As a Dad, one of the nicest things I discovered was tivo gave me absolute control over the TV. My little one never got to watch a live feed, but rather only got to watch what I had recorded - and also required intervention as each show ended to do something about it. I've seen way to many parents - and it is damn easy to do - just plop their kids in front of the tube and tune in PBS for what can quickly turn into half a day.
On the plus side, you should get in the habit of time shifting your TV watching. The odds of having a TV on for you to watch something while the little one is awake are slim. What little free time you actually have left over should not be wasted on commercials...
>>I realize the price will go down over time, but seriously, who is going to buy this chip?
But if it's released at $1000, they pay $1000 now, and you'll pay $200 in half a year.
Thing is, the prices on the FX series did not really drop. If the going price for a 57 is $1000, the fx 55 and 53 seem to be priced around $800. I waited for almost a year for the 3500+ to drop, and it went from $350 to $270 (for the rev E out today). A year. Use to be you could count on the fact that those waiting to snatch up the bargains one or two revs behind the latest greatest - not any more. I suspect the AMD64 3700+ won't drop below $200 anytime in the next six months... Love to be wrong here.
I've struggled to put my finger on it, but I think you nailed it. Gentoo makes it possible for a 'non-guru' like me to maintain the software on my server.
Originally, I had kicked Gentoo around because it had 'bleeding edge' support for new hardware. Wanted to run AMD64, wireless, or some ATI video chipset on a laptop - I could usually get it up and running a few months before the major distros started including it. All good and fine, but not enough to hold me to a distro when the others got the support sorted.
What did it for me was having a couple commercial applications (a zSeries mainframe emulator was the worst culprit) that were tied to specific distributions. Great, except for two months after buying the commercial cut of RH 8 for one and RH9 for the other, RH dropped the distro support for anything other than the enterprise versions. I then got the joy of trying to keep these boxes patched on my own. (eventually switched to the red carpet service) I was very much at the mercy of folks who packaged the RPM's or what ever the software used to distribute binary updates. Did I mention bitter? I found myself circling back to Gentoo not because it was faster or l33t, but because a n00b like myself could actually keep a system up to date with the source based approach.
Try the SuSE 'personal' edition - free if you figure out how to install via FTP, $40 for media. It picked up all the hardware on my T40p, T42p, and some of the older thinkpads I still have in service. Wireless works, bluetooth works (did not even know the T42p had that), X works. Just run the setup, hit next, next, next...
the two real issues are drivers and 16 bit userland code
It is not the drivers, it is the bloody applications hard coded to the OS versions. I've got a AMD64 system with a handful of HDD's for testing software. Just got done giving the first rounds of testing with Win2003-64 (still beta I think) and the GA version of WinXp-64. Since I am using an Nforce4 mainboard and Nvidia video card, I've got drivers for all of the on-board kit of a fully loaded box. The Adaptec controllers got picked up by the OS as well.
The real fun started when I started trying to run applications. Being clever, Microsoft thought to default the 'program files' to something like 'program files (64-bit)'. The parenthesis caused several installers (take steam for instance) to give grief. Rational Application Developer had all sorts of trouble trying to spin up, and the DVD burning software was a total loss. I've got a free copy, and I won't mess with it again for a few months.
You might get minor performance boosts from an nVidia-based PC, but don't be surprised if that PC overheats and dies within a year. SGI has military-grade strength and quality. PC hardware does not.
A better comment might have been you get what you pay for. Buy a cheapo machine, odds are you will have problems. Buy quality kit, and your expectations of what a workstation should be will remain solid. I suspect I paid more for my power supply and cooling equipment than some complete machines at Wal-Mart... The SGI kit is what I learned how to code on, back in the early days of bioinformatics and it was solid kit. The NVIDIA Quadro series cards are not slouches or some overclocked gamers card either. Just have to keep in mind that with PC's, just like any workstation platform, thought has to be put into designing the entire system. Had some great white box systems and some Dells that made our IT guys embarrassed to call them workstations.
I did. I'm just saying 16 years back I really, really sucked rocks on the salary front when I bought a 19" TV for about $250. I'd never pay that same percentage of my net income for a TV again...(grin)
No AGP slot - just running a 256M PCI-e card. Even with using a 4M PCI video card, still see 512M missing. Don't know why I see it with 4G of RAM and not 2G... Figured x86-64 would have sorted that, guess not.
... is only to serve as a warning to others. Just started to journal this the other day.
It would appear that the BIOS writers don't get this 64-bit thing. I picked up four 1G sticks of DDR 400 'value' RAM all at once rather than deal with mismatched venders later on. A painful step - about an extra $160 more than I planned to pay - but 2G of RAM is comes up a bit short when working with VMWare images that are running app servers. Besides, why not?
Had I not waited for an extra three months for a revision 'e' CPU that fixes the issues using all four memory slots, I might just be a bit bitter. Nothing on any of the forms warned me that 'supported 4G of RAM' actually translates into posting - not that you can actually access 3.4G in Win2k and 3.25G in Win2003-x64. Yup, sure enough, the 64-bit version of Windows system properties thinks it has even less memory then the 32-bit original. Task manager both report the same amount as the BIOS, however.
So, for all of those thinking this might make for a spiffy way to update an aging dual CPU rig, be warned about the RAM limitations. When DFI said 'supports 4G of RAM', they mean it will post...
+++
Dear Customer,
Thank you for submitting us the query. Due to the limitation of nF4 chipset of PCI-E aperture and related peripheral cache, it's normal condition to learned about 3+GB but not 4GB with total Memory capacity within 4 pieces 1GB memory modules inserted. If there's further query please don't hesitate to let us know.
Best,
---------------- DFI Technical Support Team
+++ (me) BIOS appears to only recognize three and a half gig of RAM, of the 4G total Ram (4x1G) installed. Fired up memtest-86 and it shows 3328M cached, 257M reserved. Add that up, and it puts me almost exactly 512M short of what I expected. I ran memtest86 on each stick individually, and in pairs and no errors were reported. Windows reports I have 3,407,334 KB RAM.
I am downloading the 64-bit SuSE Linux media. The CPU is a AMD64 3800+ Rev E (Venice core). I updated the mainboard with the current BIOS from your site.
Well, it looks pretty enough. Not a single mention as to any of the important stats, however. Modern hardware sucks up an incredible amount to juice, and this review did not mention how many amps on each rail, or decibels when the PS was running under load.
Been burned on crappy 'high wattage' power supplies before. Worth reading the Watts don't mean Jack sticky and a few others in the form if you are looking to build a SLI system.
Type-R... It was bad enough to buy a DFI 'LanParty UT SLI-DR' board, of which only three letters told me anything about it. What is with these marketing people?
I assume Hindi is accepted as standard language so people can actually communicate with each other.
Actually, they use English. Ended up spending a month or so over there and found I could communicate better with the taxi drivers in New Delhi than NYC.
Your debt card should never be used for anything other than cash withdrawal at the ATM. I pay my credit cards off each month, so I treat it as a convenient version of my checkbook. As a credit card, I am protected from fraudulent use - a maximum $50 liability without any special 'identity protection' program. Your debt card has none of this... In practice, my wife had her credit card number nicked. She audits our account each statement and caught it right away. (One of the advantages of on-line statements, btw) The credit card company canceled the card, issued a new one, and reversed all the charges. The longer delay between the time you figure out the theft and report it, the more you will pay out of your own pocket.
I am building a A64 system - should say built a system and are now troubleshooting. The BIOS will only recognize about 3.4G in a 4x1G configuration.
I'm running a SLI-DR board (rev AA0) with 4x1G of RAM and a revision E (Venice core) AMD64 CPU. The BIOS only recognizes 3,407,334 KB RAM. I've tested each stick, ran them in pairs, and tried them in another machine - so I don't think this is a RAM issue. I will be dual booting, but 64-bit Gento and Win2K (not moved to Win64 yet, but will when the MSDN kit shows up later this week) but neither recognize all the RAM. I've tried a couple BIOS versions - the latest, the latest beta, a couple hand rolled builds I found here - but no joy. Memtest-86 shows 3328M cached, 257M reserved. Add that up, and it puts me almost exactly 512M short of what I expected. I do have a 256M PCIe video card, but that is all the extra peripherals added in so far. BIOS reports all the RAM if I go 4x512 or 2x1G.
Another annoying thing is the board clocked down my DDR 400 RAM to DDR 333 and 2T timing when I added it in pairs. Granted, not the most uber leet stuff out there (CAS 3, with 3-4-7-4 stock timing, running 1T) Bumping it back up to 200mhz (DDR 400) from 166mhz (DDR 333) count as an overclock?
I use a t42p, which from the specks looks like it is a better machine than what they reviewed. I'm running 1600x1200 with 2G of RAM, and SuSE picked up all the hardware. Granted, when the t43p comes out, my current daily driver will be the 'old and busted'. I abuse the hell out of my machines, and the only series that has not come down with chronic cement poisoning has been the thinkpad.
Do yourself a favor and add http://itxt.vibrantmedia.com/ to the adblock list, before looking at the site. God, I hate that intelletext crap.
And have the lawyer write a simple letter explaining that you'll be paid through the end of your employment regardless of finding a replacement.
I'd use the lawyer only after he held up my check. Make the assumption he won't do something so stupid now, keep docs, and *if* he does something so dumb then pull out the hired guns.
Building value added plugins for a popular IDE (Eclipse) and people might pay more money
Isn't that the truth. IBM jumped into Eclipse with WSAD, then moved to the Eclipse 3 core with Rational Application Developer. I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing the current cut of RAD for the portal toolkit plugin for WPS 5.1 - only to find they want over 4k for the 'value add'. Lots of extras in there like the modeling tools, none of which I needed...
The EJB stuff is slowly working its way into Eclipse, which seems to me where most of these guys were trying to make their money. Even Netbeans had an 'enterprise' version for a couple grand if you wanted to do anything more than JavaBeans and JSP. It amazes me how long it took before things like My Eclipse plug-ins that give EJB tools for $30 a year - looking forward to more and more of these tools becoming commodity IDE items. Got to wonder how long IBM and others can keep charging stupid money for the plugins, however.
And it seems OK. On the plus side, it picked up the hardware nicely. I did not even know my t42p even had blue tooth, much less a Linux driver for it. Wireless just worked, sound, video (non accelerated) without any horking about.
The only rough spot was x would hang if I logged out the user. I could kill x with a cntr-alt-back, but the system would not nicely shut down. A minor nitpick was a fairly normal install without openoffice (would grab that and a few others fresh from the net) still required five bloody CD's to install. How hard is it to arrange a CD to have all the required packages on the first one or two iso images?
The MP3 thing pisses me off. I installed it on a spare drive since it was still a RC, so only tested a handful of apps. Rational's IDE has issues, but it looks like I can fix the scripts. Had it been a real install, I'd be a lot angry to find what looks like a sound card issue was a malformed player.
I spend a lot of time on the road, so she audits the hell out of my cards. Turns out there were a couple charges at a local hotel - weird, because it was not anything I would book! Weirder yet when she realized it was her card. My wife's credit card info got swiped at Target.
Anyhow, the way the scam worked is they booked the room with hotels.com using my bride's card info. They checked in, tried to pay with a card that was expired (or did not work - they were not clear on that). When the hotel attempted to charge for the room service and the time they were there, it defaults to the card used to make the reservation. Card canceled, new one issued, no cost to us - but dang, you really have to watch your statements.
I download music from iTunes all the time and burn it to audio CD's. How isn't it mine?
How many computers do you own? I have more than three - a small collection of laptops, a small stack of HDD with different operating systems, and more than three workstations in my home. That does not include what I have at work. Go ahead, try to put the DRM encoded AAC's into more than 3 computers iTunes and see what happens. The short version is you end up ripping the AAC to CD, then ripping the CD to MP3 (or what ever other format you want) to make it 'yours'. Absolute nonsense! I own an iPod shuffle, and the hoops iTunes made me run through just to add music to my collection was silly. CD's from half.com rip into high bitrate sound better than the re-encoded DRM AAC's.
That would mean each 'block' is 200 sq ft. Are these lilliputian cities?
Sounds about right. You have to remember - if you are campaigning outdoors, an "inch" refers to ten yards, indoors and underground, an "inch" refers to ten feet.
Everybody is forgetting each and every ethernet adapter has a unique serial number/address, called the MAC address. It would be very easy to prove/disprove you were the one or not by that address.
Many of the current cards let you set the MAC in software. Filtering keeps out the casual people, but those sniffing the network can probably spoof the MAC as well.
When I first entered the world of development, I signed an 'all your base' contract. I did not have that much meaningful code so it was easy to list the important prior art. What I missed was all those AD&D and MUD programs I wrote up.... but a contract is a contract. I contacted the legal department and ask them for a template statement indicating their IP ownership to add an updated build license, and what source repository I should check in the newly updated 'Malice's Turning Undead toolkit'.
The look on their face was priceless...
Surprisingly, the internal counsel amended the contract to not include prior art done on my home equipment. A good decade and some later I would never sign something like that again, but it was really funny at the time.
You are confusing the "number of connections for file-serving" which has not been changed with the "number of TCP connection attempts per second" which has been changed.
Not so much... They are horking about with the TCP/IP stack with the service packs. I was talking about changes they made in a Win2K service pack, but some of my code got burned with the WinXP sp2 as well.
--- Who does this feature apply to?
All users who use TCP/IP to connect and communicate information over a network should be aware of the changes incorporated in Windows XP Service Pack 2.
What new functionality is added to this feature in Windows XP Service Pack 2?
Restricted traffic over raw sockets
Detailed description
A very small number of Windows applications make use of raw IP sockets, which provide an industry-standard way for applications to create TCP/IP packets with fewer integrity and security checks by the TCP/IP stack. The Windows implementation of TCP/IP still supports receiving traffic on raw IP sockets. However, the ability to send traffic over raw sockets has been restricted in two ways:
I haven't seen any sort of consumer research, but I imagine people don't like to have their number of possible network connections restrained by the host operating system.
If you are running any cut of windows in the last five years and did the service packs, you probably have a neutered TCP/IP stack. Microsoft limits the number of connections - found this out the hard way when I patched a counter strike server and things went to hell in a handbasket. They cut down XP (10 connections with pro, 5 home) with Service Pack 2. Win2K (pro, server, adv server all different limits) had the same issues. There are tweaks - but if you are someone who might need more connections than that you might want to think about something a bit more capable as a server OS.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Dad, one of the nicest things I discovered was tivo gave me absolute control over the TV. My little one never got to watch a live feed, but rather only got to watch what I had recorded - and also required intervention as each show ended to do something about it. I've seen way to many parents - and it is damn easy to do - just plop their kids in front of the tube and tune in PBS for what can quickly turn into half a day.
On the plus side, you should get in the habit of time shifting your TV watching. The odds of having a TV on for you to watch something while the little one is awake are slim. What little free time you actually have left over should not be wasted on commercials...
>>I realize the price will go down over time, but seriously, who is going to buy this chip?
But if it's released at $1000, they pay $1000 now, and you'll pay $200 in half a year.
Thing is, the prices on the FX series did not really drop. If the going price for a 57 is $1000, the fx 55 and 53 seem to be priced around $800. I waited for almost a year for the 3500+ to drop, and it went from $350 to $270 (for the rev E out today). A year. Use to be you could count on the fact that those waiting to snatch up the bargains one or two revs behind the latest greatest - not any more. I suspect the AMD64 3700+ won't drop below $200 anytime in the next six months... Love to be wrong here.
I've struggled to put my finger on it, but I think you nailed it. Gentoo makes it possible for a 'non-guru' like me to maintain the software on my server.
Originally, I had kicked Gentoo around because it had 'bleeding edge' support for new hardware. Wanted to run AMD64, wireless, or some ATI video chipset on a laptop - I could usually get it up and running a few months before the major distros started including it. All good and fine, but not enough to hold me to a distro when the others got the support sorted.
What did it for me was having a couple commercial applications (a zSeries mainframe emulator was the worst culprit) that were tied to specific distributions. Great, except for two months after buying the commercial cut of RH 8 for one and RH9 for the other, RH dropped the distro support for anything other than the enterprise versions. I then got the joy of trying to keep these boxes patched on my own. (eventually switched to the red carpet service) I was very much at the mercy of folks who packaged the RPM's or what ever the software used to distribute binary updates. Did I mention bitter? I found myself circling back to Gentoo not because it was faster or l33t, but because a n00b like myself could actually keep a system up to date with the source based approach.
Try the SuSE 'personal' edition - free if you figure out how to install via FTP, $40 for media. It picked up all the hardware on my T40p, T42p, and some of the older thinkpads I still have in service. Wireless works, bluetooth works (did not even know the T42p had that), X works. Just run the setup, hit next, next, next...
the two real issues are drivers and 16 bit userland code
It is not the drivers, it is the bloody applications hard coded to the OS versions. I've got a AMD64 system with a handful of HDD's for testing software. Just got done giving the first rounds of testing with Win2003-64 (still beta I think) and the GA version of WinXp-64. Since I am using an Nforce4 mainboard and Nvidia video card, I've got drivers for all of the on-board kit of a fully loaded box. The Adaptec controllers got picked up by the OS as well.
The real fun started when I started trying to run applications. Being clever, Microsoft thought to default the 'program files' to something like 'program files (64-bit)'. The parenthesis caused several installers (take steam for instance) to give grief. Rational Application Developer had all sorts of trouble trying to spin up, and the DVD burning software was a total loss. I've got a free copy, and I won't mess with it again for a few months.
You might get minor performance boosts from an nVidia-based PC, but don't be surprised if that PC overheats and dies within a year. SGI has military-grade strength and quality. PC hardware does not.
A better comment might have been you get what you pay for. Buy a cheapo machine, odds are you will have problems. Buy quality kit, and your expectations of what a workstation should be will remain solid. I suspect I paid more for my power supply and cooling equipment than some complete machines at Wal-Mart... The SGI kit is what I learned how to code on, back in the early days of bioinformatics and it was solid kit. The NVIDIA Quadro series cards are not slouches or some overclocked gamers card either. Just have to keep in mind that with PC's, just like any workstation platform, thought has to be put into designing the entire system. Had some great white box systems and some Dells that made our IT guys embarrassed to call them workstations.
I did. I'm just saying 16 years back I really, really sucked rocks on the salary front when I bought a 19" TV for about $250. I'd never pay that same percentage of my net income for a TV again...(grin)
Don't forget, 250 1994 dollars is equivalent to $300-$400 at today's prices due to inflation.
True - but $400 is a lot easier to make today than what is was in 94. Glad paychecks did not follow inflation.
No AGP slot - just running a 256M PCI-e card. Even with using a 4M PCI video card, still see 512M missing. Don't know why I see it with 4G of RAM and not 2G... Figured x86-64 would have sorted that, guess not.
It would appear that the BIOS writers don't get this 64-bit thing. I picked up four 1G sticks of DDR 400 'value' RAM all at once rather than deal with mismatched venders later on. A painful step - about an extra $160 more than I planned to pay - but 2G of RAM is comes up a bit short when working with VMWare images that are running app servers. Besides, why not?
Had I not waited for an extra three months for a revision 'e' CPU that fixes the issues using all four memory slots, I might just be a bit bitter. Nothing on any of the forms warned me that 'supported 4G of RAM' actually translates into posting - not that you can actually access 3.4G in Win2k and 3.25G in Win2003-x64. Yup, sure enough, the 64-bit version of Windows system properties thinks it has even less memory then the 32-bit original. Task manager both report the same amount as the BIOS, however.
So, for all of those thinking this might make for a spiffy way to update an aging dual CPU rig, be warned about the RAM limitations. When DFI said 'supports 4G of RAM', they mean it will post...
Well, it looks pretty enough. Not a single mention as to any of the important stats, however. Modern hardware sucks up an incredible amount to juice, and this review did not mention how many amps on each rail, or decibels when the PS was running under load.
Been burned on crappy 'high wattage' power supplies before. Worth reading the Watts don't mean Jack sticky and a few others in the form if you are looking to build a SLI system.
Type-R... It was bad enough to buy a DFI 'LanParty UT SLI-DR' board, of which only three letters told me anything about it. What is with these marketing people?
I assume Hindi is accepted as standard language so people can actually communicate with each other.
Actually, they use English. Ended up spending a month or so over there and found I could communicate better with the taxi drivers in New Delhi than NYC.
Your debt card should never be used for anything other than cash withdrawal at the ATM. I pay my credit cards off each month, so I treat it as a convenient version of my checkbook. As a credit card, I am protected from fraudulent use - a maximum $50 liability without any special 'identity protection' program. Your debt card has none of this... In practice, my wife had her credit card number nicked. She audits our account each statement and caught it right away. (One of the advantages of on-line statements, btw) The credit card company canceled the card, issued a new one, and reversed all the charges. The longer delay between the time you figure out the theft and report it, the more you will pay out of your own pocket.
I am building a A64 system - should say built a system and are now troubleshooting. The BIOS will only recognize about 3.4G in a 4x1G configuration.
I'm running a SLI-DR board (rev AA0) with 4x1G of RAM and a revision E (Venice core) AMD64 CPU. The BIOS only recognizes 3,407,334 KB RAM. I've tested each stick, ran them in pairs, and tried them in another machine - so I don't think this is a RAM issue. I will be dual booting, but 64-bit Gento and Win2K (not moved to Win64 yet, but will when the MSDN kit shows up later this week) but neither recognize all the RAM. I've tried a couple BIOS versions - the latest, the latest beta, a couple hand rolled builds I found here - but no joy. Memtest-86 shows 3328M cached, 257M reserved. Add that up, and it puts me almost exactly 512M short of what I expected. I do have a 256M PCIe video card, but that is all the extra peripherals added in so far. BIOS reports all the RAM if I go 4x512 or 2x1G.
Another annoying thing is the board clocked down my DDR 400 RAM to DDR 333 and 2T timing when I added it in pairs. Granted, not the most uber leet stuff out there (CAS 3, with 3-4-7-4 stock timing, running 1T) Bumping it back up to 200mhz (DDR 400) from 166mhz (DDR 333) count as an overclock?
I use a t42p, which from the specks looks like it is a better machine than what they reviewed. I'm running 1600x1200 with 2G of RAM, and SuSE picked up all the hardware. Granted, when the t43p comes out, my current daily driver will be the 'old and busted'. I abuse the hell out of my machines, and the only series that has not come down with chronic cement poisoning has been the thinkpad.
Do yourself a favor and add http://itxt.vibrantmedia.com/ to the adblock list, before looking at the site. God, I hate that intelletext crap.
And have the lawyer write a simple letter explaining that you'll be paid through the end of your employment regardless of finding a replacement.
I'd use the lawyer only after he held up my check. Make the assumption he won't do something so stupid now, keep docs, and *if* he does something so dumb then pull out the hired guns.
Building value added plugins for a popular IDE (Eclipse) and people might pay more money
Isn't that the truth. IBM jumped into Eclipse with WSAD, then moved to the Eclipse 3 core with Rational Application Developer. I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing the current cut of RAD for the portal toolkit plugin for WPS 5.1 - only to find they want over 4k for the 'value add'. Lots of extras in there like the modeling tools, none of which I needed...
The EJB stuff is slowly working its way into Eclipse, which seems to me where most of these guys were trying to make their money. Even Netbeans had an 'enterprise' version for a couple grand if you wanted to do anything more than JavaBeans and JSP. It amazes me how long it took before things like My Eclipse plug-ins that give EJB tools for $30 a year - looking forward to more and more of these tools becoming commodity IDE items. Got to wonder how long IBM and others can keep charging stupid money for the plugins, however.
And it seems OK. On the plus side, it picked up the hardware nicely. I did not even know my t42p even had blue tooth, much less a Linux driver for it. Wireless just worked, sound, video (non accelerated) without any horking about.
The only rough spot was x would hang if I logged out the user. I could kill x with a cntr-alt-back, but the system would not nicely shut down. A minor nitpick was a fairly normal install without openoffice (would grab that and a few others fresh from the net) still required five bloody CD's to install. How hard is it to arrange a CD to have all the required packages on the first one or two iso images?
The MP3 thing pisses me off. I installed it on a spare drive since it was still a RC, so only tested a handful of apps. Rational's IDE has issues, but it looks like I can fix the scripts. Had it been a real install, I'd be a lot angry to find what looks like a sound card issue was a malformed player.
I spend a lot of time on the road, so she audits the hell out of my cards. Turns out there were a couple charges at a local hotel - weird, because it was not anything I would book! Weirder yet when she realized it was her card. My wife's credit card info got swiped at Target.
Anyhow, the way the scam worked is they booked the room with hotels.com using my bride's card info. They checked in, tried to pay with a card that was expired (or did not work - they were not clear on that). When the hotel attempted to charge for the room service and the time they were there, it defaults to the card used to make the reservation. Card canceled, new one issued, no cost to us - but dang, you really have to watch your statements.
I download music from iTunes all the time and burn it to audio CD's. How isn't it mine?
How many computers do you own? I have more than three - a small collection of laptops, a small stack of HDD with different operating systems, and more than three workstations in my home. That does not include what I have at work. Go ahead, try to put the DRM encoded AAC's into more than 3 computers iTunes and see what happens. The short version is you end up ripping the AAC to CD, then ripping the CD to MP3 (or what ever other format you want) to make it 'yours'. Absolute nonsense! I own an iPod shuffle, and the hoops iTunes made me run through just to add music to my collection was silly. CD's from half.com rip into high bitrate sound better than the re-encoded DRM AAC's.
That would mean each 'block' is 200 sq ft. Are these lilliputian cities?
Sounds about right. You have to remember - if you are campaigning outdoors, an "inch" refers to ten yards, indoors and underground, an "inch" refers to ten feet.
(kidding)
Everybody is forgetting each and every ethernet adapter has a unique serial number/address, called the MAC address. It would be very easy to prove/disprove you were the one or not by that address.
Many of the current cards let you set the MAC in software. Filtering keeps out the casual people, but those sniffing the network can probably spoof the MAC as well.
When I first entered the world of development, I signed an 'all your base' contract. I did not have that much meaningful code so it was easy to list the important prior art. What I missed was all those AD&D and MUD programs I wrote up.... but a contract is a contract. I contacted the legal department and ask them for a template statement indicating their IP ownership to add an updated build license, and what source repository I should check in the newly updated 'Malice's Turning Undead toolkit'.
The look on their face was priceless...
Surprisingly, the internal counsel amended the contract to not include prior art done on my home equipment. A good decade and some later I would never sign something like that again, but it was really funny at the time.
Not so much... They are horking about with the TCP/IP stack with the service packs. I was talking about changes they made in a Win2K service pack, but some of my code got burned with the WinXP sp2 as well.
---
Who does this feature apply to?
All users who use TCP/IP to connect and communicate information over a network should be aware of the changes incorporated in Windows XP Service Pack 2.
What new functionality is added to this feature in Windows XP Service Pack 2?
Restricted traffic over raw sockets
Detailed description
A very small number of Windows applications make use of raw IP sockets, which provide an industry-standard way for applications to create TCP/IP packets with fewer integrity and security checks by the TCP/IP stack. The Windows implementation of TCP/IP still supports receiving traffic on raw IP sockets. However, the ability to send traffic over raw sockets has been restricted in two ways:
TCP data cannot be sent over raw sockets.
I haven't seen any sort of consumer research, but I imagine people don't like to have their number of possible network connections restrained by the host operating system.
If you are running any cut of windows in the last five years and did the service packs, you probably have a neutered TCP/IP stack. Microsoft limits the number of connections - found this out the hard way when I patched a counter strike server and things went to hell in a handbasket. They cut down XP (10 connections with pro, 5 home) with Service Pack 2. Win2K (pro, server, adv server all different limits) had the same issues. There are tweaks - but if you are someone who might need more connections than that you might want to think about something a bit more capable as a server OS.