Can someone tell me why you would need all this extra bandwidth on your laptop?
Well for starters you might not want it (just) for a laptop. I'm in NexTel's cell footprint but there are no cable ISPs and no DSL here, and as far as I can tell no ISDN either. If price is similar to VZ's I would get it for my house.
However as for laptop usage, some people travel on business and would like high speed access on the road, and they can't always get hotel rooms at places that have high speed access (and this might be cheaper anyway). Other people just spend a lot of time away from the office (say in meetings, at client sites, in class rooms, or commuting on a train or bus). Existing wireless solutions are slower then dialup, so even just checking book prices at amazon is painful and the latency is very high so doing interactive work via ssh is pretty painful as well (but doable).
Verizon Wireless already offers wireless broadband. the technology is 1XEVDO (AKA "Broadband Access") and is avail.
They offer it in San Diago and the "metro DC area". I live about 90 minutes away from DC and I would have to drive 40 minutes to get to the closest covered area.
A friend of mine has it. Not as fast as cablemodems I have used, but faster then ISDN. Higher latency though. Latency seemed lower then my GPRS though.
Why don't you preemptivly solve the problem: work with all the toher access providers. Agree on a common authentification scheme so that no matter where I am my machine always works. At first I might pay large roaming costs, but once you have the identification in place you are set to make roaming cheaper. (Remember you are competing against cell providers, if you are faster and in more places you can charge a little more but not a lot. This is a buisness decision).
That won't help for people that spend time in areas that aren't in hotspots but are in NexTel/VZ/whoever's cell footprint. For example my house isn't anywhere close to a Starbucks, McD's, or anywhere else with a hotspot, but it is in VZ and NexTel's cell footprint. So are lots of places my wife shops at.
Hotspots are just spots, cell carriers can cover huge areas. I expect that is worth money to a lot of people.
I have to wonder if there's some Windows-only software that they're using for the connection, or if they just don't want the hassle of trying to deal with connection issues from other OSes.
I expect there is windows only software for the USB and PCMCIA devices. I would guess that the ethernet device (the one they call a "Broadband modem") doesn't need anything to work, but probbably needs some little windows-only craplet to display the signal strength and other hardware and session stats.
You need some kind of hardware to access the network, and hardware needs drivers.
There seem to be three kinds of hardware they use. A PCMCIA card, which may or may not look like some other kind of card there is already a driver for (I'm guessing "not"). A USB device that again may or may not look like a card there is a driver for (and again I guess "not"). A device with an ethernet sticking out if it which from it's description you need something that uses DHCP. I'm guessing Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, and many many other OSes can handle.
Nextel definitely gets no credit for this, they are late to the party.
"late" being "second in the US" (at least with any signifigant bandwidth), and since VZ is also still in the test phase, who knows which will get to wide scale deployment first.
I expect this gets to be/. news because it is a free trial. Plus it looks like at least one of the end system hardware bits looks like it might work with non-Windows systems (gives you an ethernet).
WiMax products are a year off and that technology is going displace all of these cellular data/Internet systems much like WiFi wiped out all of the wireless LAN systems.
Maybe, but there are some differences. WiMax "head ends" are not intended to become cheap, so it will take them longer to get cheap then 802.11 did. 802.11 also crushed all of the other wireless stuff in the same frequency band, but some of the 900Mhz ones remain in use because 900Mhz will go through more trees and stuff then 2.4Ghz. WiMax will be in (I think) the 5Ghz area, so killing proprietary 5Ghz wireless equipment is a good guess, but eliminating stuff in the PCS spectrum (about 2Ghz) may not be as likely.
Also the power ranges on WiMax might be similar to other "non-licensed" bands (about 100 milliW) while NexTel can use about 3W at the base station and 300milliW at the mobile unit.
The existing cell companies also already have rooftop and antenna rights in a bunch of places, so WiMax competitors will have some trouble getting the same sort of coverage areas quickly (this assumes NetTel's stuff can use the same antennas that their voice stuff uses, which I think is the case with VZ's EV-DO).
If I were starting a wireless data company and didn't own a cell company then WiMax would look like the right bet (assuming I can wait that long, otherwise maybe 802.11), at least if I'm not looking at customers with lots of trees and stuff in their way (which might make me go looking at 900Mhz solutions). If I were starting a wireless data company that was part of a cell company I would look at stuff that lets me reuse the existing cell stuff, which ain't WiMax.
The thing I would be doing that VZ and NexTel aren't (at least not yet) is focusing on areas that don't have DSL or cable available. You can sell to those people at prices higher then DSL/cable without even taking the mobility into account, then bring prices down as you move into areas that cable/DSL is already in.
Yeah, that's just it. It all depends on whether the free e-book turns into enough free press to generate enough customers that (when combined with the odd person who wouldn't have bought it but liked it so much after reading it on-line that they had to have a copy) they outnumber the people who would have bought it it if they couldn't read it for free on the screen.
You also have to factor in the number of people who wouldn't have bought it, but read it for free and like it so much they end up buying it as a gift for a friend. After all it isn't like you can say "happy birthday, I wrote the URL of a free book in your card, enjoy". Well, not unless you have deep pockets and short arms at any rate.
Lets say there is an article about FOO CORP. Lets say it isn't accurate, or complete. Let's say Bob knows some thing more about it. Lets say he knows more about it because he works for FOO CORP. So either Bob can post about it and risk losing his job (esp. if it is "that's not the half of it FOO CORP also rips you off by..."), or he can be an Anontmous Coward, or he can choose not to post.
It also might be one wants to say "BSD is dyeing, it fell in my hot grits and splashed them on natallie portman!".
Dish has a new box with two tuners, and built in PVR. The built in PVR is actually better than TiVo brand PVR IMHO. The two tuners don't work well together yet, but they update their firm ware all the time so its just a matter of time before the system starts to work perfectly.
Is this the Moxie box? I heard bits and pieces about it before it was released (one of their employes use to pose on some of the TiVo boards I use to read a lot).
What do you like better about it? From what I recall they said they would have something like TiVo's "Session Pass Priority Manager" but some how much better. Do they? And is it? And if so, how? I also seem to recall them saying you would be able to hook them together over 802.11, did that come to pass? And if so is it like TiVo does it (you can play shows stored on the other TiVos, and move them, and maybe even schedule recordings, but you can't say "I want X, Y, and Z recorded, I don't care which TiVo gets them, just make sure they all get got!").
I have had DTV for about 3 years (in two different houses). I have only had a (noticeable) signal loss from rain twice (I think), and I've had more signal loss from snow it seems to be only very short periods of time (I don't lose an hour show, I have 5 seconds of screwed up video and the audio is OK...or maybe I lose video for two minutes and audio for 90 seconds). My DTV outages definitely haven't added up in length to a single outage from my former cable TV provider, which seemed to be something rain related and if it happened after bisness hours they didn't fix until the next bisness day (so a Friday outage killed cable for the whole weekend).
As far as DVRs go before I had DTV I had DISH and a "stand alone" TiVo. I liked it so much I eventually got DTV and the "all in one" TiVo. The down side of the all in one is it won't let you record the audio-only music channels (you can watch them live), if you don't care about such channels then no problem. If you do it is a pain because you TiVo might change channels on you while you watch because you havn't touched the remote recently and it knows there is something on you asked it to record (or it thinks you will really want, and there is some free space on the drive).
I've also been told none of the "home media options" are currently only for stand alone systems. Also there is no combo DVD-writer and Sat-reciever.
On the upside it can record two things at once. Which is great because it means you can just tell it what you like and it can "just do the right thing" without have to tell you "I'm sorry, you are already recording FOO on Chanel X at HH:MM...do you want to record FOO or cancel FOO and get BAR?". Well, at least not as offen. More then two tuners would be nice:-) For me that is more important then the other stuff (esp. since I have had mine long enough that there was no home media option, or DVD writer when I made my choice).
The other upside is once in a while my stand alone TiVo wouldn't quite be able to change the channel so I would get the wrong thing recorded. I tried moving the IR transmitter around, and even at one point making a tinfoil IR sheld/guide. I've never hade that problem with the DTiVo (unless you count when DTV changed FX's channel number and a bunch of my seassion passes stoped recording anything).
Good luck with your choice.
P.S. I pretty much only switched away from DISH to DTV because of the TiVo. If you decide on another PVR or a standalone one I have no real reason to recomend DTV over DISH. I was pretty happy with the service from both.
The only thing I would be worried about is if weather affected it as it does Direct TV.
I'm sure it is, it sends using roughly the same frequencies (so roughly the same problems with water absorption), to satellites in roughly the same place (so about the same angle, so about the same amount of weather and trees to punch a signal through).
About the only difference is TCP/IP will do retries and DTV broadcasts are limited to doing forward error correction ('tho with the latencies involved I hope they also FEC the IP traffic).
Everyone I know with Direct TV is basically screwed when any amount of rain or snow is falling.
I have had DTV for about 3 years (in two different houses). I have only had a (noticeable) signal loss from rain twice (I think), and I've had more signal loss from snow it seems to be only very short periods of time (I don't lose an hour show, I have 5 seconds of screwed up video and the audio is OK...or maybe I lose video for two minutes and audio for 90 seconds). Maybe your friends have crappie installs, or maybe the east coast (where I am) has a better line on the satellites then wherever your friends are. (my DTV outages definitely haven't added up in length to a single outage from my cable TV provider)
All that said, I'm on dialup because I can't get cable IP service, DSL, or (apparently!) even ISDN here. There seems to be hills, trees, or mountains between myself and every wireless provider in the area (I'm about six miles south of Point of Rocks in VA). I have been holding out for something other then IP service from DTV. Maybe EV-DO will come out here soon. Maybe.
My reading of the fine print from DTV is if you buy their service you are not canceling for 3 years, not unless you want to pony up at least $700 or so in fees. That kind of lock in doesn't make me eager to try. The service might be really bad (either in general, or for my usage patterns) and the $700 fee seems pretty painful...
'm not aware of Apple ever claiming the $50 for iLife was to cover distribution costs because iDVD was too big to download
In the 2003 MW Keynote Jobs said iTunes and iPhoto remained free downloads and either iMove or iDVD (I can't recall which, but am pretty sure it wasn't both) was "too big to distribute online" because of all the video clips and things that came with it. Jobs claimed the other iLife apps went onto the CD because people without dial up had been asking for a way to get them on CD.
Apparently the new iPhoto has gotten larger since it is no longer downloadable (yes, that was sarcasam)
Even more man-hours would be saved if people wrote in ISO C using only POSIX functionality, without littering their code with Linux-isms, or worse still distribution-specific things. Creating a package is relatively easy once you can make the code compile.
If people only used the "standard" interfaces then the 'void' extention to K&R would never have gotten enough widespread use to be included in ANSI. Nobody would use the better select-like interfaces (epoll, kqueue) and we would never find out which should be included as a "standard" next time around. Oh, and no threads. And more buffer overuns because strlcpy won't be used just strncpy (which gets misapplied and allows buffer overuns more offen then not due to poor interfaces).
The people that push the envlope are the ones that influance the next standards.
(That's not to say one should go use sendfile/splice when you have no need, but if you need the performance, don't shy away)
In short, I don't trust e-voting. The only way I'd LIKE to see e-voting is that you choose your candidates on the computer, then it prints out a punched ballot (with names and all, so I can see it did things right) that I turn in, and THAT'S my ballot; the machine is nothing more than a ballot punching tool and holds no results of it's own. I should be able to do it all by hand if I want. This is the only way I'd like to see e-voting, and the description above is the only way that I'll accept it.
You are a bit more hard line then I. I'm fine with the computer counting the votes, but having paper ballots available for recounts and spot checks for verification of the computer tally.
I think computer voting can work, but without some sort of checks the temptation to "throw the vote" (either by the makers of the boxes, or by someone exploiting crappy security) will be too large. With a human verifiable backup and real spot checks the temptation will be signifigantly lessened (because the chances of getting away with it will be signifigantly reduced).
All I want is the iTunes music store in the UK. My new 40G iPod is reading, meerly 2gig full. My credit card is ready, my bank account is ready. I've got enough of a buy list to spend 100 in 30 seconds.
Rent a US mail box, get a US credit card, buy. Come on, if Mastercard offers my dog credit cards surely you qualify! (Hmmm, of corse my dog subscribes to Outdoor Photographer, so maybe you need a magazine subscription as well...)
Ok, I know that's not a real answer unless you happen to travel to the USA.
There are pre-payed credit cards, you can probbably manage to get one of those. The trick is how to get a US address on one. If you have any friends in the USA they ought to be able to buy it for you and mail it on (and by "friend", I mean anyone you can trust with $100 or so of your money to buy the card for you)
Batteries on cameras are easy to replace because they don't last long. Believe me, if they could make a digital camera battery that could last for 8 hours, somebody would make an all-enclosed unit (probably Canon).
The battery on the Canon EOS-D30 is good for around 500 (available light) pictures. The portrait/battery grip lets you load two batteries into the camera at once. It took it on a week long trip to the UK and only had to change batteries once (I had to change CF cards a whole lot more).
The D30 was discontinued around 2 years ago, but I would be surprised if the EOS-D10 or Digital Rebel wasn't roughly similar (well, other then the Digital Rebel probably not having a portrait grip for marketing reasons).
I live in the boonies, and havn't been able to find decent broadband, or even not-so-decent ISDN (or wireless! Come on, someone get a tower to hit northern Leesburg VA).
I selected an ISP that resold UUNET's dialup network (and others) at like $14/month for unlimited use. It was MonsterISP (remember, not chosen for it's name, but price and the fact that it was reselling someone else's decent dialup net). I had a FreeBSD box on a dedicated phone line bring up the connection adn NAT the rest of the boxes. After most of a month had gone by the connection dropped for the first time (I may have "borrowed" the line to send a FAX, or it could have been Telco joy). It called back and got "access denied". I tryed some other numbers (including non-UUNET ones) and got the same thing.
When MonsterISP's customer service people pulled up my records they saw something like 400 hours of usage (two plus weeks on one call) and were puzzled. Apparently "UUNET cuts them off at 200 hours". It was "all UUNET's fault, we can't fix it, but we can deactivate this account and give you another free of charge, you can ring back if it goes over 200 hours".
Ok, so they made good on trouble another caused me, and did it fast, and promised to do it agian any time it was needed, they get to be the good guys...right? Er. Bull. The problem happened on all the non-UUNET numbers as well. They were keeping track of the hours and denying access, and blaming it on someone else.
It is very clever sleeze, I mean they get to fix it anytime someone complains, but it discurages folks who want a lot of connect hours because it is a pain to call and get a new acocunt and configure it. More over it is impossalbe to do it when MonsterISP's offices are closed for the night. At the same time it seems unlikely that you would convince a judge or jury that they aren't "making a real effort to give unlimited dial up hours" (well, at least not if they started blaming their own software "it's a bug, but the author quit/can't find it/has better stuff to do" rather then UUNET).
I ended up with Eskimo North for $22/month. It's actually unlimited. With a gentlman's agreement not to dial back up if disconnected until you need to use the net again. (there is nothing in the agreement that says one can't run NTP which more or less will keep the line pegged all the time...which I actually do because my box has a crappy clock, so the "never wait for dial" is a bonus)
Still, I wish I could get something with real bandwidth (and latency that doesn't totally suck, which puts DirecTV's stuff out of the running, at least as far as I know).
I don't see how convergence is possible because different consumer groups seek different functionalities in the device. Some people want a gaming platform, others want a DVR, some need a single-person home computer, others need a family home theater, etc.
I'm not sure the divergant needs is really the problem. I think the devices are at odds. For example the DVR needs to be totally reliable and on all the time. If it is integrated with a game machine what happens when I want to play Soul Calibur III at the same time as the DVR needs to record something? That would suck. More so because a large part of the point of the DVR is that you no longer need to rember TV schedules!
Feh.
Individual componants will be more reliable, and likely higher quality. On the downside the probbably cost more, and some of the "highly intragrated user interface" crap is probbably very nice. (oh yeah, and there is that whole space issue....)
Cylons that hate humanity to the point of genocide, but they deliberately evolve themselves to be so much like us it takes chemical analysis to detect them. Sure, that's believeable.
It looks like they only made 12 infiltrator models, so the rest are presumabably "more robotic". It is possiable that those 12 are going to be destroyed after humanity is finished off.
Cylons so much like us that we can't detect them without chemical analysis, but if one of them dies, its consciousness is immediately transfered to a new body. Guess I missed that part of my biology glass.
Well, yeah, that one is crap.
The whole "anti-computer network" thing was just shit.
I donno, that one makes more sense. It is much much harder for an attacker to subvert a non networked computer, they need to gain physical access to it. Of corse non-networked computers are also less useful. "What is the most reliable, simplest to debug, and cheapest to produce component of any system?" "the one that isn't there"
BG actually had believable costumes. The characters looked like they were wearing regular comfortable every-day clothes, but there were enough subtle design changes to make it clear that they weren't on Any Street USA. The buildings just looked like regular buildings. It just helped add to the overall experience and I wanted to give a nod to those designers who finally Got It Right.
I think it worked for the clothing, but not the buildings. Look at buildings in a modern city or town, then look at pictures of cities or towns a mere 50 to 100 years old. Lots of changes. Far far more then we see in BG. Buildings ought to have changed a bit. New materals, new more efficent methods of heating/cooling leading to more glass maybe, or LCD-like displays all over th einside walls leading to less glass...but not exactly the same amount of glass as we have now!
The degeneration of the circuits that make up his mind. But when they examine the body, he's utterly human except for some of the compounds making up his body, so explain to me how the storm had any more effect on him than a human?
Either there are some brain diffrences they hadn't accounted for, or the body diffrences + the storm end up making something that effects the mind. Of corse how there is a transmitter that can send the brain's contents and they can't find the thing...well...that one I can't rationalise.
Oh, and considering the surprise at the ending, why didn't it effect her as much? And what about the chip in the good doctor's head?
I don't think they were on the planet with the ammo dump, nor were they even in orbit for long.
hat language is that supposed to be? It's not C, because in C, a string is delimited with "" and you'd need strcmp(karma, "excellent") instead of the equality. It's not Java or C#, because they don't have a printf function that looks like that.
It could be C++ which has a printf, and can use == on string class objects (which are not the same as quoted strings, but can take a quoted string as the left or right argument if a string object is the other).
Actually I think you can't mount some of the heavier lenses (like the ones over a pound) and use the camera's tripod mount. I doubt that is a big problem because those lenses tend to have their own tripod mounts anyway (and they are $4000+ lenses, so if you end up needing them you may well need a more costly body for other reasons).
My understanding is that the big corporations don't want the cable companies to unbundle the channels. Their model is that they want to be in as many homes as possible, so (for example) Disney forces the cable company to carry a bunch of Disney channels in its standard package, in return for the right to carry ABC.
Back when I had DISH they offered a bunch of packages a lot like Cable TV's (except with more channels then my local cableco). They also let you buy most channels for $1 each if they were not in the package you bought (or if you didn't want a package). Viacomm's channels were the only ones that didn't "play nice", so no MTV unless you bought 39 other channels, but if you wanted to buy only the History Channel International you could. Oh, and that didn't include things like HBO, if you wanted HBO3 you had to buy all 7 HBO channels (or however many there were at the time), which was about $10 (less if you had other movie packages). It was only for the "normal packaged channels" not the "normal premimum channels".
That may have changed (I would be shocked if the price was still the same!), but it is worth looking into. I would still be with DISH if their PVR/DVR thing was as reliable as the DTiVo (and had the SPM and TODO list...and...well...if it kicked ass like the TiVo, but on two or more channels at once).
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Well for starters you might not want it (just) for a laptop. I'm in NexTel's cell footprint but there are no cable ISPs and no DSL here, and as far as I can tell no ISDN either. If price is similar to VZ's I would get it for my house.
However as for laptop usage, some people travel on business and would like high speed access on the road, and they can't always get hotel rooms at places that have high speed access (and this might be cheaper anyway). Other people just spend a lot of time away from the office (say in meetings, at client sites, in class rooms, or commuting on a train or bus). Existing wireless solutions are slower then dialup, so even just checking book prices at amazon is painful and the latency is very high so doing interactive work via ssh is pretty painful as well (but doable).
They offer it in San Diago and the "metro DC area". I live about 90 minutes away from DC and I would have to drive 40 minutes to get to the closest covered area.
A friend of mine has it. Not as fast as cablemodems I have used, but faster then ISDN. Higher latency though. Latency seemed lower then my GPRS though.
That won't help for people that spend time in areas that aren't in hotspots but are in NexTel/VZ/whoever's cell footprint. For example my house isn't anywhere close to a Starbucks, McD's, or anywhere else with a hotspot, but it is in VZ and NexTel's cell footprint. So are lots of places my wife shops at.
Hotspots are just spots, cell carriers can cover huge areas. I expect that is worth money to a lot of people.
I expect there is windows only software for the USB and PCMCIA devices. I would guess that the ethernet device (the one they call a "Broadband modem") doesn't need anything to work, but probbably needs some little windows-only craplet to display the signal strength and other hardware and session stats.
There seem to be three kinds of hardware they use. A PCMCIA card, which may or may not look like some other kind of card there is already a driver for (I'm guessing "not"). A USB device that again may or may not look like a card there is a driver for (and again I guess "not"). A device with an ethernet sticking out if it which from it's description you need something that uses DHCP. I'm guessing Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, and many many other OSes can handle.
"late" being "second in the US" (at least with any signifigant bandwidth), and since VZ is also still in the test phase, who knows which will get to wide scale deployment first.
I expect this gets to be /. news because it is a free trial. Plus it looks like at least one of the end system hardware bits looks like it might work with non-Windows systems (gives you an ethernet).
Maybe, but there are some differences. WiMax "head ends" are not intended to become cheap, so it will take them longer to get cheap then 802.11 did. 802.11 also crushed all of the other wireless stuff in the same frequency band, but some of the 900Mhz ones remain in use because 900Mhz will go through more trees and stuff then 2.4Ghz. WiMax will be in (I think) the 5Ghz area, so killing proprietary 5Ghz wireless equipment is a good guess, but eliminating stuff in the PCS spectrum (about 2Ghz) may not be as likely.
Also the power ranges on WiMax might be similar to other "non-licensed" bands (about 100 milliW) while NexTel can use about 3W at the base station and 300milliW at the mobile unit.
The existing cell companies also already have rooftop and antenna rights in a bunch of places, so WiMax competitors will have some trouble getting the same sort of coverage areas quickly (this assumes NetTel's stuff can use the same antennas that their voice stuff uses, which I think is the case with VZ's EV-DO).
If I were starting a wireless data company and didn't own a cell company then WiMax would look like the right bet (assuming I can wait that long, otherwise maybe 802.11), at least if I'm not looking at customers with lots of trees and stuff in their way (which might make me go looking at 900Mhz solutions). If I were starting a wireless data company that was part of a cell company I would look at stuff that lets me reuse the existing cell stuff, which ain't WiMax.
The thing I would be doing that VZ and NexTel aren't (at least not yet) is focusing on areas that don't have DSL or cable available. You can sell to those people at prices higher then DSL/cable without even taking the mobility into account, then bring prices down as you move into areas that cable/DSL is already in.
You also have to factor in the number of people who wouldn't have bought it, but read it for free and like it so much they end up buying it as a gift for a friend. After all it isn't like you can say "happy birthday, I wrote the URL of a free book in your card, enjoy". Well, not unless you have deep pockets and short arms at any rate.
Lets say there is an article about FOO CORP. Lets say it isn't accurate, or complete. Let's say Bob knows some thing more about it. Lets say he knows more about it because he works for FOO CORP. So either Bob can post about it and risk losing his job (esp. if it is "that's not the half of it FOO CORP also rips you off by..."), or he can be an Anontmous Coward, or he can choose not to post.
It also might be one wants to say "BSD is dyeing, it fell in my hot grits and splashed them on natallie portman!".
Is this the Moxie box? I heard bits and pieces about it before it was released (one of their employes use to pose on some of the TiVo boards I use to read a lot).
What do you like better about it? From what I recall they said they would have something like TiVo's "Session Pass Priority Manager" but some how much better. Do they? And is it? And if so, how? I also seem to recall them saying you would be able to hook them together over 802.11, did that come to pass? And if so is it like TiVo does it (you can play shows stored on the other TiVos, and move them, and maybe even schedule recordings, but you can't say "I want X, Y, and Z recorded, I don't care which TiVo gets them, just make sure they all get got!").
I have had DTV for about 3 years (in two different houses). I have only had a (noticeable) signal loss from rain twice (I think), and I've had more signal loss from snow it seems to be only very short periods of time (I don't lose an hour show, I have 5 seconds of screwed up video and the audio is OK...or maybe I lose video for two minutes and audio for 90 seconds). My DTV outages definitely haven't added up in length to a single outage from my former cable TV provider, which seemed to be something rain related and if it happened after bisness hours they didn't fix until the next bisness day (so a Friday outage killed cable for the whole weekend).
As far as DVRs go before I had DTV I had DISH and a "stand alone" TiVo. I liked it so much I eventually got DTV and the "all in one" TiVo. The down side of the all in one is it won't let you record the audio-only music channels (you can watch them live), if you don't care about such channels then no problem. If you do it is a pain because you TiVo might change channels on you while you watch because you havn't touched the remote recently and it knows there is something on you asked it to record (or it thinks you will really want, and there is some free space on the drive).
I've also been told none of the "home media options" are currently only for stand alone systems. Also there is no combo DVD-writer and Sat-reciever.
On the upside it can record two things at once. Which is great because it means you can just tell it what you like and it can "just do the right thing" without have to tell you "I'm sorry, you are already recording FOO on Chanel X at HH:MM...do you want to record FOO or cancel FOO and get BAR?". Well, at least not as offen. More then two tuners would be nice :-) For me that is more important then the other stuff (esp. since I have had mine long enough that there was no home media option, or DVD writer when I made my choice).
The other upside is once in a while my stand alone TiVo wouldn't quite be able to change the channel so I would get the wrong thing recorded. I tried moving the IR transmitter around, and even at one point making a tinfoil IR sheld/guide. I've never hade that problem with the DTiVo (unless you count when DTV changed FX's channel number and a bunch of my seassion passes stoped recording anything).
Good luck with your choice.
P.S. I pretty much only switched away from DISH to DTV because of the TiVo. If you decide on another PVR or a standalone one I have no real reason to recomend DTV over DISH. I was pretty happy with the service from both.
I'm sure it is, it sends using roughly the same frequencies (so roughly the same problems with water absorption), to satellites in roughly the same place (so about the same angle, so about the same amount of weather and trees to punch a signal through).
About the only difference is TCP/IP will do retries and DTV broadcasts are limited to doing forward error correction ('tho with the latencies involved I hope they also FEC the IP traffic).
I have had DTV for about 3 years (in two different houses). I have only had a (noticeable) signal loss from rain twice (I think), and I've had more signal loss from snow it seems to be only very short periods of time (I don't lose an hour show, I have 5 seconds of screwed up video and the audio is OK...or maybe I lose video for two minutes and audio for 90 seconds). Maybe your friends have crappie installs, or maybe the east coast (where I am) has a better line on the satellites then wherever your friends are. (my DTV outages definitely haven't added up in length to a single outage from my cable TV provider)
All that said, I'm on dialup because I can't get cable IP service, DSL, or (apparently!) even ISDN here. There seems to be hills, trees, or mountains between myself and every wireless provider in the area (I'm about six miles south of Point of Rocks in VA). I have been holding out for something other then IP service from DTV. Maybe EV-DO will come out here soon. Maybe.
My reading of the fine print from DTV is if you buy their service you are not canceling for 3 years, not unless you want to pony up at least $700 or so in fees. That kind of lock in doesn't make me eager to try. The service might be really bad (either in general, or for my usage patterns) and the $700 fee seems pretty painful...
In the 2003 MW Keynote Jobs said iTunes and iPhoto remained free downloads and either iMove or iDVD (I can't recall which, but am pretty sure it wasn't both) was "too big to distribute online" because of all the video clips and things that came with it. Jobs claimed the other iLife apps went onto the CD because people without dial up had been asking for a way to get them on CD.
Apparently the new iPhoto has gotten larger since it is no longer downloadable (yes, that was sarcasam)
If people only used the "standard" interfaces then the 'void' extention to K&R would never have gotten enough widespread use to be included in ANSI. Nobody would use the better select-like interfaces (epoll, kqueue) and we would never find out which should be included as a "standard" next time around. Oh, and no threads. And more buffer overuns because strlcpy won't be used just strncpy (which gets misapplied and allows buffer overuns more offen then not due to poor interfaces).
The people that push the envlope are the ones that influance the next standards.
(That's not to say one should go use sendfile/splice when you have no need, but if you need the performance, don't shy away)
You are a bit more hard line then I. I'm fine with the computer counting the votes, but having paper ballots available for recounts and spot checks for verification of the computer tally.
I think computer voting can work, but without some sort of checks the temptation to "throw the vote" (either by the makers of the boxes, or by someone exploiting crappy security) will be too large. With a human verifiable backup and real spot checks the temptation will be signifigantly lessened (because the chances of getting away with it will be signifigantly reduced).
Rent a US mail box, get a US credit card, buy. Come on, if Mastercard offers my dog credit cards surely you qualify! (Hmmm, of corse my dog subscribes to Outdoor Photographer, so maybe you need a magazine subscription as well...)
Ok, I know that's not a real answer unless you happen to travel to the USA.
There are pre-payed credit cards, you can probbably manage to get one of those. The trick is how to get a US address on one. If you have any friends in the USA they ought to be able to buy it for you and mail it on (and by "friend", I mean anyone you can trust with $100 or so of your money to buy the card for you)
The battery on the Canon EOS-D30 is good for around 500 (available light) pictures. The portrait/battery grip lets you load two batteries into the camera at once. It took it on a week long trip to the UK and only had to change batteries once (I had to change CF cards a whole lot more).
The D30 was discontinued around 2 years ago, but I would be surprised if the EOS-D10 or Digital Rebel wasn't roughly similar (well, other then the Digital Rebel probably not having a portrait grip for marketing reasons).
I live in the boonies, and havn't been able to find decent broadband, or even not-so-decent ISDN (or wireless! Come on, someone get a tower to hit northern Leesburg VA).
I selected an ISP that resold UUNET's dialup network (and others) at like $14/month for unlimited use. It was MonsterISP (remember, not chosen for it's name, but price and the fact that it was reselling someone else's decent dialup net). I had a FreeBSD box on a dedicated phone line bring up the connection adn NAT the rest of the boxes. After most of a month had gone by the connection dropped for the first time (I may have "borrowed" the line to send a FAX, or it could have been Telco joy). It called back and got "access denied". I tryed some other numbers (including non-UUNET ones) and got the same thing.
When MonsterISP's customer service people pulled up my records they saw something like 400 hours of usage (two plus weeks on one call) and were puzzled. Apparently "UUNET cuts them off at 200 hours". It was "all UUNET's fault, we can't fix it, but we can deactivate this account and give you another free of charge, you can ring back if it goes over 200 hours".
Ok, so they made good on trouble another caused me, and did it fast, and promised to do it agian any time it was needed, they get to be the good guys...right? Er. Bull. The problem happened on all the non-UUNET numbers as well. They were keeping track of the hours and denying access, and blaming it on someone else.
It is very clever sleeze, I mean they get to fix it anytime someone complains, but it discurages folks who want a lot of connect hours because it is a pain to call and get a new acocunt and configure it. More over it is impossalbe to do it when MonsterISP's offices are closed for the night. At the same time it seems unlikely that you would convince a judge or jury that they aren't "making a real effort to give unlimited dial up hours" (well, at least not if they started blaming their own software "it's a bug, but the author quit/can't find it/has better stuff to do" rather then UUNET).
I ended up with Eskimo North for $22/month. It's actually unlimited. With a gentlman's agreement not to dial back up if disconnected until you need to use the net again. (there is nothing in the agreement that says one can't run NTP which more or less will keep the line pegged all the time...which I actually do because my box has a crappy clock, so the "never wait for dial" is a bonus)
Still, I wish I could get something with real bandwidth (and latency that doesn't totally suck, which puts DirecTV's stuff out of the running, at least as far as I know).
I'm not sure the divergant needs is really the problem. I think the devices are at odds. For example the DVR needs to be totally reliable and on all the time. If it is integrated with a game machine what happens when I want to play Soul Calibur III at the same time as the DVR needs to record something? That would suck. More so because a large part of the point of the DVR is that you no longer need to rember TV schedules!
Feh.
Individual componants will be more reliable, and likely higher quality. On the downside the probbably cost more, and some of the "highly intragrated user interface" crap is probbably very nice. (oh yeah, and there is that whole space issue....)
It looks like they only made 12 infiltrator models, so the rest are presumabably "more robotic". It is possiable that those 12 are going to be destroyed after humanity is finished off.
Well, yeah, that one is crap.
I donno, that one makes more sense. It is much much harder for an attacker to subvert a non networked computer, they need to gain physical access to it. Of corse non-networked computers are also less useful. "What is the most reliable, simplest to debug, and cheapest to produce component of any system?" "the one that isn't there"
I think it worked for the clothing, but not the buildings. Look at buildings in a modern city or town, then look at pictures of cities or towns a mere 50 to 100 years old. Lots of changes. Far far more then we see in BG. Buildings ought to have changed a bit. New materals, new more efficent methods of heating/cooling leading to more glass maybe, or LCD-like displays all over th einside walls leading to less glass...but not exactly the same amount of glass as we have now!
Ok, so not a big deal, but still...
Either there are some brain diffrences they hadn't accounted for, or the body diffrences + the storm end up making something that effects the mind. Of corse how there is a transmitter that can send the brain's contents and they can't find the thing...well...that one I can't rationalise.
I don't think they were on the planet with the ammo dump, nor were they even in orbit for long.
It could be C++ which has a printf, and can use == on string class objects (which are not the same as quoted strings, but can take a quoted string as the left or right argument if a string object is the other).
That doesn't explain the single quotes though.
Actually I think you can't mount some of the heavier lenses (like the ones over a pound) and use the camera's tripod mount. I doubt that is a big problem because those lenses tend to have their own tripod mounts anyway (and they are $4000+ lenses, so if you end up needing them you may well need a more costly body for other reasons).
Back when I had DISH they offered a bunch of packages a lot like Cable TV's (except with more channels then my local cableco). They also let you buy most channels for $1 each if they were not in the package you bought (or if you didn't want a package). Viacomm's channels were the only ones that didn't "play nice", so no MTV unless you bought 39 other channels, but if you wanted to buy only the History Channel International you could. Oh, and that didn't include things like HBO, if you wanted HBO3 you had to buy all 7 HBO channels (or however many there were at the time), which was about $10 (less if you had other movie packages). It was only for the "normal packaged channels" not the "normal premimum channels".
That may have changed (I would be shocked if the price was still the same!), but it is worth looking into. I would still be with DISH if their PVR/DVR thing was as reliable as the DTiVo (and had the SPM and TODO list...and...well...if it kicked ass like the TiVo, but on two or more channels at once).