Really? That flies in the face of established security practices and case history. Stop propogating myth as fact.
In order to establish probable cause, an employee or agent of the store must do each of the following (courtesy of Chris E. McGoey, a man with many more titles in his name than you or I will ever have, at http://www.crimedoctor.com/shopliftingPC.htm):
1. You must see the shoplifter approach your merchandise
2. You must see the shoplifter select your merchandise
3. You must see the shoplifter conceal, carry away or convert your merchandise
4. You must maintain continuous observation the shoplifter
5. You must see the shoplifter fail to pay for the merchandise
6. You must approach the shoplifter outside of the store
I don't shoplift, but I've set off the the door alarm several times at Wal-Mart on my way out of the store with the stuff I just finished buying.
Each time, the reason was simple: The checkout clerk failed to properly deactivate security tag(s) on the stuff I'd just purchased.
I'd say that that's probably the case most of the time, since most other folks don't shoplift, either. Therefore, the door alarm going off is not usually an indication that one is trying to steal something, but is more probably an indication of a failure of their security model.
I'm not responsible for Wal-Mart's security (or Best Buy's, for that matter), and it's not my job to stick around while they try to figure out where they fucked up. I've paid them in full, by the time I get to the door, and have done no wrong. If the alarm goes off, I keep walking. It's my right.
The Constitution is really not that long of a document - perhaps you should read it sometime. It works for you, too.
When I go to Sam's Club, my purchases are checked against my receipt when I leave. I'm OK with this - it's one of the things I agreed to play along with when I became a member.
Best Buy, on the other hand, does not have membership. I enter the store as a public citizen, and I leave as a public citizen. I didn't agree to any limitations on my 4th Amendment rights when I entered their store.
If I go to BB and purchase an LCD display, it is mine from the time that payment is tendered. They have no right to detain, search, or inspect me, or any of my stuff, unless they feel they have probable cause to suspect me of an actual crime. (Cluestick: Refusing search, and/or even setting off RFID door alarms does not constitute probable cause.)
What country are you in again, son? Independance Day was two days ago - have you forgotten what it's supposed to be about already?
I remember compiling 2.0.x kernels on my own 100MHz Pentium. It took -forever-.
Later on, I built a 350MHz K6-2 machine for a customer, and it was a screamer compiling its 2.0.x kernel, taking just a few minutes.
Fast forward: I've got a very similar K6-2 350 as a miscellaneous server and firewall here. Compiling its 2.6 kernel takes -forever-.
But the new 2.4GHz HT 800MHz FSB P4 box I built recently for work is again a screamer, compiling its 2.6 kernel in a few minutes. This box is in roughly the same relative performance league as that K6-2 was Back In The Day.
Moral of this story: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Program and compiler complexity has kept pace with increases in processor speed, leaving the time to compile x more or less constant over at least the past few years.
'Sides, even if you can build a proper desktop system in two hours, distcc serves well to decimate the amount of time required. Whether it is used to cut that two-hour-long run down to 30 minutes minutes, or a 5-minute compile down to 60 seconds, distcc will always have its place[1].
[1]: Yes, yes, I know. People everywhere are saying "But who cares if it takes 5 minutes instead of 60 seconds? It's not like I can't continue using the machine while it's compiling." These people are ignoring the human aspect of the whole thing, which can be summarized as follows: Wife, house, kids, cars, jobs = 4 minutes worth of life that has been rescued from the computer by distcc.
Eh? By your logic, this is 100% efficient. I'm sure that structure is quite warm inside, and it's entirely self-heated!
Rather, what we need is a way to move that heat energy to where it is more useful, rather than just dumping it into the atmosphere, or figure out something (chemical, manufacturing, agricultural) else to do with it.
Why is there an ongoing hoopla over ribbon cables being big, ugly, and hard to manage?
Properly installed, they're neater and less restrictive of airflow than either rounded or SATA cables. And, you can make them yourself with tools you probably already own.
The trick is simple: Folding. Fold them against flat things, out of the way. Fold them at neat, 90-degree angles to turn corners and avoid adding crosstalk. Do this right, and they're visually stunning, easy to work with, and nearly transparent to airflow.
It just takes a bit of forethought and planning.
I recently installed a large-ish rackmount PC, with a three-bus hardware IDE RAID 5 config, along with the usual floppy and CD-ROM cables.
Abundance of room? Ha. The box was tight, with 17 full-length PCI cards installed. And cooling was at a premium, as the majority of those cards required additional power from 4-pin molex connectors. So the ribbon cables had to be dealt with accordingly.
The RAID cables snuck behind their Adaptec controller with neat bends, making them invisible and out of airflow. From there, they tucked flat against the backplane's mounting plate, keeping them almost invisible. They continued this trend until they met the 3-drive hotswap 5.25" enclosure mounted at the front.
Same stuff with the floppy, and the CD-ROM. All routed flat, out of the way. I'm not sure it could have been done at all with rounded or prefab SATA cables, without looking like a bowl of spaghetti and/or fucking up my goal of laminar airflow.
Remember the bit about rolling your own? It's easy, -and- you don't end up with slack that needs bundled up somewhere...
You're paying BT to complete a phone call for you, not act as an ISP. When I dial a modem, I want to talk to the fucking modem that I dialed, not some reasonable-facsimile-thereof. Maybe I intend to whistle a Bell 212a carrier as part of an art project and record it with my nifty voice modem, maybe I want to yell at a housemate through the modem speaker, maybe I want my credit card transaction to happen as fast as possible rather than waiting for two handshakes to complete instead of just one. Whatever the case, I want to make a phone call, not just transfer some data. And, besides, BT has no business keeping track of which numbers have modems answering, let alone treating them differently.
No, sir. A more general solution, as I've outlined above, is in order. There's nothing to track or configure on an ongoing basis. No weird latency or flow control issues due to mismatched connection speeds. No new problems popping up from old customer equipment.
It's simple. Switch encounters a modem carrier (or, more likely, highly-noncompressible information) and changes codecs, while nobody is the wiser.
'Sides, the whole idea of extraneous modems died in the 90s, at BT's own hand, when they stopped offering Tymnet's outdial capability.
For a company the size of BT, I see the following scenario as being faily likely:
BT switch detects modem/fax carrier.
BT switch toggles from rather-compressed g.723 to uncompressed 64kbps g.711 . g.711 is is either aLaw or uLaw, depending on pond-sidedness, just like ISDN, and also just like things are switched "normally" today.
Modem communication happens normally; BT writes off increased bandwidth (vs. g.723 voice) by saying to themselves "Well, at least that one g.711 modem call didn't cost us any more line capacity than it did before, and we got to packet-switch it instead of channelize it. Cool."
Everyone's happy. And your modem doesn't even know the difference.
I mean, really. It's unlikely that he wants to run a corporate intranet web server with a hefty *SQL backend, while serving dozens of thin clients remote X11, alongside every daemon under the sun from squid to bind.
He just wants to get a little work done, maybe listen to some music or watch a little porn, locally, on an old Thinkpad[1]. Disabling anything he can live without, while firewalling the rest -will- be sufficient. If he wants to do something remotely, there's always SSH[2].
[1]: At 600MHz, it's plenty fast for most real applications. A little more RAM would help, but that's not as much of an issue with distros built in the same timeframe as that laptop was as it would be for, say, Fedora Core.
[2]: Yep, bug-ridden as hell in days of old. But it's always been a drop-kick install, in my experience, to upgrade SSL/SSH to whatever is deemed secure today, whether by using the distribution's package system or configure&&make install.
At my house, we have an XP machine, and a few Gentoo boxes. Here's what bothers me most about the Windows box:
Broken printing. I always feel lucky when printing Just Works, and when it doesn't, rebooting is required to restore printer functionality. But even then, I'm forced to listen to a guy shout "Printing started!" and, subsequently, "Printing complete!" through the sound card. Option to disable the screaming man is non-functional. Driver software hasn't been updated in years, and will probably stay broken forever.
Broken scanning. Scanner drivers work inconsistantly, and included taskbar software is complete trash, causing general instability. Also years-old, and will remain broken forever.
Windows XP does not include OpenGL support.
Autodesk products are a bitch to steal. Easier and cheaper to use something like PythonCAD under Linux, perhaps with Cygwin's X server...
You haven't been annoyed, until you've been surprised by an errant Windows "DING!" through several thousand watts of PA. Why must everything "DING!" at maximum volume? Whatever happened to the PC speaker? And why are all of these samples normalized to kill?
If these issues ever get solved, I might give it a more serious role in my daily activities.
Let us assume that it really is a CPU horsepower vs. file size vs. sound quality issue.
Looking at two extremes:
Realaudio files used to play justfine, Back In The Day, on a slowish 486. It sounded like shit, but it worked fine. Of course, this same 486 was incapable of playing MP3s. For that, you generally needed a Pentium, and preferably a fast(ish) one.
And of course, these days, it just doesn't matter. MP3 playing consumes so little CPU time that nobody gives a thought to it running in the background. In other words, the hardware finally caught up (some time ago, really).
Fast forward, and things are the same, only portable. MP3 files play justfine, on just about everything. My old Riovolt SP-250, after a lot of effort from the Xiph folks and iRiver, is able to play some Vorbis without a hiccup.
Newer units play all Vorbis justfine, though. They use even less power doing it, and cost less than my SP-250 did. In other words, the hardware is already caught up.
Sufficient CPU power to play such new-ish formats as Vorbis will eventually creep into more products as the cost of CPU power decreases (eg. Moore's Law).
I'd like to forecast that it'll be easier, cheaper, faster, and better to simply wait for CPU power to catch up across the board, than to go ahead and invent a scalable codec. By the time you're done making the thing, no matter how brilliant it is, CPUs and DSPs will have advanced the price/performance ratio sufficiently that your efforts will fade into obscurity, just like intel's indeo video format[1] of more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, any foolish manufacturers or software developers who jumped on your scalable codec-bandwagon will watch their efforts fizzle and die, as people regroup to support formats that Don't Suck, like our existing OGG Vorbis.
That said, if you must tinker with software, do feel free to help improve Vorbis. Make it faster, make it smaller. Make it shit golden eggs, whatever. But don't reinvent the wheel without first examining where the rest of the world will be by the time you get done.
[1]: indeo was created as a high-ish quality, high-bitrate video format, designed to be encoded once and played anywhere. Framerate and quality would drop on low-end devices, while things would be more pristine on faster machines, all from the same source file. It died a quiet death when inevitable increases CPU speed made it a non-issue. Subsequently, better and more-intensive codecs like MPEG1 took over. The near-universal playability, and use, of the previously-hideously-intensive DivX family of codecs drive this point home.
The manual says whatever it says. The warranty says whatever it says, as well.
*shrug*
There's Federal laws in the United States which supercede such corporate verbiage. (Ford warranty != act of Congress.)
And they say I can use whatever 215/R15 tires I want to, as long that's what the car came with and they fall within factory specifications (including runout and roundness and tread depth and a slew of other parameters, I'm sure, if there's a lawyer in the mix). The automobile manufacturer will have no obligation to warrant these replacement tires, of course. But they're still obligated to warrant the rest of the vehicle, including the wheels and bearings, unless the use of replacement tires provably caused damage to these other items.
Same with motor oils. Or filters. Or wiper blades. Or whatever.
In order for Ford to pull this off, they'd have to (at least) warrant their stock tires for as long as they do their wheel bearings. Anything else would be criminal.
There's laws about this stuff, yaknow - you can use whatever replacement car parts you feel like without warranty concerns, as long as they fall reasonably within factory specifications. You can even do the work yourself.
It's not like he's trying to turn that Ford into a pimp wagon with 12" whitewalls protruding 4" past the fender -- the parent poster just wants a set of Blizzaks for his fishtailing Focus. Why would he deviate from the factory offset or width, unless he wanted to spend $x on new rims at the same time? It's -so- -much- cheaper to just have them remounted twice a year...
(Of course, I'm assuming that Blizzaks are, indeed, available in stock Ford sizing. Which may well not be the case.)
Databases are cool, but they're almost useless by themselves. Are we supposed to grok SQL statements every day just to locate a SCSI adapter?
What front-end software would you suggest be used for a home-oriented inventory control system?
Or is learning Perl, Tcl, PHP, HTML, and/or C, along with SQL and the different various features of available engines a prerequisite for organizing one's computer cruft? What a weighty project to undertake.
I maintain a good bit of inventory/stuff at home. Here's how I do it:
A cheap medium-size (~4 foot) rollaway toolbox. Individual components (resistors, caps, LEDs), in one drawer. Fasteners get their own drawer. Bundled cables in one. Small PC-card based items like RAM and CPUs get their own drawer. Add-on cards in another. Large items (fans, odd case hardware) get their own drawer. Power supplies and the like end up in the cabinet in the bottom of the box.
When I run out of space in one of these compartments, I start throwing things away, in order of age. An interesting side effect of this is that other things tend to disappear at the same time - a 12" amber monochrome monitor is a lot less useful after you toss the 15-year-old full-length ISA control card for it.
Mod parent -1, Offtopic. Only the first paragraph deals with patents at all.
The other 23 paragraphs form a rant which has nothing to do with anything here except for the poster's own political agenda. Given their blatant lack of contextual cohesion, I submit that it was probably written long before the article was even posted.
Do you mods ever -read- the stuff that floats to the top here?
I was under the impression that AGP is just like PCI, but with faster reads from system RAM and a dedicated bus.
Which is to say that it suffers the same limits that 32bit/33MHz PCI does. So it's good for 132 megabytes per second, less overhead and fudge. And since it's got its own set of wires, it doesn't even have to compete with such things as the NIC. Nice.
If it's actually doing the rendering on the card, all it has to do is push back finished frames. 24fps 640x480x24 video consumes a bit over 20 megabytes per second, which is well within the capabilities of what we've got with AGP.
Besides, with the application in mind here, realtime isn't even a pipedream: it's an impossiblity. Minutes of video take hours or days to render. Bandwidth requirements are really pretty minimal.
Same with volume controls where increasing volume is anticlockwise. If I made a volume dial where increasing volume was clockwise, people would be righteously pissed because it clashed with expected behavior.
Where are you from? USians have been twisting things clockwise ("to the right") for more volume since the beginning of time. More recently, we've also been pushing the rightmost or uppermost button to increase volume.
Do clocks spin backward ("to the left") where you are?
The company I work for recently (~6 months ago) sold a system almost exactly as you describe, to great effect. My job was to make it all work together between them closing one PM, and reopening the next AM. So far, they're quite happy with it.
As configured, it has an LD T1, local DID PRI, auto attendant, VM retrieval by email, slick client-side GUI, about 120 analog (POTS) extensions, a handful of active h.323 IP extensions, and an operator console. Consumes only 4 rack spaces, instead of the couple dozen square feet of wall space occupied by their old switch. 17 PCI slots, hotswap Adaptec RAID, hotswap redundant power supplies, redundant quick-connect fans, audible alarms, gig-o-RAM, backplane, captive screws, yadda, yadda.
80 extensions in one spot, be they IP, analog, or 80 of each, is not a big deal.
Runs Win2k, has a network-operable Win32 GUI for administratia. It'll do all the fancy automatic least-cost call routing you can ask for between branches (via IP, or whatever other means you have). It will also do the remote PBX thing at least as well as anything else available today. Tenant-oriented resource allocation and detailed call reporting (and recording, if that's your gig) will keep the beancounters happy.
It's called Altigen. It mops the floor with Cisco's paltry offerings, across the board. And it's way, way cheaper.
the typical user (i.e. me) can expect to receive 360kB of mail in a day. At this rate one would expect that his 1GB of storage would be exhausted within
Since when does 360 times 365.25 equal one thousand thousands?
Yep. There's a few I don't like, too: I mentioned that. In my case, they're mostly EPs full of third-party remixes of music that I like, or similarly-fashioned "singles." The tracks I don't like are generally composed/reconstructed by bands I generally don't listen to.
But I knew that was probably going to be the case well before I paid for them, and wasn't surprised to find that I only enjoy a couple of tracks.
Every now and then, everyone buys a lemon. Not every product, artistic or otherwise, is perfect. Most of them are OK, though, or at enough of them to maintain my faith in the general decency of the purveyors of the products I buy.
So I buy albums, not tracks. I hope they're all good. A few (maybe 3%) aren't.
Ever hear of risk/reward? In my book, the reward of occasionally finding something new which is Really Good is well worth the 3% average risk of lemonpie filler tracks that I assume by blindly buying whole albums.
Besides:
How would anyone know if the tracks that -don't- get played on the radio are worth a fuck unless they went out of their way to find them (most conveniantly and legally, in the form of an album)?
My area is papered with cellular towers, as well. Absolutely perfect coverage everywhere, except in places like steel-walled buildings and basements. Which is rather fucking universal, unless the rules of RF propagation are different in Finland.
Should we put a sign on every non-obviously metal building and basement stair that says "Danger! Your cell phone just might not work in here!"
If I'm expecting an important phone call, I check my service indicator periodically -- at least when changing locales. If I were expecting an important phone call all the time, you'd better believe I'd be checking -all the time-.
Anything else would be either be dishonest or just plain irresponsible, even if this were Finland.
So let's download something like, oh, Manson's _Golden Age of Grotesque_. It costs us $14.95 and downloads in a few minutes (since we're already paying $50 for broadband).
What do we get? 15 non-cohesive, DRM-encrypted, lossy-encoded AAC files that are illegal to play outside of iTunes or an iPod. But, of course, we can burn it.
So let's do just that. It's been awhile since I've bought CD-Rs with jewel cases, but last time I did, they were about 60 cents each. Our total is now $15.55.
We want liner notes, of course, since we want to know who's playing which songs, and so we can read any difficult-to-understand lyrics. And the pictures are pretty cool, too. I figure it'd cost another $3 in raw materials for me to print this stuff out on my inkjet, and an additional $2 to have it laminated so that it's at least waterproof like a real CD. And since Apple doesn't have anything like a PDF file for me to work from, it also costs me a few hours of my time to research, assemble, set, and print this stuff. Being conservative, let's say 5 hours at a modest $12 per hour.
We're now up to $80.55 in just time and materials, and we don't even have a label for the fucking CD yet.
Amazon sells this CD for $14.99, with free shipping. It's even cheaper than that at the large, local music store downtown, and I can walk there from here. Comes with jewel case, glossy liner notes, a screen-printed universally-playable CD with unencrypted, unprotected, uncompressed 16/44.1 stereo audio just like the mastering engineer heard. Takes a but a few minutes to rip to MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, OGG, MPG, or whatever your particular fancy is. And the folks at Gracenote, freedb, or MusicBrainz will gladly fill in the id3 tags for you, negating any severe production time from the format conversion.
What albums do you wish you hadn't purchased because they only have a single good tune?
If they're really such bad artists that they'll publish obviously bad, unpolished songs as filler to get an album out sooner without the dread "EP" moniker/pricecut, why are you buying their stuff in the first place? That smells like material for hand-out demos and bar bands who've only written 2 songs, not professional musicians with CDs in wide distribution.
The mind boggles that people actually support such nonsense.
I've got several hundred CDs. Real, store-bought discs. On all but a handful of them, I like each and every track. On many of my CDs, even the composition of the album is a work of art in and of itself, much like a symphony.
And that's how I play them, same as my MP3s: by album.
What sort of artists do you strange people listen to, whose music you enjoy so little that you'd prefer to not hear more of their work?
Isn't the flashing "No Service" light on your phone a good enough indicator that the thing isn't going to be working?
I mean, it's not implicit that a cell phone is going to work anywhere at all, anyway. They are completely unreliable unreliable communication mediums, no matter what Verizon says.
If one is really stupid to have someone's life depend on their bloody cellphone, they'd better be diligent enough to notice when there's no service. And if they think they're too busy to notice, then their phone calls are plainly not very important to them.
Why do we need more signs to limit people's liability for other people's inattentiveness? Isn't the signal-to-noise ratio bad enough yet?
Slashdot Mirror
Really? That flies in the face of established security practices and case history. Stop propogating myth as fact.
In order to establish probable cause, an employee or agent of the store must do each of the following (courtesy of Chris E. McGoey, a man with many more titles in his name than you or I will ever have, at http://www.crimedoctor.com/shopliftingPC.htm):
1. You must see the shoplifter approach your merchandise
2. You must see the shoplifter select your merchandise
3. You must see the shoplifter conceal, carry away or convert your merchandise
4. You must maintain continuous observation the shoplifter
5. You must see the shoplifter fail to pay for the merchandise
6. You must approach the shoplifter outside of the store
I don't shoplift, but I've set off the the door alarm several times at Wal-Mart on my way out of the store with the stuff I just finished buying.
Each time, the reason was simple: The checkout clerk failed to properly deactivate security tag(s) on the stuff I'd just purchased.
I'd say that that's probably the case most of the time, since most other folks don't shoplift, either. Therefore, the door alarm going off is not usually an indication that one is trying to steal something, but is more probably an indication of a failure of their security model.
I'm not responsible for Wal-Mart's security (or Best Buy's, for that matter), and it's not my job to stick around while they try to figure out where they fucked up. I've paid them in full, by the time I get to the door, and have done no wrong. If the alarm goes off, I keep walking. It's my right.
The Constitution is really not that long of a document - perhaps you should read it sometime. It works for you, too.
When I go to Sam's Club, my purchases are checked against my receipt when I leave. I'm OK with this - it's one of the things I agreed to play along with when I became a member.
Best Buy, on the other hand, does not have membership. I enter the store as a public citizen, and I leave as a public citizen. I didn't agree to any limitations on my 4th Amendment rights when I entered their store.
If I go to BB and purchase an LCD display, it is mine from the time that payment is tendered. They have no right to detain, search, or inspect me, or any of my stuff, unless they feel they have probable cause to suspect me of an actual crime. (Cluestick: Refusing search, and/or even setting off RFID door alarms does not constitute probable cause.)
What country are you in again, son? Independance Day was two days ago - have you forgotten what it's supposed to be about already?
I remember compiling 2.0.x kernels on my own 100MHz Pentium. It took -forever-.
Later on, I built a 350MHz K6-2 machine for a customer, and it was a screamer compiling its 2.0.x kernel, taking just a few minutes.
Fast forward: I've got a very similar K6-2 350 as a miscellaneous server and firewall here. Compiling its 2.6 kernel takes -forever-.
But the new 2.4GHz HT 800MHz FSB P4 box I built recently for work is again a screamer, compiling its 2.6 kernel in a few minutes. This box is in roughly the same relative performance league as that K6-2 was Back In The Day.
Moral of this story: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Program and compiler complexity has kept pace with increases in processor speed, leaving the time to compile x more or less constant over at least the past few years.
'Sides, even if you can build a proper desktop system in two hours, distcc serves well to decimate the amount of time required. Whether it is used to cut that two-hour-long run down to 30 minutes minutes, or a 5-minute compile down to 60 seconds, distcc will always have its place[1].
[1]: Yes, yes, I know. People everywhere are saying "But who cares if it takes 5 minutes instead of 60 seconds? It's not like I can't continue using the machine while it's compiling." These people are ignoring the human aspect of the whole thing, which can be summarized as follows: Wife, house, kids, cars, jobs = 4 minutes worth of life that has been rescued from the computer by distcc.
Eh?
Surely, you meant to say "XFree86", and not just "X".
+5, even. Truly amazing.
Eh? By your logic, this is 100% efficient. I'm sure that structure is quite warm inside, and it's entirely self-heated!
Rather, what we need is a way to move that heat energy to where it is more useful, rather than just dumping it into the atmosphere, or figure out something (chemical, manufacturing, agricultural) else to do with it.
Why is there an ongoing hoopla over ribbon cables being big, ugly, and hard to manage?
Properly installed, they're neater and less restrictive of airflow than either rounded or SATA cables. And, you can make them yourself with tools you probably already own.
The trick is simple: Folding. Fold them against flat things, out of the way. Fold them at neat, 90-degree angles to turn corners and avoid adding crosstalk. Do this right, and they're visually stunning, easy to work with, and nearly transparent to airflow.
It just takes a bit of forethought and planning.
I recently installed a large-ish rackmount PC, with a three-bus hardware IDE RAID 5 config, along with the usual floppy and CD-ROM cables.
Abundance of room? Ha. The box was tight, with 17 full-length PCI cards installed. And cooling was at a premium, as the majority of those cards required additional power from 4-pin molex connectors. So the ribbon cables had to be dealt with accordingly.
The RAID cables snuck behind their Adaptec controller with neat bends, making them invisible and out of airflow. From there, they tucked flat against the backplane's mounting plate, keeping them almost invisible. They continued this trend until they met the 3-drive hotswap 5.25" enclosure mounted at the front.
Same stuff with the floppy, and the CD-ROM. All routed flat, out of the way. I'm not sure it could have been done at all with rounded or prefab SATA cables, without looking like a bowl of spaghetti and/or fucking up my goal of laminar airflow.
Remember the bit about rolling your own? It's easy, -and- you don't end up with slack that needs bundled up somewhere...
That'll never fly.
You're paying BT to complete a phone call for you, not act as an ISP. When I dial a modem, I want to talk to the fucking modem that I dialed, not some reasonable-facsimile-thereof. Maybe I intend to whistle a Bell 212a carrier as part of an art project and record it with my nifty voice modem, maybe I want to yell at a housemate through the modem speaker, maybe I want my credit card transaction to happen as fast as possible rather than waiting for two handshakes to complete instead of just one. Whatever the case, I want to make a phone call, not just transfer some data. And, besides, BT has no business keeping track of which numbers have modems answering, let alone treating them differently.
No, sir. A more general solution, as I've outlined above, is in order. There's nothing to track or configure on an ongoing basis. No weird latency or flow control issues due to mismatched connection speeds. No new problems popping up from old customer equipment.
It's simple. Switch encounters a modem carrier (or, more likely, highly-noncompressible information) and changes codecs, while nobody is the wiser.
'Sides, the whole idea of extraneous modems died in the 90s, at BT's own hand, when they stopped offering Tymnet's outdial capability.
For a company the size of BT, I see the following scenario as being faily likely:
BT switch detects modem/fax carrier.
BT switch toggles from rather-compressed g.723 to uncompressed 64kbps g.711 . g.711 is is either aLaw or uLaw, depending on pond-sidedness, just like ISDN, and also just like things are switched "normally" today.
Modem communication happens normally; BT writes off increased bandwidth (vs. g.723 voice) by saying to themselves "Well, at least that one g.711 modem call didn't cost us any more line capacity than it did before, and we got to packet-switch it instead of channelize it. Cool."
Everyone's happy. And your modem doesn't even know the difference.
Remember the firewall.
I mean, really. It's unlikely that he wants to run a corporate intranet web server with a hefty *SQL backend, while serving dozens of thin clients remote X11, alongside every daemon under the sun from squid to bind.
He just wants to get a little work done, maybe listen to some music or watch a little porn, locally, on an old Thinkpad[1]. Disabling anything he can live without, while firewalling the rest -will- be sufficient. If he wants to do something remotely, there's always SSH[2].
[1]: At 600MHz, it's plenty fast for most real applications. A little more RAM would help, but that's not as much of an issue with distros built in the same timeframe as that laptop was as it would be for, say, Fedora Core.
[2]: Yep, bug-ridden as hell in days of old. But it's always been a drop-kick install, in my experience, to upgrade SSL/SSH to whatever is deemed secure today, whether by using the distribution's package system or configure&&make install.
Broken printing. I always feel lucky when printing Just Works, and when it doesn't, rebooting is required to restore printer functionality. But even then, I'm forced to listen to a guy shout "Printing started!" and, subsequently, "Printing complete!" through the sound card. Option to disable the screaming man is non-functional. Driver software hasn't been updated in years, and will probably stay broken forever.
Broken scanning. Scanner drivers work inconsistantly, and included taskbar software is complete trash, causing general instability. Also years-old, and will remain broken forever.
Windows XP does not include OpenGL support.
Autodesk products are a bitch to steal. Easier and cheaper to use something like PythonCAD under Linux, perhaps with Cygwin's X server...
You haven't been annoyed, until you've been surprised by an errant Windows "DING!" through several thousand watts of PA. Why must everything "DING!" at maximum volume? Whatever happened to the PC speaker? And why are all of these samples normalized to kill?
If these issues ever get solved, I might give it a more serious role in my daily activities.
Let us assume that it really is a CPU horsepower vs. file size vs. sound quality issue.
Looking at two extremes:
Realaudio files used to play justfine, Back In The Day, on a slowish 486. It sounded like shit, but it worked fine. Of course, this same 486 was incapable of playing MP3s. For that, you generally needed a Pentium, and preferably a fast(ish) one.
And of course, these days, it just doesn't matter. MP3 playing consumes so little CPU time that nobody gives a thought to it running in the background. In other words, the hardware finally caught up (some time ago, really).
Fast forward, and things are the same, only portable. MP3 files play justfine, on just about everything. My old Riovolt SP-250, after a lot of effort from the Xiph folks and iRiver, is able to play some Vorbis without a hiccup.
Newer units play all Vorbis justfine, though. They use even less power doing it, and cost less than my SP-250 did. In other words, the hardware is already caught up.
Sufficient CPU power to play such new-ish formats as Vorbis will eventually creep into more products as the cost of CPU power decreases (eg. Moore's Law).
I'd like to forecast that it'll be easier, cheaper, faster, and better to simply wait for CPU power to catch up across the board, than to go ahead and invent a scalable codec. By the time you're done making the thing, no matter how brilliant it is, CPUs and DSPs will have advanced the price/performance ratio sufficiently that your efforts will fade into obscurity, just like intel's indeo video format[1] of more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, any foolish manufacturers or software developers who jumped on your scalable codec-bandwagon will watch their efforts fizzle and die, as people regroup to support formats that Don't Suck, like our existing OGG Vorbis.
That said, if you must tinker with software, do feel free to help improve Vorbis. Make it faster, make it smaller. Make it shit golden eggs, whatever. But don't reinvent the wheel without first examining where the rest of the world will be by the time you get done.
[1]: indeo was created as a high-ish quality, high-bitrate video format, designed to be encoded once and played anywhere. Framerate and quality would drop on low-end devices, while things would be more pristine on faster machines, all from the same source file. It died a quiet death when inevitable increases CPU speed made it a non-issue. Subsequently, better and more-intensive codecs like MPEG1 took over. The near-universal playability, and use, of the previously-hideously-intensive DivX family of codecs drive this point home.
The manual says whatever it says. The warranty says whatever it says, as well.
*shrug*
There's Federal laws in the United States which supercede such corporate verbiage. (Ford warranty != act of Congress.)
And they say I can use whatever 215/R15 tires I want to, as long that's what the car came with and they fall within factory specifications (including runout and roundness and tread depth and a slew of other parameters, I'm sure, if there's a lawyer in the mix). The automobile manufacturer will have no obligation to warrant these replacement tires, of course. But they're still obligated to warrant the rest of the vehicle, including the wheels and bearings, unless the use of replacement tires provably caused damage to these other items.
Same with motor oils. Or filters. Or wiper blades. Or whatever.
In order for Ford to pull this off, they'd have to (at least) warrant their stock tires for as long as they do their wheel bearings. Anything else would be criminal.
There's laws about this stuff, yaknow - you can use whatever replacement car parts you feel like without warranty concerns, as long as they fall reasonably within factory specifications. You can even do the work yourself.
It's not like he's trying to turn that Ford into a pimp wagon with 12" whitewalls protruding 4" past the fender -- the parent poster just wants a set of Blizzaks for his fishtailing Focus. Why would he deviate from the factory offset or width, unless he wanted to spend $x on new rims at the same time? It's -so- -much- cheaper to just have them remounted twice a year...
(Of course, I'm assuming that Blizzaks are, indeed, available in stock Ford sizing. Which may well not be the case.)
Databases are cool, but they're almost useless by themselves. Are we supposed to grok SQL statements every day just to locate a SCSI adapter?
What front-end software would you suggest be used for a home-oriented inventory control system?
Or is learning Perl, Tcl, PHP, HTML, and/or C, along with SQL and the different various features of available engines a prerequisite for organizing one's computer cruft? What a weighty project to undertake.
I maintain a good bit of inventory/stuff at home. Here's how I do it:
A cheap medium-size (~4 foot) rollaway toolbox. Individual components (resistors, caps, LEDs), in one drawer. Fasteners get their own drawer. Bundled cables in one. Small PC-card based items like RAM and CPUs get their own drawer. Add-on cards in another. Large items (fans, odd case hardware) get their own drawer. Power supplies and the like end up in the cabinet in the bottom of the box.
When I run out of space in one of these compartments, I start throwing things away, in order of age. An interesting side effect of this is that other things tend to disappear at the same time - a 12" amber monochrome monitor is a lot less useful after you toss the 15-year-old full-length ISA control card for it.
Mod parent -1, Offtopic. Only the first paragraph deals with patents at all.
The other 23 paragraphs form a rant which has nothing to do with anything here except for the poster's own political agenda. Given their blatant lack of contextual cohesion, I submit that it was probably written long before the article was even posted.
Do you mods ever -read- the stuff that floats to the top here?
How slow is slow?
I was under the impression that AGP is just like PCI, but with faster reads from system RAM and a dedicated bus.
Which is to say that it suffers the same limits that 32bit/33MHz PCI does. So it's good for 132 megabytes per second, less overhead and fudge. And since it's got its own set of wires, it doesn't even have to compete with such things as the NIC. Nice.
If it's actually doing the rendering on the card, all it has to do is push back finished frames. 24fps 640x480x24 video consumes a bit over 20 megabytes per second, which is well within the capabilities of what we've got with AGP.
Besides, with the application in mind here, realtime isn't even a pipedream: it's an impossiblity. Minutes of video take hours or days to render. Bandwidth requirements are really pretty minimal.
I think it'll be justfine, despite your FUD.
Do clocks spin backward ("to the left") where you are?
...since when has it been the world's job to keep track of everyone's office politics?
I don't care if, twelve years ago, Justin's boss said to him "you're not allowed to release anything without my OK."
It's not my job to keep track of these things.
He released it, and it's mine. End of story.
The company I work for recently (~6 months ago) sold a system almost exactly as you describe, to great effect. My job was to make it all work together between them closing one PM, and reopening the next AM. So far, they're quite happy with it.
As configured, it has an LD T1, local DID PRI, auto attendant, VM retrieval by email, slick client-side GUI, about 120 analog (POTS) extensions, a handful of active h.323 IP extensions, and an operator console. Consumes only 4 rack spaces, instead of the couple dozen square feet of wall space occupied by their old switch. 17 PCI slots, hotswap Adaptec RAID, hotswap redundant power supplies, redundant quick-connect fans, audible alarms, gig-o-RAM, backplane, captive screws, yadda, yadda.
80 extensions in one spot, be they IP, analog, or 80 of each, is not a big deal.
Runs Win2k, has a network-operable Win32 GUI for administratia. It'll do all the fancy automatic least-cost call routing you can ask for between branches (via IP, or whatever other means you have). It will also do the remote PBX thing at least as well as anything else available today. Tenant-oriented resource allocation and detailed call reporting (and recording, if that's your gig) will keep the beancounters happy.
It's called Altigen. It mops the floor with Cisco's paltry offerings, across the board. And it's way, way cheaper.
Questions?
the typical user (i.e. me) can expect to receive 360kB of mail in a day. At this rate one would expect that his 1GB of storage would be exhausted within
Since when does 360 times 365.25 equal one thousand thousands?
New math?
Yep. There's a few I don't like, too: I mentioned that. In my case, they're mostly EPs full of third-party remixes of music that I like, or similarly-fashioned "singles." The tracks I don't like are generally composed/reconstructed by bands I generally don't listen to.
But I knew that was probably going to be the case well before I paid for them, and wasn't surprised to find that I only enjoy a couple of tracks.
Every now and then, everyone buys a lemon. Not every product, artistic or otherwise, is perfect. Most of them are OK, though, or at enough of them to maintain my faith in the general decency of the purveyors of the products I buy.
So I buy albums, not tracks. I hope they're all good. A few (maybe 3%) aren't.
Ever hear of risk/reward? In my book, the reward of occasionally finding something new which is Really Good is well worth the 3% average risk of lemonpie filler tracks that I assume by blindly buying whole albums.
Besides:
How would anyone know if the tracks that -don't- get played on the radio are worth a fuck unless they went out of their way to find them (most conveniantly and legally, in the form of an album)?
Lovely.
My area is papered with cellular towers, as well. Absolutely perfect coverage everywhere, except in places like steel-walled buildings and basements. Which is rather fucking universal, unless the rules of RF propagation are different in Finland.
Should we put a sign on every non-obviously metal building and basement stair that says "Danger! Your cell phone just might not work in here!"
If I'm expecting an important phone call, I check my service indicator periodically -- at least when changing locales. If I were expecting an important phone call all the time, you'd better believe I'd be checking -all the time-.
Anything else would be either be dishonest or just plain irresponsible, even if this were Finland.
99 cents? Cheap?
So let's download something like, oh, Manson's _Golden Age of Grotesque_. It costs us $14.95 and downloads in a few minutes (since we're already paying $50 for broadband).
What do we get? 15 non-cohesive, DRM-encrypted, lossy-encoded AAC files that are illegal to play outside of iTunes or an iPod. But, of course, we can burn it.
So let's do just that. It's been awhile since I've bought CD-Rs with jewel cases, but last time I did, they were about 60 cents each. Our total is now $15.55.
We want liner notes, of course, since we want to know who's playing which songs, and so we can read any difficult-to-understand lyrics. And the pictures are pretty cool, too. I figure it'd cost another $3 in raw materials for me to print this stuff out on my inkjet, and an additional $2 to have it laminated so that it's at least waterproof like a real CD. And since Apple doesn't have anything like a PDF file for me to work from, it also costs me a few hours of my time to research, assemble, set, and print this stuff. Being conservative, let's say 5 hours at a modest $12 per hour.
We're now up to $80.55 in just time and materials, and we don't even have a label for the fucking CD yet.
Amazon sells this CD for $14.99, with free shipping. It's even cheaper than that at the large, local music store downtown, and I can walk there from here. Comes with jewel case, glossy liner notes, a screen-printed universally-playable CD with unencrypted, unprotected, uncompressed 16/44.1 stereo audio just like the mastering engineer heard. Takes a but a few minutes to rip to MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, OGG, MPG, or whatever your particular fancy is. And the folks at Gracenote, freedb, or MusicBrainz will gladly fill in the id3 tags for you, negating any severe production time from the format conversion.
Are you sure iTMS is cheaper?
What albums do you wish you hadn't purchased because they only have a single good tune?
If they're really such bad artists that they'll publish obviously bad, unpolished songs as filler to get an album out sooner without the dread "EP" moniker/pricecut, why are you buying their stuff in the first place? That smells like material for hand-out demos and bar bands who've only written 2 songs, not professional musicians with CDs in wide distribution.
The mind boggles that people actually support such nonsense.
I've got several hundred CDs. Real, store-bought discs. On all but a handful of them, I like each and every track. On many of my CDs, even the composition of the album is a work of art in and of itself, much like a symphony.
And that's how I play them, same as my MP3s: by album.
What sort of artists do you strange people listen to, whose music you enjoy so little that you'd prefer to not hear more of their work?
Do tell, so I can avoid buying their stuff.
Thanks.
Isn't the flashing "No Service" light on your phone a good enough indicator that the thing isn't going to be working?
I mean, it's not implicit that a cell phone is going to work anywhere at all, anyway. They are completely unreliable unreliable communication mediums, no matter what Verizon says.
If one is really stupid to have someone's life depend on their bloody cellphone, they'd better be diligent enough to notice when there's no service. And if they think they're too busy to notice, then their phone calls are plainly not very important to them.
Why do we need more signs to limit people's liability for other people's inattentiveness? Isn't the signal-to-noise ratio bad enough yet?