I use ATT UVerse, just for Interwebs these days, but I used to also have home phone and TV service from them.
If at any time my premium TV service or telephone service (which are both completely IP-based and on the same VDSL loop) were interrupted by my own or anyone else's Internet usage, I'd be very, very pissed.
That said, while I'm generally in favor of the concept of net neutrality, I do not know how to draw the line so that it is also fair and reasonable: I'd also be very pissed if any prioritization were to unduly limit my Netflix viewing.
Perhaps fortunately, it really doesn't seem to be an issue in my area: I can consistently achieve the maximum theoretical provisioned bandwidth on my VDSL line 24x7 using just a single TCP connection, except in instances where things are very plainly limited near/at the remote host. So it appears that both AT&T's network and those that they peer with seem to have ample capacity for whatever folks want to do.
I could have sworn that SGI had something like this on their Onyx and reality systems many years back. Sadly I did not get a chance to play with them, but they had the big rendering and compute machines centralized, and small head units where you wanted things.
I was too young/inexperienced/poor to actually lay hands on relative big-iron like SGI back in their heyday, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was true: There was a lot of really awesome tech being sold by them around that time, and it's an efficient way to distribute limited (and at that time, very expensive!) resources.
You neglect to remember that the Voodoo 1 and 2 were only capable of full-screen output using that passthrough cable, and had no conventional 2D processing capabilities of their own. The pass-through cable was essentially just a component of an automatic A/B switch: You could either visualize the output of one card, or of the other, but never both at the same time. (At least not by those means.)
To render 3D stuff on a Voodoo 1/2 and have it displayed inside of a window instead of full-screen required[1] the framebuffer hacks I mentioned earlier. ISTR even "all-in-one" Voodoo Banshee cards also requiring similar tricks in order to render GL into a window, and that the whole mess didn't really get sorted out until nVidia started making decent 3D products and 3dfx released the actually-really all-in-one Voodoo 3. (Though the Voodoo3 3500 TV did use an internal analog overlay[2] to support viewing live television without bogging any portion of the system in any meaningful capacity.)
Meanwhile, in another post in this thread I've also mentioned VirtualGL, which is a clever system predating this recent/. posting about Bell Labs. VirtualGL includes some aspects of network transparency, and is something you can download and get using today if you think it's useful.
To be clear: The point I'm trying to raise is not that this new "virtual graphics port" stuff might somehow be useless, but simply that the concepts behind it are not at all new, as history shows.
[1]: Some/all of that requirement could have been mitigated by using the VGA Feature Connector which was relatively common in those times, which allowed a direct analog overlay[2]. But the simple fact is that 3dfx didn't go that route for their earlier cards, for better or for worse.
[2]: Many (most? all?) TV tuners of the time used this approach.
Perhaps, depending on how hardware-agnostic the APIs in question were/are.
Then again VirtualGL has been around for a bit, too, which brings network transparency thrown into the mix. I don't know how much more hardware-agnostic such a thing could be...
Similar tricks were used a dozen or so years ago by Mesa 3D to get standalone 3dfx Voodoo cards to output accelerated OpenGL in a window on the X desktop. The 3D stuff rendered on a dedicated 3D card, and its output framebuffer was eventually displayed by a second, 2D-oriented card that actually had the monitor connected.
Why do large corporations so often have a From addresses in their email which is specifically noted to not be monitored by humans under any circumstances?
If the only useful purpose for those addresses is to bounce mail back at them, then what possible human harm or inconvenience could come from doing so?
I've been reading alt.fuck.the.skull.of.jesus.binaries.pictures.erotica ever since it got newgrouped, and never realized there was an associated website.
Not sure how you manage to spend $6,000 at Alienware without upgrades. Looking just now, the most expensive base desktop system is about $4k.
But I can see that your reading comprehension is terrible, so I'm just going to assume that your math is equally bad. Or that perhaps you're just legitimately stupid.
The question is not whether or not to bounce random unwanted mail, but how to bounce mail back to "mailing lists."
When I see "mailing list," the first thing I think of is listserv and its cousins, not V ! 4 G R/\ spam.
I used to use this feature in Pine on a shared FreeBSD box about 16 years ago, and would still find it useful on occasion if it existed commonly today.
I own a small business, and I keep my stuff on Dropbox just because it's an easy way to access it no matter where I'm at, or what computer(s) I happen to have with me.
I keep backups of the stuff I put on Dropbox (using rsync and hard links to be somewhat space-efficient about having multiple generations of them stored locally). Anything which is even slightly sensitive is encrypted.
I could care less if the entire contents of my Dropbox account were published freely, maliciously deleted/massaged, or if the company were to go away tomorrow (except for being a bit bummed about the hassle).
Pro-Tip: If you put sensitive data on Teh Interweb without taking your own steps to properly secure it, you've got nobody to blame but yourself if/when it leaks out somehow...
You don't deserve to tell me what I deserve to be able to call myself. But since you're an asshole, I'd guess that you're used to hearing things like that.
That said: The systems I was comparing were in the $1,500 range, not the $6,000 range, and at this lower price-point a fairly big percentage of the cost is spent on fixed expenses (good motherboard, big PSU, fancy case, DVD-R, good cooling) than on high-margin upgrades that can easily be installed later for far less cash.
That system builders (whether Dell, Apple, Alienware, or IBM, or Joe's PC) often have huge margins on upgrades (as you and your friend discovered) isn't anything new, and is not what is being discussed.
What was being discussed, instead, was the inherent price differential of "pretty" vs. "not-so-pretty." And I have found, in my two examples, the price to be close to zero.
Please do try to understand the discussion next time.
One or two motors instead of a bunch of pistons and a crank: OK, that's simple.
But you still need a water pump for cooling the hot bits and/or heating the cabin. And something to turn the AC compressor. And something to operate the power steering system. And something to operate the power-assisted braking system.
Traditionally, this has all been done with a simple belt-drive system and/or vacuum. An electric needs a bunch of motors to do this. I'm not sure if this part is actually simpler.
No -- actually, I don't "need to avoid Broadcom like the plague," though you're obviously free to do so yourself if you'd like.
And I think you're excessively synonymizing "software enhancements," "kernel," and "firmware."
The "firmware" on my Broadcom router is very recent and extremely capable in the role that I am using it for. New "software enhancements" happen at a fairly regular pace. The base "kernel" is old, but its age does not seem to be detrimental in any way.
Er. A transmission is roughly defined as two meshed gears with tooth counts consisting of other than a 1:1 ratio. It doesn't mean "has more than one gear."
Even a simple electric golf cart commonly has a transmission, in that the differential gearing on the driven axle is not 1:1. My electric drills, including the antiques, all also have a transmission. As does my washing machine. My multi-gear (3x8) mountain bike has a transmission, but so does the boy's single-ratio semi-pro BMX freestyle rig, and the simple belt-driven blower on my furnace. The Tesla Roadster has a transmission (which, in early examples, also had two potential gear ratios but it was later reduced by software to being effectively a single-ratio transmssion).
Please try to understand the words that you use before you use them.
Oh, and yeah: Later WRT54G versions came with even less RAM and storage (8m/2m), and dropped Linux as their out-of-the-box OS.
But I've got one of those running Linux just fine that acts as a Wifi gateway for a big gnarly HP Color Laserjet that sits in a spot at the office where a run of Cat5 was completely impractical due to building construction.
I put it together in less than 2 hours, including a trip to Wal-Mart to buy the thing, and it's been running flawlessly for about 4 years. Nobody has touched it, and except for the odd (annual-ish) power outage, it's never been turned off.
I guess you think I should gather from this experience that Broadcom gear is useless due to lack of documentation, but I really don't see it that way. Instead, I see it as cheap shit that works.
You're on Slashdot. You should realize that I am fully willing to back up my conjecture with a wild array of anecdotes and maybe even some minimal research, and will defend it to death even if that means a dissertation on the philosophical aspects of the discussion.
No, I mean the WRT54G, which spurred a whole lot of interesting development in spite of the fact that both Broadcom and Linksys refused to release anything of much help. It predates Linux 2.6.
The WRT54GL came much later and exists entirely because of the accidental popularity of WRT54G hacking.
Both devices have very limited RAM and built-in storage (16 and 4MB, respectively). It may be entirely appropriate to keep them running on 2.4 indefinitely, even in a hypothetical perfect world where running 2.6 on them could be made simple.
Yeah. I guess some scientist somewhere determined that some bird eggs had thinner shells in areas treated with DDT, than some other bird eggs in other areas that were not treated with DDT.
IIRC, no attempt was made beyond simple correlation to explain these presumably-valid observations.
And then, -poof-, no more DDT.
But at least we've still got mosquitoes, malaria and bed bugs.
Oh yeah? Well, my link showed a map of Lima and even implied it was in Peru (which is a nationality which OP did not specify in the text of his comment).
So, there. And stuff.
I submit that Lima, [unspecified] has very accurate mapping on Google Maps, having myself driven there for almost a decade, and can personally attest to the fact that it has far more than three streets.
*whoosh* indeed: It may not actually be very funny, but it is very clearly an intentional parody, which you quite plainly missed.
(Perhaps you simply lack sufficient pedantry to understand the *whoosh*. This would be exceptional for the usual crowd here on/., but nonetheless.)
Slashdot Mirror
Keep being contrived!
Yeah, you're right. Better to just not even try to let anyone know at all. Information wants to be squandered, etc.
(And, also: Please choke on a bucket of cocks.)
On the other hand:
I use ATT UVerse, just for Interwebs these days, but I used to also have home phone and TV service from them.
If at any time my premium TV service or telephone service (which are both completely IP-based and on the same VDSL loop) were interrupted by my own or anyone else's Internet usage, I'd be very, very pissed.
That said, while I'm generally in favor of the concept of net neutrality, I do not know how to draw the line so that it is also fair and reasonable: I'd also be very pissed if any prioritization were to unduly limit my Netflix viewing.
Perhaps fortunately, it really doesn't seem to be an issue in my area: I can consistently achieve the maximum theoretical provisioned bandwidth on my VDSL line 24x7 using just a single TCP connection, except in instances where things are very plainly limited near/at the remote host. So it appears that both AT&T's network and those that they peer with seem to have ample capacity for whatever folks want to do.
And as long as that's the case: Who cares?
I was too young/inexperienced/poor to actually lay hands on relative big-iron like SGI back in their heyday, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that was true: There was a lot of really awesome tech being sold by them around that time, and it's an efficient way to distribute limited (and at that time, very expensive!) resources.
You neglect to remember that the Voodoo 1 and 2 were only capable of full-screen output using that passthrough cable, and had no conventional 2D processing capabilities of their own. The pass-through cable was essentially just a component of an automatic A/B switch: You could either visualize the output of one card, or of the other, but never both at the same time. (At least not by those means.)
To render 3D stuff on a Voodoo 1/2 and have it displayed inside of a window instead of full-screen required[1] the framebuffer hacks I mentioned earlier. ISTR even "all-in-one" Voodoo Banshee cards also requiring similar tricks in order to render GL into a window, and that the whole mess didn't really get sorted out until nVidia started making decent 3D products and 3dfx released the actually-really all-in-one Voodoo 3. (Though the Voodoo3 3500 TV did use an internal analog overlay[2] to support viewing live television without bogging any portion of the system in any meaningful capacity.)
Meanwhile, in another post in this thread I've also mentioned VirtualGL, which is a clever system predating this recent /. posting about Bell Labs. VirtualGL includes some aspects of network transparency, and is something you can download and get using today if you think it's useful.
To be clear: The point I'm trying to raise is not that this new "virtual graphics port" stuff might somehow be useless, but simply that the concepts behind it are not at all new, as history shows.
[1]: Some/all of that requirement could have been mitigated by using the VGA Feature Connector which was relatively common in those times, which allowed a direct analog overlay[2]. But the simple fact is that 3dfx didn't go that route for their earlier cards, for better or for worse.
[2]: Many (most? all?) TV tuners of the time used this approach.
Perhaps, depending on how hardware-agnostic the APIs in question were/are.
Then again VirtualGL has been around for a bit, too, which brings network transparency thrown into the mix. I don't know how much more hardware-agnostic such a thing could be...
Indeed -- not new, at all.
Similar tricks were used a dozen or so years ago by Mesa 3D to get standalone 3dfx Voodoo cards to output accelerated OpenGL in a window on the X desktop. The 3D stuff rendered on a dedicated 3D card, and its output framebuffer was eventually displayed by a second, 2D-oriented card that actually had the monitor connected.
Why do large corporations so often have a From addresses in their email which is specifically noted to not be monitored by humans under any circumstances?
If the only useful purpose for those addresses is to bounce mail back at them, then what possible human harm or inconvenience could come from doing so?
Geez, indeed.
I've been reading alt.fuck.the.skull.of.jesus.binaries.pictures.erotica ever since it got newgrouped, and never realized there was an associated website.
Thanks!
Not sure how you manage to spend $6,000 at Alienware without upgrades. Looking just now, the most expensive base desktop system is about $4k.
But I can see that your reading comprehension is terrible, so I'm just going to assume that your math is equally bad. Or that perhaps you're just legitimately stupid.
(It's OK. We can't all be above-average.)
This.
The question is not whether or not to bounce random unwanted mail, but how to bounce mail back to "mailing lists."
When I see "mailing list," the first thing I think of is listserv and its cousins, not V ! 4 G R /\ spam.
I used to use this feature in Pine on a shared FreeBSD box about 16 years ago, and would still find it useful on occasion if it existed commonly today.
*shrug*
I own a small business, and I keep my stuff on Dropbox just because it's an easy way to access it no matter where I'm at, or what computer(s) I happen to have with me.
I keep backups of the stuff I put on Dropbox (using rsync and hard links to be somewhat space-efficient about having multiple generations of them stored locally). Anything which is even slightly sensitive is encrypted.
I could care less if the entire contents of my Dropbox account were published freely, maliciously deleted/massaged, or if the company were to go away tomorrow (except for being a bit bummed about the hassle).
Pro-Tip: If you put sensitive data on Teh Interweb without taking your own steps to properly secure it, you've got nobody to blame but yourself if/when it leaks out somehow...
You don't deserve to tell me what I deserve to be able to call myself. But since you're an asshole, I'd guess that you're used to hearing things like that.
That said: The systems I was comparing were in the $1,500 range, not the $6,000 range, and at this lower price-point a fairly big percentage of the cost is spent on fixed expenses (good motherboard, big PSU, fancy case, DVD-R, good cooling) than on high-margin upgrades that can easily be installed later for far less cash.
That system builders (whether Dell, Apple, Alienware, or IBM, or Joe's PC) often have huge margins on upgrades (as you and your friend discovered) isn't anything new, and is not what is being discussed.
What was being discussed, instead, was the inherent price differential of "pretty" vs. "not-so-pretty." And I have found, in my two examples, the price to be close to zero.
Please do try to understand the discussion next time.
I'm sure that those of us whom care are weeping for your loss.
Wal-Mart cashes checks for $3, and is generally open 24/7.
I use them a lot for this service, which generally costs me far less than ~5% for the checks I cash there.
(Are Wal-Marts therefore always located in a crappy part of town?)
One or two motors instead of a bunch of pistons and a crank: OK, that's simple.
But you still need a water pump for cooling the hot bits and/or heating the cabin. And something to turn the AC compressor. And something to operate the power steering system. And something to operate the power-assisted braking system.
Traditionally, this has all been done with a simple belt-drive system and/or vacuum. An electric needs a bunch of motors to do this. I'm not sure if this part is actually simpler.
No -- actually, I don't "need to avoid Broadcom like the plague," though you're obviously free to do so yourself if you'd like.
And I think you're excessively synonymizing "software enhancements," "kernel," and "firmware."
The "firmware" on my Broadcom router is very recent and extremely capable in the role that I am using it for. New "software enhancements" happen at a fairly regular pace. The base "kernel" is old, but its age does not seem to be detrimental in any way.
Er. A transmission is roughly defined as two meshed gears with tooth counts consisting of other than a 1:1 ratio. It doesn't mean "has more than one gear."
Even a simple electric golf cart commonly has a transmission, in that the differential gearing on the driven axle is not 1:1. My electric drills, including the antiques, all also have a transmission. As does my washing machine. My multi-gear (3x8) mountain bike has a transmission, but so does the boy's single-ratio semi-pro BMX freestyle rig, and the simple belt-driven blower on my furnace. The Tesla Roadster has a transmission (which, in early examples, also had two potential gear ratios but it was later reduced by software to being effectively a single-ratio transmssion).
Please try to understand the words that you use before you use them.
You should be nicer to the man's dog.
Oh, and yeah: Later WRT54G versions came with even less RAM and storage (8m/2m), and dropped Linux as their out-of-the-box OS.
But I've got one of those running Linux just fine that acts as a Wifi gateway for a big gnarly HP Color Laserjet that sits in a spot at the office where a run of Cat5 was completely impractical due to building construction.
I put it together in less than 2 hours, including a trip to Wal-Mart to buy the thing, and it's been running flawlessly for about 4 years. Nobody has touched it, and except for the odd (annual-ish) power outage, it's never been turned off.
I guess you think I should gather from this experience that Broadcom gear is useless due to lack of documentation, but I really don't see it that way. Instead, I see it as cheap shit that works.
YMMV.
You're on Slashdot. You should realize that I am fully willing to back up my conjecture with a wild array of anecdotes and maybe even some minimal research, and will defend it to death even if that means a dissertation on the philosophical aspects of the discussion.
But I really don't feel like it just now...
(Thanks for your reply. You made me laugh a bit.)
No, I mean the WRT54G, which spurred a whole lot of interesting development in spite of the fact that both Broadcom and Linksys refused to release anything of much help. It predates Linux 2.6.
The WRT54GL came much later and exists entirely because of the accidental popularity of WRT54G hacking.
Both devices have very limited RAM and built-in storage (16 and 4MB, respectively). It may be entirely appropriate to keep them running on 2.4 indefinitely, even in a hypothetical perfect world where running 2.6 on them could be made simple.
Yeah. I guess some scientist somewhere determined that some bird eggs had thinner shells in areas treated with DDT, than some other bird eggs in other areas that were not treated with DDT.
IIRC, no attempt was made beyond simple correlation to explain these presumably-valid observations.
And then, -poof-, no more DDT.
But at least we've still got mosquitoes, malaria and bed bugs.
Which, if I am not mistaken, is the same as saying "they need blood to survive."
Oh yeah? Well, my link showed a map of Lima and even implied it was in Peru (which is a nationality which OP did not specify in the text of his comment).
So, there. And stuff.
I submit that Lima, [unspecified] has very accurate mapping on Google Maps, having myself driven there for almost a decade, and can personally attest to the fact that it has far more than three streets.
*whoosh* indeed: It may not actually be very funny, but it is very clearly an intentional parody, which you quite plainly missed.
(Perhaps you simply lack sufficient pedantry to understand the *whoosh*. This would be exceptional for the usual crowd here on /., but nonetheless.)