From the article (I read it, so shoot me):
One thing always remains the same, however: the access point always costs more than the wireless card.
The problem is, I have found exactly the opposite. Wireless routers (and routers that can be used as access points) are dirt cheap. I got one just Saturday for under ten bucks after rebate at Staples. But I can't find wireless cards anywhere near that cheap, some moderately inexpensive cards don't work right (SMC, for example, even had their outsourced Indian tech support admit to me that there were known problems with the SMC2635W card I bought last month and that they knew it wouldn't work with my notebook, even under Windows and told me to return it and buy something different!), and it's still hard to find a card that is supported under Linux. So they can write all of the articles they want about kluging together Linux hot spots, but the truth is an inexpensive wireless router will do the job fine, while a Linux hack ties up a computer, makes you play games getting a card that will work under Linux, eats lots more power and turns it into lots more heat, and would only be justifyable for most users if an access point were a lot more expensive than a wireless card, which it isn't.
Well, considering the lawsuit was for McAfee's failure to provide "free lifetime upgrades", and considering that never want to install another McAfee product, it's a bit comical for you to bitch about members of the class getting screwed.
So by your logic it's OK for a company to advertise free lifetime data updates and then not deliver on that, as long as the software is bad enough that it screws up the entire OS too? And it's OK for lawyers to put together a class for such an issue and then settle on a 1 year update for still bad software for the class victims, but demand to take their share of the settlement in cold hard cash?
Hard to tell how much of a "punishment" this is for McAfee.
Or how much punishment it is for the user. I have a qualifying product right here at my side (version 4), but there is no way I'll ever install another McAfee product on my systems again. Here's yet another case of the class action lawyers getting rich, while the members of the class get less than nothing.
I can't think of a single good reason why a user needs to run their own outgoing mail server and not relay through the Comcast server.
Just because you can't think of a reason to not use the Comcast server does not mean there are not good ones. I've recently been put in the same boat by BellSouth, and I assure you there are good reasons for not wanting port 25 blocked.
First of all, if you, like me, have a notebook and actually move frequently from location to location (home, work, family and friends houses, public sites with wireless access) then you want to be able to configure your mail client so that it will reach a mail server that you can log into and not have to change settings every time you change location. If you have a mail server outside of a "me only" mentality ISP then this is simple and straight forward. But when the ISP blocks port 25 (as well as not letting you use their meil servers whenever you're not originating from their network), it's a royal pain in the ass to reconfigure all the time.
Also, if you, like me, administer or help maintain a valid mail server off of the Comcast network, you may well find it important to actually send mail through this server. Or you might even have a company policy that states that all business mail must be sent through the compnay mail server. No problem if port 25 isn't blocked and you log into the server you want. Big problem if some short sighted system administrator at your ISP insists that everyone should be expected to use the Internet in exactly the same way.
And I can't speak about quality of service at Comcast, but at BellSouth the mail server is frequently down. This was not a significant problem if I had to send time critical information out as long as I had port 25 open and could log into one of the other servers I use. Now it's a problem even from my desktop system.
Fighting spam is great, but fighting stupidity is even more important.
If it meant better battery life, I could live with a processor this slow in a laptop, but according to the linked story, AMD doesn't see much a market for that.
Yes, it would sure be nice to see this improvement moved to the laptop; but don't forget, all of the other power consumption (hard drive, lighted display, support chips, wireless NIC, CD/DVD and so on stays the same). So the improvement in laptop battery life isn't as great as you might think. Still, any improvement would be very welcome.
And be honest, if you could buy a 1 ghz laptop or a 1.4 ghz laptop for the same price, wouldn't you really buy the 1.4 gig system, even though the CPU ate more power? Of course, if the faster chip could be stepped down to the slower speeds and take power usage with it, then that would be the best of both worlds. But we really need better support here from the support chip and notebook makers, as well as from AMD.
Last night I had some geek come over to my house who wanted to install some crap on my computer. I let him, and in return I got to fondel his wife. I called it "adjusting".
#4 - LTSP.org - Use your laptop as a wireless thin client. It reduces local CPU power consumption, extends the life of your battery, and your server, (any desktop machine), does all the heavy lifting so you can still go fast.
This makes sense in theory, but I've yet to find a Linux that will run on my HP notebook and manage power properly. The fan comes on shortly after booting and the batteries run down in half the time or less than with XP, no matter what I'm doing , even sitting idle. I'm far from the only one who has been seeing this. So suggesting a Linux thin client as a power saving concept just doesn't fly, at least until Linux is able to manage power as well as windoes does on most or all of the notebook with that feature.
I have no idea what a colo server is (when are slashdot members going to learn to start defining off-beat terms and abreviations when they first use them?) but I clearly stated that for any public mail server such an option would have to be available user-by-user. Clearly some users have valid reasons to want e-mail from China. But I would suggest most don't and would be glad to be able to block everything from the source of 71% of spam. And for private e-mail servers this rule might even be put in a firewall as a set of rejected addresses.
Besides, aren't we for freedom of speech?
What an idiotic thing to say. What about my freedom to choose not to listen? Or my freedom to protect my children from pornographers and worse? I've generally been against spam filters as not being effective and because of the real problems of false positiives, but if I can block 71% of the hundreds of pieces of spam I get daily and the only negative effect is that I also block e-mail from a group of people I never exchange e-mail with anyway, it seems like a great solution.
But never impose your rules on anyone else.
What part of my statement in my first post "Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis" are you unable to understand?
I would be perfectly willing to not receive any e-mail from China, or even all of Asia for that matter. Unfortunately, not running my own mail server, I can't block their addresses direcly, but it would be nice if someone mapped out the IP addresses to block and came up with some good mail server rules. Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis, so it has to be done in the mail server and not the firewall, but I expect enough people would opt-out of Chinese oriinated e-mail to make it worth while for any system that supported such an option and coul long-term have a significant impact on this source of spam.
No, fee is different than free. Even the/. write-up said "that they would install 20,000 for-fee Wi-Fi hotspots across the U.S. within two years". I think the real issue with the business plan was that they expected people to pay too much for too little.
With no hard numbers the 10x number is absurd. I misread it as 10%, and even that number seemed hard to justify since all factors were not considered. 10x is an outrageous claim, and would imply that Linus previously spent almost all his time not doing programming.
Although there are no hard numbers
on
Bitkeeper News Redux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm no mathematician but I'd say that's a decent way of estimating their productivity increase.
Actually, it's meaningless without looking at other factors. Even the concept of more change is so open ended it tells us nothing. As Linux gains users it will certainly increase in these numbers, there is no strong indication that bitkeeper is a factor at all, or how much of a factor it is.
Although there are no hard numbers, the
estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK.
Following the statement that there are no hard numbers, the ten percent figure seems more like a number pulled out of thin air and selected to not be large enough to be called outrageous but big enough to encourage people to make a change. That's not to say we are not talking about a good tool here (I have no opnion on that issue), but this is much more hype than a valid study.
Is my only weapon having a
bunch of friends call this 800 number to make the company's overseas toll-free phone bill unbearable?
You got a modem? You got a phone line? I would set up mine so that whenever I was asleep or out of the house it would just keep dialing them. Maybe they can see the number and decide not to answer, but it would still help tie up their incoming lines.
"No, they can't hear me! Only you can hear me! Now this is what I want you to do...."
Given that we already have states populated with people who want to outlaw teaching evolution and instead teach "creation science", as well as juries who are letting off people who kill their kids with rocks after God told them to do it, what could posiable go wrong with this technology?
Well, with this keyboard you certainly need it illuminated, they moved all the keys around! No wonder they think you need it lit up to find stuff! Just look at the picture, the normal center cluster of keys has vanished and extra keys have been crammed into the right side of the main keyboard.
I do need to see my keyboard on occasion to find some of the less ferquently used keys. Maybe someday I'll get around to installing a light or two under the desk above the keyboard drawer. Or I'll buy a well done lighted keyboard. But it will have to have the keys in a somewhat standard layout, not be this painfully awkward layout where the enter key isn't even the rightmost key in the third row up.
... how much do you spend to get a dollar-worth of gold/other metals to grow on a tree. The article does not say that.
More imporantly, what it doesn't say (and no one seems to be discussing here) is how you extract that 14 grams of gold and 7 grams of mercury from a full acre's worth of harvested plant material.
Patents are intended to protect an "inventon" for a fix amount of time. In this case there are two very strong issues for why this patent should not be granted: 1) There is nothing novel or unique about the fat system (likely part of why it wasn't patented in the first place). There is simply no invention here, There is the particular locations of certain data structurs that are unique to fat, but that's not a standard, just a convention or, with the monopoly power of Microsoft, a standard.
and 2) even if there were some invention here, it should be protected at the time it was released, Microsoft should no be allowed to wait 20 or more years and then patent the fat system well after thay see it is in comon use, and only because it is in comon use. The wheelbarrow has never been patented either, but that doesn't mean that someone should be able to patent it now.
Finally, someone showing the math that proves this was bogus. My thought exactly, although I didn't have it in Joules. But I certainly knew conventional motors were better than 20% efficent, which makes this guys claim completely bigus.
The parent should be modded up.
So she uses Zip 100 disks for everything, instead.
The last 10 CDRW media I bought were free after rebate (just last week at OfficeMax). Ask her what 7 gigs worth of zip disk would cost. Of course, if I want to save the data long term I don't use CDRW - I use "cheaper" CDR's - I get those 100 at a time, free after rebate.
Of course, there are other issues too. Saving files that are too big to fit on a zip drive without having to play games and swap multiple disks, as well as not having to worry about the click-of-death taking your media and data to Iomega hell.
Someone who disagrees with you clearly would rather mod you down than try to offer any reason why you're wrong, but many people including me strongly agree with this statement
I wasn't a victim of the "click of death" drives, but I did buy a CDRW drive with their name on it. The drive had problems from day one and "technical support: would never acknowledge them. I only found out much later that the drive was a repackaged drive from another manufacturer, and that manufacturer had firmware updates out for a long time that fixed their version of the drive (but would not apply to the drive that identified itself as an Iomega drive). Iomega would never bother to supply a firmware update for the version they released or even acknowledge the problem.
In addition to this and tons of other horror stories of support issues, a problem I see with Iomega products is that the media is never cost effective. You could likely buy hard drives with more capacity than you could but just media for this new Iomega junk. And you could buy an IDE removable drive tray for a heck of a lot less than you can buy this drive for, even with several extra trays. If you go with the hard drive tray approach, hard drives for it will keep coming down in price and offer greater capacity; if you go with the Iomega solution the capacity will never increase over the 35 gigs and media will never come down in price.
Sure, there are some people (I even know a couple) who are dumb enough to put a zip drive in a computer that already has a CDRW drive in it and feed the zip drive. But there is simply no good reason to buy this or many other overpriced, underperforming Iomega products.
You don't understand. This is $440 Million that Microsoft gave to InterTrust so that InterTrust would have a big warchest to go after everyone except Microsoft who tries to compete with Microsoft. It's a drop in the bucket to Microsoft (see the last few weekly Cringley articles), and it is an even better way to grab position than to give SCO money under the table to have them try to kill Linux.
Let me ask a follow-up question to this. If one were to generate power this way and stay on the grid to try to feed back power and mak some income (as well as have power if your system greaks down), how do you keep your river driven system in sync with the 60 cycle grid (which obviously must be done if you plan on feeding the frid)?
I don't have any experience with VOIP, but I can't imagine it sucks up bandwidth any worse than DVD-quality video...
You don't have to have any experience with voice over IP to figure out the math. If you have a 1.5 mb DSL connection, or even a 3 mb cable connection, you're not going to do anything over the internet that is going to push your local network over 100 mb!
There may be some benefits to a faster local network (although the original posts questions correctly ask if any home network would really take advantage of the supposed speed), but voip isn't a real issue here.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, I have found exactly the opposite. Wireless routers (and routers that can be used as access points) are dirt cheap. I got one just Saturday for under ten bucks after rebate at Staples. But I can't find wireless cards anywhere near that cheap, some moderately inexpensive cards don't work right (SMC, for example, even had their outsourced Indian tech support admit to me that there were known problems with the SMC2635W card I bought last month and that they knew it wouldn't work with my notebook, even under Windows and told me to return it and buy something different!), and it's still hard to find a card that is supported under Linux. So they can write all of the articles they want about kluging together Linux hot spots, but the truth is an inexpensive wireless router will do the job fine, while a Linux hack ties up a computer, makes you play games getting a card that will work under Linux, eats lots more power and turns it into lots more heat, and would only be justifyable for most users if an access point were a lot more expensive than a wireless card, which it isn't.
So by your logic it's OK for a company to advertise free lifetime data updates and then not deliver on that, as long as the software is bad enough that it screws up the entire OS too? And it's OK for lawyers to put together a class for such an issue and then settle on a 1 year update for still bad software for the class victims, but demand to take their share of the settlement in cold hard cash?
Or how much punishment it is for the user. I have a qualifying product right here at my side (version 4), but there is no way I'll ever install another McAfee product on my systems again. Here's yet another case of the class action lawyers getting rich, while the members of the class get less than nothing.
Just because you can't think of a reason to not use the Comcast server does not mean there are not good ones. I've recently been put in the same boat by BellSouth, and I assure you there are good reasons for not wanting port 25 blocked.
First of all, if you, like me, have a notebook and actually move frequently from location to location (home, work, family and friends houses, public sites with wireless access) then you want to be able to configure your mail client so that it will reach a mail server that you can log into and not have to change settings every time you change location. If you have a mail server outside of a "me only" mentality ISP then this is simple and straight forward. But when the ISP blocks port 25 (as well as not letting you use their meil servers whenever you're not originating from their network), it's a royal pain in the ass to reconfigure all the time.
Also, if you, like me, administer or help maintain a valid mail server off of the Comcast network, you may well find it important to actually send mail through this server. Or you might even have a company policy that states that all business mail must be sent through the compnay mail server. No problem if port 25 isn't blocked and you log into the server you want. Big problem if some short sighted system administrator at your ISP insists that everyone should be expected to use the Internet in exactly the same way.
And I can't speak about quality of service at Comcast, but at BellSouth the mail server is frequently down. This was not a significant problem if I had to send time critical information out as long as I had port 25 open and could log into one of the other servers I use. Now it's a problem even from my desktop system.
Fighting spam is great, but fighting stupidity is even more important.
Yes, it would sure be nice to see this improvement moved to the laptop; but don't forget, all of the other power consumption (hard drive, lighted display, support chips, wireless NIC, CD/DVD and so on stays the same). So the improvement in laptop battery life isn't as great as you might think. Still, any improvement would be very welcome.
And be honest, if you could buy a 1 ghz laptop or a 1.4 ghz laptop for the same price, wouldn't you really buy the 1.4 gig system, even though the CPU ate more power? Of course, if the faster chip could be stepped down to the slower speeds and take power usage with it, then that would be the best of both worlds. But we really need better support here from the support chip and notebook makers, as well as from AMD.
Last night I had some geek come over to my house who wanted to install some crap on my computer. I let him, and in return I got to fondel his wife. I called it "adjusting".
This makes sense in theory, but I've yet to find a Linux that will run on my HP notebook and manage power properly. The fan comes on shortly after booting and the batteries run down in half the time or less than with XP, no matter what I'm doing , even sitting idle. I'm far from the only one who has been seeing this. So suggesting a Linux thin client as a power saving concept just doesn't fly, at least until Linux is able to manage power as well as windoes does on most or all of the notebook with that feature.
I have no idea what a colo server is (when are slashdot members going to learn to start defining off-beat terms and abreviations when they first use them?) but I clearly stated that for any public mail server such an option would have to be available user-by-user. Clearly some users have valid reasons to want e-mail from China. But I would suggest most don't and would be glad to be able to block everything from the source of 71% of spam. And for private e-mail servers this rule might even be put in a firewall as a set of rejected addresses.
Besides, aren't we for freedom of speech?
What an idiotic thing to say. What about my freedom to choose not to listen? Or my freedom to protect my children from pornographers and worse? I've generally been against spam filters as not being effective and because of the real problems of false positiives, but if I can block 71% of the hundreds of pieces of spam I get daily and the only negative effect is that I also block e-mail from a group of people I never exchange e-mail with anyway, it seems like a great solution.
But never impose your rules on anyone else.
What part of my statement in my first post "Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis" are you unable to understand?
I would be perfectly willing to not receive any e-mail from China, or even all of Asia for that matter. Unfortunately, not running my own mail server, I can't block their addresses direcly, but it would be nice if someone mapped out the IP addresses to block and came up with some good mail server rules. Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis, so it has to be done in the mail server and not the firewall, but I expect enough people would opt-out of Chinese oriinated e-mail to make it worth while for any system that supported such an option and coul long-term have a significant impact on this source of spam.
No, fee is different than free. Even the /. write-up said "that they would install 20,000 for-fee Wi-Fi hotspots across the U.S. within two years". I think the real issue with the business plan was that they expected people to pay too much for too little.
With no hard numbers the 10x number is absurd. I misread it as 10%, and even that number seemed hard to justify since all factors were not considered. 10x is an outrageous claim, and would imply that Linus previously spent almost all his time not doing programming.
Actually, it's meaningless without looking at other factors. Even the concept of more change is so open ended it tells us nothing. As Linux gains users it will certainly increase in these numbers, there is no strong indication that bitkeeper is a factor at all, or how much of a factor it is.
Although there are no hard numbers, the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK.
Following the statement that there are no hard numbers , the ten percent figure seems more like a number pulled out of thin air and selected to not be large enough to be called outrageous but big enough to encourage people to make a change. That's not to say we are not talking about a good tool here (I have no opnion on that issue), but this is much more hype than a valid study.
You got a modem? You got a phone line? I would set up mine so that whenever I was asleep or out of the house it would just keep dialing them. Maybe they can see the number and decide not to answer, but it would still help tie up their incoming lines.
Given that we already have states populated with people who want to outlaw teaching evolution and instead teach "creation science", as well as juries who are letting off people who kill their kids with rocks after God told them to do it, what could posiable go wrong with this technology?
I do need to see my keyboard on occasion to find some of the less ferquently used keys. Maybe someday I'll get around to installing a light or two under the desk above the keyboard drawer. Or I'll buy a well done lighted keyboard. But it will have to have the keys in a somewhat standard layout, not be this painfully awkward layout where the enter key isn't even the rightmost key in the third row up.
More imporantly, what it doesn't say (and no one seems to be discussing here) is how you extract that 14 grams of gold and 7 grams of mercury from a full acre's worth of harvested plant material.
Patents are intended to protect an "inventon" for a fix amount of time. In this case there are two very strong issues for why this patent should not be granted: 1) There is nothing novel or unique about the fat system (likely part of why it wasn't patented in the first place). There is simply no invention here, There is the particular locations of certain data structurs that are unique to fat, but that's not a standard, just a convention or, with the monopoly power of Microsoft, a standard. and 2) even if there were some invention here, it should be protected at the time it was released, Microsoft should no be allowed to wait 20 or more years and then patent the fat system well after thay see it is in comon use, and only because it is in comon use. The wheelbarrow has never been patented either, but that doesn't mean that someone should be able to patent it now.
Finally, someone showing the math that proves this was bogus. My thought exactly, although I didn't have it in Joules. But I certainly knew conventional motors were better than 20% efficent, which makes this guys claim completely bigus. The parent should be modded up.
The last 10 CDRW media I bought were free after rebate (just last week at OfficeMax). Ask her what 7 gigs worth of zip disk would cost. Of course, if I want to save the data long term I don't use CDRW - I use "cheaper" CDR's - I get those 100 at a time, free after rebate.
Of course, there are other issues too. Saving files that are too big to fit on a zip drive without having to play games and swap multiple disks, as well as not having to worry about the click-of-death taking your media and data to Iomega hell.
I wasn't a victim of the "click of death" drives, but I did buy a CDRW drive with their name on it. The drive had problems from day one and "technical support: would never acknowledge them. I only found out much later that the drive was a repackaged drive from another manufacturer, and that manufacturer had firmware updates out for a long time that fixed their version of the drive (but would not apply to the drive that identified itself as an Iomega drive). Iomega would never bother to supply a firmware update for the version they released or even acknowledge the problem.
In addition to this and tons of other horror stories of support issues, a problem I see with Iomega products is that the media is never cost effective. You could likely buy hard drives with more capacity than you could but just media for this new Iomega junk. And you could buy an IDE removable drive tray for a heck of a lot less than you can buy this drive for, even with several extra trays. If you go with the hard drive tray approach, hard drives for it will keep coming down in price and offer greater capacity; if you go with the Iomega solution the capacity will never increase over the 35 gigs and media will never come down in price.
Sure, there are some people (I even know a couple) who are dumb enough to put a zip drive in a computer that already has a CDRW drive in it and feed the zip drive. But there is simply no good reason to buy this or many other overpriced, underperforming Iomega products.
You don't understand. This is $440 Million that Microsoft gave to InterTrust so that InterTrust would have a big warchest to go after everyone except Microsoft who tries to compete with Microsoft. It's a drop in the bucket to Microsoft (see the last few weekly Cringley articles), and it is an even better way to grab position than to give SCO money under the table to have them try to kill Linux.
Let me ask a follow-up question to this. If one were to generate power this way and stay on the grid to try to feed back power and mak some income (as well as have power if your system greaks down), how do you keep your river driven system in sync with the 60 cycle grid (which obviously must be done if you plan on feeding the frid)?
Oh! The sky sounds just like a busy signal.
"They" might not have been "able" to stop the theft of music, but Ashcroft will certainly put a stop to this.
You don't have to have any experience with voice over IP to figure out the math. If you have a 1.5 mb DSL connection, or even a 3 mb cable connection, you're not going to do anything over the internet that is going to push your local network over 100 mb!
There may be some benefits to a faster local network (although the original posts questions correctly ask if any home network would really take advantage of the supposed speed), but voip isn't a real issue here.