn't mean that everyone else is.
Please broaden your horizons. You sound like folks in the early '80s, going "110 is a good enough film format for snapshots." Or folks in the '90s, going "VHS is fine; who needs DVD?" Or folks in the '10s, going "DVD is pretty good. Why do we need this other format with more than twice the resolution and uncompressed audio?".
Media tanks? Hah. At the size of a BD, I don't want to invest in that sort of online storage. It works quite well enough sitting on the shelf waiting for manual retrieval: A couple of minutes spent per film browsing and selecting a movie does not pay for a few thousand dollars in rotating storage and time to rip it all down.
It's been almost a week, now, and I'm still curious.
Do you have your citation ready, yet?
-
Ok, world:
I admit it. I'm straight.
I've had my innocent childhood curiosity forays with my male peers. I've had openly gay friends as an adult. And girls are just better. Better enough that I don't care about the other gender, at all: They're just not attractive like that. I've tried to keep an open mind, and at times in my teenage years I might've wished to be gay to avoid all of the pain wrought by teenaged girls, but it just doesn't work.
I'm straight as an arrow. Despite my occasional viewing of Thai ladyboy porn, I'm straight. (The ladyboys aren't really men, anyway, but just some mentally-twisted halfbreed that I sometimes find entertaining to watch. When I am rich and famous, I intend to hire one full-time as a "personal trainer", just to go along with the wife's persistence on having a "pool boy" on staff (whether or not we actually own a pool). I'm sure there will be drinking and Lulz and weird gratification for all.)
Just so you all know. And so there's nothing to be confused about.
-
Yeah, you're right. Even when you're (at best) 90% straight, declaring oneself as such does seem pretty obnoxious.
The only useful function I can conceive of for storing positional data long-term is for network analysis: Despite all the bitching and moaning that folks do about cellular services in general, it's no accident that it works as well as it does. Having some historical data available will make an engineer's job easier at improving things further.
The privacy advocate in me says that such data, while useful, should have sufficiently large granularity that individual activities can't be discovered, but the engineer in me says that it's impossible to have too much data available when troubleshooting or planning: Everything is potentially useful.
At the same time, the armchair cryptographer in me says that there's no way at all to sufficiently anonymize the data while retaining useful long-term results for individual devices (so the engineers can do their job better) without also having giant gaping holes in that paper-thin veil of anonymity, so it's impossible to cryptographically satisfy both privacy and engineering concerns.
I, therefore, don't opine that it's right or wrong for VZW to hold onto that stuff for a good long while. And, no, I don't think 113 days is too long from the perspective of an engineer. I do think that the court has no business requesting this data ex-post-facto, however (though I do feel that they've every right and responsibility to issue a warrant for the collection of it, and have law enforcement monitor that data during the effective duration of that warrant as long so long as it is of limited time and not retroactive).
The scholar in me says that this all conspires to mean that I feel that the data is above subpoena, which is impossible, but the voter in me doesn't give a fuck about scholarly law: I just want what's right.
Meanwhile, I submit that the data itself is likely to be pretty terse. Verizon's answer to E911's location data requirements was not to use cellular triangulation, but to incorporate GPS receivers into every handset and to disallow new activation of handsets which do not have GPS. And as the GPS radio is generally only activated (and detailed position collected) when performing an E911 call, it's not going to be a very detailed log of position even in the best case.
So instead of a continuous log of location data within 100 meters, they've only got a vague idea of where the handset is: They know which sector of which tower site you're connected to, along with signal strengths in both directions, and might have similar data for other near(ish) sites (though I doubt it: that's more of a GSM trick). This may be good enough to triangulate a very coarse position history, but by no means would it reliably pin it down to 100 meters -- especially indoors or anywhere remotely near large buildings.
More likely, it's just barely good enough to tell what section of a town you're in, and to reproduce a general route of travel when mobile. That's still enough data to be incriminating, depending on the case, but it's not at all as if VZW is harboring detailed location data on everyone: The tech isn't there for it.
My personal experience closely observing several different E911 dispatch centers in operation also bears this out: Even with all of the super-priority that emergency calls like 911 have had on every cellular network since the dawn of time (a 911 call ALWAYS goes through as long as there's signal, no matter what, even if someone else's non-emergency call is immediately dropped to make room for it), the dispatcher's CAD screen generally first pins the caller's location down directly on top of the cellular tower they're connected to. *Eventually*, if the call lasts long enough, it begins to show more detailed information, but that seems to take however long a GPS fix happens to take on [random handset] in [random place]...
(Other carriers, like AT&T, do have different tricks up their sleeves. But I'm deep in Verizon country, myself, so that's about all I've been able to directly observe, and conveniently enough that seems to be the context of TFA. I lack the knowledge and experience to guess at how other carriers behave.)
Do you realize how slow a 2.4GHz 802.11 connection is in the real world with random consumer devices and hidden nodes? And that's only half-duplex, CSMA. That's only good for maybe half a dozen users, tops. Get a few people watching YouTube [.....], and a "54mbps" radio is anything but.
(I'd parody the rest of your comment, but you're so far off in left field with regards to what the poster was asking for that you wouldn't get it anyway.)
What happened: Minidisc failed to ever really gain any foothold. Slow acceptance of MP3 on portable and other devices leading to a world largely void of Sony digital players. Conflicting goals from being a media company and a hardware company. Expiration of Trinitron patent compounded by introduction of LCD and plasma TVs and market dilution with the introduction of a new host of competitors, allowing them to lose their well-earned perception of providing superior picture quality. Homogenization of DVD (and later BD) player features leading to downward price spiral on hardware. Inability of PalmOS to keep up with the times. And, of course, more recently they seem to enjoy actively pissing off/away their customers.
I'd go on, but why?
So we all should counter crimethink with goodthink? Wouldn't it be gooder to get rid of crimethink altogether, so we would only have goodthink?
You are not thinkful enough. Crimethink is always doubleplusungood.
Is there any reason at all to use greater than 10 megabit Ethernet at all?
10base-T is made for Cat 3, and it's nowhere near as slow/ugly with modern gear as some of us remember from the dark old days of cheap unswitched networking. Just ratchet the port speed down to 10Mbps and call it a day (with the usual caveats about distance limits and the like).
Setting the port speed explicitly results in much more reliable communication than just expecting the NICs at either end to just figure it out for themselves, which they're generally not terribly good at doing.
If some of the lines are very long, or dedicated pairs are not available, there's other options. HPNA is one standard which can work at absurdly long distances over ruddy existing cabling and can piggyback on existing telephone and coax circuits. (Though using coax may conflict with any video-on-demand system that the hotel may already be using.)
It wasn't an invitation to conduct a comparative and opinionated argument, just a question.
I think the answer, after reading through all that verbiage, is "no."
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to not get the link to the data which doesn't exist.