I have had comcast for quite some time now. They introduced "speedboost" initially on the top tier plan but have extended it to the lower plans as well. It operates as a token bucket throttle, it may in fact be a token bucket, but I do not know how they are accomplishing it. So you start with a bucket of tokens, you are allowed to expend the tokens as fast as you can up to about 24Mbps, once the bucket is empty you are out of BW. The bucket refills at a rate equal to your plan rate.
I run similar filters in the linux firewalls I set up for clients as well as general BW throttle and fairness queuing. Anyone interested in this stuff for their home/bus network should look at the tc filters available in any linux kernel.
Anyway, people can bash comcast all they want about various crap they pull, but this particular feature works very well for normal user type connections. Very high initial burst rates allowing the first 10-20 MB to come in very fast then the throttle kicks in. Great for browsing and smallish downloads.
I think it is safe to say that you skipped all the classes that deal with automotive type subjects.
You are so far off target that it's funny.
Suggested Reading Topics: Transmissions, Torque Curves, Aerodynamic Drag, Torque vs. Horsepower vs. RPM
Just non calculated point here. If you car has a top speed of 100MPH and you are going 80MPH, you are probably using 50% of the engines total power output. 50% of total power output has nothing to do with 50% of total RPM.
I don't understand why you can't play two videos at once. However, as far as things like the video pausing while you move a window, check your window move options. If you select an opague window move the video will redraw as you are moving. If you have your WM set to only show the outline of the window during drags, the WM/client stops updating while you are in the click/drag mode. It however sounds like you have a bad config of your video players/video card. Like other posters, I can display several video streams at once, using several different players and drag them all around with no playback issues. I am using an ati 9600 and the stock drivers. No compiz/xgl
No, I did not use reinjection. Yes, it can speed up the process, especially on 40 bit. Not too many people are using 40 bit any longer. However, we fall back to the intent in my original post. Security overkill. It's easy to see this huge threat out there just waiting to hijack your wireless connection. It's also easy to throw a boat load of security practices at the issue. Now you are running 42 gazillion bit encryption, firewalls, virus/trojan/ad scanners, root kit hunters, password checkers, etc . . . ..
For what? To protect your home computer? You mean the one you leave unattended while you are at work? The one guarded by nothing more secure than a typical home door lock that a credit card can open?
There is a line where reasonable security measures are enough based on circumstance. Use encryption, passwords, patch your systems, firewall, keep wireless off your trusted network. Chances are that your porn collection and some mp3's are not enough to attract a dedicated attack.
So many people spend so much time, energy and money to protect bascially nothing. Again, I am talking home users here. The other side of this is if you use the least secure method of networking, wireless, then you are not too serious about security to begin with. If you don't control all access to the network, you have already lost the game. With wireless you don't!
I agree that getting WPA working can be a pain in the butt. However, the whole WPA vs. WEP thing is a pretty big waste of time for home networks. In our overly paranoid security mindset these days, everyone seems to feel that you need the maximum security settings at all times on home systems.
I tested over several weeks the ease of cracking WEP. Let me say, on low use home laptops, you are not going to crack any keys unless you get damn lucky or you have weeks and weeks to gather data.
I live in range of 4 wireless networks in addition to ours. I set up a desktop with airsnort and similar cracking software. Over several weeks I collected data on each network in succession. Not even my network with two laptops in pretty heavy use were cracked. First you need millions upon millions of packets. Then you need a router that does not block the 60k weak keys out of the billions that can be used.
To step up the sample rate I used my laptop every night streaming video to give the crack programs something to use. I never got my key.
So, in my opinion, WPA is overkill in most cases for home uses. Maybe you keep your wireless links maxed for hours and days on end. For you, maybe WPA is required, but if you are a typical home user with a couple of laptops, it is overkill. Use WEP, change your keys every month or two if it makes you feel better.
I input four keys and rotate them every so often. I feel pretty safe.
I have dealt with a ton of laptops but the only ones that seem to last forever are the thinkpads. I am typing this on a 380z. Yep, pII 300, 96 meg O ram, 4 gig HD. Add a stripped down linux install and you are good to go. I use this thing for network admin, remote X seesions, daily mail and web. It just works. Battery life is pretty much gone, but it lasts long enough to ssh into several computers to initiate shutdown after a power failure.
Thinkpads are well built, durable, reliable and I think they look stylish in thier own way. Sometimes understated design is better than all that plastic crap that gets thrown on laptops like the satelites and the viaos.
We have three thinkpads:
My baby, the 380z,
my wifes, t23(loaded)
and a backup 600.
thick, thin, heavy, lite, square, rounded, BUT always black!
Comcast in Western Mass has recently rolled out their Speed Boost plan to all the premium subscribers. My base service is the 8mbps/768kbps. With speed boost, they up the max bandwidth for about the first 15 seconds, then throttle back down to 8mbps/768kbps.
My connection currently peaks at about 20mbps/1mbps. Seems to be a token bucket kinda setup. If your DL rate drops to say 6mbps for a minute or so, it can spike back to 16-20mbps until the throttle kicks in again.
While this just seems like a trick to make speed tests rock. It is a pretty sweet deal for smallish DL's. I DL'd a 40ish MB kernel in about 23 seconds. The first 30 meg came in in about 13 seconds, the next 10 meg took the next 10 sec. So. I averaged about 13-14 mbps. Not gonna help with ISO's, but for under 50 meg it makes a difference.
I have purchased probably 15+ cases over the years. I have found two that almost meet my expectations.
1. Enermax - CS10181
Pros:
Affordable
Cons:
Fan air flow paths not well thought out(requires mods to get good airflow)
Cheapo ass front door(I hate doors, especially plastic)
No front panel anything connections
2. Antec - Lanboy
Pros:
Affordable
Cons:
Cheap ass front door(god I hate this)
Not very sturdy(100% aluminum)
No inlet fan filter
I dislike ----> Spaz cases, HUGE cases, tiny cases!
Make the damn things functional, clean lines, solid construction and good airflow.
Note to case makers:
Doors suck, doors that break really suck!
AIRFLOW via 27 fans all just randomly blowing air around is not GOOD AIRFLOW!
I want a computer case, not a freaking white noise generator.
NO tools
Front Panel Connections
I believe the case you mention deals with evidence in plain view, additionally, it was involved in a related crime. Having pot plants on your table can get you busted as they are in plain view. A police officer does not have to search for them, but merely look and he can see them. Having a joint, in a box, in a drawer, in your home is a different case. Now, the police would most likely seize the joint, but it is not automatically useable as evidence as it was not discovered during a valid search for drugs. Then again there are about 22 thousand exceptions to the illegal search and seizure laws.
Now, maybe I am wrong. It would not be the first time. However, I am basing my statements on close ties to local and state police from a couple different states, (it's a married thing).
"Then, a few years later, just recently, they passed a law saying they can pull a citizen over for not wearing a seatbelt."
Actually, that law was voted down in the second round, 84 to 76 or something to the likes, so for the moment, you cannot be pulled over for the lack of wearing a seat belt. However, I totally agree with you on the thoughts behind your comments. The constant barrage of "I am State Trooper Smith, Click it or Ticket" is getting ridiculous.
You can't get pulled over for eating a hamburger, having an arguement with your SO, doing any of 1000 things you should not do while driving, but god forbid you don't have your seatbelt on.
Personally, I always wear mine and require all in my car to wear one. A couple of years of low end stock car racing makes you appreciate good seat belts and safe cars. I don't think law enforcement needs to be dealing with this. There are far more pressing issues that our tax money should be spent on then seat belt enforcement. I can only imagine what those god damned commercials cost to produce and air.
Back to the main topic:
Data retention to the degree mentioned in the proposed law far exceeds the governments authority. The bad part is that there are far too many people who just don't care or do not see what will come of all this as the years wind on. Eventually, we are going to be living in the types of society portrayed in movies like "The 5th Element", etc.
While I cannot remember where I read some of the data, but laws designed on prevention have little effect on law breakers, but instead effect the general law abiding populace. Laws designed on punishment effect the law breakers and have little to no effect on the law abiding.
Prevention laws sound wonderful in theory, but when the results don't match the theory, beleve the results and change the theory.
I should not be punished because I might do something that may result in something illegal.
I should not be monitored becuase I might do something illegal otherwise we are entering the era of thought crimes as in "The Minority Report"
I am all for strict enforcement of laws and punishment that fits the crime when the laws are sound to begin with. I am totally against treating the general populace as a bunch of criminals just waiting for the chance to rape and pillage.
In the end, we are all screwed because crime is not going away because the underlying reason for crime is not being addressed. As the rich get richer and poor get poorer, crime will continue to florish. What is the motivation to work hard and pay taxes to support the infastructure when the blatent abuses of social programs is rubbed in our faces every day. Familys on endless social programs being rewarded with low cost housing and state benefits. Have anohter kid, we will give you even more money, more health care.
In a convience store once, I was behind a woman paying for her gas with a state EBT(welfare) card. She was driving a Ford Excursion. I can't afford a vehicle like that never mind the gas it sucks down.
As long as federal, state and local governements make it profitable to be dishonest, crime is not going away. Our goverment officials however seem to be on the fast train to enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to remove freedoms from the law abiding citizens. Stop worring about me and go after the real criminals. Stop using emotional response propoganda to pass broad base laws.
A perfect example is a standard search warrant. Say they believe you have committed a crime and stole a diamond ring. The police get a warrant to search your home for the stolen property. The warrant states what they can and cannot search for. Where they can search, etc. If they find a eveidence from another unrelated crime they cannot use that evidence against you. Very rarely are such broad based search warrants granted as they violate our protected rights against illegal search and seizure.
"fast(er) booting is one of the features of xp."
We don't have any XP around now, but we did run it for a short while. The faster boot thing is pretty deceiving. XP shows the desktop up to 60 seconds before it becomes usefull. That is not really faster booting. Hell, I could use a picture of a Linux Desktop as a splash screen on an ASUS MB with MyLogo and have it come up after POST. Does that mean I have linux booting in 3 seconds? XP boot time is trickery at best! Watch the HD activity after the desktop appears. Better yet, try to do something usefull before the hourglass goes away and stays away.
It just looks like it boots faster! You know it, I know it, don't use it in a discussion like it's a feature.
"1) Buy the most ultimate limited edition of the album on CD for say $17. Comes with awesome artwork at full CD-quality (I always laugh when I read that claim for 128 mp3s!), on a completely DRM-free media with which I can do everything I want."
I always laugh when I read the claims for "full CD quality" Digitally reproduced music? Horrible. I only buy the full band and recently installed a multimillion dollar amphitheater(no lossy electronics for me) in my living room. Of course some of the older groups are starting to smell bad! Even the full band format becomes obsolete too. I have not been able to get my Jimi Hendrix or Grateful Dead band to play in years.
The reality is that there are several levels of audio entertainment. You don't always give a crap if the audio reproduction is perfect. I listen to the radio in my car. FM is not exactly a high bandwidth format, yet, for the wonderful acoustic chamber that a glass, metal and plastic "semi-round cube" provides, FM is just fine.
Wandering around a NYC subway with your iPod is not exactly a noiseless environment, so.mp3 is just fine.
Sitting at my computer, I am not trying to recreate Aerosmith at the Centrum. I just want a compact to store, easy to select, relatively decent quality reproduction. Most people are not elite audiophiles and from my travels, most who claim to be, spend many G's on equipment only to listen to what I consider some of the worst music on the planet.
Most of my cd's are ripped to.ogg or.mp3. I am not about to add 2 TB to my fileserver so I can have an exact copy of all my CD's spinning on the hard drives. If I want to hear the best possible audio that I have available, I can always put the freaking CD in.
My point is, don't brag about your superior listening habits because you only listen to a digital sampling, of an analog performance, that was mastered on 16 track tape 27 years ago. You're not leet!
I don't know where in the Linux kernels it was introduced, but you can control traffic with very fine grained rules using tc and it's associated qdiscs' and filters.
Additionally, there are all several filters that can be layered into the qdiscs to provide fairness between the various data streams moving thru a single qdisc.
The sweet part of the tc setup is bandwidth borrowing.
For instance, say a 1 mbit link. You can have tc partition 500kbit to http traffic, 300 kbit to smtp/pop traffic and 200 to all other traffic. Add in some rules about BW caps and priorities and the "all other" traffic can borrow any set amount of the http and smtp/pop BW if those qdiscs are not using it.
Setting up tc on the WAN interface of your firewall/router can let you use your entire up and down bw concurrently and things like ping times do not suffer. The trick is taking the que away from the modem and controlling it in the router.
Anyway, there are some good sites that explain setting up tc and how to maximize your traffic flow. As far as how well it works? Awesome!
My current link is 8mbit/768kbit. I can use all available upstream for something like gnutella and the downstream does not suffer during surfing/mail/download/whatever. It can be step up extremely fine grained or just throw in a couple of ques for simple setup.
Your temp readings are rather unrealistic unless your ambient room temp is around 0-5C or you are using water cooling.
Your CPU has to dissipate it's heat to something, usually the heatsink. Unless you have found some magic heatsink that has like.1 C/W thermal resistance, your CPUs' temp is way above 36.
I have a Dual MP2400 rig that runs in a room with about 25C ambient. These are 60W CPUs'. My HS units are rated at about.6 C/W.
Give or take, a 60 watt load will rise about 36C above ambient when attached to such a cooling device.
My full load temps are 61C and 63C. Lets see if the formula works. CPU Temp (should equal) 25+(60*.6) = 25+36 = 61C.
Seems like it works. The slightly higher temp on CPU2 is because it is physically behind CPU1 in the airpath and therefore gets a slightly higher ambient to start with.
AMD 64/3700, something like 85 watts. Giving you the benefit of a decent HS/fan say.45 C/W, you are going to see a CPU temp rise of roughly 38C above ambient. I assume your room temp is not below 20C.
You actual cpu core is most likely running at 58C.
Of course there are lots of factors involved in how efficient your HS setup is like airflow direction, air volume, pressure, humidity, etc.
Overall, I have found this calulation to be accurate, within +/- 2C, in average conditions.
What a freaking waste of cpu/gpu cycles.Transparency has to be the most useless feature in any OS.
Oooohhhh, Aaaaahhhhhh, look, I can make parts of my windows unreadable and unusable. This is sooooooo like way cool dudes.
Is this where innovation is now? Stupid GUI tricks that hinder fucntionality?
MS is retarded for following a stupid idea from Apples' useless feature department!
KDE/Gnome/etc, are equally guilty for the "Look, we can make our GUI useless too!"
What I want from MS is INVISIBLE Windows. Wait, I have that already. I must have turned on the "Use Invisible Windows" feature 6 years ago with that RedHat Disc.
"And guess what -- we are all richer than anyone was 50 years ago."
What planet do you live one? You think that being able to afford meaningless toys that were either cost prohibitive or non-existent is a way to measure weath? Take your head out of your rear orifice please. Compare wage growth against something useful like the cost of homes, cars, food, clothing, insurance, etc...
40 years ago, my parents bought their house for $11,500 while earning roughly $15,000 a year. Today, a typical home in the area is over $100,000. About 9 times as expensive. I am not making $135,000 or anything near it.
40 years ago there was no such thing as a 60 month car loan. Today we have 72 month car loans. In the mid 60's my parents were buying new cars for $3,000. A very basic new car today is well into the $15,000 range and more like $20,000 for any sort of mid range vehicle. Cars have increased 5 - 7 x in cost. That would put comparable wages at &75,000 - $105,000. Not even close to reality. The average wages in this area are more like $30,000 with a lot of people living on far less.
The simple fact is that large corporations and corrupt politicians have driven a massive wedge into the income classes in the US. There is no more middle class. A middle class lifestyle requires a wage that is roughly 2x the average income. That is not middle class now is it. 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people. We are truly in the age of the working poor and there are no signs of it getting better soon.
BOINC is a damn good name, it freaking boinc'ed my smp system into a hardlock. Kinda ugly when that system is pretty much the heart of our 5 puter network. Squid, LTSP server, etc. 52 days with all sorts of varied load and a stupid SETI program kills it dead. I had a few unhappy voices about 60 seconds after starting it when damn near everything else went away except the firewall. No alien research for me thanks!
I am not doubting your success with xp, I just have to add, I have not seen it on my wifes system. She runs an msi 745 with athlon xp 2100/512 meg, msi video card with XP supported drivers, nothing oddball. Xp and Win 2K have a boot life of about 10 days or so then they both go south. Usually just slowdowns and general BSOD. The bulk of the problems come for either NAV or Mcafee AV which she usually ends up disabling. I have no doubt that either 2k or XP could be quite stable, but I just have not seen it on plain jane hardware. The reverse of that is mdk from 7.1 thru 10 has been solid on 4 different computers here. The current uptime on my file/print server is 89 days, 7 hours, 29 minutes. This handles music and video to 4 LAN puters as well as a 2 gig squid cache.
While I can see your frustration from an adapted Windows users side of the fence, I can safely say that an adapted linux user is equally baffled by the various windows behaviors. I am not sure what part of windows you find so easy. I "used" MS software from the early days of MS DOS up until about 98SE. My wife runs 2k and did try XP for a short bit. From my side, I find nothing intuitive in the entire NT line.
She has used windows 9x thru XP and still cannot complete a 2k format/partition/install/config on her own. She runs our hosting service, designs websites for people, maintains a general website/hosting helpsite. We currently have about 30 hosted clients. She is not stupid. I have to consult websites to figure out all the oddball settings in windows to keep her system running well.
Exactly what part of window is easy and intuitive? What the GUI? Sure if you already know the icons to click, the radio buttons to check and the menus to find stuff.
Here is a quick and fun test for you. In a UNIX / UNIX like environment, services like RPC are OPTIONAL. Have some time? Turn off RPC in windows 2k/xp because it is so intuitive and try to reboot.
Just a final question. What exactly is intuitive about an OS that lets you disable, with a check box, a core OS service that renders the OS unable to boot?
If, by chance, there is a way around this little critical failure, I did not know how to fix it, and it was far from intuitive!!!
"If you play UT 2K3 for just 4 hours a day, 25 days a month"
For JUST 4 hours a day? You say that like 4 hours a day is cutting back and putting a crimp in your gaming experience.
Have you tried things like reading or having a conversation, maybe spending time with your spouse/significant other/children/family/friends?
Hell, I wish I had 4 hours a day to piss away playing a game. I have to "waste" most of my free time on mundane shit like helping my aging parents, fixing my sisters car, maintaining my marriage, etc . ..
Put down the mouse, back slowly away from the monitor and welcome to real life. Yes, human interaction is scary at first, but I am sure with enough exposure, you too can adjust.
Turning it on being the single largest contributor!
Seriously, my wife runs 2k on a decent system with supported hardware and current drivers. While her system is not grossly unstable, it generally folds after 5-15 days of use. Use involving several browsers, html editors, a few games, winamp, mailmoa, etc. I have not spent the time to isolate if it's just 2k or something oddball in her system. Nothing she does however is considered "loading" the system.
2k is good, but it is hardly "all that" in the world of stability and crash resistent. Plain jane user space apps can and do bring it down hard. You just have to wait a few days and the BSOD comes a knocking.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had comcast for quite some time now. They introduced "speedboost" initially on the top tier plan but have extended it to the lower plans as well. It operates as a token bucket throttle, it may in fact be a token bucket, but I do not know how they are accomplishing it. So you start with a bucket of tokens, you are allowed to expend the tokens as fast as you can up to about 24Mbps, once the bucket is empty you are out of BW. The bucket refills at a rate equal to your plan rate.
I run similar filters in the linux firewalls I set up for clients as well as general BW throttle and fairness queuing. Anyone interested in this stuff for their home/bus network should look at the tc filters available in any linux kernel.
Anyway, people can bash comcast all they want about various crap they pull, but this particular feature works very well for normal user type connections. Very high initial burst rates allowing the first 10-20 MB to come in very fast then the throttle kicks in. Great for browsing and smallish downloads.
I think it is safe to say that you skipped all the classes that deal with automotive type subjects.
You are so far off target that it's funny.
Suggested Reading Topics:
Transmissions,
Torque Curves,
Aerodynamic Drag,
Torque vs. Horsepower vs. RPM
Just non calculated point here. If you car has a top speed of 100MPH and you are going 80MPH, you are probably using 50% of the engines total power output. 50% of total power output has nothing to do with 50% of total RPM.
I don't understand why you can't play two videos at once. However, as far as things like the video pausing while you move a window, check your window move options. If you select an opague window move the video will redraw as you are moving. If you have your WM set to only show the outline of the window during drags, the WM/client stops updating while you are in the click/drag mode. It however sounds like you have a bad config of your video players/video card. Like other posters, I can display several video streams at once, using several different players and drag them all around with no playback issues. I am using an ati 9600 and the stock drivers. No compiz/xgl
For what? To protect your home computer? You mean the one you leave unattended while you are at work? The one guarded by nothing more secure than a typical home door lock that a credit card can open?
There is a line where reasonable security measures are enough based on circumstance. Use encryption, passwords, patch your systems, firewall, keep wireless off your trusted network. Chances are that your porn collection and some mp3's are not enough to attract a dedicated attack.
So many people spend so much time, energy and money to protect bascially nothing. Again, I am talking home users here. The other side of this is if you use the least secure method of networking, wireless, then you are not too serious about security to begin with. If you don't control all access to the network, you have already lost the game. With wireless you don't!
I tested over several weeks the ease of cracking WEP. Let me say, on low use home laptops, you are not going to crack any keys unless you get damn lucky or you have weeks and weeks to gather data.
I live in range of 4 wireless networks in addition to ours. I set up a desktop with airsnort and similar cracking software. Over several weeks I collected data on each network in succession. Not even my network with two laptops in pretty heavy use were cracked. First you need millions upon millions of packets. Then you need a router that does not block the 60k weak keys out of the billions that can be used.
To step up the sample rate I used my laptop every night streaming video to give the crack programs something to use. I never got my key.
So, in my opinion, WPA is overkill in most cases for home uses. Maybe you keep your wireless links maxed for hours and days on end. For you, maybe WPA is required, but if you are a typical home user with a couple of laptops, it is overkill. Use WEP, change your keys every month or two if it makes you feel better.
I input four keys and rotate them every so often. I feel pretty safe.
Thinkpads are well built, durable, reliable and I think they look stylish in thier own way. Sometimes understated design is better than all that plastic crap that gets thrown on laptops like the satelites and the viaos.
We have three thinkpads: My baby, the 380z, my wifes, t23(loaded) and a backup 600.
thick, thin, heavy, lite, square, rounded, BUT always black!
snip
"A string of simple, no-strings relationships with nubile young women in their sexual prime is no life at all really."
Three problems with those statements:
1. I doubt that you know three 38 yr old coeds.
2. and that you had sex with all three of them,
3. At the same time!
Maybe sexual prime for females on your planet happens at a different age!
Or maybe I didn't get it!
Comcast in Western Mass has recently rolled out their Speed Boost plan to all the premium subscribers. My base service is the 8mbps/768kbps. With speed boost, they up the max bandwidth for about the first 15 seconds, then throttle back down to 8mbps/768kbps.
My connection currently peaks at about 20mbps/1mbps. Seems to be a token bucket kinda setup. If your DL rate drops to say 6mbps for a minute or so, it can spike back to 16-20mbps until the throttle kicks in again.
While this just seems like a trick to make speed tests rock. It is a pretty sweet deal for smallish DL's. I DL'd a 40ish MB kernel in about 23 seconds. The first 30 meg came in in about 13 seconds, the next 10 meg took the next 10 sec. So. I averaged about 13-14 mbps. Not gonna help with ISO's, but for under 50 meg it makes a difference.
ooops, messed up the formatting and lost 1/2 the post. ummm, nevermind, I am not retyping it.
I have purchased probably 15+ cases over the years. I have found two that almost meet my expectations. 1. Enermax - CS10181 Pros: Affordable
Cons: Fan air flow paths not well thought out(requires mods to get good airflow) Cheapo ass front door(I hate doors, especially plastic) No front panel anything connections
2. Antec - Lanboy Pros: Affordable
Cons: Cheap ass front door(god I hate this) Not very sturdy(100% aluminum) No inlet fan filter
I dislike ----> Spaz cases, HUGE cases, tiny cases! Make the damn things functional, clean lines, solid construction and good airflow.
Note to case makers: Doors suck, doors that break really suck! AIRFLOW via 27 fans all just randomly blowing air around is not GOOD AIRFLOW! I want a computer case, not a freaking white noise generator. NO tools Front Panel Connections
I believe the case you mention deals with evidence in plain view, additionally, it was involved in a related crime. Having pot plants on your table can get you busted as they are in plain view. A police officer does not have to search for them, but merely look and he can see them. Having a joint, in a box, in a drawer, in your home is a different case. Now, the police would most likely seize the joint, but it is not automatically useable as evidence as it was not discovered during a valid search for drugs. Then again there are about 22 thousand exceptions to the illegal search and seizure laws. Now, maybe I am wrong. It would not be the first time. However, I am basing my statements on close ties to local and state police from a couple different states, (it's a married thing).
"Then, a few years later, just recently, they passed a law saying they can pull a citizen over for not wearing a seatbelt."
Actually, that law was voted down in the second round, 84 to 76 or something to the likes, so for the moment, you cannot be pulled over for the lack of wearing a seat belt. However, I totally agree with you on the thoughts behind your comments. The constant barrage of "I am State Trooper Smith, Click it or Ticket" is getting ridiculous.
You can't get pulled over for eating a hamburger, having an arguement with your SO, doing any of 1000 things you should not do while driving, but god forbid you don't have your seatbelt on.
Personally, I always wear mine and require all in my car to wear one. A couple of years of low end stock car racing makes you appreciate good seat belts and safe cars. I don't think law enforcement needs to be dealing with this. There are far more pressing issues that our tax money should be spent on then seat belt enforcement. I can only imagine what those god damned commercials cost to produce and air.
Back to the main topic: Data retention to the degree mentioned in the proposed law far exceeds the governments authority. The bad part is that there are far too many people who just don't care or do not see what will come of all this as the years wind on. Eventually, we are going to be living in the types of society portrayed in movies like "The 5th Element", etc.
While I cannot remember where I read some of the data, but laws designed on prevention have little effect on law breakers, but instead effect the general law abiding populace. Laws designed on punishment effect the law breakers and have little to no effect on the law abiding.
Prevention laws sound wonderful in theory, but when the results don't match the theory, beleve the results and change the theory.
I should not be punished because I might do something that may result in something illegal. I should not be monitored becuase I might do something illegal otherwise we are entering the era of thought crimes as in "The Minority Report" I am all for strict enforcement of laws and punishment that fits the crime when the laws are sound to begin with. I am totally against treating the general populace as a bunch of criminals just waiting for the chance to rape and pillage.
In the end, we are all screwed because crime is not going away because the underlying reason for crime is not being addressed. As the rich get richer and poor get poorer, crime will continue to florish. What is the motivation to work hard and pay taxes to support the infastructure when the blatent abuses of social programs is rubbed in our faces every day. Familys on endless social programs being rewarded with low cost housing and state benefits. Have anohter kid, we will give you even more money, more health care.
In a convience store once, I was behind a woman paying for her gas with a state EBT(welfare) card. She was driving a Ford Excursion. I can't afford a vehicle like that never mind the gas it sucks down.
As long as federal, state and local governements make it profitable to be dishonest, crime is not going away. Our goverment officials however seem to be on the fast train to enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to remove freedoms from the law abiding citizens. Stop worring about me and go after the real criminals. Stop using emotional response propoganda to pass broad base laws.
A perfect example is a standard search warrant. Say they believe you have committed a crime and stole a diamond ring. The police get a warrant to search your home for the stolen property. The warrant states what they can and cannot search for. Where they can search, etc. If they find a eveidence from another unrelated crime they cannot use that evidence against you. Very rarely are such broad based search warrants granted as they violate our protected rights against illegal search and seizure.
Laws such as the data retenti
Well, for one, it would probably be better than the crap we get now!
Two, I think you have just redefined "Techno!"
"fast(er) booting is one of the features of xp." We don't have any XP around now, but we did run it for a short while. The faster boot thing is pretty deceiving. XP shows the desktop up to 60 seconds before it becomes usefull. That is not really faster booting. Hell, I could use a picture of a Linux Desktop as a splash screen on an ASUS MB with MyLogo and have it come up after POST. Does that mean I have linux booting in 3 seconds? XP boot time is trickery at best! Watch the HD activity after the desktop appears. Better yet, try to do something usefull before the hourglass goes away and stays away.
It just looks like it boots faster! You know it, I know it, don't use it in a discussion like it's a feature.
"1) Buy the most ultimate limited edition of the album on CD for say $17. Comes with awesome artwork at full CD-quality (I always laugh when I read that claim for 128 mp3s!), on a completely DRM-free media with which I can do everything I want."
.mp3 is just fine.
.ogg or .mp3. I am not about to add 2 TB to my fileserver so I can have an exact copy of all my CD's spinning on the hard drives. If I want to hear the best possible audio that I have available, I can always put the freaking CD in.
I always laugh when I read the claims for "full CD quality" Digitally reproduced music? Horrible. I only buy the full band and recently installed a multimillion dollar amphitheater(no lossy electronics for me) in my living room. Of course some of the older groups are starting to smell bad! Even the full band format becomes obsolete too. I have not been able to get my Jimi Hendrix or Grateful Dead band to play in years.
The reality is that there are several levels of audio entertainment. You don't always give a crap if the audio reproduction is perfect. I listen to the radio in my car. FM is not exactly a high bandwidth format, yet, for the wonderful acoustic chamber that a glass, metal and plastic "semi-round cube" provides, FM is just fine.
Wandering around a NYC subway with your iPod is not exactly a noiseless environment, so
Sitting at my computer, I am not trying to recreate Aerosmith at the Centrum. I just want a compact to store, easy to select, relatively decent quality reproduction. Most people are not elite audiophiles and from my travels, most who claim to be, spend many G's on equipment only to listen to what I consider some of the worst music on the planet.
Most of my cd's are ripped to
My point is, don't brag about your superior listening habits because you only listen to a digital sampling, of an analog performance, that was mastered on 16 track tape 27 years ago. You're not leet!
I don't know where in the Linux kernels it was introduced, but you can control traffic with very fine grained rules using tc and it's associated qdiscs' and filters.
Additionally, there are all several filters that can be layered into the qdiscs to provide fairness between the various data streams moving thru a single qdisc.
The sweet part of the tc setup is bandwidth borrowing.
For instance, say a 1 mbit link. You can have tc partition 500kbit to http traffic, 300 kbit to smtp/pop traffic and 200 to all other traffic.
Add in some rules about BW caps and priorities and the "all other" traffic can borrow any set amount of the http and smtp/pop BW if those qdiscs are not using it.
Setting up tc on the WAN interface of your firewall/router can let you use your entire up and down bw concurrently and things like ping times do not suffer. The trick is taking the que away from the modem and controlling it in the router.
Anyway, there are some good sites that explain setting up tc and how to maximize your traffic flow. As far as how well it works? Awesome!
My current link is 8mbit/768kbit. I can use all available upstream for something like gnutella and the downstream does not suffer during surfing/mail/download/whatever. It can be step up extremely fine grained or just throw in a couple of ques for simple setup.
Your temp readings are rather unrealistic unless your ambient room temp is around 0-5C or you are using water cooling.
.1 C/W thermal resistance, your CPUs' temp is way above 36.
.6 C/W.
.45 C/W, you are going to see a CPU temp rise of roughly 38C above ambient. I assume your room temp is not below 20C.
Your CPU has to dissipate it's heat to something, usually the heatsink. Unless you have found some magic heatsink that has like
I have a Dual MP2400 rig that runs in a room with about 25C ambient. These are 60W CPUs'. My HS units are rated at about
Give or take, a 60 watt load will rise about 36C above ambient when attached to such a cooling device.
My full load temps are 61C and 63C. Lets see if the formula works. CPU Temp (should equal) 25+(60*.6) = 25+36 = 61C.
Seems like it works. The slightly higher temp on CPU2 is because it is physically behind CPU1 in the airpath and therefore gets a slightly higher ambient to start with.
AMD 64/3700, something like 85 watts. Giving you the benefit of a decent HS/fan say
You actual cpu core is most likely running at 58C.
Of course there are lots of factors involved in how efficient your HS setup is like airflow direction, air volume, pressure, humidity, etc.
Overall, I have found this calulation to be accurate, within +/- 2C, in average conditions.
What a freaking waste of cpu/gpu cycles.Transparency has to be the most useless feature in any OS.
Oooohhhh, Aaaaahhhhhh, look, I can make parts of my windows unreadable and unusable. This is sooooooo like way cool dudes.
Is this where innovation is now? Stupid GUI tricks that hinder fucntionality?
MS is retarded for following a stupid idea from Apples' useless feature department!
KDE/Gnome/etc, are equally guilty for the "Look, we can make our GUI useless too!"
What I want from MS is INVISIBLE Windows. Wait, I have that already. I must have turned on the "Use Invisible Windows" feature 6 years ago with that RedHat Disc.
"And guess what -- we are all richer than anyone was 50 years ago."
What planet do you live one? You think that being able to afford meaningless toys that were either cost prohibitive or non-existent is a way to measure weath? Take your head out of your rear orifice please. Compare wage growth against something useful like the cost of homes, cars, food, clothing, insurance, etc...
40 years ago, my parents bought their house for $11,500 while earning roughly $15,000 a year. Today, a typical home in the area is over $100,000. About 9 times as expensive. I am not making $135,000 or anything near it.
40 years ago there was no such thing as a 60 month car loan. Today we have 72 month car loans. In the mid 60's my parents were buying new cars for $3,000. A very basic new car today is well into the $15,000 range and more like $20,000 for any sort of mid range vehicle. Cars have increased 5 - 7 x in cost. That would put comparable wages at &75,000 - $105,000. Not even close to reality. The average wages in this area are more like $30,000 with a lot of people living on far less.
The simple fact is that large corporations and corrupt politicians have driven a massive wedge into the income classes in the US. There is no more middle class. A middle class lifestyle requires a wage that is roughly 2x the average income. That is not middle class now is it. 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people. We are truly in the age of the working poor and there are no signs of it getting better soon.
BOINC is a damn good name, it freaking boinc'ed my smp system into a hardlock. Kinda ugly when that system is pretty much the heart of our 5 puter network. Squid, LTSP server, etc. 52 days with all sorts of varied load and a stupid SETI program kills it dead. I had a few unhappy voices about 60 seconds after starting it when damn near everything else went away except the firewall. No alien research for me thanks!
I am not doubting your success with xp, I just have to add, I have not seen it on my wifes system. She runs an msi 745 with athlon xp 2100/512 meg, msi video card with XP supported drivers, nothing oddball. Xp and Win 2K have a boot life of about 10 days or so then they both go south. Usually just slowdowns and general BSOD. The bulk of the problems come for either NAV or Mcafee AV which she usually ends up disabling. I have no doubt that either 2k or XP could be quite stable, but I just have not seen it on plain jane hardware. The reverse of that is mdk from 7.1 thru 10 has been solid on 4 different computers here. The current uptime on my file/print server is 89 days, 7 hours, 29 minutes. This handles music and video to 4 LAN puters as well as a 2 gig squid cache.
While I can see your frustration from an adapted Windows users side of the fence, I can safely say that an adapted linux user is equally baffled by the various windows behaviors. I am not sure what part of windows you find so easy. I "used" MS software from the early days of MS DOS up until about 98SE. My wife runs 2k and did try XP for a short bit. From my side, I find nothing intuitive in the entire NT line.
She has used windows 9x thru XP and still cannot complete a 2k format/partition/install/config on her own. She runs our hosting service, designs websites for people, maintains a general website/hosting helpsite. We currently have about 30 hosted clients. She is not stupid. I have to consult websites to figure out all the oddball settings in windows to keep her system running well.
Exactly what part of window is easy and intuitive? What the GUI? Sure if you already know the icons to click, the radio buttons to check and the menus to find stuff.
Here is a quick and fun test for you. In a UNIX / UNIX like environment, services like RPC are OPTIONAL. Have some time? Turn off RPC in windows 2k/xp because it is so intuitive and try to reboot.
Just a final question. What exactly is intuitive about an OS that lets you disable, with a check box, a core OS service that renders the OS unable to boot?
If, by chance, there is a way around this little critical failure, I did not know how to fix it, and it was far from intuitive!!!
"If you play UT 2K3 for just 4 hours a day, 25 days a month"
.
For JUST 4 hours a day? You say that like 4 hours a day is cutting back and putting a crimp in your gaming experience.
Have you tried things like reading or having a conversation, maybe spending time with your spouse/significant other/children/family/friends?
Hell, I wish I had 4 hours a day to piss away playing a game. I have to "waste" most of my free time on mundane shit like helping my aging parents, fixing my sisters car, maintaining my marriage, etc . .
Put down the mouse, back slowly away from the monitor and welcome to real life. Yes, human interaction is scary at first, but I am sure with enough exposure, you too can adjust.
Turning it on being the single largest contributor! Seriously, my wife runs 2k on a decent system with supported hardware and current drivers. While her system is not grossly unstable, it generally folds after 5-15 days of use. Use involving several browsers, html editors, a few games, winamp, mailmoa, etc. I have not spent the time to isolate if it's just 2k or something oddball in her system. Nothing she does however is considered "loading" the system.
2k is good, but it is hardly "all that" in the world of stability and crash resistent. Plain jane user space apps can and do bring it down hard. You just have to wait a few days and the BSOD comes a knocking.
Hell, You don't need their phone for this, just have sex in traffic. Save a few bucks and buy her/him something nice!