I had issues with Linksys and Netgear routers both freezing up occasionally. Finally, I figured out that by putting the router on top of the DSL modem, I was overheating one or the other. I've since separated them, but the top of the DSL modem is still brown from the heat discoloring the case.
I've had cable broadband in the past, but the modem never seemed to get as hot as the DSL modems do.
It's a common strategy. It's how Pagemaker/Indesign, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Office and Windows got to where they are. They used either no protection or very weak protection (product code 1112-11111111 anyone?), and turned a blind eye to people sharing the software, and once people get hooked on the products, they EOL the old versions and put heavy activation processes (and very high prices--almost $500 for a fucking office suite??) on the current versions.
True, but that's because they would be responsible for the charges anyway, and they only get so many chargebacks before their merchant accounts are revoked.
Chargebacks are not a problem anyway. Visa and Mastercard rules put 100% of the burden on vendors to prove that you were in control of the card at the time of purchase, and that 100% of the promised merchandise arrived. Anything less, and the merchant account provider has to pony up the refund and then go after the merchant to recoup their costs.
Yeah, digests from one particular Yahoo! group keep going into my GMail spam box, even though I repeatedly mark them as "not spam" and have the sending email address in my Contacts.
No, you call your credit card company and dispute the charges. Sunrocket's merchant account provider will be forced to eat the refund if they can't get it out of Sunrocket.
Even though most contracts say 60 days for a dispute, most credit card companies will extend that in a case like this, and a merchant (or the merchant account provider) is liable for 12 months or more for chargebacks.
That part I've never understood. My cellphone works just about everywhere. If you are a big talker and can shift some of your calling to nights & weekends (easy to do when all of your friends have cell phones too) then it often winds up costing you $0.015 - $0.03/minute to use a cell phone to make all your calls. Toss in the fact that you can use it just about anywhere and you aren't fighting your neighbors torrent of the Sopranos for bandwidth and I don't see what advantage there is to VoIP.
Some of us don't have coverage at home--from any provider.
I talked to TMo just today about their UMA. As soon as they offer it on a unit feature-comparable to my MDA, I'll snap it up in a heartbeat.
At least in the olden (DOS) days, when McAfee came upon a pklite'd executable, it would unpack and scan the unpacked executable. I would hope that current antivirus programs would do the same.
Indeed, the biggest killer feature of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is automated backups for the real world. I cannot see a significant number of home users backing up regularly before this, on any operating system. (Of course, I'm expecting this to be available in a Linux distro at some time around then too). I'm sure there will be a few thousand people on/. who do backup, but remember you aren't like the real world.
Leopard doesn't do backups. It does a redundant in-machine copy with versioning, something that VMS and Netware have done for years, and something that can be done on Windows with rsync (or a mirrored RAID), VSS and a bit of scripting.
A proper backup requires media that is removed from the site, or at least removed from the machine. With the OS X "backup" scheme, if your machine gets pwned or fried by a surge from a nearby lightning strike, or your house floods or burns down, you've still lost everything.
Okay, so you back up your PST, do the upgrade, Outlook converts the PST and then you download more mail into the PST. What good did that backup do you again?
Depends. If by connecting the Linux computer to a network, I can access it remotely, and that allows me to lock the computer away where it can't be easily accessed, is it more or less secure then an unconnected machine that everybody needs physical access to use?
I did work for a guy who has a media center in an area of his house I couldn't reach with CAT5 without opening a hole in the ceiling (two-story house.) I tried several combinations of G and N routers and repeaters over the course of 6 months, but neighboring access points would interrupt the signal enough to cause his streaming music (transmitted from his desktop running Rhapsody to his media center) to skip or stutter. Finally, I tried the Netgear HSXB101 wireless set, which uses the power lines for transmitting. At the distance he's going, it's only good for about 25mbps, but that's plenty to transmit streaming music over, and he's had no skipping or other problems since. (I also tried the Panasonic BL-PA100KTA kit, but it didn't have the range.) YMMV, of course.
Except that, if you'll recall, XP had a lot of compatibility and security issues that weren't fixed until SP2, and even then, you had to make sure you had a good backup, as SP2 hosed a lot of systems initially as well.
There are lots of sites; I use hot-deals.org. They come up with deals that are hard to find on the site. (For instance, a slim C521 with an Athlon 3600 dual core, 1GB of RAM, 160GB, DVD burner and a fax modem for $219 with free shipping.) They also come up with great ideas I didn't think of (for instance, about a year ago, they configured a normally $2,100 dual-processor mirrored-RAID dual-power-supply server by buying two $600 servers and cannibalizing one for parts.)
Yeah, that's a realistic study. Here's some tidbits from article you cited:
As study participants (SP) performed the simulated driving task, occasional red and green lights were flashed on the computer display. If SPs saw a green light, they were instructed to continue as normal. However, if a red light was presented they were to make a braking response as quickly as possible.
Yeah, that's realistic. Because when you're driving, a traffic signal stays dark until you're 10 feet from the crosswalk, then it suddenly flashes green or red.
SPs performed a pursuit tracking task in which they used a joystick to maneuver the cursor on a computer display to keep it aligned as closely as possible to a moving target. The target flashed red or green and SPs were instructed to press a "brake button" located in the thumb position on top of the joystick as rapidly as possible when they detected the red light. Red and green lights were equiprobable and were presented in an unpredictable order.
Because being on a bombing run on Flight Simulator is the same as driving.
The confederate's task was to facilitate the conversation and also to ensure that the subject listened and spoke in approximately equal proportions during the dual-task portions of the experiment.
So you're required to listen and talk to the person on the other end at a minimum rate, even though you're driving a car on a road barely wider than the car and operating the steering and braking with a joystick, and the traffic signals are dark until you're just at the intersection.
These findings also rule out interpretations that attribute the deficits associated with a cell phone conversation to simply attending to verbal material, because dual-task deficits were not observed in the book-on-tape control. Active engagement in the cell phone conversation appears to be necessary to produce the observed dual-task interference.
Force the book-on-tape people to translate the book to Spanish aloud and on the fly, and this is more realistic.
In sum, we found that conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell phone led to significant decrements in simulated driving performance. We suggest that the cellular phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.
Like every other experiment done, these are completely unrealistic experiments. They don't take into account that responsible drivers a) increase following distance and/or reduce speed when talking on the phone; b) don't engage in "working memory tasks, mental arithmetic tasks, and reasoning tasks" (quoted from article) while driving, either on the phone or off; c) stop talking and/or listening when a high-concentration portion of driving is presented; and d) can tell people "I'll call you back."
I use a cell phone with a hands-free headset while driving, and I'm not afraid to tell someone, "send me an email" or "call me back and leave your number on my voicemail" if a complicated conversation is about to ensue, and none of my callers has been offended or upset when I put them off that way while driving. I've also never had a "near-miss" or any similar lapse in driving. (In fact, I witnessed a high-speed rear-end crash into a stopped broken-down car two weeks ago in the next lane over on the 91 freeway. I told my wife, who was on the other end of the phone, "hang on a second; somebody's gonna crash" and had already slowed to less than 30 mph by the time the guy realized the traffic was stopped and braked way too late.)
I notice that the Constitution doesn't seem to grant the ability to transfer the right to others. Shouldn't that mean that the death of the author or inventor should end the copyright?
I see things from the other side and perhaps I'm biased because of my experience. I've had DSL from Verizon/GTE since the days of 384k in 1997. It used to cost me $50 a month. At one point it was up to $80 a month. These days I'm getting 3mb/768k from Verizon for $29 a month.
I'm in a different area of SoCal, where there is only Verizon, and it's still $50 a month for 3Mb/768k (which typically yields more like 1.5Mb/768k.) In the meantime, the phone lines here are terrible. The "B" Box up the street is so old and crowded, that I often go weekends without being able to receive incoming calls, and Verizon won't touch it until the following Tuesday. Say what you want about the bad ol' regulated days, but at least we had our four nines of reliability in the copper system.
Charter is rolling out digital phone service to us on Tuesday. It's sad that we have to resort to this route, but Verizon has this area all tied up, and there aren't any other options.
I actually like clicking through the GPL. It tells me right away what kind of license I'm dealing with, and lets me know I can deploy the software through my company with impunity. Hell, TUGZip and PDFCreator alone have saved my company thousands over WinZip and Acrobat, and clicking through the GPL's boilerplate lets me know that I don't have to worry about hidden gotchas that might be present in a custom "open source" license.
I dunno; I don't think it's the Internet that will determine the best in-home speeds; I think it will be the video being served to a set-top box from a media server in a closet. YMMV, of course.
And check out and possibly replace the electrical panel. A lot of houses still have panels that support 100 amps or less. If it's under 200 amps, and/or rusted out, and/or a fuse box (gads!), consider replacing it before adding more outlets. (And there's something to be said for upgrading to dedicated GFCI kitchen and bathroom outlets, so you can microwave and run the blender or toaster oven at the same time without blowing a breaker.)
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I've had cable broadband in the past, but the modem never seemed to get as hot as the DSL modems do.
It's a common strategy. It's how Pagemaker/Indesign, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Office and Windows got to where they are. They used either no protection or very weak protection (product code 1112-11111111 anyone?), and turned a blind eye to people sharing the software, and once people get hooked on the products, they EOL the old versions and put heavy activation processes (and very high prices--almost $500 for a fucking office suite??) on the current versions.
True, but that's because they would be responsible for the charges anyway, and they only get so many chargebacks before their merchant accounts are revoked.
Chargebacks are not a problem anyway. Visa and Mastercard rules put 100% of the burden on vendors to prove that you were in control of the card at the time of purchase, and that 100% of the promised merchandise arrived. Anything less, and the merchant account provider has to pony up the refund and then go after the merchant to recoup their costs.
That's okay. Their credit card merchant account provider has to cover any chargebacks, even if they don't get a dime from the merchant.
Yeah, digests from one particular Yahoo! group keep going into my GMail spam box, even though I repeatedly mark them as "not spam" and have the sending email address in my Contacts.
Even though most contracts say 60 days for a dispute, most credit card companies will extend that in a case like this, and a merchant (or the merchant account provider) is liable for 12 months or more for chargebacks.
Some of us don't have coverage at home--from any provider.
I talked to TMo just today about their UMA. As soon as they offer it on a unit feature-comparable to my MDA, I'll snap it up in a heartbeat.
I hear those have a short TTL.
At least in the olden (DOS) days, when McAfee came upon a pklite'd executable, it would unpack and scan the unpacked executable. I would hope that current antivirus programs would do the same.
Leopard doesn't do backups. It does a redundant in-machine copy with versioning, something that VMS and Netware have done for years, and something that can be done on Windows with rsync (or a mirrored RAID), VSS and a bit of scripting.
A proper backup requires media that is removed from the site, or at least removed from the machine. With the OS X "backup" scheme, if your machine gets pwned or fried by a surge from a nearby lightning strike, or your house floods or burns down, you've still lost everything.
Okay, so you back up your PST, do the upgrade, Outlook converts the PST and then you download more mail into the PST. What good did that backup do you again?
Depends. If by connecting the Linux computer to a network, I can access it remotely, and that allows me to lock the computer away where it can't be easily accessed, is it more or less secure then an unconnected machine that everybody needs physical access to use?
I did work for a guy who has a media center in an area of his house I couldn't reach with CAT5 without opening a hole in the ceiling (two-story house.) I tried several combinations of G and N routers and repeaters over the course of 6 months, but neighboring access points would interrupt the signal enough to cause his streaming music (transmitted from his desktop running Rhapsody to his media center) to skip or stutter. Finally, I tried the Netgear HSXB101 wireless set, which uses the power lines for transmitting. At the distance he's going, it's only good for about 25mbps, but that's plenty to transmit streaming music over, and he's had no skipping or other problems since. (I also tried the Panasonic BL-PA100KTA kit, but it didn't have the range.) YMMV, of course.
Except that, if you'll recall, XP had a lot of compatibility and security issues that weren't fixed until SP2, and even then, you had to make sure you had a good backup, as SP2 hosed a lot of systems initially as well.
Sorry; you're correct. It's freeware, so I just assumed it was OS.
1. FileZilla. Great FTP and SFTP client.
2. TUGZip. Excellent WinZip replacement.
3. PDFCreator. Makes PDFs out of the output of any program with a "Print..." option.
Well hey, you can turn around and eBay that bad boy and get $5 back. :-)
There are lots of sites; I use hot-deals.org. They come up with deals that are hard to find on the site. (For instance, a slim C521 with an Athlon 3600 dual core, 1GB of RAM, 160GB, DVD burner and a fax modem for $219 with free shipping.) They also come up with great ideas I didn't think of (for instance, about a year ago, they configured a normally $2,100 dual-processor mirrored-RAID dual-power-supply server by buying two $600 servers and cannibalizing one for parts.)
As study participants (SP) performed the simulated driving task, occasional red and green lights were flashed on the computer display. If SPs saw a green light, they were instructed to continue as normal. However, if a red light was presented they were to make a braking response as quickly as possible.
Yeah, that's realistic. Because when you're driving, a traffic signal stays dark until you're 10 feet from the crosswalk, then it suddenly flashes green or red.
SPs performed a pursuit tracking task in which they used a joystick to maneuver the cursor on a computer display to keep it aligned as closely as possible to a moving target. The target flashed red or green and SPs were instructed to press a "brake button" located in the thumb position on top of the joystick as rapidly as possible when they detected the red light. Red and green lights were equiprobable and were presented in an unpredictable order.
Because being on a bombing run on Flight Simulator is the same as driving.
The confederate's task was to facilitate the conversation and also to ensure that the subject listened and spoke in approximately equal proportions during the dual-task portions of the experiment.
So you're required to listen and talk to the person on the other end at a minimum rate, even though you're driving a car on a road barely wider than the car and operating the steering and braking with a joystick, and the traffic signals are dark until you're just at the intersection.
These findings also rule out interpretations that attribute the deficits associated with a cell phone conversation to simply attending to verbal material, because dual-task deficits were not observed in the book-on-tape control. Active engagement in the cell phone conversation appears to be necessary to produce the observed dual-task interference.
Force the book-on-tape people to translate the book to Spanish aloud and on the fly, and this is more realistic.
In sum, we found that conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell phone led to significant decrements in simulated driving performance. We suggest that the cellular phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.
Like every other experiment done, these are completely unrealistic experiments. They don't take into account that responsible drivers a) increase following distance and/or reduce speed when talking on the phone; b) don't engage in "working memory tasks, mental arithmetic tasks, and reasoning tasks" (quoted from article) while driving, either on the phone or off; c) stop talking and/or listening when a high-concentration portion of driving is presented; and d) can tell people "I'll call you back."
I use a cell phone with a hands-free headset while driving, and I'm not afraid to tell someone, "send me an email" or "call me back and leave your number on my voicemail" if a complicated conversation is about to ensue, and none of my callers has been offended or upset when I put them off that way while driving. I've also never had a "near-miss" or any similar lapse in driving. (In fact, I witnessed a high-speed rear-end crash into a stopped broken-down car two weeks ago in the next lane over on the 91 freeway. I told my wife, who was on the other end of the phone, "hang on a second; somebody's gonna crash" and had already slowed to less than 30 mph by the time the guy realized the traffic was stopped and braked way too late.)
I notice that the Constitution doesn't seem to grant the ability to transfer the right to others. Shouldn't that mean that the death of the author or inventor should end the copyright?
I'm in a different area of SoCal, where there is only Verizon, and it's still $50 a month for 3Mb/768k (which typically yields more like 1.5Mb/768k.) In the meantime, the phone lines here are terrible. The "B" Box up the street is so old and crowded, that I often go weekends without being able to receive incoming calls, and Verizon won't touch it until the following Tuesday. Say what you want about the bad ol' regulated days, but at least we had our four nines of reliability in the copper system.
Charter is rolling out digital phone service to us on Tuesday. It's sad that we have to resort to this route, but Verizon has this area all tied up, and there aren't any other options.
I actually like clicking through the GPL. It tells me right away what kind of license I'm dealing with, and lets me know I can deploy the software through my company with impunity. Hell, TUGZip and PDFCreator alone have saved my company thousands over WinZip and Acrobat, and clicking through the GPL's boilerplate lets me know that I don't have to worry about hidden gotchas that might be present in a custom "open source" license.
I dunno; I don't think it's the Internet that will determine the best in-home speeds; I think it will be the video being served to a set-top box from a media server in a closet. YMMV, of course.
And check out and possibly replace the electrical panel. A lot of houses still have panels that support 100 amps or less. If it's under 200 amps, and/or rusted out, and/or a fuse box (gads!), consider replacing it before adding more outlets. (And there's something to be said for upgrading to dedicated GFCI kitchen and bathroom outlets, so you can microwave and run the blender or toaster oven at the same time without blowing a breaker.)