I've notice that rural radio shacks attract the towns alpha geeks. In small towns - large enough to attract a walmart - but small enough not to have any real businesses. I've encountered VERY knowledgeable staff at Radio shack.
The Radioshack in Butler PA has a guy who's into cellphones & bluetooth Jacking - he showed me how to set any MP3 as a ring tone & even gave me the parts to make a serial to phone cable to access the lower levels of the phone.
The Radioshack near Alfred / Almond NY has two employees that are really into HAM radios, they know everything about building antennaes.
Once you get into larger cities - where there are actual employment opportunities for the alpha geeks - the Radioshacks tend to suck big time.
Sending you screenshots of the laptop being used is very useful, most security software "phones home" but only gives limited information, like the IP address of the machine (public IP if it is NATed).
The stolen laptops that law enforcement have contacted me about, have been largely pointless (as I work for an ISP and have access to the customer records). The perpetraitor or possesor of stolen goods is almost always at a hotel (wifi hotspot - what have you). Under US law - John Doe search warrant of a hotel isn't good enough.
You can't wake everyone in a hotel up and search thier rooms, the police need a specific name and room number, they can only search one room.
So thus screen shots, and knowing the identity of the person who's using their stolen laptop, improves your chances of recovery immensely.
"Downloadable video files are large enough that few are cached at the local level, and it's expensive for content companies to do so."
This is utter crap, video content on itunes and google is akamized. That means the popular stuff is cached on servers by your isp (if it doesn't suck). Or by the very least a public akamai server in your nearest city.
The bandwidth "pinch" referred to by the author doesn't exsist in a modern network. If it does your ISP is incompetant.
The only impact the increasing quailty of video can have on a network - is on the last mile - or close to the last mile.
Yes usage has increased, this is a no brainer - capacity has also increased, if your ISP is responsible capacity has increased to match demand.
Buisness critical video (as in live video conferencing)has preferred QOS (quality of service) on net - off net you can't guarantee QOS.
VOIP alos has preferred QOS if Diffserve tagging is enabled - if your ISP is offering VOIP and doesn't have this enabled on net (and to thier upstream) they are incompetant.
Voice, Faxes, Video, Data all go across the same pipes (physically - perhaps not logically). We have intelligent QOS managing with ATM and MLPS for network cores.
Regulatory changes have already been made to address physical bandwidth capacity and limitations. Collocations and POPs have been re-ordered as Tier 1, 2, & 3 determining how many physical lines they can suffiecently aggregate. (the FCC being pro-active for once)
Yes cable networks are slightly different than normal telco, they deliver streamed video via multicast - A HD channel is only 500Kb (prolly only 720i), cable companies have ample last mile bandwidth available to meet current and future demand (although some frequencies may need to be re-allocated). Basically traditional broadcast tv is already being delivered via IP, the physical bandwidth is already present.
Same thing with voice - ADPCM voice is already compressed - VOIP is nominally different, but they traverse the same trunking. VOIP can be flagged via diffserve routed across a layer two trunk (a logical trunk) with the same QOS perameters as traditional voice services.
If you are expieriencing issues with Vonage or Skype at home, it's because you have a traditional lack of capacity, or your ISP is not modern.
The author doesn't have the first clue about how the intarweb works, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid schill supporting verizon's "preferred tier" bullshit.
Voice over ATM & Voice over IP do have alot of potential for telcos & backhouling. Both VOIP & VOATM offer much of the same benefits - call routing, dynamic packet switching. The last mile barrier will prevent VOIP/ATM from completely replacing POTS, especially in rural areas.
The dhcp servier & radius server (PPP) are separate entities. More accurtately the dhcp Ip is linked to a MAC address - Once a dhcp lease expires (connection is terminated) the arp table is refreshed. I don't know how long other ISP's leave thier arp tables up - but my routers refresh every 20 minutes.
In order to tie any specific IP to a particular user the connection has to remain active and the lease on the IP cannot expire.
This is why some macintosh users were accused of running the kazza client - the IP in question was linked to the mac adress currently in the arp tables. I have never encountered an isp that logs thier arp tables. So the customer who gets slapped with the lawsuit may not have been the customer who was originally sharing mp3's.
The only time usernames would be used at all if some sort of radius authentication is required by the isp before a dhcp address is leased (pap - chap, whatever). The most common broadband technologies that use radius is PPPOE & PPP over ATM.
The majority of ISP's used bridged ethernet technologies that don't require radius authentication. The only way of matching an IP in that case is via mac address.
Many firewall / router products allow for mac address cloning - which essentially allows a user to change his or her mac adress. IANAL but if the corresponding mac adress was not found on an offenders network then the RIAA would have no case.
In either way - due to the fact that most residental broadband services only offer DHCP addresses - the method that the RIAA is using to identify thier victims is highly unreliable.
AMD K62 - 500 on an Epox main board w/ 128 MB of ram has been running for 4 years as my edgenet router. With zero stability issues. The only restarts i've had to do were either maintanance based - or of course the '03 black out.
Security, or the lack of it, is one of the most serious issues currently plaguing the IT industry. I've worked for both sides, an ISP and, during my economic down turn hiatus. I worked for a telemarketing center for M$. Shudder. The problem is, most small companies don't even know that any security issues even exsist. They don't know who to hire to find these security issues, nor do they even care to fix them.
The security issues while working for M$ were as follows, a poorly written asp served database w/ a sequel back - end. Input boxes were not checked, so even the default login page was susceptible to buffer overrun exploits.
The database was publicly avalaible on the internet using public dns, no vpn, no IP based firewall rules.
No internal e-mail for employees, because it was deemed a security risk. So passwords were distributed to new employees on paper, managers printed off pasword lists of all emplyees on thier team and handed out these lists of passwords to everyone.
Floppy drives were bios disabled, again - deemed a possible security risk, No bios password was set however.
WAP network, 802.11b, encryption was disabled to save bandwidth, not enough WAP routers serving too many clients.
They ran out of internal IP addresses several times, there were less than 250 workstations per WAP.
Yes DHCP, yes dynamically assigned, no static assignment based on mac address.
Yeah so that environment was entertaining, M$'s entire customer database was published to the internet in the most insecure network I have ever encountered.
But this is the problem with the majority of the IT industry. Small buisnesses w/ 500 employees or less, a poorly trained, dangerously inept support staff, forced into support roles that they are unqualified for.
Until software manufacturers realize that they need to make thier products for the lowest common denominator this will remain to be a huge issue.
4. You want to make high-quality digital recordings.
Apple recently announced the availability of a voice-recorder accessory for the iPod, but there's still no way to use the device to record high-quality audio. DJs who want to record their sets, people who want to encode their vinyl or cassette collections to MP3, or musicians who are looking for a replacement for their DAT recorder need this feature. Luckily for them, two new iPod competitors offer this option; compare them below.
The iPod has already begun to replace DAT machines and recorders. It supports wave and AIFF playback. Many artists had been bringing their DAT machines with them to the recording studios to eliminate variance among different DAT tape players. Becuase of the capacity of the iPod and the ability to play back WAV & AIFF files allows for a greater control of quality than you get when switching DAT machines. And the iPod is much easier to carry.:)
Professional artists are not looking for the ability to record directly to an iPod, as the input levels on any consumer product are not sufficient. However, as a decent play back machine for demos it is an excellent choice.
The Samsung YP-910GS only supports MP3 & WMP play back, even if the portable allows for audio recording, it does not support the proper file formats for high - quality playback.
However the iRiver iHP-120 supports MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, ASF, & WAV. This player does support file formats with a quality sufficient enough to replace a DAT machine. But the 10GB player lists for $399 and can be found for $349.
4. You want to make high-quality digital recordings.
Apple recently announced the availability of a voice-recorder accessory for the iPod, but there's still no way to use the device to record high-quality audio. DJs who want to record their sets, people who want to encode their vinyl or cassette collections to MP3, or musicians who are looking for a replacement for their DAT recorder need this feature. Luckily for them, two new iPod competitors offer this option; compare them below.
Let me tell you something about nations of the world: There is NOTHING stopping them from being civilized and receiving aid. But as long as they expect to develop socialist (needs of the people my ass) and murderous societies and policies, there will be no thought of this nation giving any of those barbaric folk anything but a chance at military confrontation.
SoÂcialÂism n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
UNDERSTAND that when Marx wrote Democracies were not the majority of governments, pretty much the ONLY model for government were dictatorships, monarchies - ect.
Hate to break it to you but the US is a socialist democracy.
Why do you think we have such things as the Federal Reserve. Public education, including Universities & libraries, The FCC, The SEC, The FDA.
All of these goverment requlatory organisations ARE forms of socialist government. Without such regulatory organisations, businesses would be out of control. Radio and TV stations would try and overpower each others transmissions and your employer would embezzel your pension fund.
Socialists argue for more governmental controls to protect the average worker. So situations such as Enron & Global Crossings don't happen.
When large corporations weaken the control our socialist organisations have, the ordinary worker is hurt - from middle management all the way down to the mail room.
So saying you are against socialism means you support the exploitation of workers by large corporations. Unless you are the CEO of a large multinational corporation (any of those read/. ?) being anti-socialist is a little bit counter-productive.
I promise you that Saddam would still be murdering his people, including children were it not for the military intervention of the US, something few socialist nations were willing to do and were unwilling to do for the most cynical reasons: for Saddam's money.
The European nations, and most accurately the UN security council are anti war. Not because they are socialist, but 1/2 of their populations were wiped out twice in the past 100 years. You know - a little thing called WWI & WWII.
Do me a favour and next time you post an opinion, make sure it's informed.
Deregulation is a complete and total farce. It does not drive down costs for the regular user. It allows the large corporate physical plant companies to dictate price to smaller service start-ups.
The nature of the beast is purely anti-competitive.
What I cannot believe is that Austrailia actually fucked their telephone system up this badly. It's amazing that they modeled their new telephone infrastructure after what the US is doing. The telecommuntions industry is an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. I'm not surprised - elected officials were in charge of the decision making process.
Austrailia had the perfect opportunity to deregulate PROPERLY. This is how it should be done.
1. The government retains ownership of the Copper Plant. ALL of the wires and telephone poles are owned by the government - as well as the Physical plants & Frames (CO's). - Maintainance contracts are bid for - in small sections. Companies can bid for as many sections as they wish to maintain.
2. Service providers CANNOT own physical plant - They can own their own switching equiptment - but no copper plant.
3. The goverment leases the lines to the service providers - thus paying for the maintanance companies that bid for the contract.
That's it - VERY simple you have multiple companies competeing for customers and maintainance contracts - no teleco is going to use the fact that they own the copper plant to muscle out a little guy - because the goverment is where it should be, making sure all of the little children play nice.
"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"
For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.
It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.
There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.
Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.
Fast system controller:
The system controller, first introduced in Apple?s highly-regarded Xserve line, coordinates and transfers data and instructions among the processor(s), PCI bus, memory, graphics and I/O buses of the Power Mac G4. Controller speeds in the new Power Mac G4 configurations run as high as 167MHz.
The PCI bus is what really impressed me.
Direct PCI bus:
In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.
Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.
On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.
Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.
It basically falls down to system preference.
Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400.
Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.
Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.
Do a bit of research before posting next time. Run over to pricewatch and do a bit of comparison shopping. Ohhh! whats that? 1U rack mount PC cases START at $250 and the nice one's cost around $300.
The Mac would lose most benchmarks - but may be able to keep up with a few.
I'd like to see a benchmark review for all around system performance - especially with high end systems like these.
Sure use premier benchmarks - but how long does it take to transfer video from the camera to the computer?
How fast are network file transfers?
How fast is copying / moving a 2GB file? To a different drive? On the same controller?
How many files can you have in a directory before the file manager starts slowing down?
How fast is copying multiple files (as in the thousands) - from one drive to another? - across a network?
I've never seen a benchmark site with anything so thourough - I'd like to - We usually get the same old - raw application benchmarks. Which are still useful - but don't encompass everything.
June 19, 2002 - 8:22 PM (PDT) - By Cimmerian Static Decoded!:
Thanks to Erica, Smokehouse, Avalance, r00tw0rd and others for the decyphering of the audio. The static messages can be heard in the archive
MESSAGE 1: i don't know what time is it i don't know it's not what you know, it's what you're licensed to know unlicensed knowledge unlicensed unregulated knowledge is pornography
MESSAGE 2: this is sometime after 2100 i don't know the exact time (?????) the air, all the air is gone the sun burns us i'm broadcasting from (??????) unknown grid there's still time to stop what's happening you must stop what's happening before it's too late there's still time time
Slashdot Mirror
I've notice that rural radio shacks attract the towns alpha geeks. In small towns - large enough to attract a walmart - but small enough not to have any real businesses. I've encountered VERY knowledgeable staff at Radio shack.
The Radioshack in Butler PA has a guy who's into cellphones & bluetooth Jacking - he showed me how to set any MP3 as a ring tone & even gave me the parts to make a serial to phone cable to access the lower levels of the phone.
The Radioshack near Alfred / Almond NY has two employees that are really into HAM radios, they know everything about building antennaes.
Once you get into larger cities - where there are actual employment opportunities for the alpha geeks - the Radioshacks tend to suck big time.
hold down f12 - your CD will eject after about 3-5 seconds
Sending you screenshots of the laptop being used is very useful, most security software "phones home" but only gives limited information, like the IP address of the machine (public IP if it is NATed).
The stolen laptops that law enforcement have contacted me about, have been largely pointless (as I work for an ISP and have access to the customer records). The perpetraitor or possesor of stolen goods is almost always at a hotel (wifi hotspot - what have you). Under US law - John Doe search warrant of a hotel isn't good enough.
You can't wake everyone in a hotel up and search thier rooms, the police need a specific name and room number, they can only search one room.
So thus screen shots, and knowing the identity of the person who's using their stolen laptop, improves your chances of recovery immensely.
FTA
"Downloadable video files are large enough that few are cached at the local level, and it's expensive for content companies to do so."
This is utter crap, video content on itunes and google is akamized. That means the popular stuff is cached on servers by your isp (if it doesn't suck). Or by the very least a public akamai server in your nearest city.
The bandwidth "pinch" referred to by the author doesn't exsist in a modern network. If it does your ISP is incompetant.
The only impact the increasing quailty of video can have on a network - is on the last mile - or close to the last mile.
Yes usage has increased, this is a no brainer - capacity has also increased, if your ISP is responsible capacity has increased to match demand.
Buisness critical video (as in live video conferencing)has preferred QOS (quality of service) on net - off net you can't guarantee QOS.
VOIP alos has preferred QOS if Diffserve tagging is enabled - if your ISP is offering VOIP and doesn't have this enabled on net (and to thier upstream) they are incompetant.
Voice, Faxes, Video, Data all go across the same pipes (physically - perhaps not logically). We have intelligent QOS managing with ATM and MLPS for network cores.
Regulatory changes have already been made to address physical bandwidth capacity and limitations. Collocations and POPs have been re-ordered as Tier 1, 2, & 3 determining how many physical lines they can suffiecently aggregate. (the FCC being pro-active for once)
Yes cable networks are slightly different than normal telco, they deliver streamed video via multicast - A HD channel is only 500Kb (prolly only 720i), cable companies have ample last mile bandwidth available to meet current and future demand (although some frequencies may need to be re-allocated). Basically traditional broadcast tv is already being delivered via IP, the physical bandwidth is already present.
Same thing with voice - ADPCM voice is already compressed - VOIP is nominally different, but they traverse the same trunking. VOIP can be flagged via diffserve routed across a layer two trunk (a logical trunk) with the same QOS perameters as traditional voice services.
If you are expieriencing issues with Vonage or Skype at home, it's because you have a traditional lack of capacity, or your ISP is not modern.
The author doesn't have the first clue about how the intarweb works, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid schill supporting verizon's "preferred tier" bullshit.
Hey maybe they'll find Jimmy Hoffa
M$ even provides Remote Desktop Cleint for the Mac. So you can control a win xp Pro computer from your kitchen.
r pr oducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/othe
And theres several vnc cleints fer os X too
Yes & no.
Voice over ATM & Voice over IP do have alot of potential for telcos & backhouling. Both VOIP & VOATM offer much of the same benefits - call routing, dynamic packet switching. The last mile barrier will prevent VOIP/ATM from completely replacing POTS, especially in rural areas.
The dhcp servier & radius server (PPP) are separate entities. More accurtately the dhcp Ip is linked to a MAC address - Once a dhcp lease expires (connection is terminated) the arp table is refreshed. I don't know how long other ISP's leave thier arp tables up - but my routers refresh every 20 minutes.
In order to tie any specific IP to a particular user the connection has to remain active and the lease on the IP cannot expire.
This is why some macintosh users were accused of running the kazza client - the IP in question was linked to the mac adress currently in the arp tables. I have never encountered an isp that logs thier arp tables. So the customer who gets slapped with the lawsuit may not have been the customer who was originally sharing mp3's.
The only time usernames would be used at all if some sort of radius authentication is required by the isp before a dhcp address is leased (pap - chap, whatever). The most common broadband technologies that use radius is PPPOE & PPP over ATM.
The majority of ISP's used bridged ethernet technologies that don't require radius authentication. The only way of matching an IP in that case is via mac address.
Many firewall / router products allow for mac address cloning - which essentially allows a user to change his or her mac adress. IANAL but if the corresponding mac adress was not found on an offenders network then the RIAA would have no case.
In either way - due to the fact that most residental broadband services only offer DHCP addresses - the method that the RIAA is using to identify thier victims is highly unreliable.
AMD K62 - 500 on an Epox main board w/ 128 MB of ram has been running for 4 years as my edgenet router. With zero stability issues. The only restarts i've had to do were either maintanance based - or of course the '03 black out.
http://www.openfirmware.org/
I'd definately like to see open firmware based x86 machines. It would allow for more commoditized hardware for us PPC users. And - it's open source!
Security, or the lack of it, is one of the most serious issues currently plaguing the IT industry. I've worked for both sides, an ISP and, during my economic down turn hiatus. I worked for a telemarketing center for M$. Shudder. The problem is, most small companies don't even know that any security issues even exsist. They don't know who to hire to find these security issues, nor do they even care to fix them.
The security issues while working for M$ were as follows, a poorly written asp served database w/ a sequel back - end. Input boxes were not checked, so even the default login page was susceptible to buffer overrun exploits.
The database was publicly avalaible on the internet using public dns, no vpn, no IP based firewall rules.
No internal e-mail for employees, because it was deemed a security risk. So passwords were distributed to new employees on paper, managers printed off pasword lists of all emplyees on thier team and handed out these lists of passwords to everyone.
Floppy drives were bios disabled, again - deemed a possible security risk, No bios password was set however.
WAP network, 802.11b, encryption was disabled to save bandwidth, not enough WAP routers serving too many clients.
They ran out of internal IP addresses several times, there were less than 250 workstations per WAP.
Yes DHCP, yes dynamically assigned, no static assignment based on mac address.
Yeah so that environment was entertaining, M$'s entire customer database was published to the internet in the most insecure network I have ever encountered.
But this is the problem with the majority of the IT industry. Small buisnesses w/ 500 employees or less, a poorly trained, dangerously inept support staff, forced into support roles that they are unqualified for.
Until software manufacturers realize that they need to make thier products for the lowest common denominator this will remain to be a huge issue.
The iPod has already begun to replace DAT machines and recorders. It supports wave and AIFF playback. Many artists had been bringing their DAT machines with them to the recording studios to eliminate variance among different DAT tape players. Becuase of the capacity of the iPod and the ability to play back WAV & AIFF files allows for a greater control of quality than you get when switching DAT machines. And the iPod is much easier to carry.
Professional artists are not looking for the ability to record directly to an iPod, as the input levels on any consumer product are not sufficient. However, as a decent play back machine for demos it is an excellent choice.
The Samsung YP-910GS only supports MP3 & WMP play back, even if the portable allows for audio recording, it does not support the proper file formats for high - quality playback.
However the iRiver iHP-120 supports MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, ASF, & WAV. This player does support file formats with a quality sufficient enough to replace a DAT machine. But the 10GB player lists for $399 and can be found for $349.
The 10GB ipod can be purchased for for $299.
Yes, When I first saw the cube I though apple should have made it an intermediary between the iMac & G4 tower line.
The processor should have been a G3, and the price point should have matched the iMac - minus monitor $1200.
The cube would have been an all - out success if it were so.
lol
Let me tell you something about nations of the world: There is NOTHING stopping them from being civilized and receiving aid. But as long as they expect to develop socialist (needs of the people my ass) and murderous societies and policies, there will be no thought of this nation giving any of those barbaric folk anything but a chance at military confrontation.
/. ?) being anti-socialist is a little bit counter-productive.
SoÂcialÂism n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
UNDERSTAND that when Marx wrote Democracies were not the majority of governments, pretty much the ONLY model for government were dictatorships, monarchies - ect.
Hate to break it to you but the US is a socialist democracy.
Why do you think we have such things as the Federal Reserve. Public education, including Universities & libraries, The FCC, The SEC, The FDA.
All of these goverment requlatory organisations ARE forms of socialist government. Without such regulatory organisations, businesses would be out of control. Radio and TV stations would try and overpower each others transmissions and your employer would embezzel your pension fund.
Socialists argue for more governmental controls to protect the average worker. So situations such as Enron & Global Crossings don't happen.
When large corporations weaken the control our socialist organisations have, the ordinary worker is hurt - from middle management all the way down to the mail room.
So saying you are against socialism means you support the exploitation of workers by large corporations. Unless you are the CEO of a large multinational corporation (any of those read
I promise you that Saddam would still be murdering his people, including children were it not for the military intervention of the US, something few socialist nations were willing to do and were unwilling to do for the most cynical reasons: for Saddam's money.
The European nations, and most accurately the UN security council are anti war. Not because they are socialist, but 1/2 of their populations were wiped out twice in the past 100 years. You know - a little thing called WWI & WWII.
Do me a favour and next time you post an opinion, make sure it's informed.
Deregulation is a complete and total farce. It does not drive down costs for the regular user. It allows the large corporate physical plant companies to dictate price to smaller service start-ups.
The nature of the beast is purely anti-competitive.
What I cannot believe is that Austrailia actually fucked their telephone system up this badly. It's amazing that they modeled their new telephone infrastructure after what the US is doing. The telecommuntions industry is an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. I'm not surprised - elected officials were in charge of the decision making process.
Austrailia had the perfect opportunity to deregulate PROPERLY. This is how it should be done.
1. The government retains ownership of the Copper Plant. ALL of the wires and telephone poles are owned by the government - as well as the Physical plants & Frames (CO's). - Maintainance contracts are bid for - in small sections. Companies can bid for as many sections as they wish to maintain.
2. Service providers CANNOT own physical plant - They can own their own switching equiptment - but no copper plant.
3. The goverment leases the lines to the service providers - thus paying for the maintanance companies that bid for the contract.
That's it - VERY simple you have multiple companies competeing for customers and maintainance contracts - no teleco is going to use the fact that they own the copper plant to muscle out a little guy - because the goverment is where it should be, making sure all of the little children play nice.
IANGreenspan, However looking at Apple's stock over a period of 5 years it has fared better than Microsofts.
& s= aapl&a=v&p=s&l=on&z=m&q=l&x=on&y=o n
For a niche manufacturing company Apple is performing well. And its stock is following market trends almost perfectly.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=c&c=MSFT&k=c1&t=5y
Any one calling Apple Beleagured is a moron.
The reason that steel, manufacturing, and many industrial trades are protected by tarrifs is rather simple.
They have strong unions.
IT workers don't.
Would this be considered a Segway Fault?
"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"
For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.
It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.
There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.
Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.
Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!
Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.
Fast system controller: The system controller, first introduced in Apple?s highly-regarded Xserve line, coordinates and transfers data and instructions among the processor(s), PCI bus, memory, graphics and I/O buses of the Power Mac G4. Controller speeds in the new Power Mac G4 configurations run as high as 167MHz.The PCI bus is what really impressed me.
Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.
Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.
On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.
I got this info here.
Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!
Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.
And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.
It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.
Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.
Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!
Do a bit of research before posting next time. Run over to pricewatch and do a bit of comparison shopping. Ohhh! whats that? 1U rack mount PC cases START at $250 and the nice one's cost around $300.
The Mac would lose most benchmarks - but may be able to keep up with a few.
I'd like to see a benchmark review for all around system performance - especially with high end systems like these.
Sure use premier benchmarks - but how long does it take to transfer video from the camera to the computer?
How fast are network file transfers?
How fast is copying / moving a 2GB file? To a different drive? On the same controller?
How many files can you have in a directory before the file manager starts slowing down?
How fast is copying multiple files (as in the thousands) - from one drive to another? - across a network?
I've never seen a benchmark site with anything so thourough - I'd like to - We usually get the same old - raw application benchmarks. Which are still useful - but don't encompass everything.
June 19, 2002 - 8:22 PM (PDT) - By Cimmerian
Static Decoded!:
Thanks to Erica, Smokehouse, Avalance, r00tw0rd and others for the decyphering of the audio. The static messages can be heard in the archive
MESSAGE 1:
i don't know what time is it
i don't know
it's not what you know, it's what you're licensed to know
unlicensed knowledge
unlicensed
unregulated knowledge is pornography
MESSAGE 2:
this is sometime after 2100
i don't know the exact time
(?????)
the air, all the air is gone
the sun burns us
i'm broadcasting from (??????)
unknown grid
there's still time to stop what's happening
you must stop what's happening before it's too late
there's still time
time
Tales from the Afternow
Here's a nice utility that allows you to put a password on your Open Firmware.
1 20 095&SaveKCWindowURL=http%3A%2F%2Fkbase.info.apple. com%2Fcgi-bin%2FWebObjects%2Fkbase.woa%2Fwa%2FSave KCToHomePage&searchMode=Assisted&kbhost=kbase.info .apple.com&showButton=false&randomValue=100&showSu rvey=true&sessionID=anonymous|148076290
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=
If apple was no longer using open firmware boot roms why does this application work on a Dual 867 g4? hmmm?