Yes, you can run anything you want, and you get "real" IP addresses (we got 5!). Citylink is a piece of the internet set up like a LAN (i.e. no routers), not actually a LAN. They just provide the pipe, you pick the ISP you want (there are at least a dozen, IIRC) and pay them for the traffic (and your IP addresses).
As for cost, we pay NZD90/USD38 per month to Citylink for our Fast Ethernet "apartment" connection, plus NZD150/USD63 per month to our ISP for 500MB of traffic. That is, our office Fast Ethernet LAN is plugged into a Fast Ethernet NIC in a Linux box in the garage to the fibre in the street. When I say "office", it's an apartment that I live in and work from.
And you don't even have to buy any stupid cable/DSL modems.;)
Traffic to other nodes on Citylink is free, so we can send big emails to our clients' ISPs' mail servers for nothing, and our ISP (paradise.net.nz) has RH/Debian/Mandrake/OpenBSD/FreeBSD mirrors, internet radio, and like, 40+ game servers (CS at 20-40ms pingsall the time), so 500MB/month is almost enough.
Yes, there are a lot of on-line gamers in Wellington. In the last year or two, the internet cafe thing has taken off, driven by teenagers (mainly Asians, it seems) fuelling their Diablo II and Counter-Strike addictions. I blame NVIDIA. A lot of the players are pretty good. I'm not one of them.
Before I moved in here, I lived out on the beach (Lyall Bay) - literally right on the shore. And only a 20 min. cycle from town. We "only" had cable out there, but I was able to set up an IPSec VPN to here and share my traffic quota, which I thought was neat.
Nobody was supposed to know about the "optical power distribution" thing. Mr. Lipschultz (if that is his real name) has been "seen to", and will not be giving away any more of our secrets.
Yes, state-backed monopoly telcos are bad. We privatised ours, and now it isn't a monopoly in the same way that Microsoft isn't. Still makes too much money and largely does what it likes. At least there are alternatives.
Wellington kicks arse. I specifically moved back here from Europe to work on my own project because it met my criteria:
Good internet connectivity.
Relatively cheap.
Good cafes/atmosphere.
London's nice, but SOTA there is ISDN... Now if only the Kiwi dollar was a bit stronger.
--
"Tonight, Michael, I'm going to be... Donald Knuth!"
If you came back to your car and some kind soul had left a free bottle of "engine performance enhancer" on your bonnet, with a note saying "Just pour into your fuel tank for an incredible performance boost," would you:
think "it's my lucky day," and pour it in;
ring up an engine-knowledgable friend and check first;
throw it away as a reflex action, as soon as you read "Just..."
My point being, you don't have to know much about engines to treat such things with due caution. You just need a little sense.
There's some witty paraphrase of the "million monkeys with typewriters" line I could make here, but what's the point?
"I ache therefore I am. Or in my case, I am, therefore I ache." -- Marvin
AFAIK, the LDI-D100BE is true stereo 800x600@85Hz (triads, not pixels) ( www.vrt.de/products/sony/glasstron.as p). But the stereo is field rather than frame sequential, which I gather makes it a bit of a pain to drive. Field of view is only 28 deg., which might be fine for movies, but it's not exactly right up there for HMDs.
As for the price, it's cheaper than anything else with that resolution.
And you can mount (e.g.) an InterSense InterTrax 3DOF tracker pretty easily, I gather.
What I want to know is, how does the field scanning work, and has anyone got it working on a PC?
Any comments, either here or mailed directly, would be great. I can't be the only person evaluating this stuff...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can run anything you want, and you get "real" IP addresses (we got 5!). Citylink is a piece of the internet set up like a LAN (i.e. no routers), not actually a LAN. They just provide the pipe, you pick the ISP you want (there are at least a dozen, IIRC) and pay them for the traffic (and your IP addresses).
As for cost, we pay NZD90/USD38 per month to Citylink for our Fast Ethernet "apartment" connection, plus NZD150/USD63 per month to our ISP for 500MB of traffic. That is, our office Fast Ethernet LAN is plugged into a Fast Ethernet NIC in a Linux box in the garage to the fibre in the street. When I say "office", it's an apartment that I live in and work from.
And you don't even have to buy any stupid cable/DSL modems. ;)
Traffic to other nodes on Citylink is free, so we can send big emails to our clients' ISPs' mail servers for nothing, and our ISP (paradise.net.nz) has RH/Debian/Mandrake/OpenBSD/FreeBSD mirrors, internet radio, and like, 40+ game servers (CS at 20-40ms pings all the time), so 500MB/month is almost enough.
Yes, there are a lot of on-line gamers in Wellington. In the last year or two, the internet cafe thing has taken off, driven by teenagers (mainly Asians, it seems) fuelling their Diablo II and Counter-Strike addictions. I blame NVIDIA. A lot of the players are pretty good. I'm not one of them.
Before I moved in here, I lived out on the beach (Lyall Bay) - literally right on the shore. And only a 20 min. cycle from town. We "only" had cable out there, but I was able to set up an IPSec VPN to here and share my traffic quota, which I thought was neat.
Nobody was supposed to know about the "optical power distribution" thing. Mr. Lipschultz (if that is his real name) has been "seen to", and will not be giving away any more of our secrets.
Yes, state-backed monopoly telcos are bad. We privatised ours, and now it isn't a monopoly in the same way that Microsoft isn't. Still makes too much money and largely does what it likes. At least there are alternatives.
Wellington kicks arse. I specifically moved back here from Europe to work on my own project because it met my criteria:
London's nice, but SOTA there is ISDN... Now if only the Kiwi dollar was a bit stronger.
--
"Tonight, Michael, I'm going to be... Donald Knuth!"
If you came back to your car and some kind soul had left a free bottle of "engine performance enhancer" on your bonnet, with a note saying "Just pour into your fuel tank for an incredible performance boost," would you:
My point being, you don't have to know much about engines to treat such things with due caution. You just need a little sense.
There's some witty paraphrase of the "million monkeys with typewriters" line I could make here, but what's the point?
"I ache therefore I am. Or in my case, I am, therefore I ache." -- Marvin
AFAIK, the LDI-D100BE is true stereo 800x600@85Hz (triads, not pixels) ( www.vrt.de/products/sony/glasstron.as p). But the stereo is field rather than frame sequential, which I gather makes it a bit of a pain to drive. Field of view is only 28 deg., which might be fine for movies, but it's not exactly right up there for HMDs.
As for the price, it's cheaper than anything else with that resolution.
And you can mount (e.g.) an InterSense InterTrax 3DOF tracker pretty easily, I gather.
What I want to know is, how does the field scanning work, and has anyone got it working on a PC?
Any comments, either here or mailed directly, would be great. I can't be the only person evaluating this stuff...