Betamax did have slightly better quality, it got squashed by VHS for two reasons;
1) is that pr0n really did push VHS along! (mentioned in other posts.)
2) is that Sony for all purposes the only manufacturer of the Betamax format (closed format) and didn't allow any other comers. VHS, by comparison, was available from several makers.
The length of play was a small issue, as I think the early beta machines could do 90 minutes compared to the 2 hours for early VHS machines. Both formats ramped up playback time by slowing the tape dramatically, resulting in lower quality for both.
Better tapes and even slower formats allowed betamax playback to reach 4.5 hours, but tape play duration never really entered into it.
Actually, I've already got similar shielding going on at my house.
Because I'm being paranoid about (encrypted or not) 802.11b transmissions getting out of the house, I've got the WAP hooked up in the basement. Under a desk. Under a monitor. With concrete walls on two sides. And the antennae folded down.
I did a walkaround of my property with the laptop, and no usable signal gets past my property line. Someone would have to park in my driveway, get out of the car, and still have all of the necessary settings to get on my network and my DSL connection.
There's much to be said about security through obscurity. Perhaps the WAP manufacturers could allay some fears by allowing users to dial down their transmission power. That, or you install the proverbial "tinfoil hat" on your WAP!
I used to have a tech license, but let it lapse (other parts of life got in the way). It was kind of neat being the only person in town with a car phone in the mid-80's, via autopatch and 220MHz radio. Now that I've got a little more time and money, I've peeked back at the Ham world, but got a little disappointed at what I saw.
Many of my favorite VHF & UHF frequencies got carved up and handed to commercial interests. It was almost as if the FCC said to the Ham community: "Thank you for testing out that band for us. Now we will sell it."
Don't get me wrong. One of the most powerful uses of the Ham community is more relevant than ever - emergency-time communication. However, the gov't has found that every slice of wavelength has a value, and I feel that the public is slowly losing it's ownership. In progress already: LPFM radio being squeezed out by digital broadcast.
I might still go back and re-up the license, but probably only for the same reason I keep a motorcycle class license but don't ride - just for one more thing I can do if I wanted/needed to.
I think the 11MB figure might be low - just like IE, there's a whole boatload of Office code that launches upon bootup, and it just buries itself into other tasks. Try comparing the memory usage of the whole computer, both before and after installing Office. Then launch Word and check again.
(Please don't mod me up, or at least mod me "redundant" on my earlier post. lowlypeon beat me to the post on this "Oregon" issue and deserves props on the comment. My bad.)
Dude - I'm so sorry. I posted the same comment on this story before I got to read yours! I'm going right to my comment and asking to get modded redundant.
Actually, the state of Oregon has recently doubled the registration fees for hybrid and electric vehicles (from $30 to $60/year). The rant by some elected "duh"ficials became something along the lines that "these vehicles aren't paying their fair share of taxes." This, in spite of being one of the few states that provides a state tax rebate for the purchase of said vehicle.
The longer part of the story is that Oregon relies heavily on the gas tax for its roads, and discussions of the impact on those fees as more vehicles go hybrid or electric (or propane, etc.) left some elected officials wondering where it's going to come from in a few years. Hencem the knee-jerk, short-sighted reaction.
Disclaimer - I live in Illinois and own a Honda Insight, and so I'm not directly affected by this change, but it's a peek at the chill tidings ahead. BTW, it's quite the "geek" car right off the lot! CVT (trans.) makes me dread when I have to drive a regular Auto or even a stick. It's a two-seater, but most of the time it's just me going to work and driving home, just like everyone else on the road. We've got the station wagon for driving my daughter around, so it was the logical "second car" for the house. (Sorry, got OT).
Depending upon what you mean by "development, etc.", you might find a copy of VMWare useful. It's available as both a Windows and a Linux product, and will let you run tons of Linux or Windows machines, several at the same time. They can even network amongst each other, with the "host" machine, and even the outside world/network/internet.
If you make changes to an image that you don't like, it's often simple to roll it back.
I use it all the time at work, and have ten "machines" that I bounce among all day.
Mango dropped the Medley product a few years back. They had only made a Win 95 version of it, and never got up to speed on the 98/NT versions. Sad, as they had a great idea. General reviews said that the performance wasn't as good as hoped for, but still pretty good.
I had bought a few copies from a reseller after it was dropped, just to fool around with it, but never got time.
Link below is from 1997, but the last I saw of it was 1999.
I wonder if there's any DMCA chicanery that could be pulled, or EULA, in addition to the H1B issue? Digging into someone's code to figure how it works is probably a no-no, but calling them up and talking about it might be worse.
Agreed. RAID5 does fairly well in the "reads" dept., but starts taking serious hits in the write department, because every little 20K MS Word document needs to have it's parity written off to the side. Not as big a deal when the files are big enough, but can be a pain.
Check out:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/savage/
for the work of Stefan Savage, a member of the UCSD faculty who's done some good work in the field. Scroll down to the near-bottom for the paper on "AFRAID" and see what I mean. The idea is that if we delay the parity-write long enough to queue them up, we start approaching the speed of RAID0. There's a possible data loss here, but his premise is also that the MTBF rate for most drives makes this less an issue than power supply failure, controller failure, etc. (RAID was developed back when MTBF was closer to 20K hours.
He also has some great work on DoS attacks, too. See the write-up at Ars:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/networking/networking-1.html
Guy's got a new face, but collection agencies calling every day asking for their money (RTFA). Not too cool. Friend of mine got stuck with $100k of medical bills after his health insurance company said nogo to paying for a partial pancreas removal. He was filing for bankruptcy right around the time he died in a diabetic coma (half a pancreas will do that to you.) Can you tell I'm bitter?
Also, the article mentioned that he wears sunglasses to hide the fact that his "fake eyes don't blink." Article wasn't clear - was he blind, then?
Still, cool story that a face can be "transplanted", so to speak.
I grew up in line-of-site (18 miles) with the Sears Tower and could get about six channels sharp and clear with just rabbit-ears.
Fast-forward twenty years. I get a house same distance from said tower, but can't even get two channels. Purposeful reduction in signal strength? Ambient noise increase from ~6 million EM devices? You be the judge.
New house this past year - 40 miles from the tower. No channels watchable. Got a dish, pay the fee, and my daughter gets to watch "Bear in the Big Blue House" - sigh. Oh, I get SciFi, too, but now there's no time to watch it!
Yes, this has been the pattern for years. Important to note that traditionally, children have been a retirement package.
If you're poor, infant mortality (and adulthood, too) is pretty high, and the odds that any one of your kids is going to grow up and marry and let you move in is pretty slim. Plus, who's going to help on the farm? So, you end up having lots of kids, to even the odds, for one thing.
Skip forward a generation. Wealthy royalty has a family. Do ten kids run the castle any better than two? And imagine the fights that break out for the crown? Small families pay off.
Traditionally, family size has always lagged income levels by one generation.
The only risk is that with retirement packages and day care systems (I've used both), the cycle breaks as the elderly who can afford it don't have any reason to rely on children for retirement, nor can anyone really expect their children to support them in old age.
Gotta give you some more credit, Otter. Part of the ritual is tied to time, and there's a "water-cooler" effect of people watching something together, even at great distances, often to discuss it the next day. However, I think that this mostly applies to first-run stuff, like the newest episode of "Friends", and diminishes fast with reruns and syndication.
While your points on bandwidth and football (timeshifting) are valid, I think that mega-timeshifting of TV shows might have a good market. Watching taped sports is usually followed by a punchline of two people betting on the game.
Seriously, there are times when I have a few lines of "Land of the Giants" running through my head or something, and I've got to see the show, to say nothing of last week's Futurama that I missed (because of football??). Putting those shows up on the net would also lead to increased sales of networking equipment as everyone tries to watch TV at work - many "office" jobs are in buildings with zero TV and radio reception, and many of us listen to the radio via web already.
The fact that so much TV is free is relevant, but the fact that what I want to watch is never on when I want to watch it (at work, weekends, whatever) is a big deal.
Takers: name your favorite ST:TNG episode that you don't have on tape or PVR somewhere, then name what you'd pay to watch it. If it's more than a buck (the cost of a can of soda in some areas), then it's a market.
Stream TV over net? "Dad" has been busted before..
on
The Napsterization of TV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
About two years ago, a doting Calfornian dad streamed his 8-year old daughter's favorite cartoon over the net.
He later decided to turn it into a business, all without getting "the express written consent..." blah, blah, blah... and got busted for it.
www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/20000701/fec01068
Now, admittedly, the legal climate has changed in the past 1.6 years, but doesn't this count as a "rebroadcast", etc. by the letter of the "old" laws even?
Yeah, I've got an Efficient Networks 5861 hooked up to our DSL at home and its specs say it has dial-up backup. I haven't had to try this out yet (knock-knock), but it says it does. Just plug it in the DB9 in the back and roll. I know, but it's another box.
Another post has also mentioned using another PC with Slackware (or heck, even Windows ICS), but I have to ask if sharing the connection doesn't, by definition, hurt their access already.
Seriously, I've tried to get two computers to share one modem, and it was like getting two people to share a phone booth, but more painful. Depending upon usage patterns, we could be talking serious slow-downs, here. That general stat about only 10% of users on a shared connection actually using it doesn't apply when you're at 56k.
Don't do it, man. The only thing worse than having no internet access is having half of one. At least when the net is down, you can go in the other room and watch TV.
Completely right. I'm running VMWare on this machine for development and testing, and the performance is "decent." Linux and 3 flavors of Windows.
It is a thin emulation of just the hardware, so VMWare supplies a fake BIOS, sound card, NIC, video, hard drive, etc. It always starts with your CPU, and doesn't try to hide this from the virtual OSes. What this means is that CPU speed is par for the base machine, but the video, etc. take a bit of a hit. Don't get me started on virtualize net connections - slow, but working. You wouldn't want to play Quake on it, but nothing beats it for testing how an app works on Win98,2000,XP, and all versions of IE and NS without blowing away and reinstalling a machine. We used to use Ghost, but now we switch OSes on the box in about ten seconds.
Seriously, if you want to screw around with any OS, or whatever, download the free 30-day version of it at their site and try it out. I'm running Win2000 for the "host" OS, but am installing RH7.2 in one window and testing a UDP problem in Windows XP in another. All on one drive and one CPU.
The best part is that you can set up the virtual hard disks to be "undoable", and when you shut down your session, you get asked if you want to save your changes into the main virtual drive or discard them. Throw them away and you have a fresh image.
Slashdot Mirror
1) is that pr0n really did push VHS along! (mentioned in other posts.)
2) is that Sony for all purposes the only manufacturer of the Betamax format (closed format) and didn't allow any other comers. VHS, by comparison, was available from several makers.
The length of play was a small issue, as I think the early beta machines could do 90 minutes compared to the 2 hours for early VHS machines. Both formats ramped up playback time by slowing the tape dramatically, resulting in lower quality for both.
Better tapes and even slower formats allowed betamax playback to reach 4.5 hours, but tape play duration never really entered into it.
http://www.high-techproductions.com/betamax.htm
I'm now going to put the WAP on its own box as firewall, and configure the WAP to only allow specific MACs into the net.
You really got me thinking - thanks. Scott
Because I'm being paranoid about (encrypted or not) 802.11b transmissions getting out of the house, I've got the WAP hooked up in the basement. Under a desk. Under a monitor. With concrete walls on two sides. And the antennae folded down.
I did a walkaround of my property with the laptop, and no usable signal gets past my property line. Someone would have to park in my driveway, get out of the car, and still have all of the necessary settings to get on my network and my DSL connection.
There's much to be said about security through obscurity. Perhaps the WAP manufacturers could allay some fears by allowing users to dial down their transmission power. That, or you install the proverbial "tinfoil hat" on your WAP!
Many of my favorite VHF & UHF frequencies got carved up and handed to commercial interests. It was almost as if the FCC said to the Ham community: "Thank you for testing out that band for us. Now we will sell it."
Don't get me wrong. One of the most powerful uses of the Ham community is more relevant than ever - emergency-time communication. However, the gov't has found that every slice of wavelength has a value, and I feel that the public is slowly losing it's ownership. In progress already: LPFM radio being squeezed out by digital broadcast.
I might still go back and re-up the license, but probably only for the same reason I keep a motorcycle class license but don't ride - just for one more thing I can do if I wanted/needed to.
Much more accurate.
(Please don't mod me up, or at least mod me "redundant" on my earlier post. lowlypeon beat me to the post on this "Oregon" issue and deserves props on the comment. My bad.)
Scott, the Insight owner.
Here's the O DMV site (scroll down to HB2133)
The longer part of the story is that Oregon relies heavily on the gas tax for its roads, and discussions of the impact on those fees as more vehicles go hybrid or electric (or propane, etc.) left some elected officials wondering where it's going to come from in a few years. Hencem the knee-jerk, short-sighted reaction.
Disclaimer - I live in Illinois and own a Honda Insight, and so I'm not directly affected by this change, but it's a peek at the chill tidings ahead. BTW, it's quite the "geek" car right off the lot! CVT (trans.) makes me dread when I have to drive a regular Auto or even a stick. It's a two-seater, but most of the time it's just me going to work and driving home, just like everyone else on the road. We've got the station wagon for driving my daughter around, so it was the logical "second car" for the house. (Sorry, got OT).
If you make changes to an image that you don't like, it's often simple to roll it back.
I use it all the time at work, and have ten "machines" that I bounce among all day.
Check it out: well worth the $300.
I had bought a few copies from a reseller after it was dropped, just to fool around with it, but never got time.
Link below is from 1997, but the last I saw of it was 1999.
Check Google for more specs on it.
http://www.mangosoft.com/news/pr/19970617.asp
Sorry, man. Just raising the question.
Check out:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/savage/
for the work of Stefan Savage, a member of the UCSD faculty who's done some good work in the field. Scroll down to the near-bottom for the paper on "AFRAID" and see what I mean. The idea is that if we delay the parity-write long enough to queue them up, we start approaching the speed of RAID0. There's a possible data loss here, but his premise is also that the MTBF rate for most drives makes this less an issue than power supply failure, controller failure, etc. (RAID was developed back when MTBF was closer to 20K hours.
He also has some great work on DoS attacks, too. See the write-up at Ars:g /networking-1.html
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/networkin
I was thinking more of an underwater device that could summon aquatic creatures through 802.11b broadcasts in order to fight the Legion of Doom.
Hospitals, warehouses. Think about any job where running around with little books or slips of paper is big, and you've got your audience.
Article was pretty light on tech details. I'd like to know if any of the Be IP was brought into this update.
Hearts and kidneys are TINKERTOYS
Guy's got a new face, but collection agencies calling every day asking for their money (RTFA). Not too cool. Friend of mine got stuck with $100k of medical bills after his health insurance company said nogo to paying for a partial pancreas removal. He was filing for bankruptcy right around the time he died in a diabetic coma (half a pancreas will do that to you.) Can you tell I'm bitter?
Also, the article mentioned that he wears sunglasses to hide the fact that his "fake eyes don't blink." Article wasn't clear - was he blind, then?
Still, cool story that a face can be "transplanted", so to speak.
I grew up in line-of-site (18 miles) with the Sears Tower and could get about six channels sharp and clear with just rabbit-ears.
Fast-forward twenty years. I get a house same distance from said tower, but can't even get two channels. Purposeful reduction in signal strength? Ambient noise increase from ~6 million EM devices? You be the judge.
New house this past year - 40 miles from the tower. No channels watchable. Got a dish, pay the fee, and my daughter gets to watch "Bear in the Big Blue House" - sigh. Oh, I get SciFi, too, but now there's no time to watch it!
If you're poor, infant mortality (and adulthood, too) is pretty high, and the odds that any one of your kids is going to grow up and marry and let you move in is pretty slim. Plus, who's going to help on the farm? So, you end up having lots of kids, to even the odds, for one thing.
Skip forward a generation. Wealthy royalty has a family. Do ten kids run the castle any better than two? And imagine the fights that break out for the crown? Small families pay off.
Traditionally, family size has always lagged income levels by one generation.
The only risk is that with retirement packages and day care systems (I've used both), the cycle breaks as the elderly who can afford it don't have any reason to rely on children for retirement, nor can anyone really expect their children to support them in old age.
At that size, a smallish mug should fit nicely on it. No use wasting all that heat!
Gotta give you some more credit, Otter. Part of the ritual is tied to time, and there's a "water-cooler" effect of people watching something together, even at great distances, often to discuss it the next day. However, I think that this mostly applies to first-run stuff, like the newest episode of "Friends", and diminishes fast with reruns and syndication.
Seriously, there are times when I have a few lines of "Land of the Giants" running through my head or something, and I've got to see the show, to say nothing of last week's Futurama that I missed (because of football??). Putting those shows up on the net would also lead to increased sales of networking equipment as everyone tries to watch TV at work - many "office" jobs are in buildings with zero TV and radio reception, and many of us listen to the radio via web already.
The fact that so much TV is free is relevant, but the fact that what I want to watch is never on when I want to watch it (at work, weekends, whatever) is a big deal.
Takers: name your favorite ST:TNG episode that you don't have on tape or PVR somewhere, then name what you'd pay to watch it. If it's more than a buck (the cost of a can of soda in some areas), then it's a market.
He later decided to turn it into a business, all without getting "the express written consent..." blah, blah, blah... and got busted for it.
www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/20000701/fec01068
Now, admittedly, the legal climate has changed in the past 1.6 years, but doesn't this count as a "rebroadcast", etc. by the letter of the "old" laws even?
Another post has also mentioned using another PC with Slackware (or heck, even Windows ICS), but I have to ask if sharing the connection doesn't, by definition, hurt their access already.
Seriously, I've tried to get two computers to share one modem, and it was like getting two people to share a phone booth, but more painful. Depending upon usage patterns, we could be talking serious slow-downs, here. That general stat about only 10% of users on a shared connection actually using it doesn't apply when you're at 56k.
Don't do it, man. The only thing worse than having no internet access is having half of one. At least when the net is down, you can go in the other room and watch TV.
It is a thin emulation of just the hardware, so VMWare supplies a fake BIOS, sound card, NIC, video, hard drive, etc. It always starts with your CPU, and doesn't try to hide this from the virtual OSes. What this means is that CPU speed is par for the base machine, but the video, etc. take a bit of a hit. Don't get me started on virtualize net connections - slow, but working. You wouldn't want to play Quake on it, but nothing beats it for testing how an app works on Win98,2000,XP, and all versions of IE and NS without blowing away and reinstalling a machine. We used to use Ghost, but now we switch OSes on the box in about ten seconds.
Seriously, if you want to screw around with any OS, or whatever, download the free 30-day version of it at their site and try it out. I'm running Win2000 for the "host" OS, but am installing RH7.2 in one window and testing a UDP problem in Windows XP in another. All on one drive and one CPU.
The best part is that you can set up the virtual hard disks to be "undoable", and when you shut down your session, you get asked if you want to save your changes into the main virtual drive or discard them. Throw them away and you have a fresh image.
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/