I too have an ugly ass gray box next to my entertainment center. Well, actually, it is behind the entertainment center as all I need to access is the power button. Noise is not a problem as the entertainment center itself and the carpet make it not much louder then ambient.
They problem with a streaming applicance is compatibility. There is NO way a single device is going to meet many peoples needs without being a bitch to a specific software vendor and doing everything one way. Here are some examples. Will it play Flac, WV, APE, Ogg, AAC? What bitrates can it support? How about the many different video codecs? Will it be wireless AND support WPA/TKIP or how about radius authentication? Will it have RGB, svideo, or composite video output? Will you have control over the video quality like overscan, saturation etc.. How about coaxial or optical digital or line level RCA jacks? Will it support the reading of multiple directories and multiple network drives or will you have to re arrange your media once again and put your entire media collections into specific directories? How will it handle your meta info like id tags and such?
These devices are nice and welcomed but unless you plan on limiting yourself to the capabilities of the device, you are not going to get a true all in one device.
Every company runs the risk of bad source components and/or bad design. I used to work at my parents electronics shop and I remember replacing caps in many GE and Zenith equipment as well. In the last few years, there was an issue with bad caps in a variety of motherboards and power supplies. Bad or improper design should be more of a worry then faulty components for early adopters. A faulty product can be introduced at any point in a products run as suppliers change, a design failure issue will always be there until the design is changed. The two issues can be confused easily as well. If a 50volt cap is a common failure in a certain product, is it the cap that is faulty or should the circuit design have called for a 100v or a different type of cap instead?
and is stored for some variable time on news servers all over the world
Why did you assume a variable time? What was that assumption based on? Just because your news server had a 5 day retention does not mean they all do. That retention limit was a limit based on storage space and bandwidth, not a standard. No where in any NNTP draft or RFC will you see ANY mention of a retention time limit standard what so ever. There never was one. Your assumption was technically and completely wrong and was never implied. It's nice to put your mindset on this in a sandbox environment and claim you thought there was an implied time limit but did you REALLY believe that was the case? If so, how?
Usenet is a public forum. You are posting your comments in public for all to see. There is no implied expire time, the auther may agrue there should be one or he thought there was one but there is not and there never was. The only limits were equipment and cost associated with storage for whoever has access to usenet either commercially or personally. An example, Giganews has some text newsproups with 3 years of retention, Joe's ISP may have 2 days, Dejanews and now Google have what seems to be unlimited retention. Just because the Usenet server the dude used back in the day only kept messages for 5 days is not the grounds for assumption that there is reasonable expectation the message would disappear or become unpublished. I personally have some archieves of some groups from 10 years ago as do many others. How could someone make a claim of a assumed time limit and be justified? What was that assumption based on? His assumption that my hard drive crashs and I have no backups?
There are two issues here where I believe his thinking is jacked.
1) Posted a comment to the public in a public form. Basically, published a work to the public forum for anyone and everyone in the world to see and use. 2) Wrongly assumed with absolutely no technical basis there may be some time limit where that public comment would disappear or go away.
There is a HUGE difference between breaking a law and violating a contract or a business agreement. One is criminal, the other civil. If I'm not mistaken, isn't the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act a criminal act? What about renting a VHS tape from Blockbuster and erasing the tape and returning it. I think BB would have to pursue the recourse from you as a civil matter, not the local police department. Who knows..
Besides, it should come as no great shock that Microsoft do not tolerate dual booting systems anyway - look at how easily Windows wipes over the boot block when you reinstall it on a PC where you're booting Linux also.
That is a disadvantage. I now use the plain old Windows boot loader for multibooting for that reason. The process is extremely simple if you use bootpart. It provides a easy method of extracting the boot block from other partition/drives. It will also adds the required configuation changes to the c:\boot.ini file. Dual boot in a few simple steps. If your second or third planned OS also blindly over writes the boot drive MBR as well like Windows does, it way be a little tricky. I've only dual booted with various Linux distributions and everyone of them I've used allows you to specify where you want the boot block.
On a side note, my last dual boot Windows/Linux install was Xandros. With Xandoros, when you uncheck the box to include the bootloader in the MBR, it states that you must make a boot floppy when prompted later in the install or you will not be able to boot into Xandros. I was never prompted or given a chance to make that floppy throughout the install and was only given a "Press Enter to restart computer" when the install was done. Xandros does default to also placing the boot block in the root of the installation partition so I was able to use bootpart and get it going with no problems.
Care to elaborate? I would trust the data integrety of a cd and the cd drive over a floppy and its drive any day. I'm sure each could screw up at any time though.
I've been using Sunrocket over Comcast for about two months so far. Only one call with an echo. Sunrocket themselves was down for a few hours last week but it had nothing to do with Comcast. I download a lot and I do not use QOS and it still works without problem. I also have the Gizmo on my local network side of my router and not between the router and cable modem like they suggest in their documentation.
Obviously not at the quantity this guy has but I have an common odd user name that I use on yahoo, hotmail, and several other free web mail places. I get tons of email confirmations and passwords for people that setup accounts at places. Just last week was a Myspace account a dude setup trying to get back at his ex girlfriend. Nice pictures but I had hundreds of requests to add people to my friends list because of the content of the pictures that were posted.
I've also had several accounts created with my username from Snapfish and similar photo places. The content is not spectacular but some are interesting.
If it wasnt for that GPL code, Apple would have nothing to use and would have to develop that functionality themselves or pay someone to make if for them or license it from.
All it takes to have access to an administrative share on a PC (like c$) is be in the local administrator group or be a member of a group that is in the administrator group on that PC. Considering probably 95% of the users that use Windows desktops run as administrator, that idea is not such a major difference from normal and probably overlooked. In the corporate world, companies lock down desktops or at least put users in the power users or users group. In that situation, having the IT department support people as desktop machine administrators is very common. Different classes of machines are in different OUs and you can fine tune what people (including IT), are in what groups for what computers. You obviously do not put lower tech support in a group that has administrator access to your servers and you can remove your network engineers from admin access on the PCs that are not in the IT department.
Having joe blow in a security group that has administrator access is a little crazy but can be manageable if it is only a specific subset of PCs. It is not surprising that companies do not tune or even think about permissions to that level and may provide all or nothing. I blame that on a weak or small struggling IT department or a weak and/or clueless IT manager but there are many of them out there.
You need the right tool for the job. A file server is not a document management system. There are many different document management systems available on the market for all sizes of companies. They provide central storage, versions, tracking of access and changes (who accessed and changed what and when), system admin and end user controlable security settings, ability to lock and check out documents, indexing, full text searching, and blah blah blah. If a company chooses NOT to use one of these packages, they will have problems managing and tracking.
Companies have been offering this service for years, USA.net is one example. It is not good for everyone but there are a lot of businesses where this solution seems much cheaper and easier then maintaining their own email system (at least on paper it looks that way). In general, the more spread out your employees or offices are, the more advantage you get by outsourcing your email. I worked at a company with roughly 100K employees spread throughout the world that switched over. I left before it was completed but they are up and running on it now.
I have Sirius as well. Overall, I love it. I take in in my cars and directly into my house when I get home.
The "talk" stations are good enough for talk but relative to the music stations, the quality is much lower.
I'm on the fence about the quality of the music stations though. For music, I mainly bounce around between to Boom Box, Octane, Hard Attack, Hair Nation, and Back Spin. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes not. It does not sound like Sirius is selectively changing bandwidth though as when a song does not sound so good, it does sound like it is overly compressed, it sounds more like less quality source material IMO. Maybe they have the ability to dynamically change bandwidth like that but I've never heard it happen mid song.
With all of that being said.. I would always be happier with better quality but my comments about the quality is just an observation, it a non factor and I am extremely happy with the service. There are so many different types of music and talk shows (even ones that many 18-?? year old males would find entertaining like Maxim) and not enough time in the day to listen to it all.
Now it could be that the poster is right, but we can't tell based on 1 sample. Especially when they eel that Apple is responsible for things breaking when they step on them.
My point (although not clear) is the person had one that broke and he has witnessed a 100% failure rate, your statisitical analysis was a complete waste of time and looks like an effort to defend Apple with no backing what so ever. The reason I claim you are trying to blindly defend is you keep going on and on about stepping on the headphones but clearly ignore the other two problems the user had that had NOTHING to do with that instance.
My headphone jack and battery comment was not directed specifically at Apple, that was portable players in general. These 3.5mm stereo headphone jacks have been popular since the the early 80's and it seems everything from sound cards to cell phones all suck. The companies probably save maybe 1 to 2 cents max per unit with inferior jacks coupled with a crappy design.
And, it is like anything, the fact that you pay something weeds out a lot of total losers. It doesn't get rid of all the users by any means, but that barrier to entry is enough to stop the majority of people who would just log on to be annoying.
I've spent a lot of time online with both the PS2 and Xbox live. There is no difference in the overall amount of idiots and losers between the two. Each title has different percentages but that is a function of the target age of the typical player of that game, not the online service.
>I>this only protects in that it allows us to trace spammers to a registered account
It also helps as the rogue SMTP engine would have to use your credentials to send email through your ISP mail server as well. Unless it can pluck that information from some common place in the registry, it would not be able to authenticate and send.
BB uses that practice more then any retailer I have ever seen. You can always tell what is/was on sale at a BB buy walking down the aisle and looking for empty spots. Why take a 50% of the front page of your weekly ad to advertise something that you only have a minimum of 5 per store. They claim minimum but they should really be saying maximum because that stuff is gone by 11am Sunday morning and there is little to no chance it will be back in stock before the sale is over. The reason for those sales and limited stock on hand is exactly what you stated, a scam to get you in the store. Even Sears offers a comparable discount on comparable merchandise if they run OOS of the sale item. Most other retailers seem to attempt to meet the expected demand, not BB though. This is one of the many reasons I only give BB foot traffic. I use them when I need to do a hands on compare of products then I specifically buy it somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some system in the works to ban people from entering the store that do not purchase something after 10 visits. Their shady practices WILL eventually catch up with them and I hope they die a quick death when it does.
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I too have an ugly ass gray box next to my entertainment center. Well, actually, it is behind the entertainment center as all I need to access is the power button. Noise is not a problem as the entertainment center itself and the carpet make it not much louder then ambient.
They problem with a streaming applicance is compatibility. There is NO way a single device is going to meet many peoples needs without being a bitch to a specific software vendor and doing everything one way. Here are some examples. Will it play Flac, WV, APE, Ogg, AAC? What bitrates can it support? How about the many different video codecs? Will it be wireless AND support WPA/TKIP or how about radius authentication? Will it have RGB, svideo, or composite video output? Will you have control over the video quality like overscan, saturation etc.. How about coaxial or optical digital or line level RCA jacks? Will it support the reading of multiple directories and multiple network drives or will you have to re arrange your media once again and put your entire media collections into specific directories? How will it handle your meta info like id tags and such?
These devices are nice and welcomed but unless you plan on limiting yourself to the capabilities of the device, you are not going to get a true all in one device.
Here is a pretty good "internet" timeline reference. Not much specific to web servers but does mention CERN and the first web server in 1991.
Every company runs the risk of bad source components and/or bad design. I used to work at my parents electronics shop and I remember replacing caps in many GE and Zenith equipment as well.
In the last few years, there was an issue with bad caps in a variety of motherboards and power supplies.
Bad or improper design should be more of a worry then faulty components for early adopters. A faulty product can be introduced at any point in a products run as suppliers change, a design failure issue will always be there until the design is changed. The two issues can be confused easily as well. If a 50volt cap is a common failure in a certain product, is it the cap that is faulty or should the circuit design have called for a 100v or a different type of cap instead?
and is stored for some variable time on news servers all over the world
Why did you assume a variable time? What was that assumption based on? Just because your news server had a 5 day retention does not mean they all do. That retention limit was a limit based on storage space and bandwidth, not a standard. No where in any NNTP draft or RFC will you see ANY mention of a retention time limit standard what so ever. There never was one. Your assumption was technically and completely wrong and was never implied.
It's nice to put your mindset on this in a sandbox environment and claim you thought there was an implied time limit but did you REALLY believe that was the case? If so, how?
Usenet is a public forum. You are posting your comments in public for all to see. There is no implied expire time, the auther may agrue there should be one or he thought there was one but there is not and there never was. The only limits were equipment and cost associated with storage for whoever has access to usenet either commercially or personally. An example, Giganews has some text newsproups with 3 years of retention, Joe's ISP may have 2 days, Dejanews and now Google have what seems to be unlimited retention. Just because the Usenet server the dude used back in the day only kept messages for 5 days is not the grounds for assumption that there is reasonable expectation the message would disappear or become unpublished. I personally have some archieves of some groups from 10 years ago as do many others. How could someone make a claim of a assumed time limit and be justified? What was that assumption based on? His assumption that my hard drive crashs and I have no backups?
There are two issues here where I believe his thinking is jacked.
1) Posted a comment to the public in a public form. Basically, published a work to the public forum for anyone and everyone in the world to see and use.
2) Wrongly assumed with absolutely no technical basis there may be some time limit where that public comment would disappear or go away.
There is a HUGE difference between breaking a law and violating a contract or a business agreement. One is criminal, the other civil. If I'm not mistaken, isn't the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act a criminal act?
What about renting a VHS tape from Blockbuster and erasing the tape and returning it. I think BB would have to pursue the recourse from you as a civil matter, not the local police department. Who knows..
Besides, it should come as no great shock that Microsoft do not tolerate dual booting systems anyway - look at how easily Windows wipes over the boot block when you reinstall it on a PC where you're booting Linux also.
That is a disadvantage. I now use the plain old Windows boot loader for multibooting for that reason. The process is extremely simple if you use bootpart.
It provides a easy method of extracting the boot block from other partition/drives. It will also adds the required configuation changes to the c:\boot.ini file. Dual boot in a few simple steps.
If your second or third planned OS also blindly over writes the boot drive MBR as well like Windows does, it way be a little tricky. I've only dual booted with various Linux distributions and everyone of them I've used allows you to specify where you want the boot block.
On a side note, my last dual boot Windows/Linux install was Xandros. With Xandoros, when you uncheck the box to include the bootloader in the MBR, it states that you must make a boot floppy when prompted later in the install or you will not be able to boot into Xandros. I was never prompted or given a chance to make that floppy throughout the install and was only given a "Press Enter to restart computer" when the install was done. Xandros does default to also placing the boot block in the root of the installation partition so I was able to use bootpart and get it going with no problems.
Care to elaborate? I would trust the data integrety of a cd and the cd drive over a floppy and its drive any day. I'm sure each could screw up at any time though.
It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.
Remote controls have been in use and popular for at least 25 years.
Your sigh of relief to finally find a remote you can operate is rather sad.
For games, you're right. Buy an XBox.
For games, do not by a Mac mini.
I've been using Sunrocket over Comcast for about two months so far. Only one call with an echo. Sunrocket themselves was down for a few hours last week but it had nothing to do with Comcast. I download a lot and I do not use QOS and it still works without problem. I also have the Gizmo on my local network side of my router and not between the router and cable modem like they suggest in their documentation.
You have any examples?
Obviously not at the quantity this guy has but I have an common odd user name that I use on yahoo, hotmail, and several other free web mail places. I get tons of email confirmations and passwords for people that setup accounts at places. Just last week was a Myspace account a dude setup trying to get back at his ex girlfriend. Nice pictures but I had hundreds of requests to add people to my friends list because of the content of the pictures that were posted.
I've also had several accounts created with my username from Snapfish and similar photo places. The content is not spectacular but some are interesting.
If it wasnt for that GPL code, Apple would have nothing to use and would have to develop that functionality themselves or pay someone to make if for them or license it from.
All it takes to have access to an administrative share on a PC (like c$) is be in the local administrator group or be a member of a group that is in the administrator group on that PC. Considering probably 95% of the users that use Windows desktops run as administrator, that idea is not such a major difference from normal and probably overlooked. In the corporate world, companies lock down desktops or at least put users in the power users or users group. In that situation, having the IT department support people as desktop machine administrators is very common. Different classes of machines are in different OUs and you can fine tune what people (including IT), are in what groups for what computers. You obviously do not put lower tech support in a group that has administrator access to your servers and you can remove your network engineers from admin access on the PCs that are not in the IT department.
Having joe blow in a security group that has administrator access is a little crazy but can be manageable if it is only a specific subset of PCs. It is not surprising that companies do not tune or even think about permissions to that level and may provide all or nothing. I blame that on a weak or small struggling IT department or a weak and/or clueless IT manager but there are many of them out there.
You need the right tool for the job. A file server is not a document management system. There are many different document management systems available on the market for all sizes of companies. They provide central storage, versions, tracking of access and changes (who accessed and changed what and when), system admin and end user controlable security settings, ability to lock and check out documents, indexing, full text searching, and blah blah blah.
If a company chooses NOT to use one of these packages, they will have problems managing and tracking.
Companies have been offering this service for years, USA.net is one example. It is not good for everyone but there are a lot of businesses where this solution seems much cheaper and easier then maintaining their own email system (at least on paper it looks that way). In general, the more spread out your employees or offices are, the more advantage you get by outsourcing your email. I worked at a company with roughly 100K employees spread throughout the world that switched over. I left before it was completed but they are up and running on it now.
I have Sirius as well. Overall, I love it. I take in in my cars and directly into my house when I get home.
The "talk" stations are good enough for talk but relative to the music stations, the quality is much lower.
I'm on the fence about the quality of the music stations though. For music, I mainly bounce around between to Boom Box, Octane, Hard Attack, Hair Nation, and Back Spin. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes not. It does not sound like Sirius is selectively changing bandwidth though as when a song does not sound so good, it does sound like it is overly compressed, it sounds more like less quality source material IMO. Maybe they have the ability to dynamically change bandwidth like that but I've never heard it happen mid song.
With all of that being said.. I would always be happier with better quality but my comments about the quality is just an observation, it a non factor and I am extremely happy with the service. There are so many different types of music and talk shows (even ones that many 18-?? year old males would find entertaining like Maxim) and not enough time in the day to listen to it all.
Now it could be that the poster is right, but we can't tell based on 1 sample. Especially when they eel that Apple is responsible for things breaking when they step on them.
My point (although not clear) is the person had one that broke and he has witnessed a 100% failure rate, your statisitical analysis was a complete waste of time and looks like an effort to defend Apple with no backing what so ever. The reason I claim you are trying to blindly defend is you keep going on and on about stepping on the headphones but clearly ignore the other two problems the user had that had NOTHING to do with that instance.
My headphone jack and battery comment was not directed specifically at Apple, that was portable players in general. These 3.5mm stereo headphone jacks have been popular since the the early 80's and it seems everything from sound cards to cell phones all suck. The companies probably save maybe 1 to 2 cents max per unit with inferior jacks coupled with a crappy design.
Your comment has absolutely nothing to do my reply or the quote I replied to.
but Macs have been impervious to every big, newsworthy Windows virus in the past five years.
Well no shit. My Ford has been impervious to every big, newsworthy Chevy recall in the past years.
And, it is like anything, the fact that you pay something weeds out a lot of total losers. It doesn't get rid of all the users by any means, but that barrier to entry is enough to stop the majority of people who would just log on to be annoying.
I've spent a lot of time online with both the PS2 and Xbox live. There is no difference in the overall amount of idiots and losers between the two. Each title has different percentages but that is a function of the target age of the typical player of that game, not the online service.
>I>this only protects in that it allows us to trace spammers to a registered account
It also helps as the rogue SMTP engine would have to use your credentials to send email through your ISP mail server as well. Unless it can pluck that information from some common place in the registry, it would not be able to authenticate and send.
BB uses that practice more then any retailer I have ever seen. You can always tell what is/was on sale at a BB buy walking down the aisle and looking for empty spots. Why take a 50% of the front page of your weekly ad to advertise something that you only have a minimum of 5 per store. They claim minimum but they should really be saying maximum because that stuff is gone by 11am Sunday morning and there is little to no chance it will be back in stock before the sale is over. The reason for those sales and limited stock on hand is exactly what you stated, a scam to get you in the store. Even Sears offers a comparable discount on comparable merchandise if they run OOS of the sale item. Most other retailers seem to attempt to meet the expected demand, not BB though.
This is one of the many reasons I only give BB foot traffic. I use them when I need to do a hands on compare of products then I specifically buy it somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some system in the works to ban people from entering the store that do not purchase something after 10 visits. Their shady practices WILL eventually catch up with them and I hope they die a quick death when it does.