Please do go somewhere else. Do something new. Leave us in the dust. And when you finally realize you can't knit a sweater, let alone make yarn, build a road, ensure you have clean drinking water, generate electricity, light the darkness, or any of the other million things that make your "constantly deteriorating" free time possible, perhaps you will come back with a new appreciation for being productive and honoring the social contract.
Wait. You're seriously thinking Time-Warner executives have anything to do with clean drinking water, generating electricity, lighting the darkness, etc? Nobody's complaining about the power company's old ideas (at least not in this story), nor those of the municipal water and sewer utility. These are record company executives; unlike the poor put-upon telephone sanitizers, they actually ARE completely inessential.
As for the social contract (and particularly the bit about copyright)... if it exists, it's a contract of adhesion, extremely one-sided in terms and even more one-sided in enforcement, and appears to contain a clause to the effect of "Society (meaning those of us with political power) may amend these terms at any time without recourse to those subject to them (meaning you peons with no political power)". That's not a real contract; that's just force disguised in the terms of an agreement.
If you're in a condo with microwave-transparent walls and lots of neighbors, your best answers are
1) Wire it and 2) 802.11a or 5Ghz 802.11n. These have more channels, penetrate walls more poorly and your neighbors are less likely to be on it -- especially the 5.1-5.2Ghz channels, which are not used by cordless phones.
Yeah, the equipment costs a bit more. But actually having useful wireless is worth it.
In any given modulation scheme used in 802.11, the lower speeds are more resistant to interference than the higher speeds. 802.11g uses two different modulation schemes, DSSS and OFDM. Theoretically, OFDM (used only in G) is more resistant to interference than DSSS (used in B), so reducing the speed but leaving the AP in G mode should do better than putting in in B-only-mode. This depends on your AP supporting that feature of course.
If you have to share a channel, it's far better to share one with an AP which is rarely used; most of the time, such an AP will not be transmitting anything and the spectrum will be available.
With 9 APs, you're pretty much screwed; no matter what you do you'll have major overlap. With 4 APs, it has been found that 1,4,7, and 11 works reasonably well, but you'd need control of those other APs.
Other answers (which may be illegal, immoral, impractical, or fattening)
1) Use higher-power APs (not hacked, but those designed for higher power) and cards. 2) Use high-gain directional antennas (a high gain omni may be practical on a single-floor condo) 3) Use channel 14 (illegal and generally requires firmware hacking to get 802.11g on it, as that's illegal everywhere) 4) Microwave-absorptive coating on walls/ceiling 5) Hack into neighbors APs and move them all to channel 1, then use 11 yourself.
...because they're crap. I looked at the first patent and the first few claims looked suspiciously like the (certainly not novel) idea of connecting up a keyboard matrix in such a way that pressing a key triggers an interrupt on the row lines, which triggers a wake-up event and a keyboard scan. I couldn't tell about the later claims. Then I looked at the interrupt mask patent
1. An interrupt mask disable circuit comprising:
first logic circuitry operably coupled to receive an interrupt request and a mask signal and to provide an interrupt signal when the interrupt request is active and the mask signal is disabled, and to provide a non-interrupt signal when the mask signal is enabled regardless of whether the interrupt request is active or inactive; and second logic circuitry operably coupled to receive a mask activation signal and a mask override signal and to produce the mask signal, wherein the mask signal is enabled when the mask activation signal is active and the mask override signal is not enabled and wherein the mask signal is disabled when the mask override signal is active regardless of whether the mask activation signal is enabled or disabled.
You've got to be kidding me. AMD patented a common interrupt mask circuit... in 1994? Apparently it isn't only with respect to software that the patent office is out of touch.
Should all companies get to repeal laws that might make their life harder or just the companys you like or laws you hate?
It's a refreshing change from companies (and large industry assocations) _passing_ laws which make their lives easier at my expense. However, in an ideal world, it would only be laws I hate, though that wouldn't limit it all THAT much:-)
"The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries
So it's reality based then?
No. Reality is Zork based. Though it's not clear who is playing the role of Megabozz (who destroyed the original GUE). Henry Paulson, possibly. Or of course George Bush, though he seems more likely to be the last Flathead (styled "Dimwit"). At the end of Zork Zero, the palatial estates of the Flathead dynasty have collapsed... into a White House with a boarded front door.
From the Internet bubble to the housing bubble, it's all been "let me have it all without having to work."
No, it's been "let me have it all with some simple work at the beginning, and a smoothly increasing amount of work appropriate to my increasing skills as time goes on".
Although this totally fails to explain Nethack, which is easy to learn but has more of a difficulty cliff than a difficulty ramp...
This is nothing but a slashvertisement for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II.
Canon is wasting their money if they paid for such a slashvertisement. Far as I can tell, photographers are already salivating worse than Pavlov's dogs over that camera.
all you folks need to remeber that profanity is NOT covered in the first amendment, it protects political free speech, not calling each other names or the like.
Get over it, Robert Bork, you lost. Don't you have a book about Sodom to write?
Besides, the McCain-Feingold case proved that political free speech isn't covered either.
Beyond even that, we have a ridiculous number of redundant appliances, how many get hot? Why should the oven, water heater, furnace, all produce a lot of heat and not share any bit of it. How many devices are heat exchangers? Air conditioning, refrigerators, water coolers, etc.
Because piping hot fluids around at low temperature differentials is expensive and inefficient. And _sharing_ waste heat isn't really a big problem. If you're heating your house, the waste heat from the water cooler, water heater, oven, etc, all go straight into the house and take load off your furnace. You may lose a bit of efficiency (although the oven and water heater may be _more_ efficient than the furnace), that's all. A much bigger problem is getting _rid_ of waste heat. You could make all heat exchangers into split system units with an outside compressor, and/or put some other heat-generating appliances into a well-insulated "heat pipe" ventilated from the outside, but there's plenty of disadvantages to this approach, particularly cost, bulk, and flexibility.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement.
As long as you put energy-efficiency as your only consideration and ignore all the other things people want from a fridge. Sure, it'd be great to have a fridge that would vent its hot air to the outside in the summer (but keep it indoors in the winter), but doing that is expensive, takes up space, and (in some variants) means the fridge is no longer self-contained. Venting outside air into the fridge is also expensive and bulky, and has other problems (like filtering and humidity, and sealing when outside air _isn't_ wanted as well). 5 extra inches of insulation on the door bulks things up considerably.
Most people don't have energy efficiency as their #1, let alone only concern, when they're buying a fridge. How it fits in their kitchen, interior space, ease of getting food in and out of it, cost -- those are major concerns as well.
Oh, and if you're going to put extra thermal mass into a fridge you'd want to put it in the TOP, not the BOTTOM.
Everyone has been in their pockets, and we all know that if it were up to Verizon, there would be no WiFi, no WiMax, and we'd still be using unshielded untwisted copper pairs for our (AOL-based metered) Internet.
So would AT&T... because, of course, they'd be the same company, based in New Jersey. But to Verizon's credit, when given a large enough kick in the pants, they actually did deliver FIOS.
The more I follow politics, the more I realize that most people are in politics for the same reason: they think the government can help people.
Well, some of them think the government can help people in general. Others think the government can help people, specifically themselves and their buddies. The latter are corrupt. The former are even more dangerous.
That's just stupid. I hope it's just a case of a journalist not correctly understanding (which is a common problem). Given the usage of numbers like 220 and 110, instead of the standard 240 and 120, I do suspect it is a journalist giving wrong info.
His whole series of conversions is just plain wrong. Residential power typically uses 240/120, but that's ONE transformer, from the distribution voltage(several kilovolts), to 240 split phase. The 120 isn't an extra step, it's an extra tap on the transformer. Commercial power typically goes from the distribution voltage to 3-phase wye, with 110 from phase to neutral and 208 from phase to phase. If you need 440 you'll get that with another set of windings starting from the distribution voltage also; I don't think you'd do it in two steps (distribution to 440, 440 to 208) unless it was a retrofit of some sort. Maybe data centers are different for some reason... any power systems engineers around?
I notice there's no place in the new scheme for the UPS. They convert to 575VDC (rectified 408VAC?)... but then what? 48VDC telco-style batteries at every rack? Or a big honking 575VDC UPS outside?
To me, the big question is where all this loss is occurring (if indeed it is). If it's the conversion to DC and back at the UPS, using rectified 220 or 240 (310-340VDC) would seem to make more sense. Then (as someone pointed out in a previous discussion) it's just a matter of removing the bridge rectifier from existing power supply designs, and building a DC battery backup. Why bother with the 48V step?
Well, at some places, you can. Most places serve the standard brown water fare. Starbucks isnt one of them, but we get complaints time and time again saying "Our Coffee is too burnt". bleh.
That's because it is. Roasting the hell out of coffee and then using it in a filter machine does not make for good coffee. It makes for coffee which is both weak AND burnt-tasting. If you're going to do an espresso roast, make espresso with it at least.
I'm fairly sure there was a regulation passed making it illegal for telemarketers to spoof caller-ID data. Add that to the fact that these car-warranty scammers are calling cell phones and phones on the do-not-call list, and it's clear they're doing quite a few things illegally. Not to mention that the "product" they offer is almost certainly a scam.
I had a free trial of Amazon Prime and after they charged me for the first non-free year (because I'd forgotten about it) but before I attempted to use the service, I canceled, and they refunded the fee before I even asked. They're not scammers.
My friends and I and I were on a road trip in RI, to see Ms Teen RI, who they'd met on a cruise (before being awarded the title, before college). My friend and I went to pick up the other friend from Worcester P.I., and decided to stop by her place and hang out. We got lost, and asked come cop for directions. It turned out we were in the exact opposite corner of the state. Three turns and 20 minutes later, we rolled up at her house.
Wait. A slashdotter and a bunch of his friends asked a cop for directions to the house of the local under-age beauty queen, and he GAVE it to them? I'm calling...
No, wait, on second thought, he probably realized they were slashdotters and figured it was perfectly save.
One of my big annoyances with travelling to the US, especially under the visa waiver programme, is that evil landing card that they make foreigners fill out. It's worse because that form is 1) badly designed and a pain in the arse to fill out and 2) everyone warns of dire consequences for not filling it out correctly.
Every country I've traveled to (even Canada) has had some version of the evil landing card. And they all fit those characteristics.
BTW: the questions are obviously ridiculous ("Are you traveling to the US to commit a crime?", "Have you been involved in a genocide?").
That second question could be problematic. Are they going to exclude from the US people who escaped and/or fought genocide? Because both of those count as "being involved".
And for many types of licenses -- liquor licenses, insurance agent/broker licenses, teacher licenses, CPA license, medical license, pistol permits, etc, etc, etc. People rarely complain about any of those
Actually, people complain about those all the time. Nobody listens, however; the complainers are filed under the categories of "whiner", "wacko libertarian nutcase", "pedophile", etc. Once these entry requirements are around for a while, any remaining complainers will be filed under the same category.
When you see "meta-analytic techniques" in a politically charged area, you should reach for your gun. There are many pitfalls involved with them, and they're very easy to fall into on purpose.
Now, if you want to infringe the patent, you'd have to tell us the command you could issue to allow any program except say, GIMP, from accessing your data. This is 'program access', not 'user access'.
I created a group for each program allowed special access, and made the executable for that group "setgid" for that group. Then I used ACLs (not in vanilla Unix, but I believe AFS had them prior to the patent priority date) to make my files readable by certain groups and not by others.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait. You're seriously thinking Time-Warner executives have anything to do with clean drinking water, generating electricity, lighting the darkness, etc? Nobody's complaining about the power company's old ideas (at least not in this story), nor those of the municipal water and sewer utility. These are record company executives; unlike the poor put-upon telephone sanitizers, they actually ARE completely inessential.
As for the social contract (and particularly the bit about copyright)... if it exists, it's a contract of adhesion, extremely one-sided in terms and even more one-sided in enforcement, and appears to contain a clause to the effect of "Society (meaning those of us with political power) may amend these terms at any time without recourse to those subject to them (meaning you peons with no political power)". That's not a real contract; that's just force disguised in the terms of an agreement.
If you're in a condo with microwave-transparent walls and lots of neighbors, your best answers are
1) Wire it and
2) 802.11a or 5Ghz 802.11n. These have more channels, penetrate walls more poorly and your neighbors are less likely to be on it -- especially the 5.1-5.2Ghz channels, which are not used by cordless phones.
Yeah, the equipment costs a bit more. But actually having useful wireless is worth it.
In any given modulation scheme used in 802.11, the lower speeds are more resistant to interference than the higher speeds. 802.11g uses two different modulation schemes, DSSS and OFDM. Theoretically, OFDM (used only in G) is more resistant to interference than DSSS (used in B), so reducing the speed but leaving the AP in G mode should do better than putting in in B-only-mode. This depends on your AP supporting that feature of course.
If you have to share a channel, it's far better to share one with an AP which is rarely used; most of the time, such an AP will not be transmitting anything and the spectrum will be available.
With 9 APs, you're pretty much screwed; no matter what you do you'll have major overlap. With 4 APs, it has been found that 1,4,7, and 11 works reasonably well, but you'd need control of those other APs.
Other answers (which may be illegal, immoral, impractical, or fattening)
1) Use higher-power APs (not hacked, but those designed for higher power) and cards.
2) Use high-gain directional antennas (a high gain omni may be practical on a single-floor condo)
3) Use channel 14 (illegal and generally requires firmware hacking to get 802.11g on it, as that's illegal everywhere)
4) Microwave-absorptive coating on walls/ceiling
5) Hack into neighbors APs and move them all to channel 1, then use 11 yourself.
...because they're crap. I looked at the first patent and the first few claims looked suspiciously like the (certainly not novel) idea of connecting up a keyboard matrix in such a way that pressing a key triggers an interrupt on the row lines, which triggers a wake-up event and a keyboard scan. I couldn't tell about the later claims. Then I looked at the interrupt mask patent
You've got to be kidding me. AMD patented a common interrupt mask circuit... in 1994? Apparently it isn't only with respect to software that the patent office is out of touch.
It's a refreshing change from companies (and large industry assocations) _passing_ laws which make their lives easier at my expense. However, in an ideal world, it would only be laws I hate, though that wouldn't limit it all THAT much :-)
No. Reality is Zork based. Though it's not clear who is playing the role of Megabozz (who destroyed the original GUE). Henry Paulson, possibly. Or of course George Bush, though he seems more likely to be the last Flathead (styled "Dimwit"). At the end of Zork Zero, the palatial estates of the Flathead dynasty have collapsed... into a White House with a boarded front door.
FROTZ GRUE
(Different trilogy, same mythology.)
Yeah, but wait 'till you hear the bills for care and feeding. It's not like you can just leave it parked in your garage.
No, it's been "let me have it all with some simple work at the beginning, and a smoothly increasing amount of work appropriate to my increasing skills as time goes on".
Although this totally fails to explain Nethack, which is easy to learn but has more of a difficulty cliff than a difficulty ramp...
Canon is wasting their money if they paid for such a slashvertisement. Far as I can tell, photographers are already salivating worse than Pavlov's dogs over that camera.
Get over it, Robert Bork, you lost. Don't you have a book about Sodom to write?
Besides, the McCain-Feingold case proved that political free speech isn't covered either.
Because piping hot fluids around at low temperature differentials is expensive and inefficient. And _sharing_ waste heat isn't really a big problem. If you're heating your house, the waste heat from the water cooler, water heater, oven, etc, all go straight into the house and take load off your furnace. You may lose a bit of efficiency (although the oven and water heater may be _more_ efficient than the furnace), that's all. A much bigger problem is getting _rid_ of waste heat. You could make all heat exchangers into split system units with an outside compressor, and/or put some other heat-generating appliances into a well-insulated "heat pipe" ventilated from the outside, but there's plenty of disadvantages to this approach, particularly cost, bulk, and flexibility.
As long as you put energy-efficiency as your only consideration and ignore all the other things people want from a fridge. Sure, it'd be great to have a fridge that would vent its hot air to the outside in the summer (but keep it indoors in the winter), but doing that is expensive, takes up space, and (in some variants) means the fridge is no longer self-contained. Venting outside air into the fridge is also expensive and bulky, and has other problems (like filtering and humidity, and sealing when outside air _isn't_ wanted as well). 5 extra inches of insulation on the door bulks things up considerably.
Most people don't have energy efficiency as their #1, let alone only concern, when they're buying a fridge. How it fits in their kitchen, interior space, ease of getting food in and out of it, cost -- those are major concerns as well.
Oh, and if you're going to put extra thermal mass into a fridge you'd want to put it in the TOP, not the BOTTOM.
So would AT&T... because, of course, they'd be the same company, based in New Jersey. But to Verizon's credit, when given a large enough kick in the pants, they actually did deliver FIOS.
Well, some of them think the government can help people in general. Others think the government can help people, specifically themselves and their buddies. The latter are corrupt. The former are even more dangerous.
His whole series of conversions is just plain wrong. Residential power typically uses 240/120, but that's ONE transformer, from the distribution voltage(several kilovolts), to 240 split phase. The 120 isn't an extra step, it's an extra tap on the transformer. Commercial power typically goes from the distribution voltage to 3-phase wye, with 110 from phase to neutral and 208 from phase to phase. If you need 440 you'll get that with another set of windings starting from the distribution voltage also; I don't think you'd do it in two steps (distribution to 440, 440 to 208) unless it was a retrofit of some sort. Maybe data centers are different for some reason... any power systems engineers around?
I notice there's no place in the new scheme for the UPS. They convert to 575VDC (rectified 408VAC?)... but then what? 48VDC telco-style batteries at every rack? Or a big honking 575VDC UPS outside?
To me, the big question is where all this loss is occurring (if indeed it is). If it's the conversion to DC and back at the UPS, using rectified 220 or 240 (310-340VDC) would seem to make more sense. Then (as someone pointed out in a previous discussion) it's just a matter of removing the bridge rectifier from existing power supply designs, and building a DC battery backup. Why bother with the 48V step?
Your typical problems with security programs are
1) Blocking behavior which should be permitted and
2) Not blocking behavior which should be forbidden.
This adds the potential for
3) Enabling behavior which should be forbidden.
Is there one of those snarky standard forms for this?
That's because it is. Roasting the hell out of coffee and then using it in a filter machine does not make for good coffee. It makes for coffee which is both weak AND burnt-tasting. If you're going to do an espresso roast, make espresso with it at least.
I'm fairly sure there was a regulation passed making it illegal for telemarketers to spoof caller-ID data. Add that to the fact that these car-warranty scammers are calling cell phones and phones on the do-not-call list, and it's clear they're doing quite a few things illegally. Not to mention that the "product" they offer is almost certainly a scam.
I had a free trial of Amazon Prime and after they charged me for the first non-free year (because I'd forgotten about it) but before I attempted to use the service, I canceled, and they refunded the fee before I even asked. They're not scammers.
Wait. A slashdotter and a bunch of his friends asked a cop for directions to the house of the local under-age beauty queen, and he GAVE it to them? I'm calling...
No, wait, on second thought, he probably realized they were slashdotters and figured it was perfectly save.
Every country I've traveled to (even Canada) has had some version of the evil landing card. And they all fit those characteristics.
That second question could be problematic. Are they going to exclude from the US people who escaped and/or fought genocide? Because both of those count as "being involved".
Actually, people complain about those all the time. Nobody listens, however; the complainers are filed under the categories of "whiner", "wacko libertarian nutcase", "pedophile", etc. Once these entry requirements are around for a while, any remaining complainers will be filed under the same category.
When you see "meta-analytic techniques" in a politically charged area, you should reach for your gun. There are many pitfalls involved with them, and they're very easy to fall into on purpose.
I created a group for each program allowed special access, and made the executable for that group "setgid" for that group. Then I used ACLs (not in vanilla Unix, but I believe AFS had them prior to the patent priority date) to make my files readable by certain groups and not by others.