You clearly haven't been to circuitcity or bestbuy in San Francisco bay area region. I just can't imagine the level of incompetenace of the sales force.
That's because Frys took all the "good" electronic store clerks.:-)
Tri-level townhouse. No basement, no crawlspaces, no attic. Worse, the walls don't quite line up from floor to floor either. Whee.
For kicks, we called a professional contractor about running cat5 into every major room in the house, and after the laughing died down, he quoted us ballpark figure of $3000, since it would require a bit of carpentry.
Instead we went with 4 HomePNA bridges, and turned one of the existing phone lines into our LAN.
If you have multiple machines in your cubicle/office/bedroom (you *are* a geek, right?) and you do a transfer between machines, what do you think happens with a hub? Yes, all your packets go out onto the LAN, reducing bandwidth.
What happens if you have a switch? Yes, that's right, your packets stay "inside" your cubicle (office, bedroom, whatever.)
Our old IT staff didn't know the difference between a "hub" and "switch", and put the entire company on large 40 port hubs. As a result, when one of the engineers wanted to upload a new software build to his test machine, it slogged the whole network.
Using central switches helped this a little. Using switches on everyone's desk helped even more.
Overall, using a switch vs. a hub will result in *much* higher network utilization. When I used to test network equipment, I'd max out a 10/100 hub at around 40mbps, but I'd get close 85-95mbps with a switch in the same setup.
Now then, why 3Com's NJ-gizmo versus just running 4 separate connections?
Think about it. The old way, 4 separate cables, requires 300% more cabling. Cabling may be cheap, but it's not free. Multiply the costs over dozens, or hundreds, of cubicles and it adds up. Finally, each of those 4 cables needs to plug into a something (hopefully a switch) in the machine room. Those things aren't cheap either.
The NJ100 allows you to use *1* cable drop in the wall, and only *1* port in the switch in the machine room.
Sure, you could do the same thing by taking your single drop and plugging it into a 4 port switch on your desktop (which is actually what we've done at work.) For engineers who'll easily have 6+ machines in their cubicle, the 3Com gadget may not do us a lot of good. But for sales people who often have a corporate desktop and a laptop, the 3Com gadget has some value, if for no other reason, it's easier to use, easier to support, and it won't 'walk off'.
I agree it's not for everyone, but as a targetted solution it's pretty slick.
I'm pretty sure the higher end models use two disks, not just one.
But yeah, the prices are still a bit high for essentially the same hardware as the low end model, with a larger HD.
Assuming you can modify ReplayTV as easily as you can Tivo, there would be nothing stopping you from buying the low end, then modifying it to your heart's desire.
You can easily add space (up to 240GB) to your Tivo and ReplayTV has a 300+ hour model...just how many hours of TV do you need, anyways? With many shows coming out on DVD, there's not the need to archive TV shows yourself anymore.
If you're into hacking, you can add a 10mbps ethernet port to your Tivo, get bash running, and use ExactStream to pull programs off your Tivo, so you can burn them to a CDR.
I personally think this whole "Send your friends TV shows over broadband" feature of ReplayTV needs some serious rethinking. At its lowest quality setting, an hour of TV takes up around 1.2GB of disk space on your Tivo. At the best quality (called "Best":), this same show takes up over 9GB of space. I can't imagine trying to send something this large over broadband.
More than likely, ReplayTV is hoping to use this connection so they can push commercials and other promotional video clips to your unit (if you check ReplayTV's website, they say you *must* have broadband and you *must* make your box accessible from the internet - meaning you can't put it behind your firewall or NAT box.)
The distinction is going to depend on the contract you signed.
If the contract says "no sharing", then you're violating the contract if you do it anyways. If you don't consider that "wrong", then there won't be a problem...unless your provider finds out and cancels your service.
The contract I signed said I was forbidden from sharing the connection with another household (eg. my neighbors) and from running any sort of commercial service using the connection. This is probably because they make no guarantees about service, and don't want me suing them if my line goes down, causing me to lose money.
If someone is using an "inordinate" amount of bandwidth (for whatever value of "inordinate" you choose) then charge them more for it.
Every ISP I've used since leaving college has had a low-usage and high-usage account options. If you had a low-usage account but treated it like a high-usage account, you were asked to upgrade or leave.
Sounds a bit draconian at first, but the idea is that you pay for your fair share of resources used.
If your ISP couldn't do that, well, maybe there's a reason why they're bankrupt now.
Then you'd be reselling your connection - which is clearly labeled as a no-no in most ISP contracts.
Now then, if you were sharing the bandwidth for free, I have a bit more trouble seeing why the provider would be upset, unless they also spelled out a no-sharing clause in the contract you signed.
That last part is important. I know that TCI/@Home in my area got into a lot of hot water after trying to retroactively change their contract after people had signed up when they wanted to enact upload bandwidth limiting.
DSL guarantees a minimum speed, with an unlimited top end.
Cable modem talks about a maxiumum speed, but has no promises on your minimum speed.
As a result, I get pretty consistant speeds from my DSL connection. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who had cable modem, got sick of getting sub-modem speeds so he got rid of it and switched to DSL.
Is DSL's top speed slower than cable modem? In general, yes.
But at least the DSL provider makes some promise about your minimum speed - something that the cable modem providers cannot do.
My understanding of NAT is that the packets themselves look the same as those coming from an un-NAT'd source. The difference is that the packets are originating from different ports on the box doing NAT. This is how the box figures out which packets need to go to which machines on your local network.
You might be able to analyze where the packets are headed and make some guesses about how many machines are behind that particular IP# - but that would require quite a fair bit of work to look inside each packet going to/coming from that IP# to see if there are multiple sessions going on.
Bleemcast was going to be a series of discs, each able to emulate around a dozen or so games (I believe this was even reported on/. when Bleemcast was first announced long, long, long ago.) I think there were to be 2 or 3 discs. Obviously the problem with this is that you could potentially end up buying all the discs to get to the one or two games you wanted to play, and after you threw in the cost of the (never released?) Bleempod, you might as well of bought a PS1.
I suspect the switch from multi-game discs to single game discs was the result of two things: 1: Bleem missing their deadline (no big surprise there.) 2: Bleem in desparate need of cash.
Bleemcast was like a year late, and during that time, there were no new versions of Bleem PC, even though the 1.5 versions all had major problems with the one game that was promised to work - Final Fantasy 8, not to mention the countless other games that just plain didn't work. I took this as Bleem's way of saying "Thanks for your support, now bugger off." to their PC customers.
In the meantime Sega announced the demise of the Dreamcast. This certainly didn't help Bleemcast any... So my guess is Bleem just took the few games they'd gotten working, and released single discs for each of them.
So, bye-bye Bleem, bye-bye Bleemcast. You once told me to bugger off. Don't expect me to shed a tear for you.
You could try whipping up a Canadian beer cheese soup with the beer, cheese and grits. Hawaiian cooking uses spam quite a bit, so I'm sure there's something with spam and A1 sauce.
Now, what about a real challenge: Twinkies. (I did come across a recipe which claimed to use Twinkies to make a sort of New England seafood casserole....eew...)
The premise is you take something ordinary, like a cooking show, and give it the drama and excitement of a comic book (well, manga, in this case, but you get the idea.) All the while giving running commentary.
Each episode of the show features one guest chef, who is allowed to challenge one of the Iron Chefs. The theme ingredient is introduced, and each chef, with his team of assistants, have an hour to prepare a meal consisting of 3 to 5 dishes that use and highlight that ingredient.
There's no real reward for "winning", other than the sense of accomplishment (not to mention publicity) and it's not like the guest can unseat one of the Iron Chefs to take their place.
How were the tasters/judges in the Japanese Iron Chef any less bogus?
If you were a famous chef, would you really care what some fortune teller, pop-star, and newscaster thought of your cooking? To put this into American terms, imagine Emrill Lagasse preparing a meal for "Miss Cleo", Courtney Cox, and Tom Brokaw while hanging on their every word about how they liked the food.
Many of the theme ingredients used weren't that unusual for Japan...maybe a bit expensive (like that one mushroom battle they had.) Though one of the stranger things I've seen them use is turkey - which is almost completly unknown in Japan. The Japanese description tried to compare it to duck so that the (Japanese) audience wasn't completely confused.
Depending on how you define "Asian", you could end up including the Pacific Rim and India, as well as China, Korea, Thailand, etc.
My guess "Iron Chef Asian" will mainly prepare Chinese (American Chinese, that is) style food, since that's what most Americans recognize as "Asian." (I mean, it wasn't until a few years ago that my mom experienced Japanese food for the first time...and was surprised it wasn't "Chop Suey".)
Oh well...could be worse...they could have named him "Iron Chef Ethnic."
Slashdot Mirror
There is a Smash Brothers Collection for the PS1, which works fine on the PS2.
It includes ports of all the arcade games.
I haven't seen it in stores, and had to order it from EBWorld.com. Was about $20.
That's because Frys took all the "good" electronic store clerks. :-)
How's the parent flamebait? (much less flamebait +3?)
I've gotten probably 3 dozen "make money fast" spams from @Home's subscribers, and @Home has taken zero action.
Good riddance indeed.
Yeah, that's my situation as well.
Tri-level townhouse. No basement, no crawlspaces, no attic. Worse, the walls don't quite line up from floor to floor either. Whee.
For kicks, we called a professional contractor about running cat5 into every major room in the house, and after the laughing died down, he quoted us ballpark figure of $3000, since it would require a bit of carpentry.
Instead we went with 4 HomePNA bridges, and turned one of the existing phone lines into our LAN.
If you have multiple machines in your cubicle/office/bedroom (you *are* a geek, right?) and you do a transfer between machines, what do you think happens with a hub? Yes, all your packets go out onto the LAN, reducing bandwidth.
What happens if you have a switch? Yes, that's right, your packets stay "inside" your cubicle (office, bedroom, whatever.)
Our old IT staff didn't know the difference between a "hub" and "switch", and put the entire company on large 40 port hubs. As a result, when one of the engineers wanted to upload a new software build to his test machine, it slogged the whole network.
Using central switches helped this a little. Using switches on everyone's desk helped even more.
Overall, using a switch vs. a hub will result in *much* higher network utilization. When I used to test network equipment, I'd max out a 10/100 hub at around 40mbps, but I'd get close 85-95mbps with a switch in the same setup.
Now then, why 3Com's NJ-gizmo versus just running 4 separate connections?
Think about it. The old way, 4 separate cables, requires 300% more cabling. Cabling may be cheap, but it's not free. Multiply the costs over dozens, or hundreds, of cubicles and it adds up. Finally, each of those 4 cables needs to plug into a something (hopefully a switch) in the machine room. Those things aren't cheap either.
The NJ100 allows you to use *1* cable drop in the wall, and only *1* port in the switch in the machine room.
Sure, you could do the same thing by taking your single drop and plugging it into a 4 port switch on your desktop (which is actually what we've done at work.) For engineers who'll easily have 6+ machines in their cubicle, the 3Com gadget may not do us a lot of good. But for sales people who often have a corporate desktop and a laptop, the 3Com gadget has some value, if for no other reason, it's easier to use, easier to support, and it won't 'walk off'.
I agree it's not for everyone, but as a targetted solution it's pretty slick.
I'm pretty sure the higher end models use two disks, not just one.
But yeah, the prices are still a bit high for essentially the same hardware as the low end model, with a larger HD.
Assuming you can modify ReplayTV as easily as you can Tivo, there would be nothing stopping you from buying the low end, then modifying it to your heart's desire.
You can easily add space (up to 240GB) to your Tivo and ReplayTV has a 300+ hour model...just how many hours of TV do you need, anyways? With many shows coming out on DVD, there's not the need to archive TV shows yourself anymore.
If you're into hacking, you can add a 10mbps ethernet port to your Tivo, get bash running, and use ExactStream to pull programs off your Tivo, so you can burn them to a CDR.
:), this same show takes up over 9GB of space. I can't imagine trying to send something this large over broadband.
I personally think this whole "Send your friends TV shows over broadband" feature of ReplayTV needs some serious rethinking. At its lowest quality setting, an hour of TV takes up around 1.2GB of disk space on your Tivo. At the best quality (called "Best"
More than likely, ReplayTV is hoping to use this connection so they can push commercials and other promotional video clips to your unit (if you check ReplayTV's website, they say you *must* have broadband and you *must* make your box accessible from the internet - meaning you can't put it behind your firewall or NAT box.)
Both Tivo and ReplayTV are DVRs, but have slightly different feature sets.
Some prefer ReplayTV, others Tivo. Competition is a good thing...
(BTW, I prefer Tivo, mainly for its UI and ease of use.)
The distinction is going to depend on the contract you signed.
If the contract says "no sharing", then you're violating the contract if you do it anyways. If you don't consider that "wrong", then there won't be a problem...unless your provider finds out and cancels your service.
The contract I signed said I was forbidden from sharing the connection with another household (eg. my neighbors) and from running any sort of commercial service using the connection. This is probably because they make no guarantees about service, and don't want me suing them if my line goes down, causing me to lose money.
So long as the subnets on both sides of the NAT didn't overlap (eg. 10.10.10.0/24 & 10.10.11.0/24) I don't see why this wouldn't work.
If someone is using an "inordinate" amount of bandwidth (for whatever value of "inordinate" you choose) then charge them more for it.
Every ISP I've used since leaving college has had a low-usage and high-usage account options. If you had a low-usage account but treated it like a high-usage account, you were asked to upgrade or leave.
Sounds a bit draconian at first, but the idea is that you pay for your fair share of resources used.
If your ISP couldn't do that, well, maybe there's a reason why they're bankrupt now.
Then you'd be reselling your connection - which is clearly labeled as a no-no in most ISP contracts.
Now then, if you were sharing the bandwidth for free, I have a bit more trouble seeing why the provider would be upset, unless they also spelled out a no-sharing clause in the contract you signed.
That last part is important. I know that TCI/@Home in my area got into a lot of hot water after trying to retroactively change their contract after people had signed up when they wanted to enact upload bandwidth limiting.
DSL guarantees a minimum speed, with an unlimited top end.
Cable modem talks about a maxiumum speed, but has no promises on your minimum speed.
As a result, I get pretty consistant speeds from my DSL connection. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who had cable modem, got sick of getting sub-modem speeds so he got rid of it and switched to DSL.
Is DSL's top speed slower than cable modem? In general, yes.
But at least the DSL provider makes some promise about your minimum speed - something that the cable modem providers cannot do.
My understanding of NAT is that the packets themselves look the same as those coming from an un-NAT'd source. The difference is that the packets are originating from different ports on the box doing NAT. This is how the box figures out which packets need to go to which machines on your local network.
You might be able to analyze where the packets are headed and make some guesses about how many machines are behind that particular IP# - but that would require quite a fair bit of work to look inside each packet going to/coming from that IP# to see if there are multiple sessions going on.
Wow...a company with a conscience?!
Mine would have just jacked the prices saying the increase was needed to improve their service.
I dunno...being able to play PSX games on my laptop sounded pretty good to me...
Too bad most of the games I was interested don't work (never did) with Bleem PC.
Bleem warez?
Who'd be so pathetic as to go through the problem pirating something that *doesn't work*?
I paid for the thing with the hopes that the team would continue to make improvements to it. This was the case until they announced Bleemcast...
Fortunatly I'd bought a real PSX by that time.
Bleemcast was going to be a series of discs, each able to emulate around a dozen or so games (I believe this was even reported on /. when Bleemcast was first announced long, long, long ago.) I think there were to be 2 or 3 discs. Obviously the problem with this is that you could potentially end up buying all the discs to get to the one or two games you wanted to play, and after you threw in the cost of the (never released?) Bleempod, you might as well of bought a PS1.
I suspect the switch from multi-game discs to single game discs was the result of two things: 1: Bleem missing their deadline (no big surprise there.) 2: Bleem in desparate need of cash.
Bleemcast was like a year late, and during that time, there were no new versions of Bleem PC, even though the 1.5 versions all had major problems with the one game that was promised to work - Final Fantasy 8, not to mention the countless other games that just plain didn't work. I took this as Bleem's way of saying "Thanks for your support, now bugger off." to their PC customers.
In the meantime Sega announced the demise of the Dreamcast. This certainly didn't help Bleemcast any... So my guess is Bleem just took the few games they'd gotten working, and released single discs for each of them.
So, bye-bye Bleem, bye-bye Bleemcast. You once told me to bugger off. Don't expect me to shed a tear for you.
Inefficient? Of *course* it's inefficient!
That's what Bleem is(was) all about.
You could try whipping up a Canadian beer cheese soup with the beer, cheese and grits. Hawaiian cooking uses spam quite a bit, so I'm sure there's something with spam and A1 sauce.
Now, what about a real challenge: Twinkies. (I did come across a recipe which claimed to use Twinkies to make a sort of New England seafood casserole....eew...)
You're not too far off...
The premise is you take something ordinary, like a cooking show, and give it the drama and excitement of a comic book (well, manga, in this case, but you get the idea.) All the while giving running commentary.
Each episode of the show features one guest chef, who is allowed to challenge one of the Iron Chefs. The theme ingredient is introduced, and each chef, with his team of assistants, have an hour to prepare a meal consisting of 3 to 5 dishes that use and highlight that ingredient.
There's no real reward for "winning", other than the sense of accomplishment (not to mention publicity) and it's not like the guest can unseat one of the Iron Chefs to take their place.
Still, it's interesting to watch now and then.
How were the tasters/judges in the Japanese Iron Chef any less bogus?
If you were a famous chef, would you really care what some fortune teller, pop-star, and newscaster thought of your cooking? To put this into American terms, imagine Emrill Lagasse preparing a meal for "Miss Cleo", Courtney Cox, and Tom Brokaw while hanging on their every word about how they liked the food.
Many of the theme ingredients used weren't that unusual for Japan...maybe a bit expensive (like that one mushroom battle they had.) Though one of the stranger things I've seen them use is turkey - which is almost completly unknown in Japan. The Japanese description tried to compare it to duck so that the (Japanese) audience wasn't completely confused.
But "Can't Smeg, Won't Smeg" was hilarious!
Depending on how you define "Asian", you could end up including the Pacific Rim and India, as well as China, Korea, Thailand, etc.
My guess "Iron Chef Asian" will mainly prepare Chinese (American Chinese, that is) style food, since that's what most Americans recognize as "Asian." (I mean, it wasn't until a few years ago that my mom experienced Japanese food for the first time...and was surprised it wasn't "Chop Suey".)
Oh well...could be worse...they could have named him "Iron Chef Ethnic."