I haven't used this part of their products, but I am impressed with their wireless APs and controllers...especially for client density and VoIP.
Meru uses their radio switches and bonds multiple channels of wireless to create backbone trunks between APs. You end up with around 150Mbps full-duplex if you used 3 channels for the backbone...a bit better than 100-Base. These trunks are encrypted, and the wireless path between AP and controller are also encrypted. Keep in mind, this path is between APs and radio switches...not the actual wireless clients. Those are still a/b/g speeds.
They've had a few of their customers switch over entirely to a wireless LAN. The advantages are easy deployment for new installs or temporary installs. The disadvantages are sub-GigE speeds and typical concerns about security.
Well, I can appreciate the space-saving design in theory, but I doubt anything good will come from a keyboard in which you need to use a Function key to type a number. Laptops may have this feature, but they also have a regular number row.
A side note: The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite. I still need to learn all the keys, but there's only half as many spaces in which to put them. So I'm learning at least two key positions for every button...if not more.
Why allow port 25 outgoing? My clients. They come in to my business and want to send their email. Guess what? Their corporate, locked-down laptop is set up to point to only their smtp server. VPNs are around 20-30% of the time, and so they end up needing to connect to their mail servers to send out.
Having port 25 open on an outgoing connection isn't that big of a deal if you monitor and control it. Virus scan both ways, rate limit max connections, etc.
Trends like these are all over the place in advertising. There's an initial horrid reaction of the disgust and intolerance. And then, people just move on and get used to it. You become numb to the advertising...
Remember when previews were the first thing on a movie screen? Now...I watch advertising for local companies the entire time before the projector even starts. And then, I get about 5 minutes of movie-sized commercials before the previews. This is for a movie I've already paid $10 to go see.
Video games have become saturated with product placement and music singles. Games used to use generic descriptions and canned music.
Entire television shows are dedicated to selling products. The real-life business opportunities for The Apprentice candidates are paid advertising bought buy those companies. A few million bucks and your product gets a 30-minute show based around having people promote and sell your brand. It's reality TV mixed with an infomercial, but people flock to season after season of it.
Does anyone even notice the corner ads in the entire Comcast menu guide anymore? Any time you change the channel or browse the listings, you're hit with an ad.
It's all stuff we've learned to ignore. Tivo seems to be no exception to the trends and over time, we'll block that out as well. A vicious cycle...but one which will continue unless companies aren't interested in making more money than they did last year.
If you're one of the users who has pop-ups coming during regular programming, call up Tivo. Complain. Play the dumb card and talk to as many people as possible. Start asking for stuff like a new Tivo because yours is obviously broken (since...the pop-ups aren't supposed to be doing this, right?) or credit for your monthly service. It's an 800 charge to Tivo and their customer support time wasted.
Now, who knows what's going to happen...but if enough people complain, they might think again about how and when they place these pop-ups. If you're a user paying a monthly fee for their service and don't like something, it's worth your time to let Tivo actually know about it rather than just the slashdot crowd.
It seems like all three have various nice features but all three also have negatives that you have to suffer through.
Um...from reading the article (and I'd hope our submitter did, as he's the first feedback post praising the author)...you'll see how most of it defends the MS box on a point-by-point basis of what Tivo offers.
To me, it reads like 'We can do everything Tivo can do better...' It's a response to Pogue's praise of Tivo with praise of his own. A fair comparison, a blogger's thoughts on DVRs, and a waste of slashdot's frontpage.
One thing which I really liked was watching the orchestra react to the audience. The Chicagoland Pops orchestra is pretty talented and plays a wide range of classical music, but you could guess many of these musicians weren't familiar with FF or the music before. They played well, but they were blown away by multiple standing ovations after the more popular songs (like Aeris' Theme). Most theatergoes to the Rosemont Theatre to see the Pops perform are probably enthusiastic and polite, but not jumping to their feet clapping and cheering like crazy.
It really seemed to give a boost to the musicians that the audience really connected to the music they were performing. Many of them seemed to really be enjoying the concert as much as we were. It's amazing music to seen performed somewhere other than the speaker on your TV set, and really seemed to fit well with an orchestra and an audience.
For research, I checked out some of those pictures returned by the Britney search.
Many of the thumbnails displayed aren't the same picture that's retrieved when you click on the link. So, their cache must be outdated already. When I'm browsing thumbnails, I expect...no I demand...my search engine to return the appropriate photos!
There's lots of suggestions for MPEG...but any MPEG-1 encoding will probably be much larger than the file sizes you're currently using to maintain quality. It does have the advantage of being cross-platform.
You could create some good quality, small size movies using MPEG-4. Older systems might not have the codecs to play that back installed. But, as an alternative in addition to WMV, your Mac and Linux visitors will probably be able to deal with MPEG-4.
I'm not sure what SBC and 2wire are doing, but just looking at the SBC/Dish Network/2wire box on their mainpage (www.2wire.com) makes me afraid.
It has 2 separate 4-way toggle switches, 3 random buttons on the left side, and then SIX rainbow-colored buttons in the middle. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. ROYGBIV...pretty much.
Tivo...well...Tivo doesn't have any buttons. You just plug it in. That's it.
I forgot that reading the article is rare...and reading more than two lines of comment is even more dismal.
I'd like to know about the lawsuits...not how to trick my mom into using a different browser. Typical slashdot answer...fix the symptoms without addressing the problem.
I'd like to know if anyone has heard success stories of legal action against these companies. Forget about targeting Microsoft or their browser holes, forget about using the "right" browser. My mom doesn't understand why I make her click on the red globe icon instead of the blue E.
I've heard of spammer suits in small claims court being won thanks to the fax abuse law. Has anything similar been done with spyware? If infection and installation can occur and cripple a machine without user permission...requiring computer tech support (and hourly rates) to repair...how could I go about suing these people for those costs?
AirTunes is the software driving this thing...but Apple's real device here is AirPort Express. It's a very portable base station, which can create a wireless network for connecting to a WAN through your cable/dsl modem...or extend the range of another base Apple base station.
So, yeah...compared to the full features of a Squeezebox for music, it's lacking. And compared to the price of a Linksys or other 802.11 router...a little more expensive.
I'll take wireless access to my stereo from my G5...which I already drive around via Bluetooth from my phone when I'm too lazy to move off the couch. Who needs a remote??
Awhile ago, John Lasseter of Pixar was in some promotional documentary for one of their films. He claimed that when they originally created their short film with the desklamp, render times were around 7 hours per frame.
He said that for Finding Nemo today, render times were about...7 hours per frame.
More machines and faster processors let you cram much more detail and technology into the same package. Working in commercial advertising, digital editing and graphic workstations are fantastic and powerful...but their advantage isn't speed. We spend the same amount of time making a commercial as 10 years ago...but now we make 7 versions and change it 30-some times along the way. Power gives you the ability to change your mind....and that's a creative force which people gladly pay for.
HiFun has a few things going for it. It's a members site which essentially ranks its members. Those who receive the most gifts are the most popular, so this could be compared with a dating service or one of those hot-or-not sites a few years back. Also, it's similar to friendster in that you collect this circle of people around you who you've invited inside.
Their members publish photos of themselves...attractive women in various poses as well as some regular looking joes. So now it's personal and less sterile than just icons or avatars.
Would people pay membership dues for something like this? Sure they would... HiFun has created an interactive webboard that just happens to draw some income for themselves. All of their elements have worked quite well before in parts of the web...might as well work for them too.
Adobe never actually updated FrameMaker for OS x on the Mac, which made this a legacy app that needed to run in Classic anyway. Print shops can be somewhat slow in updating to newer software and technology, so many might still run some OS 9 Macs...but lack of support for the current system hinted that this software was considered dead long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used this part of their products, but I am impressed with their wireless APs and controllers...especially for client density and VoIP.
e ases/050106a.shtml
Meru uses their radio switches and bonds multiple channels of wireless to create backbone trunks between APs. You end up with around 150Mbps full-duplex if you used 3 channels for the backbone...a bit better than 100-Base. These trunks are encrypted, and the wireless path between AP and controller are also encrypted. Keep in mind, this path is between APs and radio switches...not the actual wireless clients. Those are still a/b/g speeds.
They've had a few of their customers switch over entirely to a wireless LAN. The advantages are easy deployment for new installs or temporary installs. The disadvantages are sub-GigE speeds and typical concerns about security.
Here's the link for more info...http://www.merunetworks.com/news/press_rel
Well, I can appreciate the space-saving design in theory, but I doubt anything good will come from a keyboard in which you need to use a Function key to type a number. Laptops may have this feature, but they also have a regular number row.
A side note: The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite. I still need to learn all the keys, but there's only half as many spaces in which to put them. So I'm learning at least two key positions for every button...if not more.
Just no girls on slashdot.
Pretty soon they'll close their chat rooms to men who pretend to be women online... That should cut back on traffic as well.
Watching this thing dance through my firewall, it seems that if it fails to connect on port 5222, it then connects to google via https.
I'm wondering if the connection is actually encrypted of if they're just floating it on a commonly-open port through the firewall.
An infinite number of monkeys used an infinite number of typewriters...and this is exactly the kind of article they would produce.
Why allow port 25 outgoing? My clients. They come in to my business and want to send their email. Guess what? Their corporate, locked-down laptop is set up to point to only their smtp server. VPNs are around 20-30% of the time, and so they end up needing to connect to their mail servers to send out.
Having port 25 open on an outgoing connection isn't that big of a deal if you monitor and control it. Virus scan both ways, rate limit max connections, etc.
Trends like these are all over the place in advertising. There's an initial horrid reaction of the disgust and intolerance. And then, people just move on and get used to it. You become numb to the advertising...
Remember when previews were the first thing on a movie screen? Now...I watch advertising for local companies the entire time before the projector even starts. And then, I get about 5 minutes of movie-sized commercials before the previews. This is for a movie I've already paid $10 to go see.
Video games have become saturated with product placement and music singles. Games used to use generic descriptions and canned music.
Entire television shows are dedicated to selling products. The real-life business opportunities for The Apprentice candidates are paid advertising bought buy those companies. A few million bucks and your product gets a 30-minute show based around having people promote and sell your brand. It's reality TV mixed with an infomercial, but people flock to season after season of it.
Does anyone even notice the corner ads in the entire Comcast menu guide anymore? Any time you change the channel or browse the listings, you're hit with an ad.
It's all stuff we've learned to ignore. Tivo seems to be no exception to the trends and over time, we'll block that out as well. A vicious cycle...but one which will continue unless companies aren't interested in making more money than they did last year.
If you're one of the users who has pop-ups coming during regular programming, call up Tivo. Complain. Play the dumb card and talk to as many people as possible. Start asking for stuff like a new Tivo because yours is obviously broken (since...the pop-ups aren't supposed to be doing this, right?) or credit for your monthly service. It's an 800 charge to Tivo and their customer support time wasted.
Now, who knows what's going to happen...but if enough people complain, they might think again about how and when they place these pop-ups. If you're a user paying a monthly fee for their service and don't like something, it's worth your time to let Tivo actually know about it rather than just the slashdot crowd.
It seems like all three have various nice features but all three also have negatives that you have to suffer through.
Um...from reading the article (and I'd hope our submitter did, as he's the first feedback post praising the author)...you'll see how most of it defends the MS box on a point-by-point basis of what Tivo offers.
To me, it reads like 'We can do everything Tivo can do better...' It's a response to Pogue's praise of Tivo with praise of his own. A fair comparison, a blogger's thoughts on DVRs, and a waste of slashdot's frontpage.
I got to see the show, and it was well worth it.
One thing which I really liked was watching the orchestra react to the audience. The Chicagoland Pops orchestra is pretty talented and plays a wide range of classical music, but you could guess many of these musicians weren't familiar with FF or the music before. They played well, but they were blown away by multiple standing ovations after the more popular songs (like Aeris' Theme). Most theatergoes to the Rosemont Theatre to see the Pops perform are probably enthusiastic and polite, but not jumping to their feet clapping and cheering like crazy.
It really seemed to give a boost to the musicians that the audience really connected to the music they were performing. Many of them seemed to really be enjoying the concert as much as we were. It's amazing music to seen performed somewhere other than the speaker on your TV set, and really seemed to fit well with an orchestra and an audience.
For research, I checked out some of those pictures returned by the Britney search.
Many of the thumbnails displayed aren't the same picture that's retrieved when you click on the link. So, their cache must be outdated already. When I'm browsing thumbnails, I expect...no I demand...my search engine to return the appropriate photos!
I'm curious as to why A9 returns Google clickthroughs at the bottom of the page as "Sponsored Links" when you search for something generic.
So in the http://a9.com/plumber example, you'll find A9 directs through Google at the very bottom. I guess they need to make a dime somehow.
There's lots of suggestions for MPEG...but any MPEG-1 encoding will probably be much larger than the file sizes you're currently using to maintain quality. It does have the advantage of being cross-platform.
You could create some good quality, small size movies using MPEG-4. Older systems might not have the codecs to play that back installed. But, as an alternative in addition to WMV, your Mac and Linux visitors will probably be able to deal with MPEG-4.
I'm not sure what SBC and 2wire are doing, but just looking at the SBC/Dish Network/2wire box on their mainpage (www.2wire.com) makes me afraid.
It has 2 separate 4-way toggle switches, 3 random buttons on the left side, and then SIX rainbow-colored buttons in the middle. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. ROYGBIV...pretty much.
Tivo...well...Tivo doesn't have any buttons. You just plug it in. That's it.
I forgot that reading the article is rare...and reading more than two lines of comment is even more dismal.
I'd like to know about the lawsuits...not how to trick my mom into using a different browser. Typical slashdot answer...fix the symptoms without addressing the problem.
I'd like to know if anyone has heard success stories of legal action against these companies. Forget about targeting Microsoft or their browser holes, forget about using the "right" browser. My mom doesn't understand why I make her click on the red globe icon instead of the blue E.
I've heard of spammer suits in small claims court being won thanks to the fax abuse law. Has anything similar been done with spyware? If infection and installation can occur and cripple a machine without user permission...requiring computer tech support (and hourly rates) to repair...how could I go about suing these people for those costs?
I've had a guy at Best Buy explain that I needed the extended warranty on my TV to cover expenses for yearly cleaning of the digital comb filter.
He explained how the filter could get dirty over time and maintenance would be required...
First the US learns that the Brits have all the good sitcoms...and now Slashdot shows me that they have all the good radios as well.
Digital Audio Broadcasts? 85% coverage of the UK? Wicked radios? And it's for FREE!?!? XM ain't lookin' so hot right now...
AirTunes is the software driving this thing...but Apple's real device here is AirPort Express. It's a very portable base station, which can create a wireless network for connecting to a WAN through your cable/dsl modem...or extend the range of another base Apple base station.
So, yeah...compared to the full features of a Squeezebox for music, it's lacking. And compared to the price of a Linksys or other 802.11 router...a little more expensive.
I'll take wireless access to my stereo from my G5...which I already drive around via Bluetooth from my phone when I'm too lazy to move off the couch. Who needs a remote??
Awhile ago, John Lasseter of Pixar was in some promotional documentary for one of their films. He claimed that when they originally created their short film with the desklamp, render times were around 7 hours per frame.
He said that for Finding Nemo today, render times were about...7 hours per frame.
More machines and faster processors let you cram much more detail and technology into the same package. Working in commercial advertising, digital editing and graphic workstations are fantastic and powerful...but their advantage isn't speed. We spend the same amount of time making a commercial as 10 years ago...but now we make 7 versions and change it 30-some times along the way. Power gives you the ability to change your mind....and that's a creative force which people gladly pay for.
This deserves an explanation for those who haven't heard the joke...
Busch (or insert your huge American beer merchant here) beer is like having sex in a canoe.
It's fucking close to water.
HiFun has a few things going for it. It's a members site which essentially ranks its members. Those who receive the most gifts are the most popular, so this could be compared with a dating service or one of those hot-or-not sites a few years back. Also, it's similar to friendster in that you collect this circle of people around you who you've invited inside.
Their members publish photos of themselves...attractive women in various poses as well as some regular looking joes. So now it's personal and less sterile than just icons or avatars.
Would people pay membership dues for something like this? Sure they would... HiFun has created an interactive webboard that just happens to draw some income for themselves. All of their elements have worked quite well before in parts of the web...might as well work for them too.
Adobe never actually updated FrameMaker for OS x on the Mac, which made this a legacy app that needed to run in Classic anyway. Print shops can be somewhat slow in updating to newer software and technology, so many might still run some OS 9 Macs...but lack of support for the current system hinted that this software was considered dead long ago.
Link that works out of the box, and properly formated...here...
_ ipod_0404/
http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/17/markets/freeintro