The larger the cups, the less trips to the 7-11 you need to make.
Back when I was a youngin' (3 years ago) and could handle staying up for days at a time at a lan party, I once drank over 11 litres of slurpee in just over 24 hours. If the caffine doesn't keep you awake, the bathroom trips sure as hell will.;)
I guess thats how I earned my title of "Slurpee King".
How effective is this really going to be? I can't see them using any more then a "beep" when a text ad pops up, but how many people are going to "read" text on their TV screen? People watch TV to be entertained, not to read. Thats also why commercials are more and more becoming a form of entertainment rather then some mundane "Buy product X from big monopoly corporation Y". Just look at the superbowl commercials for proof of entertaining commercials.
People get bored _very_ easily and I can't see placing a simple logo and some text at the bottom of the screen being very effective, people can easily ignore it. Now a 30second commercial that makes you roll on the floor laughing your ass off is about as effective of advertising as it gets. So much so that people will actually go out of their way to see your commercial. (ie: spending hours downloading them from the former adcritic.com?)
Is slashdot looking over my shoulder?
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 5, Informative
My VoIP Blasters just arrived last night, and I had a few hours to play with one of them.
The long and short of it is, if your only making calls in North America (from North America) its a waste of time and money. Theres enough flat rate/unlimited calling plans that will be cheaper, and better quality. I have a 1.5mbit/640kbit DSL line and making a call 400km's away up here in Canada was not that great. I would guess the latency was around 150-200ms, and even though I could hear the other party crystal clear 99.9% of the time, they complained my voice was "choppy" and it would miss the first/last bit of whatever I said. (silence detection I assume)
The Windows software is a little clumsy as well, it seemed difficult to control it entirely from the phone, without touching the computer. I'm guessing PC to PC calls (less latency,and not gateways in between trying to minimize network bandwidth) would be much better with this device, as I think the main problem was with InnoSpheres network.
There is something really cool about your cordless phone being plugged in to your computer and dialing 192#168#1#1, only to have the phone connected to that computer ring.:)
No, do not disable functionality in a piece of _evaluation_ software. I spent the time downloading it and setting it up to test all its features, not just a small percentage of them!
Car dealerships don't have demo vehicles with only three wheels, and offer you the fourth wheel once you make the purchase do they?
As well, when the trial period ends, do not cripple the program, especially if it gets installed on a server. The last thing I want is my phone ringing off the hook with angry users complaining a service isn't available because the trial period ran out and the program killed itself. Send reminders, maybe even put a delay at startup with a message or something, but please don't make the software self-destruct itself. If I'm serious about evaluating a piece of software, I want to put it to good use, in a semi-real enviroment.
I used to think that Mozilla was too slow and bloated. I still used it every day on my Linux box, but it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences.
However the speed issue was put on the back burner once I started using a small fraction of the features. Tabbed browsing, disabled onload popups, javascript console/debugger, etc, etc...
I still kept thinking, jeez, its just a browser people, it can't be _that_ hard to make something that renders HTML. However once I downloaded Komodo ( here )
and used it for a couple days, I saw the light. Mozilla isn't just a browser, its a platform. Komodo still suffers from Mozilla's slowness, but the amount of useful features included with it easily makes up for any speed issues. Mozilla will start to speed up once it matures more, so thats something I can wait patiently for.
I work for a medium sized web hosting company which sells dedicated/managed servers to customers. We will only put ICP Vortex cards in them. These are the only cards we put in our own servers as well, I would say we have at least 40 of them in our datacenter and they work great. Not to mention if a drive fails you can easily hear them beeping from outside the datacenter, even with all the server/air conditioner noise.
Great cards, great speed, and a not so bad price. They work flawlessly in Linux and Windows.
IBM claims this computer will do 7.5teraflops.
Compare this to Seti@home's 26.11 TeraFLOPs/sec.
Why wouldn't NuTec develope the software so every joe blow and there handheld could run a distributed client that does this. I personally have a hard time justifying time spent installing distributed.net or seti@home clients on all the machines I have access to, as I know my boss wouldn't understand the importance of cracking encryption, or searching for aliens on company time.;)
However searching for cures to human illnesses, who wouldn't want to do this? With a good piece of software and some proper advertising, theres no doubt they would surpass 30 or even 50 teraflops.
Though this may not be a possibility if huge amounts of data are required for the calculations. Anyone have some ideas about this?
I never looked in to this much, as I don't use Gnutella very often. But anytime I did, it wasn't more then 5 minutes before I had 25+ people all trying to download a file or two from me. Even on my cable modem this is too much. It eventually got to the point that each download was transfering on average less then 2-3kb/s.
If a poor modem user tries to share files and gets anything close to the same treatment, he/she wouldn't be able to download a thing! Let alone other people having a hope in hell in completing a transfer from them.
Why not just block them all together with IPChains?
966120470 - 08/12/2000 15:47:50 Host: authorized-scan.security.home.net/24.0.94.130 Port: 119 TCP Blocked
I've been doing that on 10 machines (all different cities) ever since they started scanning their hosts, and I run a full set of services on each machine. Haven't been bothered yet.
How much speed do you really need? If its available in your area, spend $40/month each for a cable modem or ADSL line and setup a VPN between the two of you. It still works great for games, and sharing files. Probably your cheapest short term solution.
Oh, I forgot to mention as well. The unit itself I could not get to skip, but I could however cause it to turn off. (yes, turn right off) by "twitching" it in two different directions. Slight hand movement and the thing would turn off. As well some MP3's caused it turn off.
Maybe I just got lucky enough to get the Microsoft "feature" Enhanced version.;)
I picked up a MPTrip from Easybuy2000, I wasn't impressed by this unit at all, I was hoping to plug it into my car stereo for some sweet driving music, but the line out quality was the shits. So I sent it back to EasyBuy requesting my money back (they have a 30 day money back guarantee)I sent it back within 2 weeks of recieving it, and haven't heard a thing from EasyBuy. Despite my repeating Emails. Money well spent. heh.
We tried the ol'fake camera AND motion sensor trick in one of the locations. Its been hit 3x more then any other place since we installed the fake system. Go figure. Also the locations are open 7 days/week so if something significant goes missing, it should be noticed within 48 hours.
I've done a little testing of my own, and if you had a camera taking snap shots once a second or so, creating a mpg, it doesn't take long to fast forward through a days worth of video. There are only two exits maximum to watch as well so... I guess I'll find out for sure though.
I _think_ this is company that makes the unit this guy mentioned. They make a huge variety of different products. Can't beat the price either. I just purchased one.
The way I understand it, is Transmeta got stats from the general "mobile computing" public, which stated people were not happy with the length of time batteries last in there "computing appliances". (Duh!) Why not, instead of investing 5+ years and tons of money etc... solving the problem for only the "mobile computing" market, solve the problem for every battery user in existance by making a better battery?
First off, if your "brave" enough, water cooling is very quiet. Use a fish tank pump or a garden "fountain" pump, in a tank of water is about as quiet as it comes for the best cooling possible really. (You can't hear your fish tank pump really can you?)
HINT: Use distilled water, unless you have _really_ clean tap water. I noticed a build up of "gunk" in the container surrounding the CPU's heat sink, after about 3 months the thing was so full it basically turned in an oven. Baked on bacteria isn't so nice to scrape off either.;)
Failing that, my other solution (currently in use) is two large 150 watt tower speakers made by Kenwood (www.kenwood.com?) with 10inch woofers. Crank some MP3's with these babies and your noisy fan problems disappear into the floor pounding bass. Though this route is little more expensive.;)
Not all companies have the exact same hardware, where this "imaging" idea works best. I can see using Ghost, ImageCast, or similar programs where every machine has the exact same hardware/settings. But comon, lets get practical. How many places do you know has this kind of setup?
The average medium to large sized business probably has a great variety of hardware configurations. Who wants to have store a 1-3Gb Image file for each different set of computer hardware configurations? The other thing is, most of these packages are more of a one-time, deal. Image them once and they run forever? Not likely, especially with Windows. I want something that runs every day and corrects the problems that occur on a daily basis. Especially when students and/or new users are using the computer. Things can really get messed up when the above people get there hands on a computer.
Where I work, we have about 10 different kinds of hardware configurations with 30 computers. We're a medium sized computer training business, so we have people who know next to nothing using these computers on a daily basis. 30-50 people use these computers EVERY day, and when they don't know what there doing for the most part, things can get really screwed up. But in a learning enviroment, locking people from certain areas of the system doesn't cut it. People don't learn when you lock them out. So we need to find a better approach.
Is there any software packages that support something similar to "imaging" only have a feature for computers with vastly different hardware? Like, to be honest it is really only a few registry key's that need changing to overcome this obsticle. (I know, because I've created software a few years back that did it. But unfortunately it doesn't work with FAT32, and I don't have the time to re-code it.)
It would be great to find a piece of software that takes care of this problem. Im sure its out there somewhere?
The test is missing several weapons, as I expect the demo will be as well. Buy the game, get the weapons. Some quite important weapons too I might add. Grenade Launcher? BFG?
It seems publishers of software products often take care of "testing" the software for the companies which create it. (ie: Activision does some testing for id software?) Why not have these companies that test the software release information about the bugs they find? Even, just make up some way to rate a product, and put that rating on the box somewhere. Similar to the current "movie like" ratings you see on computer gaming products. A bug rating of "A" would represent a minimal amount of bugs found during testing. A rating of "F" would tell consumers that there were many bugs found during the testing phase which were not fixed before the product shipped. If there was a central body that oversaw this rating, I think software companies would quickly clean up there act after there software got a "F" rating for bugs.
Of course, does anyone look at those "movie like" ratings on games anyways?:)
Slashdot Mirror
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
Thats all I've used since version 7 of Mandrake, it works great!
http://distro.conectiva.com.br/projetos/42
The larger the cups, the less trips to the 7-11 you need to make.
;)
Back when I was a youngin' (3 years ago) and could handle staying up for days at a time at a lan party, I once drank over 11 litres of slurpee in just over 24 hours. If the caffine doesn't keep you awake, the bathroom trips sure as hell will.
I guess thats how I earned my title of "Slurpee King".
How effective is this really going to be? I can't see them using any more then a "beep" when a text ad pops up, but how many people are going to "read" text on their TV screen? People watch TV to be entertained, not to read. Thats also why commercials are more and more becoming a form of entertainment rather then some mundane "Buy product X from big monopoly corporation Y". Just look at the superbowl commercials for proof of entertaining commercials.
People get bored _very_ easily and I can't see placing a simple logo and some text at the bottom of the screen being very effective, people can easily ignore it. Now a 30second commercial that makes you roll on the floor laughing your ass off is about as effective of advertising as it gets. So much so that people will actually go out of their way to see your commercial. (ie: spending hours downloading them from the former adcritic.com?)
It's better to pissed off then pissed on!
My VoIP Blasters just arrived last night, and I had a few hours to play with one of them.
:)
The long and short of it is, if your only making calls in North America (from North America) its a waste of time and money. Theres enough flat rate/unlimited calling plans that will be cheaper, and better quality. I have a 1.5mbit/640kbit DSL line and making a call 400km's away up here in Canada was not that great. I would guess the latency was around 150-200ms, and even though I could hear the other party crystal clear 99.9% of the time, they complained my voice was "choppy" and it would miss the first/last bit of whatever I said. (silence detection I assume)
The Windows software is a little clumsy as well, it seemed difficult to control it entirely from the phone, without touching the computer. I'm guessing PC to PC calls (less latency,and not gateways in between trying to minimize network bandwidth) would be much better with this device, as I think the main problem was with InnoSpheres network.
There is something really cool about your cordless phone being plugged in to your computer and dialing 192#168#1#1, only to have the phone connected to that computer ring.
No, do not disable functionality in a piece of _evaluation_ software. I spent the time downloading it and setting it up to test all its features, not just a small percentage of them!
Car dealerships don't have demo vehicles with only three wheels, and offer you the fourth wheel once you make the purchase do they?
As well, when the trial period ends, do not cripple the program, especially if it gets installed on a server. The last thing I want is my phone ringing off the hook with angry users complaining a service isn't available because the trial period ran out and the program killed itself. Send reminders, maybe even put a delay at startup with a message or something, but please don't make the software self-destruct itself. If I'm serious about evaluating a piece of software, I want to put it to good use, in a semi-real enviroment.
I used to think that Mozilla was too slow and bloated. I still used it every day on my Linux box, but it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences.
However the speed issue was put on the back burner once I started using a small fraction of the features. Tabbed browsing, disabled onload popups, javascript console/debugger, etc, etc...
I still kept thinking, jeez, its just a browser people, it can't be _that_ hard to make something that renders HTML. However once I downloaded Komodo ( here )
and used it for a couple days, I saw the light. Mozilla isn't just a browser, its a platform. Komodo still suffers from Mozilla's slowness, but the amount of useful features included with it easily makes up for any speed issues. Mozilla will start to speed up once it matures more, so thats something I can wait patiently for.
Kudos to the Mozilla team, keep up the good work!
I work for a medium sized web hosting company which sells dedicated/managed servers to customers. We will only put ICP Vortex cards in them. These are the only cards we put in our own servers as well, I would say we have at least 40 of them in our datacenter and they work great. Not to mention if a drive fails you can easily hear them beeping from outside the datacenter, even with all the server/air conditioner noise.
Great cards, great speed, and a not so bad price. They work flawlessly in Linux and Windows.
IBM claims this computer will do 7.5teraflops.
;)
Compare this to Seti@home's 26.11 TeraFLOPs/sec.
Why wouldn't NuTec develope the software so every joe blow and there handheld could run a distributed client that does this. I personally have a hard time justifying time spent installing distributed.net or seti@home clients on all the machines I have access to, as I know my boss wouldn't understand the importance of cracking encryption, or searching for aliens on company time.
However searching for cures to human illnesses, who wouldn't want to do this? With a good piece of software and some proper advertising, theres no doubt they would surpass 30 or even 50 teraflops.
Though this may not be a possibility if huge amounts of data are required for the calculations. Anyone have some ideas about this?
I never looked in to this much, as I don't use Gnutella very often. But anytime I did, it wasn't more then 5 minutes before I had 25+ people all trying to download a file or two from me. Even on my cable modem this is too much. It eventually got to the point that each download was transfering on average less then 2-3kb/s.
If a poor modem user tries to share files and gets anything close to the same treatment, he/she wouldn't be able to download a thing! Let alone other people having a hope in hell in completing a transfer from them.
Why not just block them all together with IPChains? 966120470 - 08/12/2000 15:47:50 Host: authorized-scan.security.home.net/24.0.94.130 Port: 119 TCP Blocked I've been doing that on 10 machines (all different cities) ever since they started scanning their hosts, and I run a full set of services on each machine. Haven't been bothered yet.
How much speed do you really need? If its available in your area, spend $40/month each for a cable modem or ADSL line and setup a VPN between the two of you. It still works great for games, and sharing files. Probably your cheapest short term solution.
Oh, I forgot to mention as well. The unit itself I could not get to skip, but I could however cause it to turn off. (yes, turn right off) by "twitching" it in two different directions. Slight hand movement and the thing would turn off. As well some MP3's caused it turn off.
;)
Maybe I just got lucky enough to get the Microsoft "feature" Enhanced version.
I picked up a MPTrip from Easybuy2000, I wasn't impressed by this unit at all, I was hoping to plug it into my car stereo for some sweet driving music, but the line out quality was the shits. So I sent it back to EasyBuy requesting my money back (they have a 30 day money back guarantee)I sent it back within 2 weeks of recieving it, and haven't heard a thing from EasyBuy. Despite my repeating Emails. Money well spent. heh.
We tried the ol'fake camera AND motion sensor trick in one of the locations. Its been hit 3x more then any other place since we installed the fake system. Go figure. Also the locations are open 7 days/week so if something significant goes missing, it should be noticed within 48 hours.
I've done a little testing of my own, and if you had a camera taking snap shots once a second or so, creating a mpg, it doesn't take long to fast forward through a days worth of video. There are only two exits maximum to watch as well so... I guess I'll find out for sure though.
http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm
I _think_ this is company that makes the unit this guy mentioned. They make a huge variety of different products. Can't beat the price either. I just purchased one.
The way I understand it, is Transmeta got stats from the general "mobile computing" public,
:)
which stated people were not happy with the length
of time batteries last in there "computing appliances". (Duh!) Why not, instead of investing 5+ years and tons of money etc... solving the problem for only the "mobile computing" market, solve the problem for every battery user in existance by making a better battery?
This would make more sense to me
First off, if your "brave" enough, water cooling is very quiet. Use a fish tank pump or a garden "fountain" pump, in a tank of water is about as quiet as it comes for the best cooling possible really. (You can't hear your fish tank pump really can you?)
;)
;)
HINT: Use distilled water, unless you have _really_ clean tap water. I noticed a build up of "gunk" in the container surrounding the CPU's heat sink, after about 3 months the thing was so full it basically turned in an oven. Baked on bacteria isn't so nice to scrape off either.
Failing that, my other solution (currently in use) is two large 150 watt tower speakers made by Kenwood (www.kenwood.com?) with 10inch woofers. Crank some MP3's with these babies and your noisy fan problems disappear into the floor pounding bass. Though this route is little more expensive.
Not all companies have the exact same hardware, where this "imaging" idea works best. I can see using Ghost, ImageCast, or similar programs where every machine has the exact same hardware/settings. But comon, lets get practical. How many places do you know has this kind of setup?
The average medium to large sized business probably has a great variety of hardware configurations. Who wants to have store a 1-3Gb Image file for each different set of computer hardware configurations? The other thing is, most of these packages are more of a one-time, deal. Image them once and they run forever? Not likely, especially with Windows. I want something that runs every day and corrects the problems that occur on a daily basis. Especially when students and/or new users are using the computer. Things can really get messed up when the above people get there hands on a computer.
Where I work, we have about 10 different kinds of hardware configurations with 30 computers. We're a medium sized computer training business, so we have people who know next to nothing using these computers on a daily basis. 30-50 people use these computers EVERY day, and when they don't know what there doing for the most part, things can get really screwed up. But in a learning enviroment, locking people from certain areas of the system doesn't cut it. People don't learn when you lock them out. So we need to find a better approach.
Is there any software packages that support something similar to "imaging" only have a feature for computers with vastly different hardware? Like, to be honest it is really only a few registry key's that need changing to overcome this obsticle. (I know, because I've created software a few years back that did it. But unfortunately it doesn't work with FAT32, and I don't have the time to re-code it.)
It would be great to find a piece of software that takes care of this problem. Im sure its out there somewhere?
Easy, weapons...
The test is missing several weapons, as I expect the demo will be as well. Buy the game, get the weapons. Some quite important weapons too I might add. Grenade Launcher? BFG?
It seems publishers of software products often take care of "testing" the software for the companies which create it. (ie: Activision does some testing for id software?) Why not have these companies that test the software release information about the bugs they find? Even, just make up some way to rate a product, and put that rating on the box somewhere. Similar to the current "movie like" ratings you see on computer gaming products. A bug rating of "A" would represent a minimal amount of bugs found during testing. A rating of "F" would tell consumers that there were many bugs found during the testing phase which were not fixed before the product shipped. If there was a central body that oversaw this rating, I think software companies would quickly clean up there act after there software got a "F" rating for bugs.
:)
Of course, does anyone look at those "movie like" ratings on games anyways?