Okay, so it's not ideal, but here's what you can do that doesn't require running a virtual machine on your primary PC, or a dual-boot-into-Windows to run the scanner/authenticator software every once in a while scenario:
Get yourself a cheap-ass PC. Throw two ethernet NICs in it. Install a new copy of Windows XP, and any software that your campus IT staff require to be installed on there. Then run Windows XP Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) on the unused ethernet adapter. (ICS is a small DHCP server + NAT engine built into Windows.) Plug that into a switch along with your main computer or computers, and use the XP box running ICS as your router.
Then from the university's perspective, you have a single Windows XP box hooked up which is clean and conforms to their standards for network access. Unless the software that you need to install prohibits ICS from functioning, and there is no way around the artificial restriction, they won't know about the PC or PCs you have running behind the ICS machine.
How do I get my Iphone, Ilaptop, Iwhatever to receive Shoutcast radio while I'm driving in my car? I was thinking maybe I could cancel my satellite Sirius-XM and just go with "free" internet radio.
On my iPhone, I use a free app from the App Store called FStream which can stream MP3, OGG, ASX, and WMA formats over HTTP or MMS. It actually works great over 3G/HSDPA and even EDGE in many cases as well (I drove 300 miles once along Hwy 26 in Washington with EDGE service most of the way, and listened to a 128kbps Shoutcast radio stream most of the time...worked great).
You can create a "favorites" list that you can scroll through and select the station of your choice to "tune in" to by simply tapping the selection, so it works fairly well in the car while driving. It even ties into the main Shoutcast Directory server where I can browse all of the advertised streams on there and connect to any one of them.
You have absolutely no need or cause for apology. My curiosity often gets the better of me and I end up asking questions the answers to which I have absolutely no entitlement.
If you happen to somehow manage to read over your docs and then furthermore have time to flesh out your answer to me in more detail, I'll consider that a bonus. You pretty much confirmed what I guessed about the different names being internal codenames for entire series, so I guess the more interesting information at this point would be what makes a drive that takes CC firmware different from one that takes SD firmware (especially since it would seem that there are at least some distinct differences between the two branches of firmware revs, considering that although one bug was shared between the two -- the stuttering -- the other so-called "bricking" bug never crossed over between firmware branches).
I personally have not been affected by any of the recent firmware issues on Seagate drives, but I have long been a Seagate fan and have been reading your posts with interest. First, I just wanted to say that the great deal of transparency that you personally and your company as a whole have both shown through these recent ordeals is more likely than not going to counter any possible fear that might have resulted in me leaving the brand for another. So, kudos.
Mostly I'm just curious about some of the more technical details behind-the-scenes. You keep referring to the BRINKS and MOOSE model of drives; elsewhere, when I Google those terms, I also have caught wind of a GARBO model as well. Nowhere do you explain in your posts what the differences actually ARE between these different models. Is it just a matter of assembly, or are they different revisions of the same drive, or are they completely different top-to-bottom but just happen to bare the same customer-facing model #? (It _drives me up a wall_ when companies do that...) Are the differences between these drive models related to the differences in the firmware series (CC## vs. SD##), or is that a different thing entirely? Is all of this perhaps somehow related to the split-branding between Seagate and Maxtor (same silicon and platters, subtle differences in the firmware to account for that branding distinction)? Do the differences in these drive models (BRINKS vs. MOOSE vs. GARBO) or the differences in the drives that accept different firmware series (those that take "CC" vs. "SD" firmwares) somehow come down to performance differences, or MTBF/QC differences at all? Is one line of drives preferable to another?
Unless it would cause you to risk your job or reveal any kind of trade secrets, please don't feel the need to spare any details...I absolutely love this kind of "trivia.":)
Also, can we assume from your username that you were brought into the Seagate fold from the merger? If so, I'd love to ask you about that (how you viewed that coming into the fold, what your perceptions are/were of Maxtor and now of Seagate, etc.), but I've already asked you enough.:P
Please, only answer as your time and conscience allows. Feel free to contact me by e-mail, if you *really* feel like it.:P
The setup file is still downloadable at that location, BTW, despite the fact that it is not mentioned on the Google Pack page any longer nor does Google Updater recognize it as a Google Pack app. So if you STILL want it...
Actually, since I see from the diagram that the left grille (which you say doesn't work) is the speaker anyway, I wonder if I jumped the gun and rushed to conclusions about what you meant. Do you mean that when you plug headphones in, the left side of your pair of headphones doesn't sound at all? Or do you mean that the only speaker on your iPhone that works is the phone earpiece (so you hear absolutely nothing from the phone itself except for phone conversations without any headphones plugged in...no music, sound for videos, system sounds, alarms, nothing)?...or did you really mean what I initially thought you meant?:-P
Yeah, that's great and all, and you may be right that this is the reason why they aren't sinking time and resources into making it "excellent," but the LEAST they could do is not BREAK crap that was previously working just fine. Google Groups used to return great and relevant search results through Advanced Search. The only explanation for the fact that it doesn't work anymore is that they changed something.
If what they changed broke it, for heaven's sake put it back the way it was before so that it is at least useful again.
1st gen phone already handle location...through triangulation, the same way they have since day 1.
As you say, opening up the iPhone to third-party apps will naturally help fill in some of the holes. There's nothing standing in the way of someone writing a better mail client for the phone than the one that comes with it, and by observing the popularity of such apps, Apple can learn about functionality that people want the iPhone to possibly natively support out-of-the-box, and then improve their own applications. Since it's all just software, there's nothing saying that Apple can't release an update to the system for free with a better e-mail client down the road. Right now, they are concentrating on getting the next-gen hardware platform out the door...once that has been dealt with, the software can be addressed very easily.
As far as the whole iChat thing goes, I posted the following to a thread on MacRumors.com:
To those complaining about the lack of a front-facing camera/iChat video feature:
I was disappointed as well, but then realized that this is probably not something that Apple can provide at the current time anyway. This is because effectively adding iChat capability would be like allowing VoIP calls over the 3G network, except it's even better because you have video AND audio. Since this would be using the data side of the plan, effectively this would be allowing people to get around the voice minutes of their plan, and the cell phone industry probably is not ready to change from their current voice minutes and voice/data split model.
You might object that Apple could have written the iPhone's iChat client so that it ONLY communicated with other iPhones, and not with MacOS's iChat, effectively making video calls "in-network" calls which are unlimited between AT&T customers as it is, but then people would cry "foul" over that decision as well. Also, even though iPhone is currently only AT&T *in the United States*, there will now be iPhones sold on other networks worldwide, so iChats would be (in theory) free between iPhones on different networks in different countries (!!) unless Apple put an artificial restriction on that ability as well, which would be uber-lame (but the phone companies wouldn't stand for free video/audio "calls" between phones in different companies, cutting into their profit gouging for international calls).
Unfortunately, that's just the state of things right now. Hopefully, in the (near?) future, the inertia of the way the market is going will force the issue at some point, probably at about the point that cell phone plans become "all-you-can-eat" in much the same way that landline VoIP accounts are, as mobile phone companies begin to leverage the universality of the internet to reduce the cost of national and international voice transport/trunking.
I was just about to post saying that I had no problems getting to the site. I hit Amazon's home page, and it came up just fine for me...the first time. I was about to hit submit until I decided to also try navigating around the site a bit, log into my account, etc.; so I went back to try, and ran into the problem.
Just because they stop releasing commercial versions of the software that runs on PowerPC doesn't mean that they have to stop making builds of it that do internally. They pretty much fessed up when the Intel version was announced that they had been building for Intel for years.
It might be in their interest to discontinue the PPC version as far as commercial sales and especially SUPPORT is concerned (having to support only one version and a more limited set of hardware is easier/cheaper), but to continue maintaining the PPC branch/port internally in order to keep OS X code inherently portable, on the off-chance that they find themselves in the position of needing to transition to yet another different underlying hardware architecture again sometime in the future.
So, one question that the ThinkGeek site does not address is whether or not these units are Point-to-Point only, or if I can have multiple power satellite units talking to the main power access point, all being fed power at the same time?
Point-to-Point, or Point-to-Multipoint?
-- Nathan
P.S. -- Just play along, everybody. Okay?
Packet8...?
on
Vonage IPO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The blurb mentioned that Vonage is the first Internet Telephony player to go public, but I happen to know that Packet8 is publicly traded...
The minute I saw this article, Vivato was also the first thing to spring to my mind.
We had one of the Vivato sales people visit us last spring. (We're also not too far away from Spokane ourselves.) We couldn't justify the cost of the system at the time for the application we were thinking about using it in, but we got to see and play with possibly one of the coolest 802.11 devices in existence.
BTW, the Vivato system (at least their 11b one) uses 14 radios...13 to talk back-and-forth to clients, and one for passive listening/"rogue AP detection." It is built around Lucent/Agere Hermes radis, has a PowerPC for the main processor, and runs on Linux.:-) I think I remember the sales guy mentioning to us that one of their customers managed to port Kismet over, even.
It seems to me that Vivato's phased-array antenna system is probably at least as good, if not better, than the Xirrus's uber-sectorized solution. Their claim of 16 non-overlapping channels seems amazing at first (are the only considered non-overlapping because despite high channel reuse the sectors don't cross each other's paths?), but as far as I can tell, they're counting the 5GHz spectrum in with those non-overlapping channels, which means two things: A) you HAVE to have a dual-band card in your laptop if you want to take maximum advantage of this thing, and B) there's naturally going to be some inconsistency in performance since 2.4GHz and 5.(2/3/4/7/8)GHz react differently to physical obstructions and have different rules set by the FCC for maximum EIRP and such that both the AP and client have to honor.
"Spam" (telemarketing) over certain VoIP services might be a problem, yes. I'd say that those ripe for the picking would include such things as Free World Dialup and Skype.
But I really, really don't see how services like Vonage, Packet8, Broadvoice, Broadvox, Primus/Lingo, etc. can fall victim to this type of thing, because they are inherently different from the FWD and Skype-alikes in that you pay for the service, have tie-ins to the POTS network, and are assigned a real POTS-addressable phone number. This last point is the biggie in my mind. Us Packet8 customers are charged the 3% Federal Excise Tax fee (but that is the only additional charge that shows up on my bill from them). Although this has been a controversial topic amongst P8 customers and the VoIP community in general, the defense for the charge is that Packet8, although not a regulated phone company, does internetwork with POTS and even provides a POTS "alias" (number) for each Packet8 account.
Since this phone number is provided to Packet8 by a nationwide CLEC (Level3) that serves them in each market that they provide local numbers in, and since Packet8 phones cannot be addressed by any other number (even by other clients on the Packet8 network), I don't see any reason why a Packet8 account -- or any other non-free VoIP provider that works in a similar manner -- would not be protected by the nationwide and statewide "Do Not Call" lists equally along with "real" POTS phones. If telemarketers start to call my P8 number (which, so far, hasn't happened yet...hooray for unlisted numbers), then I will simply add my P8 POTS number to the Do Not Call lists, and if they continue to call after that, I will sick the law on them.
Because, after all, the phone number that the telemarketers are calling is a real POTS number provided by a CLEC.
Here's a GREAT article on the subject that I found a few months back with a lot of technical details on the differences between the two formats:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/113
Interestingly, although a number of people have noted that DVD-R seems to be more "compatible" overall with the majority of readers/players out there, my experience has been that my old ThinkPad 2nd-generation 2x DVD drive (Toshiba) reads DVD+Rs without a lick of trouble, whereas several different DVD-R discs that I've tried in it skip horribly and give me read errors. And this drive was manufactured before either standard was drafted! The especially funny part is that Toshiba was in bed with Pioneer drafting DVD-R (whereas Sony/Philips is the duo that brought us +R) and yet it can't even read the stuff.
Yes; as other posters have pointed out, you can not only open ZIP files in Windows XP natively and use them as if they were normal folders *without installing a third-party piece of software*, but you can add and remove files from these ZIP archives quite easily (drag-'n-drop) and even create new ZIP archives quite easily, too: either right-click file -> Send To -> Compressed Folder, or right-click empty space -> New -> Compressed Folder, and start dragging things into it.
Of course, if you want to verify this yourself, you are going to have to make sure that you test it on a virgin XP box that you haven't raped yet by installing WinZip on it...that'll kill the built-in ZIP "folder" class as WinZip messes with the file associations.
Oh, and by the way, the Windows ZIP folder class has been around since Windows 98, when it came with the Windows 98 Plus! pack. The first version of Windows to include it as part of the operating system was Windows ME. And if you look hard enough, you can actually find a copy of it on Microsoft's web site (disguised as an update/bug fix for the ZIP folder; it won't install if you don't have it already, but you can extract the files from the self-extracting CAB and install it manually). It runs on virtually every Win32-based Microsoft OS. Heck, I have managed to install and use the Microsoft ZIP folder on Windows NT 4.0 (regsvr32 zipfldr.dll), and it ran perfectly fine.
Infinitely superior to WinZip in every way (except for the fact that it doesn't do disk spanning). It even has an encryption feature.
Hey, I'm not *defending* LG here.:-) I'm just trying to flesh out the facts. Just for the record, I think it is moronic that they redefined commands, and I also think it is moronic that just by issuing a firmware upload command you can trash the current firmware.
I believe I read someplace that LG is working on fixing its firmware. That is truly the appropriate fix.
If you read the posts higher-up, you will discover that someone at LG, in writing the firmware for their normal CD-ROMs (not their CD-RWs), redefined the code that normally means "write flush cache" (which I guess is used by an experimental kernel patch to detect if you have a CD writer capable of packet writing, if I read everything correctly) to mean "firmware upload".
Naturally, the kernel driver expects to get an error returned back to it, indicating that we don't have a CD-RW drive. Instead, the LG CD-ROMs initiate a firmware wipe and await the upload of new code.
I work in Technical Support for a local ISP here that provides access via dial-up, DSL, and terrestrial wireless (802.11b mostly, but also Turbocell, Trango & Motorola 5GHz solutions as well for backhaul links and bigger clients), and we also supply net access to a few apartment complexes and student housing facilities in the area (college town ISP).
Ever since Welchia hit, we have been doing exactly what is being described here: kicking off individual customers and even shutting off entire chunks of our network when it is discovered that a particular user or a large group of users are infected with Welchia and spewing their worm-related ICMP crap all over creation. We've had to take down entire apartment complexes and have people go door-to-door with CDs containing the removal tools and MS patches before bringing them back up.
I'm not certain how many people outside of the ISP technical support world know just how much of a PAIN Blaster and Welchia have been FOR technical support departments. Welchia came out, what, 2-3 weeks ago?, and although for the most part the majority of people are not seeing their effects anymore, these worms *are* still alive and kicking, and I don't see the end in sight anytime soon...our incoming calls have skyrocketed ever since the worms were released and especially after we found we had to take the drastic actions that we have had to take, and they have not waned yet!
We're going to be forced to continue to deal with these annoyances (-- understatement) for a long time to come.
I remember when I was in junior high, I had a few friends of the "nerd" persuasion, and we would occasionally write things out in the Standard Galactic Alphabet for each others' benefit.
No, it isn't quite on the same level as writing lecture notes in elvish since the SGA is nothing more than substitutions for letters in the English alphabet (whoda thunk that advanced species like the Vorticons, the Shikadi, and the entirety of the population on the planet Fribbulus Xax would be speaking and writing in perfect modern English, just with a different alphabet?), but it was a fun inside joke.:-)
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Okay, so it's not ideal, but here's what you can do that doesn't require running a virtual machine on your primary PC, or a dual-boot-into-Windows to run the scanner/authenticator software every once in a while scenario:
Get yourself a cheap-ass PC. Throw two ethernet NICs in it. Install a new copy of Windows XP, and any software that your campus IT staff require to be installed on there. Then run Windows XP Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) on the unused ethernet adapter. (ICS is a small DHCP server + NAT engine built into Windows.) Plug that into a switch along with your main computer or computers, and use the XP box running ICS as your router.
Then from the university's perspective, you have a single Windows XP box hooked up which is clean and conforms to their standards for network access. Unless the software that you need to install prohibits ICS from functioning, and there is no way around the artificial restriction, they won't know about the PC or PCs you have running behind the ICS machine.
How do I get my Iphone, Ilaptop, Iwhatever to receive Shoutcast radio while I'm driving in my car? I was thinking maybe I could cancel my satellite Sirius-XM and just go with "free" internet radio.
On my iPhone, I use a free app from the App Store called FStream which can stream MP3, OGG, ASX, and WMA formats over HTTP or MMS. It actually works great over 3G/HSDPA and even EDGE in many cases as well (I drove 300 miles once along Hwy 26 in Washington with EDGE service most of the way, and listened to a 128kbps Shoutcast radio stream most of the time...worked great).
You can create a "favorites" list that you can scroll through and select the station of your choice to "tune in" to by simply tapping the selection, so it works fairly well in the car while driving. It even ties into the main Shoutcast Directory server where I can browse all of the advertised streams on there and connect to any one of them.
Not affiliated with the author, just a fan, etc.
-- Nathan
You have absolutely no need or cause for apology. My curiosity often gets the better of me and I end up asking questions the answers to which I have absolutely no entitlement.
If you happen to somehow manage to read over your docs and then furthermore have time to flesh out your answer to me in more detail, I'll consider that a bonus. You pretty much confirmed what I guessed about the different names being internal codenames for entire series, so I guess the more interesting information at this point would be what makes a drive that takes CC firmware different from one that takes SD firmware (especially since it would seem that there are at least some distinct differences between the two branches of firmware revs, considering that although one bug was shared between the two -- the stuttering -- the other so-called "bricking" bug never crossed over between firmware branches).
Thanks again,
-- Nathan
Hey Maxtorman,
I personally have not been affected by any of the recent firmware issues on Seagate drives, but I have long been a Seagate fan and have been reading your posts with interest. First, I just wanted to say that the great deal of transparency that you personally and your company as a whole have both shown through these recent ordeals is more likely than not going to counter any possible fear that might have resulted in me leaving the brand for another. So, kudos.
Mostly I'm just curious about some of the more technical details behind-the-scenes. You keep referring to the BRINKS and MOOSE model of drives; elsewhere, when I Google those terms, I also have caught wind of a GARBO model as well. Nowhere do you explain in your posts what the differences actually ARE between these different models. Is it just a matter of assembly, or are they different revisions of the same drive, or are they completely different top-to-bottom but just happen to bare the same customer-facing model #? (It _drives me up a wall_ when companies do that...) Are the differences between these drive models related to the differences in the firmware series (CC## vs. SD##), or is that a different thing entirely? Is all of this perhaps somehow related to the split-branding between Seagate and Maxtor (same silicon and platters, subtle differences in the firmware to account for that branding distinction)? Do the differences in these drive models (BRINKS vs. MOOSE vs. GARBO) or the differences in the drives that accept different firmware series (those that take "CC" vs. "SD" firmwares) somehow come down to performance differences, or MTBF/QC differences at all? Is one line of drives preferable to another?
Unless it would cause you to risk your job or reveal any kind of trade secrets, please don't feel the need to spare any details...I absolutely love this kind of "trivia." :)
Also, can we assume from your username that you were brought into the Seagate fold from the merger? If so, I'd love to ask you about that (how you viewed that coming into the fold, what your perceptions are/were of Maxtor and now of Seagate, etc.), but I've already asked you enough. :P
Please, only answer as your time and conscience allows. Feel free to contact me by e-mail, if you *really* feel like it. :P
And thanks for being here on /.
-- Nathan
...as I point out here.
-- Nathan
In addition, if you Google around a bit or know where to look, you can find the URL to download Google StarOffice directly without having to download the Google Pack/install Google Updater.
The setup file is still downloadable at that location, BTW, despite the fact that it is not mentioned on the Google Pack page any longer nor does Google Updater recognize it as a Google Pack app. So if you STILL want it...
-- Nathan
Actually, since I see from the diagram that the left grille (which you say doesn't work) is the speaker anyway, I wonder if I jumped the gun and rushed to conclusions about what you meant. Do you mean that when you plug headphones in, the left side of your pair of headphones doesn't sound at all? Or do you mean that the only speaker on your iPhone that works is the phone earpiece (so you hear absolutely nothing from the phone itself except for phone conversations without any headphones plugged in...no music, sound for videos, system sounds, alarms, nothing)? ...or did you really mean what I initially thought you meant? :-P
-- Nathan
Oh, good grief; not you, too?
Neither iPhone model has stereo speakers. It's not a dead speaker, it's the fricking MICROPHONE.
Yeah, that's great and all, and you may be right that this is the reason why they aren't sinking time and resources into making it "excellent," but the LEAST they could do is not BREAK crap that was previously working just fine. Google Groups used to return great and relevant search results through Advanced Search. The only explanation for the fact that it doesn't work anymore is that they changed something.
If what they changed broke it, for heaven's sake put it back the way it was before so that it is at least useful again.
I'm done ranting now...
-- Nathan
1st gen phone already handle location...through triangulation, the same way they have since day 1.
As you say, opening up the iPhone to third-party apps will naturally help fill in some of the holes. There's nothing standing in the way of someone writing a better mail client for the phone than the one that comes with it, and by observing the popularity of such apps, Apple can learn about functionality that people want the iPhone to possibly natively support out-of-the-box, and then improve their own applications. Since it's all just software, there's nothing saying that Apple can't release an update to the system for free with a better e-mail client down the road. Right now, they are concentrating on getting the next-gen hardware platform out the door...once that has been dealt with, the software can be addressed very easily.
As far as the whole iChat thing goes, I posted the following to a thread on MacRumors.com:
To those complaining about the lack of a front-facing camera/iChat video feature:
I was disappointed as well, but then realized that this is probably not something that Apple can provide at the current time anyway. This is because effectively adding iChat capability would be like allowing VoIP calls over the 3G network, except it's even better because you have video AND audio. Since this would be using the data side of the plan, effectively this would be allowing people to get around the voice minutes of their plan, and the cell phone industry probably is not ready to change from their current voice minutes and voice/data split model.
You might object that Apple could have written the iPhone's iChat client so that it ONLY communicated with other iPhones, and not with MacOS's iChat, effectively making video calls "in-network" calls which are unlimited between AT&T customers as it is, but then people would cry "foul" over that decision as well. Also, even though iPhone is currently only AT&T *in the United States*, there will now be iPhones sold on other networks worldwide, so iChats would be (in theory) free between iPhones on different networks in different countries (!!) unless Apple put an artificial restriction on that ability as well, which would be uber-lame (but the phone companies wouldn't stand for free video/audio "calls" between phones in different companies, cutting into their profit gouging for international calls).
Unfortunately, that's just the state of things right now. Hopefully, in the (near?) future, the inertia of the way the market is going will force the issue at some point, probably at about the point that cell phone plans become "all-you-can-eat" in much the same way that landline VoIP accounts are, as mobile phone companies begin to leverage the universality of the internet to reduce the cost of national and international voice transport/trunking.
-- Nathan
I was just about to post saying that I had no problems getting to the site. I hit Amazon's home page, and it came up just fine for me...the first time. I was about to hit submit until I decided to also try navigating around the site a bit, log into my account, etc.; so I went back to try, and ran into the problem.
So, it seems to be working...at times.
Just because they stop releasing commercial versions of the software that runs on PowerPC doesn't mean that they have to stop making builds of it that do internally. They pretty much fessed up when the Intel version was announced that they had been building for Intel for years.
It might be in their interest to discontinue the PPC version as far as commercial sales and especially SUPPORT is concerned (having to support only one version and a more limited set of hardware is easier/cheaper), but to continue maintaining the PPC branch/port internally in order to keep OS X code inherently portable, on the off-chance that they find themselves in the position of needing to transition to yet another different underlying hardware architecture again sometime in the future.
YHBT.
:-)
HTH. HAND!
-- Nathan
So, one question that the ThinkGeek site does not address is whether or not these units are Point-to-Point only, or if I can have multiple power satellite units talking to the main power access point, all being fed power at the same time?
Point-to-Point, or Point-to-Multipoint?
-- Nathan
P.S. -- Just play along, everybody. Okay?
The blurb mentioned that Vonage is the first Internet Telephony player to go public, but I happen to know that Packet8 is publicly traded...
The minute I saw this article, Vivato was also the first thing to spring to my mind.
:-) I think I remember the sales guy mentioning to us that one of their customers managed to port Kismet over, even.
We had one of the Vivato sales people visit us last spring. (We're also not too far away from Spokane ourselves.) We couldn't justify the cost of the system at the time for the application we were thinking about using it in, but we got to see and play with possibly one of the coolest 802.11 devices in existence.
BTW, the Vivato system (at least their 11b one) uses 14 radios...13 to talk back-and-forth to clients, and one for passive listening/"rogue AP detection." It is built around Lucent/Agere Hermes radis, has a PowerPC for the main processor, and runs on Linux.
It seems to me that Vivato's phased-array antenna system is probably at least as good, if not better, than the Xirrus's uber-sectorized solution. Their claim of 16 non-overlapping channels seems amazing at first (are the only considered non-overlapping because despite high channel reuse the sectors don't cross each other's paths?), but as far as I can tell, they're counting the 5GHz spectrum in with those non-overlapping channels, which means two things: A) you HAVE to have a dual-band card in your laptop if you want to take maximum advantage of this thing, and B) there's naturally going to be some inconsistency in performance since 2.4GHz and 5.(2/3/4/7/8)GHz react differently to physical obstructions and have different rules set by the FCC for maximum EIRP and such that both the AP and client have to honor.
Vivato...*drool*. I want one for my home.
-- Nathan
"Spam" (telemarketing) over certain VoIP services might be a problem, yes. I'd say that those ripe for the picking would include such things as Free World Dialup and Skype.
But I really, really don't see how services like Vonage, Packet8, Broadvoice, Broadvox, Primus/Lingo, etc. can fall victim to this type of thing, because they are inherently different from the FWD and Skype-alikes in that you pay for the service, have tie-ins to the POTS network, and are assigned a real POTS-addressable phone number. This last point is the biggie in my mind. Us Packet8 customers are charged the 3% Federal Excise Tax fee (but that is the only additional charge that shows up on my bill from them). Although this has been a controversial topic amongst P8 customers and the VoIP community in general, the defense for the charge is that Packet8, although not a regulated phone company, does internetwork with POTS and even provides a POTS "alias" (number) for each Packet8 account.
Since this phone number is provided to Packet8 by a nationwide CLEC (Level3) that serves them in each market that they provide local numbers in, and since Packet8 phones cannot be addressed by any other number (even by other clients on the Packet8 network), I don't see any reason why a Packet8 account -- or any other non-free VoIP provider that works in a similar manner -- would not be protected by the nationwide and statewide "Do Not Call" lists equally along with "real" POTS phones. If telemarketers start to call my P8 number (which, so far, hasn't happened yet...hooray for unlisted numbers), then I will simply add my P8 POTS number to the Do Not Call lists, and if they continue to call after that, I will sick the law on them.
Because, after all, the phone number that the telemarketers are calling is a real POTS number provided by a CLEC.
-- Nathan
Ah, dagnabit...I hate it when people don't make their URL a link, and yet there I go and forget to do it myself.
Here ya go: http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/113
-- Nathan
Here's a GREAT article on the subject that I found a few months back with a lot of technical details on the differences between the two formats:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/113
Interestingly, although a number of people have noted that DVD-R seems to be more "compatible" overall with the majority of readers/players out there, my experience has been that my old ThinkPad 2nd-generation 2x DVD drive (Toshiba) reads DVD+Rs without a lick of trouble, whereas several different DVD-R discs that I've tried in it skip horribly and give me read errors. And this drive was manufactured before either standard was drafted! The especially funny part is that Toshiba was in bed with Pioneer drafting DVD-R (whereas Sony/Philips is the duo that brought us +R) and yet it can't even read the stuff.
-- Nathan
Yes; as other posters have pointed out, you can not only open ZIP files in Windows XP natively and use them as if they were normal folders *without installing a third-party piece of software*, but you can add and remove files from these ZIP archives quite easily (drag-'n-drop) and even create new ZIP archives quite easily, too: either right-click file -> Send To -> Compressed Folder, or right-click empty space -> New -> Compressed Folder, and start dragging things into it.
Of course, if you want to verify this yourself, you are going to have to make sure that you test it on a virgin XP box that you haven't raped yet by installing WinZip on it...that'll kill the built-in ZIP "folder" class as WinZip messes with the file associations.
Oh, and by the way, the Windows ZIP folder class has been around since Windows 98, when it came with the Windows 98 Plus! pack. The first version of Windows to include it as part of the operating system was Windows ME. And if you look hard enough, you can actually find a copy of it on Microsoft's web site (disguised as an update/bug fix for the ZIP folder; it won't install if you don't have it already, but you can extract the files from the self-extracting CAB and install it manually). It runs on virtually every Win32-based Microsoft OS. Heck, I have managed to install and use the Microsoft ZIP folder on Windows NT 4.0 (regsvr32 zipfldr.dll), and it ran perfectly fine.
Infinitely superior to WinZip in every way (except for the fact that it doesn't do disk spanning). It even has an encryption feature.
Hey, I'm not *defending* LG here. :-) I'm just trying to flesh out the facts. Just for the record, I think it is moronic that they redefined commands, and I also think it is moronic that just by issuing a firmware upload command you can trash the current firmware.
I believe I read someplace that LG is working on fixing its firmware. That is truly the appropriate fix.
It actually has something to do with firmware...
If you read the posts higher-up, you will discover that someone at LG, in writing the firmware for their normal CD-ROMs (not their CD-RWs), redefined the code that normally means "write flush cache" (which I guess is used by an experimental kernel patch to detect if you have a CD writer capable of packet writing, if I read everything correctly) to mean "firmware upload".
Naturally, the kernel driver expects to get an error returned back to it, indicating that we don't have a CD-RW drive. Instead, the LG CD-ROMs initiate a firmware wipe and await the upload of new code.
Whoops.
I work in Technical Support for a local ISP here that provides access via dial-up, DSL, and terrestrial wireless (802.11b mostly, but also Turbocell, Trango & Motorola 5GHz solutions as well for backhaul links and bigger clients), and we also supply net access to a few apartment complexes and student housing facilities in the area (college town ISP).
Ever since Welchia hit, we have been doing exactly what is being described here: kicking off individual customers and even shutting off entire chunks of our network when it is discovered that a particular user or a large group of users are infected with Welchia and spewing their worm-related ICMP crap all over creation. We've had to take down entire apartment complexes and have people go door-to-door with CDs containing the removal tools and MS patches before bringing them back up.
I'm not certain how many people outside of the ISP technical support world know just how much of a PAIN Blaster and Welchia have been FOR technical support departments. Welchia came out, what, 2-3 weeks ago?, and although for the most part the majority of people are not seeing their effects anymore, these worms *are* still alive and kicking, and I don't see the end in sight anytime soon...our incoming calls have skyrocketed ever since the worms were released and especially after we found we had to take the drastic actions that we have had to take, and they have not waned yet!
We're going to be forced to continue to deal with these annoyances (-- understatement) for a long time to come.
Hahah...your post just reminded me of something.
:-)
I remember when I was in junior high, I had a few friends of the "nerd" persuasion, and we would occasionally write things out in the Standard Galactic Alphabet for each others' benefit.
No, it isn't quite on the same level as writing lecture notes in elvish since the SGA is nothing more than substitutions for letters in the English alphabet (whoda thunk that advanced species like the Vorticons, the Shikadi, and the entirety of the population on the planet Fribbulus Xax would be speaking and writing in perfect modern English, just with a different alphabet?), but it was a fun inside joke.
-- Nathan
So what you're saying is that now slashdot can stop posting all these extra software release stories! :)
;-)
:)
;-) Thanks for the reminder...
Bah; trolling for responss like mine to make a point, eh?
Also, your homepage is a 404, dude.
Ah, foo...I never even thought to change that. That URL has been outdated for a while.
-- Nathan