Sending URLs is a big benefit of IM applications in tech-heavy offices. Our mailserver has a rather significant lag (actually, not everyone in the office uses the same server, so sometimes it can be quick and other times 10-15 mins or longer), and hand-copying URLs leads to errors.
Although something like TinyURL within the intranet would probably be handy (the IT security people seem to really hate it when people use the public one...), the way people were usually sending URLs around was just by pasting them into Notepad and printing the document out. This behavior has almost totally stopped since we got an IM system.
OTOH, IM can be just as annoying as traditional phones because it has a tendency to go off while you're in the middle of things, but at least you can set an away message and warn people off (and suppress messages). And I could see how it could be isolating and lead to a lack of contact if overused. But for "hey, Joe, let me send you the address for that page," it's quite nice.
A few months ago my company came through the office and tore out everyone's regular phones and replaced them with super-duper Cisco VOIP sets.
The things are crap (you have to sign into them every morning... as if I don't have enough passwords to remember already, now I need to sign in to my freaking phone?) but they do have one upshot. If I just don't sign into the thing, nobody can call me -- the calls just roll right over into voice mail. And since my voicemails get emailed to me as attachments (where I can conveniently play them at faster-than-normal speed), I can basically ignore the phone handset and do everything through my PC.
By my unofficial count, I'd say something like 30-50 percent of the office is doing the same thing, either intentionally or just because they can't remember to sign into the phones in the morning. I think it's actually boosted productivity -- nobody uses the phones to call around the office anymore, unless they've already sent an email or an IM to see if the person is available on the other end.
Those artifacts really only show up when you have the compression turned up too high or you're trying to encode text That last bit is why PNG gets used -- if you have a graphic that contains text, you don't want to use JPEG. Hence, it gets used a lot for small graphics that contain text, screenshots, and the like.
JPEG is for photos; PNG is graphics. You don't want to compress graphics that have text in them with JPEG, and it's wasteful to compress big photos with PNG. (Unless you need a lossless format in which case PNG can sometimes be used as an alternative to the many mutually-incompatible flavors of TIFF.) But because PNG produces smaller file sizes than GIF (its only real competitor) and it's non-proprietary and free to implement, it's succeeding fairly well.
Not to put words in the GP's mouth, but there are a few transport-layer protocols that I've come across which go in different directions from TCP and UDP.
There is a list over at Wikipedia, although I don't know if it's really close to exhaustive.
A lot of them are aiming for some sort ofmiddle ground between TCP and UDP. They want the statelessness of UDP but some of the congestion-control and error correction of TCP, but without having to reinvent the wheel by building their own error-correction on top of UDP on a per-application basis. Others are just low-overhead versions of TCP, which were probably a lot more appealing when network and computing resources were less abundant.
Some other protocols seem like pretty straightforward attempts to patent, proprietize, and replace TCP: e.g. Venturi Transport Protocol. Others seem more well-intentioned, but look like solutions seeking problems, or buzzword-compliant* attempts to please everyone with one product.
The only one that seems particularly interesting is SCTP, which is an IETF proposed standard for a protocol that's similar to TCP but allows the transmission of multiple simultaneous streams of data, within one connection. That seems like it might be useful.
* I couldn't resist quoting this description of XTP, which sounds like it was copied and pasted from a Dilbert strip:
XTP was designed to provide a wide range of communication services built on the concept that orthogonal protocol mechanisms can be combined to produce appropriate paradigms within the same basic framework. Rather than using a separate protocol for each type of communication, XTP's protocol options and control of the packet exchange patterns allow the application to create appropriate paradigms.
There are lots of ways to run wired Ethernet nondestructively, if you get creative.
My two favorite ways:
1) Just leave it out in the open, but get it out of the way. What I usually do is go out and buy a whole bunch of 3/4" cup hooks and run them around the ceiling, generally about 1" down from the top of the wall (screwed into the wall). They leave small enough holes so that it's trivial to patch them when you leave with a little bit of spackling, if your landlord will even care about small holes like that. I basically run them around all four walls of any rooms where I have a lot of computer equipment, and then run the cabling from client machines up to the ceiling, around to the room's door, then down to floor level and go under the door at the hinge side (usually with some gaffer's tape to keep it out of the pinch point) then back up to run to wherever it needs to go. As long as you don't need to get more than 4 or 5 pieces of Cat-5 under a door, this works pretty well, and it keeps you from ever having cable in places where you'll trip over it.
2) To get between floors, or to just get the wiring out of sight (the ceiling-run wiring doesn't go well with the S.O., funny, that), I've taken to running the cabling through the forced-air HVAC ducts. It can be challenging to run it from one room to another room on the same floor, but it's a good way of getting cabling to another floor. It's pretty easy to take off the vent faces and drop wiring down them, or in some cases just thread the Cat-5 through the grille.
The other place I've seen people run wiring in apartments, is using the "wet walls" where a lot of plumbing runs vertically from one floor to the next. One of the easiest ways to get into this is via the access panels that are usually located near the faucet end of bathtubs (often in a closet or the next room... there usually has to be one so you can get to the tub drain's trap, they just are hidden sometimes). I've never tried this because the plumbing in my house doesn't *go* anywhere that I want to run cables to.
The other thing that's sometimes worth investigating is if there are any extra, unused pairs in the household phone wiring. This isn't the greatest networking medium in the world, but you can sometimes push 10BT over a single unused pair (half-duplex), if the wiring is decent and you can isolate that pair from anything else at either end. (Actually if you don't care about using the phone wiring for anything, I've run 100BT over Cat3 wiring, strictly point-to-point, for distances less than about 50'. I just leave pins 7 and 8 in the RJ45 disconnected, wiring the others as normal T568A.)
It can take a few hours of work to wire an apartment this way, but I've found the time is worth it, in terms of improved reliability and bandwidth over wireless.
BPL is a red herring. Just think about what it's attempting: pushing broadband data over unshielded, unbalanced lines -- lines that are already carrying line current and are connected to all sorts of noisy equipment. You think that DSL is bad? At least those wires are designed for carrying information, and are wired in balanced loops, with circuits end-run to the DSLAMs -- and DSL sucks in most places already.
Using power lines combines the worst of DSL, unshielded wiring (even worse, since it's unbalanced), and shared-circuit cable internet. BPL was the power companies' attempt at cashing in on 'last mile mania'; the damage it would do to the radio spectrum is only the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to its problems.
In fact, almost all contracts these days include binding arbitration clauses. This is a good thing, because it helps to reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits clogging up the court. You seem to assume that all lawsuits are frivolous. This is dumb -- if that was true, we should just eliminate the entire legal system and let people work everything out mano y mano.
Allowing monopolists to force consumers to give up their rights is obviously wrong and subverts centuries of jurisprudence.
Actually according to some researchers (mainly Sudhir Venkatesh, who's heavily quoted in Freakonomics), most drug-gang members make far sub-minimum wage -- they'd make more money working at McDonalds, if that was the goal. And your chances of getting killed while dealing much higher than they are in Iraq (1 in 2000 as opposed to allegedly 1 in 4 if you're dealing crack, although the latter sounds a little high). The best explanation I've heard for gang activity is psychological; it's a prestige job, one you do for respect and a lack of attractive alternatives, not one you do for money.
While an Army private doesn't get paid hugely well, they don't do horribly either, particularly when you consider that their salary is almost entirely "take-home pay" (they're not paying for food/rent/healthcare). Plus, it's just not that easy to spend money when you're deployed, which is also when you make the most bonus pay (and get some decent tax breaks -- in an unusual show of decency by the government, combat pay is tax free). Although the pay-per-hour isn't great, it's not unusual to come back from deployment with a sizable amount of savings.
Is soldiering as profitable a career as borrowing money to get a business degree and working for a corporation? Not nearly. But it's not as bad as it's sometimes made out to be, if that's what you really want to do. The problem with the military right now is that they've basically tapped out the supply of 'risk junkies' who actually want to do the job, and have started to deploy people who are only in the service because they thought it was an easy way to get a college education (and who had no real interest in being in the military outside of that). IMO, this is why there are far worse morale problems in the Army than in the Marines -- the Marines were always fairly clear in their recruiting what you were signing up to do, and drew people who actually want to do 'crazy Marine shit;' the Army (until recently) was billing itself as a disaster-relief and college scholarship program, leading to accusations of a bait-and-switch.
I normally avoid anything from Cringely, but in this case I think he's spot on:
There are no good guys in this story. Misguided and incompetent regulation combined with utilities that found ways to game the system resulted in what had been the best communication system in the world becoming just so-so, though very profitable. We as consumers were consistently sold ideas that were impractical only to have those be replaced later by less-ambitious technologies that, in turn, were still under-delivered. Congress set mandates then provided little or no oversight. The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can't do that here and will probably never be able to.
Despite this, the FCC says America has the highest broadband deployment rate in the world and President Bush has set a goal of having broadband available to every U.S. home by the end of this year. What have these guys been smoking? Nothing, actually, they simply redefined "broadband" as any Internet service with a download speed of 200 kilobits per second or better. That's less than one percent the target speed set in 1994 that we were supposed to have achieved by 2000 under regulations that still remain in place. This sounds like the telcos' modus operandi to a T. Recall a few years ago, when the FCC eliminated some surcharges, and they continued charging them to customers (as "cost recovery fees") until so many people got angry that the Federal government slapped them down? This is just the same thing, writ even larger.
Although I'm sure there are most corrupt agencies somewhere in the government, I can't think of one that's more bald-facedly corrupt than the FCC. Until we can the whole business and replace it with an organization -- and people -- who have as their mandate the best interests of the citizens of the United States, rather than the telecommunications companies, we're never going to have a first-class communications infrastructure. And the longer we keep the current bunch of bent industry shills and political operatives in place, the worse of a backwater the U.S. will become.
Actually it works like that in real life, too. There are paths to citizenship in the U.S. that involve military service. I've met people who have done, or were in the process of doing, it. You have to meet all the other regular qualifications (High school education or GED, basically no criminal or drug history, speak/read English, no visible tattoos on hands or face, etc.). It's a pretty good program -- all the guys I ever met who taken advantage of that path were totally solid.
I don't know if they actually let you serve in combat before your citizenship goes through, though -- it's not like the French Foreign Legion or anything. (I suspect they do not; I think it's a case of, we'll make you a citizen, but if you do, you owe us x years in the Army, and we'll pull your citizenship if you renege on it.)
I think it's "trusting people" vs "trusting systems."
This is obviously going to be making a lot of broad generalizations, but I think that conservatives tend to be suspicious of systems (e.g. "the Government" as an entity, or its bureaucracy) but trust individual people that they agree with or find agreeable, ignoring that even a seemingly decent person might be warped by power.
Many liberals seem to take the opposite view; they distrust individuals and emphasize the inherent corrupting nature of power, but seem to trust (sometimes a little more blindly than I find comfortable) complex systems that lack a particular face or human qualities.
I think you see the same dichotomy in the liberal and conservative readings of history: conservatives seem to favor "great man" theories that emphasize individual leadership and the influence of small numbers of people on historical outcomes, while many liberal scholars seem to downplay the role of the individual and instead look at the progression of abstract systems (the progress of 'society', etc.).
right, but if there's anything that Alienware knows how to do it's pad in lots of extra price into a high-end PC, so can't they just pad it a little more to cover the calls? Doubtless some MBA somewhere in their organization decided that it's not cost-effective to do that; they can just refuse to sell them to consumers without impacting their sales significantly, and not have to deal with the additional overhead.
In short: Alienware knows that their customers are chumps (I mean, anyone with a clue isn't going to pay the Alienware premium), and that CableCard isn't mainstream yet.
This time they spun it quite well, they got us to swallow it all bait and hook it's way down there this time. The timing was also quite effective, The nations youth and middle class are some of the most distractable Americans in history. I don't think the difference is really "distractability." The difference is demographics. In the 1960s and 70s, the Baby Boom generation was in its youth.
Today, that generation is in decline; they have, for the most part, sold out the values they held as younger people, in favor of security for themselves, their lives, and their families.
There just aren't enough young people around -- not to mention actually voting -- to overcome the influence of the aging Boom generation. And many younger people realize this, and become more cynical about the entire system, less interested in doing anything to modify it -- which, perversely, actually gives the older people more power.
I don't think you're going to see a major change in the direction this country is going, until the demographics come back into balance, and that's not going to happen until a whole lot of people in their mid-60s die.
See any of the many comments above. It's GPL-incompatible, almost certainly by design (since they basically make it as liberal as possible, but stop *just short* of GPL-compatibility).
It's an effort to split the open-source community into two camps, one around the GPL and "ideology," and another around the BSD and MS licenses and "pragmatism." In time, Microsoft can just grab all the code from the BSD and MS license camps, incorporate it into its own products, break compatibility, and walk away from the whole thing. At the very least they get a lot of work done for free, at the most, they've killed the GPL, which is open-source's main weapon against proprietization.
I can only conclude from this conversation that either the developers at Apple must be rare geniuses (since they basically nailed sleep long ago and never looked back) I think the Apple guys/gals are really good at what they do, but I think it's worth pointing out that Apple's "sleep" is not exactly the same thing as Windows' "hibernate." Sleep is more like Standby; it's not a full zero-power-consumption shutdown with a dump-to-disk like Hibernate is.
Apple does have a hibernate-like feature: it's called "Safe Sleep," and it's relatively new (circa 2005). It only came out in 10.4.3 and it only works on a limited number of new Power/MacBooks.* Admittedly, they did a better job on the UI than Windows does -- the computer just automatically goes into Standby (writing its memory configuration to disk just in case), and then after a while it goes into Safe Sleep / Hibernate. There's no separate option. You just close the lid and it does its thing.
So while I think Apple does do a good job on Sleep/Hibernate, they took their time coming out with a suspend-to-disk feature.
* Though you can hack it on some "unsupported" models, I think, via OpenFirmware.
Theoretically, sure. But not for less cost than you can run a conventional electric chiller, because of the location of the plant relative to the location where people want cooling power. As evidence, you have the fact that they're not doing it. Steam does not travel very well.
If we built nuclear power plants right in the middle of our cities, doubtless they'd do a lot more with their waste heat. Heck, you could run pipes under the streets and you'd never have to plow snow. But good luck getting people to support that; people would rather pay through the nose for energy than live near a nuclear plant.
There's no giant conspiracy on the part of the nuclear power plant operators to throw away heat. If there was an economically feasible way to extract more energy (read: money) from it, they'd be doing it. They're paying for the fuel to make the heat, after all -- it's their loss when it goes down the river. But do to geography, there's very little use for the heat once it's done generating electricity.
Nuclear plants are expensive, but we build them anyway because they produce energy at a marketable cost. They don't line steam tunnels with thermocouples, because the electricity that they produce would be too expensive to be marketable.
The reason that power plants throw away lots of heat is because it's not economically feasible to do anything with it. In time, as the cost of energy increases, it might be worthwhile to extract more from it, using more expensive methods. But at the moment, it's not.
Trying to rush things just wastes resources. Every dollar you spend extracting energy uneconomically is a dollar that can't be spent elsewhere.
Sure. But once you've removed the personally-identifying part of the watermark you've made it impossible for someone to trace the file back to you.
That's the major deterrent in watermarking -- the fear that if you share the copy of the file that you bought with the world, the FBI will show up knocking on your door to haul you away for a few decades of butt-loving in Federal prison.
Once the personal identifiability is gone, so is the incentive not to share it. Wipe out the differences between John Doe's and Sally Sue's copies of the file, and you can dump it on a P2P network with your plausible deniability intact.
The actual origin of self-organizing "life" from chemical compounds is still an open question, but it's a separate discussion than the development of biological diversity as it currently exists from unicellular life.
But there's just as little evidence for "god did it" as there is for "cosmic radiation did it." Actually less so, since while cosmic rays exist in a verifiable sense and interact with matter in known ways, god doesn't.
Just playing devil's advocate here, but what about sites that don't directly sell anything...only distribute/display content? I would think that slashdot would be an example. CowboyNeil's gotta feed his childin's, right?
I have no idea what CowboyNeal / et al actually *would* do if the advertising-supported model collapsed, but they already have a subscription system. It's quite cheap, actually. I tend to read Slashdot a lot, and I have them whitelisted in Adblock Plus and then have the adblocking turned on via my subscription (which seems like a silly thing to do, but that's how I tell when my subscription runs out), and a $5 donation lasts a while.
I don't think it would be a huge stretch to go to a subscribers-only format if the ad model collapsed. It would definitely change the character (and perhaps quality) of Slashdot as a community, and it might not work -- I don't know whether people would pay enough to pay for the bandwidth and maintenance and opportunity cost of the editors time -- but if people value it, they'll pay. If they don't, it will disappear.
(Alternately, there are pay-to-register schemes like MetaFilter's that only charge new users, rather than requiring a continuing membership; this works as long as you have a certain number of new people joining all the time.)
It's easy to look at the advertising business model and assume that's the only way things could work. It's not. However, it seems to be the easiest thing at the moment, so that's what people do. But if it stops working, people will do something else; if there is a demand for content then it will still exist, for those who want to pay for it.
Also, to speak of advertising as the only way to operate the Internet (not that you were saying that, specifically, but it's an attitude that I've encountered a lot) ignores the very long time during which the Internet existed without any advertising on it. There was a lot of content that was developed and put up by people, for free, just because they wanted to do that. Even now, there's probably more ad-free content -- in absolute terms -- than there ever was before (just look at Wikipedia, for instance). Certain parts of the internet probably wouldn't survive, and I suspect a lot of "premium content" (news, stocks, etc.) that take money to publish would retreat into pay-to-access zones, but it wouldn't be the end of the 'net.
Necessity is the mother of invention; as long as people put up with ads, that will be the dominant business model. When people get sick of them and decide to block them in large numbers, a new model will develop for the content that people care about enough to pay for. The only content that will ever disappear is the stuff that nobody wanted anyway (as evidenced by the fact that they're not willing to pay for it).
Humm. I would have thought that "network.http.max-connections-per-server - 8" would violate the RFCs, but I admit to not having read the RFC in question so maybe it only cares about the number of persistent connections at once, which is what's limited to 2 at a time. I wouldn't imagine that FF by default would blow the limit by that much. (And it's the number of persistent connections to the server that would really be important; if you started opening and keeping open dozens of connections per client, things would start to get messy.)
But at any rate, the number of maximum independent HTTP connections is different than HTTP pipelining; what the network.http.max-connections-per-server is doing, is letting the browser grab several page elements at the same time, but doing it through separate connections. Pipelining is getting multiple page elements in one TCP connection, by stacking them up.
Anyway, if you go into Firefox and want to do pipelining, what you have to change isn't the network.http.max-connections, but network.http.pipelining (set to true, default is false), network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (I have it set to 8, but you could set it to some smaller value), and network.http.proxy.pipelining (again to true). The last one is really only important if you want to use pipelining through a proxy server.
You mean some browsers serialize that? My browser appears to fetch multiple hosts concurrently.... Unfortunately, it still won't render the page with certain missing content (e.g. slow-loading javascript crap from ad servers). Well, the RFCs only allow 2 connections per client to one webserver; any more is considered abusive. And to support some older webservers, most browsers only get one page element per connection. So they open a connection, send one GET request, let the server respond, close the connection... rinse, repeat.
This was OK on narrowband/dialup connections (in fact, most browsers used to render the page between elements by default, so that it would show you the whole page, then re-render as various images or other elements were downloaded and ready to display -- although as connections got faster relative to rendering time, most browsers switched to only rendering the page once when it was complete), but it sucks on broadband. As the amount of time each data transfer takes drops relative to the time required to establish the connection, the establishment and resetting of the connections for each page element becomes more "expensive."
So in HTTP/1.1 they introduced a way of making multiple requests in one connection. (It may have predated HTTP/1.1 but I think that was when it was first formalized). Basically the web browser opens a connection to the server and make multiple requests at once. Then the server will respond with all the requested elements. Then the connection will close. This is considered kosher and non-abusive because it doesn't require spawning a whole lot of connections at the server; everything is done in one.
However this isn't enabled in default in Firefox; you have to go into the about:config page and turn it on, and set the number of requests per connection to something reasonable (I think 8 is the max).
Also, it requires a certain amount of intelligence on the part of the browser to do this correctly. There are certain kinds of requests that shouldn't be pipelined (PUT requests, for instance), and some older servers may not like it. However, I think we're moving pretty quickly towards a time where it can be made the default.
Okay, just to clarify what was going on: I was wrong in my original post (the parent to this). There is no CSS/IE-quirks/rendering trickery going on.
What was happening is that, for a period of time, the filtering list used by AdBlock Plus in the US was actually blocking the whole site. It didn't prevent the HTML from downloading, so it was possible to view the source, but it was stopping the page from rendering, producing a white screen.
Apparently the person behind the whyfirefoxisblocked site is known to the guy who runs the EasyList blocklist. I don't know exactly what's up, but based on the forums over there (http://www.richsterling.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f =64&t=1142), there's been a certain amount of back-and-forth between them. I don't know if WFFIB is some sort of vendetta against the people behind ABP and EasyList, or whether it's actually an ideological dispute, but WFFIB got blocked by EasyList as "slanderous." (Which it may be, but that's not really the point.)
However, earlier today that decision was reversed, and WFFIB has been removed from the latest version of the EastList block list. (You can check for yourself, the URL that it downloads is http://easylist.adblockplus.org/adblock_rick752.tx t.)
So if you're a FF+ABP+EasyList user and you're seeing a white screen when going to WFFIB, you just need to wait until ABP reloads the EasyList blocklist, or go into the ABP preferences and disable the "whyfirefoxisblocked.com#body" line towards the bottom.
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Sending URLs is a big benefit of IM applications in tech-heavy offices. Our mailserver has a rather significant lag (actually, not everyone in the office uses the same server, so sometimes it can be quick and other times 10-15 mins or longer), and hand-copying URLs leads to errors.
Although something like TinyURL within the intranet would probably be handy (the IT security people seem to really hate it when people use the public one...), the way people were usually sending URLs around was just by pasting them into Notepad and printing the document out. This behavior has almost totally stopped since we got an IM system.
OTOH, IM can be just as annoying as traditional phones because it has a tendency to go off while you're in the middle of things, but at least you can set an away message and warn people off (and suppress messages). And I could see how it could be isolating and lead to a lack of contact if overused. But for "hey, Joe, let me send you the address for that page," it's quite nice.
A few months ago my company came through the office and tore out everyone's regular phones and replaced them with super-duper Cisco VOIP sets.
... as if I don't have enough passwords to remember already, now I need to sign in to my freaking phone?) but they do have one upshot. If I just don't sign into the thing, nobody can call me -- the calls just roll right over into voice mail. And since my voicemails get emailed to me as attachments (where I can conveniently play them at faster-than-normal speed), I can basically ignore the phone handset and do everything through my PC.
The things are crap (you have to sign into them every morning
By my unofficial count, I'd say something like 30-50 percent of the office is doing the same thing, either intentionally or just because they can't remember to sign into the phones in the morning. I think it's actually boosted productivity -- nobody uses the phones to call around the office anymore, unless they've already sent an email or an IM to see if the person is available on the other end.
Maybe they're not so bad after all...
JPEG is for photos; PNG is graphics. You don't want to compress graphics that have text in them with JPEG, and it's wasteful to compress big photos with PNG. (Unless you need a lossless format in which case PNG can sometimes be used as an alternative to the many mutually-incompatible flavors of TIFF.) But because PNG produces smaller file sizes than GIF (its only real competitor) and it's non-proprietary and free to implement, it's succeeding fairly well.
There is a list over at Wikipedia, although I don't know if it's really close to exhaustive.
A lot of them are aiming for some sort of middle ground between TCP and UDP. They want the statelessness of UDP but some of the congestion-control and error correction of TCP, but without having to reinvent the wheel by building their own error-correction on top of UDP on a per-application basis. Others are just low-overhead versions of TCP, which were probably a lot more appealing when network and computing resources were less abundant.
Some other protocols seem like pretty straightforward attempts to patent, proprietize, and replace TCP: e.g. Venturi Transport Protocol. Others seem more well-intentioned, but look like solutions seeking problems, or buzzword-compliant* attempts to please everyone with one product.
The only one that seems particularly interesting is SCTP, which is an IETF proposed standard for a protocol that's similar to TCP but allows the transmission of multiple simultaneous streams of data, within one connection. That seems like it might be useful.
* I couldn't resist quoting this description of XTP, which sounds like it was copied and pasted from a Dilbert strip:
There are lots of ways to run wired Ethernet nondestructively, if you get creative.
... there usually has to be one so you can get to the tub drain's trap, they just are hidden sometimes). I've never tried this because the plumbing in my house doesn't *go* anywhere that I want to run cables to.
My two favorite ways:
1) Just leave it out in the open, but get it out of the way. What I usually do is go out and buy a whole bunch of 3/4" cup hooks and run them around the ceiling, generally about 1" down from the top of the wall (screwed into the wall). They leave small enough holes so that it's trivial to patch them when you leave with a little bit of spackling, if your landlord will even care about small holes like that. I basically run them around all four walls of any rooms where I have a lot of computer equipment, and then run the cabling from client machines up to the ceiling, around to the room's door, then down to floor level and go under the door at the hinge side (usually with some gaffer's tape to keep it out of the pinch point) then back up to run to wherever it needs to go. As long as you don't need to get more than 4 or 5 pieces of Cat-5 under a door, this works pretty well, and it keeps you from ever having cable in places where you'll trip over it.
2) To get between floors, or to just get the wiring out of sight (the ceiling-run wiring doesn't go well with the S.O., funny, that), I've taken to running the cabling through the forced-air HVAC ducts. It can be challenging to run it from one room to another room on the same floor, but it's a good way of getting cabling to another floor. It's pretty easy to take off the vent faces and drop wiring down them, or in some cases just thread the Cat-5 through the grille.
The other place I've seen people run wiring in apartments, is using the "wet walls" where a lot of plumbing runs vertically from one floor to the next. One of the easiest ways to get into this is via the access panels that are usually located near the faucet end of bathtubs (often in a closet or the next room
The other thing that's sometimes worth investigating is if there are any extra, unused pairs in the household phone wiring. This isn't the greatest networking medium in the world, but you can sometimes push 10BT over a single unused pair (half-duplex), if the wiring is decent and you can isolate that pair from anything else at either end. (Actually if you don't care about using the phone wiring for anything, I've run 100BT over Cat3 wiring, strictly point-to-point, for distances less than about 50'. I just leave pins 7 and 8 in the RJ45 disconnected, wiring the others as normal T568A.)
It can take a few hours of work to wire an apartment this way, but I've found the time is worth it, in terms of improved reliability and bandwidth over wireless.
BPL is a red herring. Just think about what it's attempting: pushing broadband data over unshielded, unbalanced lines -- lines that are already carrying line current and are connected to all sorts of noisy equipment. You think that DSL is bad? At least those wires are designed for carrying information, and are wired in balanced loops, with circuits end-run to the DSLAMs -- and DSL sucks in most places already.
Using power lines combines the worst of DSL, unshielded wiring (even worse, since it's unbalanced), and shared-circuit cable internet. BPL was the power companies' attempt at cashing in on 'last mile mania'; the damage it would do to the radio spectrum is only the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to its problems.
Allowing monopolists to force consumers to give up their rights is obviously wrong and subverts centuries of jurisprudence.
Actually according to some researchers (mainly Sudhir Venkatesh, who's heavily quoted in Freakonomics ), most drug-gang members make far sub-minimum wage -- they'd make more money working at McDonalds, if that was the goal. And your chances of getting killed while dealing much higher than they are in Iraq (1 in 2000 as opposed to allegedly 1 in 4 if you're dealing crack, although the latter sounds a little high). The best explanation I've heard for gang activity is psychological; it's a prestige job, one you do for respect and a lack of attractive alternatives, not one you do for money.
While an Army private doesn't get paid hugely well, they don't do horribly either, particularly when you consider that their salary is almost entirely "take-home pay" (they're not paying for food/rent/healthcare). Plus, it's just not that easy to spend money when you're deployed, which is also when you make the most bonus pay (and get some decent tax breaks -- in an unusual show of decency by the government, combat pay is tax free). Although the pay-per-hour isn't great, it's not unusual to come back from deployment with a sizable amount of savings.
Is soldiering as profitable a career as borrowing money to get a business degree and working for a corporation? Not nearly. But it's not as bad as it's sometimes made out to be, if that's what you really want to do. The problem with the military right now is that they've basically tapped out the supply of 'risk junkies' who actually want to do the job, and have started to deploy people who are only in the service because they thought it was an easy way to get a college education (and who had no real interest in being in the military outside of that). IMO, this is why there are far worse morale problems in the Army than in the Marines -- the Marines were always fairly clear in their recruiting what you were signing up to do, and drew people who actually want to do 'crazy Marine shit;' the Army (until recently) was billing itself as a disaster-relief and college scholarship program, leading to accusations of a bait-and-switch.
Despite this, the FCC says America has the highest broadband deployment rate in the world and President Bush has set a goal of having broadband available to every U.S. home by the end of this year. What have these guys been smoking? Nothing, actually, they simply redefined "broadband" as any Internet service with a download speed of 200 kilobits per second or better. That's less than one percent the target speed set in 1994 that we were supposed to have achieved by 2000 under regulations that still remain in place. This sounds like the telcos' modus operandi to a T. Recall a few years ago, when the FCC eliminated some surcharges, and they continued charging them to customers (as "cost recovery fees") until so many people got angry that the Federal government slapped them down? This is just the same thing, writ even larger.
Although I'm sure there are most corrupt agencies somewhere in the government, I can't think of one that's more bald-facedly corrupt than the FCC. Until we can the whole business and replace it with an organization -- and people -- who have as their mandate the best interests of the citizens of the United States, rather than the telecommunications companies, we're never going to have a first-class communications infrastructure. And the longer we keep the current bunch of bent industry shills and political operatives in place, the worse of a backwater the U.S. will become.
Actually it works like that in real life, too. There are paths to citizenship in the U.S. that involve military service. I've met people who have done, or were in the process of doing, it. You have to meet all the other regular qualifications (High school education or GED, basically no criminal or drug history, speak/read English, no visible tattoos on hands or face, etc.). It's a pretty good program -- all the guys I ever met who taken advantage of that path were totally solid.
I don't know if they actually let you serve in combat before your citizenship goes through, though -- it's not like the French Foreign Legion or anything. (I suspect they do not; I think it's a case of, we'll make you a citizen, but if you do, you owe us x years in the Army, and we'll pull your citizenship if you renege on it.)
I think it's "trusting people" vs "trusting systems."
This is obviously going to be making a lot of broad generalizations, but I think that conservatives tend to be suspicious of systems (e.g. "the Government" as an entity, or its bureaucracy) but trust individual people that they agree with or find agreeable, ignoring that even a seemingly decent person might be warped by power.
Many liberals seem to take the opposite view; they distrust individuals and emphasize the inherent corrupting nature of power, but seem to trust (sometimes a little more blindly than I find comfortable) complex systems that lack a particular face or human qualities.
I think you see the same dichotomy in the liberal and conservative readings of history: conservatives seem to favor "great man" theories that emphasize individual leadership and the influence of small numbers of people on historical outcomes, while many liberal scholars seem to downplay the role of the individual and instead look at the progression of abstract systems (the progress of 'society', etc.).
In short: Alienware knows that their customers are chumps (I mean, anyone with a clue isn't going to pay the Alienware premium), and that CableCard isn't mainstream yet.
Today, that generation is in decline; they have, for the most part, sold out the values they held as younger people, in favor of security for themselves, their lives, and their families.
There just aren't enough young people around -- not to mention actually voting -- to overcome the influence of the aging Boom generation. And many younger people realize this, and become more cynical about the entire system, less interested in doing anything to modify it -- which, perversely, actually gives the older people more power.
I don't think you're going to see a major change in the direction this country is going, until the demographics come back into balance, and that's not going to happen until a whole lot of people in their mid-60s die.
Well, we're already working on it.
The way you can tell that you're interacting with a government agency is the distinct feeling that you're being fucked.
See any of the many comments above. It's GPL-incompatible, almost certainly by design (since they basically make it as liberal as possible, but stop *just short* of GPL-compatibility).
It's an effort to split the open-source community into two camps, one around the GPL and "ideology," and another around the BSD and MS licenses and "pragmatism." In time, Microsoft can just grab all the code from the BSD and MS license camps, incorporate it into its own products, break compatibility, and walk away from the whole thing. At the very least they get a lot of work done for free, at the most, they've killed the GPL, which is open-source's main weapon against proprietization.
Apple does have a hibernate-like feature: it's called "Safe Sleep," and it's relatively new (circa 2005). It only came out in 10.4.3 and it only works on a limited number of new Power/MacBooks.* Admittedly, they did a better job on the UI than Windows does -- the computer just automatically goes into Standby (writing its memory configuration to disk just in case), and then after a while it goes into Safe Sleep / Hibernate. There's no separate option. You just close the lid and it does its thing.
So while I think Apple does do a good job on Sleep/Hibernate, they took their time coming out with a suspend-to-disk feature.
* Though you can hack it on some "unsupported" models, I think, via OpenFirmware.
Wow, my brain isn't functioning today.
Theoretically, sure. But not for less cost than you can run a conventional electric chiller, because of the location of the plant relative to the location where people want cooling power. As evidence, you have the fact that they're not doing it. Steam does not travel very well.
If we built nuclear power plants right in the middle of our cities, doubtless they'd do a lot more with their waste heat. Heck, you could run pipes under the streets and you'd never have to plow snow. But good luck getting people to support that; people would rather pay through the nose for energy than live near a nuclear plant.
There's no giant conspiracy on the part of the nuclear power plant operators to throw away heat. If there was an economically feasible way to extract more energy (read: money) from it, they'd be doing it. They're paying for the fuel to make the heat, after all -- it's their loss when it goes down the river. But do to geography, there's very little use for the heat once it's done generating electricity.
Nuclear plants are expensive, but we build them anyway because they produce energy at a marketable cost. They don't line steam tunnels with thermocouples, because the electricity that they produce would be too expensive to be marketable.
The reason that power plants throw away lots of heat is because it's not economically feasible to do anything with it. In time, as the cost of energy increases, it might be worthwhile to extract more from it, using more expensive methods. But at the moment, it's not.
Trying to rush things just wastes resources. Every dollar you spend extracting energy uneconomically is a dollar that can't be spent elsewhere.
Sure. But once you've removed the personally-identifying part of the watermark you've made it impossible for someone to trace the file back to you.
That's the major deterrent in watermarking -- the fear that if you share the copy of the file that you bought with the world, the FBI will show up knocking on your door to haul you away for a few decades of butt-loving in Federal prison.
Once the personal identifiability is gone, so is the incentive not to share it. Wipe out the differences between John Doe's and Sally Sue's copies of the file, and you can dump it on a P2P network with your plausible deniability intact.
Abiogenesis != Evolution.
The actual origin of self-organizing "life" from chemical compounds is still an open question, but it's a separate discussion than the development of biological diversity as it currently exists from unicellular life.
But there's just as little evidence for "god did it" as there is for "cosmic radiation did it." Actually less so, since while cosmic rays exist in a verifiable sense and interact with matter in known ways, god doesn't.
So that's a stupid argument on several levels.
Just playing devil's advocate here, but what about sites that don't directly sell anything...only distribute/display content? I would think that slashdot would be an example. CowboyNeil's gotta feed his childin's, right?
I have no idea what CowboyNeal / et al actually *would* do if the advertising-supported model collapsed, but they already have a subscription system. It's quite cheap, actually. I tend to read Slashdot a lot, and I have them whitelisted in Adblock Plus and then have the adblocking turned on via my subscription (which seems like a silly thing to do, but that's how I tell when my subscription runs out), and a $5 donation lasts a while.
I don't think it would be a huge stretch to go to a subscribers-only format if the ad model collapsed. It would definitely change the character (and perhaps quality) of Slashdot as a community, and it might not work -- I don't know whether people would pay enough to pay for the bandwidth and maintenance and opportunity cost of the editors time -- but if people value it, they'll pay. If they don't, it will disappear.
(Alternately, there are pay-to-register schemes like MetaFilter's that only charge new users, rather than requiring a continuing membership; this works as long as you have a certain number of new people joining all the time.)
It's easy to look at the advertising business model and assume that's the only way things could work. It's not. However, it seems to be the easiest thing at the moment, so that's what people do. But if it stops working, people will do something else; if there is a demand for content then it will still exist, for those who want to pay for it.
Also, to speak of advertising as the only way to operate the Internet (not that you were saying that, specifically, but it's an attitude that I've encountered a lot) ignores the very long time during which the Internet existed without any advertising on it. There was a lot of content that was developed and put up by people, for free, just because they wanted to do that. Even now, there's probably more ad-free content -- in absolute terms -- than there ever was before (just look at Wikipedia, for instance). Certain parts of the internet probably wouldn't survive, and I suspect a lot of "premium content" (news, stocks, etc.) that take money to publish would retreat into pay-to-access zones, but it wouldn't be the end of the 'net.
Necessity is the mother of invention; as long as people put up with ads, that will be the dominant business model. When people get sick of them and decide to block them in large numbers, a new model will develop for the content that people care about enough to pay for. The only content that will ever disappear is the stuff that nobody wanted anyway (as evidenced by the fact that they're not willing to pay for it).
Humm. I would have thought that "network.http.max-connections-per-server - 8" would violate the RFCs, but I admit to not having read the RFC in question so maybe it only cares about the number of persistent connections at once, which is what's limited to 2 at a time. I wouldn't imagine that FF by default would blow the limit by that much. (And it's the number of persistent connections to the server that would really be important; if you started opening and keeping open dozens of connections per client, things would start to get messy.)
But at any rate, the number of maximum independent HTTP connections is different than HTTP pipelining; what the network.http.max-connections-per-server is doing, is letting the browser grab several page elements at the same time, but doing it through separate connections. Pipelining is getting multiple page elements in one TCP connection, by stacking them up.
Anyway, if you go into Firefox and want to do pipelining, what you have to change isn't the network.http.max-connections, but network.http.pipelining (set to true, default is false), network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (I have it set to 8, but you could set it to some smaller value), and network.http.proxy.pipelining (again to true). The last one is really only important if you want to use pipelining through a proxy server.
This was OK on narrowband/dialup connections (in fact, most browsers used to render the page between elements by default, so that it would show you the whole page, then re-render as various images or other elements were downloaded and ready to display -- although as connections got faster relative to rendering time, most browsers switched to only rendering the page once when it was complete), but it sucks on broadband. As the amount of time each data transfer takes drops relative to the time required to establish the connection, the establishment and resetting of the connections for each page element becomes more "expensive."
So in HTTP/1.1 they introduced a way of making multiple requests in one connection. (It may have predated HTTP/1.1 but I think that was when it was first formalized). Basically the web browser opens a connection to the server and make multiple requests at once. Then the server will respond with all the requested elements. Then the connection will close. This is considered kosher and non-abusive because it doesn't require spawning a whole lot of connections at the server; everything is done in one.
However this isn't enabled in default in Firefox; you have to go into the about:config page and turn it on, and set the number of requests per connection to something reasonable (I think 8 is the max).
Also, it requires a certain amount of intelligence on the part of the browser to do this correctly. There are certain kinds of requests that shouldn't be pipelined (PUT requests, for instance), and some older servers may not like it. However, I think we're moving pretty quickly towards a time where it can be made the default.
Okay, just to clarify what was going on: I was wrong in my original post (the parent to this). There is no CSS/IE-quirks/rendering trickery going on.
f =64&t=1142), there's been a certain amount of back-and-forth between them. I don't know if WFFIB is some sort of vendetta against the people behind ABP and EasyList, or whether it's actually an ideological dispute, but WFFIB got blocked by EasyList as "slanderous." (Which it may be, but that's not really the point.)
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What was happening is that, for a period of time, the filtering list used by AdBlock Plus in the US was actually blocking the whole site. It didn't prevent the HTML from downloading, so it was possible to view the source, but it was stopping the page from rendering, producing a white screen.
Apparently the person behind the whyfirefoxisblocked site is known to the guy who runs the EasyList blocklist. I don't know exactly what's up, but based on the forums over there (http://www.richsterling.com/forum/viewtopic.php?
However, earlier today that decision was reversed, and WFFIB has been removed from the latest version of the EastList block list. (You can check for yourself, the URL that it downloads is http://easylist.adblockplus.org/adblock_rick752.t
So if you're a FF+ABP+EasyList user and you're seeing a white screen when going to WFFIB, you just need to wait until ABP reloads the EasyList blocklist, or go into the ABP preferences and disable the "whyfirefoxisblocked.com#body" line towards the bottom.
I gave the WFFIB people far too much credit.