Just try getting a laptop without windows? I did. It was easy... I simply selected "None" as the OS.
It's all about knowing what to buy and where to buy it. I bought a Compal CL56 notebook, which is a whitebook chassis used to manufacture many other notebooks (Such as one of Voodoo PC's 15" Centrino model). Because it's a whitebook, I buy the chassis and parts seperately (Though I chose to pay $29 Canadian to have the store assemble it for me).
Because it was not purchased from a big computer maker, but simply a computer store, there is no obligation to buy or run Windows on the notebook.
The reason it is in beta is quite obvious; it is of beta quality.
Take an example from yesterday; In the sports section, a news article with a picture of a baseball player in a baseball stadium, "more info" links to several stories about the Montreal Expos leaving Montreal for Washington... And story headline/title about the American Taliban guy. What that was doing in the sports section and what that had to do with baseball, I have no clue. Hence, beta.
So? Same thing in SCO's case; their claims have been proven baseless, but that doesn't (and still hasn't) stopped them from sueing the pants off a number of other companies, causing millions of dollars in legal fees for said companies, not to mention the FUD they're spreading.
In fact, the guy could go the patent-route; start sueing each and every Mambo user, most of who will not be able to afford the legal fees and will simply settle.
So, if you ask me, there's still penty to be afraid about; they're far from free and clear.
Guessed and implied? I recall it having been mentioned by people like Gabe Newell during E3 presentations (The first one they showed off Counter-Strike: Source at least). Perhaps that's not official, but he is the Big Man (In more ways than one),
Why does the US government waste so much time debating and passing/not passing dozens of new laws on copyrights and file trading? It hasn't even been conclusively shown that file trading hurts (record|movie|software|etc) sales. Some studies show it hurting, some studies show it helping.
Doesn't the government have more important things to do than make the (MPA|RIA|BS)A feel more secure (I'd say help them line their pockets, but they can't even prove it'd do that)?
Yes, but IIRC LinkSys resolved this by complying with the GPL and releasing the complete source to their entire firmware, unlike the reaction of some other companies.
In fact, the custom (SveaSoft or other) firmwares are not complete re-implementations, they are modifications of the existing firmware.
LinkSys has, if they wanted to or not, set themselves up as having one of the most flexible series of consumer hardware routers out there.
There is a lossless version of JPEG, nobody seems to consider it an option.
In fact, while on that tangent, what about lossless JPEG2000? I would imagine that a lossless wavelet-based codec would be the most efficient (best compression) lossless codec you could get.
Go with DynDNS.org. Most popular, and best supported among various clients. LinkSys routers even come with support to update DynDNS.org right in the official firmware.
They have a variety of domains you can choose from; I chose ath.cx simply because it's very short.
The default search criteria is within 75km of your target city. Unfortunately, as most of Canada's cities are very close to the US border, most searches produce results from the US.
For example, search for Computer Stores in Montreal or a suburb, Canada's second largest city, and the top 5 to 6 results are for stores in the US; from both New York and Vermont.
What's the point of having a Canadian version if most of the results are from the US? Yes, I can reduce the search radius to get only hits from montreal, but 75km is the DEFAULT.
This is yet another site that is using full URLs for his image links instead of relative links. A fatal flaw.
All these images are being loaded off the slashdotted server instead of through the cache. If the author of the page had instead used relative images, the coral cache would be positively zippy.
If the foundation you describe was removed in OSX, how does OSX run 68k mac programs? Full blown emulation? Or not at all?
I'd hope not at all, while I've been a PC user for years, if I ever went back to a Mac, there are a few old programs (Mostly older games, with the odd handy utility) that I'd probably want to keep using.
I'm very happy with my Linksys WRT54G router. With custom firmware you can SSH or telnet into the router and mess around with the linux install it has on it; it does all it's routing with IPTABLES if I'm not mistaken, and you can manually mess around with routes.
The custom firmwares also let you run a few servers on the router, like PPTPd.
Anyhow, I don't generally mess around with it; the router's web GUI offers what I need; forward ports and port ranges on either TCP, UDP, or both, to a certain IP, or enable DMZ for a certain IP.
Oh, I should mention, while I'm only one user, I do tend to use BitTorrent with hundreds of simultaneous connections, with no trouble; this was enough to cause my modem's built-in router to reboot, but the Linksys router hasn't had any trouble.
Surprisingly enough, this works. I had a user who was performing thousands of searches to bump phrases up into the top-ten-searches list.
I checked out his IP, turned out to be RoadRunner. A bit of digging around on their sites got me a first-level support line... Called that up and was blunt saying "A user on your network is DoSing my site (It was a DoS of sorts, but I wanted the scare factor as much as anything).
He bumped me a level up, then that guy bumped me a level up, and soon enough, within a few short minutes, I found myself leaving a voicemail with the VP of security (Or similar title, can't remember exactly).
The guy surprisingly enough called me back, and said "I gave the guy a call, told him we were watching him. He won't be giving you trouble anymore."
It appears to be coralizing the entire page properly. All the images are relative links, so all the images are served up through the cache.
If you're wondering why the page loads so slowly through Coral, that's because nobody is loading the page through Coral in bulk; without a large number of requests to the system, the page won't be cached right away, and you'll have to wait for Coral to download the content before it serves it up to you. However, it IS working and serving it to you; further requests should return cached copies.
Luckily this is one situation where we have the power to implement this change to slashdot ourselves; all it takes is for the article submitters to use Coral for their links. So far I've seen one article use Coral for the primary link... Unfortunately the Coral'd site didn't use relative URLs for the images, so the server got swamped; it didn't have to serve up the HTML as that was Coral'd, but it had to serve up the images, because they still linked back to the original site.
They don't work because by the time somebody posts a Coral link, the site is already down.
Coral is a cacheing solution; unless it can get a copy of the site to cache it, it can't serve it up.
This is why Coral needs to be used beforehand (IE, in the slashdot post) in order to be of any use. And even then, it works best on sites that have relative URLs on the images.
A suggestion to the owner of said site: Coralize as much of your site as you can, and enable HTTP compression (mod_gzip, mod_deflate, IIS6's compression, etc) for whatever else you can. With all that combined even a home connection should be able to handle a slashdotting.
IIRC, modern nuclear energy is perfectly clean (Other than the waste, which can be safely stored, and who knows, in the distant future perhaps burning it up in the sun would be cheap enough)... And modern reactor designs seem to have a virtually nil chance of a meltdown. I seem to recall some sort of Canadian reactor that used pebbles of material or something. CANDU reactor or something?
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Anyhow, nuclear plants don't have to be in farmland (Less power lost on transport), are clean (Perhaps a smaller effect on the environment than wind power?), are safe, and best of all, produce much more stable output.
That and hydro. Which, while it has an impact on the environment when installed, after that it seems to me to be pretty clean. Heck, Quebec serves all of it's millions of people with a few hydro dams, and we have some of the cheapest power costs in North America.
Oh, and there's also the ever increasing efficiency of solar. And heck, while we're at it, fusion will be around eventually, perfectly clean radiation-free energy, as I understand it. Yes, it's far off, but if you invest in a worldwide wind power network only to have fusion come out and be a much better option, that's a huge waste of money. In fact, take the money you would have spent on all those wind generators, and put it into fusion research:p
Their software, QuickTransit, is already shipping, just not to end-users. They claim they're already shipping to OEMs, ISVs, etc.
Also, they don't claim no performance hit; on their page oriented for gaming OEMs, they claim 80% of what you'd get for a native-recompile.
Anyhow, it doesn't look like they're going to ship a consumer model, so somebody is just going to have to licence this and put it into a product. Then we can all evaluate how good it is.
BTW: Their press release from today about QuickTransit is linked to from here:
Who said anything about hooking it up to their network? The university says people with these APs are plugging it into their own DSL and cable internet modems.
While they may own the cable/telephone wiring, I don't think they can count that as their own network. Certainly it has no direct connection to their DATA network.
My bad, I had assume DV was simply very high bitrate MPEG-2.
However, my point stands. With a high bitrate MPEG-4 encoder (And 256kbit is a bit overkill for stereo, but sure, throw that in too) and you're still WAY under MPEG-2 or DV.
In fact, assuming a 7.5mbit MPEG-4 stream, which seems reasonable as WMVHD is only 6.5mbit all told, twice as much as the situation you outlined.
And of course regular DV res (720x480, is it?) would require an even lower bitrate.
Slashdot Mirror
Just try getting a laptop without windows? I did. It was easy... I simply selected "None" as the OS.
It's all about knowing what to buy and where to buy it. I bought a Compal CL56 notebook, which is a whitebook chassis used to manufacture many other notebooks (Such as one of Voodoo PC's 15" Centrino model). Because it's a whitebook, I buy the chassis and parts seperately (Though I chose to pay $29 Canadian to have the store assemble it for me).
Because it was not purchased from a big computer maker, but simply a computer store, there is no obligation to buy or run Windows on the notebook.
The reason it is in beta is quite obvious; it is of beta quality.
Take an example from yesterday; In the sports section, a news article with a picture of a baseball player in a baseball stadium, "more info" links to several stories about the Montreal Expos leaving Montreal for Washington... And story headline/title about the American Taliban guy. What that was doing in the sports section and what that had to do with baseball, I have no clue. Hence, beta.
So? Same thing in SCO's case; their claims have been proven baseless, but that doesn't (and still hasn't) stopped them from sueing the pants off a number of other companies, causing millions of dollars in legal fees for said companies, not to mention the FUD they're spreading.
In fact, the guy could go the patent-route; start sueing each and every Mambo user, most of who will not be able to afford the legal fees and will simply settle.
So, if you ask me, there's still penty to be afraid about; they're far from free and clear.
Guessed and implied? I recall it having been mentioned by people like Gabe Newell during E3 presentations (The first one they showed off Counter-Strike: Source at least). Perhaps that's not official, but he is the Big Man (In more ways than one),
Haven't we known that CS:S would be HL2's only multi for a very long time, through passing comments by Valve employees? Why is this news now?
Why does the US government waste so much time debating and passing/not passing dozens of new laws on copyrights and file trading? It hasn't even been conclusively shown that file trading hurts (record|movie|software|etc) sales. Some studies show it hurting, some studies show it helping.
Doesn't the government have more important things to do than make the (MPA|RIA|BS)A feel more secure (I'd say help them line their pockets, but they can't even prove it'd do that)?
Yes, but IIRC LinkSys resolved this by complying with the GPL and releasing the complete source to their entire firmware, unlike the reaction of some other companies.
In fact, the custom (SveaSoft or other) firmwares are not complete re-implementations, they are modifications of the existing firmware.
LinkSys has, if they wanted to or not, set themselves up as having one of the most flexible series of consumer hardware routers out there.
Yes, I believe so.
However, I'm using a custom firmware at the moment so I can't confirm. I'm pretty sure the original supported DynDNS.org though.
There is a lossless version of JPEG, nobody seems to consider it an option.
In fact, while on that tangent, what about lossless JPEG2000? I would imagine that a lossless wavelet-based codec would be the most efficient (best compression) lossless codec you could get.
Go with DynDNS.org. Most popular, and best supported among various clients. LinkSys routers even come with support to update DynDNS.org right in the official firmware.
They have a variety of domains you can choose from; I chose ath.cx simply because it's very short.
The default search criteria is within 75km of your target city. Unfortunately, as most of Canada's cities are very close to the US border, most searches produce results from the US.
For example, search for Computer Stores in Montreal or a suburb, Canada's second largest city, and the top 5 to 6 results are for stores in the US; from both New York and Vermont.
What's the point of having a Canadian version if most of the results are from the US? Yes, I can reduce the search radius to get only hits from montreal, but 75km is the DEFAULT.
This is yet another site that is using full URLs for his image links instead of relative links. A fatal flaw.
All these images are being loaded off the slashdotted server instead of through the cache. If the author of the page had instead used relative images, the coral cache would be positively zippy.
If the foundation you describe was removed in OSX, how does OSX run 68k mac programs? Full blown emulation? Or not at all?
I'd hope not at all, while I've been a PC user for years, if I ever went back to a Mac, there are a few old programs (Mostly older games, with the odd handy utility) that I'd probably want to keep using.
I'm very happy with my Linksys WRT54G router. With custom firmware you can SSH or telnet into the router and mess around with the linux install it has on it; it does all it's routing with IPTABLES if I'm not mistaken, and you can manually mess around with routes.
The custom firmwares also let you run a few servers on the router, like PPTPd.
Anyhow, I don't generally mess around with it; the router's web GUI offers what I need; forward ports and port ranges on either TCP, UDP, or both, to a certain IP, or enable DMZ for a certain IP.
Oh, I should mention, while I'm only one user, I do tend to use BitTorrent with hundreds of simultaneous connections, with no trouble; this was enough to cause my modem's built-in router to reboot, but the Linksys router hasn't had any trouble.
After I RTFA, it seems that this is a Canadian trademark, not a New Zealand trademark. In fact the letter posted has no mention of NZ at all...
As I understand it, trademarks are NOT international, and as long as you're not in NZ, you don't have to listen to them.
IANAL, but if you trademark it in your own country, that will prevent this other group from trademarking it in your country.
If you have any developers in NZ though, that might cause problems.
Surprisingly enough, this works. I had a user who was performing thousands of searches to bump phrases up into the top-ten-searches list.
I checked out his IP, turned out to be RoadRunner. A bit of digging around on their sites got me a first-level support line... Called that up and was blunt saying "A user on your network is DoSing my site (It was a DoS of sorts, but I wanted the scare factor as much as anything).
He bumped me a level up, then that guy bumped me a level up, and soon enough, within a few short minutes, I found myself leaving a voicemail with the VP of security (Or similar title, can't remember exactly).
The guy surprisingly enough called me back, and said "I gave the guy a call, told him we were watching him. He won't be giving you trouble anymore."
Well, then here, see it working properly:
http://servermatrix.com.nyud.net:8090/
It appears to be coralizing the entire page properly. All the images are relative links, so all the images are served up through the cache.
If you're wondering why the page loads so slowly through Coral, that's because nobody is loading the page through Coral in bulk; without a large number of requests to the system, the page won't be cached right away, and you'll have to wait for Coral to download the content before it serves it up to you. However, it IS working and serving it to you; further requests should return cached copies.
Luckily this is one situation where we have the power to implement this change to slashdot ourselves; all it takes is for the article submitters to use Coral for their links. So far I've seen one article use Coral for the primary link... Unfortunately the Coral'd site didn't use relative URLs for the images, so the server got swamped; it didn't have to serve up the HTML as that was Coral'd, but it had to serve up the images, because they still linked back to the original site.
They don't work because by the time somebody posts a Coral link, the site is already down.
Coral is a cacheing solution; unless it can get a copy of the site to cache it, it can't serve it up.
This is why Coral needs to be used beforehand (IE, in the slashdot post) in order to be of any use. And even then, it works best on sites that have relative URLs on the images.
A suggestion to the owner of said site: Coralize as much of your site as you can, and enable HTTP compression (mod_gzip, mod_deflate, IIS6's compression, etc) for whatever else you can. With all that combined even a home connection should be able to handle a slashdotting.
Does this mean that companies like Dell (Any big computer company really) will stop charging five times more than retail for memory upgrades?
I tried to price it on Dell's site for notebooks. In retail, 2x256 is the same price as 1x512, more or less. (All prices that follow are Canadian)
Dell charges 200$ for the DIFFERENCE between them.
To upgrade from 2x256 to 2x512, they charge 600$. They should be charging about 150$. When I purchased a DDR333 512MB SODIMM, I paid 144$.
Now, even when using ultra-premium ram (Which they don't), there's a big difference between 144$ and 600$.
IIRC, modern nuclear energy is perfectly clean (Other than the waste, which can be safely stored, and who knows, in the distant future perhaps burning it up in the sun would be cheap enough)... And modern reactor designs seem to have a virtually nil chance of a meltdown. I seem to recall some sort of Canadian reactor that used pebbles of material or something. CANDU reactor or something?
:p
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Anyhow, nuclear plants don't have to be in farmland (Less power lost on transport), are clean (Perhaps a smaller effect on the environment than wind power?), are safe, and best of all, produce much more stable output.
That and hydro. Which, while it has an impact on the environment when installed, after that it seems to me to be pretty clean. Heck, Quebec serves all of it's millions of people with a few hydro dams, and we have some of the cheapest power costs in North America.
Oh, and there's also the ever increasing efficiency of solar. And heck, while we're at it, fusion will be around eventually, perfectly clean radiation-free energy, as I understand it. Yes, it's far off, but if you invest in a worldwide wind power network only to have fusion come out and be a much better option, that's a huge waste of money. In fact, take the money you would have spent on all those wind generators, and put it into fusion research
Their software, QuickTransit, is already shipping, just not to end-users. They claim they're already shipping to OEMs, ISVs, etc.
Also, they don't claim no performance hit; on their page oriented for gaming OEMs, they claim 80% of what you'd get for a native-recompile.
Anyhow, it doesn't look like they're going to ship a consumer model, so somebody is just going to have to licence this and put it into a product. Then we can all evaluate how good it is.
BTW: Their press release from today about QuickTransit is linked to from here:
http://www.transitive.com/news.htm
Who said anything about hooking it up to their network? The university says people with these APs are plugging it into their own DSL and cable internet modems.
While they may own the cable/telephone wiring, I don't think they can count that as their own network. Certainly it has no direct connection to their DATA network.
My bad, I had assume DV was simply very high bitrate MPEG-2.
However, my point stands. With a high bitrate MPEG-4 encoder (And 256kbit is a bit overkill for stereo, but sure, throw that in too) and you're still WAY under MPEG-2 or DV.
In fact, assuming a 7.5mbit MPEG-4 stream, which seems reasonable as WMVHD is only 6.5mbit all told, twice as much as the situation you outlined.
And of course regular DV res (720x480, is it?) would require an even lower bitrate.