"Still the CBC gives us the choice of having the TV on or off, no need to change channels"
If you're in Canada, then you can get satellite. (That is, unless you're on the wrong side of an apartment building. But if it's an apartment, you'd probably have better than 26.4.)
"Telecom Italia upgraded, once agian, to ADSL in 2000. And, once agian, they fucked it up. They implemented ADSL using PPPoE. If you have not used PPPoE, your modem establishes a connection using a username/password. ISPs do this so they can monitor how much bandwidth you use."
ISPs like PPPoE because it acts as an additional layer, allowing you to treat a broadband network like a dialup network. There is less investment in infrastructure. It allows for easier dynamic reallocation of IP addresses. With PPPoE you are not 'online all the time' and you have to install a fscking client on your machine (typically win32 or mac only) to use it, although now most broadband routers support it as well.
"
Sometimes, I wonder who I pissed off to get so screwed on internet access..."
I mentioned this earlier, but I'll say it here: You are not screwed for internet access. I am, because the best I can get is 28.8K which happens to be shared across a 6 machine LAN at home.
"
Think this post is stupid? I've seen it happen too often. While wandering through the streets of Paris, I heard an American traveller comment to her husband about how "these people can't even get a Big Mac right!""
Who the hell goes on vacation to Europe and eats at MCDONALDS of all places?!!?!? I would have slapped that person so hard...
The provider does actually allow us to multilink on two lines. So at night when nobody wants to use the voice line we can get 2 x 28.8, or if the stars are aligned correctly, 2 x 31.2 allowing for a very fast 62.4K connection! I am actually away from home right now on business, and I have access to a 1.5 mbit line. Whenever this happens, my dad asks me to download the latest version of [...] linux distro.
Living in rural canada stinks. I would be surprised if anyone reading this has a worse situation than the one at my home: We have a single 28.8K dialup line shared over a LAN with six machines. There is no 56K available due to damn long phone loops. No broadband to speak of.
"They just made it more pen friendly. I, personaly, like the new Start menu. It adds a nice list of my most frequently used programs and such so that I don't have to go diving through the whole thing just to run my development environment."
If you like that, then you'll love this. It's a quasi command line freeware tool called MCL that has all but obsoleted using the mouse to start programs on my windows machine. Once you're used to it, you can't live without it.
"What if I gave them my bank account with £0? Tell them to deposit into an empty account.. instead of providing your *real* account? Also, can the banks track who makes the withdrawl so the criminals can be caught?"
Of course you should be willing to pay the NSF charge when they overdraw your account.
The person who was scamming the scammer got very elaborate, sending fake passports, documents, etc. with the name "James Kirk". It's quote funny.
I tried the same thing some months back and I actually got the scammer to fax their documents to the FBI electronic fraud group. He e-mailed me back saying he phoned "my number" which actually was the FBI and the woman there said there was no James Kirk... hehe
But seriously, if you receive a physical letter and you're in the USA, fax it to the FBI at (202) 406-5031. The Internet Fraud Complaint Centre is worth a visit, and in canada you can forward all such e-mails to wafl@phonebusters com which is Phonebusters which is a fraud specialist group that's federally funded.
"I had a bad experience along those lines with the Windows Update site, where a particular sound driver (I forget which, at the moment) from them would not work with my hardware, where the one from the manufacturer's website did."
I have never had a case where a driver from windows update did NOT cause an issue like this. Be it for sound, networking, or a mouse, the windows update driver always messed the system up. This is why I never get drivers from windows update for windows machines anymore.
"That's not odd at all. That's just how microsoft works. They want to protect their monopoly, and perhaps extend it to new products (Microsoft Brand Penis enlargers anyone?)."
I would find it ironic if MSFT actually offered these things, considering that it's the only company I know of named after it's founder's genitals.
"There is a proof-of-concept tool available right now, but it does not get good quality yet. There hasn't been much demand for it yet so developers have focussed elsewhere - maybe with the portables out this will change."
It would be cool if the software for the ogg vorbis portable player(s) would automatically peel files transferred to the player down to n kbps to save space, while the original high quality one stayed on main computer.
According to your nick, you are a cat, but I suspect you are in fact part of some FUD spreading team, or at least woefully mislead.
" I buy a few patented items every time I go to the grocery store. It doesn't bother me if there is a patent on that stand-up toothpaste dispenser and I don't see why it should, as long as it doesn't prevent me from getting the product and it only makes up a small fraction of its price. Why should it be different when paying $2 extra for that portable player or iTunes?"
If the patent owners on the toothpaste dispenser started charging at $50 royalty, obviously you would switch brands. If Thomson Conumer Electronics or MSFT started demanding outrageous royalties for MP3/WMA, you would switch to OGG, yes? Wait, your entire music collection is encoded in WMA... you're out of luck until you re-encode. Maybe at the time this happens, you are running MSFT's super DRM operating system with palladium and you can't even transcode your WMA/MP3 to ogg because you don't want to pay to access them. We shouldn't just pay a small fee and settle for MP3/WMA because unlike the toothpaste, you entire history of useage of the product is what they use to force you to stay with it. Re-encoding an entire music selection is not easy work.
" There is a loose end of non-commercial encoders, decoders and streams. But so far, mp3 consortium is just letting them exist and going after commercial licenses (that's as far as I know, any corrections?). Another good solution would be for them to ask end users go to some website and pay $5 for the right to use any MP3 software of their choice."
Thompson shut down BladeENC which was an open source encoder with patent litigaton. Fraunhofer's original purpose for creating MP3 was clearly stated: They want to make money from patent royalties on streaming audio. That's why the original FHG encoder was so bad above 128 kbit/s. It was designed for low bitrate streaming -- most people did not have broadband back then and Napster did not exist. In the long run, they will not tolerate companies or individuals who make free products to compete with paid ones. They, like any commercial entity, are out to make money!
" Yes, mp3 consortium could start going after LAME and WinAmp, harassing P2P users and otherwise turn evil. And that's a good thing that OGG and WMA are around to keep them reasonable. But they didn't turn evil yet and in the worst case I'll lose a couple of hundred bucks then buying new devices."
Of course OGG is around to keep Thompson reasonable. Although Thompson has said that they think there's patent infringing code within OGG Vorbis. (You'd think they would know considering that it's open source.) As to losing a couple of hundred dollars on new devices, you're saying that you would PAY to get into a world where you use products where a company can just instantly decide that you have to pay additional fees to access your music collection, and you're happy with that?
" As for quality, interoperability is far more important. If you make an 128Khz, CBR MP3, you can give it to about anyone and be sure they'll be able to play it. With OGG or WMA, a Mac user will be at least forced to do some painful things to hear the sound. And with portable players all bets are off. Even Linux-based Zaurus doesn't come with OGG support by default."
This is what the people who stand to make a lot of money from you on patented audio formats WANT you to say and think. Apathy in changing formats will just let them snare you that much more easily. It is just like with banks -- I work in the banking industry and I know that it is only apathy that keeps most people banking with their bank. If they woke up and looked at their situation, they would probably be able to find a better deal where they get the same services at much less cost with higher interest rates for their savings.
" Besides, mp3pro is not bad if you want quality at low bandwidth and still works with regular MP3 players in a pinch. Why not give it a try if you are not worried about interoperability?"
Once you start going with mp3pro, you run into the same problems with mp3. The cycle of exploitation by patents starts again.
If you were trying to write FUD, I hope you now realise that you need more practice because you are a poor FUD-spreader. If you honestly believed what you said, I hope you have learned something by reading this.
"WMA also boosts the volume of the encoded material to give the listener the impression that it's better quality, which is bad form, IMO."
Do you have a source for this? A while back, someone was spreading FUD about how WMA added 3 dB to make things sound louder and fake higher quality. (I actually helped spread this before I came to my senses.) As far as I know, the part about WMA boosting the amplitude is fiction. And just for the record, I also swear by OGG, and I can tell the difference between quality level 8.5 and 9.0.
Divide by 7 because you can get 7 usernames for one account. Also keep in mind that many people just coast on the '3 months free' service and then at the end, call to cancel it, and then take another free month when it's offered (so that they don't cancel.) The phone reps get a cash bonus for getting a person to stay with AOL like this.
"None of my failures were catastrophic. I haven't shutdown since the upgrade, so I can't speak to the clock issue, but the Dock was quite unusual - it was OS-install fresh for me. Everything was in the proper places (sort-of reply to above posts about friggin with the OS) - I keep iCal, Safari, and Terminal in my Dock and they were all missing. Maybe I'm just lucky."
The same thing happenned on my iBook.
"The picture shows how this thing is barely bigger than a pair of quarters edge-to-edge. Great. You know how often I lose change?"
That's what the 'accessory' market is for. Companies like kensington and targus will make cool keyring and necklace storage for these things if they become widespread.
"Text mode start up screen are cool! I don't need fancy graphics just so that my graphics card can get it's early morning POST exercise."
Who needs text OR graphics? My brother got a new Asus A7N8X Deluxe board for his birthday (along with a new Athlon XP and DDR RAM) and I was shocked to hear the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!
You'd hear in a sort of female type voice that the bootup was complete and the OS was loading. How about that for advanced boot?
" I'm sure the member directory plays a significant part. A year ago I created an email addy with them but forgot to opt out when registering. The name was a very obscure Babylon 5 alien reference (i.e. doesn't resemble any dictionary word); many fans don't even know about it. But the VERY NEXT DAY I had 5 spams sitting in my inbox. I hadn't even used it yet."
Spambot databases have very low lag. One time, as an experiment, I un-spam-armoured the e-mail address attached to my slashdot posts, and then I posted some messages. Within eight hours, I had spam. Fortunately for me, Sneakemail allows me to generate a new 'relay address' instantaneously.
"Sony and friends don't offer non-Windows laptops because IT WOULD COST THEM MONEY! This article is the biggest troll i've ever seen. In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line before the Windows install, stock them somewhere marked differently from the generic (Windows) laptops, update their inventory database, notify their distibutors who will then have to notify the stores... all adding up to a hell of a lot more than it would cost them to just put Windows on it and say "reformat at home if you like"."
This is why the article's submitter should look into an Apple notebook anyway. If the iBook is too large, then the 12" powerbook, although it does have heat issues. When buying this, you can be very sure that the money will be used to FIGHT microsoft as opposed to support it. And you can just load up Fink and Apple X11 which is enough for most people.
I have owned an iBook for about one month now which is a first after 10 years of windows and nearly 20 years total of microsoft computing. I get a nice warm feeling inside knowing that I did not help fuel anti-competitive practices by paying for windows when I bought the notebook.
"Anybody care to explain the purpose (if any) for the Sys Req button (shared by Print Screen). My impression of it is that it may have had some use way back in the day before my time, but can't think of any purpose today."
On windows, if you press this button, it will do a screen capture. Just press it, open your favourite paint program, and then paste and you will have a screen cap (without the mouse cursor.)
"But any tech geek worth his salt knows Plextor is besto. I have an old plextor 8/4/32a. It burns a cdr in about 10 minutes. It can get by any sort of copy protection with the appropriate software. And I've never had buffer underrun. Ever. The newer Plextors are even faster and even more high quality. No burner is better."
You've got that right. I've owned 2 plextors now (both IDE CD-R/w drives) and they were 100% solid with no problems ever. And I never found a copy protected CD which couldn't be properly ripped and then backed up with my drive.
One other good thing is that if you life in Europe and buy a Plextor burner, you'll get a copy of Nero, which is IMO one of the best burning programs out there. Too bad they ship the Roxio EasyCD crap in North America.
"There are plenty of legitimate reasons for doing this, such as wanting all incoming mail to go to one account, or making people have to think about whether they want to reply to a mailing list or just the default of the original poster. The From header is the one that requires a tiny bit of knowledge to "forge"."
One time, someone deliberately forged the 'from' header, inserting my address. They e-mailbombed a local grade school with tons of messages 'from' me talking about how 'I' had rooted their system. I had gone to that school once upon a time and the teachers there knew that I knew my way around computers, thus giving a grain of credibility to it.
I first found out about it when the police called me in to interview me. They were apparently told by someone that the only way such a thing could have been done was from my computer. I had to walk the officer through the basics of e-mail headers and how such things are very easy to forge. I was never changed with anything but the officer admitted to me that she did not know why she was given the case as she did not even own a computer!
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If you're in Canada, then you can get satellite. (That is, unless you're on the wrong side of an apartment building. But if it's an apartment, you'd probably have better than 26.4.)
ISPs like PPPoE because it acts as an additional layer, allowing you to treat a broadband network like a dialup network. There is less investment in infrastructure. It allows for easier dynamic reallocation of IP addresses. With PPPoE you are not 'online all the time' and you have to install a fscking client on your machine (typically win32 or mac only) to use it, although now most broadband routers support it as well.
" Sometimes, I wonder who I pissed off to get so screwed on internet access..."
I mentioned this earlier, but I'll say it here: You are not screwed for internet access. I am, because the best I can get is 28.8K which happens to be shared across a 6 machine LAN at home.
Who the hell goes on vacation to Europe and eats at MCDONALDS of all places?!!?!? I would have slapped that person so hard...
The provider does actually allow us to multilink on two lines. So at night when nobody wants to use the voice line we can get 2 x 28.8, or if the stars are aligned correctly, 2 x 31.2 allowing for a very fast 62.4K connection! I am actually away from home right now on business, and I have access to a 1.5 mbit line. Whenever this happens, my dad asks me to download the latest version of [...] linux distro.
Living in rural canada stinks. I would be surprised if anyone reading this has a worse situation than the one at my home: We have a single 28.8K dialup line shared over a LAN with six machines. There is no 56K available due to damn long phone loops. No broadband to speak of.
If you like that, then you'll love this. It's a quasi command line freeware tool called MCL that has all but obsoleted using the mouse to start programs on my windows machine. Once you're used to it, you can't live without it.
Of course you should be willing to pay the NSF charge when they overdraw your account.
The person who was scamming the scammer got very elaborate, sending fake passports, documents, etc. with the name "James Kirk". It's quote funny.
I tried the same thing some months back and I actually got the scammer to fax their documents to the FBI electronic fraud group. He e-mailed me back saying he phoned "my number" which actually was the FBI and the woman there said there was no James Kirk ... hehe
But seriously, if you receive a physical letter and you're in the USA, fax it to the FBI at (202) 406-5031. The Internet Fraud Complaint Centre is worth a visit, and in canada you can forward all such e-mails to wafl@phonebusters com which is Phonebusters which is a fraud specialist group that's federally funded.
I have never had a case where a driver from windows update did NOT cause an issue like this. Be it for sound, networking, or a mouse, the windows update driver always messed the system up. This is why I never get drivers from windows update for windows machines anymore.
I would find it ironic if MSFT actually offered these things, considering that it's the only company I know of named after it's founder's genitals.
This is a little misleading. TkcPlayer is a software program. It runs on the Zaurus.
It would be cool if the software for the ogg vorbis portable player(s) would automatically peel files transferred to the player down to n kbps to save space, while the original high quality one stayed on main computer.
If the patent owners on the toothpaste dispenser started charging at $50 royalty, obviously you would switch brands. If Thomson Conumer Electronics or MSFT started demanding outrageous royalties for MP3/WMA, you would switch to OGG, yes? Wait, your entire music collection is encoded in WMA ... you're out of luck until you re-encode. Maybe at the time this happens, you are running MSFT's super DRM operating system with palladium and you can't even transcode your WMA/MP3 to ogg because you don't want to pay to access them. We shouldn't just pay a small fee and settle for MP3/WMA because unlike the toothpaste, you entire history of useage of the product is what they use to force you to stay with it. Re-encoding an entire music selection is not easy work.
" There is a loose end of non-commercial encoders, decoders and streams. But so far, mp3 consortium is just letting them exist and going after commercial licenses (that's as far as I know, any corrections?). Another good solution would be for them to ask end users go to some website and pay $5 for the right to use any MP3 software of their choice."
Thompson shut down BladeENC which was an open source encoder with patent litigaton. Fraunhofer's original purpose for creating MP3 was clearly stated: They want to make money from patent royalties on streaming audio. That's why the original FHG encoder was so bad above 128 kbit/s. It was designed for low bitrate streaming -- most people did not have broadband back then and Napster did not exist. In the long run, they will not tolerate companies or individuals who make free products to compete with paid ones. They, like any commercial entity, are out to make money!
" Yes, mp3 consortium could start going after LAME and WinAmp, harassing P2P users and otherwise turn evil. And that's a good thing that OGG and WMA are around to keep them reasonable. But they didn't turn evil yet and in the worst case I'll lose a couple of hundred bucks then buying new devices."
Of course OGG is around to keep Thompson reasonable. Although Thompson has said that they think there's patent infringing code within OGG Vorbis. (You'd think they would know considering that it's open source.) As to losing a couple of hundred dollars on new devices, you're saying that you would PAY to get into a world where you use products where a company can just instantly decide that you have to pay additional fees to access your music collection, and you're happy with that?
" As for quality, interoperability is far more important. If you make an 128Khz, CBR MP3, you can give it to about anyone and be sure they'll be able to play it. With OGG or WMA, a Mac user will be at least forced to do some painful things to hear the sound. And with portable players all bets are off. Even Linux-based Zaurus doesn't come with OGG support by default."
This is what the people who stand to make a lot of money from you on patented audio formats WANT you to say and think. Apathy in changing formats will just let them snare you that much more easily. It is just like with banks -- I work in the banking industry and I know that it is only apathy that keeps most people banking with their bank. If they woke up and looked at their situation, they would probably be able to find a better deal where they get the same services at much less cost with higher interest rates for their savings.
" Besides, mp3pro is not bad if you want quality at low bandwidth and still works with regular MP3 players in a pinch. Why not give it a try if you are not worried about interoperability?"
Once you start going with mp3pro, you run into the same problems with mp3. The cycle of exploitation by patents starts again.
If you were trying to write FUD, I hope you now realise that you need more practice because you are a poor FUD-spreader. If you honestly believed what you said, I hope you have learned something by reading this.
Do you have a source for this? A while back, someone was spreading FUD about how WMA added 3 dB to make things sound louder and fake higher quality. (I actually helped spread this before I came to my senses.) As far as I know, the part about WMA boosting the amplitude is fiction. And just for the record, I also swear by OGG, and I can tell the difference between quality level 8.5 and 9.0.
Divide by 7 because you can get 7 usernames for one account. Also keep in mind that many people just coast on the '3 months free' service and then at the end, call to cancel it, and then take another free month when it's offered (so that they don't cancel.) The phone reps get a cash bonus for getting a person to stay with AOL like this.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Free AOL access for life.
"None of my failures were catastrophic. I haven't shutdown since the upgrade, so I can't speak to the clock issue, but the Dock was quite unusual - it was OS-install fresh for me. Everything was in the proper places (sort-of reply to above posts about friggin with the OS) - I keep iCal, Safari, and Terminal in my Dock and they were all missing. Maybe I'm just lucky." The same thing happenned on my iBook.
That's what the 'accessory' market is for. Companies like kensington and targus will make cool keyring and necklace storage for these things if they become widespread.
Who needs text OR graphics? My brother got a new Asus A7N8X Deluxe board for his birthday (along with a new Athlon XP and DDR RAM) and I was shocked to hear the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!
You'd hear in a sort of female type voice that the bootup was complete and the OS was loading. How about that for advanced boot?
Spambot databases have very low lag. One time, as an experiment, I un-spam-armoured the e-mail address attached to my slashdot posts, and then I posted some messages. Within eight hours, I had spam. Fortunately for me, Sneakemail allows me to generate a new 'relay address' instantaneously.
This is why the article's submitter should look into an Apple notebook anyway. If the iBook is too large, then the 12" powerbook, although it does have heat issues. When buying this, you can be very sure that the money will be used to FIGHT microsoft as opposed to support it. And you can just load up Fink and Apple X11 which is enough for most people.
I have owned an iBook for about one month now which is a first after 10 years of windows and nearly 20 years total of microsoft computing. I get a nice warm feeling inside knowing that I did not help fuel anti-competitive practices by paying for windows when I bought the notebook.
On windows, if you press this button, it will do a screen capture. Just press it, open your favourite paint program, and then paste and you will have a screen cap (without the mouse cursor.)
You've got that right. I've owned 2 plextors now (both IDE CD-R/w drives) and they were 100% solid with no problems ever. And I never found a copy protected CD which couldn't be properly ripped and then backed up with my drive.
One other good thing is that if you life in Europe and buy a Plextor burner, you'll get a copy of Nero, which is IMO one of the best burning programs out there. Too bad they ship the Roxio EasyCD crap in North America.
One time, someone deliberately forged the 'from' header, inserting my address. They e-mailbombed a local grade school with tons of messages 'from' me talking about how 'I' had rooted their system. I had gone to that school once upon a time and the teachers there knew that I knew my way around computers, thus giving a grain of credibility to it.
I first found out about it when the police called me in to interview me. They were apparently told by someone that the only way such a thing could have been done was from my computer. I had to walk the officer through the basics of e-mail headers and how such things are very easy to forge. I was never changed with anything but the officer admitted to me that she did not know why she was given the case as she did not even own a computer!
It was a joke ...
Sig: "Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!"
So you're not really a rocket scientist then ...