HMMM - so how do you know that the $65 includes the cable cost? My attbi account has a distinct cable and internet connection fee. They are separate!
Further, the cost has gone up in the last year and the service has gotten much worst with the demise of @home. My email account got smoked. My download bandwidth has been cut in half. I had no service for around a week.. So how can the movement to attbi be a good thing?
I'll be turning in my modem Monday and going to direct TV dsl!
I've got the replay 4000 as seen here on/.;-) and haven't tried to hook it up to my Dish system yet (mainly because the dish needs to be moved for better view of the sky..)
Anyway - the replay looks like it only records the NTSC signal or the channel 3 video version of the vidio. Further, the video play back quality of the replay from over-the-air programming is usually a bit lower than one I see off of the Dish decoder. I have a clue about what to look like (worked at a encoder builder some years ago..) and I see digital artifacts more often watching the replay.
At the same time- just the ability to pause live TV is AWESOME! The other neat trick is to pause a live show for a few minutes before it actually plays - then no commercials. Also VERY enjoyable.
Hmm - gee - the Glendale Ca Power company comes to mind. Then there is the Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power. Thats two. There are few dozen municipally owned companies in CA - most not suffering from power outages last year!
Well - in many cases it DID work for IBM. Did you know that there were at least two design teams working on the IBM-AT. One of them ran into issues with fabrication of parts, and the other design completed and went to market (and sold millions of copies there of..)
3 hours- that's nice. But my modem is still sitting there without synch, and I spoke to at least three other users in the area (Fremont CA) yesterday in the same boat. We're all dead in the water. I'm loosing an email address that I've had for nearly 5 years! I'm pissed about that (though I truly won't miss the spam..) I think that the whole thing sucks.
I'm kinda fortunate - I've got DSL to the house too. I was playing with the idea of terminating the cable services (thus the DSL) and POOF - they did if for me;-)
Seriously, after having DSL for a month or so, and cable for four years, the cable service speed is nominally much faster, mainly because of it's ability to peek at higher performance. The DSL has been more reliable. When you have both, at least you have near 100% up time. My only real concern now is that Covad goes the way of @home. Then I'm truly screwed....
I'm not sure if this is a reply to my post about the ISA - but if it is, you seem to contradict yourself.
At the same time - in patents it seems from my limited experience (only hold two patents) the distance between a description of something and the implementation of something is ALL important.
One of my patents is a different implemenation of a specific feature on a competitors' product. There is a description of what the external interface looks like - I replicated interface with my own internal workings. Quite different enough to receive a patent.
My point is demonstrated by the existance of Amdahl which in days gone by used to build an ISA compatible version of IBM's architecture. The point was settled back in the 70's or earlier. You can't patent an ISA. Another example, there are LOTS of implementations of the 8051 by non-Intel licensee's. Oddly - you don't see Intel running after these people because they've already been down this road.
You can't patent mov Ax,Bx - but perhaps you could patent a series of registers organized into a a register file with an instruction register which has an attached collection of timing and control logic that implements mov Ax,Bx in a particular manner. That is the difference in a nutshell.
Dude, it depends on who publishes the results of the ruling: See http://www.picoturbo.com/News/Court_Update/court_u pdate.html for the PicoTurbo view of things. I know that this was interpreted by the industry locally to be a Picoturbo win considering the fact that I've heard of a couple of folks looking seriously at Picoturbo now. Last I heard - you can't patent an ISA - you CAN patent particular methods used to implement that ISA.
As for not liking Reverse Engineering - get over it!
LWN was one of the first news sites (if not THE first) to cover linux at all! Back in the early days of the net being popular, LWN was the a great place to get a good summary of ALL the happenings in the world of Linux.
If they went to a subscription service, I'd probably be willing to get a subscription. They still do a good job of coverage.
The folks who interpret the constitution, i.e. the courts have said that it is legal for you to copy other people's work for personal consumption, and that THOSE OTHER PEOPLE don't have a right to limit that ability. The DMCA comes along and limits that ability - see the problem here.
If I own the CD, then I'm legally entitled to make copies of it for personal consumption, not publishing it myself. Big difference there.
Summary - legal in this case does make it a right.
Ever heard of non-compete agreements? I'm willing to bet that CT, et al had to sign such things at one point or another, and that their still in effect.
I've worked as a ham radio volunteer for CDF on a couple of fires so have been through some of the training concerning issues like this.
First - water weighs ALOT. Second, replenishing the supply quickly is an issue. You really want a heavy lifter that can have a fast turn-around and do more drops per hour. A small UAV isn't going to fill that bill.
Another interesting fact is that mapping out the fires in real time was done by the hams here in CA around 10 years ago, along with giving the CDF real-time video feeds of the fire from helicopters.
For doing the mapping, a GPS unit was tied to a Terminal Node controller (ham packet radio speak there) that just spit out the bits from the GPS. These were displayed on a map as the helicopter flew the perimiter of the fire. This same copter had a Amateur Television on it that could simultaneouly broadcast pictures back to the Incident Command. Point is that some versions of this basic idea have been around for quite a while.
Well - that an the fact that alot of us got the IOpener for $100 and put Linux on it. My only problem has been the lack of a wireless enet connection on such things. Well - now with the availability of a Linksys 802.11b bridge I can deploy wired enet up-stairs I'll be able to deploy the IOpener in my bedroom as planned and run my son's computer system in his bedroom off of our high-speed internet connection down-stairs.
80211b might be the thing that makes these things more useful.
Did any of you folks consider that the article might be just so much nonsense? I've got an 8 year old kid who LOVES Legos, so I've got a great real-time lab for observations on whether Lego toys are accepted by today's youth.
The article claims that the company hasn't adapted to today's kids realities. Uhm - Huh? So explain Lego Land or the Lego CDROM titles that my kid has played for endless hours, not to mention that he builds lego kits ALL the time. It is absolutely his favorite toy...bar NONE!
If my son is an example, Lego still has what it takes to make money, and they've come up with dozens of new and imaginitive products to keep my kid interested (why haven't I bought stock?? Hmmm..)
First off - we're talking about Australia - they have a different take on things down there, and what may be legal here might not be there (and vice-versa.)
If I recall correctly, the 1996 Telecommunications Act made ISP's the equivalent of common-carriers, and they are exempt from worrying about content issues. The DMCA modified that to the extent that you can be tried and convicted by the ISP by them merely receiving a letter claiming you've done something wrong. The DMCA requires that they take action upon receipt of a letter. So - the ISP can only be held liable if they don't take action.
My solution is to send all the lawyers in the land to this little island off the coast of Africa where there are no scheduled boats or planes. This in and of it self should take care of congress since it's mostly lawyers. Think of what a wonderful world it could be!;-)
I agree - I've had a two week outage from @home partially due to the fact they couldn't get a service person out here quickly. They gave me a month off my bill which is ONLY reasonable! I was without the service for half a month, what they did was "the right thing."
I've been working on PCB's (and now chips) for over twenty years. I've always called the protective layer that stops the solder from wicking between adjacent pieces of metal a solder mask -I suppose you could call it a conformal coating, but the functional name is most common here in Silicon Valley.
But then, I don't know much - even though I've even done board layout and routing.;-)
To be honest - this was a VERY concise treatise on the whole process. There are things missing about some of the engineering that goes into boards - but those are details you can expect to cover in such a concise document.
I'm one of the earlier @home customers in Fremont CA. which was a test city for the technology. The terms of service I signed didn't limit the things I could run on the system. I checked for that before I signed it.
Unfortunately there is the "out" in the contract where they can unilaterally change the terms of service by simply publishing new ones at a given URL:
So is that binding on me? Not sure - IANAL, but it isn't really fair either. On the other hand, it has been true for most of the time that I've been on the service that they "officially" not allowed ANY kinds of servers on the home systems. For that matter, they even had one version of the dang TOS that let them prohibit me from doing any business over the internet - yeah like going to amazon.com and ordering a book was prohibited. That part got dropped like a hot potato because of a ton of public criticism locally.
I do think they are being heavy handed, and extremely short sighted. They are in many ways restricting freedom of speech by such filters. They are probably legal - but they suck!
At my place of employment we're constantly receiving email based virus attacks from people that insist on running Outlook. We've jokingly came up with what we called the Update worm. The spec for this would be to detect if the user is using the virus spreading outlook, then download the free version of Eudora. Once that was accomplished it would transfer all the mail over to the Eudora format, then change all the desktop links, etc to point at Eudora instead of outlook. Then - remove Outlook!
Well - you are at least ignorant. This much you just demonstrated.
Do you even know what business model Metricom was founded on? Thought not. There original business model was to build a self-organizing set of radio repeater cells that would be placed on people's power meters! They were to replace meter readers!
Metricom saw another possible use for the technology as they were getting this all rolling at the beginning of the intenet revolution. They switched hats and rolled out their wide-area radio network.
At least get your facts straight when you opine something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
And when you graduate EE- you'll be using Win NT with an X server or a Sun/Linux box to do your work! All your sims will run on linux or Sun servers.
I haven't seen an engineering organization using a Mac for better than 12 years! (That counts about 10 organizations...)
HMMM - so how do you know that the $65 includes the cable cost? My attbi account has a distinct cable and internet connection fee. They are separate!
Further, the cost has gone up in the last year and the service has gotten much worst with the demise of @home. My email account got smoked. My download bandwidth has been cut in half. I had no service for around a week.. So how can the movement to attbi be a good thing?
I'll be turning in my modem Monday and going to direct TV dsl!
I've got the replay 4000 as seen here on /. ;-) and haven't tried to hook it up to my Dish system yet (mainly because the dish needs to be moved for better view of the sky..)
Anyway - the replay looks like it only records the NTSC signal or the channel 3 video version of the vidio. Further, the video play back quality of the replay from over-the-air programming is usually a bit lower than one I see off of the Dish decoder. I have a clue about what to look like (worked at a encoder builder some years ago..) and I see digital artifacts more often watching the replay.
At the same time- just the ability to pause live TV is AWESOME! The other neat trick is to pause a live show for a few minutes before it actually plays - then no commercials. Also VERY enjoyable.
Hmm - gee - the Glendale Ca Power company comes to mind. Then there is the Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power. Thats two. There are few dozen municipally owned companies in CA - most not suffering from power outages last year!
Well - in many cases it DID work for IBM. Did you know that there were at least two design teams working on the IBM-AT. One of them ran into issues with fabrication of parts, and the other design completed and went to market (and sold millions of copies there of..)
3 hours- that's nice. But my modem is still sitting there without synch, and I spoke to at least three other users in the area (Fremont CA) yesterday in the same boat. We're all dead in the water. I'm loosing an email address that I've had for nearly 5 years! I'm pissed about that (though I truly won't miss the spam..) I think that the whole thing sucks.
I'm kinda fortunate - I've got DSL to the house too. I was playing with the idea of terminating the cable services (thus the DSL) and POOF - they did if for me ;-)
Seriously, after having DSL for a month or so, and cable for four years, the cable service speed is nominally much faster, mainly because of it's ability to peek at higher performance. The DSL has been more reliable. When you have both, at least you have near 100% up time. My only real concern now is that Covad goes the way of @home. Then I'm truly screwed....
I'm not sure if this is a reply to my post about the ISA - but if it is, you seem to contradict yourself.
At the same time - in patents it seems from my limited experience (only hold two patents) the distance between a description of something and the implementation of something is ALL important.
One of my patents is a different implemenation of a specific feature on a competitors' product. There is a description of what the external interface looks like - I replicated interface with my own internal workings. Quite different enough to receive a patent.
My point is demonstrated by the existance of Amdahl which in days gone by used to build an ISA compatible version of IBM's architecture. The point was settled back in the 70's or earlier. You can't patent an ISA. Another example, there are LOTS of implementations of the 8051 by non-Intel licensee's. Oddly - you don't see Intel running after these people because they've already been down this road.
You can't patent mov Ax,Bx - but perhaps you could patent a series of registers organized into a a register file with an instruction register which has an attached collection of timing and control logic that implements mov Ax,Bx in a particular manner. That is the difference in a nutshell.
Dude, it depends on who publishes the results of the ruling: See http://www.picoturbo.com/News/Court_Update/court_u pdate.html for the PicoTurbo view of things. I know that this was interpreted by the industry locally to be a Picoturbo win considering the fact that I've heard of a couple of folks looking seriously at Picoturbo now. Last I heard - you can't patent an ISA - you CAN patent particular methods used to implement that ISA.
As for not liking Reverse Engineering - get over it!
LWN was one of the first news sites (if not THE first) to cover linux at all! Back in the early days of the net being popular, LWN was the a great place to get a good summary of ALL the happenings in the world of Linux.
If they went to a subscription service, I'd probably be willing to get a subscription. They still do a good job of coverage.
Well - they didn't replace windows, but the were running Linux on the Desktop. So that would fit the basic requirement.
Don't forget - Thin Clients count for the "Desktop" just as surely as a full PC does.
The folks who interpret the constitution, i.e. the courts have said that it is legal for you to copy other people's work for personal consumption, and that THOSE OTHER PEOPLE don't have a right to limit that ability. The DMCA comes along and limits that ability - see the problem here.
If I own the CD, then I'm legally entitled to make copies of it for personal consumption, not publishing it myself. Big difference there.
Summary - legal in this case does make it a right.
Ever heard of non-compete agreements? I'm willing to bet that CT, et al had to sign such things at one point or another, and that their still in effect.
I'm not a professional who uses either Java or Scheme..
For me it's so much simpler - To many parens makes brain hurt.
I'll just crawl into my corner and use C now (note not even C++...)
this is a BIG jpg that is just a picture of S Ballmer sitting down. Don't bother.
Uhm - dumb idea really.
I've worked as a ham radio volunteer for CDF on a couple of fires so have been through some of the training concerning issues like this.
First - water weighs ALOT. Second, replenishing the supply quickly is an issue. You really want a heavy lifter that can have a fast turn-around and do more drops per hour. A small UAV isn't going to fill that bill.
Another interesting fact is that mapping out the fires in real time was done by the hams here in CA around 10 years ago, along with giving the CDF real-time video feeds of the fire from helicopters.
For doing the mapping, a GPS unit was tied to a Terminal Node controller (ham packet radio speak there) that just spit out the bits from the GPS. These were displayed on a map as the helicopter flew the perimiter of the fire. This same copter had a Amateur Television on it that could simultaneouly broadcast pictures back to the Incident Command. Point is that some versions of this basic idea have been around for quite a while.
Well - that an the fact that alot of us got the IOpener for $100 and put Linux on it. My only problem has been the lack of a wireless enet connection on such things. Well - now with the availability of a Linksys 802.11b bridge I can deploy wired enet up-stairs I'll be able to deploy the IOpener in my bedroom as planned and run my son's computer system in his bedroom off of our high-speed internet connection down-stairs.
80211b might be the thing that makes these things more useful.
Did any of you folks consider that the article might be just so much nonsense? I've got an 8 year old kid who LOVES Legos, so I've got a great real-time lab for observations on whether Lego toys are accepted by today's youth.
The article claims that the company hasn't adapted to today's kids realities. Uhm - Huh? So explain Lego Land or the Lego CDROM titles that my kid has played for endless hours, not to mention that he builds lego kits ALL the time. It is absolutely his favorite toy...bar NONE!
If my son is an example, Lego still has what it takes to make money, and they've come up with dozens of new and imaginitive products to keep my kid interested (why haven't I bought stock?? Hmmm..)
First off - we're talking about Australia - they have a different take on things down there, and what may be legal here might not be there (and vice-versa.)
;-)
If I recall correctly, the 1996 Telecommunications Act made ISP's the equivalent of common-carriers, and they are exempt from worrying about content issues. The DMCA modified that to the extent that you can be tried and convicted by the ISP by them merely receiving a letter claiming you've done something wrong. The DMCA requires that they take action upon receipt of a letter. So - the ISP can only be held liable if they don't take action.
My solution is to send all the lawyers in the land to this little island off the coast of Africa where there are no scheduled boats or planes. This in and of it self should take care of congress since it's mostly lawyers. Think of what a wonderful world it could be!
I agree - I've had a two week outage from @home partially due to the fact they couldn't get a service person out here quickly. They gave me a month off my bill which is ONLY reasonable! I was without the service for half a month, what they did was "the right thing."
I've been working on PCB's (and now chips) for over twenty years. I've always called the protective layer that stops the solder from wicking between adjacent pieces of metal a solder mask -I suppose you could call it a conformal coating, but the functional name is most common here in Silicon Valley.
;-)
But then, I don't know much - even though I've even done board layout and routing.
To be honest - this was a VERY concise treatise on the whole process. There are things missing about some of the engineering that goes into boards - but those are details you can expect to cover in such a concise document.
Actually - I didn't.
I'm one of the earlier @home customers in Fremont CA. which was a test city for the technology. The terms of service I signed didn't limit the things I could run on the system. I checked for that before I signed it.
Unfortunately there is the "out" in the contract where they can unilaterally change the terms of service by simply publishing new ones at a given URL:
So is that binding on me? Not sure - IANAL, but it isn't really fair either. On the other hand, it has been true for most of the time that I've been on the service that they "officially" not allowed ANY kinds of servers on the home systems. For that matter, they even had one version of the dang TOS that let them prohibit me from doing any business over the internet - yeah like going to amazon.com and ordering a book was prohibited. That part got dropped like a hot potato because of a ton of public criticism locally.
I do think they are being heavy handed, and extremely short sighted. They are in many ways restricting freedom of speech by such filters. They are probably legal - but they suck!
At my place of employment we're constantly receiving email based virus attacks from people that insist on running Outlook. We've jokingly came up with what we called the Update worm. The spec for this would be to detect if the user is using the virus spreading outlook, then download the free version of Eudora. Once that was accomplished it would transfer all the mail over to the Eudora format, then change all the desktop links, etc to point at Eudora instead of outlook. Then - remove Outlook!
Only a joke mind you - never implemented!
Well - you are at least ignorant. This much you just demonstrated. Do you even know what business model Metricom was founded on? Thought not. There original business model was to build a self-organizing set of radio repeater cells that would be placed on people's power meters! They were to replace meter readers! Metricom saw another possible use for the technology as they were getting this all rolling at the beginning of the intenet revolution. They switched hats and rolled out their wide-area radio network. At least get your facts straight when you opine something like this.
I've used the Richochet network - it did the job, i.e. quite cool. To bad they couldn't make it for the long haul.