I worked with some people who were simulating battery-powered electronics. The program had an error message of "Device is on fire". People would call up the tech support for the simulator and ask what the error message means (perhaps they thought it was like Guru Meditation errors or something equally geek-funny). It meant, literally, that the simulated battery is on fire.
The battery controller is in the phone, not the battery, so if it doesn't get the battery it expects to get, there's no limit to the pyromaniac fun that can be had.;)
A decentralized power grid is only going to help so much.
Smaller generators are less efficent than larger ones. Solar power and wind power only works when you've got solar power and wind power. Works fine for certain parts of the US, but works pretty crappily in the eastern seaboard. Plus, it multiplies the maintenence costs to have a lot of different generators.
Lately, I've become more pro-nuclear. And that's the sort of thing where, despite the fact that it's been incredibly safe so far, you still want it out where people are more sparsely populated, just in case. Solar power is a waste of space and only works in some parts of the world, wind power kills the little birdies in large numbers, hydrothermal power destroys scenic river views... Hydrogen is a code word for "we'll build lots of nuclear plants in Mexico or Canada or maybe even Japan, electrolyze the seawater, and then ship it to the US". Eventually the non-whacko environmentalists are going to realize that there's three options, and the one that's unarguably the easiest and most palatable is nuclear power. (the other two are to bring it all down and space-based solar power)
The only thing that would alleviate this is to maintain a higher potential power surplus. This means either build more generators, in general, or use less power. The problem is that it's very hard to use less power and make it stick, except by collapsing back to anarchy. About the only lasting change in california from the blackouts is that everybody keeps the timers to turn off lights, the energy-saving florescent bulbs, etc. A lot of the other stuff they cooked up for conservation is quickly passing from people's thinking.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you here.. The biggest mistake of the shuttle was combining everything you needed in space into one vehicle when you really need a fleet of related vehicles.
The main costs of the shuttle is mostly fixed. Where things went wrong is that the shuttle requires too much service work between flights. Were they able to fly the shuttle 26 times a year, the cost per flight would go down. But, the afformentioned shuttle rebuild kills that.
With respect to the Proton-M, I think you might have missed the point. I'd wager that Pournelle has it right. Figure out how to get a $100/lb to LEO transport. Manned, unmanned, recoverable, expendable, big, small, dumb, smart, doesn't matter. Likely case is that it'll have a quarter the payload of the shuttle and be reusable, but it will be $100/lb and decidedly safer than the shuttle. The problem (And cool part) is that you then also need an orbital truck -- except that it doesn't actually need to take off or land. And you also need orbital construction because you won't be able to fit a full station part or satelite into the space-truck cargo bay, which means you need a space station dedicated to construction (so you don't screw up the experiments with the ISS) and either better spacesuits (Pournelle's opinion) or a large inflatable hangar (My opinion).
Jewelers charge 200% markup, they call it the Triple Keystone price.
The problem is, they are charging that because they mostly have to. They need to have a jeweler on staff to put people's stones back in the mounting, size rings, etc. Jewelers expect to be paid reasonably well. They have to pay insane insurance on all of the diamonds that are just lying around.
Now, the problem is, it's not going to save you any to have the jeweler do stuff for you. Any savings in them not needing to keep stock goes towards the jeweler's money.
They probably don't want to bother with your gems and materials because then you'd know what the triple keystone is. It's also got less surprises. There may be lead or oxides in the metal.
Probably the best way to go, if you want to do things cheap, is to pick your rock out first -- Downtown SF is the place to get them, or if you've got something particular in mind, search online.
If you don't have your heart set on casting it with existing metal, you can always buy pre-made rings and prongs. Google search for "Findings".
The bitchy, evil part is actually putting the damn stone into the prongs. The rest is just simple brazing (a.k.a. hard soldering) that anybody can do. Screw the prongs up too much and the diamond will fall out of the prongs at the wrong moment. Oops.
Other strategies you can try are to bring a wax version of the ring and the metal to a casting foundry and have them do it. Much more likely than folks in the US.
See if a jeweler will just set the stone, nothing else. Or, be sneaky and say "Oh, the stone fell out of my ring, could you set it back in?"
Or go to India, where it's standard operating procedure to provide your own materials if necessary. But then you have to go to India and buy tickets. Oops.;)
You can generally gather notions about what she'll want just by going to any jewelery store and browsing. Just remember what the common feature is.
No, the real problem is the hard stuff -- the witches-brew of unstable radioisotopes.
Check out http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/anti-n uke.html
The interesting part is that we aren't talking about the half-life of Uranium. We are mostly talking about the half-life of what happens when Uranium splits. Which does NOT have a particularly long half-life.
So, really, what you are looking at is 500 years before it is less radioactive than the ore it came from, and a few thousand years before it is truly safe. Not the millions and millions of years that people always talk about.
Of course, a few thousand years is still quite some time.
What should have happened is for somebody like RMS to have thought up DRM first and generated patents on it and then refused to license them to anybody.;)
However, my logic is still sound. If the ISPs are having this much trouble surviving without needing to block addresses, imagine how much more trouble they would have surviving with needing to block addresses.
In reality, the bubble is the main reason for why the ISPs are having problems. Too much excess capacity, not enough fiber was a myth, etc.
Seriously, if the RIAA goes through with this, you can kiss your ISP's fiscial stability good-bye.
Can you imagine how many sites for illegal content appear outside of the US? Can you imagine how many requests every large backbone provider would have to deal with? Can you imagine how quickly the blocking tables on the router would be stuffed to the gills?
Whoa, Jason Zych on slashdot. Jason, don't ever let them teach 225 in anything that doesn't force you to think about how you use memory.;)
The problem is that *other* schools think they can push people through with NO memory management experience whatsoever. As in, we've got people who don't know what a pointer is and barely understand what a linked list is for interviews.
My big worry is that if the CS undergrad programs stick to all memory managed languages and ditch assembley, than we're in for a lot of pretty useless programmers in the future. There are way too many cases where assembley knowlege has saved my ass while programming. We had people from the top-5 CS schools who seemed to be like that, although it's my strong suspicion that said canidate either was on drugs, a moron, cheated, or some combination of the above.
Yeah, I was the first of the Java students at UIUC.
I used to think that we should be using Smalltalk instead of Java, but then I learned a little more about Scheme and think we should be using Scheme.
The problem that I've seen is some universities have moved entirely to Java and Scheme and other garbage collected languages and we've had some pretty baaad job canidates from there who know absolutely nothing about memory management.:/
This is nothing new. For quite some time, every CS Freshman at UIUC was issued a free copy of MS Visual Studio.
Of course, it happened my Sophmore year, so I was not gifted with the freebies. Of course, I did get a free copy of the one true version of Windows (Win2k) from MS for free later, so I'm no more bitter than I usually am.
Well, the whole neato notion of 3D formats like VRML is that you could fit a LOT of cool interactive data in a small file. So that's not actually the problem.
In order to make something scriptable, it needs to be on a much higher level than GL. They've already made GL bindings for Perl and Python, but nobody uses them because they are far too slow.
One big problem is that there's far too many disperate uses for an open 3D format. It would be nice to have a 3D format we could use for games, but there's far too many problems there. CAD has one set of requirements, making pretty pictures has another set of requirements, etc. etc. etc.
I suspect that we'll see the GUI reorganized to take advantage of the video card's 3D circutry to give every app a speed boost before any 3D format catches on.
And within the next year or two, nobody's going to be too interested in 3D on the web because they all spent far too much on the web in general.
The only thing that they have any hope of managing to create is a nice alternative to the standard DXF and OBJ formats that most 3D software can roughly parse through.
See, the sad thing is that marketing with a strong regulating element is the only way that it doesn't get annoying.
Like, catalog merchants are good about this. Because it costs them money to print up a nice catalog, they make sure that they have a potentially willing recepient. People watch TV for the programs, so you *can't* have just commercials, you have to have a program. I attribute the growth of Tivo commercial skipping mostly to the TV programmers losing touch with their audience and putting in enough commercials to reach most peoples annoyance factor.
The problem is, there's too big of a growth of weird corporate shell structures that makes it possible for a boiler room operation to start up and shut down quickly. So it becomes moderately profitable to run a boiler room operation, get fined by the attorney general/fcc, shut down, start up a new corporation, buy up old corporations assets, do it all over again, etc.
The 5.4 million dollar fine is based on the TCPA, not actual damages.
The problem is that the TCPA hasn't been shown to cover spamming. Which is unfortunate. They really need to superscede it with a law that bans advertisement in all cases where the caller does not foot the bill of the communication -- i.e. making only telemarketing and junk mail legal.
You can pick up bend meters from Jameco that are intended for PowerGlove sort of VR usages. From there, you'd want to use it to drive a Darlington transistor array or something similar (i.e. device that triggers on once a certain amount of power passes through the collector) to run a Radio Shack buzzer. You'd want a trim-pot to control when the buzzer triggers.
Note -- I'm a digital boy and I'm designing this in my head, so I could be very wrong.
So, for the trouble of one mail order part, you have a buzzer that trigers when a strip is straightened. Very very little force required to move it.
Either that, or just attach a lever arm attached to a pot set just close enough that a small movement will trigger the transistor on the buzzer so that she can push down on a paddle with minimal force.
It is likely that the best solution to spammers skipping town would be to make ISPs legally liable for certain spam-related infractions -- primarily signing pink contracts with spammers or not taking steps to verify the identity of a customer.
Which would make the business of being an ISP suck, but would probably eliminate the problem.
Re:What about video quality over long distances?
on
USB KVMs Compared
·
· Score: 2
For the exact same distance, BNC cable will give you higher quality than HD15 because it has much much much better isolation. No crosstalk between the various signals because they are all shielded nicely.
So you will be able to run cables much longer before they start to look bad. How much longer? Depends on your individual standards of quality and how long you are trying to make it go. But they did some phenominal cable runs at a lecture hall in my alma mater that did 1600x1200 pretty well with BNC.
The problem is that, really, the "plain language" ability of a command language isn't going to get you anywhere that a not-quite-pain-language-but-shorthand language won't.
They tried this with 4GLs and cobol. COBOL wears the tips of your fingers down to the nubs because it is incredibly verbose. Doesn't make it easier to program, but damn, it's close to spoken language. "Copy all MP3s from here to the hard drive" makes sense to you. Do you mean to copy every file that has the extension.mp3, the file type of MPEG1 layer 3, the file named "all MP3s" that you use to keep track of what you've got, or what? Do you really mean the hard drive or is that what you call the CD-RW drive? Do you really want the computer confirming every possible ambiguity with you every time? What happens when it assumes wrong? And then what happens when you type "Now, I want you to write my research paper" because you are now ascribing HAL-like properties to a computer that just has a user friendly command line.
See, we can't parse plain language unambiguously, so you would need to clarify any ambiguities to the computer. So no matter what, you will have to change your method of interaction to deal with the computer. The only thing you do by making it more "plain language" is making it easier for somebody who doesn't quite know what they are doing to get themselves in real trouble.
OTOH, it makes some sense to keep things the way they are.
Consider that the internal core of a perfect-new RISC chip and a x86-64 chip are more-or-less the same. x86-64 instructions come in, are translated to internal RISC code, and are then executed. The main difference is an extra translator and the register-renamer. But any architecture that lasts long enough will need such trappings, as it starts being used for things that nobody would have thought of when the designer thought the chip up.
Remember that, for a long time, the 286 instructions that aren't easily mappable to the RISC core aren't particularly efficent.
I used to think exactly the same thing as you are thinking now. I want a MIPS or Alpha inside, not Intel. But, given that 99% of programming is not done in assembley and the cost of adding a hardware instruction set translator is minimal compared to the difficulty and risks of switching instruction sets, the instruction set of a processor ceases to matter.
At my place of employ, we've been pleasantly surprised with the performance of the latest latest laptop hard drives, actually. Compares quite favorably to anything but 7200 RPM drives, at least for what we do (software development).
Depending on how you configure it, some Thinkpads can take two IDE drives. But I suspect your best bet is to get a pair of 3.5" drives in an external case and either hook up via FireWire or SCSI. I doubt that 2.5" IDE drives will take well to RAID 0.
The other thing is that it works on a different chain of authority than you would see with a user on a cable modem running 802.11. You control the 802.11 AP and so it's kinda your problem when people mess around with your internal network. If somebody gets a WaveRider box and does nasty things with it, they are messing with the WaveRider ISP, not a person with an 802.11 cable modem.
Meaning, in theory, it's far easier for the WaveRider ISP to bust somebody's balls and the ISP is more likely, because a h4x0r is making it hard for the ISP to do business.
OTOH, I hope that they are using some sort of encryption anyways; ISPs tend to be far sloppier than they should about security.
VC++ does not require language extensions. I would, of course, not recomend you try to use MFC with any compiler except VC++ because it'll probably drive you up the wall.
VC++ and wxWindows both require lots of macros, however.
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I worked with some people who were simulating battery-powered electronics. The program had an error message of "Device is on fire". People would call up the tech support for the simulator and ask what the error message means (perhaps they thought it was like Guru Meditation errors or something equally geek-funny). It meant, literally, that the simulated battery is on fire.
;)
The battery controller is in the phone, not the battery, so if it doesn't get the battery it expects to get, there's no limit to the pyromaniac fun that can be had.
A decentralized power grid is only going to help so much.
Smaller generators are less efficent than larger ones. Solar power and wind power only works when you've got solar power and wind power. Works fine for certain parts of the US, but works pretty crappily in the eastern seaboard. Plus, it multiplies the maintenence costs to have a lot of different generators.
Lately, I've become more pro-nuclear. And that's the sort of thing where, despite the fact that it's been incredibly safe so far, you still want it out where people are more sparsely populated, just in case. Solar power is a waste of space and only works in some parts of the world, wind power kills the little birdies in large numbers, hydrothermal power destroys scenic river views... Hydrogen is a code word for "we'll build lots of nuclear plants in Mexico or Canada or maybe even Japan, electrolyze the seawater, and then ship it to the US". Eventually the non-whacko environmentalists are going to realize that there's three options, and the one that's unarguably the easiest and most palatable is nuclear power. (the other two are to bring it all down and space-based solar power)
The only thing that would alleviate this is to maintain a higher potential power surplus. This means either build more generators, in general, or use less power. The problem is that it's very hard to use less power and make it stick, except by collapsing back to anarchy. About the only lasting change in california from the blackouts is that everybody keeps the timers to turn off lights, the energy-saving florescent bulbs, etc. A lot of the other stuff they cooked up for conservation is quickly passing from people's thinking.
I picked up some modeling clay and started sculpting. Easy enough to pack when you head back home -- sqish it all down back into a lump.
I brought a laptop of my own, to toy around with software.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you here.. The biggest mistake of the shuttle was combining everything you needed in space into one vehicle when you really need a fleet of related vehicles.
The main costs of the shuttle is mostly fixed. Where things went wrong is that the shuttle requires too much service work between flights. Were they able to fly the shuttle 26 times a year, the cost per flight would go down. But, the afformentioned shuttle rebuild kills that.
With respect to the Proton-M, I think you might have missed the point. I'd wager that Pournelle has it right. Figure out how to get a $100/lb to LEO transport. Manned, unmanned, recoverable, expendable, big, small, dumb, smart, doesn't matter. Likely case is that it'll have a quarter the payload of the shuttle and be reusable, but it will be $100/lb and decidedly safer than the shuttle. The problem (And cool part) is that you then also need an orbital truck -- except that it doesn't actually need to take off or land. And you also need orbital construction because you won't be able to fit a full station part or satelite into the space-truck cargo bay, which means you need a space station dedicated to construction (so you don't screw up the experiments with the ISS) and either better spacesuits (Pournelle's opinion) or a large inflatable hangar (My opinion).
Jewelers charge 200% markup, they call it the Triple Keystone price.
;)
The problem is, they are charging that because they mostly have to. They need to have a jeweler on staff to put people's stones back in the mounting, size rings, etc. Jewelers expect to be paid reasonably well. They have to pay insane insurance on all of the diamonds that are just lying around.
Now, the problem is, it's not going to save you any to have the jeweler do stuff for you. Any savings in them not needing to keep stock goes towards the jeweler's money.
They probably don't want to bother with your gems and materials because then you'd know what the triple keystone is. It's also got less surprises. There may be lead or oxides in the metal.
Probably the best way to go, if you want to do things cheap, is to pick your rock out first -- Downtown SF is the place to get them, or if you've got something particular in mind, search online.
If you don't have your heart set on casting it with existing metal, you can always buy pre-made rings and prongs. Google search for "Findings".
The bitchy, evil part is actually putting the damn stone into the prongs. The rest is just simple brazing (a.k.a. hard soldering) that anybody can do. Screw the prongs up too much and the diamond will fall out of the prongs at the wrong moment. Oops.
Other strategies you can try are to bring a wax version of the ring and the metal to a casting foundry and have them do it. Much more likely than folks in the US.
See if a jeweler will just set the stone, nothing else. Or, be sneaky and say "Oh, the stone fell out of my ring, could you set it back in?"
Or go to India, where it's standard operating procedure to provide your own materials if necessary. But then you have to go to India and buy tickets. Oops.
You can generally gather notions about what she'll want just by going to any jewelery store and browsing. Just remember what the common feature is.
No, the real problem is the hard stuff -- the witches-brew of unstable radioisotopes.
n uke.html
Check out http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/anti-
The interesting part is that we aren't talking about the half-life of Uranium. We are mostly talking about the half-life of what happens when Uranium splits. Which does NOT have a particularly long half-life.
So, really, what you are looking at is 500 years before it is less radioactive than the ore it came from, and a few thousand years before it is truly safe. Not the millions and millions of years that people always talk about.
Of course, a few thousand years is still quite some time.
What should have happened is for somebody like RMS to have thought up DRM first and generated patents on it and then refused to license them to anybody. ;)
Actually, Verizon uses CDMA, not TDMA.
Sad, but true.
However, my logic is still sound. If the ISPs are having this much trouble surviving without needing to block addresses, imagine how much more trouble they would have surviving with needing to block addresses.
In reality, the bubble is the main reason for why the ISPs are having problems. Too much excess capacity, not enough fiber was a myth, etc.
Damn, a good first post for once. ;)
Seriously, if the RIAA goes through with this, you can kiss your ISP's fiscial stability good-bye.
Can you imagine how many sites for illegal content appear outside of the US? Can you imagine how many requests every large backbone provider would have to deal with? Can you imagine how quickly the blocking tables on the router would be stuffed to the gills?
Whoa, Jason Zych on slashdot. Jason, don't ever let them teach 225 in anything that doesn't force you to think about how you use memory. ;)
The problem is that *other* schools think they can push people through with NO memory management experience whatsoever. As in, we've got people who don't know what a pointer is and barely understand what a linked list is for interviews.
My big worry is that if the CS undergrad programs stick to all memory managed languages and ditch assembley, than we're in for a lot of pretty useless programmers in the future. There are way too many cases where assembley knowlege has saved my ass while programming. We had people from the top-5 CS schools who seemed to be like that, although it's my strong suspicion that said canidate either was on drugs, a moron, cheated, or some combination of the above.
Yeah, I was the first of the Java students at UIUC.
:/
I used to think that we should be using Smalltalk instead of Java, but then I learned a little more about Scheme and think we should be using Scheme.
The problem that I've seen is some universities have moved entirely to Java and Scheme and other garbage collected languages and we've had some pretty baaad job canidates from there who know absolutely nothing about memory management.
This is nothing new. For quite some time, every CS Freshman at UIUC was issued a free copy of MS Visual Studio.
Of course, it happened my Sophmore year, so I was not gifted with the freebies. Of course, I did get a free copy of the one true version of Windows (Win2k) from MS for free later, so I'm no more bitter than I usually am.
Well, the whole neato notion of 3D formats like VRML is that you could fit a LOT of cool interactive data in a small file. So that's not actually the problem.
In order to make something scriptable, it needs to be on a much higher level than GL. They've already made GL bindings for Perl and Python, but nobody uses them because they are far too slow.
One big problem is that there's far too many disperate uses for an open 3D format. It would be nice to have a 3D format we could use for games, but there's far too many problems there. CAD has one set of requirements, making pretty pictures has another set of requirements, etc. etc. etc.
I suspect that we'll see the GUI reorganized to take advantage of the video card's 3D circutry to give every app a speed boost before any 3D format catches on.
And within the next year or two, nobody's going to be too interested in 3D on the web because they all spent far too much on the web in general.
The only thing that they have any hope of managing to create is a nice alternative to the standard DXF and OBJ formats that most 3D software can roughly parse through.
See, the sad thing is that marketing with a strong regulating element is the only way that it doesn't get annoying.
Like, catalog merchants are good about this. Because it costs them money to print up a nice catalog, they make sure that they have a potentially willing recepient. People watch TV for the programs, so you *can't* have just commercials, you have to have a program. I attribute the growth of Tivo commercial skipping mostly to the TV programmers losing touch with their audience and putting in enough commercials to reach most peoples annoyance factor.
The problem is, there's too big of a growth of weird corporate shell structures that makes it possible for a boiler room operation to start up and shut down quickly. So it becomes moderately profitable to run a boiler room operation, get fined by the attorney general/fcc, shut down, start up a new corporation, buy up old corporations assets, do it all over again, etc.
The 5.4 million dollar fine is based on the TCPA, not actual damages.
The problem is that the TCPA hasn't been shown to cover spamming. Which is unfortunate. They really need to superscede it with a law that bans advertisement in all cases where the caller does not foot the bill of the communication -- i.e. making only telemarketing and junk mail legal.
You can pick up bend meters from Jameco that are intended for PowerGlove sort of VR usages. From there, you'd want to use it to drive a Darlington transistor array or something similar (i.e. device that triggers on once a certain amount of power passes through the collector) to run a Radio Shack buzzer. You'd want a trim-pot to control when the buzzer triggers.
Note -- I'm a digital boy and I'm designing this in my head, so I could be very wrong.
So, for the trouble of one mail order part, you have a buzzer that trigers when a strip is straightened. Very very little force required to move it.
Either that, or just attach a lever arm attached to a pot set just close enough that a small movement will trigger the transistor on the buzzer so that she can push down on a paddle with minimal force.
You can probably figure that every ISP that isn't going bankrupt is either hosting pornsites or spammers, or both.
It is likely that the best solution to spammers skipping town would be to make ISPs legally liable for certain spam-related infractions -- primarily signing pink contracts with spammers or not taking steps to verify the identity of a customer.
Which would make the business of being an ISP suck, but would probably eliminate the problem.
For the exact same distance, BNC cable will give you higher quality than HD15 because it has much much much better isolation. No crosstalk between the various signals because they are all shielded nicely.
So you will be able to run cables much longer before they start to look bad. How much longer? Depends on your individual standards of quality and how long you are trying to make it go. But they did some phenominal cable runs at a lecture hall in my alma mater that did 1600x1200 pretty well with BNC.
The problem is that, really, the "plain language" ability of a command language isn't going to get you anywhere that a not-quite-pain-language-but-shorthand language won't.
.mp3, the file type of MPEG1 layer 3, the file named "all MP3s" that you use to keep track of what you've got, or what? Do you really mean the hard drive or is that what you call the CD-RW drive? Do you really want the computer confirming every possible ambiguity with you every time? What happens when it assumes wrong? And then what happens when you type "Now, I want you to write my research paper" because you are now ascribing HAL-like properties to a computer that just has a user friendly command line.
They tried this with 4GLs and cobol. COBOL wears the tips of your fingers down to the nubs because it is incredibly verbose. Doesn't make it easier to program, but damn, it's close to spoken language. "Copy all MP3s from here to the hard drive" makes sense to you. Do you mean to copy every file that has the extension
See, we can't parse plain language unambiguously, so you would need to clarify any ambiguities to the computer. So no matter what, you will have to change your method of interaction to deal with the computer. The only thing you do by making it more "plain language" is making it easier for somebody who doesn't quite know what they are doing to get themselves in real trouble.
OTOH, it makes some sense to keep things the way they are.
Consider that the internal core of a perfect-new RISC chip and a x86-64 chip are more-or-less the same. x86-64 instructions come in, are translated to internal RISC code, and are then executed. The main difference is an extra translator and the register-renamer. But any architecture that lasts long enough will need such trappings, as it starts being used for things that nobody would have thought of when the designer thought the chip up.
Remember that, for a long time, the 286 instructions that aren't easily mappable to the RISC core aren't particularly efficent.
I used to think exactly the same thing as you are thinking now. I want a MIPS or Alpha inside, not Intel. But, given that 99% of programming is not done in assembley and the cost of adding a hardware instruction set translator is minimal compared to the difficulty and risks of switching instruction sets, the instruction set of a processor ceases to matter.
At my place of employ, we've been pleasantly surprised with the performance of the latest latest laptop hard drives, actually. Compares quite favorably to anything but 7200 RPM drives, at least for what we do (software development).
Depending on how you configure it, some Thinkpads can take two IDE drives. But I suspect your best bet is to get a pair of 3.5" drives in an external case and either hook up via FireWire or SCSI. I doubt that 2.5" IDE drives will take well to RAID 0.
The other thing is that it works on a different chain of authority than you would see with a user on a cable modem running 802.11. You control the 802.11 AP and so it's kinda your problem when people mess around with your internal network. If somebody gets a WaveRider box and does nasty things with it, they are messing with the WaveRider ISP, not a person with an 802.11 cable modem.
Meaning, in theory, it's far easier for the WaveRider ISP to bust somebody's balls and the ISP is more likely, because a h4x0r is making it hard for the ISP to do business.
OTOH, I hope that they are using some sort of encryption anyways; ISPs tend to be far sloppier than they should about security.
VC++ does not require language extensions. I would, of course, not recomend you try to use MFC with any compiler except VC++ because it'll probably drive you up the wall.
VC++ and wxWindows both require lots of macros, however.