I have a LN52A550P3FXZA. I've been calling it an A550 for years, not an S550, but maybe I've been calling it wrong. In any case, they should be similar. I have no idea what firmware it is running currently, since that doesn't seem to be immediately available on the menu.
I just checked, and I can definitely rename an HDMI input to PC. Menu -> Gear widget -> edit names, or some other such obvious sequence of commands. PC is in the list. (I haven't named my other inputs, though: Perhaps only one input can be called "PC," and if you've already forcibly named one that, it's may simply not be in the list any longer.)
Using Game as a name, IIRC, is also supposed to reduce lag. It should be available on any input no matter what particular strangeness your set has.
Your 1/8" TRS addendum is particularly bizarre. I don't think I've ever done much with that input, since I try to route everything possible directly through a stereo preamp and bypass the TV, but I'll plug my laptop or something into it tomorrow when I'm more motivated to dig out the correct cabling. I've read your addendum twice now, but I still have to ask: The audio lags? Really? Holy shit.
My TV is mostly for TV-ish viewing and console games, since it's way too big to big for use as a computer monitor at a lowly 1080p at computer-monitor distances (not to mention way too hot), and I found WoW on my laptop to be annoying from the couch. Plus, it sits in the living room mounted hard to a rather heavy stand, so it's kinda stuck where it is. I don't think I've ever used it as a computer display, and an audio device at the same time, since it has always had a reasonably good stereo sitting among it. And for troubleshooting PCs, I don't usually much care about audio, except sometimes to verify that it works.:)
I'm really rather pleased with my TV, though, in every capacity that I've used it, and I consider myself to be rather sensitive to timing issues in particular. Hence, my motivation.
Unfortunately for you, it's a pain in the ass for me to decable a PC with DVI or HDMI outputs and put it next to the TV and see how it goes, but if I have to, I will.
Somewhat as an aside: Why do you care about that 1/8" TRS jack? I don't know what gear you've got available, or why you might want to do things that way, but there's got to be a better way...
And, in case I get a burr up my ass and try it: What OS and video card are you using? The boy's new HDMI-equipped Dell box (which is the most likely candidate for me to experiment with, due to lack of attached cabling) is running Windows 7, with an nVidia card. In a perfect world, these would be meaningless data points, but in reality it might be useful.
Mine's an A550. I don't know if they're similar in these aspects.
Some things that might work:
Label the input in question as "PC". IIRC, this is magic in a lot of ways on my set, including latency.
Turn off entertainment modes, dynamic modes, and every single goddamn widget which seems to describe something fancier than "Hi. I'm a dumb computer monitor with an HDMI input." These are all things which would be variously annoying doing computer graphics, anyway. And they're all generally pretty bad with regular video, too: IMHO, it all needs turned off, as a rule, for all sources, since there's nothing magical it can add to video to make it better that the producer hasn't already done. (This might make your TV temporarily ugly, but you can fix that later with the remaining adjustments. For now, it's a latency battle.)
Firmware. See if there's newer firmware for your TV, as absurd as it sounds to do so for a TV. This will also nuke your settings, of course, but newer firmware has helped my TV with HDMI sync with the PS3 and (oddly) reduced infrared interference with my Uverse box. I don't recall any particular improvements in lag, but it was never all that bad on my TV anyway and I always turn off all the gee-whiz so I might never even notice.
And, on my TV at least, it sometimes hates certain HDMI devices only when using cables with ferrite beads. Cutting the molding off the ferrite with a good knife and shattering the exposed grey blob with a hammer (they break easy) always results in a working cable, for me. Since learning this trick, I've been 100% successful with plugging in whatever random gear -- I even use the TV, sometimes, to troubleshoot PCs for friends when they bring them over.
Post back what you find, if you bother with any of this. I'm curious.
Some displays have processing which involves a delay. My Samsung, for instance, adds a bit of delay for any input not listed as "PC" or "Game," regardless of whether it is VGA, component, or HDMI. (Presumably, it does this so that it can utilize some intra-frame data to do whatever it does, but for all I know it does it just to be annoying.)
The VGA input defaults to PC. The others default to something else that produces a small amount of lag. They're all configurable, though.
(This message is anecdotal instead of an actual attempt at help only because your rants are devoid of sufficient information that help might actually be possible.)
This looks like a good opportunity to remind everybody about the Bill Gates Wealth Clock, wherein you can learn what your contribution to Bill Gates' wealth is.
I had a couple of Palm devices (both of them antiques, now), and loved the accuracy of the stylus.
Why?
Choice. I could just use my finger, if I needed do some quick math with the calculator or scribble down a short number or something. And when I wanted accuracy, it was no trouble at all to whip the stainless steel stylus out from the Handspring Visor and do something detailed.
And the lengthier notes I'd write in chicken-scratch using the stylus? I didn't care that they weren't machine-readable text. They were my notes, and I could read them just fine.
I like that touch screens have progressed as much as they have (and you can have my Droid when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers), but I really liked being able to do both.
Plus, with a stylus, one gets the opportunity to have other tools as well. The Visor stylus I had included a #00 screwdriver which could take the device itself (or other things) apart, and a reset pin (which worked well on various other things, too). Others included ball-point pens or other amenities.
First Usenet article referencing Shoutcast was on December 31, 1998. It stated that Shoutcast had been released earlier that same day.
Icecast's first public release happened a few weeks later, on January 18, 1999, according to the tarball, which lines up neatly with the same date on the Freshmeat page.
Lots of higher-efficiency furnaces already have a spot to tie an intake plenum into place. My current ancient house uses black 2" ABS pipe for intake and exhaust. My previous ancient house used 2" PVC for exhaust, and had nothing for intake, like yours. It wouldn't have been obvious to me that it was designed to support a dedicated intake line if I hadn't read the book for that particular unit, but the fittings were right there if one knew to look for them. (I never did hook that up, because we were having some real flooding problems, and the bloody thing was getting replaced on average every six months, anyway. But that's a different story.)
On my current furnace, this intake plumbing goes straight to the combustion blower. There's also a valve in-line in the basement that is supposed to open up in the event that the outside intake becomes clogged with birds or snow or something. The old furnace was a lot different, in that the intake plumbing would have simply vented into the furnace's housing instead of directly to the blower, but the housing itself was pretty well gasketed and sealed up so it was essentially the same thing.
And in any case, everything should slope down toward the furnace, so any condensation or moisture that occurs in these lines will find its way out through the condensate drain on the furnace rather than sit around and be annoying.
I'd be wary about intentionally installing a leaky pipe near the furnace as an intake. It seems like a good idea, but without a system to contain the airflow, any pressure differential (from wind, say) between the rest of the house and the basement will create draft, whether the furnace is running or not. You'd go from having a predictable loss some of the time, to having an uncontrolled loss all the time.
But, meh, anyway. I'm pretty sure I'd lose a lot more heat through using the clothes drier, the bathroom exhaust fan, and the range hood, than the bit of air the furnace uses for combustion.
I've been running Swype for months on my Motorola Droid. It works great, and it was not at all difficult to locate it using Google. AFAICT, it's been running on most or all Android phones for quite awhile (though mostly with questionable legality).
That said, it's great that the beta is open -- this way, I get to legally use Swype. Hopefully, some day, they'll actually let me pay for it -- I'd love to give these guys a few bucks.
In support of your point: One of my prized archives is a CD, cut from a cassette tape, cut from a wire recording of my dad's family when he was young.
I remember being young myself as we all gathered around the old wire recorder that Grandpa had produced from the nether regions of the basement. He turned it on, and we waited a few minutes for the tubes to warm up, and then he engaged the play mechanism. Lo! Sound came forth from 40 years prior. As far as anyone could remember, nobody had ever listened to that recording before, but there it was, preserved as little magnetic nuances on a reel of steel wire.
The next playing happened at an audio shop, where it was transferred by a very skilled (and much later a very good friend of my own) person to a cassette.
A decade or so later, I transferred that cassette (myself having gained some skill in the audio field) to CD-R. I gave copies to everyone living whose voice was heard on the recording.
Presumably, that old recording still exists. But there any playback gear that can play it? Who knows -- I haven't seen the recorder that made it in 20 years, myself, but if it's still around it'd be straight-forward to rejuvenate it, and I'm reasonably sure that the recording itself would play just fine. So, yeah, the recording is fine, but the playback gear is (at best) rare. In order to play back that old Edison recording, they had to build a machine basically from scratch, which does not speak highly of the useful longevity of the format.
In attack of your point: That wire recording was only about 40 years old when I heard it the first time. I'm 30, now, and I have many recordings older than me that I can easily listen to using modern gear. It's just not a big deal to spin 40 or 50-year-old vinyl on a modern turntable.
Likewise, with compact discs. The format is creeping up on having 30 years of use, now, and is showing no signs of being unplayable any time soon. I'd bet my hat that a little more than ten years from now, I'll still handily be able to play CDs that are 40 years old using cheap off-the-shelf gear, in complete contrast to the wire recorder, which was a fancy bit of antiquity 40 years hence.
So, in conclusion: Come 2030, I sincerely doubt that I will have to re-invent a CD-playing machine in order to access CD recordings from the early 80s. Therefore, I must suggest that more modern record methods involving physical media have greater longevity than older methods, even if it always seems like "they sure built things to last" in yesteryear.
(Case in point: I recently bought a CD player for $10. It works fine, and sounds good, and has the functions that I wanted. It is already 20 years old. But, meanwhile, I have no problem playing CDs on the myriad of computers and DVD and Blu-Ray machines that litter my house, and that's not likely to change as long as optical formats are both useful and CD-shaped...)
Cisco gear *and* a professional support group cost almost nothing when spread across thousands of units, if the support group and the gear they're supporting is worth a fuck.
And frankly, I don't care what you think about how I might express myself in person and at work. My actual peers accept me just fine, and my ideas are more profitable than theirs.
I haven't read TFA. Or any comments. I'm not really sure if I will. And I'm late to the party, so the mods won't see this - bummer.
But: I have it on good authority (as in: I personally service both the wearable and monitoring devices) that at least one county in Ohio never did care about these things to the extent that they claimed to.
People are issued "tracking bracelets" that go around their ankles in cases of house arrest and such. But there's no centralized monitoring, at all: The only way that a detective would know that a criminal under house arrest had violated their terms, would be to drive by their house and see if they're there.
Yes, that's right: Short-range RF links, much like those that your gas provider likely uses to read your gas meter these days.
So, if nobody bothers to drive by, then nobody will know if the convicted criminal is actually abiding by the terms of their sentence...and even if they do, it's going to be hit-or-miss whether or not they see them actually violating anything.
Of course, the criminals themselves don't necessarily know this. But even so it is more of a deterrence than a highly-regulated sentence.
My second paragraph covers your first and second paragraphs. But if I may add my own analog: Good "consumer" broadband here is about $50. "Business" broadband is about $80. I'm generalizing, obviously, but so were you.
Your third paragraph is lunacy. Even if it is licensed-and-proper Cisco gear, it's still cheaper than air conditioning.
I guess I'd just willingly forgotten about the Tandy, Packard Bell, and Compaq atrocities of the past. I never did give them any respect, since it always seemed at the time that there were always less-proprietary computers available that always seemed like better options.
I'm very glad that we've (mostly) moved on from there. Damn you for reminding me of these relics, but you're right.
I've always been lost as to the reason WiFi needs to be so heavily monetized.
I mean: It's a business, right? Presumably, in the course of running the business, they already have a need for Internet access -- that it exists, and is working, is a foregone conclusion.
Why is it that companies (like, say, Starbucks and McDonald's) have found that it's so bloody expensive to open the pipe up for random folks to use? The initial investment of cabling in an AP or two is pretty small, even with union labor. Configuration should be near-zero cost, as since there are thousands of devices and they can all be set up pretty much identically in advance.
I realize that the fact that it's cheap doesn't mean that it's free, but geez. Air conditioning is more expensive to offer than free WiFi, but we don't see ever see them charging extra (or looking for looking for sponsorships -- WTF?) for that.
My favorite local coffee shop has offered free 802.11 since before the term "WiFi" existed, and still has functional Ethernet jacks beside the tables that are left over from the time before anything wireless was common. I'd like to suggest that they've got more invested their network than any particular Starbucks, that the coffee is better and cheaper, and that the barristas are more nubile. Oh, and it's air conditioned, too.;)
I hope you mean something other than GT 1 -- that game had such horrible physics, it was comical.
I had a cheesy Mitsubishi Galant with something north of 400HP. It was easy to drive -- just hit the corner (any corner) at full throttle, steer into it, and use the brake to put the car sideways while never, ever lifting the throttle (ever). No countersteering was needed as the car would correct itself neatly if the brake was released at the right point just before the exit of a turn.
It took awhile to get the suspension and gearing to be so fucked that this goofy driving style worked, but after that walking through the entire game and making massive amounts of cash was simple.
It's one thing when an ISP with a near-monopoly does it, but it's entirely another when a small institution where folks will be spending a small amount of time does it.
This is not new tech. Indeed, the problem of a Wifi leech has been solved for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Ok.
I have a LN52A550P3FXZA. I've been calling it an A550 for years, not an S550, but maybe I've been calling it wrong. In any case, they should be similar. I have no idea what firmware it is running currently, since that doesn't seem to be immediately available on the menu.
I just checked, and I can definitely rename an HDMI input to PC. Menu -> Gear widget -> edit names, or some other such obvious sequence of commands. PC is in the list. (I haven't named my other inputs, though: Perhaps only one input can be called "PC," and if you've already forcibly named one that, it's may simply not be in the list any longer.)
Using Game as a name, IIRC, is also supposed to reduce lag. It should be available on any input no matter what particular strangeness your set has.
Your 1/8" TRS addendum is particularly bizarre. I don't think I've ever done much with that input, since I try to route everything possible directly through a stereo preamp and bypass the TV, but I'll plug my laptop or something into it tomorrow when I'm more motivated to dig out the correct cabling. I've read your addendum twice now, but I still have to ask: The audio lags? Really? Holy shit.
My TV is mostly for TV-ish viewing and console games, since it's way too big to big for use as a computer monitor at a lowly 1080p at computer-monitor distances (not to mention way too hot), and I found WoW on my laptop to be annoying from the couch. Plus, it sits in the living room mounted hard to a rather heavy stand, so it's kinda stuck where it is. I don't think I've ever used it as a computer display, and an audio device at the same time, since it has always had a reasonably good stereo sitting among it. And for troubleshooting PCs, I don't usually much care about audio, except sometimes to verify that it works. :)
I'm really rather pleased with my TV, though, in every capacity that I've used it, and I consider myself to be rather sensitive to timing issues in particular. Hence, my motivation.
Unfortunately for you, it's a pain in the ass for me to decable a PC with DVI or HDMI outputs and put it next to the TV and see how it goes, but if I have to, I will.
Somewhat as an aside: Why do you care about that 1/8" TRS jack? I don't know what gear you've got available, or why you might want to do things that way, but there's got to be a better way...
And, in case I get a burr up my ass and try it: What OS and video card are you using? The boy's new HDMI-equipped Dell box (which is the most likely candidate for me to experiment with, due to lack of attached cabling) is running Windows 7, with an nVidia card. In a perfect world, these would be meaningless data points, but in reality it might be useful.
I don't think I've ever had a cell phone (except my most recent, which is a Motorola Droid) which was unable to do that by itself.
The process is simple: Connect it to a PC with an appropriate cable (and the appropriate drivers, if applicable), start issuing AT commands, and go.
I used to dial a local ISP like this every now and then, and I've sent faxes with it back when that still mattered.
Billing was the same as a regular voice call, and data rates were pretty ugly compared to what we're used to these days, but it worked.
YMMV.
Mine's an A550. I don't know if they're similar in these aspects.
Some things that might work:
Label the input in question as "PC". IIRC, this is magic in a lot of ways on my set, including latency.
Turn off entertainment modes, dynamic modes, and every single goddamn widget which seems to describe something fancier than "Hi. I'm a dumb computer monitor with an HDMI input." These are all things which would be variously annoying doing computer graphics, anyway. And they're all generally pretty bad with regular video, too: IMHO, it all needs turned off, as a rule, for all sources, since there's nothing magical it can add to video to make it better that the producer hasn't already done. (This might make your TV temporarily ugly, but you can fix that later with the remaining adjustments. For now, it's a latency battle.)
Firmware. See if there's newer firmware for your TV, as absurd as it sounds to do so for a TV. This will also nuke your settings, of course, but newer firmware has helped my TV with HDMI sync with the PS3 and (oddly) reduced infrared interference with my Uverse box. I don't recall any particular improvements in lag, but it was never all that bad on my TV anyway and I always turn off all the gee-whiz so I might never even notice.
And, on my TV at least, it sometimes hates certain HDMI devices only when using cables with ferrite beads. Cutting the molding off the ferrite with a good knife and shattering the exposed grey blob with a hammer (they break easy) always results in a working cable, for me. Since learning this trick, I've been 100% successful with plugging in whatever random gear -- I even use the TV, sometimes, to troubleshoot PCs for friends when they bring them over.
Post back what you find, if you bother with any of this. I'm curious.
HDMI lag?
Some displays have processing which involves a delay. My Samsung, for instance, adds a bit of delay for any input not listed as "PC" or "Game," regardless of whether it is VGA, component, or HDMI. (Presumably, it does this so that it can utilize some intra-frame data to do whatever it does, but for all I know it does it just to be annoying.)
The VGA input defaults to PC. The others default to something else that produces a small amount of lag. They're all configurable, though.
(This message is anecdotal instead of an actual attempt at help only because your rants are devoid of sufficient information that help might actually be possible.)
Yum. One of them even comes with a bunch of real serial ports.
The same way that people hooked up SCSI arrays when ISA bit the dust.
This looks like a good opportunity to remind everybody about the Bill Gates Wealth Clock, wherein you can learn what your contribution to Bill Gates' wealth is.
Indeed:
Thanks for the examples!.
Hear, hear.
I had a couple of Palm devices (both of them antiques, now), and loved the accuracy of the stylus.
Why?
Choice. I could just use my finger, if I needed do some quick math with the calculator or scribble down a short number or something. And when I wanted accuracy, it was no trouble at all to whip the stainless steel stylus out from the Handspring Visor and do something detailed.
And the lengthier notes I'd write in chicken-scratch using the stylus? I didn't care that they weren't machine-readable text. They were my notes, and I could read them just fine.
I like that touch screens have progressed as much as they have (and you can have my Droid when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers), but I really liked being able to do both.
Plus, with a stylus, one gets the opportunity to have other tools as well. The Visor stylus I had included a #00 screwdriver which could take the device itself (or other things) apart, and a reset pin (which worked well on various other things, too). Others included ball-point pens or other amenities.
First Usenet article referencing Shoutcast was on December 31, 1998. It stated that Shoutcast had been released earlier that same day.
Icecast's first public release happened a few weeks later, on January 18, 1999, according to the tarball, which lines up neatly with the same date on the Freshmeat page.
Lots of higher-efficiency furnaces already have a spot to tie an intake plenum into place. My current ancient house uses black 2" ABS pipe for intake and exhaust. My previous ancient house used 2" PVC for exhaust, and had nothing for intake, like yours. It wouldn't have been obvious to me that it was designed to support a dedicated intake line if I hadn't read the book for that particular unit, but the fittings were right there if one knew to look for them. (I never did hook that up, because we were having some real flooding problems, and the bloody thing was getting replaced on average every six months, anyway. But that's a different story.)
On my current furnace, this intake plumbing goes straight to the combustion blower. There's also a valve in-line in the basement that is supposed to open up in the event that the outside intake becomes clogged with birds or snow or something. The old furnace was a lot different, in that the intake plumbing would have simply vented into the furnace's housing instead of directly to the blower, but the housing itself was pretty well gasketed and sealed up so it was essentially the same thing.
And in any case, everything should slope down toward the furnace, so any condensation or moisture that occurs in these lines will find its way out through the condensate drain on the furnace rather than sit around and be annoying.
I'd be wary about intentionally installing a leaky pipe near the furnace as an intake. It seems like a good idea, but without a system to contain the airflow, any pressure differential (from wind, say) between the rest of the house and the basement will create draft, whether the furnace is running or not. You'd go from having a predictable loss some of the time, to having an uncontrolled loss all the time.
But, meh, anyway. I'm pretty sure I'd lose a lot more heat through using the clothes drier, the bathroom exhaust fan, and the range hood, than the bit of air the furnace uses for combustion.
I've been running Swype for months on my Motorola Droid. It works great, and it was not at all difficult to locate it using Google. AFAICT, it's been running on most or all Android phones for quite awhile (though mostly with questionable legality).
That said, it's great that the beta is open -- this way, I get to legally use Swype. Hopefully, some day, they'll actually let me pay for it -- I'd love to give these guys a few bucks.
Here's your woosh:
*woosh*
You're welcome.
Paragraphs, FFS.
Maybe.
In support of your point: One of my prized archives is a CD, cut from a cassette tape, cut from a wire recording of my dad's family when he was young.
I remember being young myself as we all gathered around the old wire recorder that Grandpa had produced from the nether regions of the basement. He turned it on, and we waited a few minutes for the tubes to warm up, and then he engaged the play mechanism. Lo! Sound came forth from 40 years prior. As far as anyone could remember, nobody had ever listened to that recording before, but there it was, preserved as little magnetic nuances on a reel of steel wire.
The next playing happened at an audio shop, where it was transferred by a very skilled (and much later a very good friend of my own) person to a cassette.
A decade or so later, I transferred that cassette (myself having gained some skill in the audio field) to CD-R. I gave copies to everyone living whose voice was heard on the recording.
Presumably, that old recording still exists. But there any playback gear that can play it? Who knows -- I haven't seen the recorder that made it in 20 years, myself, but if it's still around it'd be straight-forward to rejuvenate it, and I'm reasonably sure that the recording itself would play just fine. So, yeah, the recording is fine, but the playback gear is (at best) rare. In order to play back that old Edison recording, they had to build a machine basically from scratch, which does not speak highly of the useful longevity of the format.
In attack of your point: That wire recording was only about 40 years old when I heard it the first time. I'm 30, now, and I have many recordings older than me that I can easily listen to using modern gear. It's just not a big deal to spin 40 or 50-year-old vinyl on a modern turntable.
Likewise, with compact discs. The format is creeping up on having 30 years of use, now, and is showing no signs of being unplayable any time soon. I'd bet my hat that a little more than ten years from now, I'll still handily be able to play CDs that are 40 years old using cheap off-the-shelf gear, in complete contrast to the wire recorder, which was a fancy bit of antiquity 40 years hence.
So, in conclusion: Come 2030, I sincerely doubt that I will have to re-invent a CD-playing machine in order to access CD recordings from the early 80s. Therefore, I must suggest that more modern record methods involving physical media have greater longevity than older methods, even if it always seems like "they sure built things to last" in yesteryear.
(Case in point: I recently bought a CD player for $10. It works fine, and sounds good, and has the functions that I wanted. It is already 20 years old. But, meanwhile, I have no problem playing CDs on the myriad of computers and DVD and Blu-Ray machines that litter my house, and that's not likely to change as long as optical formats are both useful and CD-shaped...)
Cisco gear *and* a professional support group cost almost nothing when spread across thousands of units, if the support group and the gear they're supporting is worth a fuck.
And frankly, I don't care what you think about how I might express myself in person and at work. My actual peers accept me just fine, and my ideas are more profitable than theirs.
Next?
I haven't read TFA. Or any comments. I'm not really sure if I will. And I'm late to the party, so the mods won't see this - bummer.
But: I have it on good authority (as in: I personally service both the wearable and monitoring devices) that at least one county in Ohio never did care about these things to the extent that they claimed to.
People are issued "tracking bracelets" that go around their ankles in cases of house arrest and such. But there's no centralized monitoring, at all: The only way that a detective would know that a criminal under house arrest had violated their terms, would be to drive by their house and see if they're there.
Yes, that's right: Short-range RF links, much like those that your gas provider likely uses to read your gas meter these days.
So, if nobody bothers to drive by, then nobody will know if the convicted criminal is actually abiding by the terms of their sentence...and even if they do, it's going to be hit-or-miss whether or not they see them actually violating anything.
Of course, the criminals themselves don't necessarily know this. But even so it is more of a deterrence than a highly-regulated sentence.
Color me unimpressed that actual GPS-enabled tracking devices are ignored when boundary alerts go off.
Read it again.
My second paragraph covers your first and second paragraphs. But if I may add my own analog: Good "consumer" broadband here is about $50. "Business" broadband is about $80. I'm generalizing, obviously, but so were you.
Your third paragraph is lunacy. Even if it is licensed-and-proper Cisco gear, it's still cheaper than air conditioning.
You fail at enlightening me.
I guess I'd just willingly forgotten about the Tandy, Packard Bell, and Compaq atrocities of the past. I never did give them any respect, since it always seemed at the time that there were always less-proprietary computers available that always seemed like better options.
I'm very glad that we've (mostly) moved on from there. Damn you for reminding me of these relics, but you're right.
I've always been lost as to the reason WiFi needs to be so heavily monetized.
I mean: It's a business, right? Presumably, in the course of running the business, they already have a need for Internet access -- that it exists, and is working, is a foregone conclusion.
Why is it that companies (like, say, Starbucks and McDonald's) have found that it's so bloody expensive to open the pipe up for random folks to use? The initial investment of cabling in an AP or two is pretty small, even with union labor. Configuration should be near-zero cost, as since there are thousands of devices and they can all be set up pretty much identically in advance.
I realize that the fact that it's cheap doesn't mean that it's free, but geez. Air conditioning is more expensive to offer than free WiFi, but we don't see ever see them charging extra (or looking for looking for sponsorships -- WTF?) for that.
My favorite local coffee shop has offered free 802.11 since before the term "WiFi" existed, and still has functional Ethernet jacks beside the tables that are left over from the time before anything wireless was common. I'd like to suggest that they've got more invested their network than any particular Starbucks, that the coffee is better and cheaper, and that the barristas are more nubile. Oh, and it's air conditioned, too. ;)
Someone please enlighten me.
Van driver, sometimes. Field tech, other times. Project manager, some other times.
(Why is the concept of a "company car" so foreign, these days?)
Heh.
I hope you mean something other than GT 1 -- that game had such horrible physics, it was comical.
I had a cheesy Mitsubishi Galant with something north of 400HP. It was easy to drive -- just hit the corner (any corner) at full throttle, steer into it, and use the brake to put the car sideways while never, ever lifting the throttle (ever). No countersteering was needed as the car would correct itself neatly if the brake was released at the right point just before the exit of a turn.
It took awhile to get the suspension and gearing to be so fucked that this goofy driving style worked, but after that walking through the entire game and making massive amounts of cash was simple.
I don't think GT made me a better driver. :)
Mmmm, WiGLE. I try to gather at least 100 new nodes a day for that beast, in the hope that some one, some day, will make use of all that data.
Or better QoS. Or throttling. Or...
It's one thing when an ISP with a near-monopoly does it, but it's entirely another when a small institution where folks will be spending a small amount of time does it.
This is not new tech. Indeed, the problem of a Wifi leech has been solved for a long, long time.
As is paper.
What's your point?