I have "The New AT&T" and always get advertisements for their pro DSL service. I had that at my previous location and it was fine there. But when I moved I figured out that the pro DSL service didn't buy me anything. Why? Because my DSL modem tells me it can't go much faster.
Transfer Direction: Downstream Upstream Current Rate : 1536 Kbps 384 Kbps Maximum Rate : 1745 Kbps 573 Kbps
The first numbers are what I'm capped to. The second is how fast the modem is synced up at and it varies, but not much more than my current rate. That and it is only able to go that fast with Interleaved mode enabled. More latency, but the connection is pretty solid. I've had the phone company out to clean up the line or to try a different wire pair, but I guess this is as good as it gets.
You're just jealous because you had lots of computers, spare ethernet ports, and a Mountain Dew fountain, but you never got your page posted on slashdot.
I think it was a cool project. Hardware, software, and what it took to hook it all together. I was really interested in how they did their blinds. I want to do something for my basement and as I only have mini blinds, I'll have to think a bit on how to do it.
It's not the alcohol (at least the lan parties I went to last didn't have any). VoIP is great for those on your team, but you can't match the the kick you get when everyone in the basement groans loud enough for you on the other team up stairs to hear. That, and you can't look over your buddies shoulder to come up with a strategy to beat the bastard's^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hother team.
With as many laptops around it is much easier than it used to be. I used to lug my computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, power strip, and lots of cables. People like company, I don't see lan parties going away.
My A/C isn't working in my car, so I scheduled a conversion from R-12 to R-134a for next week. I found a shop that did R-12 repair, but since everything is going R-134a I figured I might as well just bite the bullet and do the conversion.
Any chance of R-12 making a comeback? Should I cancel the conversion and just stick to R-12?
having it run on X11 and OS X is just a matter of compiling the thing for X11 and OS X. That's what Qt's for...
Maybe, but that's assuming you don't do anything like,
open(filename, O_RDONLY);
and expect to get the same bytes out of a file on Windows and Unix (Windows tends to eat one of the line terminators).
Good luck getting it to compile everywhere unless you only use only Qt classes and function calls. Even then you probably will have some subtle things. Unless you are actively building and testing on both, good luck.
If I had a vote I would vote for Jason's design. I know I don't so I'm just going to say that I like the shadow work. It seems really clean and nice to me.
I tried it out for a couple days, but while I figured out how to add things to my own little private world, I never quite figured out how to delete things. It had to be a matter of not spending enough time to figure things out. One of the objects I inserted was a giant version of their boat in the sailing demo, I even figured out how to grab the thing (ie teather it to yourself and move around with it). I could see a frame or two of it when I jumped around, but I couldn't ungrab or delete it.
It was also way to slow on my OpenGL accelerated G200 Matrox graphics card. I have a faster graphics card with an SiS chip, but apparently that company doesn't release the chip documentation so no acceleration and no hope of running Open Croquet.
It seems to me that they could have a few performance tuning options for those that don't have the highest priced (and proprietary OpenGL drivers) around. Even the simple stuff could make a big difference. They have the portals that take you from one place to the other. Yes it is nice and cool to be able to look into the next world from the current one. It's a cool feature, but it has a big performance impact. It would be nice if it had some degraded performance options for those that don't have the fastest systems. That way the people with the fastest systems get what they paid for and the rest of us, well, still get the play.
For being billed as an collaborative, massively, multiplayer environment (from the SDK I think) I was surprised when I looked through their home page and didn't see any public worlds to join. The documentation makes it sound like there isn't any security concerns to worry about.
It is also supposed to be bug for bug compatible in any computer. In the one demo there is the toolbar that is accessible by moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen. The non-accelerated computer gave me a nice set of icons, the accelerated version wiped out the bottom of the screen with white.
It was definitely an interesting concept. It sounds like they have some good solid ideas going for them, I'll be interested to see where things go.
And these people call themselves visionaries. I'm holding out for 4D.:)
I once had a 4D sound card. No it wasn't one of these 5.1 channel sound cards, it only supported stereo outputs. Now I'm trying to remember how they got 4D out of two channels. I think they claimed accelerating 3D sound position calculations even when it was going to two speakers as 3D and an additional dimension was accelerating sound effects based on time.
In extension 4D could be achieved by simply caching everything that happens in a 3D web and being able to pick any point in the past to view what things looked like then.
Let's see, nuclear reactors produce nuclear waste, which
you want to put back into the nuclear reactors? Is that
kind of like hooking up your car's exhaust pipe to the
fuel tank? Sure you could probably recover some uranium
from the reactor waste, but at some point it just isn't
worth it.
I guess they assume Geiger counters will vanish. Seems like they should put a bunch of Geiger counters in argon in gold cases and hope a few survive, that and modify them to run off of solar cells. Between plans to build them and what remains of the devices (even if none survive) with any luck they will be able to build them and figure out what the danger is.
Maybe they should print up some business cards with their
url. Tell them to look it up in a couple days and it would all be clear!
Re:Great, now they can see what I watch
on
A Look at IPTV
·
· Score: 1
Someone once wrote a program for the old HP48G
calculators that let them be used as normal
remotes. You just need to have it wake up and
change the channel once and a while while you
aren't there. If you do a good enough job it
can just happen to always be on the channel you
want to watch when you want to watch it so no one
will ever know what you actually watch.
Just be nice and make sure you skip the shopping
channels. If they think enough people are watching
10 hours of the shopping channel a day we just
might end up with nothing else on.
They are using Microsoft,
"AT&T alone inked a US$400 million deal for Microsoft's IPTV Edition software last year, for instance". Which is why I'm crossing my fingers
that after the dust settles I'm hoping that the
DSL modem
will still provide an Ethernet IP based connection
that will work with Linux. I mean, when the content
providers are pushing for encryption between your
computer and your monitor, why would they want to
allow just any device to get at the multicast
packets coming over the wire?
Being a Microsoft based solution it also means
I'll not be watching any TV from AT&T. None of my
computers at home are running Windows and I don't
have a TV. I'm
not going to go out and buy a TV and a set top box
running Windows
just to watch TV that comes over the Internet,
thatseems a little silly to me. I have a TV
tuner so I can watch TV when I want to, and it has
been a while.
The diagram says 2D/3D for video. Does that include
3D acceleration under Linux? I know the SiS board
I have with 315PRO doesn't have support for the 3D
functions.
Is anyone else making a Mini-ITX board that has
supported 3D under Linux?
I don't like the idea of a stand alone device
that is ment for nothing but reading books. That
aside I didn't think I would like reading a novel
on a computer. I mean computer, laptop, pda,
or cellphone. But then I actually did read one
on my computer and laptop, and it wasn't so bad.
Computer screens are at a good angle for reading.
and easy to minimize the book and come back to
it later. I was using a pdf and had to write down
what page I was on if I had to close the program,
but other than that it worked pretty good.
The book I read was
Accelerando
by Charles Stross. The price was right for
the electronic version (Free). Feel free to
get both the electronic and paper version and
decide which one you like better.
What I would do is fill the house with Universal
Powerline Bus (UPB) devices. Think of X10, only
done right.
I'll say this much for X10. It allowed me to
see what is possible, I just don't use it for much
more than a remote control for the floor lamp
behind my desk.
Fortunately there are better things out there
than X10. Universal Powerline Bus (UPB) would be the
one I would like to give a try if it wasn't so
expensive. What's better than X10? It's faster,
the devices acknowlege the transfer, and the devices
can let the rest of the system know when they are
manually changed. It isn't just a slave to the
computer.
As far as prices go, $75 for a light
switch/control $95 for a serial to UPB for computer
control, $85 to $95 for an inline relay or outlet.
To replace a house worth of outlets and light switches
would be very expensive.
What I would like to know is if their relays
are any quieter than the X10 ones. I tried having
X10 turn on a light for me in the morning, but
waking up to a loud THUNK wasn't what I had in mind.
Raised-flooring or double-hung
cielings, for instance, aren't exactly
aesthetically pleasing but make network
installation a lot easier than it is in the
typical home.
I've seen some really good looking raised
flooring.
What they did at the show room floor at
work was put sticky backed carpet squares over
the normal raised flooring tiles.
They are removable
so you can get at the raised floor tiles and the
space
under. It looks good. It is probably
a good thing, but they didn't make the carpet
tiles the same size as the raised floor tiles. If
they were the same size I would think the seams
of the carpet easier. The down side is you have
to pull up more carpet tiles to uncover the floor
tiles.
If you were to make the entire level
of the house with it you wouldn't know it was
there. I hear raised flooring is expensive, making
it look nice like they did at work is doubly
so. Then you have to figure that your ceiling
must be higher as well.
What you mean I won't be getting my daily dose of
e-mail like the following? Darn...
Subject: ?$B65$($F$"$2$k!y
?$B3'$3$3$G=P2q$C$F$k$+$i(^-^)?$B"v
?$B:#=P2q$$7O%i%s%/$G0l0L$K$J$C$F$F@($$;v$K$J$C$F$ k$_$?$$!*!*!*
?$BAa$/$7$?J}$,$$$$$+$b$7$l$J$$$h!y
The only sound I hear is the groan coming out of
my mount with each new sector that is unreadable.
I'm convinced it is dying. It's a Seagate
ST3160023A-RK 160GB drive with fluid dynamic
bearings and very quiet, but it is up to 51
reallocated sectors and it seems to be dropping
more than one a week. I guess I need to return
it (again) for a warranty.
But I've learned how to track down in Linux what
is on the sector that is bad. I'm getting pretty
good at that.
On a more general scale I really doubt that there's any benefit in talking to 9 people at the same time over a phone-like device.
I would have to disagree. I would also have to
say that limiting it to just 10 seems harsh as
well. I've been in a few conference calls that
were hours long at a time that I'm sure we had
many more than 10 people on at any one time. In my
case we were doing software integration testing
and getting ready for a demo. As far as people
talking over other people there was a lot less
talking than there was silence.
Granted in most situations 5 would be plenty,
but in our case we had more buildings that needed
to be in the conference than that.
As far as Skype goes, how long before someone
either disables the 5 call check by modifying the
software or runs in a virtual machine program that
only changes the return value of the cpu id?
Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard.
Why is multithreading hard? What's a MMU good for?
Multithreaded programs are hard because there
are multiple tasks running (which can be at the
same time on multiple cpus), which share the same
code and address space. If task 1 messes with the
memory that task 2 is working on, then task 2 can
cause a seg fault and kill the entire program. To
a lesser degree that is the same problem with
systems that don't have (or don't use) a MMU.
The memory management unit and a modern operation
system makes it so that one program can't screw
with another program's memory (there are ways
around that which debuggers use, but for the most
part that's the case). Then again if you write
perfect code without bugs you don't have to worry
about the above problems.
Even if you could write bug free programs there
still is the
problem of how do you as a programmer divide up
what needs to be done among the availabe threads?
Can you logically divide up everything that needs
to be done? Something like for an audio playback
program, one thread to read data from disk and
decompress it, another takes the decompressed
data and feeds the sound card, while another updates
your GUI or text output. If you were doing a
raytracing program you could divide up the image
into blocks and give each thread a block to
produce.
You don't have to do multithreading to take
advantage of multiple cpu or multiple cpu cores.
For the audio example you could have one process
decode the audio data and pipe it to another
process to send to the sound card. Multiple
processes will take
advantage of multiple cpus just like multiple
threads of one program. Same with
the raytracing case. Heck you could even communicate
between multiple computers rendering one frame if
your inner process communication was done with
TCP or UDP. Try moving one thread of a program to
another computer. Won't work.
No kidding, my syslog doesn't even support that
there was a 2005! Maybe one of these years someone
will teach it out to print a year.
Oct 3 04:31:54 SpacedOut squid[2235]: storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Finished. Wrote 2423 entries.
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Took 0.1 seconds (23658.4 entries/sec).
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:/var/log/squid/store.log
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:/var/log/squid/access.log
...
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Finished. Wrote 2830 entries.
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Took 0.1 seconds (35392.3 entries/sec).
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:/var/log/squid/store.log
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:/var/log/squid/access.log
Has squid been running for four months or a year
and four months?
This feature got me excited when I read in the
story that you can actually check none for Apple
and not hear about Apple. I thought finally,
they are implementing a feature they had a long
time ago, but when I went to the preferences
I saw that while Apple was a choice, Microsoft
wasn't!
I know, Microsoft is a topic and Apple is
section. Maybe next round we will be able to
disable topics we don't want to hear about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was a cool project. Hardware, software, and what it took to hook it all together. I was really interested in how they did their blinds. I want to do something for my basement and as I only have mini blinds, I'll have to think a bit on how to do it.
With as many laptops around it is much easier than it used to be. I used to lug my computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, power strip, and lots of cables. People like company, I don't see lan parties going away.
My A/C isn't working in my car, so I scheduled a conversion from R-12 to R-134a for next week. I found a shop that did R-12 repair, but since everything is going R-134a I figured I might as well just bite the bullet and do the conversion. Any chance of R-12 making a comeback? Should I cancel the conversion and just stick to R-12?
and expect to get the same bytes out of a file on Windows and Unix (Windows tends to eat one of the line terminators).
Good luck getting it to compile everywhere unless you only use only Qt classes and function calls. Even then you probably will have some subtle things. Unless you are actively building and testing on both, good luck.
It is going to be a windows/mac only player right? I'm sure glad I'm running Linux!
If I had a vote I would vote for Jason's design. I know I don't so I'm just going to say that I like the shadow work. It seems really clean and nice to me.
It was also way to slow on my OpenGL accelerated G200 Matrox graphics card. I have a faster graphics card with an SiS chip, but apparently that company doesn't release the chip documentation so no acceleration and no hope of running Open Croquet.
It seems to me that they could have a few performance tuning options for those that don't have the highest priced (and proprietary OpenGL drivers) around. Even the simple stuff could make a big difference. They have the portals that take you from one place to the other. Yes it is nice and cool to be able to look into the next world from the current one. It's a cool feature, but it has a big performance impact. It would be nice if it had some degraded performance options for those that don't have the fastest systems. That way the people with the fastest systems get what they paid for and the rest of us, well, still get the play.
For being billed as an collaborative, massively, multiplayer environment (from the SDK I think) I was surprised when I looked through their home page and didn't see any public worlds to join. The documentation makes it sound like there isn't any security concerns to worry about.
It is also supposed to be bug for bug compatible in any computer. In the one demo there is the toolbar that is accessible by moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen. The non-accelerated computer gave me a nice set of icons, the accelerated version wiped out the bottom of the screen with white.
It was definitely an interesting concept. It sounds like they have some good solid ideas going for them, I'll be interested to see where things go.
I once had a 4D sound card. No it wasn't one of these 5.1 channel sound cards, it only supported stereo outputs. Now I'm trying to remember how they got 4D out of two channels. I think they claimed accelerating 3D sound position calculations even when it was going to two speakers as 3D and an additional dimension was accelerating sound effects based on time.
In extension 4D could be achieved by simply caching everything that happens in a 3D web and being able to pick any point in the past to view what things looked like then.
That sounds like Rober Cringely's theory of Apple's direction. That is to speed up OS X, drop the microkernel. Pulpit, Native Speaker
Let's see, nuclear reactors produce nuclear waste, which you want to put back into the nuclear reactors? Is that kind of like hooking up your car's exhaust pipe to the fuel tank? Sure you could probably recover some uranium from the reactor waste, but at some point it just isn't worth it.
I guess they assume Geiger counters will vanish. Seems like they should put a bunch of Geiger counters in argon in gold cases and hope a few survive, that and modify them to run off of solar cells. Between plans to build them and what remains of the devices (even if none survive) with any luck they will be able to build them and figure out what the danger is.
Maybe they should print up some business cards with their url. Tell them to look it up in a couple days and it would all be clear!
Just be nice and make sure you skip the shopping channels. If they think enough people are watching 10 hours of the shopping channel a day we just might end up with nothing else on.
Being a Microsoft based solution it also means I'll not be watching any TV from AT&T. None of my computers at home are running Windows and I don't have a TV. I'm not going to go out and buy a TV and a set top box running Windows just to watch TV that comes over the Internet, thatseems a little silly to me. I have a TV tuner so I can watch TV when I want to, and it has been a while.
Is anyone else making a Mini-ITX board that has supported 3D under Linux?
Computer screens are at a good angle for reading. and easy to minimize the book and come back to it later. I was using a pdf and had to write down what page I was on if I had to close the program, but other than that it worked pretty good.
The book I read was Accelerando by Charles Stross. The price was right for the electronic version (Free). Feel free to get both the electronic and paper version and decide which one you like better.
I'll say this much for X10. It allowed me to see what is possible, I just don't use it for much more than a remote control for the floor lamp behind my desk.
Fortunately there are better things out there than X10. Universal Powerline Bus (UPB) would be the one I would like to give a try if it wasn't so expensive. What's better than X10? It's faster, the devices acknowlege the transfer, and the devices can let the rest of the system know when they are manually changed. It isn't just a slave to the computer.
As far as prices go, $75 for a light switch/control $95 for a serial to UPB for computer control, $85 to $95 for an inline relay or outlet. To replace a house worth of outlets and light switches would be very expensive.
What I would like to know is if their relays are any quieter than the X10 ones. I tried having X10 turn on a light for me in the morning, but waking up to a loud THUNK wasn't what I had in mind.
Better make that a one story house and put in real beds, because when the power goes out in the middle of the night...
I've seen some really good looking raised flooring. What they did at the show room floor at work was put sticky backed carpet squares over the normal raised flooring tiles. They are removable so you can get at the raised floor tiles and the space under. It looks good. It is probably a good thing, but they didn't make the carpet tiles the same size as the raised floor tiles. If they were the same size I would think the seams of the carpet easier. The down side is you have to pull up more carpet tiles to uncover the floor tiles.
If you were to make the entire level of the house with it you wouldn't know it was there. I hear raised flooring is expensive, making it look nice like they did at work is doubly so. Then you have to figure that your ceiling must be higher as well.
What you mean I won't be getting my daily dose of e-mail like the following? Darn... Subject: ?$B65$($F$"$2$k!y ?$B3'$3$3$G=P2q$C$F$k$+$i(^-^)?$B"v ?$B:#=P2q$$7O%i%s%/$G0l0L$K$J$C$F$F@($$;v$K$J$C$F$ k$_$?$$!*!*!*
?$BAa$/$7$?J}$,$$$$$+$b$7$l$J$$$h!y
But I've learned how to track down in Linux what is on the sector that is bad. I'm getting pretty good at that.
I would have to disagree. I would also have to say that limiting it to just 10 seems harsh as well. I've been in a few conference calls that were hours long at a time that I'm sure we had many more than 10 people on at any one time. In my case we were doing software integration testing and getting ready for a demo. As far as people talking over other people there was a lot less talking than there was silence.
Granted in most situations 5 would be plenty, but in our case we had more buildings that needed to be in the conference than that.
As far as Skype goes, how long before someone either disables the 5 call check by modifying the software or runs in a virtual machine program that only changes the return value of the cpu id?
Why is multithreading hard? What's a MMU good for? Multithreaded programs are hard because there are multiple tasks running (which can be at the same time on multiple cpus), which share the same code and address space. If task 1 messes with the memory that task 2 is working on, then task 2 can cause a seg fault and kill the entire program. To a lesser degree that is the same problem with systems that don't have (or don't use) a MMU. The memory management unit and a modern operation system makes it so that one program can't screw with another program's memory (there are ways around that which debuggers use, but for the most part that's the case). Then again if you write perfect code without bugs you don't have to worry about the above problems.
Even if you could write bug free programs there still is the problem of how do you as a programmer divide up what needs to be done among the availabe threads? Can you logically divide up everything that needs to be done? Something like for an audio playback program, one thread to read data from disk and decompress it, another takes the decompressed data and feeds the sound card, while another updates your GUI or text output. If you were doing a raytracing program you could divide up the image into blocks and give each thread a block to produce.
You don't have to do multithreading to take advantage of multiple cpu or multiple cpu cores. For the audio example you could have one process decode the audio data and pipe it to another process to send to the sound card. Multiple processes will take advantage of multiple cpus just like multiple threads of one program. Same with the raytracing case. Heck you could even communicate between multiple computers rendering one frame if your inner process communication was done with TCP or UDP. Try moving one thread of a program to another computer. Won't work.
Oct 3 04:31:54 SpacedOut squid[2235]: storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Finished. Wrote 2423 entries.
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Took 0.1 seconds (23658.4 entries/sec).
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:
Oct 3 04:31:55 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:
...
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Finished. Wrote 2830 entries.
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: Took 0.1 seconds (35392.3 entries/sec).
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:
Feb 7 04:32:16 SpacedOut squid[2235]: logfileRotate:
Has squid been running for four months or a year and four months?
I know, Microsoft is a topic and Apple is section. Maybe next round we will be able to disable topics we don't want to hear about.