Actually, there has always (for the 3 years I've had a cable modem, anyway) been this kind of language in the ToS, at least @Home's. It's been a while since I read it, but IIRC it's worded vaguely enough that you are technically verboten from using "residential class" cable modem hookups for ANY business purpose. I'm sure they do that mostly to hoodwink the gullible into upgrading their connection to "business class" if they want to do so much as check their work e-mail via Outlook Web Access.
I am of the opinion that since I'm paying for the connection, I will use it for whatever I Goddamned well please, within reason, and @Home can go f themselves. If @Home is too incompetent to keep their mailservers running reliably, or their irc server running at all, they sure ain't gonna catch me.
If Microsoft is making those devices, or partnered with the company that is, you can forget about being left alone.
Eventually these companies will become so dependent on the sales of demographic data that they'll either charge you an addtional monthly fee to opt out, or make giving up your data a condition of the service, which would promptly wink out if you started returning zeros in place of the sweet, sweet data they were expecting.
Macs are just as, if not more flakey than windows boxes.
I beg to differ. I'm an Integrator and though I do Windows stuff, I specialize in Macs. I can go for weeks, sometimes even months without getting a call from my Mac-using clients. I've got their systems running like well-oiled machines. My Windows clients, I'm lucky if I can make it through a week without getting a call that something has blown up, and badly-- and don't even get me started about these fucking Outlook viruses. My Windows-only co-workers continually marvel at how seldom the Macs under my care need fixing, and how quickly and easily they are fixed when they do malfunction.
Macs are much easier to fix. 98% of the time one or more of these things will fix the problem: reboot, rebuild the desktop, run Norton, zap PRAM, trash the faulty app's preference file. 1% of the time, a reinstall or clean install of the OS (which takes significantly less time than a reinstall of Windows, BTW) will be necessary to fix the problem. The remaining 1% of the time, it's a hardware failure.
CyberGuys carries this, which will take up a drive bay and an expansion slot, but gives you front-panel connections for FireWire, game, headphone out, speaker out, microphone, and two USB connectors, plus volume control. Seems kinda like a kludgey solution to me, but it will do what you're looking for.
I also forgot to add that a lot of the G3 MiniTowers came standard with two monitor ports. Use the PCI video card to drive the big monitor, and buy your friend a 14" RGB display (Apple model M1212) to run on the onboard video and be her 'palette monitor'. The Apple 14" can be had on eBay for less than $50, including shipping. I know, because I just replaced my original 14" workhorse after 9 years of faithful service.
For starters, your friend's budget is ludicrous. She might as well have given you a garden spade and asked you to fill in the Grand Canyon. Unless she plans to pirate her software, the Adobe Design Collection alone will consume most of her $1000 budget without you even starting to consider hardware.
Secondly, you would not be doing her any favors by pushing a Windows or Linux solution on her. You *want* the fonts and the colors to be consistent from computer to computer, and you don't want her to make enemies at the print shop if they keep having to dust off their lone PC off in the corner to take care of her jobs. Windows may do the shit-work of word processing and database-storing for the planet, but in the design world *Macs* are "what everyone else uses."
I would personally do the eBay thing for a beige Power Mac G3 (if you want to do the video capture stuff, get the MiniTower model, which came standard with RCA A/V In and Out jacks). The original G3s still have a lot of life left in them and can take huge, cheap IDE drives and scads of RAM. You can toss a USB or USB/FireWire combo PCI card in them to use modern peripherals while still having built-in SCSI support for the older, used peripherals that she may need, like a high-quality scanner or a CD-R drive. Upgrading the processor to a G4 (since Photoshop can take advantage of AltiVec) might be a good idea, if you're so inclined and get a good price. You might even luck out and find a whole package deal like this being sold by an artist who has recently upgraded to a new G4.
Spare no expense on the monitor-- when putting together a system for a designer I usually recommend the largest ViewSonic the person can afford. Oh, not that it matters for this project-- no LCDs. IMHO, they're still not where they need to be for serious design work.
As for input devices, you can use a regular ADB keyboard or a nice USB one-- you may want to keep an ADB model around for maintenance purposes (more easily booting from CD, zapping PRAM). I swear by Logitech USB mice. Wacom makes the best graphics tablets, even their small consumer model is very nice.
OS 9.1 is nice and stable, and you can fairly easily optimize the System Folder items to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the machine. Even on occasions when the machine does go belly-up, a quick Nortoning will straighten it out 99% of the time.
That's it. Build her a system like that, and she'll be productive very quickly, and it will last her for years. If your friend is good at what she does, she'll get the debt incurred building it paid off pretty quickly, and then start putting money in her G5 or G6 Tower Fund.:-)
...a former Microsoftie explaining how Netscape failed?
"Well, we bought another company's browser, threw the Microsoft logo on the splash screen, and gave it away for free. Nobody bought Netscape's when they could get ours for free, so there goes the R&D budget for Netscape. We're raking in *our* R&D money from the Windows/Office upgrade treadmill we put the planet on, and..."
the fact that it shoves an icon on your desktop without asking, etc
Yeah, no Microsoft products have EVER sprinkled icons all over my carefully-pruned Start Menu, taskbar, desktop, Favorites... Puh-leeze. The only offender worse than Media Player is Outlook Express, which would probably keep showing up on my desktop if I cracked open the hard drive and cut the area where its bits resided right out of the platter.
And Microsoft keeps on sneaking more and more DRM shit into every successive release of Windows Media Player. One day you're gonna wake up and find that you can't play a lot of the stuff on your hard drive because it's 'not in compliance with licensing,' or some such nonsense.
Macs are always the better investment when you factor in two things:
1) Longevity. Macs remain usable (by non-geeks) much longer than PCs do. Take a look on eBay, and you'll see Macs that are 5 and 6 years old still going for quite a bit of money. A 5 or 6 year old PC is either a doorstop, bookend, or Linux box (hence my 'non-geeks' comment above).
2) Cost of maintenance and upkeep. Macs break less and are much easier to troubleshoot. I can tell you that because I'm an integration consultant who specializes in Macs, and I have clients who can go for months without needing me. Most Mac problems I'm called in for require an hour to fix, worst-case, and I'm usually done and gone in 15 minutes. I need to support Windows crap to keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth. Most schools that use Macs don't have full-time support staff, the teachers are able to maintain them in their spare time. Schools that have gone Windows have incurred tremendous support costs and often must hire staff dedicated to supporting the PCs.
Here's a link where someone in the education trenches explains this, so don't just take my word for it.
ADB stands for Apple Desktop Bus. USB is little more than Intel's modern copy of ADB. ADB was used on Macs from the Macintosh SE, up to and including the very first blue & white G3 machines, and also on some NeXT computers. It was used to mostly hook up input devices, such as keyboards, mice, joysticks, graphics tablets, etc. Just like USB, ADB let you daisy-chain peripherals together-- the mouse plugged into a port on the keyboard, so you didn't need a mile-long mouse cord that stretched to the back of the computer. ADB also provided advantages like being able to power up the computer from the keyboard, which also allowed 'smart' power strips that could sense when the machine became unresponsive and initiate a 'three-finger-salute' all by itself-- great for machines running unattended. I have two such power strips at home, one on my main Mac, and one on my Mac server that does all my mail and routing and runs the house.
~Philly
The demo video is pretty cool
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
I'm sure someone else has posted a link to the videos by now, but here it is again anyway. Pulling down the QuickTime version was a very fast download for me just a few minutes ago.
I give this thing 2 maybe weeks from start of public sale before the "extreme sports" assholes start successfully modding them to go faster at the expense of battery life, and maybe remove the handlebars, and become a public nuisance on city sidewalks just like the skate-rats are now. Expect cities to come up with entire new revenue streams as they pass Segway Speed Limit ordinances and it becomes possible to get pulled over and get a ticket on the sidewalk.
~Philly
Re:Yeah, they WOULD have to build a city for it...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
The Government spends a buttload of money putting useless bicycle lanes on roads where no sane person would DARE ride a bicycle, because there are, I'm sure, Federal laws that say states must put bike lanes on n% of their roads before said states' Departments of Transportation are eligible to receive additional Federal money.
Forgot to mention that I'm on a static IP here, so if there was any attempt at some kind of switchover, I'm guessing I'd find out about it the hard way.
My inbound home.com mail is working just fine here in Philadelphia, on Comcast. My domain mail is redirected to my home.com address, and I've been getting mail since I woke up an hour ago.
I'm on Comcast@Home in Philadelphia. Incoming e-mail works fine. Dunno about outgoing, I have my own SMTP server I use. My @Home webspace is still accessible. @Home's newsserver is still up last I checked a few minutes ago. DNS still working fine. I can pull up web pages just fine, though I don't use @Home's web proxy so that may be down, but doubtful since everything else is still up.
And yeah, it does feel like the climax of WarGames. At about 2:30EST this morning, while I was huddled with other @Home'ers on IRC waiting for the Big Wink Out, it felt a lot like Last Night.
~Philly
3 things I'll always remember...
on
Farewell to SNK
·
· Score: 2
Ikari Warriors- Cool game, until the one time my friend ruined an attempt to finish the game by advancing the screen and trapping me when no enemies were left.:-(
Samurai Shodown- One of the reasons I bought a 3DO.
Their ridiculous home system- Way overpriced when it was new (I seem to remember seeing it for sale in a Babbage's, for ~$600-$700), friggin' gigantic cartridges you could kill someone with, and great controllers. Too bad you couldn't make a game last for more than a minute, unless you were normally as twitchy as Beavis on a sugar-high. I kept my Neo Geo system for about 2 months, before re-selling the entire package back on eBay where I bought it from-- the games were just too ridiculously fast-paced to be enjoyable.
Well of course, half of them were Yankee fans hoping to see 'their' team win, and the other half were Yankee-haters, hoping to see the arrogant bastards lose what they think they deserve every year just because they're the New York Fucking Yankees. I fall into the latter category (could you tell?), but I didn't watch Game 7.
What really chapped my ass was how the D'backs weren't even viewed as a match for them, like the Yankees should've been given the World Champions title after winning the ALCS. I distinctly remember one FOX promo's voiceover after the Arizona was leading the series 2-0: "NOW it's a Series!" Like the Yankees threw the first 2 games to make it a challenge for them to win it all. Dicks.
Back on topic, I, too, hated the World Series and continue to hate the football shit disrupting my viewing habits. I have workdays when I *need* to come home and see an hour of The Simpsons to unwind, and nothing inflamed me more than clicking on the TV at 6:30 only to find the stupid fucking World Series pregame show on.
I can only hope that when the time comes to renew these stupid TV contracts to carry sports, FOX gets outbid by someone whose shows I don't give a shit about. Maybe ABC, since they have killed all interest in 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' by giving it Vanilla Ice-level overexposure. One headline The Onion never used: "ABC proposes eight-day week to allow more airings of 'Oprah', 'Millionaire'."
The AirPort Base Station is basically just Apple support hardware surrounding a Lucent(?) 802.11b PC Card. There is an antenna made by Lucent(?) specifically for this card. All you have to do is get the antenna, and Dremel a hole in your ABS case plastics so the connector can run from the card inside to the antenna outside. Do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find detailed instructions, part numbers, and photos.
What would a thief do with several hundred dollars worth of gas?
One of my friends lost one of his credit cards. He reported it as soon as he realized it, but not before the person who found it apparently called all his friends and relatives and they all had a 'free fill-up' party with it. The dude then went and bought a few PlayStations, I think in a Funcoland. There were a few other odd purchases, but I think the CC company finally put a halt on the card when dude tried to buy a computer somewhere.
Nothing could really be done about the pay-at-the-pump gas station, but the stores should have at least matched the signature on the card to the signatures on the receipts. My friend got back copies of the thief's receipts and the times they forged my friend's signature on them, the signatures were not even CLOSE. A few times the thief just signed another arbitrary name. Even so, the purchases sailed through no problem until the CC company's computers apparently noticed an aberration from the normal buying patterns on that card.
Fortunately, the CC company ate the costs instead of sticking them on my friend, but he had to fight like hell for a while to get them to do it.
They'll come up with some client software that will be required on any LAN device you want to have Internet connectivity. The client passes a checksum unique to each LAN device it's running on, to the cable company for authentication. You will be billed extra according to how many different unique checksums (i.e. devices) are authenticated from your IP address each month. If you try to connect with a LAN device not running that client software, the packets will be blocked or ignored.
They'll also slap some cheesy encryption into the checksum-generation part of the client software-- just enough so it falls under the DMCA-- and just so people will be prevented from reverse-engineering it and spoofing the authentication server. This way, they'll be able to prosecute spoofers for DMCA violations as well as fraud, which they hope will be a major deterrent.
Don't be surprised if Microsoft supported an initiative like that, because if the Mac/Linux/whatever versions of this client software lagged behind the Windows version (as most non-Windows versions of software tend to do), that's something that could be turned into a huge deal by Microsoft's PR people.
The cable companies can't even provide adequate support today for people with a single machine plugged right into their cable modem. How the fuck does anyone think they're gonna be able to support home LANs? Throw more tier-1 script monkeys at the problem? Feh! Won't work, and all the profits they hope to squeeze out of us NAT users would have to go to pay all those added people. And if they can't provide support for something but want to charge extra for it, nobody will stand for that.
The cable companies can go piss up a rope, as far as I'm concerned. They already limit the amount of bandwidth that I can use at any given time, and that's enough. I will use it on as many different machines/devices as I see fit.
Next thing you know, they'll try to make my friends who don't have cable TV wear blinders when they're in my house and the TV is on.
Slashdot Mirror
years, and *three* times faster. Thank God it's Friday!
~Philly
Yes, I know this is a very late reply, but I'm extremely bored at work today.
:-)
The first Usenet post uttering the phrase "Windows sucks" appeared on October 8, 1986, less than one year after the November 20, 1985 ship date of Windows 1.0, but the first post containing "Mac sucks" did not appear until February 6, 1987, more than four years after the January 24,1984 ship date of the original Macintosh.
So not only did Microsoft beat Apple in this regard by being first, they also did it more than four times faster! Way to go, Bill and company!
~Philly
If you want to commit vehicular mayhem Down Unda, you'll just 'ave to wait until after the Pocksaclypse.
~Philly
Actually, there has always (for the 3 years I've had a cable modem, anyway) been this kind of language in the ToS, at least @Home's. It's been a while since I read it, but IIRC it's worded vaguely enough that you are technically verboten from using "residential class" cable modem hookups for ANY business purpose. I'm sure they do that mostly to hoodwink the gullible into upgrading their connection to "business class" if they want to do so much as check their work e-mail via Outlook Web Access.
I am of the opinion that since I'm paying for the connection, I will use it for whatever I Goddamned well please, within reason, and @Home can go f themselves. If @Home is too incompetent to keep their mailservers running reliably, or their irc server running at all, they sure ain't gonna catch me.
~Philly
I DO want to be left alone to my own devices.
If Microsoft is making those devices, or partnered with the company that is, you can forget about being left alone.
Eventually these companies will become so dependent on the sales of demographic data that they'll either charge you an addtional monthly fee to opt out, or make giving up your data a condition of the service, which would promptly wink out if you started returning zeros in place of the sweet, sweet data they were expecting.
~Philly
Macs are just as, if not more flakey than windows boxes.
I beg to differ. I'm an Integrator and though I do Windows stuff, I specialize in Macs. I can go for weeks, sometimes even months without getting a call from my Mac-using clients. I've got their systems running like well-oiled machines. My Windows clients, I'm lucky if I can make it through a week without getting a call that something has blown up, and badly-- and don't even get me started about these fucking Outlook viruses. My Windows-only co-workers continually marvel at how seldom the Macs under my care need fixing, and how quickly and easily they are fixed when they do malfunction.
Macs are much easier to fix. 98% of the time one or more of these things will fix the problem: reboot, rebuild the desktop, run Norton, zap PRAM, trash the faulty app's preference file. 1% of the time, a reinstall or clean install of the OS (which takes significantly less time than a reinstall of Windows, BTW) will be necessary to fix the problem. The remaining 1% of the time, it's a hardware failure.
~Philly
CyberGuys carries this, which will take up a drive bay and an expansion slot, but gives you front-panel connections for FireWire, game, headphone out, speaker out, microphone, and two USB connectors, plus volume control. Seems kinda like a kludgey solution to me, but it will do what you're looking for.
~Philly
I also forgot to add that a lot of the G3 MiniTowers came standard with two monitor ports. Use the PCI video card to drive the big monitor, and buy your friend a 14" RGB display (Apple model M1212) to run on the onboard video and be her 'palette monitor'. The Apple 14" can be had on eBay for less than $50, including shipping. I know, because I just replaced my original 14" workhorse after 9 years of faithful service.
~Philly
For starters, your friend's budget is ludicrous. She might as well have given you a garden spade and asked you to fill in the Grand Canyon. Unless she plans to pirate her software, the Adobe Design Collection alone will consume most of her $1000 budget without you even starting to consider hardware.
:-)
Secondly, you would not be doing her any favors by pushing a Windows or Linux solution on her. You *want* the fonts and the colors to be consistent from computer to computer, and you don't want her to make enemies at the print shop if they keep having to dust off their lone PC off in the corner to take care of her jobs. Windows may do the shit-work of word processing and database-storing for the planet, but in the design world *Macs* are "what everyone else uses."
I would personally do the eBay thing for a beige Power Mac G3 (if you want to do the video capture stuff, get the MiniTower model, which came standard with RCA A/V In and Out jacks). The original G3s still have a lot of life left in them and can take huge, cheap IDE drives and scads of RAM. You can toss a USB or USB/FireWire combo PCI card in them to use modern peripherals while still having built-in SCSI support for the older, used peripherals that she may need, like a high-quality scanner or a CD-R drive. Upgrading the processor to a G4 (since Photoshop can take advantage of AltiVec) might be a good idea, if you're so inclined and get a good price. You might even luck out and find a whole package deal like this being sold by an artist who has recently upgraded to a new G4.
Spare no expense on the monitor-- when putting together a system for a designer I usually recommend the largest ViewSonic the person can afford. Oh, not that it matters for this project-- no LCDs. IMHO, they're still not where they need to be for serious design work.
As for input devices, you can use a regular ADB keyboard or a nice USB one-- you may want to keep an ADB model around for maintenance purposes (more easily booting from CD, zapping PRAM). I swear by Logitech USB mice. Wacom makes the best graphics tablets, even their small consumer model is very nice.
OS 9.1 is nice and stable, and you can fairly easily optimize the System Folder items to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the machine. Even on occasions when the machine does go belly-up, a quick Nortoning will straighten it out 99% of the time.
That's it. Build her a system like that, and she'll be productive very quickly, and it will last her for years. If your friend is good at what she does, she'll get the debt incurred building it paid off pretty quickly, and then start putting money in her G5 or G6 Tower Fund.
~Philly
...a former Microsoftie explaining how Netscape failed?
"Well, we bought another company's browser, threw the Microsoft logo on the splash screen, and gave it away for free. Nobody bought Netscape's when they could get ours for free, so there goes the R&D budget for Netscape. We're raking in *our* R&D money from the Windows/Office upgrade treadmill we put the planet on, and..."
~Philly
the fact that it shoves an icon on your desktop without asking, etc
Yeah, no Microsoft products have EVER sprinkled icons all over my carefully-pruned Start Menu, taskbar, desktop, Favorites... Puh-leeze. The only offender worse than Media Player is Outlook Express, which would probably keep showing up on my desktop if I cracked open the hard drive and cut the area where its bits resided right out of the platter.
And Microsoft keeps on sneaking more and more DRM shit into every successive release of Windows Media Player. One day you're gonna wake up and find that you can't play a lot of the stuff on your hard drive because it's 'not in compliance with licensing,' or some such nonsense.
~Philly
PS- Go ahead, mod me down! I'm at the karma cap!
Macs are always the better investment when you factor in two things:
1) Longevity. Macs remain usable (by non-geeks) much longer than PCs do. Take a look on eBay, and you'll see Macs that are 5 and 6 years old still going for quite a bit of money. A 5 or 6 year old PC is either a doorstop, bookend, or Linux box (hence my 'non-geeks' comment above).
2) Cost of maintenance and upkeep. Macs break less and are much easier to troubleshoot. I can tell you that because I'm an integration consultant who specializes in Macs, and I have clients who can go for months without needing me. Most Mac problems I'm called in for require an hour to fix, worst-case, and I'm usually done and gone in 15 minutes. I need to support Windows crap to keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth. Most schools that use Macs don't have full-time support staff, the teachers are able to maintain them in their spare time. Schools that have gone Windows have incurred tremendous support costs and often must hire staff dedicated to supporting the PCs.
Here's a link where someone in the education trenches explains this, so don't just take my word for it.
~Philly
ADB stands for Apple Desktop Bus. USB is little more than Intel's modern copy of ADB. ADB was used on Macs from the Macintosh SE, up to and including the very first blue & white G3 machines, and also on some NeXT computers. It was used to mostly hook up input devices, such as keyboards, mice, joysticks, graphics tablets, etc. Just like USB, ADB let you daisy-chain peripherals together-- the mouse plugged into a port on the keyboard, so you didn't need a mile-long mouse cord that stretched to the back of the computer. ADB also provided advantages like being able to power up the computer from the keyboard, which also allowed 'smart' power strips that could sense when the machine became unresponsive and initiate a 'three-finger-salute' all by itself-- great for machines running unattended. I have two such power strips at home, one on my main Mac, and one on my Mac server that does all my mail and routing and runs the house.
~Philly
I'm sure someone else has posted a link to the videos by now, but here it is again anyway. Pulling down the QuickTime version was a very fast download for me just a few minutes ago.
I give this thing 2 maybe weeks from start of public sale before the "extreme sports" assholes start successfully modding them to go faster at the expense of battery life, and maybe remove the handlebars, and become a public nuisance on city sidewalks just like the skate-rats are now. Expect cities to come up with entire new revenue streams as they pass Segway Speed Limit ordinances and it becomes possible to get pulled over and get a ticket on the sidewalk.
~Philly
The Government spends a buttload of money putting useless bicycle lanes on roads where no sane person would DARE ride a bicycle, because there are, I'm sure, Federal laws that say states must put bike lanes on n% of their roads before said states' Departments of Transportation are eligible to receive additional Federal money.
~Philly
Forgot to mention that I'm on a static IP here, so if there was any attempt at some kind of switchover, I'm guessing I'd find out about it the hard way.
~Philly
My inbound home.com mail is working just fine here in Philadelphia, on Comcast. My domain mail is redirected to my home.com address, and I've been getting mail since I woke up an hour ago.
~Philly
I'm on Comcast@Home in Philadelphia. Incoming e-mail works fine. Dunno about outgoing, I have my own SMTP server I use. My @Home webspace is still accessible. @Home's newsserver is still up last I checked a few minutes ago. DNS still working fine. I can pull up web pages just fine, though I don't use @Home's web proxy so that may be down, but doubtful since everything else is still up.
And yeah, it does feel like the climax of WarGames. At about 2:30EST this morning, while I was huddled with other @Home'ers on IRC waiting for the Big Wink Out, it felt a lot like Last Night.
~Philly
Ikari Warriors- Cool game, until the one time my friend ruined an attempt to finish the game by advancing the screen and trapping me when no enemies were left. :-(
Samurai Shodown- One of the reasons I bought a 3DO.
Their ridiculous home system- Way overpriced when it was new (I seem to remember seeing it for sale in a Babbage's, for ~$600-$700), friggin' gigantic cartridges you could kill someone with, and great controllers. Too bad you couldn't make a game last for more than a minute, unless you were normally as twitchy as Beavis on a sugar-high. I kept my Neo Geo system for about 2 months, before re-selling the entire package back on eBay where I bought it from-- the games were just too ridiculously fast-paced to be enjoyable.
~Philly
With 39 Million viewers tuning in to watch game 7
Well of course, half of them were Yankee fans hoping to see 'their' team win, and the other half were Yankee-haters, hoping to see the arrogant bastards lose what they think they deserve every year just because they're the New York Fucking Yankees. I fall into the latter category (could you tell?), but I didn't watch Game 7.
What really chapped my ass was how the D'backs weren't even viewed as a match for them, like the Yankees should've been given the World Champions title after winning the ALCS. I distinctly remember one FOX promo's voiceover after the Arizona was leading the series 2-0: "NOW it's a Series!" Like the Yankees threw the first 2 games to make it a challenge for them to win it all. Dicks.
Back on topic, I, too, hated the World Series and continue to hate the football shit disrupting my viewing habits. I have workdays when I *need* to come home and see an hour of The Simpsons to unwind, and nothing inflamed me more than clicking on the TV at 6:30 only to find the stupid fucking World Series pregame show on.
I can only hope that when the time comes to renew these stupid TV contracts to carry sports, FOX gets outbid by someone whose shows I don't give a shit about. Maybe ABC, since they have killed all interest in 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' by giving it Vanilla Ice-level overexposure. One headline The Onion never used: "ABC proposes eight-day week to allow more airings of 'Oprah', 'Millionaire'."
~Philly
The AirPort Base Station is basically just Apple support hardware surrounding a Lucent(?) 802.11b PC Card. There is an antenna made by Lucent(?) specifically for this card. All you have to do is get the antenna, and Dremel a hole in your ABS case plastics so the connector can run from the card inside to the antenna outside. Do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find detailed instructions, part numbers, and photos.
~Philly
Heh. I guess @Home and the cable companies never did get their shit together regarding this, though it has been a known problem for years. The previously-linked story was also discussed here on /.
~Philly
What would a thief do with several hundred dollars worth of gas?
One of my friends lost one of his credit cards. He reported it as soon as he realized it, but not before the person who found it apparently called all his friends and relatives and they all had a 'free fill-up' party with it. The dude then went and bought a few PlayStations, I think in a Funcoland. There were a few other odd purchases, but I think the CC company finally put a halt on the card when dude tried to buy a computer somewhere.
Nothing could really be done about the pay-at-the-pump gas station, but the stores should have at least matched the signature on the card to the signatures on the receipts. My friend got back copies of the thief's receipts and the times they forged my friend's signature on them, the signatures were not even CLOSE. A few times the thief just signed another arbitrary name. Even so, the purchases sailed through no problem until the CC company's computers apparently noticed an aberration from the normal buying patterns on that card.
Fortunately, the CC company ate the costs instead of sticking them on my friend, but he had to fight like hell for a while to get them to do it.
~Philly
They'll come up with some client software that will be required on any LAN device you want to have Internet connectivity. The client passes a checksum unique to each LAN device it's running on, to the cable company for authentication. You will be billed extra according to how many different unique checksums (i.e. devices) are authenticated from your IP address each month. If you try to connect with a LAN device not running that client software, the packets will be blocked or ignored.
They'll also slap some cheesy encryption into the checksum-generation part of the client software-- just enough so it falls under the DMCA-- and just so people will be prevented from reverse-engineering it and spoofing the authentication server. This way, they'll be able to prosecute spoofers for DMCA violations as well as fraud, which they hope will be a major deterrent.
Don't be surprised if Microsoft supported an initiative like that, because if the Mac/Linux/whatever versions of this client software lagged behind the Windows version (as most non-Windows versions of software tend to do), that's something that could be turned into a huge deal by Microsoft's PR people.
~Philly
The cable companies can't even provide adequate support today for people with a single machine plugged right into their cable modem. How the fuck does anyone think they're gonna be able to support home LANs? Throw more tier-1 script monkeys at the problem? Feh! Won't work, and all the profits they hope to squeeze out of us NAT users would have to go to pay all those added people. And if they can't provide support for something but want to charge extra for it, nobody will stand for that.
The cable companies can go piss up a rope, as far as I'm concerned. They already limit the amount of bandwidth that I can use at any given time, and that's enough. I will use it on as many different machines/devices as I see fit.
Next thing you know, they'll try to make my friends who don't have cable TV wear blinders when they're in my house and the TV is on.
~Philly